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Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A.
BETWEEN THE SWAY OF WIND-CATCHING WILLOWS, Joe Sanderson searched. He climbed over the knotty skeletons of old shrubs, and planted his feet into spongy soil. His sneakers snapped dead branches in two. These were the early days of autumn, and his arms and cheeks were still summer-bronzed and freckled over the last layers of his baby fat. He was eleven years old and an expert butterfly collector. Probably the top kid-lepidopterist in Champaign County, in his own humble opinion. At night his bones ached and added marrow, and each morning his limbs felt more sinewy and masculine, as if he’d somehow entered the body of Davy Crockett. Or Daniel Boone. Manhood was calling to him in the contracting muscles of his calves and his bulkier biceps, but not yet in his loins. For the moment, he was still a boy.
Joe’s friend Jim trailed behind him. Above them, the Illinois sun streamed through the tree canopies and their leaves became emeralds and rubies. Joe looked down at the ground before him, which had been made wet by weeks of rain showers, and saw slugs, snails and hopping insects, creatures that were burrowing and slithering. An earthworm oozed over his foot. His new canvas tennis shoes were covered in mud and ruined. Mom’s going to be heaping mad! Nah, that’s a dumb thing to think. A scientist doesn’t worry if his shoes are covered in mud. His father, Professor Milton W. Sanderson, was an entomologist at the University of Illinois and the world’s leading expert on the June beetle. Joe had been trying to sound like his father when he invited Jim on this butterfly expedition. They had traveled from Joe’s house on Washington Street on bicycles, down the straight and flat asphalt strip of Race Street to the edge of town, past the asterisk petals of yellow wildflowers, to this grove of university-planted trees. Nearby, the last patches of native prairie grass in Champaign County were catching the wind and drawing bugs, while the shallow stream whispered to the butterflies and dragonflies to come rest by its muddy shores.
Muddy shores. Muddy shoes. My mother will be angry at these muddy shoes.1
* * *
TWO HOURS EARLIER, Joe’s mother, Virginia Sanderson, née Colman, had watched Joe emerge from his bedroom in his pajamas. She felt, for what would prove to be the last time, the sensation that had often come over her when Joe was a cotton-diapered infant and milk-toothed toddler: that he had somehow stretched out, thinned out, and grown taller overnight.
On most days, Virginia sat behind a desk at the Champaign County Bank and Trust. She spent her workdays keeping ledgers and turning the crank on a machine whose gears could add up to $9,999,999.99. When she got home, Virginia kept on counting. One man, two boys (Joe and his brother, Steve), four steaks, one pan, four potatoes, one cup of milk, two teaspoons of butter, four hours till bedtime. Four feet eleven inches, size-eight shoes. With each new school year and season, her healthy, freckled son presented new puzzles. He had a mouth of mostly new permanent teeth, with perhaps one last baby canine or premolar still left to drop. His energy was boundless, protomasculine and unfocused, as evidenced by the ever-growing collection of bugs and other artifacts in his bedroom, filling his room with the sugary, unnatural aroma of preserved death; and sometimes, the musky, fermented scent of the urine and wet fur of the living mammals he brought into the house from the wild. More than two hundred and fifty butterflies in his collection. The rescued baby rabbits she helped him feed with an eyedropper. Mom is the mother rabbit, Steve! Look at Mom! She kept waiting for him to grow out of his collecting and wandering stage.
* * *
FOR THE REST OF JOE SANDERSON’S LIFE, butterfly collecting will be a metaphor for curiosity and adventure. When he’s on battlefields distant from Urbana and the United States, he’ll jokingly call himself a “butterfly collector” and say his M16 rifle is his “butterfly net.” At the age of eleven, he keeps picture frames with his captured and pinned butterflies, and also jars filled with snakeskins. He can identify the castes in his ant farm. He has a stuffed oriole, dried maple leaves and beetles. Intricate, startling and perfect things that remind him of the infinite variety of the living world. The wing of a monarch butterfly when he blows it up five hundred times in his father’s microscope and sees rows of delicate scales, a feathery field of saffron-colored grass. The exoskeleton of a beetle, and the stacked-coin patterns in the snake’s rattle.
Now, in this small ecosystem tucked between the city and the cornfields, wounded sparrows died and putrefied, the caterpillars secreted smelly vapors, and the short-tailed shrews and meadow voles dropped feces. Cycles of living things. The mud inside his shoes made music as he marched. Swish, issh, swish, issh.
“This is a good spot,” Joe told Jim. “There’s water nearby. And all these shrubs down here. You catch them near what they eat.”
A stiff breeze came rushing into the grove of willows, cottonwoods and oaks again, causing the branches and leaves over his head to fill with a sound that made him think of sand falling through an hourglass. The tall pillar of air around Joe shifted westward, then eastward, with him and Jim and all the other living things inside it moving in the same cadence, every leaf and every branch, every bird, every nest. The swaying stopped, and a warm air was born from the stillness, the final hot humid breath of a Midwestern summer. Joe saw a brown, beating stain in the shadowy light, a butterfly rising and falling on currents of air as if careening down some invisible roller coaster. It passed a foot or so from his left ear and came to rest upon a shrub. Quickly, expertly, Joe plopped his net down and the fat butterfly was his, spotted wings beating furiously in the white mesh. “It’s a silver-spotted skipper,” Joe said, and he held the net closed with one hand and reached into the pocket of his collector’s jacket with the other, retrieving a jar and a wad of cotton, which he moistened with ether. The butterfly fluttered its wings in a final convulsion. So cruel to kill a living thing.
When they were done collecting, Joe and Jim marched out of the woods and heard the elephant wail of a passing train, and felt a tremor moving through the ground: the Illinois Central, on its diesel march between Chicago and New Orleans. The boys stepped out onto Race Street, into full sunshine, and they retrieved their bikes and pedaled northward through two parallel fields of harvest-high corn. A wind-wave rippled through the ears, the tassels and the silk. Urbana was surrounded by so much corn it made you feel like a castaway on an island in a corn ocean. They passed the sign announcing the city limits: URBANA: ELEV. 730 FEET. He could follow this road all the way to Chicago. Maps at the gas station with this highway and many others, and railroad lines. Danville, Bloomington, Decatur. The blue whorls of the Sangamon River.
Joe forgot about the butterflies and the dragonfly in his jacket. What next? What now? He felt the book shift in its pocket. Maybe I should write this down. Words made adventures live forever. His father was reading Les Misérables to him at night. They were almost finished. Dad said they’d read Robinson Crusoe next. When he visited his grandmother in Kansas, she read Huckleberry Finn to him. Books brought him joy, and books doomed him, because from an early age he believed every exciting thing that happened to him belonged in a book. Even now, as a fifth grader, he believes his story can fall onto a sheet of paper as easily as the rubber tire of his bicycle rolls onto the black asphalt. One day he’ll write as many words as there are white dashes in the center of this road. You live something, you write it down with words, words, words. Men set off on ships to conquer new territories, across the ocean, wave after wave, word after word.
Copyright © 2020 by Héctor Tobar
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lines from “My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death” (poem) from Split, copyright © 2014 by Cathy Linh Che, Alice James Books.
