5 Butterfly

My father had brought home from WWII as a memento of his military service in the South Pacific a Japanese sword and scabbard which for years he hid mysteriously somewhere in the house and only on rare and special occasions brought out to show guests.

He owned and also hid a .22 rifle, the existence of which I learned only decades later. I never saw it. After his death my mother told me that he had packed it with them in case of trouble, the very slight possibility, she said, that they might encounter drunken young men on the few occasions when my parents parked overnight alone in public campgrounds in their later years after we boys had grown and left home. Nothing ever happened.

In case of robbery he also kept a revolver under the front counter of Genuine Parts, his small auto parts store and shop. So far as I know neither he nor his three or four employees ever had occasion to use it. I knew where it lay and in junior high and high school I saw it each time I swept and cleaned the store but I was never even tempted to disturb it.

When I was still in elementary school my father bought me a big bag of green plastic army soldiers—little dolls for boys, really, though then I would have been shocked and embarrassed to hear them called dolls—with which my friend Jack and I played games of war in his sandbox, pretending to blow them up along with the small box turtles we purchased at the five and dime and heartlessly, mindlessly, mistreated.

When I was still too young to leave our yard by myself I remember that as my mother worked in the garden I entertained myself by chasing butterflies and batting them out of the air with a board I swung like a paddle. When they fell, stunned, crippled, or dead, I collected them in canning jars and thought nothing of it until years later at Iowa State in my required course in Shakespeare I read this passage in Coriolanus and remembered my childhood:

I saw him run after a gilded butterfly: and when he caught it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and again; catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him, or how 'twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it; o, I warrant it, how he mammocked it!

To this day I can recall with disgust the repulsive, distinctive sour smell of the colorful corpses at the bottom of the canning jars I had forgotten to empty after my innocent morning amusement of a day or two earlier.

As far back as I can remember on my strolls to school or to the home of a friend I seldom failed to kick to dust and destroy any anthill I might discover raised up from the crack between two slabs of concrete sidewalk and to mash with my sneaker any ants that tried to scurry away.

Many years later, out for a summer walk with my grandchildren, just toddlers, no older than three or four, their soft, precious, tiny hands in mine, we'd stumble across a colony of ants just as I had. First, Dylan or Katy would hunker down, curious, and peer at them, then with a kind of scientific detachment they'd perhaps dare to touch one or two, maybe poke at them, and then finally with a shudder, real or pretended, they'd move to destroy them. Though I always tried, rarely could I deter them from doing just as I had done as a child.

"Ants can't hurt you," I whined. "Just let them be."

"No!"