Butterfly Sarcophagi
By S.E. Schaible
In the summer of 1973, I was nine years old. We spent a weekend at my grandparents’ house in rural Allentown, Pennsylvania. The home was surrounded on three sides by hundreds of acres of farmland, on a 2-lane country road. The Wilsons next door had a Butterfly Bush in their back yard, and I had permission to stalk Swallowtail Butterflies with my net. I always let the butterflies go unharmed.
I had an idea and got up the nerve to put it out there, everyone forking down shoefly pie: I want to stay with Nana and Pop Pop for the week. I won’t be any trouble, and you can get me next week. The adult heads all turned toward each other with eyebrows raised. Nana whispered something in German to Pop Pop. “If it’s okay with your parents, it’s okay with us.” Pop Pop worked at Bethlehem Steel, but Nana was off for the summer from her school cafeteria job. Dad peeled off five singles for some walking around money, Mom gave me a proud hug, and their green Buick left the driveway toward Route 22.
On Monday I announced that I was walking to the Greenawalds General Store. It was over a mile toward a quiet hamlet of small homes. I had only ever gone with my brother, but I was excited to buy some penny candy. I craved the Neapolitan coconut rectangles. Waist-high corn grew just off the road I walked. I spent forty cents on Topps baseball cards and candy and took a quick drink from the hose on the side of the store like I had seen some local kids do.
On the walk back, I spotted a butterfly ahead, but something wasn’t right. It was a huge black Swallowtail with yellow stripes on the grass near the road, not opening and closing its wings like when sipping nectar. I knelt carefully next to it, my bare knees gnashing into the mixture of gravel and grass, and I realized it was dead. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time – fluttering across just as a pickup truck sped along. I gently turned it in my hand. An amazing specimen, larger than any I had netted. I set it down by the corn and surrounded it with small sticks and reeds of grass to construct a crude cabin, a tiny sarcophagus for the noble creature. Honorably entombed, I wiped the sweat and possibly a tear from my eyes and kept walking. Heat shimmered up from the road like a mirage; When a car breeched through, it seemed to explode out of an ethereal storm, a starship coming out of warp speed. I spotted dead white and yellow moths, but they were common and plentiful, and it didn’t occur to me to mourn them.
I took this walk every day. By the weekend I had entombed fourteen butterflies. Sometimes I took a detour onto Minnich Road, past an old junkyard of cars from the 40’s and 50’s looking like bloated whales in the sun. In lieu of spouting water, there were tall sunflowers growing out of open hoods. I could pick a line through the corn and guess my way to the house. Later when the corn was twice as tall, these treks were like walking through a seabed of kelp. A tree line separating fields ran perpendicular from Wilson’s backyard, so if I was off by any measure, I would just hit the trees and turn right. I found Native American arrowheads in this reddish dirt over the years, kicked up by a John Deere tiller hundreds of years after being fired at a deer or a rival, wooden shafts long since returned to the soil. I was amazed by how razor sharp the knapped edges still were.
My grandparents gave me a Jehovah’s Witnesses book with a pink cover entitled Listening to the Great Teacher. I was asked to read a passage at their Thursday meeting. Over cookies and milk, one of the ladies said to me, “Don’t you think it will be incredible when the Earth becomes a paradise? The lion and the lamb will be friends and there will be no more misery.” I politely nodded yes, but I thought the lion was already perfect – something that hunts other animals and eats them. I had just found another dead Tiger Swallowtail with an army of ants harvesting it. Just doing what they do. I blew the ants off and cupped it in my hands and built another straw crypt. Placing those beautiful creatures someplace safe was a way to celebrate them and accept that they emerged at the wrong time, a time when speeding cars were a factor. Something beautiful was taken, the circumstances were harsh, and a ceremony was warranted.
Published RITUALS Summer 2024 pg. 170 | Buy a physical copy HERE pg. 170
A Domesticated Primate & Anomaly Poetry
Summer Solstice publication. © 2024