Magdalena Mountain

by Robert Michael Pyle

  Winchester looked surprised, almost shocked. “Where?”

  “What?”

  “The journals—where are they?”

  “I found them by accident in the Petrunkevitch Alcove, stacked on a deep shelf behind some works on amber spiders. I couldn’t help looking them over.” Then, afraid he might have trespassed where he ought not to have been, he said, “Gosh! I hope—”

  “No. No, it’s all right. They’re no secret. I’m just relieved to know they are intact. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years, and I was worried that they’d been discarded while I was on sabbatical at Oxford. My collections manager must have been short on space, tucked the journals back there, and promptly forgot about them. I’ve been unable to locate them, despite intensive searching. I’m delighted that you turned them up.”

  “Just a fluke,” Mead said. “Who is he, and why are his journals important?”

  “In the opposite order,” Winchester replied. “The journals contain original field notes on many western butterflies by an excellent self-taught naturalist and very careful observer. Also, if I recall, they give something of an intimate look at a fascinating man.”

  “He seems to be,” said Mead.

  “Because of Carson’s unusual habit of mixing field notes with personalia in his diaries, one cannot mine the former without eavesdropping on the latter.”

  “So I’ve noticed. Although some entries are more skeletal, others go on and on. I wonder when he slept! But then, I gather he often didn’t sleep, stranded by the roadside and such. But who is this guy? And how did you get the books?”

  Winchester leaned back in his swivel chair, his big hands behind his fuscous hair, and considered for a moment before replying. “I don’t actually know very much about him.” He became pensive, as if trying to recall the name of a boyhood pet. “I’ve never met him, and our correspondence was slender. But he supplied the museum with much good material, in superb condition, always meticulously labeled, and eventually he sent me his field books as well.”

  “So he was a professional collector?”

  “Yes, among other things. What used to be called, in Alfred Russell Wallace’s day, a ‘flycatcher,’ but much more curious than most and, in his way, more scientific too. And more than that . . . he was, I would say, sort of a quixotic searcher and scavenger. He moved about a great deal, never married, as far as I know.”

  “Footloose?”

  “Very. He filled the niche of a kind of peripatetic forager of patchy habitats—like a high-class, curious tramp or rambler.” He paused, looked thoughtful, and went on. “Maybe he sought to escape some past, somebody? It seems as though he was always after something, anyway. Butterflies filled that need to a substantial extent in summer, and the market we provided gave him a modest grubstake. I could always weasel some funds from museum sources to buy his best material, just as I set aside a little fund for the purpose of scouring the amber markets in New York for spectacular specimens and new species. But beyond that, I know little of him.”

  “How about his name?” Mead asked, unwilling to let it lie.

  “I asked him the origin of his interesting first name once in a letter. I think you’ll find his reply in the files—let’s look now!” At that sudden inspiration Winchester wheeled about and the two of them stalked over to the prof’s rank of filing cabinets. “Carson, Hampton . . . great picture-winged fly man in Hawaii . . . Carson, Rachel” (ignoring Mead’s incredulous “Golly, you knew her?”) “. . . should be in between—yes, here it is.” A thin sheaf of letters emerged from the gray filing cabinet in the great paw of George Winchester. “Here, you may as well read them all, since you’re reading the journals. Please make a photocopy of each, charge it to my account, and put them with the journals. Then return these precisely here. I’d not like to lose the originals.”

  The letter in question began, “Dear George,” and went on: “Since you ask, I’ll tell you what I’ve been told about my name. My parents had five children, of which I was the last. The first four were named for their birth months—April, May, June, and August. Those were fairly ordinary names. So when I came along, the pattern stuck, and I was called October. Only sometimes I think it was an expression of the bleakness my mother felt as a recent widow during that lonely Depression autumn of 1932.”

  “And that,” said George, “is all I know of October Carson’s early life. And that he wandered the West for some ten years or more.”

  “And since? What’s become of him?”

  “I honestly don’t know. The letters tell nothing, and the journals stop just over three years ago. That same fall, I received a large package containing the journals and a very extensive consignment of butterflies from all over the West. There was a brief note that I must not have saved, asking me to send payment to general delivery in Allenspark, Colorado . . . I’d never have remembered that, except that I used to frequent that part of the Front Range when I worked out of CU’s Science Lodge above Ward.”

  “So that was it?”

  “I sent the museum’s check, it was cashed, and then I heard no more. I’ve never known whether he simply resumed his scavenging rambles, minus his butterfly net, or vanished somewhere, like Gauguin in the South Seas. I hadn’t thought about Carson for many months, until you mentioned the journals just now.” Winchester sighed and smiled high in one corner of his mouth. “So you see,” he mused, “I’m just as curious as you are.”

  “I’ve just begun the journals. But with your permission,” Mead said, forgetting his resolution, “I’d like to read the rest. Maybe I’ll catch some clues.”

  “If you have time, feel free. Just don’t let it become a detour from your important work. Do let me know what you discover. Well, I must get home, James. Jane and I have a rare date with the TV. Peter Freulich’s going to appear on The Tonight Show, with yet another Carson, not yet represented in my files—and I want to see him. You know his important work on fritillaries and their population biology, but did you know we cofounded Natural Limits to Growth?”

  “NLG—really!”

  “Yes, and his famous book, Nuking Ourselves, has gained even more notoriety than his scholarly work and has had him on the talk shows ever since. He’s a special favorite of Johnny Carson, who really seems to get the message. In any case, you’ll be needing to see to our mutual friends down the hall.”

  For once, Mead didn’t feel a bit like seeing to the noble roaches. He’d been learning some interesting things from their nighttime revels, but now, spurred on by Winchester’s revelation and invitation, he was truly piqued by Carson and eager to learn more about him. So, after a perfunctory feeding and cleaning, he made a fresh path in the snow across to the museum, gathered up the journals, and returned to Osborn, his tracks already covered. As the snow swaddled the world outside, Mead took to his tower with the first volume of Carson’s journal and a flask of hot tea from the Bunsen. He followed as Carson carried on across the pallid, frigid sagelands, eking food and shelter from his chancy pursuits through the coldest winter in almost forty years.

  10

  Mead’s own winter passed too. His mental distance from New Mexico and his mother grew with the sum of the weeks. She wrote no more; his father sent short notes instead with family news of the light sort and the occasional check folded inside. The pain of his mother’s frost became the kind of dull background ache that one mostly forgets, most of the time.

  Something else troubled Mead when he thought about it, but in a very different way: that one young woman’s smile, from his first visit to the department. He’d scarcely dated anyone in New Haven and was stewing in a stale winter’s brew of his own testosterone. A remarkable face, he thought, the one he’d glimpsed flitting out of George Winchester’s office that first day at Yale. He’d been right about her being part Asian—Hawaiian, in fact: some indigenous, some Japanese. Her smile infected him, made others smile; also made him want to kiss her mouth and lick her teeth. As he thought such
thoughts, Mead realized he had been too long in the roach room at night, too long cooped in his monastic tower. When he next encountered Noni Blue, he asked her out, and she accepted.

  After their first date, a movie and a drink, Mead walked home across the Old Campus. “I suppose that’s grad school for you,” he muttered, a touch of disgust in his voice. “I’ve thought about Noni all year, so here I am, on a rare night away from the roaches, facing her across our beers, and what do we talk about? Bloody committees!”

  But that was natural. Few aspects of life affect the postgrad quite as much as the faculty committee. Your fortunes, fun, fury, and future rotate on the whim and judgments of this arbitrary posse of pedagogues. Given a sympathetic tribunal, life can be worth living. But let one or two be petulant prima donnas, and you may be screwed, regardless of scholarship. Mead had heard of committees that greased the skids, others that gummed up the works, but never one that failed to put up a few hoops to jump through. Along such runnels ran the conversation of James Mead and Noni Blue on their first date. “Committees!” Mead croaked again an hour later, trudging up the steps of the tower. “Couldn’t I have thought of something more romantic?”

  So the next time, he spoke of hissing roaches and their marvelous courtship rituals. That hadn’t been quite right either.

  On their third date, over coffee, Mead let out much more than he’d intended. They’d been getting to know each other, and Noni said, “Tell me about your family. And where you’re from, besides just New Mexico.”

  “I was born in Las Cruces,” Mead began. “Dad worked on rockets at White Sands—nothing nuclear, but they were getting ready. We moved to Albuquerque a few years ago when he got a job at the university. Mom’s spent her whole life so far on me and my two brothers. Wants to paint, but never quite gets the brushes out, you know?”

  “Or gets the lead out?” asked Noni. “My mom was like that—until she left.”

  “My mother would never do that.”

  “Any woman will, if she’s had enough. Or maybe not enough.”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, she’d be an emotional cripple on her own.”

  “You sell her pretty short, don’t you?”

  “Never mind. Anyway, UNM waives tuition for faculty brats, so I stayed there. Then returned to Las Cruces for my master’s.”

  Noni tried again. “So what do you mean about your mother? I don’t mean to pry, but what you said was provocative. Why is she so emotionally dependent?”

  “Well, nuts,” he said, running his long fingers through his brown hair. “All right—you want to know? You might not like it.”

  She kept on nodding, if only just.

  “Okay. My mother always wanted a girl; Dad too. They got us three boys—I’m the oldest, Lance and Roger are eighteen and fifteen. So eight years ago—Mom’s fifty-four—she got pregnant again.”

  “Wow! And, yay for her—so she got her girl?”

  “Don’t cheer yet. They got their girl, all right. She was born with spina bifida.”

  “Oh, James, I’m sorry . . .”

  “That’s not the bad part,” he continued. “The surgery was good, she was coming along, and we all loved her very much. But she took a lot of care.” Mead was staring straight ahead, into his cooling cup. “It wore us out sometimes, but Molly got and gave all the love any kid could have.” He paused, and Noni said nothing. “Then, two years ago, she died.” Mead went pale. “And that’s still not the worst of it,” he said with a small, mirthless laugh. “Mom and Dad never got out anymore, what with the demands of Molly’s care. One day I talked them into going hiking with us boys. For the first time, they consented to leave Molly with a respite worker from the county. Everything seemed fine. We all had a good time, almost like before, when we hiked all the time. Then we got home to find an ambulance in the driveway. The respite helper had fallen asleep, and Molly drowned in the bath.”

  Noni took his hand.

  James snorted. “If only we hadn’t gone hiking . . .” He let his head fall onto her shoulder, feeling way too close to blubbering. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “I’ve never told anyone before.”

  Noni shoved him. “James, I am sorry, that’s a horrible story. And my shoulder’s yours if you want it. But you really carry guilt about this, don’t you?”

  “I know it’s not my fault. And I can’t say I saw a great future for Molly. But it’s what it did to Mom. She’s been very brittle ever since. Therapy doesn’t work, and she’d never take pills.”

  “But James, tens of thousands of mothers have lost healthy sons, not to mention lovers and husbands and fathers, in Vietnam in these past few years. Like my aunt, when my cousin Charlie was killed in Khe Sanh. Most of them get on with it, as she does.”

  “You’re right. And so does my mother, in her way. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Well, I almost think she blames me. The outing was my idea, after all, and I talked them into it. We were exceptionally close, always—great pals. But ever since Molly died, she’s been stiff, even cold toward me. I guess that haunts me more than Molly’s loss itself. That must sound incredibly selfish. Oh, shit.”

  Noni gave her shoulder back.

  Later, as Noni spoke softly, trying to comfort him, James considered her face as well as her words. She flicked her long, dark brown hair, glinting red in some lights, black in others. Mead knew he was supposed to respond to what he thought she had said, but he let himself lose track in the flickers and sparks of her hair. That night it was hellishly hard to return to his lab, the roach room, and the lonely, chilly turret. Eventually he fell asleep, for once with more than randy roaches and western ramblers in his dreams.

  More dates followed. When weekend weather permitted, they walked the trails of the traprock ridges outside of town. Or they caught a bus to some salt marsh village, dined on crab cakes and Schaefer beer in little beach bistros, and walked back on long-abandoned trolley lines that once served the university. When the snow closed in, they prowled weedy winter fields, stark with the heads of dried asters.

  The day came at last when Mead kissed Noni’s mouth and licked her teeth. And one night, sealed in her warm room by the bewitching glaze of a Connecticut ice storm off Long Island Sound, beside a little Christmas tree they’d fashioned from snapped-off boughs of pine, they became lovers. Afterward, Noni’s almost negative weight buoyant across his belly beneath the sheets, Mead lay in a state of happy disbelief.

  Lifting her hand to stroke his long side and his short brown beard, Noni said, “I was beginning to wonder whether we’d ever get here.”

  “I know,” said Mead. “God, I’ve needed this.”

  “Need more?” she asked.

  So the two of them, young and lithe and randier than the roaches from too much bookwork and too little life, wrapped themselves together again. Then, sweaty and laughing like mockingbirds, they slept into the morning. When Mead awoke, Noni’s bedside candle burned low and bright as her grass-sweet breath lisped on in slumber.

  Mead looked around him at Noni’s books, records, prints, posters, family photos, and artifacts from a privileged and cosmopolitan upbringing. A field hockey stick angled across one corner while another supported a generous spiderweb unmolested. On a corner clothesline, a trio of pastel blouses danced with a pretty array of panties and bras. Mead worried that she was much more sophisticated than he in her background, and he mumbled something to himself. Just then she stirred, turned her warm front against his side, and asked, “What did you say?”

  “You have a lot of books,” he said, and then he crushed her petal lips, doing them no harm whatever.

  One day about a week later Mead was working in the main museum collection, placing some butterflies of the brushfoot subfamily Satyrinae into unit trays. His eyes were arrested by the label on a tray of stunning black velvet butterflies: Erebia magdalena, read the label. “Eureka!” he erupted. The boss was on hand, working in another
range of cabinets.

  “The missing link?” Winchester asked.

  Mead called him over. “Could be,” he said, “or the missing Carson!” He explained.

  “Yes, surely that is the Magdalena Carson referred to in his journal,” Winchester confirmed. “Not only was it one of the man’s most lucrative catches, when it could be had, but I believe he was also quite fond of the species.”

  Peering into the tray, Mead could see why that might be.

  “If you’ll look closely, you’ll see that some of those specimens were collected by him.” Indeed, the pin label on several read LEG. O. CARSON.

  Mead beheld a series of large alpines. Unlike most members of the genus Erebia, these were devoid of eyespots or any other decoration. Magdalena spanned more than two inches across its spread wings, which were utterly unmarked. The long, rounded panes shone wholly black or darkest chocolate, or a weathered brown plush on older specimens. Aside from its immaculate ebony surfaces, it seemed an unremarkable insect, but then Mead knew nothing of its biology.

  Winchester came alongside Mead again and set a case atop a low cabinet for viewing. “Look here, James,” he said, pointing. “As you know, we have several specialty collections in the museum, such as species that have become extinct—I purchased several of these from the great insect bourses in London, Paris, and Hamburg after the war—as well as sexual gynanders and mosaics, mimicry pairs and rings, and so on.” He indicated the “so on” with an all-inclusive sweep of his massive hands, which were capable of lofting Cornell insect drawers in a single grasp. Mead nodded; he had done some curating in several of these specialized groups.

  “For example, look at these gynandromorphs,” he said, pulling out a drawer of the oddest-looking butterflies Mead had ever seen. Most were bilateral—all male on one side, all female on the other—making for a particularly striking contrast in sexually dimorphic species. “Charlie Covell donated that superb bilateral of Speyeria diana from Kentucky,” Winchester said, indicating an amazing half-and-half fritillary of jack-o’-lantern orange and black on one side, black and blue on the other. “The genetics of that are fairly straightforward,” he said. “But this one is much more rare, and complex.” He pointed at a Queen Alexandra’s sulphur that looked ordinary, until Mead noticed that it had one female wing to three male ones. “A young fellow named Michael Heap sent me that,” Winchester said. “His mother collected it in Colorado.”