James Cain - The Butterfly

“That’s in the past.”

“I want to be bad.”

“I’m taking you to church.”

But all during the preaching she kept looking out the window at the mountainside, and I don’t think she heard a word that was said. And later, when we shook hands with Mr. Rivers and those people from Tulip, she tried to be friendly, but she didn’t know one from another even after I spoke their names. And some of them noticed it. I could see Ed Blue look at her with those little pig eyes he’s got, and I didn’t care for Ed Blue, and had even less use for him after what happened later, but I didn’t want him talking around. Some of those people remembered her when she was a little thing, and wanted to like her, and giving him something to talk about wasn’t helping any.

For apple-harvest, corn-husking, and hog-killing, I always got in two fellows from the head of the creek, and she fed us all three, and did a lot of things that had to be done, like running into Carbon City in the truck for something we needed, or staying up with me until almost daylight the night we boiled the scrapple. But when it got cold, and things slacked off a bit, and Jack and Mellie went home, she began sitting around all the time, looking at the floor and not saying anything. And then one night, after I’d been shelling corn all day, she asked what I did with it. “Feed it to the stock, mostly.”

“Two mules, six hogs, two cows, and a few chickens eat up all that grain? My, they got big appetites. I never heard of animals as hungry as that.”

“Some of it I sell.”

“For how much?”

“Whatever they pay. This year, a dollar ten.”

“That all you get?”

“It’s according’s according. Now you can sell it. But I’ve seen the time, and not so long ago, when you couldn’t even give it away, and a dollar ten was a fortune.”

“Bushel of corn’s worth more than that.”

“Who’ll pay you more?”

“Café, maybe.”

“Kady, what are you getting at?”

“You meal it and mash and just run it off once. You can get five dollars a gallon for it while it’s still warm. You take a little trouble with it, you can get more. Put it away in barrels a couple of months you can get ten.”

“People quit that when Prohibition went out.”

“But they’re starting up again, now the places can’t get liquor. The mountain stuff goes in city bottles, and money is paid for it.”

“Where’d you learn so much about this?”

“In Carbon, maybe I’ve been doing more than bringing back boxes for those apples of yours. Maybe I’ve found friends. Maybe they’ve told me how to get plenty of money quick.”

“Did they tell you it’s against the law?”

“Lot of things are against the law.”

“And I don’t do them.”

“I want money.”

“What for?”

“Clothes.”

“Aren’t those clothes pretty?”

“They look all right in a church on a mountain, but in Carbon they’re pretty sick. I told you, I’ve been a sucker too long, and I’m going to step out.”

“A church is better for you than a town.”

“But not so much fun.”

I shelled corn, and did no mealing or mashing. And one day she went off after breakfast and didn’t come home till ten o’clock at night.

“Where have you been?”

“Getting me a job.”

“What kind of a job?”

“Serving drinks.”

“Where?”

“In a café.”

“That’s no decent job for a girl. And specially it’s no job for a girl that has an education and can teach school.”

“It pays better. And it is better.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“Because if I feel like having a baby or something, they’d let me stay and not kick me out and after I had the baby they’d let me come back and be nice to it and be nice to me.”

“What do you mean, feel like having a baby?”

“With the right fellow, it might be nice.”

“Quit talking like that!”

She pulled off her hat, threw her hair around, and went to bed. It went on like that for quite a while, maybe two or three months, she staying out till ten, eleven, or twelve o’clock, us having fights, and me going crazy, specially when she began bringing home clothes that she bought, the way she told it with the tip money. But they must have been awfully big tips. And then came the night that she didn’t come home at all, and that I didn’t go to bed at all. I went down to meet the last bus, and when she wasn’t on it I drove to Carbon City and looked everywhere. She was nowhere that I went to. I came back, lay on the bed, did my morning work, and then I knew what I was going to do.

That afternoon I saddled a mule and rode up a trail that ran up the mountain to a shack that the super had built when he was young and used to shoot. It was all dust and there was no furniture in it and it hadn’t been used for a long time, but out back was what I was looking for. It was the old hot-water heater, with a coil inside, and the hundred-gallon tank, on a platform outside, that he had put in so him and his friends could have a bath any time they wanted.

“God but I’m glad you’re back.”

“Well look who’s excited.”

“I was afraid you weren’t coming.”

“We had to open a lot of cases, and we didn’t get done until late and I missed the last bus. I stayed with a girl that works there.”

My arms wouldn’t let go of her, and we held hands while she ate the supper I had saved for her, and I was so happy a lump kept coming in my throat. And then when we were sitting in front of the fire I said: “That idea you had, remember?”

“About the corn?”

“Suppose I said yes. Would you quit this work you’re doing, and stay out here and help me with it?”

“What’s changed you?”

“I can’t stand it when you’re gone.”

“Is it fifty-fifty?”

“Anything.”

“Shake.”

The mine, which was where I figured to set up our plant, scared me so bad I almost lost my nerve and quite before we began. Except maybe for rats and dust and spiders, I had thought it would be the same as when they took the machinery away, but when we got up there we found some changes had taken place. The top, where the weight of the mountain was on it, had bulged down in a bunch of blisters, about like the blisters on paint, except that they were the size of a wagon wheel instead of the size of a quarter, and as thick as a concrete road instead of as thick as a piece of paper. Each blister had split into pieces, and a lot of the pieces had fallen down, with the rest of them hanging there ready to kill you if you happened to be underneath when they dropped. And the floor had pumpkined up in wavy bumps that about closed the opening in a lot of places. So in the main drift, where I had thought we’d haul stuff in and out on a mine car, and pull it up and lower it down with a falls to the old roadbed below, there were three feet of jagged slabs with a trickle of water running over them, and the car track all buried. When she saw what it was like she begged me not to go inside, but I crawled in to have a look. After a hundred feet I had to stop. Because in the first swag was a pool of water at least six feet deep, and overflowing to make the trickle that was running out the drift mouth.

When I got out we talked it over, and I had cold feet. But she kept saying a coal mine wasn’t the only place, and she was sulky and I could see she didn’t mean to give up. And then I happened to remember one of those tunnels we had driven the year when they were trying to find out if there was any more thick seam. It wasn’t like a mine tunnel, where they drive their drift into a layer of coal, and there’s rock top and rock floor, with coal for the rib and no need of timber, except of course in the rooms where they rob the coal and have to put in posts as they go or the whole thing would cave in. This tunnel was through shale, with sandstone top, and we had timbered as we went with cribbing. It was a quarter mile around the mountainside, at the top of a straight cliff that dropped into the creek, and we went around there. Sure enough, there it was, all dirty and damp and dark, but with the timbers still holding and the track still in place. I lit up and crawled in, and saw a string of cars on the first siding, about two hundred feet in. They weren’t the heavy steel cars they used on motor trains, but little ones, that we had pushed by hand. I kept on, and found all entries open, even the ones that connected with the worked-out part of the mine, though they were full of slabs, like the main drift. And then at last I came to what I’d been headed for since I first crawled in the old drift mouth, which was the shaft that was sunk for ventilation, and because it would crosscut everything, and they could see if they had anything or not, and when they found out they hadn’t, they quit.