purple flashing from the sun on its wings. It didn’t fly like the small white butterflies with their dizzy fluttering or the little violet hoppers that literally jumped into the air and then beat their wings furiously just to stay there; those reminded me of my dream, when I’d tried to fly. No, the Swallowtail was graceful in its flight. It flapped its wings a few times and glided a ways, flapped again and glided, then seemed to almost float to a landing on the damp earth.
“Give me the net,” Laurel said, and shoved her jar at me. She ran straight for the wet area, jumping clumps of grasses and weeds, towards the butterfly. The Swallowtail lifted into the air, climbed fast. Laurel made a leap for it, slipped on the wet grass and sprawled face first onto the ground, almost completely hidden by the clumps of tall grass, weeds, and wildflowers.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”
The Swallowtail had landed again, not far from where Laurel had first chased it. I lifted my net and crept slowly towards it; a hard to find specimen like that would be a perfect start for my new collection. Just as I drew close the butterfly must’ve seen me coming and started to take off again. I swung the net fast and managed to trap it on the ground, being careful to not damage its wings. Just touching a butterfly’s wings can ruin them so I didn’t put any grass in the jar that it could scrape against. After all, a butterfly without its wings is just another bug.
I got my jar over it, but unlike the smaller butterflies it couldn’t get a grip on the glass walled jar to climb inside, so I carefully slipped the lid under the jar until the Swallowtail had to climb inside it. I then quickly flipped the jar upright and tightened the lid. With no alcohol in the jar to kill the butterfly I didn’t know how long it would take to die. The beetles I’d collected, the locusts and grasshoppers, the Katydids and the delicate Green Lacewings, all died almost immediately from the alcohol and even the largest would be dried and ready to mount within a day or so. I’d have to wait for this one to suffocate before I could dry and mount it, but it would be worth the wait.
This butterfly seemed calm, unlike the small white ones and the little hoppers, and it just sat in the bottom of the jar. It was so large it couldn’t spread its wings fully until I held the jar sideways. I slowly rolled the jar in my hands and looked my catch over from top to bottom; there didn’t seem to be any damage, even to the narrow “tails” on the two lower wings. Shades of blues and purples flashed from the black wings as I turned the jar in the sun. This butterfly would be the centerpiece of my new display since I wasn’t likely to find a better specimen for a long time, if ever. Every facet of the butterfly’s compound eyes reflected the same colors and for a moment it seemed like it was looking right at me. Then I realized that of course it was looking at me; for all that tiny creature knew I was about to make a meal of it!
I turned back to Laurel. “Hey, I got it! You can show it to your mom if you want to but you can’t let it go; I’m keeping this one.”
Laurel was on her knees in the grass, facing the other way. She got to her feet and began brushing dirt and grass from her clothes.
“Thought you could fly there for a minute, didn’t you?”
She turned around, cocked her head to the side and grimaced like she sometimes did. I felt the jar slip from my fingers and thump onto the ground, roll to a stop against a grass clump, but I forgot about the swallowtail. I couldn’t look at the jar or what I’d trapped inside; all I could look at was Laurel’s forehead. She stared back for a few seconds, confused, then her face went slack, flushed red, and in one motion she threw her hands to the sides of her head, spun away from me and crouched low as though to hide in the tall grasses. I watched from behind as she lifted her hair from her head and shook it gently. Her scalp looked even worse than Granddad’s hands when his skin condition flared up: cracked, raw skin and scar tissue. She fitted her hair like a cap, pulling it back to front, patted her bangs into place then stood and turned around again.
“Is it straight?” she asked, but I didn’t understand.
“Is what straight?”
“My hair! Is my hair straight?”
I looked at her, at the bangs that hung almost to her eyes. “Yeah,” I said, ‘I mean, I guess it looks like it always does.”
“It must’ve got stuck on a briar,” she said, and then brushed a few pieces of dried grass from her sleeves. “I’m sorry; I didn’t know it had pulled loose.”
“Oh, that’s okay.” I knew that sounded lame but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“You can’t see anything?” She turned in a circle, tilted her one way and then the other.
“No,” I shook my head, “It looks fine.”
“I want to go home now,” she said, and started back up the slope. I picked up my jar, the swallowtail seemed okay, then picked up her jar and both nets and followed a few steps behind her. We’d walked about halfway back up the slope before she spoke again.
“Don’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t.”
“Nobody else knows.”
“Okay.”
She stopped and turned to face me. “You promise?”
“Swear to God and hope to die.”
She turned around and started walking again. “That’s why I don’t ride the bus,” she said. “In first grade a boy in the seat behind me pulled my hair and it came off in his hand. He yelled out, ‘Gross!’, and threw it across the bus. It landed on a girl and she threw it on the floor and screamed, ‘What is it?’ Then some other girls screamed and the bus driver pulled over at a phone and called my Mama to come get me.”
“What happened?”
“Mama moved us here so I could go to another school. Now she drives me to school every day and doesn’t want me playing anywhere else. Except up here with you, so I can catch butterflies.”
“No, I mean, what… happened? To your head?”
“Oh," she said, and hesitated a moment. “When I was four, Mama had boiled a pan of water for iced tea and had it in her hand. Billy was running in the house and bumped into her from behind and the whole pan of boiling water splashed on my head and part of my back.”
I thought then how my mom was really picky about every pan handle turned towards the stove. She was always afraid we might knock one off and burn ourselves if we weren’t careful. After seeing Laurel’s head I realized mom knew what she was talking about.
"Only a little bit got on my face and my bangs hide that."
“And it burned off all your hair?”
Laurel nodded. “It burned off the skin. Mama said they put skin grafts on it but the hair won’t ever grow back.”
“What’s a skin-graft?” I asked, but she ignored me.
“Now I get a new wig every year,” she said, her voice sounding a little brighter. “Made special just for me; will you bring my net home?”
I was already carrying her net and jar so I didn’t answer. She started to run, ducked into the pine stand with her hand tight on her head. I knew the kite would be okay where I’d left it and I could come back for it later, so I followed Laurel towards the neighborhood.
She was in her house when I got there. I loosened the top on her jar of butterflies so they could get air, then set it in a shaded spot on the back steps, left her net by the porch and then went home. I set the jar with my swallowtail in the shade with the jar top loosened.
I saw Laurel later that afternoon, holding the butterfly jar on her lap. She slowly turned the jar, watching as the butterflies climbed over one another, then removed the top and set the jar on the bottom step. The little violet hoppers jumped into the air before they even reached the top of the jar, but the larger white butterflies took their time and crawled up to sit on the rim. They opened their wings in the sun and then one after another jumped into the air. I sat on my back porch and watched them spin and flutter into the sky in a spiral like torn bits of paper.
After I watched the last of Laurel’s butterflies disappear into the brightness, I picked
up my own jar and looked at what I'd trapped in a glass-walled prison. The butterfly sat at the bottom of the jar slowly opening and closing its wings to keep cool, but without room to open them fully. I held the jar up to the sunlight and slowly turned it in my hands; the undersides of the wings seemed a little duller and didn’t refract the light as much as the topsides. In the past hour that delicate creature had been cruelly snatched from its home, imprisoned in a container that was dropped, rolled, bounced and shaken, yet it still sat calmly in its glass prison.
I felt sad for Laurel and the hair of her own that she’d never have again, for the freedom to go wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Like the rest of us.
And me, I just wanted to fly. The freedom I had now was all Laurel wanted, yet I still wanted more. I thought of all of the flying insects I’d killed without a second thought, taking from the very thing I wanted; the ability to fly. Just so I could stick them to a board for a collection.
I picked up my jar then, examined my trophy, that wonderful Black Swallowtail butterfly, and I thought how cruel it was that the butterfly could see through the glass, wanting to fly but held back by an invisible barrier. I removed the top from the jar, and knowing that it couldn’t climb the glass walls, I found a stick on the ground and stood it upright in the jar. The swallowtail climbed slowly, and then paused a few moments, clinging to the top end of the stick. It
Butterflies- The Adventures of Roland Mccray Page 3
