The Butterfly Read online

  "Why didn't he tell me?"

  "Maybe Belle wouldn't let him."

  "What reason could she have for not letting him?"

  "Ashamed, maybe."

  "Or maybe she didn't know it."

  "If I knew it, she had to."

  "Not if only the men in that family had the butterfly. I haven't got it. Maybe neither of them knew it until Danny came and they saw the birthmark. Maybe that's why they began to fight. Maybe that's why Moke took Danny. Maybe that's why Bell tried to kill him, to keep him from saying anything to me about it."

  "I tell you, if I knew it —

  "Jess, there's a simple answer to that."

  "What is it?"

  "You might be lying to me. Right now. About knowing it before I was born, about how it was between you and Belle then, and all the rest of it."

  "I might be an Indian, but I'm not."

  She stretched out on top of the blankets and stared up at the harness that was hanging on pegs over our heads, and it was quite a while before she said anything. "Jess, you are lying."

  "If you think so, all right."

  "You didn't know it when we were up there in the mine every day, running liquor, and in town every night, selling it."

  "What makes you think I didn't?"

  "The passes I was making."

  "I fought you off."

  "But why?"

  "Didn't you hear me in court? I was married."

  "Jess, don't make me laugh."

  "That's funny to you, being married?"

  "Jess, the way you wanted me, being married wouldn't have meant any more to you than nothing. And what are you trying to tell me? You hadn't seen Belle for eighteen years, and just because you hadn't taken the trouble to get a divorce, and she hadn't, you think I'm going to believe it you were still worrying about being married? But laying up with your own daughter, that would be something else. That would be something you would think you had to fight. That would mean plenty to you on Sunday, when you were going to church and singing the hymns and worrying about hell-fire after you die. Jess, why don't you own up to it? At that time you thought I was your daughter."

  "I own up to nothing."

  It began to get light, and still she lay there, and after a while she said: "And you didn't know I wasn't your daughter that day Belle was dying."

  "You seem to have it all figured out."

  "That detective work you were doing, about why she tried to do something to Moke. If you knew about this, why couldn't you figure that out? But you never once thought of it."

  "I told you, I thought you already knew it, only you hadn't said anything to me about it. Later, when I found out you didn't know it, then I began to get it, why she went out of her head so, on that trip up here."

  "And you didn't know it my wedding day!"

  "Our wedding day."

  "Our wedding day, my eye. I've only had one wedding day, and it wasn't ours. But you, you're lying to me if you say you knew it that morning. You weren't married any more, and yet you were willing I should marry Wash, and glad of it. For your daughter, that makes sense. But for Moke's daughter? A girl that was no relation to you at all, and that you wanted so bad you couldn't sleep nights? Oh no, Jess. That day was the day you found it out. I thought then there was some connection between the way you disappeared and Wash not showing up, and now God help me I have the same feeling."

  "No connection I know of."

  "And Moke hasn't been seen since that day. Maybe there's' some connection there too. If you saw him, why didn't you tell me?"

  "I wanted to forget Moke."

  "Why didn't you tell Ed Blue?"

  "I still wanted to forget him."

  "Seems funny you didn't snap it into Ed Blue's face about the rifle and how you warned Moke off the creek, like you told the judge."

  "Let him look for his rifle."

  "Where is the rifle?"

  "I threw it in the creek."

  "Where's Moke?"

  "How should I know?"

  "Jess, you killed Moke, didn't you?"

  The prickle up my back had told me what she was going to say, but for once my mouth went off and left me. I said something. I hollered no, but it was after at least three seconds of trying to act surprised, like I didn't know what she was talking about. She was already laughing at me not being able to make up my mind when this croak came out of my throat, a cold, hard laugh that had my number, and knew it.

  When I went in for breakfast, it was she that gave it to me. When Jane came in she was dressed to go out, with her hat on, and a coat.

  "Well, Jess, I'll say good-by."

  "Where you going?"

  "Blount, I guess."

  "You mean you're leaving me?"

  "I'm not really needed any more, now that Kady takes care of Danny so well, and there's a fellow over there that's offered me a job in his café, helping him run it. It's time I took him up."

  "Kind of sudden, isn't it?"

  "Oh I've been thinking about it."

  But she said it all in a queer way, fooling with her bag while she talked, and it seemed to me she was going for some special reason she wasn't telling me. "Then I'll run you over there."

  "I'm taking the bus."

  "I'll run you to the state road."

  "I can walk."

  "You need any money?"

  "I've got some."

  On account of waking up early I felt tired that afternoon, and how long I slept I don't know, but Kady was standing there when I woke up, all dressed up, looking at me. "Good-by, Jess."

  "And where are you going?"

  "To be married."

  "When?"

  "Next week some time."

  "You are married. Did you forget that?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "Then how can you get married?"

  "Next week I'll be able to."

  "That I don't understand."

  "You will."

  "And who's the lucky man?"

  "Wash."

  "Changed his mind again, hey?"

  "He found out the truth, at last. Jane called him when she got to Blount. In fact, that might be partly why she went over there."

  "I knew she wasn't telling me the reason."

  "She called him and he came in and was crazy to know what, had happened up here, because it was on the radio when you were arrested but not in the papers when they turned you loose, because if nobody gets convicted they're afraid. So she told him what you told the judge, and he ran her back over here again. Jess, you told him Moke was Danny's father. You told me he was my father. And both were lies. You're my father. But you don't tell any third lie. You got that, Jess? You understand why next week I can get married?"

  "You'll get into plenty trouble that way."

  "We don't think so."

  "I tell you, the deputies will find out, sure."

  "We're going to tell them."

  It seemed funny, she was never going to believe the truth, and I had killed the one man that could prove it. And when they heard what she thought was the truth, no jury would hold her for what she meant to do to me.

  Outside it had started to rain, and when I peeped through a crack she was running down the road to his car, that had the top up, and inside I could see Jane and the baby. She got in and the car drove off. I went to the cabin for my rifle. It wasn't there, and neither was the .45. I put on my hat and coat and started down to the barn, to get out the truck and run into Carbon to get sheriffs protection. But when I got to the door a shot cut the air, and splinters ripped off the wood. I started back to the house, and another shot clipped my hat. I slammed down on my face, and when it got darker I crawled. Out in the stable I could hear the stock bellowing, and down the creek the cows were hooking it up, but I was afraid to go outside. Later on, after I had made myself something to eat without stirring up the fire, for fear they were looking through the cracks and could see, I got all my money together and put on my raincoat and started creeping down the road. All ove
r, you could hear bellowing from pigs and mules and chickens and cows that hadn't been fed or milked or attended to. I got about two hundred yards when something hit my leg and I heard a shot. I crawled back, doused it with liniment, and got the blood stopped.

  ***

  It's been raining for a week, they've been out there for a week, and I've been writing for a week. Maybe they've got to kill me to wipe it all out, what happened, so they can have each other again, or think they have, and maybe they're going to tell it, so they get off. But I've got to tell it too, because I didn't do anything but what I thought was right. What I told him I thought was true, and if he didn't think enough of her to go see her about it, to give her her chance to say what she had to say, then that was his lookout. After I found out how it really was, she was anybody's woman, and all I've got to say is, I love her as much as he does. So I'm putting it down. It's finished now, and tonight I'm taking it with me when I leave, and maybe there won't have to be any telling, and they'll decide they can have each other without any killing. Because my leg's better now, and there's one thing they've forgotten. And that's the mine.

  I slipped out the back way when it got dark, crossed the creek above the cabin, and got up the path without their seeing me. I got to the timbered drift, went inside, and soon as I was well inside so no light could be seen from the road I got out the carbide lamp I had brought with me. All I had to do now was slip through to the bottom of the shaft, go up the ladder to the top, kill the light, and then slide down the mountainside and come out on the road about a mile below where they're laying for me. From there on to the bus stop is a short walk, and I'd be away. But when I hit the lamp to strike the flint, I dropped it, and I heard the top pop open and the carbide go all over the track. And while I was feeling around for a couple of crumbs I could put in there with a little spit, I heard something that almost made me drop dead. It was Moke, in there under the tunnel, prizing around with the gun barrel, trying to get out. He would hit a rock three or four times, then get the steel in a crack, twist it around, move a chunk, then start all over again. I gave a yell and started to run out of the place, but I fell and hit my head and that was the last I knew for a while. When I came to he was nearer, and I could hear his chinking plainer. I got out of there somehow. When I got back it was day.

  It's still raining out, but it's daylight now, and I've been listening to the water run off the roof and I've figured out what that was in the mine. It wasn't Moke. It was water dripping. Now I know what it is, I won't mind it any more, and tonight I'll get out of here.

  I'm cut off. Ed Blue is out there and

  The End

  Preface

  This story goes back to 1922, when I was much under the spell of the Big Sandy country and anxious to make it the locale of a novel that would deal with its mine wars and utilize its "beautiful bleak ugliness," as I called it at the time, as setting. I went down there, worked in its mines, studied, trudged, and crammed, but when I came back was unequal to the novel; indeed, it was another ten years before it entered my mind again that I might be able to write a novel, for I had at least learned it is no easy trick, despite a large body of opinion to the contrary. But then I did write a novel, and the earlier idea began recurring to me not the part about labor, for reflection had long since convinced me that this theme, though it constantly attracts a certain type of intellectual, is really dead seed for a novelist but the rocky, wooded countryside itself, together with the clear, cool creeks that purl through it, and its gentle, charming inhabitants, whose little hamlets quite often look as they must have looked in the time of Daniel Boone. And then one day, in California, I encountered a family from Kentucky, running a roadside sandwich place. Certain reticences about a charming little boy they had led me to suspect he was the reason for the hegira from Harlan County, and the idea for a story began to take shape in my mind. The peculiarities of a birthmark possessed by one branch of my family helped quite a lot, and presently I had something fairly definite: a girl's disgrace, in a mountain village, which causes a family to make the grand trek to California, this trek being the main theme of the tale; the bitter, brooding unhappiness of all of them over California, with its bright, chirpy optimism, its sunshine, its up-to-date hustle; finally, a blazing afternoon, when the boy who started it all blows in, orders an egg malt, and finds himself staring into the murderous eyes of the girl's father.

  Quite pleased with this fable, I drove to Huntington early in 1939, and cruised up and down both forks of the old familiar river, stopping at the old familiar places, picking up miners, visiting friends, noting changes, bringing myself down to date. Back in the West, I started to write, and the thing began to grow. And then Mr. Steinbeck published his Grapes of Wrath. Giving the project up was a wrench, but I had to, or thought I did, and presently was at work on something else. Bit by bit, traces of the abandoned book began appearing in other books: a beach restaurant in Mildred Pierce, divers recovering a body in Love's Lovely Counterfeit, a tortured soul, in Past All Dishonor, cornered and doomed, writing his apologia before his destiny catches up with him though that had appeared in previous books, as it is occasionally forced on me by my first-personal method of narration.

  But last summer, while Past All Dishonor was in the hands of the various experts who had to O.K. it before I could send it to the publisher, and I was having an interlude where all I could do was gnaw my fingernails, I happened to tell The Butterfly to a friend, who listened, reflected for a time, then looked at me peculiarly and said: "Now I understand the reason incest never gets written about, or almost never."

  "Which is?"

  "Because it's there, not in fact very often, but in spirit. Fathers are in love with their daughters. It's like what you said in Serenade, about there being five per cent of a homo in every man, no matter how masculine he imagines himself to be. But if a father happens to be also a writer and cooks up a story about incest, he's in mortal terror he'll be so convincing about it all his friends will tumble to the truth. You, though, you haven't any children, and I personally think you're a fool to give this book up."

  "After the Joad family trip if I had a Tyler family trip I'd never live it down."

  "Well, if you don't mind my saying so, I think that Tyler family trip is just dull, and all that California stuff so phony you'd throw it out yourself after you'd worked on it awhile a wonderful, hot conflict between your description of the look in their eyes and your description of the scenery. That story is the story of a man's love for his own daughter, and the more it stays right up that mountain creek where it belongs and where you can believe it, the more it's going to be good. And look what you're throwing away for the damned California sunlight. That abandoned mine you told me about just makes my hair stand on end, and it's absolutely in harmony with that fellow's disintegration. What does California give you that compares with it? California's wholesome, and maybe it's O.K., but not for this. You go to it, and pretty soon you'll have a book."

  So I started to work and it began to come, slowly at first, but presently at a better rate. I had to suspend for the Past All Dishonor changes, but soon was back on it, and at last, after the usual interminable rewrite, it was done. Re-reading it, now the final proofs are in, I like it better than I usually like my work, and yet I have an impulse to account for it; for most people associate me with the West, and forget, or possibly don't know, that I had a newspaper career of some length in the East before I came to California. Also, the many fictions published about me recently bring me to the realization I must relax the positivist attitude I carried over from newspaper work and be less reticent about myself. In an editorial room we like the positive article, not the negative; we hate rebuttals, and even when compelled to make corrections as to fact, commonly do so as briefly as possible. Thus, when false though possibly plausible assumptions began to be printed about me, I let them pass, for as a polemist I had acquired a fairly thick hide, and the capacity to let small things bounce off it without getting unduly concerned. But
when these assumptions are repeated and I still don't deny them, I have only myself to blame if they become accepted as fact, and if elaborate deductions, some of them not so negligible, begin to be made from them. This may be an appropriate place, then, to discuss some of them, and perhaps get them discarded in favor of the truth.

  I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise, and I believe these so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics, and have little correspondence in reality anywhere else. Young J writers often imitate some older writer that they fancy, as for example I did when I used to exchange with my brother You Know Me Al letters, except that instead of baseball players we had the sergeants of 1918. We gave wonderful imitations of Lardner, and some traces of them, for any who care to look, can be seen in my book Our Government, the first sketch of which was written for the American Mercury in 1924. Yet if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal; it is sealed off in such fashion that outside "influences" are almost impossible. Schools don't help the novelist, but they do help the critic; using as mucilage the simplifications that the school hypothesis affords him, he can paste labels wherever convenience is served by pasting labels, and although I have read less than twenty pages of Mr. Dashiell Hammett in my whole life, Mr. Clifton Fadiman can refer to my hammett-and-tongs style and make things easy for himself. If then, I may make a plea on behalf of all writers of fiction, I say to these strange surrogates for God, with their illusion of "critical judgment" and their conviction of the definitive verity of their wackiest brainstorm: You're really being a little naive, you know. We don't do it that way. We don't say to ourselves that some lucky fellow did it a certain way, so we'll do it that way too, and cut in on the sugar. We have to do it our own way, each for himself, or there isn't any sugar.