Authors: Jane Urquhart
Yes, having watched them wither and decay, I know something about orchards. I am intimate with the shortness of their lives. Sixteen years, tops, my uncle told us, or anyone else who would listen. The good fruit is borne between the third and the twelfth year, after which the yield begins to thin out. At the end of each season the “old” trees were cut and dismembered by the few Mexicans who stayed to complete the task. Teo, who had by then always returned with his mother to his home
and presumably to school, was never among them. But that last summer I’d heard that he’d come back in April in time to burn the tangled brush of the previous years’ discards. I wasn’t at the farm until late June, but he told me about the burning when I arrived from the city with my mother.
When a job at the Sanctuary Research Centre brought me here and I took over the house, a few trees were still producing in what remained of one peach and one apple orchard. The cherry orchards along the lake had been sold almost immediately to developers and the wood harvested by specialty craftsmen. The tomato field behind the house gradually filled with wildflowers and, happily for me and for the butterflies, milkweed. I tried to keep a half-dozen apple trees going without the help of the sprays that I had come to detest because of what they had done to the butterflies, but the trees stopped producing. And then, of course, other life forms took up residence in their flesh, and the orchards began to die.
As for the monarchs, in those early summers we didn’t even know where they went or where they came from, depending on your point of view. We simply accepted them as something summer always brought to us, like our own fruit, or like strawberries or corn at roadside markets, or, for that matter, like the Mexicans. It would be years before the sanctuary on the Point began to tag the butterflies in order to follow the course of their migration, and several
years more before the place where the specimens from our region “wintered over” would come to my attention.
Still, each summer we were stunned anew by what we came to call the butterfly tree. In the intervening months with winter upon us, preoccupied with school and other pursuits, we would have forgotten this spectacle, so its discovery was a surprising gift at the end of the season: an autumn tree that is a burning bush, an ordinary cedar alight with wings. Glancing down the lane, we would presume that while the surrounding foliage had retained its summer green, the leaves on that one tree had turned orange overnight. Then, before the phenomenon had fully registered in our minds, we would recall the previous occasions.
Not that the butterflies hadn’t been around all summer: one or two could be seen each day bouncing through the air in the vicinity of flowers and feeding on nectar. But, until the butterfly tree, they would never have gathered in such stupendous numbers. This multitude, this embarrassment of wings covered every available inch of leaf and bark, or sailed nearby, looking for a place to light. We would take the image of that tree with us as we turned toward the day, not remarking on it again until the shock of it had dissipated and the tree and its inhabitants had become a statement of fact.
The butterflies are back on the tree
. That announcement, more than anything else, was the beacon that lit the close of the season, the code that told us the games of summer were over.
Oddly, in those days we asked no questions about such an occurrence. Not one of us had ever witnessed the moment of the monarchs’ departure, which I imagined – not incorrectly – as an enormous orange veil lifting from the tree, then floating out over the great lake, heading for Ohio. They had surprised us and were no longer among us. We were blessedly young. We had no time for reflection.
Old enough to require explanations now, suspicious of unpredictability and impressions, I complete my fieldwork and my labwork with a meticulousness I couldn’t have even imagined in the thrall of those summers. These days it is all pinned specimens, tagged wings, and permanent records.
When I was in graduate school and was first told about the tagging of the monarchs, I considered the whole notion of fixing adhesive to something as fragile as a butterfly’s wing to be barbarous. But now I myself am a tagger, a labeller, one who is driven to track down the last mysterious fact until there is no mystery left. Yet I cannot explain how something as real and as settled as my uncle’s world – which was also our world – could shatter in one night. And while I might partly understand why he vanished, it is not possible for me to determine where he has gone. I picture him sometimes, standing on a mountain in Mexico surrounded by exhausted, tattered butterflies. Mating accomplished. Journey’s end. The temperature too cold for flight. Everything grounded. Not a single monarch ever returns, incidentally. The ones who come back to us may look
exactly the same as those who departed, but it is their great-grandchildren who make the return flight, the two previous generations having mated and died at six-week intervals in springtime Texas and Illinois. The third generation we welcome in June mates and dies six weeks later in our very own Ontario fields, engendering the hardy fourth Methuselah generation, which amazes us on trees like the one at the end of the lane and lives an astonishing nine months in order to be able to make the long journey back. All that travel and change, all that death and birth and transformation takes place in the course of a single year.
And yet the pieces of furniture that surround me now, the mirrors that reflected our family’s dramas — even those we should never have been witness to — remain firmly in place, unmoved, unchanged. The mystery of Mandy: her march toward order and regimen, passion and death remains in place as well, unsolved. I cannot explain the perfect symmetry of a boy’s eyebrows or the exact design of a butterfly’s wing. And then there is the mystery of that Mexican boy himself, and what did and did not pass between us.
Once, late in the season of that distant summer, when the days were getting shorter and the nights cooler, when the last of the tomatoes were harvested and the apples were beginning to be picked, I observed my uncle watching my aunt. She was wearing dark pants and a fuchsia cardigan over a white blouse. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her sculpted face, on which there was just a trace of makeup: eye shadow and lipstick, blue and red. The delicate gold band of a small watch surrounded her left wrist and moved slightly when she lifted her arm. Each gesture, as she bent to clear plates or turned to speak to her sons or her daughter, was a study in grace. Her poise, her demeanour, was perfect.
I had given little consideration at that time to how one mature person might respond, in an unspoken, inner way, to another. The whole adult personality was to my sixteen-year-old mind so fixed, so certain – even my uncle’s volatility had its own predictable patterns – that the idea of one citizen of that community causing a hidden reaction in
another, especially within my own family, was unthinkable. I had my own secret moods by then, and believed that the journey I had found myself taking into privacy and preoccupation was something uniquely mine, perhaps because I was not old enough to shake it. For the previous month while I had talked and laughed with my cousins, or played soccer after supper in the yard, or swam, or dried the dishes, there was something beyond my control growing in my mind: a variety of longing, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time.
My uncle looked at his wife, and for the first time I was able to read his thoughts, dark fish swimming behind the solemnity of his blue eyes. He needs her, I thought, and he admires her, but he is not at ease with either his need or his admiration. Her beauty and her strength diminished him somehow. At least that is what I remember thinking, though admittedly these may have been observations nurtured in hindsight being, I now see, far too complicated for the girl I was then. Still, regardless of how I might have interpreted that look, I noted it and was startled and vaguely frightened by what it might hold, by all that remained unexpressed between that couple and would remain, I knew, unavailable to me.
What can I do now with all that ambiguity and doubt? There is no information I can bring to it, no light I can shine on it to make it any clearer. Despite the evidence of subsequent events, each theory I have developed lies
discarded somewhere in the shadows. I have even attempted to examine the opposite of what I intuited and later observed, believing that if I could at least disprove
that
, I might strengthen one hypotheses or another. But it is impossible to follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. There is no scientific method by which to establish that the look I apprehended was not one of uncomplicated adoration without even the rumour of approaching contempt to interfere with its clarity. She was beautiful and talented and intelligent in ways that he admired, and he loved her. End of story.
But it is not the end of the story. The story ended in the sorriest of ways out on Sanctuary Line, the road I drive each day to the research station at the Point. Or perhaps it ended before that while we romped through the summer days and clung to the furniture of the past. Yes, perhaps, even then it had ended. The minute that boy put his hand in my hair and his face next to mine, for example, I could feel something change and close up behind me, I could feel something ending. But perhaps that was only the beginning of the end; perhaps the true finish was the military pomp, the ceremony that marched poor, exquisite Mandy from a country whose name we barely knew as children to the old graveyard where her mostly forgotten ancestors awaited her arrival.
After two full decades of life experience it still astonishes me to admit that I brought no more insight to what
happened to Mandy while she was over there than I brought to the night everything fell apart all those years ago. In spite of the lengthy phone calls placed in the early hours of the Afghan morning, phone calls during which Mandy, a brilliant officer and ambitious military strategist, barely mentioned the war, her passion and obsession having eclipsed even that ongoing catastrophe. In spite of the times when she was home on leave and making every effort to pay attention to each of her old friends while her mind was thinking, thinking, thinking about one man. In spite of the way she returned to this house and collapsed into an orgy of confession with me as her unlikely priest, I couldn’t really hear what she was saying. Except, when one is set apart by passion and goes into the world of that secret, there seems no reason to take heed of anything beyond those gestures that protect the secret. If I believed in destiny, I would be compelled to call it destiny. There seemed to be no tools with which to examine it, you see, and no weapons with which to blow it up. I could only assume that hidden, unknowable forces were at work. But I am a scientist. I am supposed to believe that what appears to be unknowable is merely that which has not yet been thoroughly examined.
The thing about scientific system taxonomy —
Life, Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus
— is that while it pretends to inject predictability and comfort into our world, it can’t really cause either of these states to come into being. I’ve been taught that we can define every
life form in this manner, by simply moving in a deliberate way, down the list. Everything, that is, except for extinction, which carries out its own scientific duties in an opposite manner. Working its way slowly up through the divisions, it is creation in reverse. First a species disappears, then a genus, then a family, an order, a class. Extinction is relentless, and it is flourishing. I believe it will win in the end.
I spend my time now moving back and forth between the field and the lab, between the quick and the dead. Everything is at risk, not just the orange and black
Danaus p. plexippus
of the Lepidoptera family, but everything. The old barns – those that have not burned or been taken down – sag and collapse. The small white churches are almost empty on Sundays, if they haven’t already been sold and turned into cafés or antiques stores. All of my ancestors and their houses sleep in closed and unexamined albums. Neither my much-loved cousin nor my enigmatic, haunted uncle is ever coming back.
My uncle was a dynamic man, an experimenter, a risk-taker, always pulling the new into a traditional world, wanting to be the first to grow an exotic crop, use innovative equipment, employ the science of chemical farming, build new structures. Perhaps having been born, as I now believe he was, into the full flowering of previous men’s pioneer labour, he knew that to cling to tradition — no matter how much one loved that tradition — was only to encourage eventual loss. He who came of age in this county when the second growth of trees was entering its lush maturity, and the pastures, fields, flocks, and herds were fed and cared for, and the children educated and inoculated, might have spent his days watching everything he admired grow old and irrelevant around him had his vibrancy not caused him to lean toward change. He was the first farmer in this part of Ontario to cause a strawberry crop to ripen twice in one season, and one of the first to employ foreign workers. He invented a method of staggering the development of plants, and the growth of trees, so that he was able
to use his workers to the maximum, with five or six significant harvests a summer. He had the bunkhouses built and the Mexicans flown to the cargo terminal at the Toronto airport and the governments of both countries convinced before anyone could question his purpose. And, in spite of the low wages he paid, he was kind without being patronizing to his employees. Or so we were told, perhaps by him. And it seemed, at the time, to be so. The same men came willingly back year after year, the same men and a couple of women returned and worked steadily from dawn until dusk; all this happening on one of the oldest farms in Essex County, in the fields and orchards that surround this marvellous fieldstone house. It was built long ago, as I’ve told you, by the second Canadian Butler in the middle of the nineteenth century, and built, I would imagine, without a thought given to Mexican labourers or chemically encouraged farming. Built at a time when the success of each tree in the orchard and the fattening of each animal in the barn seemed to be a gift provided by the relatively moderate climate near the great lake, the hardwood lumber, and the wonderful rich soil of what in those days was called “the front.” Various fruit trees on the farm were named at that time for the men of the family who planted them, so that there was Eber’s tree or Oran’s tree or once, inexplicably, even Matilda’s tree, though no one ever told us who Matilda was. Varieties of apples were identified by the Old World locations they’d come from or, now and
then, the New World spots where they were first grown: St. Lawrence, Northern Spy, Hubbardston Nonesuch, King of Tompkins County, or the famous Butler Light, named for the lighthouse-keeping side of our own family. Or so our uncle, Stan Butler, told us. There was not a single exotic apple tree on the farm by the time my cousins and I were born — only the reliable McIntosh remained — so we had neither seen the blossoms nor tasted the fruit of those legendary, vanished trees.