Butterfly Weed (7 page)

His brother Murray showed him how to rub Prince on a piece of Arkansas whetstone, which is the best there is, and he always kept Prince sharp enough to slice a hair in two. His brother Virgil tried to show him how to use Prince to play a dumb game called mumble the peg, but he did not like sticking Prince into the earth, which was dirty. He did not mind sticking Prince into things which bled, because blood is not dirty. With Prince he carved up birds and frogs and squirrels, and he got into bad trouble with his mother when he carved up a cat that she cherished. His mother took Prince away from him for two months.

When she finally let him have Prince back, he took Prince and stuck him into the largest snake he could find. The snake writhed and twisted and flopped for a good long spell before it finally died. Gilbert wanted to hang it on the wall of the house, but his mother would not let him, so he took it back to the spot where he killed it and told it, “You can jist lay there and rot, for all I care.” Then he had to scrub his hands with lye soap to get rid of the snake’s blood and stains. Gilbert’s childhood ended not when he learned that death is an escape nor even when he learned that we must confront the meaning of death but when his well-meaning sister Bert tried to teach him what death is like. Elberta did not try to kill him, and what she did was not even meant to hurt him. She did not even understand perhaps that a six-year-old boy was not old enough to feel the kind of death she was contemplating. Many years afterwards he was to ask her, “How come ye didn’t pick Boyd or Frank or Virgil or one of yore other brothers?” and she was to answer only, “They was too big and besides they wasn’t handy.” He assumed she meant that they weren’t sleeping with her, as he was.

Being the “least one,” Gilbert Alonzo had always been required to sleep in the bed that contained all the females of the family, where every night there was usually a right smart of constant whispering and giggling amongst his sisters, which kept him awake and went on until Gilbert’s mother told them to shut up and skedaddle for the Land of Nod. Sometimes Gilbert listened to the sounds of the dark: the snickers and titters and tee-hees, and sometimes he heard a fragment of their whisperings, which had to do with girly stuff that either didn’t interest him or, more than likely, was too tough for him to figure.

Although they had customary places in the bed—Gilbert usually sleeping between his mother and Esther, the youngest girl, who was less than a year older than Gilbert and, being so small, not as encumbered with protruberances as the older girls—the place a body went to sleep in was not necessarily the place a body would wake up in, and sometimes before morning Gilbert would find himself at the opposite side of the bed from his mother, and not be able to remember how he had managed to climb over or roll over or be shoved or lifted over all the sisters.

The night his childhood ended, the night he decided henceforth to “go by” his middle name, Gilbert Alonzo woke perhaps an hour after going to bed to find himself face-to-face with Bert, who was the fleshiest of the sisters, and being so soft, not so troublesome to be face-to-face with, although you usually didn’t get face-to-face until you were in deepest slumber. Bert was awake too, and she commenced whispering into Gilbert’s ear. All he could make out in his grogginess was the question “Does that feel good?” which she would repeat in several variations during the course of the next hour or so. She was doing something that not even his mother had ever done, as far as he could recall. She was holding him by his handle, which had swole. He had never touched his jemmison himself except when he had to go to the bushes with it, and he had been taught that one goes to the bushes for a good reason: because the bushes are private, shielding. Sometimes one of his sisters had to go to the bushes in the middle of the night, but she didn’t actually go outside where the real bushes were, she just squatted down over the slop jar that was kept beneath the bed, and apparently didn’t even have to aim her jemmison, an accomplishment which led Gilbert to the eventual realization that girls don’t even possess jemmisons, and now Bert was taking his hand and making him touch her to confirm that she did not possess a jemmison and asking him, “Does that feel good?” He didn’t know for sure if it felt good or not but it sure felt funny, just a damp crease where a jemmison ought to be. And next thing he knew she was saying, “Let’s us mash our things together and see how that feels,” and they did, and when she asked the next time, “Does that feel good?” he was compelled to speak the only word that he uttered that night: “Some.”

Bert squirmed and shifted her legs and tried to arch her back without knocking the next sleeper out of the bed, and she grabbed him and pulled him and tugged him, and pretty soon he knew that his swole jemmison had been tucked into her. “Don’t that feel good!” she said, but it was not a question. He studied the feeling. It was not quite like sticking Prince inside of something. Prince would slice or tear to get inside. But still it was a kind of insideness. A disappearance. He was only mildly troubled to discover that Bert, and by implication all other girls, had all of that slick tight warm interior space, which his jemmison could not quite fill.

The movements that Bert began making seemed intended to make him fill her better or fill her repeatedly or fill her deeper or fill her faster. Bert was getting so busy that the mattress, which was stuffed with corn shucks, began to utter and grumble. Whoever was sleeping on the other side of Bert was jostled awake and said “Huh?” and then “Who?” and then “Hee,” and then rolled the other way and dropped back into sleep. Bert was making the whole bed shake. It was a wonder she didn’t wake everybody. But then she asked, “Don’t ye feel good enough to die?” and she declared, “I’m a-fixin to die!” and then she gasped and hollered, “I’m a-dyin!” and Alonzo tried to break loose from her but she grabbed his bottom and mashed him even harder against her, and she went on dying for a while and then, to his relief, she quit dying and came alive again, and let him go. He got his jemmison out and backed off from her as far as he could, up against whichever sister was behind him. Bert said, “Wal, I reckon ye aint old enough to die yet.” And she went to sleep.

Five more years went by before Alonzo was able to die himself, and discover why dying was so important to Bert and also to his sisters Octavia and Zenobia, who, once they discovered what Bert had done with Alonzo, had to try it themselves. ’Tavy and Nobe were both older than Bert. Two of the sisters younger than Bert, Nettie and Esther, also wanted to give it a try, but although they managed to do everything with Alonzo that they were supposed to do, with some difficulty because of their virginity, they were not able to die yet. For four years Alonzo was passed around from one sister to another, usually in bed in the dark, but sometimes elsewhere around the place in daylight too. He greatly enjoyed “the funny feeling,” as he called it, the mild sting or buzz or whatever it was that was almost but not quite dying.

Then when he finally did die for the first time, it wasn’t with a sister but a pretty little girl who lived up the creek a ways, name of Mellie Chism. But while this death was the best feeling that he’d ever had, two things troubled him about it: the very fact that Mellie wasn’t any sister of his, and the fact that Mellie herself didn’t die as his sisters so readily did. Studying this problem, he decided that you aren’t supposed to do it with your sister if you want to die, but if you’re a sister you have to do it with your brother if you want to die. Since he wasn’t a sister, it didn’t matter to him whether Mellie died or not, and he went on doing it with her whenever they could sneak off somewheres private together.

For a year all of his deaths were dry deaths. Mellie got right damp and creamy but he never did. A few times at her suggestion because she wanted to see if it might make her die, he had taken a piss while he was inside her. It had felt funny to him and given her a thrill but it didn’t kill either one of them. The time when finally he had his first true wet death he thought at first that he was only pissing again, but it wasn’t. Whatever it was, it stayed inside her.

Alonzo Swain was fourteen years old before he ever saw what his own jism looked like. It happened one time when Mellie took a notion to remove her dress. Alonzo had never seen a girl naked. All his sisters slept in nightdresses that came down to their ankles and besides it was dark, usually, and the few hundred times that he had lain with a sister in the daylight she had kept her day dress on, just raising it to her waist. But one time Mellie and Alonzo were way off in the woods and it was hot July and she suddenly took her dress plumb up off over her head. He already had a very stiff jemmison in anticipation of what they would sooner or later do and because they hadn’t done it in over two months, and now the sight of Mellie without a stitch just caused his mind to run away with him and then his glands ran away with him and before he knew what had happened he was squirting jism all over creation, even hitting Mellie in the face, which for some reason she thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. The stuff had no resemblance to piss. It was much thicker, and white, and runny. Using his hand to wipe it off her face, he asked, “Is this yere what I’ve been a-fillin ye up with all along?”

Even though Mellie never died, she craved to have him fill her up, and he filled her so often he had nothing left for his sisters. When Mellie started getting pooched out in the stomach, Alonzo figured that those Chisms must be eating high off the hog in harvesttime. But the rest of her family stayed as skinny as ever. Then one day he never saw Mellie, and the next day neither, and when he finally did see her, months later, she was holding a baby to her breast.

That was the first of Alonzo’s seven sons. Nobody, perhaps not even Mellie herself, ever really understood that Alonzo was the father of the boy. The boy was given “Chism” as his last name, and, because he had difficulty pronouncing it, so that it came out as “Ism” if anyone asked him what his name was, that is what he was called for the rest of his life. As Ism grew older, he clearly inherited his father’s good looks: the golden blond hair and the broad brow and perfect nose and strong jaw. In fact, Ism was going to be as popular with the ladies as his father was, and, as I’ll have to tell you by-and-by, Ism ended up competing with his father unknowingly for one of the best of the ladies.

Alonzo, as he grew into manhood, was irresistible to females, and before he was eighteen he left both Cora Plowright and Sirena Coe with woodscolts, both boys. In all of Newton County there was only one girl who wouldn’t come a-running the instant Alonzo crooked his finger at her, and that was Lora Dinsmore, who lived out toward Butterchurn Holler on Banty Creek. Lora had made up her mind to stay a virgin, and she didn’t want some boy chasing after her who’d already knocked up three girls, even if he was the handsomest feller in all creation. Maybe because she was so hard to get is why Alonzo Swain made up his mind that he had to have her, or die trying. He lost interest in all other girls, even his sisters. He spent all his time for two years trying to get himself fixed up with Lora. He even promised her he wouldn’t even try to lay with her. Then he promised her he wouldn’t even touch her. Finally he promised her he wouldn’t even try to kiss her. He stopped just short of promising to marry her, and he gave serious consideration to promising that, but he wasn’t the marrying kind.

Lora turned him down flat. She didn’t want anything to do with him. She begged him to leave her alone. “’Lonzo, you jist leave me
be!
” But she was such a pretty thing, the cutest girl any feller could hope for, and Alonzo spent all his time for two years hoping for her, and doing everything he could to get her to notice him, and trying everything he could to persuade her to step out with him.

When it finally became obvious that she wasn’t going to listen to reason or any kind of cajolery, not even with him down on his knees, he decided he’d just plain and simple have to ravish her against her will. So he commenced laying low for her and watching for a chance to grab her alone. The longer he waited, the hornier he got, and he began to mutter to himself, “If ever I catch that gal, I’ll give her a fucking she won’t never forget, like nobody never had!” And he meant it, too. He was storing up his jism, and he’d give her a gallon of it in one dose.

So then one day he happened to catch up with her along a lonely stretch of the road to Butterchurn Holler, which was only a deer path in those days. She saw him coming, and took out for the woods as fast as she could run. He was gaining on her, and she commenced yelling and begging, but she wasn’t begging him. It was like she was begging for God or somebody to help her.

He finally caught her and flung her down in a patch of butterfly weed. That’s just a kind of milkweed, fit for nothing and even the cows won’t eat it because it tastes bad, but those big orange butterflies, some folks call them monarchs, like to lay their eggs on it and have their caterpillar babies grow up on it. Maybe that’s what gives the butterflies their bad taste, so a bird would think twice before eating another one after getting a taste of one of them. Anyhow, the butterflies were a-hovering over it when Alonzo threw Lora down there.

The way some folks tell this story, those butterflies were going to try to protect Lora, but the truth is more likely that they just sort of distracted Alonzo from what he was doing, maybe they even got in his eyes or leastways tickled the back of his neck as he started taking down his pants and whipping out his jemmison and yanking up her dress. It doesn’t matter, because the butterflies didn’t really have anything whatever to do with what happened next.

Alonzo woke up lying atop a big clump of butterfly weed as if he’d been a-fucking that clump. Lora was nowheres in sight. The back of Alonzo’s head hurt as if he’d been hit with something. He wondered if maybe Lora had conked him with a rock or a big stick, maybe. He got up and pulled up his pants and spent some time looking for Lora, but never could find her. The next day he discovered that he wasn’t the only one looking for her. Couldn’t nobody find her. Sheriff Jim Salmon and a couple of his deputies came out to Stay More, and they took Alonzo and asked him a whole bunch of questions, because it was widely known that he’d set his hat for her. He wouldn’t admit to what he’d done, or tried to do. The sheriff and them looked all over creation, and even dug a few holes looking for a body.