Edited by, p.17
Edited By, page 17
Eventually Mister Jessup reach a point in he fancifyin where he standin atop the world, decidin whether or not to let it spin, and that pear to satisfy him. He lead me back to where my daddy stropped down. Daddy he starin at me like he get loose, the island not goin to be big enough for me to hide in.
Don’t you worry, boy, Mister Jessup say. He ain’t goin to harm you none.
He slip Daddy’s gag and inquire of him if the launch can make it to La Ceiba and the weather calm. Daddy reckon it can. Take most of a day, he figures.
Well, that’s how we’ll go, say Mister Jessup.
He puts a match to the kerosene lamp by the bed and brings the butterfly people in. Daddy gets to strugglin when he spies them. He callin on Jesus to save him from these devils, but Jesus must be havin the night off.
The light lend the butterfly people some color and that make them look more regular. But maybe I just accustomed to seein them, cause Daddy he thrash about harder and goes to yellin fierce. Then the one woman touch a hand gainst he cheek, and that calm him of an instant. Mister Jessup push me away from the bed, so I can’t see much, just the three of them gatherin round my daddy and his legs stiffening and then relaxin as they touch he face.
I goes out in the front room and sits on the stoop, not knowin what else to do. There weren’t no spirit in me to run. Where I goin to run to? Stay or go, it the same story. I either winds up beggin in Coxxen Hole or gettin pounded by my daddy. The lights of Wilton James’ shack shining t’rough the palms, not a hundred feet away, but Wilton a drunk and he can’t cure he own troubles, so what he goin to do for mine? I sits and toes the sand, and the world come to seem an easy place. Waves sloppin on the shingle, and the moon, ridin almost full over a palm crown, look like it taken a faceful of buckshot. The wind carry a fresh smell and stir the sea grape growin beside the stoop.
Soon Mister Jessup call me in and direct me to a chair. Flanked by the butterfly people, my daddy leanin by the bedroom door. He keep passin a hand before his eyes, rubbin he brow. He don’t say nothin, and that tell me they done somet’ing to him with they touches, cause a few minutes earlier he been dyin to curse me. Mister Jessup kneel beside the chair and say, We goin off to La Ceiba, boy. I know I say I’m takin you with me, but I can’t be doin that. I gots too much to deal with and I havin to worry bout you on top of it. But you showed me somet’ing, you did. Boy young as you, faced with all this, you never shed a tear. Not one. So I’m goin to give you a present.
A present sound like a fine idea, and I don’t let on that my daddy have beat the weepin out of me, or that I small for my age. I can’t be certain, but I pretty sure I goin on eleven, t’ough I could not have told him the day I were born. But eleven or eight, either way I too young to recognize that any present given with that kind of misunderstandin ain’t likely to please.
You a brave boy, say Mister Jessup. That’s not always a good t’ing, not in these parts. I fraid you gonna wind up a wrecker like your daddy…or worse. You be gettin yourself killed fore you old enough to realize what livin is worth. So I’m goin to take away some of your courage.
He beckon to one of the women and she come forward with that glidin walk. I shrinks from her, but she smile and that smile smooth out my fear. It have an effect similar to Mister Jessup’s pats-on-the-head. She swayin before me. It almost a dance she doin. And she hummin deep in she throat, the sound some of Daddy’s girlfriends make after he climb atop them. Then she bendin close, bringin with her a sweet, dry scent, and she touch a finger to my cheek. The touch leave a little electric trail, like my cheek sparklin and sparkin both. Cept for that, I all over numb. She eye draw me in til that gray crystal all I seein. I so far in, pear the eye enormous and I floatin in front of it, bout the size of a mite. And what lookin back at me ain’t no buttterfly. The woman she may have a pleasin shape, but behind she eye there’s another shape pressin forward, peekin into the world and yearnin to bust out the way the butterfly people busted out of they cocoon. I feels a pulse that ain’t the measure of a beatin heart. It registerin an unnatural rhythm. And yet for all that, I drawn in deeper. I wants her to touch me again, I wants to see the true evil shape of her, and I reckon I’m smiling like Mister Jessup, with that same mixture of terror and delight.
When I rouse myself, the shack empty. I runs down to the beach and I spies the launch passin t’rough a break in the reef. Ain’t no use yellin after them. They too far off, but I yells anyway, t’hough who I yellin to, my daddy or the butterfly girl, be a matter for conjecture. And then they swallowed up in the night. I stand there a time, hopin they turn back. It thirty miles and more to La Ceiba, and crossin that much water at night in a leaky launch, that a fearsome t’ing. I falls asleep on the sand waitin for them and in the mornin Fredo Jolly wake me when he drive his cows long the shore to they pasture.
My daddy return to the island a couple weeks later, but by then I over in Coxxen Hole, doin odd jobs and beggin, and he don’t have the hold on me that once he did. He beat me, but I can tell he heart ain’t in it, and he take up wreckin again, but he heart ain’t in that, neither. He say he can’t find no decent mens to help, but Sandy Bay and Punta Palmetto full of men do that kind of work. Pretty soon, three or four years, it were, I lose track of him, and I never hear of him again, not even on the day he die.
Mister Jessup have predicted I be hearin bout him in a few years, but it weren’t a week after they leave, word come that a Yankee name of Jessup been found dead in La Ceiba, the top half of he head chopped off by a machete. There ain’t no news of the butterfly people, but the feelin I gots, then and now, they still in the world, and maybe that’s one reason the world how it is. Could be they bust out of they shapes and acquire another, one more reflectin of they nature. There no way of knowin. But one t’ing I do know. All my days, I never show a lick of ambition. I never took no risks, always playin it safe. If there a fight in an alley or riot in a bar, I gone, I out the door. The John Anderson McCrae you sees before you is the same I been every day of my life. Doin odd jobs and beggin. And once the years fill me up sufficient, tellin stories for the tourists. So if Mister Jessup make me a present, it were like most Yankee presents and take away more than it give. But that’s a story been told a thousand times and it be told a thousand more. You won’t cotch me blamin he for my troubles. God Bless America is what I say. Yankees gots they own brand of troubles, and who can say which is the worse.
Yes, sir. I believe I will have another.
Naw, that ain’t what makin me sad. God knows, I been livin almost seventy years. That more than a mon can expect. Ain’t no good in regrettin or wishin I had a million dollars or that I been to China and Brazil. One way or another, the world whittle a mon down to he proper size. That’s what it done for Mister Jessup, that’s what it done for me. It just tellin that story set me to rememberin the butterfly girl. How she look in the lantern light, pale and glowin, with hair so black, where it lie across she shoulder, it like an absence in the flesh. How it feel when she touch me and what that say to a mon, even to a boy. It say I knows you, the heart of you, and soon you goin to know bout me. It say I never stray from you, and I going to show you t’ings whose shadows are the glories of this world. Now here it is, all these years later, and I still longin for that touch.
The Lepidopterist
Salon Fantastique, edited by me and Terri Windling, and published in 2006, was commissioned by John Oakes, who is a passionate publisher of political books. I was friendly with him for several years, and soon after divesting himself of Four Walls, Eight Windows, the publishing house he and Dan Simon started, and during his brief time as publisher of Thunder Mouth Press he took me to lunch and asked if I’d like to edit an anthology for him. I told him that I’d love to do a non-themed, all original fantasy anthology—but that it had to be with Terri Windling.
Unfortunately, he resigned while the book was in production, so by the time it came out, it was orphaned, one of the worst things that can happen to a book. Sad and frustrating, it usually means there is no one to champion it, help in the marketing/publicity, etc that’s crucial to getting a book into the consciousness and hands of readers. Despite this, the book won the World Fantasy Award.
One story was “The Lepidopterist” by Lucius Shepard. I personally feel that Lucius’s best work was at novella length, but most of those I published were on SCIFICTION, where I had unlimited space.
He was an underrated writer who had a lot of more great work in him when he died.
Bird Count
By Jane Yolen
(From Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers, 1998)
It was his wings I fell in love with first: feathers soft, wimpling; the strong pinions flexing. They weren’t white or yellow, but somewhere in between, like piano keys after years in a dark room. I dreamed those wings around me. I dreamed them against my breasts.
I dreamed them between my legs. But I never dreamed they could hurt so, the shafts scraping against my shoulders and back, leaving a deep imprint on my skin, as if I—and not he—had worn the wings.
When I saw him first, he was only a speck against the sky. I was by the fire tower at Mount Tom, one of the early risers for the annual hawk watch. I was there because my lover, Lewis, was an obsessive birder who thought nothing of spending hours in the field making lists that only he would ever care about or actually see.
Trying to hold on to a relationship that had nothing to recommend it but inertia and obsession, I had bought myself a pair of vastly-too-expensive field glasses. I would rise each weekend morning before dawn to accompany Lewis on his passionate activity—he saved his passion for birds alone. I had become a martyr to ornithology, a bird widow, even though I knew little about the birds we watched and cared less. I only wanted to get Lewis’s attention. He wasn’t much, but he was all I had at the time. And at thirty-two, time was the operative word.
My biologic clock wasn’t just ticking; it was sounding like a Geiger counter in an old sci-fi movie.
The thing about Lewis was that even when we were together I was alone. Or rather Lewis was alone and I was just some thing that happened to be occupying space near him. It wasn’t that he didn’t notice me; he didn’t notice anyone. If he was hungry, he ate whatever food appeared before him. If his laundry needed doing, he knew that the universe would somehow, mysteriously and wonderfully, get it cleaned. Before me there had been Lewis’s mother to deal with the mundane world.
I was the intern on call when his mother had coughed gently, said “Take care of my boy,” and died. Thinking she was talking about a minor child, I worried as I went out to the waiting room, afraid who I would find there. I was quite unprepared for Lewis, but relieved to find him an adult.
“Mr. Snowden,” I said, “I am afraid that your mother has just passed away.”
He seemed less shocked then confused, saying simply “She can’t have.” But his tone was not one of denial; rather he seemed put out with her, as if she had just gone on a trip without telling him.
And then he smiled a dazzling smile at me, and in all seriousness added, “I’ll need a white shirt for the funeral and I don’t know how to iron.”
So when my shift was over, I went home with him, did his shirts, and stayed. He was quite simply the most beautiful man I had ever seen and I, while not technically a virgin, was so focused on my medical career I hadn’t had much experience with men. Beauty in a man shook me, entangled me in a way for which I was unprepared.
When I say beautiful, there is no other word for it. He had a shock of dark hair that fell uncut—unless I cut it—over a clear, broad forehead. His eyes were like dark almonds and about as readable. He had a straight, perfect nose, skin that had the kind of ermine edging that is on a blackberry leaf—soft and slightly fuzzy to the touch. His ears, shell-like, were velvety and made to be touched, caressed, blown into. He was lean and well-muscled, but never had to work at it, so he did not have that false sculpting that men have who only develop their tone in a gym. And most important, he was totally unaware of his beauty. It was like his clothing—there for covering. I must have tried to write dozens of poems about him those first weeks with him, which was odd because I had never written anything before other than critical essays for school.
Even when his beauty lost its power over me, I stayed—and this will sound bizarre and slightly shocking, but is true nonetheless—because he smelled like summer, moist and hot and beckoning. He was not in fact any of those things. He was more winter than summer, arctic really. But he smelled as if he could be cultivated and might even blossom in time if only I could find the right tools.
So I stayed.
Which is how I found myself frequently on birding expeditions: tracking down errant wheatears along the stone abutments at the Quabbin Reservoir, chasing after odd rarities at feeders in Hadley and Montague, looking through snowstorms for an elusive snowy owl, spending a whole day and night driving Lewis around the Northampton meadows on the Christmas bird count. Of course he did not know how to drive. The universe supplied drivers.
As for why he stayed with me, there is no mystery in that. I was as comfortable for him as his furniture. He did not expect his furniture to up and move away. Nor did I.
Until.
Until the hawk watch when something extraordinary happened. And only I seemed to have noticed it.
A bird as big as a man, a man with wings, came down from the sky and took me in a feathery embrace. And only then, after I had been well and truly fucked by some otherworldly fowl, did I begin to understand real beauty.
I do not expect you to believe me. I expect you will say I had been drinking. Or smoking funny cigarettes. I expect you to say I was hallucinating or dreaming or having an out of body experience. I expect you to say the words “alien abduction” with a breathy laugh, and suggest I was having a breakdown.
I was not. I was awake that day as I am at this moment. The morning was still and chill. I had dressed warmly, but evidently not warmly enough for I could feel the cold through my chinos, like a light coating of ice on my thighs. My earlobes were numb.
Lewis was with the ardent birders high up on the fire tower. I was down below, my field glasses in my hand, thinking about my caseload and praying that my beeper would signal me to make an early and unanticipated visit to the hospital. My relationship with Lewis had reached the point where I could not just leave without a summons, but I spent a lot of time praying that one thing or another would demand my time away from his side.
I heard a noise. Not my beeper, but a kind of insistent high pitched cry. When I looked up, I saw this speck in the sky hurtling toward me. I put my glasses to my eyes, twisted the focus, and then dropped the glasses on the ground. $2,500 worth of Zeiss and I simply let it fall from my hand without thinking. But I was too shocked to notice. What I had seen was not possible. How quickly it moved was not possible. I scarcely had time to raise my hands to ward off the thing when it was hovering over me, the wind from its wings literally taking my breath away so that I could not have screamed if I wanted to.
No one else seemed to have noticed anything wrong and I, even as I was stunned by the quickness of the bird-thing, wondered how that could be. The best birders in Western Mass were crowding the high platform of the fire tower: Gagnon and Greene and Stemple and the rest. They were taking notes and talking hawks and comparing counts from the year before. At any one moment, eight or nine pairs of eyes were scanning the skies over the valley. Those birders missed nothing. Nothing! Yet not a one of them had seen what now landed in front of me, scarcely a yard away.
For a long moment I stared into the bird-thing’s eyes. No, not a thing. A man. He had the fierce beaked nose of a hawk and a feathery brow, white and black and brown intermixed. His eyes were yellow; his mouth a generous gash. He was naked except for the feathers that curled around his genitals, that encircled his nipples, that streaked across his flat stomach and bare chest like ritual scars. His wings arched and beat back and forth and we were both caught in the swirling winds from them. I could scarcely stand up to those winds, even thought for a minute I might be swept off the mountain, even hoped I might so that he could rescue me and take me off into the air with him. I felt drunk with the thought.
He stood still for another long minute, with only those wings beating. Then he moved his shoulders, up and down, turned away from me and opened his wings even wider, then turned back. The feather-scars on his chest rippled like little waves, the white feathers like foam on top of the dark. His long, black hair stuck straight up in front like a cock’s comb and he was deadly serious as he stared at me. Then suddenly he threw his head back and crowed. Not like a rooster or any other bird I could name. But it was certainly some kind of triumphant cry.
Then he pumped those wings again and took off into the air and was gone.
I was stunned. It took me a while to realize that he had been doing a mating display. And by the heat in my face, by the burning between my legs, by that odd sensation in my stomach that was part nausea and part longing, I know I had responded to it as he had meant.
There was a sudden odd clatter above me as the birders descended the iron stairs. I reached out to one of the railings. Cold iron, I thought. Proof against fairies. I tore off my glove, touched the icy metal. But it did nothing to banish the picture in my head of that glorious creature—man, bird, whatever. It did nothing to discourage the flush on my face, the weakness in my groin.
“We’re going for coffee,” Lewis told me, “You can go on to the hospital. Dave will get me home.” And they walked on by me without another word, going down the path, leaving me to follow as best I could with shaky knees and a head full of odd ideas.
