The Butterflies of Grand Canyon
Page 27
It’s a warm evening. The air is infused with the smell of honeysuckle, but Morris Merkle, sitting by the barbecue, smells only cooking steak. Martine looks up at him with dewy eyes. She’s small, undoubtedly still growing, but she’ll end up smaller than her predecessor. She has an easygoing nature, and she’s not in love with squirrels or garbage, as Martin was. She seems, instead, in love with her master. And New York sirloin. She likes hers rare. Morris is happy to oblige, but tonight something occurs that leads him to forget the sizzling meat, even when the dog violates etiquette and whines and nudges his hand. Not until she barks, a soft, chesty sound closer to a human cough, does he look up and see the meat aflame.
He rises slowly to his feet. In his hand is a letter from Jane, written and sent a year ago but unopened until this moment. It’s a jolly letter, full of gossip and unimportant things, something about the loss and recovery of a purse. The content is unremarkable on every level, but his dear wife’s determination to involve him in her daily life from afar touches him deeply and makes him long for her company now. Now, when she is less apt to include him, no longer so willing to share herself with him, though they passed the winter hours with apparent affection and, he would say, a modicum of happiness. But her heart is in Arizona, and for the summer, at least, her fair body has traveled to meet it.
“What was I thinking?” he says to Martine. He removes the charred steaks from the grill and proceeds to cut them in strips. He can think of no motive, no reason for not having opened her letters, and now to find them in a pile of old newspapers—he has only himself to blame. He was cross at her, perhaps. It seems unlikely, even absurd, but maybe it’s so.
He must be honest with himself. His mind travels back to his engagement to Eleanor. It was in her untidy cursive on a piece of heavy stationery that he received the blow, the severing of their tie. (He can still feel the weight of the paper in his hand in the last moments of his ignorance.) The memory disturbs him. How is it that a man cannot see his own blindness? Eleanor is not Jane, and Jane is not Eleanor. Eleanor in her letter cut him away, and Jane in hers wished to include him. Yet a man who acts out of blindness draws to himself the very thing that blinded him. In his case, a withdrawing of affection. He knows, of course, Jane has placed her heart elsewhere. Had he read and responded to her letters, might she have placed it all the more with him? He thinks not. He has progressed in his understanding of the female need. His love for his wife is not love for something won or possessed. He is experienced in many ways she is not, and understands her desire for romantic exploration. It saddens him, but makes them more equal.
Whatever it is, or was, he sees no point in prolonging his regret or reinforcing his culpability. He puts the steak knife down, reaches into the basket of newspapers, and pulls out the letters. The dog looks at him in astonishment as one by one he feeds them to the coals and they catch fire.
He fixes himself a plate of eggs and serves the ruined meat to Martine. First he apologizes to her. It’s not cooked the way she likes it. But something happened that will never, ever happen again. She needn’t worry. It has nothing to do with her. She’s still the best dog, the very best. It’s human business.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
This novel arose from a need to express my appreciation for the incredible landscape of Grand Canyon. I found my original inspiration in Mrs. Merkle’s name, which I borrowed from a tag affixed to a pin on the underside of a butterfly in the museum at Grand Canyon National Park. Tags of this sort are sources of information. They measure only one centimeter by two-and-a-half, yet there in the lepidopterist’s handwriting, a print so small it can only be deciphered with a magnifying lens, we are given genus and species of the specimen, the date and place of its capture, the taxonomist who classified it, and the person who collected it—collection being the term used for capture and death. Thus we can piece together the where and when, and of course the what in the form of the butterfly, and from this a picture grows, a story. Mrs. Merkle, on the seventeenth of July, 1951, brings down a wood nymph or two at Point Sublime on the North Rim of Grand Canyon. E. Wigglesworth captures a red admiral in the same place at the same time. There is no mention of Mr. Merkle, though there’s evidence of his collecting the day before at Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim, which to the North Rim is a far distant place. There, in the company of H. C. Bryant, superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, he chases down a single painted lady while the tireless Bryant captures fifteen field crescents, three sisters, thirty-four painted ladies, and an acmon blue. These are the facts. From here it is no great leap to fiction, and I have leapt.
Fictional too are the motives and meditations of several historical characters who populate this book. Elzada Clover was indeed a botanist, but only in my imagination a gumshoe. Her associate, Lois Jotter Cutter, did not return with her to Grand Canyon to solve a mystery. Louis Schellbach and his family lived for many years at the South Rim where he was Chief Park Naturalist. His boss, H. C. Bryant, was an ardent lepidopterist as well as superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. Brothers Ellsworth and Emery Kolb photographed the canyon for decades, and the skeleton in Emery’s garage, for years the subject of speculation, has recently been identified as that of an unfortunate victim of suicide. Brief mention is made of Norm Nevills, Bill Gibson, Neez Charlie, and Supai Mary, all of whom lived and breathed. Mrs. Merkle is entirely a product of my imagination, though her name is real enough, and her collector’s skill and spirit. However modest her contribution to science may have been, she certainly inspired a world of fiction.