The Butterfly Plague (43 page)

The trees had been moved so often that even the most frequent guests never had seen the landscape in the same order on two consecutive visits. Douglas Fairbanks called the house Dunsinane. He swore to Ruthie (aged ten) that one day there would be a gardeners’ revolt, and that George would regret it.

Ruth continued down the long stone walls. The boxed trees, dry and lichen-encrusted, had all died from lack of the coolies’ loving care. They stood, bone-branched and ghostly, in their unpainted wooden graves.

The grass abounded on the lawns, tall, uncut, and bleached. A few plaster casts of Valentino and Bushman reached out with their pseudoancient salutes in the direction of the house.

In some of the windows glass was broken.

“He’s gone,” she said. “They have all gone. Forever.”

At the sound of her voice, several birds flew up out of the grass.

She stood, waist-high amid the alien roses, delphiniums, poppies, and ferns, and she felt like Eve deserted in a whispering Eden. Unmanned, Paradise had not been long to press in close around the house, and the sun, smelting a golden afternoon, poured it out hotly now over gables, roofs, chimneys, windowpanes, and gardens. All alike were turning dry and brittle.

Ruth wheeled back like a lone survivor to the doors of the castle. They were not locked.

“Halloo!” she called into the long darkness of the hall. But there was no reply.

She left the door open, forcing a crowd of shadows to huddle in the twin corners of the central staircase.

“Father? Dolly? Mother?”

Mice.

They scurried away from their meals of carpet, wood, and damask curtains, belting hell-bent-for-safety into long-deserted cupboards and crevices. Holes. Cracks. Missing floorboards.

“Daddy?”

No answer.

“Mama?”

She wandered. The living room was on the left. Probably only two or three living rooms in the whole world were large enough to hold fifteen wing-back chairs and ten sofas. This was one of them. At the far end there was a walk-in fireplace large enough to contain three men, side by side, with their arms outstretched.

“Where are you?” said Ruth.

She turned back. She crossed the hall to the dining room and library, the study and the kitchens. No one. Not a sign.

She went upstairs. In the upper hallway the twelve gilded cages that had once held her father’s parrots were empty, their little gilded doors flung wide, the water bowls so dry that dust had formed a quarter-inch thick on the bottoms.

Certain at last that there was no one there, Ruth did not even bother to look in the Louis Quatorze bathrooms, or into the Carolinian boudoirs, or the marble-vaulted lavatories, or the sitting rooms modeled after Victorian antechambers. She did, however, walk out along the balcony at the rear of the house, and there at last she sat down on the great stone steps that led in a wide Renaissance gesture to the terrace below.

She lit a cigarette.

She was sweating. The black-fox coat fell back from her shoulders, and what little breeze there was cooled her briefly. She stared out through dark glasses, unwilling to remove them, unwilling to admit the impediment of reality, how harsh it all might be. Dolly’s hat was pulled down close over her brow.

Everyone dies and is gone.

Who will remember Valentino and Virden and Arly Robinson ten, twenty years from now? Or my father or my mother or my brother. Or me.

Like the flowers, she thought, in her youthful garden. They grow huge and gorgeous and then one day a gardener comes to cut them down. Or a bulldozer. Probably a bulldozer would come here now and push through this mountain of improbability, and the house standing on the precipice, filled with its ghosts, would topple down into the dreamy sleep of all those tormented and forgotten-to-be dolls who wallowed in their present fame below her in the valleys.

Ruth felt the sun leaving her and she knew at last that the promised rain would come. She sat there, very still in her mother’s furs, and her brother’s hat, on the steps of her father’s terraced mansion. All had left her. All had waved good-bye, and gone. She felt like a hostess whose most popular guests have departed, and who is left alone with a handful of dull and difficult strangers. She sighed into the moratorium between sun and rain.

Even her own vocation and her own fame had left her. She felt no sense of place or position, felt as though someone—perhaps a policeman—might challenge her presence the next time she walked or wanted to walk down the street.

Like the Nightmare of Germany.

Like America, she thought. I have come home. She laughed, very lightly.

Slowly, in the early twilight, still waiting for the rain, Ruth became aware that the gardens below her were coming wanly alive with the pleasant voices of insects and birds.

A lone old butterfly, staggering through the dense atmosphere, laden with the burden of its age, crept upon the air with scarred, exhausted wings. Ruth watched.

Were they really going? Was it really over?

The butterfly flew in a crazy zigzag daze, searching desperately for one last other butterfly to dazzle with his colors. But the air was empty of his kind. Under the trees the cicadas horded themselves in the sweet groves of grass. The grasshoppers waited with crooked energy for the aphids to be driven from the roses. Golden-backed spiders, scorpions, phosphorescent beetles—all hid among flowers in anticipation of rain. The birds had gathered in the branches of the avocado trees, so thickly that they could see each others fleas. There was a crowd of everything but butterflies.

This was that sudden season of change—constant in nature and in history. The season when things go.

Far away, the pleasant thunder corroded the silence with a thin, metallic hum. The air was filled with the smell of electrical activity. The clouds turned green and bronze and brass. Toledo. El Greco. Los Angeles. California.

The butterfly knelt on the outstretched tongue of a fern. Ruth watched with a careful silence as it rested.

And then the rain came.

She did not move and neither did the butterfly.

Ruth stared while the first deluge of relief beat out the little remaining brightness in the butterfly’s wings, and at last she saw them crumple and melt. She watched as the slim, black battered boat of its tiny body slid, still clinging at first, this way and that—until the flood upon the fern became so torrential and overpowering that it swept the beaten remnants, finally, far down into the mold and mud below.

And then the rain fell in such a crowd of drops that there was nothing left in sight but the vaguest outline of the thing it could not hope to wash away.

And Ruth thought, Now there will be no more fires…And a moment later she thought…And no more butterflies. This rain has extinguished them. Forever. Or a while.

And she spread the ashes.

And they were mud.

And there was nothing to do but turn around and go.

Timothy Findley

Dinner Along The Amazon

The sound of screen doors banging, evening lamplight; Colt revolvers hidden in bureau drawers and a chair that is always falling over.

These are the sounds and images that illuminate this brilliant collection of twelve short stories from one of Canada’s finest writers.

The stories range from the powerful, haunting
Lemonade
, where a young boy’s world is shattered by his mother’s self destruction, to the title story, an unusual journey into the complexities of modern relationships, written especially for this collection.

Timothy Findley

Famous Last Words

In the final days of the Second World War, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley scrawls his desperate account on the walls and ceilings of his ice-cold prison high in the Austrian Alps. Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament—the sordid truth that he alone possessed. Fascinated but horrified, they learn of a dazzling array of characters caught up in scandal and political corruption. The exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor, von Ribbentrop, Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, Sir Harry Oakes—all play sinister parts in an elaborate scheme to secure world domination.

A brilliant blending of fiction and historical fact,
Famous Last Words
is another highly acclaimed novel by the author of the award-winning The Wars.

Timothy Findley

The Last Of The Crazy People

The Last of the Crazy People
is Timothy Findley’s first novel, originally published in 1967.

One brilliant summer morning, an eleven-year-old boy commits a shocking and unpredictable crime. What drove Hooker Winslow to his act of insanity?

Rejected by his mother, who mysteriously keeps to her room; abandoned by the older brother he adores; and ignored by his father, whose obsession with the family’s disintegration prevents him from taking action; Hooker is more and more separated from reality. Left to himself, he broods on the events of the summer, misinterprets them, and takes terrifying steps to end the confusion. Findley makes the conclusion to Hooker’s story credible and devastating.

Timothy Findley

Not Wanted On The Voyage

Not Wanted on the Voyage
is the story of the great flood and the first time the world ended. It is the story of who went on the ark and who was left behind. It is also the story of a divided family: of Noah, the tyrannical patriarch and God’s magician; of his sons and their wives—Japeth and his victimized wife Emma; Shem the Ox and Hannah the survivor; the inventor Ham and Lucy, the enigmatic, disturbing woman who is not what she seems. And finally it is the story of Noah’s wife, Mrs Noyes, who desperately battles to save the magic and mystery of the old world, and of Mottyl, the blind cat who sees all.

Not Wanted on the Voyage
is a story as old as mankind, made new by a brilliant story-teller. It is a dazzling journey through time and biblical mythology; a journey that carries the reader through a vision of life that is vital, uncompromising and complete.

Like
Famous Last Words
in its panoramic sweep, like
The Wars
in its mournful sense of an unreclaimable past,
Not Wanted on the Voyage
weaves its unforgettable spell and takes its place as required reading for our age.

Timothy Findley

The Wars

“What he did was terrible…and brave.”

Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer went to war—The War To End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare; of mud and smoke; of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.

“He did the thing that no one else would even dare to think of doing.”

Was it an act of compassion or an act of madness?