The Butterflies of Grand Canyon Read online

  “A mess,” she says. “I can see that.”

  “Well, yes,” he laughs self-consciously. “I’m a few over par in the cocina, I must admit, but you, my lovely wife, were asleep, and the Hedquists seem to have gone out, and—”

  “Cocina?” she asks.

  “It means kitchen.”

  “It means kitchen?”

  “Yes, it does,” he says firmly. “In Spanish.”

  “You’ve taken up Spanish?”

  “I have. I mean, I haven’t, but Dotty has. She keeps the book right here by the sink so she can . . . let’s see. So she can lavar and,” he searches the page, “so she can lavar and aprender at the same time. There!”

  Jane is beyond astonishment, but she keeps it to herself. She gives her husband the task of making toast while she organizes the coffee. She looks for eggs but finds none. There is almost nothing in the icebox and little to eat in the cupboards. Oliver’s recent retirement seems to have taken its toll. She finds some old jam and a tub of margarine and places them on the table. Morris burns the toast but remains optimistic and cheerful. “Nothing a bit of scraping won’t take care of,” he announces. She covers her ears. She can’t bear the sound of scraping.

  “Lavar, lavar, lavar,” says Morris to himself as he washes up the plates. Repetition is the only way he can learn anything. He is feeling different this morning, full of energy, alive and feisty, like a somewhat younger man. No wonder Dotty’s having a go at another language. It’s the air, perhaps. He’s never been in air so thin, so unoppressive. It melts, that’s what it does. Unlike Missouri air, which thickens as it touches the skin, this Arizona air seems to vanish as one passes through it.

  Upon their return the Hedquists seem surprised to see him at the sink. “I’ve sent Jane off to get dressed,” he explains. “She has nothing to wear.”

  “Well, she must borrow some of my clothes,” says his sister, brushing past him, charging down the hall. “And Moose,” she calls back, “for heaven’s sake leave those dishes.”

  “All done!” he announces brightly, looking around for a towel on which to wipe his hands. And there it is, towel rack and towel located conveniently at hip level, close enough to the sink to be useful, yet not so close as to obstruct movement or catch one in the groin. The logic of domesticity suddenly overwhelms him. How is it that he’s never noticed it before, never surrendered himself to its calming influence? The pair of plates clean and drying upside down, the washed utensils, glasses, coffee cups. It astonishes him, the simple pleasure of doing.

  He has a sudden great thirst for tasks and says to Hedquist, “I’m a man on vacation, Oliver. Point me the way to the mower and I’ll have a go at your lawn.”

  Hedquist laughs, “You’re not in Missouri anymore, Morris. Come have a look at my lawn.” He motions Merkle to join him at the window. Suddenly, from the direction of the village, a piercing whistle blows.

  “Is that a train?” asks Morris. “I thought we were done with trains.”

  “It’s the local line from Williams.” Hedquist looks at his watch. “Two minutes late. Come,” he says again. “Stand here and behold.”

  There is a certain jump in Morris’s pulse as he looks out at the differentness before him. It is a different differentness than the barren tableaux he saw from the train: the land loping off in all directions, frighteningly dry, easily snapped and broken or lifted and blown by the wind. He had shuddered through the plains of Colorado, gritted his teeth through New Mexico. And of Arizona he had expected the same. He had prepared himself for an awful dread. He’d seen little of the state in daylight, and that suited him fine. By the time he arrived at the Hedquists’ the night was inky black, so he’d imagined a lawn or two, some hedges to buoy his hopes, a sense of civilization amid desolation. But now, as he gazes through the pine woods and small oaks that occupy and define the Hedquists’ yard, and lead in some mysterious way toward an opening, becoming themselves pillars along many avenues of light, he cannot be sure whether his heart races with the unexpected vision of beauty or with relief. To be sure he feels relieved. The trees give him a feeling of home, of Missouri, though they lack the lushness he loves. He thought he might, for the next fortnight, have to do without flora altogether, but it seems Arizona can grow a thing or two. Oaks and pines. Perhaps Dotty has a garden. Hedquist seems less interested in the intervening characters of trees than in the opening they point to, and says, “Out there, my friend, that’s what whupped the conquistadores.”

  “Whupped?” asks Morris.

  “Whupped.” His brother-in-law nods. “Man called Cárdenas, García López de Cárdenas, parked his horse, fell to the ground, had a kind of epileptic fit right then and there. Plans ruined. Invincibility shaken if not destroyed. Seven golden cities—a dream, only a dream. Hopes for a Spanish world dashed to smithereens. That’s what did it,” Hedquist says, pointing. “That right there.”

  “What right where?”

  “See it through the trees?”

  “I don’t see anything,” Morris admits.

  “People come here expecting a mountain,” grumbles Hedquist.

  A Tower of Good Intentions

  At 11:23 AM, in her seat on the right side of the train, Elzada Clover consults her watch and announces to her companion, “We’re running a few minutes late.” Miss Lois Jotter laughs and says, “Calm down, Elzie. The canyon will be there.”

  “It’s not the canyon I worry about. It’s Louis Schellbach.”

  “Mr. Schellbach will be there as well.”

  “You’re an optimist.”

  “I’m nothing of the sort. I’m a pessimist, as you well know.”

  “He’s a very busy man, my dear.”

  “Who is anxious to see you.”

  “I hate to keep him waiting.”

  “Two minutes, Elzada!”

  “We’re now four minutes behind.”

  “You’re impossible, as usual!”

  “I’m not,” says Miss Elzada Clover, briskly dusting the knees of her trousers. “I’m nervous. Quite a different kettle of fish.”

  She sighs and leans back in her seat, trying to relax. But the movement of the train is so jarring. It never used to be. What has happened? she wonders. Is it a change in her or in the railroad bed? Could it be that teaching all these years has made her soft? Lois was right to leave the university behind and sail off into married life.

  She sees that they’re approaching Red Butte. Not long now, not long. They cross into piñon-juniper country, a distinct line on the landscape that she calls to Miss Jotter’s attention. “See, it hasn’t changed, Loie. Twelve years later—”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen, then, and still no transitional zone whatsoever. The abrupt shift in species. Highly anomalous. What purpose does it serve? And does grazing affect it? The uplift of the plateau? We must put our minds to it. That’s another mystery I’d like to solve before I die.” She glances at her watch again, her father’s gold pocket watch. “We’ve made up some time.”

  Miss Jotter regards her skeptically. “How in the dickens do you know?”

  “Do I know what?”

  “Whether we’re two minutes late or four?”

  “Red Butte is a landmark, of course, as well as the piñon juniper, and that outcropping there—it has no name—that’s precisely twenty-two minutes from the South Rim station. We’re due in at 11:45, and it’s 11:26 at the moment, so forty-five minus twenty-six equals nineteen, minus twenty-two puts us at negative three, or three minutes late. It’s simple math.”

  “Yes, I see!” laughs Miss Jotter.

  “Nothing to it.”

  “You once told me that about playing the harmonica. Do you remember? Easiest thing in the world, you said.”

  “What I said was, it’s no more difficult than kissing. No need to blush, Loie. What ever happened to that fellow you were so taken with on the Nevills expedition? What was his name? The actor from San Francisco? Gibson? Bob Gibson?”

  �
��Bill. And I wasn’t taken with him. He was an artist, not an actor. I don’t trust actors.”

  “Oh, he didn’t know what he was. Handsome, though. A good-looking boy.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Miss Jotter shrugs. “I paid no attention to his looks.”

  “Too bad. He was really quite attractive. Pleasing. So few people are.”

  “Why, that’s not true. Good looks are a dime a dozen.”

  “Ah, perhaps among the young.”

  “I’m no longer young, Elzie.”

  “Yes, my dear, I know. But you don’t yet rank among the ancient.”

  “You don’t either.”

  “I do, in fact. Fifty-four. It makes one shudder.”

  Elzada can remember, and takes this moment to do so, the last time she might have called herself young. She was forty-one, a few years older than Lois is now, a rose past its bloom, to be sure, but before her lay a tremendous adventure. She was to become, or attempt to become, the first woman to successfully ride the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. Only one other female had braved it, and she’d disappeared, presumed dead. Elzada was not the sort to let someone else’s poor luck deter her, and besides, the opportunity for collecting along the way was unprecedented. No botanist had traveled the river before. The flora of Grand Canyon was virtually unexplored, unrecorded. A fellow by the name of George Vasey had been memorialized by his friend John Wesley Powell, who gave the botanist’s name to a marvelous gushing spring: Vasey’s Paradise. But Vasey himself had never set foot in Grand Canyon, much less sampled there, which was Elzada’s highest priority. And to this purpose she’d brought along her teaching assistant from the University of Michigan, a girl named Lois Jotter. Elzada had the utmost admiration for Miss Jotter. She possessed intelligence and physical fortitude; she was young and pretty and had even rowed a boat before! And indeed, it had been a memorable expedition in every way. They’d gotten an exciting paper out of it, a ground-breaking paper. There was so much to study! So little was known about desert flora. So few had ventured out into the wilderness with their collecting bags, operating instead out of old books and defending dry theories. The historical information—so much of it was untested! And in Elzada’s mind, there was no test better than experience. As she said to Lois time and time again as they stayed up into the wee hours of the Nevills expedition, listening to the river and filling their plant presses with the day’s collections, “Let the old pedants sit in their classrooms spouting bombast till they’re blue: the fact remains, it’s difficult to dispute the sample in one’s hand.”

  But Lois had needed to sow her wild oats, hadn’t she? One could hardly blame her. Elzada—not herself an oat sower—nevertheless understood the necessity of the phenomenon. It saddened her. She had in one fell swoop lost both companion and friend. But here they were again, on a different sort of expedition, one that required no sampling bag. Their old acquaintance Emery Kolb, who had joined them those thirteen years ago on the river, was in a bit of hot water. The call came to Elzada from Louis Schellbach, chief park naturalist at Grand Canyon National Park, a man she’d met only once. He asked for her help and her strictest confidence in the matter, but beyond that she had only an inkling of what might be required of her. At the last moment she had sent word that she was bringing along Miss Jotter, and if Mr. Schellbach disapproved, she certainly hadn’t given him time to say no. Which, right now, seventeen minutes from him, made her nervous. Not that she regretted her decision—she never did, any decision—but she wished it to go smoothly for all of them, and she did not want Lois to feel like an afterthought. She was, in fact, anything but an afterthought, though Elzada had kept that to herself for years and intended to continue to.

  The train rattles fiercely along, swaying, thinks Elzada, like a drunken bride. Where that image came from she has no idea. She reports it to Lois, who laughs and says, “Well, it’s common enough, I suppose. I was a drunken bride.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “I was. I was drunk as a skunk. You would have been ashamed of me.”

  “Ashamed?” Elzada purses her lips. “No.”

  “You might have been. I wobbled up the aisle to say ‘Yes, yes’ and ‘I do, I do.’ Just the kind of thing you hate.”

  “I don’t hate it. Why would I hate it? Agreements are noble if they’re sincere.”

  “Sincere!” Lois laughs. “Sincerity and cherry brandy hardly co-occur. None of it made sense to me. Nothing I did that day made sense at the time. I couldn’t wait to get out of my costume. I was dying for a swim somewhere, a long, cool swim.”

  “But it did make sense. It has made sense.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “An observation.”

  “It’s true.”

  “And why should it not be true?”

  Lois looks at her lap. “I expect it offends you, marriage.”

  “It does nothing of the sort,” says Elzada crossly. “Silly girl.”

  She had, in fact, been offended on the occasion of Lois’s wedding for the simple reason she had not been invited. Perhaps this is why the girl remains Miss Jotter in her mind, when in fact she has become Mrs. Cutter. But no matter. As Norm Nevills, the great river runner, used to say, it’s all upstream now. It’s behind them. She sighs, thinking of Norm, the way he stood with his hands on his hips, his weight on one foot—the right foot—looking out at his beloved Colorado River . . .

  “Elzie.” Lois has a hand on her shoulder. “Elzada. There’s Mr. Schellbach. Isn’t that he?”

  The train is no longer moving. How can that be? The moment of arrival has come and gone, and she’s missed it entirely! She looks at her watch, sees that they are two and a half minutes behind, which puts them at somewhat less than that to the station—though, of course, she has no accurate data, which is as good as having none at all. Asleep at the wheel, Elzada! Ah, the crepuscular years. Will she nap through her fifties and on into her sixties, she wonders? Will she live that long?

  Mr. Schellbach is quite difficult to miss. He’s a lean fellow with a dark mustache (he must dye it) and an efficient gaze that searches the platform, regards each passenger as he or she steps down onto terra firma. The misses Clover and Jotter gather their bags—they are used to traveling lightly and carry only a change of clothes and shoes and a few toiletries and reading material, all of which fills one valise apiece. They descend from the train. Miss Jotter is wearing a thin summer dress the color of peach skins. Elzada sports trousers and a long-sleeved blouse that makes her feel boxy and mannish. Lois is a solid girl herself, but somehow she flows, thinks Elzada. And just at that moment the wind catches the skirt of the peach-colored dress and sends it spiraling upward. “Goodness!” cries Miss Jotter, laughing and batting at her clothing. “The darn thing’s alive!”

  Alive indeed. She looks like a daylily. Hemerocallis. The kind Elzada’s mother used to grow in great rowdy bunches, one day there, the next day gone. Mr. Schellbach is upon them. He removes his hat and shakes Miss Jotter’s hand. The mustache is certainly dyed, Elzada observes. The hair on his head is thin and gray. “Dr. Clover,” says he, and the hand comes out once more. “We meet again. So glad you could come. And how was your journey? Come this way, please. Let me get your bags. This can’t be all you have for luggage.”

  Lois says, “We’re river runners, Mr. Schellbach. We’ve learned to economize.”

  He laughs, finding this charming for some reason, and Elzada feels a pang of jealousy run through her, a bolt of jealousy barbed and swift. “Yes,” says she. “Miss Jotter and I used to travel the world together. We developed a habit of simplicity that’s hard to break.”

  “Well, I don’t know about the world, Elzada. We did a bit of traveling, it’s true, but never what I would call—”

  “We planned many trips.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “And we accomplished one or two of them.”

  “We did, yes. We certainly did.”

  “It made us good travelers.”
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br />   “I suppose it did.” There is a silence; then Lois asks, “Do you travel much, Mr. Schellbach?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, though Ethyl and I hope to visit Hawaii someday.”

  “Hawaii!”

  “Ethyl is my wife.”

  They make their way across the tracks to Park Headquar ters. Elzada wishes she had her hat, which is in her valise, which the park naturalist is carrying. She’s quite forgotten how hot the southwestern sun can be, the noonday sun that casts no shadow save a small gray pool at one’s feet. Miss Jotter and Mr. Schellbach carry on a conversation about the weather. The rains have arrived early, to everyone’s relief. Even Miss Jotter, who has never given a moment’s thought to the rains, is relieved. Elzada follows along behind, feeling dull and unattractive, unable to reconcile the Elzada Clover of the present moment with the University of Michigan’s most distinguished professor of botany. She wonders what in the world she is doing here, why she has made the trip, whatever possessed her to try and recreate the past. Emery, she reminds herself. There’s the matter of Emery. And at that moment, as if reading her mind, Schellbach turns to her and says, “I would rather introduce the business here in the open air than in my office, which has ears.” He stops, sets down the luggage. “I sincerely hope you are prepared for a bit of nastiness, Dr. Clover. And you as well, Mrs. Cutter. For it seems our old friend Emery Kolb has . . . There is no way to put it delicately. Mr. Kolb has very probably . . . er . . . committed murder.” The misses Clover and Jotter gasp in unison. “Yes, yes, I know,” continues Schellbach. “It’s quite a shock. But we have recently been made aware of a body, a skeleton at this point, stashed in his garage.”

  “No!” breathes Lois.

  “And how does he explain it?” asks Elzada.

  “He doesn’t,” says Schellbach. “He simply laughs. The seriousness of the situation seems to elude him. Which is why I’ve called upon you, in the hopes that you can talk some sense into him before we’re forced to take legal measures, which might include,” Schellbach lowers his voice, “arrest. It would be very disruptive to the community, and we’re trying our darnedest to avoid it. But we haven’t much time. Already the rumors are flying, as you can imagine. It won’t be long now before the whole grisly business explodes, and then we’ll have a scandal on our hands. Bad for revenue,” he adds. “The parks, I have discovered in my time here, are about revenue, alas.”