The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  Of course it wasn’t. It was a dream. But whose, Dolly wondered.

  He bashed down some more flowers and Myra wailed. Dolly gave her a look. For the first time he noticed the large purple welts she had raised on her arms, buttocks, shoulders, the backs of her legs—her stomach and her face as she scratched.

  “My God, Myra! What are you covered all over with?”

  The expression on Dolly’s face made Myra scream with terror, for he seemed to be saying she had been mounted by a troop of giant spiders. She flung her arms in the air, and ran and screamed again, flying amidst a cascade of vine leaves and flowers, right into a dark pool of water that lurked close at hand by the path.

  There was a terrible noise of splashing and choking and loud cries of “Quicksand!” and “Alligator!” and “Can’t swim!” and “Dolly!!!” until, moments later, Dolly felt moved to rush to her assistance.

  “Myra, Myra! Be calm!” he called, sliding and falling knee-deep into the waterhole. When he had fully assessed he was neither drowning nor being attacked himself, he regained his composure and asked Myra to pass him his stick, which was floating in the middle of the pool.

  She retorted that she was too busy removing leeches from her arms to take time to pass him his damn walking stick, but at the word “leeches” Dolly had already gone berserk.

  If ever a more natural enemy had been created for a hemophiliac, surely it had not been heard of.

  Literally unable to speak in his terror, Dolly thrashed about like a man possessed. Myra, certain he would harm himself, made for the opposite shore, got out and ran stark naked around the pool and hauled him out onto the bank.

  He refused to stop jabbering, so she threatened to hit him on the mouth and, as always, the merest hint of earnest violence persuaded him to faint.

  While he was passed out, Myra took the opportunity to check him carefully for leeches. Finding none, she proceeded to divest herself. Or at least she tried.

  Of course, without benefit of either salt or a match, it was impossible to make the leeches budge. There were three of them—one on her leg and two on her arms. She yanked at them, pulled at them, scratched at them, and swore at them.

  Dolly began to recover. Before he had a chance to panic, Myra told him he had no leeches. But she had, and she was frightened.

  Dolly said, “Unless we can get you back to the car in half an hour, they will kill you.”

  “Yes,” said Myra, disconsolate. “What a way to end my lovely life.”

  Then a foot crunched on the path behind them and Dolly whirled.

  It was Miss Bonkers, looking very odd.

  “Have you got a match?” said Dolly.

  Miss Bonkers merely stared at him through her goggles.

  “Miss Bonkers? Where have you been?” Dolly demanded. His wrath needed an outlet. He glared at her hotly, but she did not seem to comprehend. He tried another tack—the tack of compassion and pity. “Miss Bonkers,” he implored, “have you a match or not? Surely you have a match somewhere on your person. Miss Myra is being eaten alive by leeches—see them?—and we must burn them to save her.”

  At the word “burn” a strange look came into Miss Bonkers’s eye. She lifted up her nose like a dog, tasting the air, and she waggled her head up and down like that, indicating that Dolly should do the same. She clutched at his arm with her gauntleted paw.

  “She seems to have been struck dumb,” said Dolly over his shoulder to Myra. He looked inquisitively into Miss Bonkers’s face. “What is it?” he asked.

  Miss Bonkers shook his arm and gazed off into the treetops, bobbing her head and sniffing loudly. Delicately, Dolly did likewise.

  “I don’t…” he began, but then he did. “Fire,” he barked. “Oh, holy God. This canyon is on fire.”

  Miss Bonkers nodded. She agreed.

  Myra rose. The leeches were becoming larger by the minute, and now they seemed to be very, very heavy. Each of them had grown from an inch or so in diameter to the size of a small fist, and they were lengthening constantly, like grotesque balloons. The welts on her body had turned from purple to blue and her hair hung down in muddy blond ringlets to her shoulders. She was a mess.

  Dolly searched Miss Bonkers’s pockets for a match, but could find nothing save his mother’s hypodermic set and the bottle of morphine. There was not time to wonder what effect the morphine might have on the leeches, for by now they could hear the distant roaring of the flames and, far off through the trees, Dolly could see their yellow and orange reflections on the rubber leaves.

  “Please—please—oh, please! Haven’t you got a match?” he bellowed into Miss Bonkers’s goggles. But she shook her head violently. The noise of the fire was beginning to mount and would soon deafen them completely.

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Dolly, turning to Myra, who wavered and felt faint. “I think we’d better get out of here. Don’t you?”

  “All right,” said Myra. “Anything you say.” Her voice was flat and bloodless.

  Dolly looked around. There was only the one path, the one they had been on for hours, and he did not know where it went, but he was certain, the way things were slanted and fated, that it probably led into the growing holocaust. Still—it was the only path they had and a number of animals seemed to be making use of it, so he concluded they would use it too.

  “Are you coming?” he yelled at Miss Bonkers.

  She smiled and coughed and nodded and, like a child, she took his hand.

  With his other hand, Dolly gingerly clung to Myra’s elbow, well away from the bag-like leech that hung nearby at her wrist, and they began very slowly to walk away from the flames.

  “We’re going to die! We’re going to die!” Myra whispered.

  “Yes,” said Dolly. “You’re probably right.”

  3:30 p.m.

  Letitia Virden, of course, refused to run.

  She gave the flames a steely glare. It occurred to her that she had been in worse positions before this, albeit most of them in pictures.

  She turned to Cooper Carter. “Well, Cooper,” she said, “it looks as though we must make a bold decision. Right or wrong, we must choose a direction and follow it up.”

  Cooper called to the three men in leather coats. He took them a little to one side and counseled them. “It may be necessary for some of us to die,” he said. “I want you to devote your last energies entirely to Miss Virden. Whatever happens, she must be saved.”

  Not a flicker of emotion crossed the faces of the henchmen. Cooper gave them each a pat on the shoulder and turned back to Letitia.

  “My men will see you get through, my dear,” he said. And then, “Pick her up, gentlemen.”

  Two of the fellows joined hands to form a chair and knelt before the Virgin. She smoothed her skirts and sat down, supporting herself serenely on their leather shoulders. They raised her up. Her veiling billowed and she looked all at once like the Empress of China riding forth to war on the arms of her servants.

  Cooper raised his arm dramatically.

  Curse him, George thought, mindful of his own face and figure, and of his own disgrace in Letitia’s eyes. Curse him with his profile and his money and his age. He has it all, George thought. He has it all! And now he’s going to save her life.

  They marched off down the path, Cooper striding first, like a superman, followed by the Virgin-Empress in her leather cradle. George was last, as if forgotten.

  3:45 p.m.

  The cars and the motorcycle faced the gates of Alvarez Canyon Paradise. Their metal bodies reflected a wall of distant fire.

  The people sat upon the ground, disconsolate and lost.

  At last, the noise of the animals was heard.

  Naomi said, “They will all die.”

  But Ruth said, “No. Pay attention. Wait.”

  Gazing at one another, the survivors neither advanced nor withdrew recognition. They were figures in a dream-scape. They were there, but this had no connection with the reality of their names and faces. N
aomi would claim later she had had a dream about George. George would swear he had not laid eyes on his wife since the day of their divorce. Letitia, in or out of reality, would not have divulged her identity in any case.

  Myra, Dolly, Miss Bonkers, the men in leather, Cooper Carter and the woman in the pith helmet were all blurs. Fading in and out of sight. The Negro chauffeur, the apelike custodian and the wardens in their green jackets were just so many shadows on the grass.

  The light dimmed.

  It began.

  At first, there was a pause. Silence. Whatever had cried did not cry. Whatever had run was still. The fire itself did not roar. The wind changed. It changed down the canyon from the peaks. It harried the wavering flames. It gusted—and blew them up into tree-high torches. It licked and cajoled and persuaded. Sparks flared. Dead embers reared into balloons of fire.

  The animals quit all thought of individual flight and joined in mutual panic and terror—fleeing mindlessly in concerted directions, not knowing what death was, but smelling death—not knowing what fire was, but being burned. Some turned back into the furnace. Others crept into flaming trees. Some attempted impossible flight into the sky. Some went into caves where the scorched air burned their lungs. The reptiles devoured their young and were swallowed themselves by fire. Birds fell down like stones and hives of bees and nests of hornets exploded. The living closed ranks.

  The wheeling wall of flesh turned round and round. Perhaps it remembered the gate. It seized on that direction. It fled through the corridor of fire toward space. The clearing, with its people, became visible. Green.

  “They’re coming!” someone shouted.

  “Close all the gates!”

  “Keep them back! They’ll kill us! Back!”

  Someone ran and flung himself against the height of the gates and swung them closed.

  “Why? Why?” said Naomi.

  “Wait,” someone said.

  “But why?”

  They all stared.

  The wave of beasts appeared. It had one voice.

  “Help them!” cried Naomi, and fell back into Miss Bonkers’s arms and was engulfed at once in drugs.

  Ruth took a step toward the gate.

  But she was halted.

  The chains of the fence bulged; almost gave—but did not. Paws reached through. Beggars. Dead. Noses, eyes, portions of torn and unrecognizable anatomy dropped before Ruth, melting in the grass at her feet. She turned back. It was over. No more noises. Four thousand creatures had perished against a wall.

  But no one saw it. No one heard it. No one was there. Or, so they all claimed. Everyone heard about it, of course, but afterward. In the reports.

  Days later Miss Bonkers said to Ruth, “What wall?”

  And Ruth said, “The wall they died at.”

  And Naomi said, “There was no wall, dear.”

  And Ruth said, “The animals…”

  But then Miss Bonkers just laughed and shook her white-capped head.

  “Oh, no,” she stated flatly, opening her copy of Come and Get It, “no animals, Mrs. Haddon. There were no animals. Nothing died. Nothing. It was a miracle. The papers said so.”

  “But we were there,” said Ruth. “We saw.”

  “No, dear,” said Naomi. Her patience, in pain, gained an edge. “We read about it. Don’t you remember?”

  Ruth looked along the beach.

  Children played.

  “We didn’t see it?” she asked. “We weren’t there?”

  “No, dear,” said Naomi. “No.”

  Miss Bonkers flipped her page.

  “It’s all in your mind,” she announced to Ruth quite comfortably. “It’s only in your mind, Mrs. Haddon. You dream too much.”

  And she read her book.

  But Ruth believed. She could feel the swastika in her pocket.

  Alvarez Canyon Paradise did burn down. And someone was there. I was.

  “Everything isn’t a dream or a nightmare,” she wanted to say. “Some things happen!”

  Instead, she maintained her silence, which was rather like sucking one of Miss Bonkers’s comfits. The longer it nested on her tongue, the deeper the flavor became. And the comfort.

  Book Two

  The Chronicle

  of the Wish

  Tuesday, September 27th, 1938:

  Topanga Beach

  11:45 p.m.

  Ruth could not sleep.

  She pulled open the glass doors and stepped out.

  Further down the beach someone was giving a party. The sound of gramophone records needled her ears. Youthful laughter mingled with blown words, careless and maddeningly innocent. Several people were dancing tangos a la Bully.

  Her mind began to play with the distant sound of the music and the postures of the dance. The wash of the waters—sibilant as whispers—and the stiff-arm of the tango harried her with echoes she could hardly bear.

  She closed her eyes.

  Slowly, she fled indoors.

  11:50 p.m.

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what, Ruth?”

  “For waking you up.”

  “No. No. You didn’t. That’s all right. I heard you walking and I thought perhaps you might come in.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No.”

  “I wondered…”

  “No. I’m not in pain.”

  “May I sit down?”

  “Of course.”

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, Ruth?”

  “Alvarez Canyon…”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Alvarez Canyon didn’t happen?”

  “No.”

  “We weren’t there?”

  “No, dear. We weren’t there.”

  “Not any of us?”

  “No.”

  Silence.

  The curtains fingered the edges of the rug. The breeze was seaweed scented.

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  Naomi waited.

  “I don’t know how to ask. It’s so personal, Mother, and I can’t think of the right words.”

  “Ask it just as it occurs to you.” Naomi waited again, and when Ruth did not speak, she said, “Is it dying you want to know about?”

  “Yes. But dying in your mind.”

  “In my mind…” Naomi paused. “That’s impossible to answer, because it isn’t in my mind.”

  “Where is it, then?”

  Don’t say your heart, Ruth begged, don’t say your heart. I want to know the mind.

  “I guess it’s around me somewhere. Still outside of me.

  Gathering. I don’t know—like a crowd, I was going to say. But gathering like an event—the days and weeks before the event takes place. You know? The way anticipation fills the minds of everyone concerned, and yet they go on doing what they do. The women make cakes and eat meals and scold their children and the men read papers and listen to radios, but the event is always there, waiting to happen. My death. It takes on a personality all of its own, you know. It has a face. And legs and arms and…hands. It even has a way of talking. In a sense, that’s really true. I talk with my death. I listen to it and I pay attention to it. Because soon it will have me and that is the subject of our conversation and that, I suppose, is the way I look at it—sizing up the size of it—seeing what sort of match it will be.”

  “You still haven’t said you’re afraid.”

  “I am.”

  “Why don’t you show it?”

  “I’m surprised to hear I don’t.”

  “Are you brave, then? Is that courage? Is courage silence?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. I haven’t the foggiest notion.”

  “Mother?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to have a baby.”

  So.

  Even the sea seemed to stop for a moment.

  This is the la
st thing I expected, Naomi thought, lying propped on her pillow in the wavering dark, watching her daughter, who was far across the room smoking cigarettes, picking at the edges of her nightgown, broken in some mysterious way that Naomi did not fathom. Ruth, who had always been strong, had been weakened—even to the point of wanting the child she knew she must never have. It was impossible.

  “Ruth—I have told you a million times—I cannot have this conversation.”

  “Mother. Please. I must talk about it.”

  “Talk about it. Go ahead. But I cannot help you. I cannot tell you yes or no. I had to make those answers for myself…”

  “And were you sorry? Once you’d made them? Sorry your answers were yes?”

  Now. What do you say to the product of the wrong answer?

  “I got you. And Adolphus.”

  “But were you sorry?”

  “You are here now. No parent knows any other answer than that.”

  Ruth closed her eyes. “You love me.”

  “Yes. I love you. And Adolphus.”

  “But are you sorry? Do you wish you hadn’t? Please, Mama! I need answers.”

  Naomi thought. “May I have one of your cigarettes?”

  “Of course.” Ruth stood up and crossed the room.

  “I don’t smoke. But…why shouldn’t I smoke?” Naomi puffed. And puffed again. “I like it.”

  She looked up at Ruth, standing near the bed, depositing the match in a cold cup of coffee that sat on the table. There was no ashtray.

  “Do you want to sit over here? Sit on the foot of the bed.”

  Ruth sat.

  Naomi held her cigarette like an amateur. Very slowly she began to speak.

  “Let me tell you something. The world is round. And you swim. And I was a picture star. Your father is a world-renowned producer. And your brother is a brilliant young director. All these things are facts. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. You no longer swim. And I don’t star in pictures and your father doesn’t make movies. And one day, suddenly, we all know, Adolphus will hurt himself and die. Nothing lasts. But in the meantime, these things form a portion of reality. Right? They are—they were—facts. And vehement facts, at that.”