James Cain - The Butterfly

“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.”

“Didn’t that make you happy?”

“I hate it.”

I asked her a few questions, and she told how Old Man Blount had paid the hospital bill, and was giving Belle an allowance, for the baby’s board. Then she broke out: “To hell with it, and to hell with all this you’ve been telling me, about being good, and always doing the right thing. I was good, and look what it got me.”

“No, you were bad.”

“I wasn’t. I loved him.”

“If he loved you, he’d have married you.”

“And who are you, to be having so much to say? You were good too, and it got you just what it got me. Didn’t you know what Belle was doing to you? Didn’t you know she was two-timing you with Moke?”

“He still around?”

“Him and his banjo.”

Moke, I guess, had made me more trouble than anybody on earth, and even now I couldn’t hear his name without a sick feeling in the stomach. He was a little man that lived in Tulip, which is not a town at all, but just some houses up the hollow from the church. His place was made of logs and mud, and he never did a day’s work in his life that anybody hear tell of. But he had a banjo. Saturday afternoons, he played in at the company store and passed the hat around, and the rest of the time he hung around my place and played it. Belle said it was good for the pop drinking, but all I could see it might be good for was to hit him back of the ear with it, and then listen which made the hollower sound, it or his head. I got so I hated it and hated him. And then one day I knew what was going on. And then next day they were gone. Kady must have seen, from the look on my face, what I felt, because she said: “Nice, how they’ve treated you and me.”