Lynn Hoffman

The Butterfly Farmer
a novel by

Lynn Hoffman
 

        Fall
    Nine days after his wife died, Jonathan Motaro stood looking west from her garden on the island across the shallow bay to the tower-spiked line of the mainland. The sun was low and bright, stretching his shadow out behind him to almost twice his height. By their island’s calendar, it was ‘the golden time’ the season that began on Labor Day and lasted until the flowers died.
    Dana’s garden was separated from the bay by a bulkhead- a line of treated wooden pilings and planks that held the land in place. The plantings that made up her garden followed, in a loose, brush-stroked fashion, the line of a dry stone wall that he had built for her in front of the bulkhead. They spilled from there along the two wooden fences that separated their lot from the neighbors’. Along the north fence and near the back of the house there was a patch of herbs, planted just this year. The garden, just by being untouched for over a week, was already less a monument to her than a blunt reminder that she was gone.
    He fought his urge to sleep- turning his face up and into the freshening wind. A tingling numbness had been sweeping tidally in and out of his hands. He wondered without caring much, if that feeling was a sign of something.
    Across the bay and to the north he could see a small two-masted sailboat. The top of its masts were in line with the edge of the opposite shore, reminding him as it pitched along, of the silver charms that used to hang from his daughter’s bracelet.
    His wife’s garden was always in motion- always changing. He had been, for the fourteen years they lived by the bay, her willing garden slave, digging out the brittle remains of last year’s salt-killed perennials, replacing an anglo-saxon elegy in white blossoms with a meditative composition in driftwood and grasses then spading that up a season later in favor of something else.
     The garden was the place where they liked each other the most, the place where the accumulated disappointments of their marriage haunted them least. He enjoyed seeing her severely beautiful face without makeup, watching her blue eyes against the pale skin that flushed as she worked. He loved how she was transformed in their garden hours into a playful visionary, a de mille, a hitchcock, an o’keefe. Her compositions commanded attention, not through drama but thru their almost complete lack of art. She touched things and they remarkably turned into themselves. There was a miracle in her gardening that refreshed him and he never thought to rebuke her for not bringing that magic to their marriage. “It is a pleasure, madam,” he would say at the end of a gardening day “to perspire in your company.”
    

    Jonathan was, by most accounts he had heard, a handsome man. He was tall, with red thinning hair and high cheekbones that kept a leanness to his face long after his body had grown slightly, respectably, middle-agedly, thick. His eyes were brown, wide and active. His wife’s friends confessed at various times that they thought he could pass for a rodeo cowboy, an astronaut, a sea captain.
    Their fantasies left him unmoved, unattracted as he was to the rugged forms of adventure. He had sought and found the focus of his life in the apparent simplicity of very homely things. He made his living building houses, a trade he cherished not so much for its manly image as for the softer pleasure of making homes, of seeing everything comfortable and tidy and everyone safe inside.
    Standing in the garden, Johnathan again tried to stay awake. Two or three times a day, every day since she died, he had been dropping into exhausted unconsciousness. He found a seat on a piece of sandstone. They had bought it and levered it into place a few years back. To his right was their patch of herbs. Dana had laid it out by laying herself out on the sand, arms out from the hips. While he traced her outline with a stick, their dog Red, a chunky black Lab, came over and plunked himself down at her feet. Jonathan traced him too. From their bedroom window they could read the vegetable shadow of woman and dog and watch them fill up with greens as the summer passed. They filled in the body with creeping oregano and marjoram and gave her a parsley bikini bottom. In the navel she planted a circle of rosemary for a jewel. She did her head in nasturtiums, which grew golden and unruly. Dana had always wanted to be a blonde.
    Jonathan’s sandstone seat put him a few feet from the herb garden, his head about level with the blossoms of a thickly planted clump of parsley that grew at her breasts. He pushed the sleep away with deep breaths and arched eyebrows. He didn’t want to miss this last bit of daylight. Time passed more easily, he had found, in the light.
    From his seat he could make out the circle of quiet perennials that marked the passage of summer like a sundial. A few days before she died, she told him that it was ‘a quarter to the sedums and half-past the echinacea’.
    He noticed that it was time to touch up the house paint. He might do it himself, might take a man from the crew of the house that was building itself in his absence over on the mainland, or might not bother at all. It was a problem too big for words, too prickly for thought, and he found himself drifting into a dull semi-consciousness.
    He was startled in a sleepy, stupid sort of way by a flash off to his right. He turned his head and saw a black butterfly. It had stopped on one of the flat landing pads of the parsley’s flower heads. The stalk bent slightly in response to the insect’s weight, lowering flower and butterfly just enough to give Jonathan a perfectly perpendicular view.
    The butterfly was big, the front edges of each wing about two inches long. The wings curved up and away from the head like well-muscled shoulders. Its body was black except for a row of yellow spots down the side, along the ribs Jonathan thought, although he knew that couldn’t be right. The hind wings trailed off at their ends into tapering points like swallows’ tails. The points were a chalky blue-black with a doubled row of yellow spots along the trailing edge and a blush of blue with two cartoon eye spots at the tail. The small eye spots were a blended red-to-yellow each with a black dot. The effect, he thought, was of a tiny cross-eyed tail gunner staring out of a miniature warplane.
    This butterfly slapped him back to wakefulness with its beauty, with its quiet advertisement for itself. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to keep the moment precious by not letting it last too long. He opened them, and the butterfly was still there, one heartbeat, two three and then it was gone, gliding over the bulkhead to the bay against the easterly breeze.
 
    In the middle of the night a few days later, Jonathan was jerked back from a thrashing sleep. Red was standing on his hind legs, front paws slipping on the window sill and crying into the night. Red who was beloved of Dana, would never be Jonathan’s dog. Instead they had settled in and became, as fellow mourners do, tender and neighborly.
     Red’s voice was thin and breathy, sounding like it came from an animal half his size. The dog had stopped searching the house for her a few days before. He had been watching Jonathan’s face for signs, searching perhaps for any of the sets and poses that might have signaled her return. Today he must have seen something else, some closing or blankness. His choked howl had incubated through the day in the rustic quiet of a dog brain and burst out now in the moonlight. Jonathan turned him away from the window and stroked his head. The dog answered him with tiny yelps and jerky stretching of his legs. After a few minutes of petting and soothing sounds, he licked Jonathan’s hand and was asleep. Jonathan sat on the floor, holding the dog and looking at his own legs- stretched along the floor next to the dog’s- both of them enclosed in a square of moonlight.
    His cat, who always preferred his company to Dana’s, found them and improvised a lap from Jonathan’s legs. The cat nuzzled his free hand, tended to him, took his grief as her professional concern.
 

 

    By the day before Thanksgiving, the garden had collapsed and darkened and he, following last year’s instructions, hacked down the stems. His son would be spending the holiday with his new in-laws in the Pocono mountains to the west. Jonathan had been invited to join them, but declined. He would spend at least one more feast with his wife and his memories. He tried to release his only daughter from her obligation to come home. It was a long way to travel, he told her. She must have some studying to do, exams coming up and all. She didn’t buy it, she was coming anyway.
    For the last ten Thanksgivings Jonathan had always cooked two turkeys; one was packed with herbs under the skin and hot roasted. The other he soaked in sugared brine and slow smoked over maple chips in an outdoor gas grill.  The two turkeys avoided an argument between his children and gave the grownups some variety at a meal that might otherwise have bored them before they started to eat it. The two large birds also provided an informal stream of food for the guests who arrived later at night, fed up with their own families and hoping to redeem the piety of the day with a little fun. Dishes, recipes and guests changed like the garden from year to year, but the ‘matched pair of dueling turkeys’ was a constant.

    Just after noon, Vanessa’s wallowing white sedan turned left into the graveled strip in front of the house. He found himself jogging from the kitchen at the sound of the wheels. From the raised back deck he could see her through the windshield as she fumbled with packages. He noticed the characteristic clump of sandwich wrappers and a paper coffee cup on the seat beside her. He watched her grab her bunch of flowers and heard the clanking of bottles from inside her brown paper bag, saw her blow a strand of red hair off her face. By the time she kicked her way, coatless, out of the car and into the cold, he was down the steps wanting to hug her, needing to keep his baby warm.
 

    Julia Clewitt was buying a boat. After years of resistance, it suddenly seemed like the most natural thing a woman could do for her fortieth birthday. That it was November and therefore well past the usual time for that sort of commerce didn’t bother her at all. She had read an entire summer’s worth of classified ads, sailed a dozen boats, even rented one for a week to try it out. She had banged her knuckles, been caught in the rain and thrown into a mast by a powerboat wake. She had also been wreathed by sunsets, buzzed by ospreys and soothed into a special inner quiet that she remembered from a long time ago.
    The day the quiet happened, the day that all the voices and noises and conversations in her head turned off was the day she knew she had to have a boat for herself.
    Now, after a summer of hesitation and exaltation, she was standing in the office of a small marina on the Jersey shore, just a few miles’ sail from her home. She flipped her brief case open. There was her checkbook, in its elastic pocket next to the pens. Through the office window, she could just see the boat’s two masts, each with a gold sail wrapped around it. She filled in the check record first, and when she signed her name, her hand hardly shook at all.

    Julia got her divorce eleven years earlier. Like the boat, it had been a birthday present. She had, in a peculiarly stubborn way, taken it not just as the end of her marriage, but as the charter for the rest of her life. The divorce decree included, she swore, provisos about a lightly cynical approach to men in general and commitment in particular. The resolution she had taken from family court was to let men touch her from a distance if at all. Romance, should it happen, was to be with strangers and on vacation, or with amusing men who called once in a great while from distant states. That resolution became a contract, a creed, a promise to some sour spirit she couldn’t name. She courted herself with this idea and after a while, without ceremony or ring, she became married to it.
    Julia’s cynicism did not extend beyond her relationships with men. On the contrary, in every area but love, she was a thoroughgoing romantic. She was, after all, buying a boat.
    She mentioned her boat plan to a man she saw from time to time. He advised her that ‘the world wants to sink a boat from below and rot it from every other damn direction’. She agreed but blinked away the gloomy extension, refused to see that observation as a metaphor. Instead she dreamed herself reaching north along the sunset draped bay and saw the man’s caution as a call for more varnish, epoxy and sailorly diligence.
    The boat itself spoke to her in an insistent gotta-have-it voice. Its slim black hull looked ready to move over, not in, the water. You sat behind the second, smaller mast in a cockpit, steering the boat with a wooden tiller and two lines called ‘sheets’ that pulled the sails in to resist the wind and make the thing go. And ‘go’ is what it did.
    The boat was a dancer, a hiphopper of waves; lighter than air, solid as a train. On her test sail, she found herself laughing at the spray that hit her face as the boat surged into the wind. She was startled at the sudden stillness when she turned the boat away from the wind, eased the sheets and let herself be pushed across the tops and down the fronts of the small bay waves. The stillness rose from the bay and rolled into her as she sailed.
    The boat had a stubby arm pinned outboard on either side. You lowered the one on the downwind side when you sailed and it prevented the boat from being blown sideways. She thought the marina owner looked faintly amused as he explained this to her. He called them leeboards, and allowed that they were probably as good for the purpose as any other kind of board.
    She had been pleased to learn that the boat was called a Sea Pearl. It called up for her an image of her mother in a gray woolen dress wearing a string of white pearls. Composed and fulfilled. She made arrangements to pick the boat up the next day, Thanksgiving morning. She stole one more satisfied peek at the boat and drove off over the causeway to the mainland, to work.

    Culinary Hall was cool and dark, thermostats turned to ‘holiday’ setting. Julia delighted in the place without its mob of white coated students. She loved the clean abstract perfection of the steely surfaces and the uncompromising hardness of the tiles. “Desserted” she said aloud, smiling as she tapped in the code that turned off the alarms.
    A few minutes later, wearing chef’s whites and clogs, she was slicing the legs and wings from eight turkeys and putting them in roasting pans. Some of the thighs would be boned, stuffed and frozen. The other parts would end up in the stock pot. Today she would roast the breasts until they were almost done and carefully remove the crispy layer of skin. Then she would take the large breast muscle off the skeleton, slice it across the grain into rounds and wrap this filet of turkey in its own skin. Friday, when the Barrier Island Society had its post-Thanksgiving fundraising dinner at the firehouse, she would finish cooking them in the firehouse kitchen and then lift the skin and drizzle some concentrated veal stock over the meat. By the time the dish hit the buffet table, the meat would have soaked up the flavor of veal, wine, herbs and mushrooms.
    It took a certain calculated courage to serve this on the day after Thanksgiving, when most people thought they were sick of turkey. She had done this before, on other Thanksgivings and every time Julia would stand in the kitchen and smile as the plates came back in empty.
    Julia cooked for the delight, that inner squeal of joy that great food could provoke; that was why. The Society dinner brought her back to the enthusiasm she used to feel about cooking. Those were days when she didn’t mind the heat because she was its source, days before she cooked in her own restaurant. Before she married the charming young restaurant manager and made him her partner and before the marriage dissolved in a whirl of drugs and shame and younger women and the pitying glances of her friends. She thought that maybe her students and some of the younger faculty still felt that passion for cooking and today, for a while, she did too.