The Butterfly

Chapter 10

When I got near the bend I stopped, hid the truck back of the old filling station, got the rifle out, and crossed the creek on the pillars of the old bridge. I kept on up on the other side, keeping under the cliff and out of sight from above till I came to the path. Then I crept up the mountainside without making any noise at all. When I came to the drift I went in, opened the tool chest, refilled the lamp, lit it, and set it down. I cut off about six feet of fuse, rolled it up, and stuck it in my pocket. I put a box of caps in there with it. I stuck a couple of sticks of dynamite in my pocket on the other side. Then I went on in. When I came to the shaft I laid out powder, fuse, and caps on a scaffold, and put my shoes beside them, tied to a scantling against rats. Then I picked up the rifle and started up the ladder. When I lifted my head out he had moved, with the sun, about six feet away from where he had been before, but that put him facing me more, and made it better. He was eating beans out of a can with his knife, and I let him finish them up before I raised my gun. I drew my bead right on the butterfly. He doubled up when I pulled the trigger, and held on to his stomach, and kicked like a cat trying to shake papers off its feet, and drew his breath in and out fast like a dog in the summer time, except instead of heat that made him do that, it was pain. That suited me fine. I stepped out, picked up his rifle from where he had set it down to eat, and sat down to watch him twitch.

“You dirty son of a bitch.”

“Hello, Moke.”

“God, that would be like you, Jess, to shoot me in the belly and then go on and leave me here to die.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go off and leave you, if that’s all that’s worrying you. There’s buzzards up there, and I couldn’t have them flying around to tip anybody off.”

“Couldn’t you shoot me through the heart?”

“I shoot you where you got it coming.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I let you off once, because I thought neither you nor the woman was worth it. But now you went too far, and I got to tach you to lay off my daughter.”

“Your what?”

“You heard me.”

“Say, that’s a joke.”

“I shot you in the butterfly. That’s what little Danny’s got, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you did for your country? Leave a poor little kid that’s birthmarked like you? Well, you don’t do it with my daughter and live to tell about it.”

“Kady never done nothing with me.”

“I’ll attend to her, later.”

“You going to attend to Danny?”

“I’ll take care of him, anyway.”

“You like Danny, don’t you?”

“That’s none of your damned business.”

“The hell it’s not. Yeah, you’ll attend to Kady. You’ll hit her with a harness trace, and put her out, and act just like you always acted, with that religion-crazy disposition you got. But you won’t put Danny out, oh no. You’ll keep him, and let Jane take care of him, because you’re crazy about him. No matter what she done, he’s yours. Kady’s nothing but a woman, and you never knew how to treat one. But Danny, oh yes, I seen you with him up there yesterday, when Belle was dying. You never seen nothing as pretty as he is, did you? He’s yours, no matter what Kady done. He’s your grandchild, ain’t he? Well now you get it, you rotten, belly-shooting, dumb son of a bitch. He’s not yours. He’s mine.”

“What did you say?”

“That butterfly, yeah, we got a butterfly in my family. But only the men got it, see? If the child’s a girl, it skips. It skips to the next boy. He’s not your grandchild, Jess, he’s mine!”

He raised up on one elbow to shove his face closer to mine, then fell back from the pain and held both hands over his stomach and drew his legs up tight over his hands. “Jesus Christ, stuff is coming out of me!”

“What’s that you said?”

“Get a doctor, stuff is coming out with the blood!”

“Never mind the stuff! Talk!”

I got up and hauled off my foot and kicked him where he was holding his hands, but he began to scream and said he’d talk but to get him some water or he can’t stand it any more. I climbed down the ladder, dipped up some cold spring water in the bucket, put on my shoes and came on back up. Sweat was on his face when I filled the cup and give it to him to drink. He took it in one hand, then began to puke.

“The stuff that’s all over my hand, it stinks!”

“Here.”

I held the cup and let him wash out his mouth and drink three or four cupfuls. Then I poured water over his belly to wash off the stuff and the blood and the bugs that had got in it. “Now spit it out, what I asked you, and spit quick.”

“I told you all I’m telling you.”

“That Danny’s your grandson?”

“You’re goddam right. We never knew it, Belle and I, for twenty years, that Kady was ours, until Danny came, and we seen the butterfly. Then we knew.”

“So Belle two-timed me even before she left.”

“The way you treated her why not?”

“I loved her. What more did she want?”

“Yeah, you loved her. If she’d go to church three times on Sunday and pray every night and look at your sour face all the rest of the time, you loved her. Well who she loved was me. Because she liked a good time. And me, I had a banjo.”

“That was something, wasn’t it?”

“To Belle it was. You bet she two-timed you.”

He called for more water, and I gave him some, and he cussed me out, and began calling Kady every dirty name he could think of. “She hated Danny. She hated him because his father walked out on her, and she’s been so proud and stuck-up she couldn’t stand it she was just a girl like anybody else. But I loved him.” And then, after a while: “Belle was going crazy from fear I would spill it to Kady whose child she really was, and if I did, she would hate Belle. So that was late afternoon, and Belle caught the bus, to come up here and kill me. If it had been morning she wouldn’t have done it. The fever, it came on as the day wore on. It made her crazy. After she come in my shack that night, and I knew she was going to die, I thought I’d wait till that was over, and then come out with it. It was all I had to live for. Why should I keep my mouth shut? Why should I give a hoot how Kady felt? She never cared how I felt. But Belle knew what she could do with me. She got me to come over there, just before she died, after you left and Kady left and they took Danny away, and promise I’d never say anything to Kady about it. So that’s what I done. I give up the one thing I wanted in life, to please a woman that was dying, and that I loved. But I made up my mind, if I had to give it up, you’d give it up too. You weren’t going to be happy with something that was mine. So I got Ed Blue’s gun, and I’d have killed you, Jess. That’s the only thing I’m sorry for, that you got me first. But by Jesus Christ, I’m going to take it away from you, that one thing that you want. I never promised not to tell you, and now I’m letting you have it. There’s not one drop of Tyler blood in Danny, and you’ve just been making a fool out of yourself to think there is. Come here, you samsinging bastard, and let me spit on you.”

I put his jumper over his chest, crossed the arms over his back, and tied them up tight. Then I used them for a handle and began dragging him.

“Stop it! That hurts!”

“It won’t, much longer.”

“Where you taking me?”

“You’ll see.”

I drug him to the shaft, and when he saw what I was going to do he began to scream. I slung him in, and he screamed clear to the bottom, but stopped when he hit. I slung Mort’s rifle in after him, and stepped back in case it would go off. When it didn’t I picked up my own gun and climbed down. He was at the bottom, all crumpled up, beside the bricked-in fireplace of the still. I tied the jumper on him better, lit the lamp, and began dragging him along the tunnel. But when I came to the first of the old entries I turned off, and began dragging him over the jagged rock that had fallen down, and it was the hardest work I ever did in my life. But it felt good, too, to know he was dead, and I had killed him, and I was going to put him where he never would be found, and nobody would ever remember he had been on this earth. I drug him at least two hundred feet. Then there was a swag, and I threw him in. Then I climbed back to the timbered tunnel, went on back to the shaft, took a bucket, scraped up some dirt and put it in, poured in some water, and mixed up some mud. Then I took my fuse, caps, and dynamite, stuck them in my pocket, and went back to the swag with them. The first blister that was hanging down on the other side, between the swag and the worked-out part of the mine, I cut off half a stick of dynamite, made a mudcap against one of the hanging pieces, stuck the dynamite in with a cap in it and six inches of fuse. The blister between the swag and the timbered drift, I made another mudcap, with a foot of fuse. Then I went in, lit the short fuse, scrambled to the next one and lit it, and stepped around to the angle of the timbered tunnel to wait. Why I had done that, I wanted those shots not to fire at once, and then I could check that they both went off. Sure enough, here came the first one. Then I almost dropped dead, because I had forgot the rifle.

I ran to the shaft mouth, got it, and coming back I ran sidewise like a crab, the way you have to do in a low tunnel. Smoke was pouring out of the tunnel, but I crawled in there and gave the rifle a pitch. Before I got to the timbered drift the second shot went off, and blew me right up against the rib. Then I was glad I had had to make the second trip in, for the rifle. Because by going in there I had seen what I’d always have been worried about. That powder had blown down the top until the tunnel was blocked up solid with rock, both sides of Moke, so it would take a hundred men a month to get in there, even if they could ever guess what they were digging for. Mr. Moke Blue could just as well have been at the bottom of the sea, so far as anybody in this world could ever find him.

When I got to the creek I took the empty shell out of my gun, threw it in the water, and put a fresh one in the chamber. Then I cut a switch and peeled it, and rammed a piece of my handkerchief through the bore, to clean it, so it hadn’t been fired since it was loaded. Then I went down and pitched it on the truck and started over to Blount, to tell Wash what Moke had told me. I was already halfway over there, before it came to me what it meant, if what he said was true.

She wasn’t my daughter any more!