Sound of Butterflies, The

by King, Rachael

  His dreams were troubled by the way the evening had ended. In one dream the captain said that Santos had seduced his wife; in another he had stolen their children. In still another, Arturo was mad that they were with Santos because he had desperately wanted to accompany them on their journey and Santos had forbidden him. In the dream, Arturo sat down and wept like a child.

  Thomas felt ready to get out of his hammock when the canoes bumped towards the shore. A makeshift jetty jutted out into the water, its logs cracked and scarred, whether from misuse or disuse it was not obvious.

  ‘Are we there? Have we arrived?’ His voice cracked in his throat.

  ‘Yes, sleepyhead,’ said George. ‘We have arrived. Time to get to work instead of lying about all day.’

  Thomas’s legs felt as they had when he reached shore after his voyage across the Atlantic: they shook as he put his weight on the jetty, and his body was not connected to them. The problem was compounded by the swaying of the jetty, and as a rotten log began to give way under him, he leapt off and onto the sand of the adjoining shore. His legs collapsed and he sank to his hands and knees. He stayed on all fours, gathering his bearings, while Ernie jeered at him and the men began to unload the crates. The sand was damp between his fingers and seemed to be alive. It trickled over his skin, tickling him. Then an excruciating stab made him cry out and yank his hand away; another pain shot through his other hand and he jumped to his feet, suddenly steady. He looked down and saw that the sand was alive — seething with blood-red insects, which ran over his boots and tried to scramble their way up his legs. He yelled and drummed his feet on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum. His hands burned as if they had been thrust into the heart of a log fire, and the stings were angry and swollen. He had been stung by ants since he had been in the Amazon, but these ants were different. With two wide strides he was on the jetty again. Antonio was beside him, ready with a bucket of river water to throw over his legs. He began to beat at Thomas’s trousers and boots with a rag.

  All the men had turned back at Thomas’s cries, and now young Paulo and João the guide were speaking to each other in low tones, nodding and scowling.

  ‘Wait,’ said George, and he crouched down and attempted to catch one of the ants with his tweezers. ‘Fire ants. They’re not deadly, Thomas, don’t worry, but I imagine you are in a lot of pain.’ He gave up trying to catch one, and instead joined the others in stamping on them with his boots. Most of the insects escaped and crawled back down towards the sand. ‘Formiga de fogo,’ he said to the men. Antonio grunted and nodded, while Paulo beamed at him. George grinned back, pleased with himself.

  ‘Why is it always me that gets stung?’ wailed Thomas.

  Ernie rolled his eyes. ‘“Why is it always me?”’ he imitated in a shrill voice. ‘Please, Tom, don’t be such a girl.’

  ‘Shut up, Ernie,’ said John, and the others looked at him in surprise. ‘You wait until something has a go at you, and see how you feel about it.’

  Suddenly the rainforest was starting to lose some of its appeal, and Thomas wondered if the feeling he had was homesickness — not for England, but for the relative safety of Belém or Santarém. Perhaps adventure wasn’t something he craved after all.

  A narrow sandy road bordered by towering trees led them a few hundred yards into the forest. Thomas imagined they were being watched — by laughing monkeys and twitching birds, keeping the intruders in their sights, ready to flee. Perhaps some of the eyes waiting in the gloom were human. After the hot light that bounced off the river, the forest seemed to consume them in its darkness. Despite the loss of the scorching sun, the lack of wind made the humidity almost unbearable. Sweat rolled down between his shoulder blades in a salty river. A root, snaking out from the forest floor, caught his foot and pitched him into the mulch. He braced himself for another insect onslaught, but instead strong arms pulled him to his feet. The men said nothing, but Thomas felt the sting of their stares on his neck. He mentally kicked himself as the blood pumping into his head carried with it the renewed pain of his hangover. When he wiped his face with his hands, he winced as the salt found his wounds.

  The sight of the compound, with four huts facing one another in a circle, made Thomas even more ill. A makeshift construction in the middle, nothing more than a few palm fronds supported by sticks, served as a cookhouse. There was no outhouse. His stomach ached from holding in his regular movements, and now his bowels had backed up and were pressing against the wall of his gut. He had been waiting until they reached their camp to release them, and now saw he had waited in vain — the forest would be his lavatory. He would have to squat, exposed to God only knew how many hazards.

  The small settlement, once the temporary home of rubber collectors, had been roughly maintained. The huts were nothing more than basic shelters, with holes for doors, but the undergrowth had been cut back to prevent the jungle from reclaiming the palm leaves and poles that made up the building materials. Two of them sloped dangerously off-kilter, crazy houses at a fun fair.

  ‘Four huts,’ said Ernie as he set his bag down. He raised his arms in a diamond above his head, and pushed upwards, stretching. ‘Perfect. One each.’

  ‘What about the men?’ said Thomas. He noticed the dark patches under Ernie’s arms, smelt the sharp scent of his sweat. And something else, sour. He realised with a shudder that it smelt like semen.

  ‘Yes. Of course. They can have one, you and John can have another, and George and I will have one each.’

  George smiled. The pomade on his hair had melted and begun to creep down his forehead. He took his handkerchief and wiped his face, then pressed it over his nose, sidling away from Ernie. John shrugged.

  ‘Suit yourself, Ernie,’ said Thomas. The truth was that he would rather share with somebody, especially somebody like John, who could explain the noises in the night and know when they were getting dangerously close.

  ‘Good man,’ said Ernie. He retrieved his bag and strode off to examine the interior of one of the huts.

  Thomas managed to sweep his hut out satisfactorily with a palm frond, and to hang a curtain for a door. He and John slung their hammocks from beams in the ceiling. Antonio brought some balsam to smear on the ropes, to prevent ants crawling on them as they slept, and encouraged them to rub the foul-smelling liquid, like rotten fruit, on their exposed skin. The previous occupants had left behind some hardy basic furniture, which included footstools, so that when they sat down, their feet would be off the ground; the legs of the chairs and stools were doused with the same liquid. Thomas thought the stress of always keeping his feet moving when he stood would drive him mad but he soon got used to it, and they learned to avoid the sandy mounds that signalled ant nests. Unfortunately for Ernie, one of the nests was in front of his hut and he was the only one to get stung regularly.

  George was fascinated by the creatures, and collected many specimens, alive — which he fed on farina and anything left over from meals — and dead. He studied the ants’ sizeable jaws, which latched onto their prey from the front while they attacked with their stings from the other end. In the cookhouse, the men had to suspend supplies in bundles from the ceiling, the cords holding the food smeared with the same bitter balsam, to stop the ants from invading their food.

  Ants were not the only problem. Thomas huddled every night under his mosquito net, while insects, unhindered by the flimsy walls of the hut, hurled themselves at him. Ernie had caught a vampire bat in his hut one night and confessed he had almost let it bite him just so he could record the effects. Damp rose up from the ground with every rainfall, and the pages of Thomas’s books were beginning to mildew and undulate.

  The richness of the collecting opportunities went some way towards making up for the discomforts Thomas felt. The men slipped back into their routines, but they were sure to take their guides with them, and kept together more; the lack of proximity to a city made them feel less safe than they had previously. The land around the settlement was looped by tracks t
he rubber collectors used. Each hevea tree stood far from the one before it, but the tangle of paths linked some two or three hundred trees in seven or eight miles of trail. Thick cuts of machete blades scarred the smooth grey trunks, a startling human intrusion in the otherwise pristine rainforest. The incisions were deep but controlled, in regular and deliberate stripes. Rusted tin cups dangled from branches, used to catch the weeping milk, which Antonio explained would later be smoked and hardened by the seringueiros, the rubber tappers, to be shipped off to appease the world’s hunger for rubber.

  One morning, as Thomas strolled through a sandy path near the river with John and João, the Indian stopped and pointed at something on the ground.

  ‘Rastro de Jaguar,’ he said.

  This Thomas understood: jaguar tracks. He fell on the ground beside them, pushing his face as close as he could.

  ‘How fresh are they?’ he asked.

  John got down and examined the prints, fat scars in the sand, which was damp from the overnight rain. If it had been dry, as it had been every other day since they had arrived, they might not have seen them.

  ‘Since last night, obviously, or they would have been washed away.’

  Thomas looked around, peering through the gloom into the depth of the forest. Shadows and blurred shapes moved everywhere — in the treetops, on the forest floor — but nothing took the form of a jaguar.

  ‘Perhaps it’s watching us,’ he whispered hopefully. ‘Will it attack?’

  John chuckled. ‘It’s more scared of you than you are of it, Thomas.’

  They continued on their way, but Thomas couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder, and he caught no more specimens that afternoon.

  That night, as he lay in his hammock, he heard an unearthly cry just outside their camp.

  ‘There’s your jaguar, Thomas,’ said John, creaking in his hammock as he turned on his side.

  It was some time before Thomas fell asleep. He lay in his hammock, listening for the jaguar, picturing its heavy feet treading lightly through the forest, its body swinging. The print had been the size of a man’s hand and he imagined holding the velvet paw in his palm. He must remember to tell Sophie about it the next chance he had to write: the black jaguar was so rare.

  Though he thought of her often, he found that more and more his head was filled with butterflies — one in particular. He realised he hadn’t written to Sophie before they left Santarém, and there was no point in writing now until they got back to the city. His last letter from the agent said the first consignment had fetched a healthy sum, and he had sent details of his bank account to make sure Sophie was well provided for while he was gone, but there it was. That guilt again, at leaving his wife. Not only at leaving her, but at the fact that at times he didn’t even think of her; their life together in Richmond seemed so far away. So irrelevant.

  But her letters were cheerful enough — full of meals with friends, with games, with walks in the park — and they went a good way towards alleviating these feelings. He even envied her a little bit, for the time she spent in his beloved Richmond Park. He did miss it, despite the fact it would seem quite bare and barren of insect life when he returned.

  He remembered his first walk in the park, clutching his new butterfly net, a few days after his fifth birthday. He saw a deer picking its way through the bracken. His father gripped his hand and walked briskly towards the flower beds, the rough tweed of his jacket flapping in Thomas’s face. Thomas had to run to keep up with him and his first attempts at swiping at a red admiral failed. He was on the verge of tears when his father put his big hand over his own and guided it. Together they caught the butterfly and Thomas watched its slow struggle in the light netting, its legs as fine as hairs poking through the tiny holes.

  His parents hadn’t realised that by giving him such an innocuous present they had started a fire. Butterflies began to take up all of his spare time. He was still too small to go collecting on his own, but inevitably his father would get so fed up with Thomas’s badgering that he would yank him into the park, stand around smoking his pipe for five minutes, then order him home again. Thomas did not let this deter him. He began to request books on butterflies for all of his birthdays, and whenever the family went on a picnic would take his net and jars with him.

  Elderly gentlemen they passed on the way to their picnic spot invariably feigned interest. ‘Going fishing, are we?’ Thomas would shake his head and the men would wander away, no doubt wondering at the impertinence of the boy. He clearly had a net with him; what else would he be doing with it?

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Thomas,’ said his mother, when they were settled and pouring tea. ‘Sit still. You’re to finish your sandwiches and sit there and be quiet before you go running off all over the countryside. Really,’ she said, turning to her husband, ‘I wish we’d never given him that stupid net.’

  But his mother had gasped with pleasure when he brought her the chrysalis he had kept on his windowsill. Together they watched the brimstone emerge from its slippery bed, yellow and slick as a newborn calf. Slowly and quietly; they felt that if they spoke or breathed it might disturb the transformation and send the butterfly back into its cocoon. It slipped out, dew-wet, and rested, testing its wings, opening and closing them carefully, feeling for a drying wind that didn’t exist in his mother’s gloomy bedroom.

  ‘Let it out now, Tom,’ she said, and he sensed in her the same reluctance he felt to say goodbye to this small miracle. He crossed to the window and opened it, setting the jar with its branch on the sill. The butterfly waited another minute, seemed to be gathering its bearings, then launched itself from the branch and spun away into the garden.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said, and his mother opened her arms to him. He climbed onto her bed and was enclosed in a rare embrace by her cinnamon smell and the pillow of warm air that arose from under the covers.

  For all his father’s gruffness and complaints, he still encouraged his son’s habit. He took him to London when he was twelve years old to ‘Watkins and Doncaster, Naturalists’ in the Strand. Up until this point Thomas had caught butterflies and inexpertly pressed them into books, where they lasted for only a few months before insects attacked them and they mildewed and rotted away. Visiting Watkins and Doncaster was to Thomas as pleasurable as being in the most delicious sweet shop was to other boys — rows and shelves of all the equipment the serious collector could ever hope for. Instead of the smell of blackballs and sherbet, Thomas was enclosed by the odour of killing chemicals, laurel leaves and the dusky odour of plaster of Paris. He was allowed to select a new net, some cork-lined collecting boxes and, most important, a bottle of cyanide potassium. Until this point, he had only been allowed to use laurel leaves to kill his insects. The man behind the counter, with a giant belly and fingers like sausages, bent his face down close to Thomas’s and said, ‘Highly poisonous, young man. If you touch this or breathe it, you will die. You must only use it when your father is there to supervise you. Do you understand?’ Thomas nodded and pulled his face away — the man’s grey muttonchops were tickling his nose. The man gave a nod, satisfied that he had relieved himself of all responsibility should the boy kill himself. Mr Edgar gripped the back of Thomas’s neck and squeezed, just to make sure the message had got through.

  The last present Thomas received from his father before the old man died, when Thomas was finishing his studies, was a magnificent set of collecting drawers, fashioned by none other than the Bradys of Edmonton. Thomas could hardly breathe when he saw them; they were the most highly prized drawers that money could buy. Usually, money couldn’t buy them. The Bradys, a father-and-son team, wouldn’t sell them to just anyone who asked; one had to impress Brady senior with one’s connections, and he might offer to make a set of drawers. It was an elaborate game that saw many men leave his premises empty handed, their supply of famous names well and truly exhausted, their countenance defeated.

  But here they were: a set of Brady drawers, for Thomas.

&n
bsp; ‘Just remember I will always be proud of you, Thomas, no matter what you do.’ His father laid his hand on Thomas’s shoulder, and his eyes became rimmed with red. It was the most honest display of emotion Thomas had seen from him, and he vowed at that moment not to hide his feelings from his own children for so long. Mr Edgar died a month later. The doctor said he had a weak heart.

  The sadness that rose up inside him as he lay on his hammock surprised him. He hadn’t thought of his father for some time. His gut twisted and a pain shot between his lower ribs. His father had loved the park. And now Sophie was discovering the delights of its shaded walks and the hidden valleys. In her letter, she also spoke of her friendship with Agatha, who he knew would keep her happy — she had a gift for making people laugh, Thomas included. Sophie had also mentioned a retired army captain she had met at church. Some kindly old widower, he expected, who had taken an avuncular interest in Sophie in the absence of her husband and her father.

  His guilt was subsiding, along with the pain in his stomach. She’ll be all right, he thought. She’s strong and likes to be independent.

  He turned his thoughts again to the giant swallow-tailed butterfly he hoped to capture. What if he found only one? He would be reluctant to kill it right away, but knew that if he didn’t it could damage itself and then be useless as a specimen. Would he sell it? Or would he donate it to the Natural History Museum in the name of science? Science. He shuddered. The more he collected, the more Thomas realised how far from a scientist he actually was. Ernie and George made that obvious to him every day — not always intentionally. He had to identify many of the specimens he caught with books, and George seemed to be able to recognise many that he couldn’t. Thomas had pored over the cabinets of lepidoptera at the museum, but their Latin names filled him with frustration at their unwillingness to adhere to his memory. He was still an amateur, no matter that he would make some money from his sales.