The Butterfly

Chapter 2

“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.”

“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.”