Butterfly Moon: Short Stories

Painted Lady

63 Painted Lady After her husband left her, Meg came to me looking for work. I knew her, of course. She’s bought all her bulbs and flowers from us for years. She’s got ten green thumbs. I told her I’d talk it over with my sister, Liv, and get back to her. I almost didn’t recognize Meg. She’d dyed her hair sunflower yellow. She wore tulip red lipstick and lots of mascara. I noticed her fingernails were long and painted crimson. She wore pedal pushers in mint green and a short white blouse. If she worked for us, she’d better get used to chipped nails and old Levis. Our nursery is a small operation. A few acres, a greenhouse that needs a new fan, test beds, a small warehouse, and potting sheds. We specialize in iris, glads, and plants that attract butterflies. Brilliant yellow yarrows, native to Eastern Washington, grow on the prairie our grandfather first farmed in 1899. Just before Meg’s rusty truck crunched up the gravel road, I’d been looking at a Painted Lady breakfasting on the nectar of wild yarrow. We call our place “Butterfly Gardens.” Behind the old barn, you can see our grandfather’s sod house. He came from Denmark and dug out a house ten feet by ten feet. He lived there all winter, alone. In the spring, he emerged, blinking and bearded like a cinnamon bear. He was a little crazy, so we come by our dispositions naturally. Even when he got married to a Swedish girl, my grandmother Inge, he preferred the sod house to the wooden one he built for her. He claimed to hear the roots growing in his earthy chamber and the staccato hoofbeats of deer on the roof. Inge could never budge him or cajole him to spend the whole night in their bed. They had four kids. My dad was the youngest . When he died, Liv and I inherited the farm. No one else wanted it. 64 Up on the high prairie, the sky is a deep marvel. You can drink in the air, gulping mouthfuls that taste like cold flowers. It’s flat land jutting up like a mesa from the surrounding woods and creeping suburban plots. Before Grandfather Bjørn cut the sod, wild onions and sage covered the virgin land. I suppose there were Indians around here once. There’s an old trail that bisects the prairie. Last year, some kids digging a fort found old bones. The police came out and said they were from an Indian over a hundred years old. He was folded up like an old lawn chair, roots binding the bones together. They gave the body back to the local tribe, the Spokans. Five Mile Prairie has good soil, sweet and rich. We live on the northwest part where the pines seem to grow taller. We’re three hundred miles east of the ocean, but Grandfather must’ve felt that the waves of wild grasses reminded him of the Baltic Sea. When he died, we buried him in the sod house. Liv says it’s like the old Viking burials, where chieftains were buried under mounds shaped like their dragon ships. Instead of copper torques, white horses, slaves, or battle axes, we buried him with a bottle of aquavit and his Danish/English dictionary. Through the years, we’ve adorned his grave with other things; two beaters from mother’s mixer, the crumbling rubber from a dead tractor tire, the wicked tines of a gaping tiller. You might think it’s all just junk, but it isn’t. It’s what’s left of our wealth, once-coveted objects, now worn and rusted. Farms don’t pay off nowadays. We don’t have thousands of acres, knee deep in loess, like they do on the Palouse. They farm wheat and lentils there. The farmers are rich. But not us. One winter night when the ice was an inch thick on the window panes and we were burning whole forests of trees, trying to keep warm, Liv and I sat down. “Something has to change, Erik,” she said to me. We talked, drew diagrams, argued, and finally went to bed, each of us dreaming in our own bedrooms of summer as the wind battered the house. We had the same dream. Grandfather was combing butterflies out of his long beard. Butterflies. In Danish, it’s sommerfugler, or summer birds. We were eating...