I know he wouldn’t. He camps by a thistle to wait for a painted lady, and after that it’s a long afternoon of watching him touch each unfortunate mourning cloak, checkered skipper, and white peacock as though he were tinkering with a clock; he pokes their thoraxes and brushes their wings with his pinky.
I sit on a bench to rest as Nate wanders over to look at a glass room where there are pupae hanging from branches, looking like tiny pieces of rice.
It reminds me of the maggots that must have been in those deer heads.
I see him slip on a pair of headphones, and he stands completely still, that same kind of completely still he was the day he’d watched them bring the deer home. His pale green shorts have a smear of dirt up the back, and I remind myself to instruct him not to wear his dress clothes when he’s out watching the boys mess with filthy things.
He trudges back to me, his eyes bright with curiosity. “Does the sun carry the spirits like my lamp?”
“Like your lamp?”
“Yeah. The deers come into my lamp at night and light it up, and in the morning, I take it apart to let them all out so Daddy can use them again. Is that what the sun does? Like when I help Daddy? It sucks up the old spirits of the dead things and then puts them back into the butterflies when they’re sleeping in the hanging bags?”
I chuckle, not only because it’s cute, but because I hear Jayce’s voice in my head: Foolish woman! He thinks the souls are turning on the lamp! My actions have created a regular quagmire in his child brain, and it was so obvious! Next to us, a father is hoisting his strawberry-haired tot with flushed cheeks up onto his shoulder, and I hear snatches of soft words, farmers and bugs and real, and I decide I will stop this lamp business, once and for all. “They don’t go into your lamp, honey. That’s me. Mommy turns on your light for you so you won’t be afraid if you wake up.”
He blinks at me, pooching his lower lip out and furrowing his brow so that I can see the miniscule lines that will one day become wrinkles, perhaps when I’m no longer around. Then he looks up through the dome netting, maybe at the veins of canvas that plunge his face into serpentine shadow patterns. “The sun doesn’t take souls?”
“No. The sun is—it’s gas. It’s hot gases that warm the Earth and make the plants grow, and it nourishes the butterflies, but it doesn’t carry their souls.”
Silence again. He reaches up to slip his sticky hand into mine. We walk farther down the path, to the display of butterflies that are just beginning to emerge from their pupae. Now they look like long-grain rice, that nutty dark stuff that used to be plentiful in organic stores when I was a child but is now nearly impossible to get.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, dear?”
“So then, where do they go?”
“Where does who go?”
“The souls of the deer. If Daddy doesn’t use them and the sun doesn’t take them, where do they go? Are they waiting to hurt me?”
There really isn’t a concept of heaven anymore. The churches now teach very basic reincarnation, perhaps to help people accept the fact that their food is no longer organic and to encourage the byrotecnic farmers to recycle their metals. “You don’t have to be afraid of the souls. They go—up into the night sky, where—where all the twinkling lights are. And they’re very, very happy. There’s no more pain, and no more sadness—”
“Daddy says they don’t hurt. The animals.”
“Sometimes, honey, they do. Like—like when you have a sunburn. When they twinkle in the night sky, they’re twinkling because they don’t have to be hurt anymore. They’re twinkling with happiness, just like when Daddy winks at you.”
He seems to accept this, and I want to be out of the heat. “Come on.”
The Firefly Cave is welcome relief from the sun’s watery eye and we descend into black lights and cool smells of green earth and moss. He leaps to grab the fireflies, and I just can’t stop him. “We need to go.” I finally say. “The zoo is closing in an hour.”
“No.”
“Yes, Nate.”
“No.”
“We can see these at home. You know the big tree that glows at night? The big evergreen? We can go see them there. Every night for the rest of the summer.”
It’s too dark for me to see him thrust out his lower lip, but I know he’s doing it. Then he slips his hand in mine and leads me to the gift shop, where he plunges his hands into a barrel of colorful projects that he can assemble and take apart, assemble and take apart: insect gliders crafted of metal with moving parts. “Please?” he begs. “I’m not going to take my lamp apart anymore. I understand, now.”
I smile, thinking I will have to buy him a new lamp anyway—it’s been through the wringer so many times it sits on his bedstand looking bashed up. “Okay.” I buy him ten credits’ worth of metal spiders, butterflies, bumblebees, fireflies and ants. We sit on the park benches and he’s eager for me to open one of the packets and put it together. I tear open the red wax paper and empty a small body, black plastic head the size of a large blueberry, two curvy sprig-like antennae, and a set of wings. Slot A goes into Slot B goes into Slot C—much like the gliders I’d played with when I was a child, except a little more complicated and with batteries—and the butterfly is done. “Look, Punkin,” I say, but he has not shown any interest in my putting it together. He takes the butterfly in his sticky hands, pulls wings from body from head from antennae, and thrusts it back in my lap.
“I could show you how to put it together,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Can you do another one?”
So packet after packet I open: the indigo of the red-spotted purple, the blood red of the ladybug, the chocolate of the brown recluse, the fuzzy blinding yellow of the bumble bee, the putrescent green of the firefly. As I do each he takes it apart, and when he’s done deconstructing every insect I’ve lovingly set up, I pile him in the truck for the long ride back across the state’s waving grains and lavender sunsets.
“Mommy, can we put the bugs back together again when we get home?”
I want to answer that I think we’ve had enough of that for one day, but it’s the first time he’s shown an interest in actually assembling something on his own—shown an interest in rebuilding rather than dismantling, and I take this as a sign maybe he’s growing out of his phase. At least I know he’ll no longer be taking apart his lamp. “We’ll see.”
“I want you to show me how to put them together.”
I smile and pat his bottom. “You want me to show you how?”
“Yeah.” He peers back out the window, and I wonder if he sees things moving in the woods in the whorling dust; the wolves, maybe. The wolves that Jayce wished they hadn’t forced him to make.
Nate falls quiet, and a few bumpy miles down the road, where it begins to turn to dirt and reach our farm, he is asleep.
The night is close and even sleeping without the sheet is like being cloistered in a warm bath; Jayce snores but it isn’t the noise that keeps me awake. I roll over and look out the window, past sheer black curtains that flutter despite the lack of breeze, and there’s the faint, green aura from the firefly tree a half-mile from the house. When we’d first bought the farm, back before Jayce had driven himself gray and little Nate was still a star in the sky, the tree had been by itself, standing, watching over us on summer nights; now, it’s shrouded behind a decade or so of woods the boys planted.
I rise from bed and sneak into Nate’s room, click on the lamp, and sidle up to him. “Punkin.”
He opens his eyes, closes them, opens them again. “Mommy?”
“Come on. I want to show you something, something special.” I set aside his yellow plastic screwdriver. “Put your boots on, and we have to be quiet. We don’t want to wake your daddy.”
He nods, folding back the pale green sheet and sitting up, letting his legs dangle over the floor. He studies the boards for a moment, then reaches out and turns off the lamp.
We creep down the hall like Jayce and I do on Yule
Day at four a.m. when we’re drunk and setting out the last of our son’s gifts: toe by toe, hunch your back, avoid the third board from the wall on the right because it makes a pop-splinter sound. When we get to the bottom of the stairs, I unhitch the thick metal bolt on the door and set a hand on his back to usher him outside.
The lawn is quiet, and the corn rustles and everything is moving, alive, and breathing, and again I wonder why that could be when there’s no breeze. The milk house light burns low, meaning the fire’s last flames are licking themselves apart and the boys, I imagine, are passed out, Jigger’s fleshy leg propped up on an old milk can.
“There.” I point. “See the glow?”
“We’re going to the firefly tree!”
“Yes.”
“Really?” He tightens his grip on my hand.
“Yes, really. Now stick close to me.” I step barefoot onto the pile of sand below the front step of the paint-hungry porch. I wonder if I should have consulted Jayce before doing this: we had decided that the day he was old enough to understand, we would take him to the tree to explain what had happened there. Neither of us had planned on tackling the subject without the other.
“I can’t see, Mommy. Turn on the flashlight.”
“Just give your eyes a minute to adjust. We don’t want to frighten them.” I crush blades of grass under my feet, and they prickle like pins. In the barn, the owl Jayce built for me last Valentine’s Day hoots his awareness of something moving in the dark that shouldn’t be. There is a distant clank of metal on metal, and I imagine Jigger knocking over his footrest.
The tree looms larger with every step, and then we’re at the edge of the woods and I reach up to part the low-hanging branches of a pair of elms guarding the clearing. We step through, and I hear little Nate gasp as he becomes that topiary-still again. His face is illumed, a small pale-green moon, and he reaches to the tree to touch a branch.
The fireflies shimmy and part and spiral up and away into another section of the tree, and he runs in pursuit. I want to chase him, but am stopped when my toe stubs the bottle.
I bend down to pick it up; the label is still legible: To Ilse. Tenth Anniversary Dandelion Wine. Jayce. He’d vinted this himself, working on it for at least a year before the date; I probably hadn’t noticed the collection of jugs, tubes, orange peels and lemons in the back corner of the lab because I’d been busy cooking up my own surprises: garlic cheese, pear preserves, ground wheat wafers.
Nate giggles and runs around the tree, tripping and getting caught in the tall weeds that have sprung up over the years; he falls and gets dirty, leaps into the air and swats the fireflies.
“Come here,” I call. I set the bottle next to me and sit on the grass. He crawls into my lap and his breaths are quick and loud. “I just want you to look at them. Don’t touch. Just look.”
His hair tickles my chin.
“Why are they all here, Mommy?”
“Because this place is—natural. This place is where your soul came down from the sky.” I can’t tell him about that unusually warm first of May. The boys had been, for once, whooping it up somewhere else on account of the Spring Festival, and we’d come down to the tree, the two of us with our much-too-rich gifts to share. The fireflies hadn’t been out yet, but we hadn’t needed them, and when we’d finished—the last of the wine drained, the cheese gone, sticky dots of the pear preserves at the corners of our mouths—we’d set the bottle at the base of the tree in hopes it would bring good fortune. I wonder, now, if I were to put the empty bottle to my ear, would I hear the echoes of that night, the little wishes that had scaled the tree boughs to the heavens. “This,” I say, rubbing his cheek, “this is where you were given to us.”
“What does that mean?”
“Created. Made.”
“Like Daddy does with the deers?”
“No, not like the deer. Daddy and Mommy made you together.”
He squints. “Is that where I came from?”
“Yes. Your soul came down, and you went inside me, and I kept you safe and warm.”
“Did you see what my soul looked like?”
“No. You can’t really see a soul.”
He is quiet for a long time and the crickets fill in the hole between us. Then he climbs off my lap and stands, stuffs his little-man hands into the pockets of his near-threadbare pajamas, and heaves a sigh. “Can we come back tomorrow?”
“We’ll see, honey. Mommy has lots of chores.”
“But Mommy, you said ‘every night for the rest of the summer.’ ”
“We’ll see.”
I climb to my feet and take his hand to lead him back through the thicket and across the lawn to the house. He rushes a few steps ahead of me, head down, and for the first time I look at him and realize he may very well, indeed, grow up to be just like Jayce.
August is ebbing when the boys finally take those ghastly heads from the roof of the cold cellar; the days have pleasantly trundled by in a tumble of little Nate’s deconstructing and assembling the animatronic bugs in his room. He doesn’t follow Jigger out to call the cows in; he doesn’t watch Hap dissecting car parts; he hasn’t taken apart the new lamp I had Lair make for him. I’m overjoyed about all of these changes—I’m even happy to provide him with scissors and all the empty mason jars he wants “to keep the parts in,” he says. However, he has been tired—the kind of tired where trying to rouse him from bed in the morning for breakfast or chores is a thirty-five minute affair. When I mention my concern to Jayce, of course he just answers, “Probably a growth spurt or something. He’s eating, right?” in between his gulps of orange juice.
Sporting Day again, and the boys have killed off the last of Jayce’s herd. They roar in on the truck and scream about eighteen-pointers and how these are gonna be beauties, and I resign to turn away from the scene and go right back to that apple pie I’ve been working on. I pick up the corer and set to work, thrusting the round instrument and listening to its blades cut through the flesh of each green fruit with a corporeal, wholesome ffft.
Nate comes down and runs to the decrepit window. He presses his fingers on the sill, resting his chin on the wrinkles of his joints. I hear the boys whooping and the clang-clang of metal legs and arms clattering against each other as they’re all chucked onto the tarp.
“Would you like some apple?” I take three slices and put them in a bowl.
He turns from the window and walks to me and I see that his pale yellow shirt has some black smears on it. “Mommy, can you put my bugs back together?”
“You know how to put them back together.” I pluck the seeds from the core and drop them into an aluminum pouch to save for the boys to plant. “You’ve been doing just fine the last few weeks. Eat your apple.” I motion to the bowl. “There’s even some cinnamon on there.”
“No,” he says, his blue eyes hot with defiance. He frowns and folds his arms in front of his chest.
“Don’t tell me no.” I finish peeling another apple; the peel falls into a spiral. “I’m sure you can do it. Why don’t you get your tweezers and your jars and show me?” I wipe my sticky hands on my jeans and turn on the sink, and hear him tromping into his room, the boards beneath his feet whining like the shutters in a strong wind, that sound I sometimes hear at night when I know no one’s awake and the shadows of the leaves on the trees spatter the walls in camouflage. Then there’s silence.
I turn off the water.
A clunk, like a bag of beer bottles, and a swoosh. Silence. Swoosh. Silence. Swoosh.
I dry my hands on a towel and step to the base of the narrow, crooked stairs.
There is a sudden rush of hot air through the open window, and I hear Lair’s laughter and Jigger’s command to cut that shit out let’s go down the milk house. Then I see little Nate at the top of the stairs, hauling with all his might a paper bag from a long-defunct department store. The bag slams against every step, foreshadowing disaster, and I think maybe I have been wrong, maybe he’s been out in the milk house an
d the boys have convinced him to drink? Maybe that’s why he’s been so tired!
“See?” He gets to the bottom step, and the bag tips over and a few of my mason jars spill out, rolling like marbles across the warped floorboards.
I pick one up and peer inside. There’s one of his father’s razor blades and a pair of tweezers, and a pile of something that’s like the wood dust at the bottoms of fireplaces in summers: black bodies shredded like mouse feces, wings splintered into fine gray powder, miniscule antennae crushed and cock-eyed. Fireflies. He’s been going to the tree and getting real fireflies.
“I took the bugs apart like Daddy. I took them all apart and now they don’t work anymore!” He pooches his lip out, like he’s going to cry. “Where did they go?”
“Where did who go?”
“The souls! I couldn’t find the souls! If you put the bugs back together they’ll come back, right?”
I don’t know what to say.
I look out the window and a river of light flows from the milk house down the drive. I hear Jigger and Hap and Lair, howling with laughter, louder than they’ve been in a while. I’m not sure what it is when I first hear the bang and the glass in the window shatters like so much rock candy. Then I see the gold sparks and the feathers, and I know the inside walls of the structure are tarred in downy flesh from the boys overheating another chicken.
HOW I STopped complaining and
learned to love the bunny
M y wife, Bunny, falls in love with one of those hideous plastic lawn rabbits at Savers.
They’re not around much anymore, but you’ve probably seen them—it’s like one of the knee-high Santas with the hole in the middle of its back, just wide enough for one of those frosted Christmas bulbs. You plug it in, and Santa’s cheeks glow peach-orange. Except this one’s a bunny, so I guess it’s for Easter, and when you plug it in the ears glow pig-pink. Noxious thought.
“Please?” she asks.
“You don’t like rabbit.” Once we went to a potluck game dinner, and she refused to taste the rabbit stew (we had contributed potato chips and corn on the cob).
The Shadows Behind Page 22