Monarch

Monarch Jason Lee Brown Butterflies have returned to our oak tree four years running. Usually, they're here and long gone by now and Schooney's back to normal. Not this year. He backs my pick-up toward the barn and ignores my hand signals. He whips the tailgate inside and slams the truck in park, barely hitting the brakes. I let down the tailgate, the truck bed filled with fiftypound feed sacks. He hops out and puts on his gloves. He's only twelve but he's been behind the wheel of everything on this farm and knows better. He hasn't said more than a couple words to me for a month or so, and when I ask him about his first little-league game, he just stacks the sacks next to the back wall of the barn like he doesn't hear me. He does this shit every year before the butterflies show up. He doesn't listen to me anymore and has stopped listening to my wife Rhonda long ago, and even if he did listen, all he'd hear is her bitching at me for drinking. He stacks like we're racing—three sacks to my one. "Are you helping or not?" he says. He slams down a sack and wipes his forehead. "I said Td help and Tm helping." My back has been out for a week and I've been sleeping on a sheet of plywood. I hear him mumble the word shotgun. He picks up another sack. "Say it again," I say. "You said you were getting me a shotgun," he says. "You know how Rhonda feels about guns," I say, and when I hear the words in the air, I am as disgusted as he is. "Who cares?" He turns away and slams down the sack. I married Rhonda shortly after Schooney's mother died and though it's been five years, Schooney still hates her. He calls her RR. I have no idea why. After we finish unloading the truck, our last chore of the day, I tell him to fetch me a beer from the cooler next to him before he sneaks off. Rhonda wants me to stop drinking altogether. She's always nagging so during our last argument I agreed to drink only at home. 174 Jason Lee Brown "You know how RR feels about drinking," he says in his smart-ass tone that makes me want to laugh or choke him. He marches toward the shed next to the house. Normally, Td beat his ass with my belt for smarting offbut that would only make things worse. The first year after the accident, I didn't think Schooney was going to snap out of it. Didn't think I would. It's my fault his mother died. I wasn't in the car but right before the accident, we had a huge argument and I opened my mouth when I shouldn't have. She was gone, out the door, the last I ever saw her. Then it happened, one year after the accident, to the day. I watched my seven-year-old from the kitchen window. He puffed a cigarette, flicked the ashes, and lit the wick to a small rocket that shot out of a bottle and whistled somewhere over the cornfield and popped. He looked up at ten or so monarchs fluttering around his head. A large one landed in the grass next to his knee, its orange and black wings motionless . The rest rose into the oak tree. Several more butterflies dangled above him before landing. The heat that day had hit triple digits, and the monarchs must have stopped for shade. He yelled into the kitchen for me and Rhonda. Rhonda, pregnant and overdue, waddled out the back door. Butterflies had already painted a quarter of the tree orange and black. Just when I thought the monarchs would stop landing, more would fly out of nowhere and find a spot. It wasn't long before there was no green. Even the trunk was clustered. Schooney ran circles under the tree that breathed orange and black, his hands waving above his head. Butterflies fluttered...