The Butterfly Plague

by Timothy Findley

  They set out at 11:00 a.m. Luncheon, with wine, went with them in a wicker basket.

  In one of those unlikely coincidences that plague the chronicler of history (the writer of fiction usually doesn’t dare employ them), it so happened that, besides the Damarosch group on that Sunday, not only the whole Trelford family, but Octavius Rivi, as well, decided to travel to Fringes Bay to see the Trees.

  Ruth and Adolphus, Ruth driving and Adolphus riding in the rumble seat amongst his pillows and pads, went down in the purple Franklin.

  The Trelfords went down in the Ford.

  Octavius went down in a hired limousine.

  And Miss Bonkers went down, of course, by motorbike.

  They made a large party.

  It was ominous.

  12:00 noon

  “Shall we have lunch in the car or shall we wait till we get there?” said Ruth. She could not bear the speed at which she was being forced to drive. The boredom was appalling.

  “Oh, do let’s stop by the side of the road,” shouted Dolly. “Picnic on the grass. It would be so lovely. Besides, we have to feed Miss Bonkers, too.”

  “Very well,” said Ruth.

  Miss Bonkers, who was cruising lazily along behind them, drew over to the shoulder at Ruth’s signal.

  “What’s happening?” she yelled above the din of her motorcycle.

  “We’re going to eat!” Ruth screamed back.

  Miss Bonkers nodded.

  They parked under a tree and spread their tablecloth on the wild flowers, the moss, and the creepers that flourished there.

  As they ate, they watched the cars go by, and the bicycles, and even, on one occasion, a troup of hikers who strode by on foot, chanting numbers.

  “Do you think they’re all going to Fringes Bay?” Ruth asked.

  “It’s very likely,” said Dolly. “Last year everyone went to Monterey. Once the public makes a decision…”

  “…It’s very hard to decide against the public,” Ruth finished, with a hard smile.

  This had been one of George’s mottoes.

  “Still no word?” said Dolly, referring to their father’s lack of response to Naomi’s death.

  “Still no word,” said Ruth.

  “How strange…” said Adolphus.

  “Downright queer, if you ask me,” said Miss Bonkers, biting into a ham-on-rye. “Married all those years and not a word when she dies. I call it thoughtless and cruel. Thoughtless and cruel.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Ruth, picking a small blue flower and twirling it between her fingers, under her nose. “Wild flowers rarely have a smell. Have you noticed that?”

  “Skunkweed smells,” said Dolly.

  “Yes, but flowers. Flowers. Wild flowers.”

  Dolly leaned over, prepared to sniff.

  “There isn’t a bee in there, is there?” he asked. “By any chance?”

  “No,” said Ruth. “No bees.”

  Dolly drew a deep breath through his nostrils.

  “Not a touch,” he said. “You try, Miss B.”

  Miss Bonkers took her turn smelling the flower.

  “Isn’t that peculiar,” she said. “Not the faintest whiff.”

  “Almost as though it was dead.”

  “Or artificial.”

  “Or deodorized,” Ruth smiled.

  “Deodorized flowers! Isn’t that lovely?” said Dolly, chuckling at the thought. “Deodorized flowers—like a white sunset.”

  “Yes,” said Ruth. “Or like us.”

  “What do you mean by that?” said Adolphus, knowing exactly what she meant.

  “Oh, nothing,” said Ruth. “Just a joke that didn’t work.”

  “I should think so,” said Dolly with a soft edge of petulance. “Indeed, I’d damn well say so.”

  “All right,” said Ruth. “Forget it.”

  Miss Bonkers had watched this exchange and had listened to it with that excessive nonchalance that enforced eavesdropping on family matters demands of outsiders.

  “I always say…” she said.

  “That you can’t beat a lost cause?” said Dolly with a sigh, picking up a sandwich.

  “No.”

  “That a motorcycle isn’t an airplane?” said Ruth.

  “Oh, no,” said Miss Bonkers. “Never.”

  “Then what?” said Ruth.

  “Yes, what?” said Dolly. “What do you always say?”

  “I always say,” said Miss Bonkers, “what I always say is—that an apple a day keeps disease at bay.” And so saying, she picked up the object of her maxim and gave it a very large crunch.

  Ruth and Adolphus laughed in spite of themselves, and Miss Bonkers smiled. She felt she had eased a difficult situation and was proud of herself.

  The Trelfords drove past at this point, some of the children leaning, or being pushed, far out of the windows, and all of them singing a song at the top of their voices.

  “Oh, my darling,

  Oh, my darling

  Oh, my dar–—ling Clementine,

  You are lost and gone forever,

  Dreadful sorry, Clementine.”

  A cheer went up.

  “Damarosch—Damarosch

  Rah! Rah! Rah!

  Damarosch—Damarosch

  Siss boom bah!”

  And finally, as they sped away into the dusty distance, one forlorn, evaporating voice was heard to call out, “Hi…Auntie Ruthie…bye, Auntie Ruth…ie…”

  “That was Charity,” said Ruth.

  “Oh,” said Adolphus, who had not met Charity. “I would have called it gross indecency, yelling at people on a highway. Really!”

  “They’re very dear friends,” said Ruth. “Very, very dear to me.”

  She sat back down and started to pack away the picnic things.

  “Do you know,” said Miss Bonkers, staring after the Trelford car, which had now quite disappeared, “I think they even had that dog in there with them.”

  “I should hope so,” said Ruth. “He’s my best friend.”

  1:00 p.m.

  They were on their way again.

  “You mustn’t associate with people beneath you, Ruth,” Adolphus was saying. “These Trelfords look like a scruffy lot, to me.”

  “He’s a very fine artist,” said Ruth. “And they’re not scruffy at all. In fact, you’ll like them enormously, once you get to know them.”

  “That sounds like a threat,” said Adolphus.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” said Ruth. “They’re perfectly marvelous people.”

  “They’ve obviously bred like rabbits,” said Adolphus. “That’s clear enough. Anyone who has children by the gross is obviously from the lower classes, and possessed of the worst bad taste.”

  “I mean to have children by the gross,” said Ruth.

  “Hah!” Dolly roared. “That’ll be the day.”

  “I’m carrying one right now,” said Ruth.

  There.

  Dolly very nearly fell backward out of the rumble seat.

  “Stop the car!” he shrieked. “Stop the car! Stop the car!”

  Ruth slowed to a stop and turned to look at her brother. He was livid—as white as his clothes.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Do you need to go to the toilet? Or are you bleeding?”

  “Don’t tease me, Ruthie. Please don’t tease me like that.”

  She perceived that he was almost in tears.

  “I’m not teasing you,” said Ruth. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “You’re going to have a baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.”

  “But you don’t look—and Bruno is…and you can’t!”

  “It isn’t Bruno’s child. As for ‘can’t,’ I can and I’m going to.”

  “But you—you—you mustn’t. Think what will happen. Think what will happen.”

  “Nothing will happen.”

  “It will die!” Dolly wailed. “
Die!”

  Ruth just looked at him.

  “Everyone dies,” she said.

  Dolly raged.

  “Platitudes!” he roared. “How dare you say a thing like that to me?”

  “Well, don’t they?” said Ruth.

  “Yes. But not like that. Think what you’re doing, Ruth. Think what sort of life this child will live—and it’s bound to be a boy and it will suffer like me and live an eternal life of…! Who the hell’s the father?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” said Ruth.

  She started the car and made her way back onto the road.

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell me?” Dolly roared, bouncing about dangerously amongst his pillows.

  “Not yet,” said Ruth. “Sometime I will. But not yet. I want you to see the child first. Then you won’t care who the father is.”

  Suddenly she pushed her foot down hard on the accelerator and, Dolly be damned, the Franklin shot forward like a bolt of purple lightning. Fifty, sixty miles an hour.

  “She’s gone crazy,” Dolly muttered. “She’s gone stark raving mad.”

  “What did you say?” Ruth yelled back at him.

  And he yelled back at her, “Mad! Mad! Maddened! That’s what I said! You have gone completely, absolutely mad!”

  But Ruth did not hear, and only drove faster, and smiled.

  1:30 p.m.

  They passed the hikers, who were still counting off their steps, and they passed the Trelfords, who were parked at a gasoline station.

  Ruth and Dolly themselves were passed by Miss Bonkers on her motorbike, and by the enormous rented limousine of Octavius Rivi.

  “Who was that?” Dolly asked, as the dust settled.

  “Now, how would I know!” said Ruth.

  “Well, whoever it was,” said Adolphus, sitting bolt upright in the rumble seat, and lightly rubbing the side of his nose with the ram’s head handle of his brand new cane, “it was the most beautiful face I have ever seen.”

  2:00 p.m.

  Fringes Bay was a small town. Little more than a village. It no longer exists.

  It depended at that time for its livelihood on the migratory habits of four species of creature: smelts, swallows, butterflies, and people.

  The populace of Fringes Bay declined to speak of the migratory people as tourists. Instead, they called them visitors. Tourists were foreigners, and the people who flocked to Fringes Bay three times a year (smelt catchers, swallow watchers, and butterfly collectors) came from nearby places. There were other beaches where the smelts threw themselves in suicidal fervor into the shallows, and there were other missions to which the swallows returned each year, and there were other groves of willow trees sheltering droves of monarch butterflies. To these others, “tourists” journeyed—those who did not know of Fringes Bay. But the pilgrims of Fringes Bay returned there from year to year. They brought news of friends and relatives. Their children, hand-held at first, returned in the accumulating years with hand-holders of their own. They were visitors, not tourists.

  Ruth and Dolly had been brought as children. They had been many times. This was only the second time B.J., Noah, and the children had been. For Miss Bonkers and the dog, it was the first visit, and as it turned out, probably the last.

  The butterflies excited Ruth and Dolly with visions. They founded dynasties of dreams that lasted through time. They blazed with colors, hardly stirring in their trees, sleepers and dreamers themselves, providing sleep and dreams of peace. Golden. Red. White and black. Some called them rusties. Some, monarchs. Some, dotties, and the rest, just butterflies.

  They were, however, dreams.

  The word occurs and recurs in their history. Dreams of color. Dreams of gentleness. Dreams of flight.

  Or, the virgin’s dream.

  Now there was a plague of dreams. A plague of butterflies.

  They stood in the insect presence like priests and populace before a shrine.

  The trees were three in number—a mystical figure. There was silence, the sort of silence that includes sound—a sea breeze, a child’s sudden question and a parent’s whispered reply.

  To one side stood Octavius Rivi, dressed all in black. (To the other side stood Dolly, all in white.) Octavius had much to dream about. He was not yet certain who his mother was, nor who his father had been. He knew nothing except that he was alive. People stared at him. He was most impressive in his silence. He wasn’t large. He wasn’t loud. He was not well known. He did not exude wealth (in spite of the limousine). But people stared. It was his stillness. His concentration.

  Picture the three trees, covered with butterflies instead of leaves. Even the largest leaves were hidden by wings and bodies. All the wings were closed. Like prayers. This added to the sense of silence and mystery.

  A semicircle of watchers extended from right to left. Beyond the trees a cliff gave way to sea views and the long curve of Fringes Bay with its beach and its gentle breakers below. The village was hung like seried steps upon the hill. Behind, was the mission with its silenced bells. The waiters and the watchers, waiting and watching. If silence could be seen, they saw it.

  Even B.J. and Noah stood silent. Noah’s thumbs worked in mute frustration in the air, aching with their inability to sculpt a butterfly. The children stared. The dog sniffed uncertainly at the breeze, and the hair along his spine bristled with menace.

  Ruth stirred.

  “They’re moving,” she said.

  “Be quiet,” said an old woman. “Be quiet. Listen.”

  There was nothing to listen to, except the faraway surf and a few cries from some distant, floating gulls.

  Ruth watched the gentle fluster of brown-and-red butterfly bodies. Perhaps the temperature was rising and that was why they moved. No one else seemed to notice. The wings did not open. They remained closed.

  Adolphus, who had seen the butterflies so many times before, was concentrating more on the view he had of Octavius. (They had never met; it seemed as if Octavius had never met anyone.) But there was something disturbing about the figure in black. Dolly did not link it with the naked form at the end of the beach. That figure had no face, no complete form. It was never seen except in pieces—an arm, a leg, a hand, a buttock. No. He did not make the connection. The connection lay elsewhere. But Dolly could not tell where or in whom. It was just a way of standing. The way the head was held. The stillness. (Serenity?) The brevity of gesture.

  Dolly was standing up in the rumble seat. Miss Bonkers sat up on the leather back in front of him. Ruth stood on the grass beside the car.

  A breeze rose. The willow ropes swayed. The butterflies held fast.

  Their wings were closed. Still.

  And Ruth thought, Hold on.

  The breeze died. The silence deepened.

  Five hundred people held it, like a single breath in one lung. And then it broke.

  All the wings had spread. In the sun. It was very sudden.

  Every eye, even Dolly’s, strained to witness the cause of this change. Some movement in the sky, perhaps. Danger. But there was nothing to be seen.

  And then, gradually, there was.

  Clouds.

  From beyond the houses, from under the cliffs, from behind them over the milkweed meadows, from above them out of the sun itself…Butterflies. One by one, hundred by hundred, thousand by thousand; it seemed there must be millions of them. Some were the size of little birds.

  The visual signal of the trees seemed to cause a panic amongst the new arrivals and before anyone could believe what they were seeing—their eyes and ears filled up with butterflies.

  Children tried to scream.

  People ran.

  Some clambered into their cars, calling names: Bertha! Hilary! Leroy! Run! Engines started. An old man was knocked down. A woman by the name of Francine Quigley was struck by a backing truck and instantly killed. Priests from the mission and police from the town arrived and fought for order and calm. But the air was filled with dazzling wings and any call
to order was stifled by them. People began to choke on inhaled butterfly scales. The air was full of dust. Later, twenty-two victims were operated on. Parts of butterfly wings and masses of powdery scales were removed from their lungs. Three died, all children.

  Dolly crouched low, now, in the rumble seat, and threw a blanket over his head. Miss Bonkers sat down on the floor and drew the aviator helmet over her face. Ruth struggled to make the top rise. Dolly scrambled up beside the nurse, and at last they were all safely inside, with Miss Bonkers squashed in the middle and the windows raised.

  “What is it?” said Ruth, pulling wings out of her veil. “It’s terrifying—terrifying! What is it?”

  “I’m sure it’s a nightmare,” said Dolly. “Or I pray to God it is!”

  To her relief, Ruth had seen Noah wrestling B.J., the children, and the dog into their car. From time to time, as the insect tide fluctuated, Ruth caught glimpses of the excited faces of Charity, Peter, and Joe mouthing exclamations behind the windows, while the dog mimed a frenzy of barking.

  A child, unknown to anyone inside, came and banged on the Franklin’s side window. Dolly rattled his cane against the glass and the child fled across the field, choking and terror-stricken, where it was lost in the stampede of its panicked elders.

  On the far side of the field, Octavius sat, erect and quiet, in the back seat of his limousine, while a thousand wings beat in soft adoration against the dusty glass of the car’s windows. It seemed as if he had expected this to happen, that they should so mutely clamor to reach him, to catch a glimpse of him. To be with him in the car. His expression was a mixture of terror and aloofness. As though he might have been their long-lost sovereign, returning from exile uncertain of their mood, and finding them jubilant.