Butterflies- The Adventures of Roland Mccray Read online

other hand and moved a short distance, then again, and then once more.

  I got to a place where I could stand and waited for her. “Why don’t you just use your other hand?”

  “Because,” and she threw her empty mayonnaise jar at my feet, grabbed hold of a branch and got to her feet, “I don’t want to mess up my hair.”

  “What’s to mess up?" I asked. "It always looks the same to me.” Until then I’d never really thought about it, but Laurel’s hair always was the same, as far as I could tell. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her hair not brushed or bangs not even; it didn’t even move when the wind blew. I figured she must use hairspray, like my Mom did.

  “Well,” she said as she patted her hair into place, “Mama says it makes me look like a young Marlene Dietrich.” I didn’t know who she was talking about and wasn’t going to ask.

  We cleared the pine stand and reached the first part of the field. The grasses grew high and shrubby there, weaved with tangles of vines that made it harder to walk, but at least it was easier to carry the kite there than through the woods. In a few minutes we got to the part of the field that was just tall grass; the Park Service cut that section a few times every year.

  There’s always wind in places that don't have trees to block it, and this field was huge!. From the top of the incline we could see a quarter of a mile or more; with no trees or power lines it was the only place near the neighborhood safe for kites. The wind swept through the tall grasses and made the field change color, the way that velvet does when you run your hand over it.

  “I don’t know how to fly a kite,” Laurel said. “I’ve never done it before.”

  “It’s easy. I’ll show you what to do. And once you get it high enough in the sky it will fly itself.”

  I put the roll of string on a stick and showed her how to hold it.

  “Just hold the line tight. Only let out enough line for the kite to rise, but not too much or it will lose its catch on the air and fall.”

  I held the kite high by its tail end so it could catch the steady breeze while Laurel held the string the way I’d shown her and walked with her back to the wind. She kept the line tight as the air caught the kite almost immediately and lifted it from my hand.

  “Alright, Laurel, just let it out easy. Don’t rush it. Let the wind pull it from you.”

  The breeze was picking up and as the kite rose it swooped to one side and then the other. About thirty feet up a strong gust snapped Laurel’s arms up and jerked her whole body forward as though it wanted to pull her into the sky. She lost hold of the string roll and it scampered through the grass like a scared rabbit. The kite wavered a moment, began to drop tail first and then sort of spiraled to the ground.

  "I'm sorry," Laurel said. "I didn't mean to let it go."

  "That's alright. I said I'd teach you how to fly it."

  I walked down to where the kite had crashed and picked it up. Neither of the wood ribs was broken and the paper wasn’t torn. It was okay.

  “Besides, you almost had it that time. Get the string roll and we’ll try again.”

  The wind was still picking up and the paper stretched taut against the frame of two crossed sticks as I held the kite up towards the sky. It practically jumped from my hand and lifted into the air again, the central rib straining at the end of the line. It swayed and dipped a few times, and then Laurel got the hang of slowly letting out just enough line to keep the kite rising without forcing it into a stall. Once she had it stabilized, the kite rose more or less smoothly into the sky.

  When the two hundred and fifty foot red mark showed on the string, I kicked the stick into the ground at a sharp angle to hold the roll and wedged the string into the notched end of the stick. “There. That will hold it.”

  We sat down then and lay back on the cool ground, sun warm on our faces. It was mid-afternoon quiet and we could hear the cars over the rise behind us pass in little wisps of sound. Laurel watched the kite with a delighted smile as though she’d never seen anything like it.

  “It will stay up by itself?”

  “For a while,” I said, “until the wind changes, or dies down. It’s like I told you, Laurel, if you get it high enough in the sky it will fly itself.”

  I watched the kite dance against the sky, flying so easy, so free and wished again I could be up there. I wanted that to happen to me.

  I’d even had a dream one time that I could fly. I saw my house, the oak trees that towered over it and I wanted to soar as high as the clouds, look down on the tops of those trees. But when I flew in my dream I struggled to get just ten feet or so above the roof of Dad’s old Buick; it was like swimming in molasses.

  I watched the kite as it hovered in the air and knew it really wasn’t as high as the clouds; it only looked that way from the ground. Just an illusion of freedom, not the real thing. I decided that day that in flying, the trick wasn’t in how to stay in the sky; the trick, rather, was getting into the air at all.

  §

  As big cumulus clouds began to move in the wind picked up and the kite began to swing, and dive side to side.

  “It’s getting too windy now, Laurel,” I said, and she looked disappointed. “But we’ll try it again another day.” I grabbed the string roll before it could pull the .stick from the ground and reeled the kite in.

  “You want to catch bugs now?” she asked

  “Yeah, if you want to. Let’s see what we can find.”

  We went closer to the pine stand and near where honeysuckle tangled around the wildflowers. The grasses there grew in clumps and clustered, draped onto the ground like a mat. Little flowers called Johnny Jump-Ups streaked purple on the shaded side of every big clump of grass, red clover bobbed under the weight of honeybees and grasshoppers popped into the air with every step.

  “I don’t know why you even bother to catch butterflies,” I said, “if you’re just going to let them go again.”

  “They die if you keep them,” she said, something sad in her voice.

  “Well, I collect insects and I keep what I catch. When they dry I put pins through them and stick them on a board.”

  “I know,” she replied and squenched up her nose. “That’s gross.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said and shrugged. “But you do it however you want.”

  “Butterflies need water,” Laurel said, already focused on what she might catch, and she walked down the slope towards the low area near the creek that trickled at the bottom of a long, gradual decline. Low areas near the creek stayed damp in all but the driest months and butterflies flocked to those places. Laurel walked ahead of me, holding her net above her head and then came to an abrupt halt. The ground ahead was littered with white that moved slightly in the breeze like little torn pieces of paper scattered on the grass.

  We called them Cabbage moths, but they’re actually small white butterflies and that’s why they were out in the full sun. Moths fly mostly at night, and night flying insects never have bright white wings. One of the butterflies flitted into the air, followed by another. They spiraled around one another, separated and descended, then spiraled up again, like a dance in the sky. Laurel held the net high and waved it back and forth slightly, looking for the best angle of attack. When the two butterflies began their third spiral up the net swooped through the air in a clean arc, took them from above, quickly, and then gently lowered them to the ground.

  “You got two with one try, Laurel!”

  “Yeah, sometimes you can do that with the white ones; they always fly together.”

  I removed the top from her jar, slipped it under the net and set it down over one of the two. When butterflies are too crowded to spread their wings they’ll climb a stalk of grass or a tree branch, anything that leads out of the tangle. As soon as the first one crawled halfway up the glass I lifted the jar and set it over the other. When that one had climbed into the jar I quickly put a few blades of grass inside, and then put on the lid.

  She held the jar up against the sky, looked at
the butterflies from both sides and from below, and then picked up her net.

  “But I need more than just two.”

  We walked a little farther down the slope, closer to the little creek, and stopped. The ground ahead crawled with the white butterflies. Dozens of them sipped from the damp soil, fluttered from point to point, clung to blades of grass and warmed their wings in the sun. Laurel scanned the area and chose her target, then trapped two more of the white butterflies under her net, and one of the little violet butterflies we called hoppers. The other white butterflies scattered across the field as we put the new ones into her jar. Laurel caught two more of the little violet hoppers and several of the white butterflies that had fluttered back.

  “You can’t put any more in the jar,” I said. “It’s too crowded.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. I’ll show these to Mama before I let them go.”

  I tightened the lid on her jar, we both took a swallow of water from my canteen, and then picked up her net as we headed back up the slope.

  “But you didn’t catch anything.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve got enough bugs already.” I hadn’t put the usual alcohol-dampened cotton in my jar before I left the house that day because it ruins butterfly wings. “And anyway, I think I want to start collecting butterflies.”

  “Well, you can’t have mine. I’m letting them go after Mama sees them.”

  Just then a huge Black Swallowtail butterfly glided by, blue and