The Butterfly

James M. Cain

THE BUTTERFLY

She was sitting on the stoop when I came in from the fields, her suitcase beside her and one foot on the other knee, where she was shaking a shoe out that seemed to have sand in it. When she saw me she laughed, and I felt my face get hot, that she had caught me looking at her, and I hightailed it to the barn as fast as I could go. While I milked I watched, and saw her get up and walk all around, looking at my trees and my corn and my cabin, then go over to the creek and look at that and pitch a stone in. She was nineteen or twenty, kind of a medium size, with light hair, blue eyes, and a pretty shape. Her clothes were better than most mountain girls have, even if they were dusty, like she had walked up from the state road, where the bus ran. But if she was lost and asking her way, why didn't she say something and get it over with? And if she wasn't, why was she carrying a suitcase? When I was through milking, it was nearly dark, and I picked up my pails, came out of the barn, and walked over. "How do you do, miss?"

"Oh, hello."

"Is there something you want?"

"How can I tell till I know what you've got?"

She laughed, and I felt my face hot again, because from how she sounded and how she looked, she could have meant a whole lot more than she said. "Miss, I think there's a mistake. I think you're looking for somebody else's place, not mine."

"I'm looking for you."

"You never seen me before, so how do you know?"

"Maybe I saw your picture."

"Maybe you know my name?"

"Sure I know it. You're Jess Tyler."

"...I asked you once, what do you want?"

"I told you once, how can I tell?...If you invited me in now, and told me to look around a little bit, why then I might pick something out."

"I don't like people making fun."

"Maybe I'm not."

She went to the pump, picked up the cup, and came back to where I had set down the milk. "I see one thing I want, right away."

"That milk's fresh, it's not cold."

"I like it warm, with foam on it."

She dipped up a cup, tasted it, then opened her mouth and poured it in. She gulped fast, but not fast enough, and a little ran out. "If somebody stuck their tongue out, they could stop that trickle on my chin."

I wiped with the back of my hand, and her eyes got a funny look in them, like I was pretty slow.

"Will you kindly tell your business?"

"Can't you take a hint? For one thing, it's supper time, and I kind of feel like I could put away a little food."

"I never sent anybody away hungry."

"That's what I heard."

"Who from?"

"Don't you know?"

"No, I don't."

"Look who's raring up."

My cabin is log, but it's better than most, because it's always been in my family, and we're not trash like a lot of them around here. Some of the furniture goes back a hundred years, as you can tell from the dates carved on the chairs, but the plaster, whitewash, and underpinning I did myself, and some of the stuff I got when the coal camp broke up and people left things behind, specially the super, that give me four rag rugs. While I was cooking supper she went all over the front room and looked at everything in it, the pictures, settles by the fireplace, andirons, chairs, and knitted table covers, then got on her knees and felt the floor, because it's pine and gets scoured with sand every week, so it's white as snow and soft as silk. Then she did the same for the back room. Coming into the lean-to, where I was at the stove, she stopped and sniffed what I was cooking, and from the way her nose turned up I had her figured out, or thought I had. "Anyway, you're a Morgan."

"What makes you think that?"

"You favor them. They all look alike."

"The way you say it, it's nothing to be proud of."

"I wasn't saying any special way."

"Still, I guess no man likes his wife's family."

"He might, if he liked his wife."

"Didn't you like Belle?"

"Once, I loved her."

"And what then?"

"She killed it."

"How did she do that?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Did other men have something to do with it?"

"I don't say they didn't."

"And you put her out?"

"I never put her out. She left me."

"That was after the mine closed down?"

"It was after the mine closed down, and after the camp broke up. The seam feathered out to nothing, from a seven-foot seam of the finest steam coal in all this section, to just a six-inch layer that couldn't be worked. And for a year twenty or thirty of us drove tunnels in the rock, where they were hoping it would thicken up again, and we even put down a shaft, so if there was a jag in the seam we'd know it. We never found anything, but all during that time people were moving out, and she said them empty shacks got on her nerves. Then they backed up the trucks and took the shacks away, down to their No. 5 mine near Carbon City. Then they took the church and the store and the tipple and the railroad and everything away, so there was nothing there to get on your nerves. And then she moved out."

"Maybe she liked people."

"Maybe she liked a lot of things."

"You sound awful bitter."

"I told you once I don't want to talk about it."

"You ever see her anymore?"

"No, never."

"Or the children?"

"Not since she took them away."

"You ever want to?"

"Sometimes I think of them. Specially little Kady. Jane, she took after my grandmother, and had the same stony disposition. But Kady was cute."

"You know where they are?"

"Yes, I know."

We had hominy and chicken, that I had killed the day before and put in the well for the preacher, and after we ate she helped me wash up and it only took a little while. Then she wanted to see where the mine had been and the camp, so we took a walk in the moonlight and I showed her how it was laid out. Then we came back to my place and I showed her my cornfields and hog pens and stable and barn, and explained to her how I had been just over the line from the company land, so I never had to pay them rent when I worked in the mine, and I could make a little extra selling pop and stuff to the men, because I did it cheaper than the company store.

"Did you buy their land when the camp was taken away?"

"No, I didn't."

"That your corn growing on it?"

"I don't say it's not."

"You rent that field?"

"It might be I just plant it."

"You mean they like you?"

"Once a year they come out here and warn me to get off and stay off. Something about the law, I forget what. They can't admit I got a right there, I guess that's it."

"And what do you do?"

"I get off and stay off. One hour."

"You mean they just let you use that land?"

"I accommodate them a little bit. When they were first moving out, and all that machinery was up there in the tipple, I watched it for them. Things were kind of lively around here in those days, what with the union moving in and all, and sometimes dynamite got left in dangerous places, with the caps and stuff all ready to go off. Then later, if a rock got washed down, so it might fall on somebody and they'd be sued, I moved it for them or let them know. They treat me all right."

"I should say they do."

Under my apple trees she hooked little fingers with me. "Miss, you can stop doing things like that."

"Mister, why?"

"How old do you think I am?"

"I know how old you are. You're forty-two."

"Well, to you forty-two may look old, but to me it don't feel old. You don't watch out, something might happen to you."

"Not unless I want it to."

"If your name is Morgan, you would want it to."

"Even with you?"

"If he's a relation, that just makes it better."

"And if your name is Tyler, you wait at the head of the hollow till he goes by and then you shoot him in the back."

"I never shot anybody."

"We were talking about names, weren't we? Some people have got a name for one thing, some for something else."

"All I'm saying is, some things run in the blood."

"And all I'm saying is, there's blood and blood."

"And if it's there, you better fight it."

"What good does that do you?"

"If you don't know, nobody can't teach you."

"Maybe I already did some fighting. Maybe it didn't get me anything. Maybe I'm tried of fighting. Maybe I feel like cutting loose. Maybe I just want to be bad."

"That's no way to talk."

"It's one way."

When we got back to the cabin I told her she had to go, to get her things and I'd run her down to wherever she wanted to go, in the little Ford truck I use for hauling stuff. She went in the back room where her suitcase was, and was gone quite a while. When she came back she had taken off her clothes and put on a nightgown, wrapper and slippers. I tried to tell her to get dressed again, but nothing would come out of my mouth. She sat down beside me and put her head on my shoulder.

"Don't make me go."

"You got to."

"I couldn't stand it."

All of a sudden she broke out crying, and hung on to me, and talked all kind of wild stuff about what she'd been through, and how I had to help her out. Then after she quieted down a little she said: "Don't you know who I am?"

"I told you three times, no."

"I'm Kady."

"...Who?"

"Your little girl. The one you like."

If I could write it down in this old ledger I'm using that I took her in my arms and told her to stay because she was my child, and could have anything from me she needed, I would do it, because on what happened later it would look like I never meant anything like that at the start, and like I got into it without really knowing what I was doing. But it wouldn't be true. I took her in my arms, and told her to stay, and fixed the back room for her, and took my own blankets to the stable, where there's a bunk I can sleep in. But all the time my heart was pounding at the way she made me feel, and all the time I could see she knew how she made me feel, and didn't care.

"What was it that happened to you?"

"What is it ever?"

"You mean a man?"

"If you could call it a man."

"And what did he do to you?"

"He left me."

"And what else?"

"That's all."

It was Sunday morning, and she was lying on the stoop in the sun, still in the pink gingham dress she had put on to help me with the feeding. I mumbled how sorry I was, and switched off to Blount, where Belle was running a boarding house for miners in the Llewelyn No. 3. Then all of a sudden she changed her mind, and did want to talk. "That's not all. There's a lot more to it than that. I didn't have much to say when you were talking about Morgans, did I? I know about that. I was twelve I guess when I woke up to a few things that were going on. Jane, she knew about them before I did, and we talked about it a lot, and kept saying we would never be like that. And we decided the whole trouble, when you see something like that, is how ignorant people are, like Belle not even being able to read.

And then we made up our minds we were taking the bus every day and going to high school. And that was when Belle got sick."

"Her sickness all comes out of a bottle."

"This was lung trouble."

"You mean she's really got lung trouble?"

"The doctor said if she was careful she'd get along, but she couldn't work hard so one of us had to run the place. So Jane said it would be her."

"She sounds nice."

"She's just wonderful."

"She still favor me?"

"Yes, and we talked about you a lot, and it was on account of you we wanted to go to school, because we knew you read and wrote and went to church. So she studied my books at home. Then when I graduated I led the class, and at Blount last year they gave me a job, teaching the second grade. I mean, little kids. It caused a lot of talk that a miner's girl should teach school, and there was a piece in the paper about it."

"Well, I'm proud of it."

"So was I."

She lay there looking at the creek for quite a while, and I said nothing, because if she didn't want to tell me about it I didn't want to make her. But she started up again. "And then he came along."

"Who was he?"

"Wash Blount."

"He belong to the coal family?"

"His father owns Llewelyn. And because he used to be a miner, he thinks a miner's girl isn't good enough for his boy, and wants Wash to marry in a rich family, like the girl did, that lives in Philadelphia. So he kept after Wash. And at Easter he left me."

I said she'd get over it, and a couple more things, but then her face began to twist, and tears ran down her face, and she almost screamed the next thing she said. "And that's not all. In May they made me quit the school. Because they could see what I didn't know, what I wouldn't believe even when they told me, because I hadn't been a Morgan, only loving him in the most beautiful way. But it was true just the same. A month ago, in July, they took me to the hospital and I had a baby a boy."