Here and There a Dead Moth

A pastor in a raincoat and umbrellas huddled together for warmth. 

This is the scene in early November. Wind out of the north, stumbling south, spitting cold rain into the face of the midwest the whole trip through. Shivering car engines tick down the seconds as loved ones trample wet grass towards the hole dug into the center of a decomposing township. They can’t wait to get out of there any more than the dead couldn’t wait to get in. 

This is the way the chill dances through a crowd, tickling exposed skin where layering up wasn’t done enough. It’s in and out of people’s lungs, emptying the air of nutrient oxygen and imposing ebony hoarfrost instead. 

And this is the boy. 

The boy is more the focus of the mourning than the man in the hole; the young man in the hole is gone. The future he had, is the future only others will come to see. The future he had intended to see the boy through on his term through manhood, to fulfill the pride that he had invested into the boy, was now a path travelled by two feet instead of four.

These are the half-forgotten cousins, aunts and uncles, forgotten faces from early life that no longer impressed the boy that swarmed him. Condolences fell at his feet like dead moths. He shuffled through them, past the wad of mourners and sweet, meaningless comforts, into an empty patch of grass near the hole. 

This is the dirt and dead turf that the boy watches flitter over the edge of the cavity as he leans, a hollowed-out scarecrow of a boy, to better examine the final resting place of a brother who’d never crossed God any more than he’d crossed a red light. 

This is the lot of good that it does to be humble; to be a watchful, authoritative mentor and jack-of-all trades in the hopes of being something that the boy could learn from, and be better than.

This is the boy, a successor half-baked. 

The pastor crosses to the boy and grabs hold of his collar.

“What are you doing, boy?”

The boy was only looking into the hole to see how deep it was. 

“You’ll find out yourself, if you’re not careful enough. Step back here with me.”

The boy and the pastor step back, and the crowd murmurs among itself. 

“You ought to have more respect than to wander right up to the edge of the grave like that. Imagine the ruckus if you’d have fallen in. Where’s your mother?”

The boy doesn’t know. The pastor’s raincoat smells like parchment. 

“Where’s your father?”

The boy doesn’t know that, either. 

“Who was it that brought you here?”

This is the look of realization on the pastor’s face as the boy points up to a bus sign that, like the chill, does a jig in the wind. And here is his hand on the boy’s shoulder, gloved and dead stiff. Another dead moth is pumped out of the pastor’s mouth and into the buffalo grass at the boy’s feet. 

This is the scene in early November. An old northern chill does its dance around flowers forgotten atop a gravestone while a boy collects his dead moths to comfort him on the bus ride home.

2

November is an old steam engine, chugging. 

This is the boy coming to a new home, to the men in grey sports coats and junky leather shoes, who smile and help him when he carries his things -- an old suitcase and a cardboard box -- to the second floor. They tell him their names and what they do at this place. The boy nods, unhearing.  

These are the boy’s eyes, drooped and impersonal, highlighted with new shadows which sag under them. They are not like the eyes of the other boys all round him in the hallways, bright and curious and analyzing. 

A thick old oak door is opening and the boy is walking through it, into a room where shadows congregate into taller, starker shadows that drape on and over everything. He pulls his arms closer to himself as they wake up, reaching out, poking and prodding his ribs, his knees, his ankles, trying to get a good feel of him, trying to wrap him up tight and feed on the shadows they can smell which dwell inside of him. 

His belongings are dropped upon the floor next to a barren writing desk and an oil lamp. In the desk is etched Prop. of Lifton Liberal Arts Boarding School. The boy opens a drawer and spies a quill, which quivers in old age and overuse. He finds himself fascinated by this dreary, meaningless thing. When one of the men spots him looking at it, making a move to take it out and throw it away, the boy shuts the drawer nearly quick enough to catch the man’s fingers. With peeved and incoherent mumbles, the men disband, and the boy is again alone. 

This is his brother’s suitcase. 

It is weathered oak wood and leather, with only one working clasp. Even after the boy’s use, particles of dust still rise from it, coating the air, coating his lungs, making it hard to breathe. It is harder still to breathe when the thing is opened up again, and the boy’s eyes are locked on its contents. 

This is the first tear from the boy’s eyes since leaving home that day, falling among the dust in the air, collecting it, spreading it over the cover of the item which the boy has first pulled out. 

A half empty jug of his brother’s favorite whiskey that the boy had always pretended he didn’t know was buried under the extra blankets in the hall closet, it was something he knew he should have left behind. The consequences of its discovery would be harsh. But if his brother wanted it hidden, the boy took a strange pride in keeping it so. The boy took one look around the room, spying a loose floorboard, and raised it. It would do. 

The tears continued to ebb into existence as the boy worked among the rest of his belongings, mostly simple, practical things, a couple of photos, some drawing books, some writing and maths utensils, and a deck of rumpled playing cards that he often toyed with but had never learned any games to use them for. 

Things placed where they ought to be made the boy a little less homesick, and the tears slowed. He took a broom and unsettled some of the dust that had accumulated over who knows how long in the empty room. He felt his bed and was satisfied with it. He toyed with some of the moth-eaten holes in the comforter absently. 

This is the closet door being opened, and his brother’s old suitcase being laid down inside of it. 

Sitting down at the desk, grabbing one photo from it, the boy felt a surge of emotion for the upteenth time that night. The boy and the brother, together, fishing along an old lake shoreline close to the childhood home that they had grown up alone in. It was them, always. 

And now it was just him, forever. 

This is the back of the photograph. Date stamped May 22. And this is his older brother’s careless scrawl:

Brothers forever. Keep fishing, little man. I’ll be there to cook it up for you. 

This is the combustion of everything the boy had felt erupting at once, burrowing down deep to the atomic level of his very being. There will never again be a pain like this in the boy’s life. There’s nothing that could earn it. 

Needing fresh air, the boy found himself at his new windowsill. He unlatches it, and spies something in his peripheral, on the inside of the window. 

This is the scene in late November. In a windowsill looking out on the dark, a boy spies a dead moth, the flutter gone from its wings. 

He wonders who spoke it.