Orion headless

by Nels Hanson

“Good night, Sweet Prince—” ~

I watched Kyla’s husband Delmus disappear down the blowing vine row—past the elm I saw the empty dark fields under the stars—then holding the window frame I got down off the trunk. I leaned forward and pushed the black case back along the wall.

Without closing the window, I moved to the bed.

The wind was cool and I slipped off the sheer robe and put on the blue nightgown, first looking down again at the Butterfly Delmus had seen, then snapping the buttons. I lay back without fear on the pillows.

I turned off the lamp on the night table and listened to the wind rattle the elm leaves, watching the stars flicker across the dimly moonlit sky beyond the shadowed branches, past the velvet dress and its diamonds at the foot of the bed. The white and red and green fire of the stars seemed to rise and fall with the wind. It was marine air, straight from the sea.

Now the scent of the yellow roses was cloying. Soon, the night wind would bring clouds and rain, to spoil the ripened grapes laid upon the ground for raisins—

Even with the breakers smashing against the rocks below Aaron’s house in San Francisco, I had always been a country girl, a jewel of the San Joaquin. The name never reminded me of St. Joachim, father of the Virgin and the husband of St. Anne, but instead of Murrietta, eternally avenging the rape and murder of the beautiful woman he loved.

Ramon had the dream, said he and I were nearly man and wife a long time ago.

In the darkness, I felt the waves hitting against the cliff, sending tremors like veins through the rock to the foundation and up the timbered stories of Aaron Markham’s house, to the room where Joaquin Murrietta looked down from his picture above the bed.

Suddenly the salt air lifted the lace curtains at the balcony and turning I saw the tall man standing in the open doorway, grinning and doffing his hat. He wore the same black swallowtail coat and the black turned-brimmed hat with the sable pearl.

“Who are you?” I nearly spoke, before he moved to me across the carpet of red roses by the blue pool. “Why have you come?”

As he leaned to kiss me, his face and eyes growing big, the pearl gleamed, brightening, becoming the white full moon.

I could feel his mustache against my neck, his white teeth and cold lips, and instantly I was wafted across the bay and mountains to Acacia again, to the Harvest Fair, standing at the entrance to the Ferris wheel.

Which was where, in a way, I always was.

Pursued by my many suitors, I mounted the platform, gave my ticket to the short hunchbacked man in the golf cap. He threw back the wood bar and I stepped into the scalloped white rocking gondola.

As I glanced back at the young men calling and pleading—“Wait! I’ll come with you!” “There she is! Let me by!” “Dolly! Dolly, wait! Please!”—a tall man in a black hat stepped quickly, unannounced, into my car.

I rose, to move past the stranger.

But his hand caught my arm, pushing me onto the seat, now the bar swung tight against my lap.

“No!” I cried, but the man with the checkered cap nodded and threw the lever. Something whirred. The great wheel jerked.

The man in black leaned close to me, grasping my wrist.

I pulled away, then turned my head, trapped by the bar. The gondola rocked as the wheel creaked upward.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“Aaron,” he said in my ear. “I’ve watched you all night.”

I bent forward, quickly scanning the milling crowd diminishing below.

My four sisters in identical white had disappeared, and my suitors—strong blonde Carl Renfro whom I might marry, or the Chester twins, Beau Bentley or Howard Price, all of them, since I hadn’t picked one of them yet—were tin soldiers staring upward as I tried to lift my arm to wave.

“Now you take the first step, toward a beautiful city—”

Aaron’s hand locked on my shoulder, he drew me close to his chest, pinning my other arm. He ran his cheek hard against my hair.

The Valley lay spread in a flat expanse of blackness with a few scattered lights, faint single lamps like lit ships alone at sea. I searched vainly for my father’s farm, his house and glowing parlor window.

I struggled, trying to kick my feet, to lift my nails to scratch, then realizing his strength I relaxed like caught prey against the tightness of his grip.

I appealed to the friendly stars—in a glance I saw them in their places, dippers and hunters, animals, doomed lovers, the constellations who knew me. All my life I had asked them, “What will become of me? Whom will I marry? Will I be happy?”

They glinted like pieces of a finished puzzle, each huntsman and bright beast definite and alive, and above them the little dipper of the Pleiades, the seven flying white doves.

Help me!

But the stars didn’t answer, they remained mute, ancient, resigned—all along they had known and not told me—

The Ferris wheel halted, amid cries and laughter. The gondola had reached the top of its arc and still I tried to ease from under the bar, to stand and leap out.

His arm took my waist, he was pressing his mustache and lips to my neck. He smelled of cologne and tobacco, smoky, ambiguous, part dust, part cool breeze.

The seat tipped forward, then steadied. If the Coast Range tilted, the waves would flood the fields, lift the dark houses like boats.

I could see the tops of the heads of two girls in the car below. I raised a hand to signal, but he turned me.

His white shirtfront flashed like the underwing of a hawk.

“You’re beautiful, Dolly.”

“No—”

His fingers plucked quickly at the bodice of my dress, someone would see.

Twelve polished wood buttons, one for each month, then the ribbon of my camisole. Under starlight he touched my bare breasts and now their centers.

Now he knew all my secrets—the blue shoes and pink muslin dress in the closet, the yellow and gold strawflowers blooming from the tulip glass, the lacquered box that kept at evening the silver heart on its chain, the china swan full of pins, in the corner my unfolding silk parasol—

He pulled me to him, lifting my chin with his hand.

The wind blew fast and hard through the spaced stars and I was falling into his darkness, his icy lips forced my mouth open to his.

Death in a kiss.

Then attack, he threw back the bar.

Holding me flat against the painted seat he pushed up my petticoats in a rustling of skirts, placing his free hand across my mouth, muffling my scream.

Somehow he was above me, blocking out the stars as now something more secret swelled and broke.

Abruptly, it was over, like a hot, out-of-season summer rain ruining the yellow grapes picked and spread upon the ground to dry.

Seconds, hours had flown away—

Far off I heard a muffled babble of excited talk, five seats down the wheel a boy crawled out on one of the metal spokes.

A crowd had gathered below. I could see faces looking up, their cheeks and foreheads smeared with color from the wheel’s bars of lights.

Voices separated from the low din, floating up.

“No, give it here—”

Someone—it sounded like Howard Price—argued faintly with the man at the lever, who shook his capped head, then looked up toward our car, at the man beside me who adjusted his coat and raised a hand.

The wheel began to turn downward.

I heard the childish, relieved shouts of the riders as the colored bulbs on the wheel’s rim blurred like tears against the sky.

Now I could hear again the bubbling pipe organ playing.

A boy in straw bowler, it was Beau Bentley, called up to me: “Dolly? Dolly, you all right?”

I knew the ground would be cold to the touch of my shoes, from now on it would be as if I walked on the moon.

The wheel stopped suddenly, rocking twice.

Aaron took my hand and I stepped out onto the wooden planks of the platform.

It wasn’t the moon.

I saw the shiny rounded nail heads and the polished grain of the wood. It was beautiful, alive and intricate, and my throat tightened.

All of my life was written in that smooth foot-polished wood that remembered its life as a high heavy-limbed blooming tree.

I was on Aaron’s arm, moving past my school friends, the Chester twins and Laura Knight, Snow and Hope Browne. My sister Crystal raised a hand to cover her open mouth. I saw there was blood on my dress.

The young suitors with fresh concerned faces stood back like strangers as I looked straight ahead and passed them, Aaron’s arm pressing firmly so I couldn’t turn and run to them sobbing and throwing open my arms for comfort.

I had crossed a river and now we lived on different sides.

Aaron and I were walking swiftly through the lit avenues of the fair, then down a quiet alley past a sleeping mastiff in a cage, into a striped tent where a long silver car stood waiting.

“Where are we going?”

“San Francisco.”

Aaron helped me onto the running board and into the high leather seat. With no roof above him, a man in a blue uniform sat behind the great steering wheel—it was dear Ramon but I didn’t know him yet.

Aaron tapped the glass partition lightly with his ring, then turned to me.

“My darling—Have I found you at last?”

For the first time, I began to weep.

“Dolly?” He took me in his arms as the car rolled forward out of the tent and across the cut hay field past wagons and standing horses.

The side windows were open and I felt the cool breeze and breathed its heavy scent of rich earth and the husky night-sap of stalk and leaf as the stars filed by above a running moonlit ditch.

I watched the houses and dark barns and silver driveways set between the vineyards and orchards and sharp-smelling fields of alfalfa.

Goshen. Traver. New Lund. Lemas.

At each cluster of frail lights, I glanced at his shadowed profile, I thought of easing from under his heavy arm, throwing open the door and jumping out.

But all the towns and shuttered shops were asleep. I heard moths hit against the windshield and leaning back my head I closed my eyes. Was this love?

But it wasn’t.

The only love in Aaron’s house by the sea lived in Ramon Zapata and the strains of his Spanish guitar from the servants’ quarters, and in the portrait of my guardian Murrietta above the headboard of my walnut bed. The blue flag with Anna’s initial flew from Aaron’s roof like Captain Nemo’s banner upon the dead volcanic isle, the black flag with the silver N.

After Joaquin Murrietta’s treasure was found and Ramon had left me for Los Angeles to become the star Domingo Esquivel, I was only Aaron’s prisoner, the replacement for Anna, his lost love.

Until the last night in April the elderly man in a frayed collar and black ribbon tie appeared suddenly at my bedroom door. He carried a brown leather satchel.

He bowed, smiling, then began taking a dozen colored bottles from his bag and placing them in rows on the dresser.

I looked at Aaron, who had risen from his chair beside the lamp, putting down his book.

“It’s all right. He’s a doctor. Dr. Bolger.”

“Come with me, Pretty Lady—”

Dr. Bolger led me from the love seat to the bed, guiding my arm as I lay down and he leaned over me, smiling.

“Lie easy and dream of the Earth like a star beneath your wings.”

“Aaron?”

Now Aaron was above me, holding my shoulders as the stranger lowered a handkerchief soaked with ether to my mouth and I fought it, twisting my head from side to side, seeing Murrietta’s face flash from the picture on the wall, calling to him—“Joaquin!”—until I breathed in fully the dizzying scent.

Aaron gripped my hand and for a moment I felt as if I were floating just above the white sheet, my body had become a bed of burning coals and like clear wavering smoke I hovered just above the pink unclothed woman on the bed.

I wondered if dying might be anything like this, I wasn’t frightened, it was peaceful. Dr. Bolger worked at the dresser, a colored map unrolled among the different vials like bright thimbles.

I turned and saw Aaron standing by the French doors, a tall shadow beyond the light. Or was it someone else? Ramon? Was the wind blowing? Or was it his guitar?

“Ramon,” I said. “Is that the wind?”

Dr. Bolger brought his smiling face close to mine.

“Ten,” he was saying, “count backward now . . . nine, eight . . . seven . . . six . . . .”

Grasping the wooden bar locked across my lap I was riding the Ferris wheel again, it was going too fast, then faster, faster, it was all I could do to hold on and not be thrown forward from my seat—

Too fast and the wheel broke off its axle and was racing across the Valley, crashing down orchards and vineyards and my father’s barn, climbing mountains, the peaks of the Sierras, then quicker, across flat land and mountains again and flat until it was fording the wide muddy Mississippi I had spelled in school, rolling back to New York and its bridges and spires, across the white surf and gray ocean, the Atlantic, now past the waiting shore and on, to the cities of Europe, the Eiffel Tower stood up like a curved stairway to the sky above the horizon, at last Aaron had kept his promise to show me all the places in his books.

I could make out things far below the metal spokes, so far and small it was a long time ago, castles and rivers and little figures in a field cocking gold hay, and then closer, the wheel sweeping down and the yellow stubble at my bare feet before the wheel rolled on and abruptly I was hoisted backward and up.

“There’s Notre Dame,” I heard Aaron say. “And Versailles.”

I felt the sudden warmth of a bright light, like a mirror full of sun, but before I could see the Sun King something plucked me from my seat and looking up I saw it was the red hawk that had dived at the car that day we drove to Pacific Grove to see the Monarch butterflies and Ramon sang in Spanish—“Butterfly, Butterfly, where is my pretty wife, pretty as you, Butterfly?”— only much larger, now it was an eagle, all white with slowly beating wings.

Inside its snowy plumes I felt safe and closed my eyes on the snow-capped mountain impossibly high and far in the distance because I knew that now—like Aaron’s friend Ambrose Bierce, Anna and Belle Solar, Joaquin’s ravished and murdered wife—I was flying to Tibet—

When I woke I was terribly thirsty.

The little man sat in a chair beside the bed. Under his arms his white shirt was dark with sweat. His worn collar lay open at his neck, his black tie hanging in two withered strands. His face looked thinner than before, older.

I was going to ask him for water when he moved, something sparkled, and I saw the butterfly brooch pinned to his vest, Murrietta’s diamonds glinting in the broad mother-of-pearl wings—

I couldn’t feel my body. Was I sick?

“Aaron, he stole the Butterfly,” I tried to say.

“Time to wake up, Pretty Lady— ”

“Who are you?”

“You know me. Dr. Bolger—”

His name was Dr. Bolger I remembered.

Carefully, I raised myself on one elbow. My legs and chest were numb, something was wrong. A sheet lay across me. Beyond the circle of lamplight the room was hazy, the air creased with slanted wrinkles.

“Aaron!” I was terrified. Had I lost a child?

“You’re all right,” the doctor said kindly.

But I wanted a drink of water. It was hard to speak, my throat hurt.

“Thirsty?” Dr. Bolger asked with raised brows.

He held a crystal glass to my lips.

“Careful, drink it slowly.”

The water tasted so good, clear and cold, like water from a flowing mountain spring. I drank and drank, now the room was clearer. I tipped back my head and my old friend Murrietta looked down at me from the wall. I heard the gold clock ticking on the mantelpiece.

“How long have I slept?”

“Two days.”

“What happened?”

“Something wonderful—” Dr. Bolger’s face broke into a wide smile that showed his stained teeth. The Butterfly sparkled on his vest.

“Would you like to see?”

“See what?”

“Take a deep breath,” he instructed. His hands lifted the sheet and helped me undo the cotton shift.

“There—”

It was terrifying. Beautiful. Strange.

The strangeness of the miraculous, like the thought that a man might die, sleep, rise again like Lazarus from his shroud.

I had died and awakened in the blinding plumage of a phoenix, brilliant feather upon feather, blue flames and orange, burning gold leaf.

“Ah,” said Dr. Bolger, holding my knee, “think of the men who will leave the Earth on the wings of the Butterfly. And before you die, Pretty Lady, you will know—it will fly away. What a wonderful death!”

He turned and put on his coat, touching the butterfly brooch.

“Thank you.” At his side he held his satchel, again he bowed. From the doorway he pointed to a brown short bottle on the nightstand.

“For a week. One spoon in the morning, one at night, with some tea. For the New Friend—”

I looked down at the Butterfly. Gingerly, I moved and immediately it responded, jade green and deep azure, endless ultramarine like the sea that took Anna—

The least breath sent a shiver of color, a changing ripple across its tall wings. Sudden oxblood and coral swirled to cinnamon and amber, lush lemon and Chinese red instantly turned indigo, deep purple and then teal. Like a hummingbird’s breast, bottle green shimmered silver and rose, an instant spectrum of yellow, blue, fathomless shade on shade to dizzy and exhaust the eye—

Two black lines grew narrow and violet and midnight blue as they arched from my stomach and parted to encircle each breast, reaching far from the bright narrow body that rested at my inmost self.

I felt something stirring within me, as it wobbled its way upward like a bubble I realized it was the beginning of a scream and stopped it high in my throat.

At the door Aaron Markham appeared with a crystal vase of large staring flowers. He took the yellow roses by their stems, and dripping water he came to the bed and knelt, kissing me tenderly on the cheek, taking and urgently caressing my hand.

The water ran from the roses’ cut ends that he laid across my breasts, petal and thorn against my changed skin.

After that I learned to live with the Butterfly.

Sleeping by the sea with the long nights of stars and planets and the window open to the wind, I let the Butterfly enfold Aaron and carry him aloft and away or dive with him deep under the cold Atlantic to the sunken ship.

Once, with the wind and stars rushing through my hair, I felt the night slide past me like water and I could hardly catch my breath.

It was then that I sensed it was not all just leaving, that there was something beyond the night I was traveling through, the darkness parting in fast V’s at my sides as something flickered now in the distance like brief sun against silver, a glancing light that touched something shadowed and large, and went out. The flaring burst both frightened and made me very happy, my heart racing in praise to something whose face or name I never knew.

Was it real? Or only some rapture of the deep?

I wondered, opening my eyes wide, as somewhere leagues and countries away Aaron murmured “Anna” through trembling lips.

I never saw Dr. Bolger again.

“Who is he?” I asked Aaron once as we lay in my bed with the light out, our quick breaths slowing to the rhythm of the waves. We looked past the high bedposts carved like tasseled wheat, toward the balcony and the sinking quarter apricot moon.

“I met him in Hamburg. He’d just returned from the East, from the court of a Moslem prince.”

Aaron touched my shoulder.

“Don’t worry. There’s one Butterfly. In all the world just one.”

But Aaron wouldn’t cease his studies, not even to take me to Paris, as he’d promised in the first days of the Butterfly, to see Notre Dame and the barges on the Seine I’d spied from the revolving Ferris wheel in the ether dream.

Just the foggy voyage by steam yacht up the coast beyond Portland and Seattle to Alaska past Fairbanks, dropping anchor in the icebound bay. Then the dog sled to the snow-shrouded dock, where the blind Eskimo stood waiting in a decorated caribou robe. On his brown high-boned cheeks, a red-tattooed tear hung below each white eye as he chanted and rattled a circle of bleached bones.

When Ramon visited with Greta and his child on their way to Canada, the brief, bittersweet re-plighting of our love was overshadowed, by Domingo’s immense fame, his new family, and the hovering presence of the Butterfly—

And after Domingo’s departure, Aaron’s startling confession that Ramon Zapata was in fact Joaquin Murrietta, that’s how Aaron had found the treasure under the flat stone by Cantua Creek, the gold turned into the diamonds set in the butterfly brooch and that Cepeda had sewn to the purple velvet dress—

Toward the end, at the opera house to hear Gluck, Aaron seized my arm and lurched toward me, his eyes large and wild in the middle of “J’ai Perdu Mon Eurydice.”

“Did you feel that,” Aaron insisted, “that tremor, like a shudder? An upheaval?”

His face was haggard, he was the center of whatever disturbance he’d divined.

“What is it?” Orpheus who could tame the wild beasts with his song could not retrieve his love from Pluto’s shadowed realm.

“Just then, the dead almost rose.”

The Butterfly had not settled him but increased his driven, impatient excitement. Aaron grew erratic, demanding obedience and arguing over trifles as my days in San Francisco stretched slowly toward three years—a thousand and one nights—of unlove.

Weeks on end, while he worked in his locked library, I lay on my bed under Murrietta’s portrait, Joaquin who couldn’t help me now. He was Ramon, busy in Hollywood being Domingo Esquivel for ten million swooning hearts.

Who was left to play the guitar and ease me to sleep?

To hold me close and whisper poetry?

Only dead authors, whose pages I turned until daybreak.

Another gray August, a fall, somber Christmas.

New Year’s Eve I sat alone in my room. Beyond the closed French doors to the balcony, above the waves crashing impotent and forlorn, I could hear the faint shouts of the revelers. Firecrackers. A beach party around a fire.
I was reading. Robinson Crusoe had just found Friday’s footprint in the sand.

I stared at the glossy plate, studying Crusoe’s umbrella made of palm fronds, as the doorknob turned. My door drifted open, as if pushed by a breeze.

A stranger stood beyond the lamplight. I reached for the desk drawer, for the gun Aaron had given me for protection when I ventured out with Cepeda and men tried to bother me on the street.

But it was Aaron in the doorway, dressed all in white linen, head to foot. His thin face shone pale as his clothes.

“Are you all right?”

“Splendid,” Aaron said. “And you, at one year’s death, the birth of another?”

His eyes and mustache were crow black.

“You didn’t answer when I knocked at your door.”

Often now he didn’t come to supper. If he did and his place wasn’t set, he broke things and shouted, spoke in nonsense words.

Days would go by and I wouldn’t see him, only hear down the hall his striding boot steps and the quickened frenzied tempo of his whistling that sought escape from its weary repeating round.

“I’ve completed my studies—”

I should rise from my chair, rush to him and throw my arms around his neck. The study had become a vault where he’d entombed himself.

But I hesitated. Aaron still stood across the room, in shadow.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Crusoe.”

“About a shipwreck, a survivor.”

“Let me ring you some dinner.”

“It’s too late.”

“I told the cook to stay until I heard from you. We’ll celebrate, now your work is finished. It’s New Year’s—let’s have some champagne.”

“A drink?”

“Why not? I’ll ring for Cepeda.” I reached for the button.

“A drink?” he asked again, lifting his face. “From which river?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Hades—like Mesopotamia—has two tributaries.”

“Let me pour you a brandy.”

I turned to get up, to take the carafe from the bureau. Alone, I’d begun to drink at night. How I missed Ramon, his serenades and those evenings I’d descend to the cellar to talk and hold him closely on his iron bed—

“You have a drink for me.”

Aaron stepped into the light. His lined cheeks were sunken, his skin yellow ivory. He stared hard at me, then turned his head, surveying the room, as if he were lost and had never seen it before.

“Where’s the dress?”

“You haven’t wanted to go out. I put it away.”

Aaron went to the armoire. He opened the mahogany doors, running his hands through the line of hanging clothes. I could almost feel his chill fingers across the slope of my shoulders.

We hadn’t made love for months, I cringed at his random touch, as if it threatened the onslaught of attack, the Ferris wheel. That’s what I dreamed about at night, waking in a feverish sweat when Joaquin rode off on Rey Blanco, leaving Belle Solar alone and she heard a knock at her door before the white men rushed in—

“Are we going out to celebrate?”

“I’m attending church,” Aaron said.

He lifted the muslin dustcover, now his hands were motionless. They rested on Anna’s bridal gown white as his coat.

“The mass for the fishermen?”

A week before, a fishing boat had sunk with all hands. Three days ago their bodies had washed up on the beach.
Aaron attended funerals, wakes, weddings, baptisms, of people he didn’t know.

“No,” Aaron said.

He fingered the purple dress. It was the one he’d been looking for.

“I have an appointment. A wedding. Stroke of midnight, Mars and Venus aligned.”

Uninvited, unrecognized, Aaron would step forward to kiss the bride. He’d give her a pearl necklace, or a bouquet of silver roses. The jewelry drawer in the rosewood dresser was empty.

“You’re taking the velvet dress?”

“A wedding present.”

Finally I understood.

Aaron had to talk in riddles—

Everything was a mystery, from where the wine at dinner had come from, to which sea the fish on the china platter had swum. Everything had to be a secret to be discovered.

Even a proposal.

“You’re the groom?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Aaron said.

Now he turned to me, the purple dress draped over his arm.

“I’m marrying again.”

Finally, in his own way, he’d asked me. After the strange years, we’d be man and wife.

I got up from the chair.

“Oh, Aaron.”

His face stiffened.

“No—”

“No?”

“It’s something else. You’re mistaken.”

“What is it?”

“I found Anna.”

Anna was dead, drowned, at the bottom of the freezing sea. I felt the icy waters close over my head.

“Her body?”

I touched the silver locket at my breast, the heart that held the few strands of poor Anna’s blonde hair I had plucked from her comb.

“She’s alive,” Aaron said.

“You mean we’re alike, I remind you of her.”

He nodded.

“As I’ve said, in some ways you do.”

I began to tremble.

“Anna’s dead,” I said. “I’m alive. Here, in the flesh.”

“She’s come back.”

“Aaron, she’s lost. You must accept—”

“What was lost is found!”

Aaron’s black eyes flared, steady and certain.

“Where is she then?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

Now he smiled, with tenderness. His eyes softened.

“Her name’s Lei Wang. She’s a girl, 12 years old. In Chinatown.”

Aaron was insane.

“What about me?”

“You’ll have the Butterfly. No one can take the Butterfly from you.”

“Aaron—”

“You betrayed someone, in another life. Several times.”

He started for the door, his linen back turned to me again.

“The wheel of karma must make its turn—”

“You can’t do this.”

But he could and he was, in a moment he’d be gone. I grabbed the gold gun from the open drawer, cocked it and Aaron heard and stopped.

“It’s no use,” he said. “You can’t change my mind. Or God’s.”

“Remember,” I said, “what you told me? ‘I’ll die young, at the hand of a woman—’”

“‘And you’ll live a long time. Until you want to die.’”

“You said a hand never lied.”

“All hands are the same. Each one bears the wound.”

Now he took a step.

“Anyway, I’m a thousand years old—”

“Aaron!”

“If you wish, we can meet later.”

I fired and inside the roaring deepening rebounding explosion I knew I would hear all the days of my life and the moment of my death—it was sucking into its cyclone of sound my heartbeat and breath and the bitter smoke and all the room’s air—Aaron fell forward, a red tiny moon and then a spreading blot ruining his white coat.

“Dolly—”

I hurried to him and knelt where he lay, taking his hand that had told the truth after all. Something bubbled in his throat and I helped him turn on his side.

“Oh, God, Aaron, don’t die. Forgive me.”

“Nothing,” he said, “to forgive.”

“I’ll get a doctor—”

“No,” Aaron whispered. There was blood on his lip. “My book.”

He looked up at me with desperate empty eyes.

“Key, in my pocket.”

I put my hand into the bloodstained linen.

“Vest.”

I found the silver key. He was dying.

“Quickly.”

I ran to the study, fumbled with the lock and threw open the door.

The book lay at the center of the cleared table, where once his papers and calculations had spread in dusty stacks among books and crystals, the quartz skull and the chalcedony scarabs in the chest, the black butterfly in its cube of amber. I grabbed the black diary and ran back.

“To the end,” Aaron said.

The pages flashed before my eyes—rows of jumbled numbers, diagrams, notes, charts of sea currents and the sky, drawings of the sun, Jupiter, the moon, dotted lines tracing the angles of starlight. Anatomical sketches of women and men showed their bodies contained planets instead of hearts and livers or lungs.

The last page:

Anna! Twelve o’clock.

“Pen.”

I placed it in his shaking hand, helping his fingers to grip it. On his side, gasping, he scrawled something, collapsed, his head falling against the carpet.

Then someone was calling, from downstairs.

I cradled Aaron’s head in my lap, looking up at Murrietta’s portrait watching me from above the bedstead—night after night silently he had witnessed Belle Solar ravished. Once, in another life, he and Aaron had shared the same fate in the desert.

Another life—

Now the picture spoke at last:

“Buena suerte, Señorita . . . .”

I leaped up, pulling the purple dress from under Aaron’s body, quickly rolling it up, then pushed it far underneath the mattress. I set the gun in the secret drawer with the pen and book and threw open the French doors to the balcony.

“Señor Aaron!”

Cepeda stood at the bedroom door.

“He’s been shot—an intruder! Call a doctor. Hurry!”

The book was wrapped in wax paper, at the bottom of the black trunk under the brown-eyed fox. I’d never looked at it again, at the words Aaron had written in jagged black ink.

La muerte lo vence todo.

Death conquers all.

The chief of police questioned me for hardly half an hour, comforting the lovely country girl who wept and shook with sudden waves of uncontrollable emotion and fright. A doctor administered a sedative.

The detectives found no leads, and fortunately no second party was ever charged with the crime. Perhaps certain proper, high-toned San Franciscans were relieved by Aaron’s sudden demise and disappearance from their city.

After the first rush of police and reporters and the morbidly curious, a vaudeville promoter and a photographer who made postcards, neither doorbell or telephone rang again.

The rich and influential, the beautiful, the boldly adventurous, the talented and brilliant, those who were learned but mysterious and obscure, avoided the “Murder Mansion,” as the newspapers quickly christened Aaron’s white house by the sea cliff.

Did his friends and fellow psychical explorers suspect me of Aaron’s murder, or only wish to give his complicated memory a wide berth? The Chronicle’s lurid, week-long front-page story quoted “an anonymous, knowledgeable witness” who made veiled allusions to St. Germain and Cagliostro, Rasputin and Svengali, to “thrill parties,” arcane sexual practices, mesmerism and narcotics, to white slavery and necromancy.

In death, Aaron remained the enigma he had been in life, the verifiable biographical details scant—a local eccentric bohemian of apparent but sourceless wealth, with an interest in magic and the occult, and no known close associates or friends, except his consort, Dolly Mable, 19, and his manservant.

Aaron’s age was unknown, no birthdate could be determined. The coroner estimated him to be a man in his early 50s, maybe slightly younger or older depending on the toll the years had taken. It was possible the name “Aaron Markham” was an alias.

Only Cepeda and I attended the private night burial, Ramon was filming in Italy and couldn’t come, though by cable he sent his sympathies and ardent love.

No priest or preacher gave a service. Cepeda spoke in the foggy moonlight among the dull headstones:

“Maestro Aaron, viva usted ahora los años infinitos—con su amor eterno, la bella y buena Señora Anna.”

(“Master Aaron, now you live the infinite years—with your eternal love, the beautiful and good Lady Anna.”)

He dropped two white entwined roses into the grave.

For days I lay on the bed under Murrietta’s picture, listening to the lead-colored waves break and retreat and advance and break—until I dreamed of serrated foaming waves whose pound and hushed withdrawal was the beating of my own heart—each night I waited impatiently for the sea to stop and my heart to cease, for the Butterfly to leave, each night wishing, praying it would go—

“Ah, when you die, you will know—it will fly away!”

But each morning the Butterfly was there when I woke in the cold sheets before the open doors and the fog, my dreams of Aaron slowly dissolving:

In a deep-sea diving suit he had found the Titanic, rescued Anna from the grand salon where she and the orchestra were still alive, still lowly breathing among their dropped instruments and the floating echoes of Anna’s last song.

Once I was Belle Solar, Murrietta’s fiancée, Aaron was Murrietta, Ramon was Aaron, Anna was Dolly. Then Aaron became the posse’s leader, Captain Love, raising his sword—

But none of it was true. Even Aaron who knew so much, who had found out so many hidden things, could not conquer death and return, anymore than he could find Anna or in the opera Orpheus might retrieve lost Eurydice.

For a while, I half-thought he might reappear. I listened for his step in the hall, for the study door opening and closing, the lock turning in the early hours with the silver key. I imagined I heard his whistle, the circling song from Crete rising and falling, nearer and far, like the futile call of a wandering captive or just the wind in the bending corridors of the hopeless maze.

“If you wish, we can meet later.”

But no brave Theseus would escape from that labyrinth . . . .

Ships sailed, fog whistles blew. Parades marched by. St. Patrick’s, Fourth of July. Bands, politicians, soldiers. Columbus.

Stark Christmas, then awful New Year’s, a cold sterile spring—

Days and nights passed like the lift and drop of a breeze across ashes. Only my room remained the same, the house appeared different, as if I dreamed and in the nightmare familiar objects, chairs and tables disappeared. Aaron’s blue banner with the gold embroidered A grew tattered on its staff, until the weathered fabric slipped from its cord and one morning lay like a dead bird on the gravel walk in the garden.

That afternoon Cepeda knocked at my door.

“Señorita Mable, nothing remains.”

“Nothing?”

Cepeda frowned.

“What is it, Arturo?”

“It seems Señor Markham’s collections were not—”

Arturo hesitated, glancing at me nervously.

“Tell me, Arturo.”

“Legitimate.”

He looked down in embarrassment, as if his god had been exposed as a tin statue filled with rubble, now the years of faithful service became a road turned to senseless dust.

Aaron had been the victim of charlatans, unscrupulous agents who had preyed upon an unbalanced, distraught man in deep endless mourning. And there were numerous large, unpaid debts not settled by the contents of the house Cepeda had let go piece by piece. Now I understood the changed, diminished rooms, like a moated castle only mine had been kept intact—

Tall, silver-haired Arturo led me to the study door.

“Gone now,” Cepeda said, gesturing with a hand. “All gone. Only Señor Zapata’s guitar—”

It leaned against the wall by the tall window. The astrolabe and the x-ray machine, the mummy’s cloth and the iron torture chair, even the ungainly furniture had been sold.

“May I have it?” I asked Cepeda.

“As the lady wishes,” Cepeda said, bowing. He moved to the window and picked up Ramon’s guitar and carefully set it down lengthwise in my outstretched hands.

“Do you have family, Arturo?”

“I must discover one, Señorita. Until then, you may reach me here.”

I took the slip of paper from Arturo’s hand.

“Ah, Arturo—”

A policeman in the foyer said I would have to move out.

“Where?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Miss. Would you like to talk to the captain?”

I could take some clothes and was provided with temporary lodging downtown.

Within the week I became the captain’s mistress.

He wanted to leave his wife to marry me, but when I told him no he threatened me with his pistol, then promised to kill himself and secretly the next morning I dodged his lieutenants on the street and rushed to the cable car and found an obscure rooming house above a laundry.

Later, at dark, I went out to pawn my furs.

Young men who beseeched me I turned away, sensing the sting of the Butterfly under my dress, and a scalding hotness in my palm whose lines might open and drip with Aaron’s blood.

Out of loneliness and guilty grief so strong I had to stand and tightly embrace the guitar as I remembered Ramon, twice a week I met an investment executive from the Bank of Italy, he wanted to take me to Chicago, until his wife found out and hired an attorney, who contacted the police.

I quickly stepped aside, I had no urge to enter the divorce courts or meet the captain again, or to expose the Butterfly to other foreign eyes. I’d had more than a lifetime of deathless love.

I plucked four large stones from the purple velvet and nervously, expecting the worst, took them to a jeweler on Van Ness. With a glass to his eye he quickly acknowledged their quality and I trembled as I recalled Aaron and the hypnotized Ramon in the desert where they lifted the flat stone that concealed the treasure of Joaquin Murrietta, the forlorn lover of Belle Solar—

No doubt taking me for the mistress of a rich suspicious man who might surface at any second, the jeweler made a fair and quick buy, removing stacks of bills from the safe.

I asked to use the phone and talked to the deskman at the Hotel Californian on skid row, who confirmed that Cepeda was for the moment still a tenant. He was behind on his rent and soon to be evicted. I took a cab to Western Union and wired Arturo $2,000.

The next morning, the 1st of May, in the spring of the year 1919, on the first anniversary of the Butterfly, I sailed on the ferry to Oakland, then rode the Southern Pacific inland and south through the San Joaquin Valley, a lost dove returning home past the stations like descending stairs:

Acacia. Quietly I could have settled north in Fresno or Sacramento or acknowledged that all my hope was ended and buried myself alone in some small forgotten farming town—

Except I had an idea, a feeling down my spine, that where my life had first broken the young branches might still lie scattered and green for me to pick up and graft together, in the Valley air and sun with the turning familiar seasons I might sink my roots in native soil and strike a vein of nourishment to bloom and leaf and spread shady limbs in summer, to grow a strong if different life.

In San Francisco I had dissuaded decent young men and scrupulously avoided the unsavory—the Butterfly made a respectable marriage impossible and a casual liaison offered the dangers of disclosure, of crime and squalor.

Now I would have to cut my own trail with the tools at hand as I made a new person, from my pantheon of heroines in the books I had read I would choose and weave the useful strands of Clara Barton and Helen of Troy, Florence Nightingale and Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc and Sweden’s Queen Christina, Jane Addams who established Hull House in Chicago.

I bought the old Clairidge mansion on Alma Street and had it redone while I stayed downtown in a suite at the Grand Hotel. My three-story home wasn’t as elegant as Aaron’s house in San Francisco—no red flag with an emblazoned butterfly flew from the French mansard roof—but it was immediately the talk of Acacia.

My mother and father had died of the influenza, and my only brother, Bryan, had fallen in France, as little Faith, the minister’s daughter, had seen when she stared into the lit bowl of rose water.

Soon three of my sisters moved away after an afternoon visit, when we embraced and I told them a portion of my strange story and they wept, gazing at me with an untenable combination of regret and fascination, sympathy and horror, then suddenly rose and coolly departed as if the unfortunate fallen angel had journeyed to another country farther away than death and could never return, not to this or any land.

Only Harriet, the youngest, and her husband, George, remained.

Many men will leave the Earth on the wings of a butterfly—

What began in part as an inspired, just, perfect vengeance toward the world—I would turn Aaron’s violent definition of myself to an appointed destiny as an avenging angel of many splendid colors—soon changed to something akin to Arturo’s description of infinite eternal love:

I discovered to my gratified surprise that by accident or fate I had struck upon my true identity and calling, a buried avocation with an ancient and honored pedigree reaching back to the holy temple in Nebuchadnezzar’s Emerald Babylon, a sacred art that in 1920 offered a woman of my special situation and gifts an unusual range of influence and opportunity.

After arranging discreetly with the police and the mayor, there were Armies and Navies, Air Forces of men—

To remember one lover individually, first I had to imagine a wide, just-cut hay field where they all stood dressed in ranks, or a lake or wide sea with no waves and the men in rows, each standing in his separate boat.

Then I could find him, feel the texture of his face, his lips, smell his hair, and by the scent tell the color and shade of his eyes. After they had visited my bed, the men changed, their eyes looked different and you could tell them by their eyes when you saw them on the street, whether they tipped their hats or stopped to talk or moved quickly past.

Some came to me again and again, and others only once—

My fame sailed swiftly along those underground rivers of communication old as time and kept brimming by a quenchless passion of curiosity and desire that first flared in Eden, a burning current that merged the drive for possession with the urge to desperate revolt or transcendence before the inescapable looming shadow of oblivion.

I quickly made money and many friends, some of them people in important places, judges, politicians, ultimately two governors, financiers and famous figures from the worlds of sport and stage, heralded authors and luminaries from the East.

Actors and directors came up from Hollywood—Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, Errol and then Hemingway, who was raising money for the Spanish Republic, who promised to stop killing the elephants, Hannibal or no Hannibal.

He never wrote about me, in a letter he declared I was like the ocean of blue dolphins he had watched once off Bimini, as far as the eye could see dolphins leaping in unison in identical arcs above the waves.

Like Dante, he said there weren’t words to capture the transforming vision.

But I distrusted privilege and position, and the arrogance that almost always accompanied wealth, the power the rich held over the poor, even if they were unaware or never consciously wielded it to cruel purpose.

Wasn’t withholding power for good wielding power for ill?

The women who worked not for me but with me were given two years to save their salaries and educate themselves so that a girl from nowhere could marry at a distance and well. In the late mornings I taught reading and mathematics, history and art with lessons in graceful etiquette underlined by my cardinal rules of kindness and mutual respect, the twin sparks that kindled true ardor and enduring love.

I knew people all over the state and beyond, I could make introductions, my aid in arranging attractive matches was often requested and not a few times by apparently unlikely parties, as in the case of ________ and _________ of the ________ Family from ____ _______, _________, whose names I didn’t repeat even to myself and had promised to take unspoken to the grave.

Dr. Bennell had begged me to marry him.

“No,” I told him. “Play Mozart and Schubert for me, when I wake or sleep. I’ll always be yours.”

“Is there someone else?” he asked sincerely.

“Everyone and no one,” I answered him, smiling.

“You love everybody best?”

“I’m just the moon,” I said. “Ask the sun.”

He wasn’t the first or the last or the wealthiest or the most handsome, but he was truly good and when his graceful fingers touched the black and white keys the notes hung like shining stair steps I could climb above Acacia toward the light.

I gave generously to Disabled Veterans, FDR and his March of Dimes, the soup kitchen to feed the Depression’s unemployed, the home for unwed mothers, bond drives after Peal Harbor, then Buddy Poppy, wearing the blood-red paper flower pinned to my dress.

And innumerable small and larger gifts and long-term loans to men and women in sudden need or difficulty, to pay a specialist for a delicate operation or the bank to forestall imminent foreclosure, quietly send a pregnant daughter to live with an aunt or slip money to an attorney to make a bad thing right, reverse an injustice in the town or the barrio where I brought food and clothes and a doctor those fog-bound winter months.

“You’re like the goddess Ishtar or Astarte,” Dr. Bennell told me as I stood at his shoulder and he picked out a passage from “Rhapsody in Blue.”

“All hearts beat towards yours and take their rhythm from your own.”

“If you say so, Wise Doctor, then it must be true.”

He smiled and nodded in agreement.

“And so it is, my Madame Butterfly—”

The war years were my busiest time, especially with the air base, Hammer Field, up in Fresno. On week nights I could hear the boys flying low over Acacia, not buzzing the house, but just there, below the stars and moon, to say, “Hello, sweet dreams, see you Sunday, Dolly.”

Or sometimes, toward the end, when training was done, the labored, mournful night-drone of the powerful twin Black Widow engines: “Please, remember me.”

I had remembered them all, every one. I worried over the young soldiers, hugged them tightly and kissed them deeply goodbye as I sent them off to war, waving, always careful never to look into their palms.

It seemed the way of my life, that I would never go but be the one who gave a man an inkling, a brief glimpse of blue water and green continents softened by clouds and distance, receding like the sun in a rear-view mirror—

Once, the second year in Acacia, I received an odd post card, from France, that showed Napoleon’s marble tomb—

I never knew if it was true or a scheme to blackmail or defraud and never tried to find out—Cepeda might have told me something—I’d received news Arturo was a gentleman’s gentleman again, in Los Angeles, that he worked now for Ramon—but I let the lead drop like a string into a dark maze—

In the end, I was the Butterfly, nothing would change that, and the only path was ever forward, like the sun—

When Kate didn’t come to visit and I was lonely in Kyla’s house, when I was low and I knew that soon the Butterfly would leave, I imagined my lovers filling the room, the hall and stairway and the house, the barnyard, the vineyard and orchard, in a long silent curving line stretching all the way past the eucalyptus grove north to Lemas and then west to the Coast Range and the sea.

I was the lock that all keys fit but none would open, except the one I never tried—

I felt the angina, not strong, just a dull ache, holding there, neither fading nor shooting up. The gold gun lay under my pillow, Murrietta’s diamonds at my feet as one of Mrs. Watkins’ peacocks cried out at a honking passing car whose headlights swept the vines—

In my life, the Butterfly had left me only twice before May Eve in Acacia.

In my eighth month of pregnancy, I lay gasping in labor, bearing the child of Aaron Winters, who nine months earlier I’d kindly but firmly rebuffed and sent back to his wife, though for some years he and I remained friends, Aaron Winters and Larry Jones and I were water witches and secret Masons.

I had dreamed that something was circling me as I stood still and watched the shining thing revolve, whatever it was, I couldn’t make it out, then that I was turning, I rode the Ferris wheel that made the stars and the lights of Acacia rise and fall, then the Ferris wheel was on its side, a merry-go-round, instead of seats it had horses and I was afraid someone would choose to ride me, I hated my little black saddle and silver bridle and my mane combed in painted tight curls and I summoned all my strength and will and leaped before the awful brass ring could come around again, I escaped, running and running with my hooves against the grass to find Rey Blanco, until the men threw a rope around my neck and wrestled me kicking to the ground so I lay on my side as they held me down and I was trying to have a little colt—

Cool air blew across my face, like the wind through the open French doors in San Francisco.

Looking up, I saw the Butterfly, but grown much larger, fanning its wings in wide circuits above me.

It had nothing to do with me, I just watched it, admiring it, its painted circles within circles within circles and long curved bands of blazing complex color. The wings rippled like broad banners, like the flags of some country I’d never read about in any book, then the decorated sails of a ship that might carry me there.

For a while the Butterfly was very large and clear and beautiful and I felt grateful to behold such a rare wonder more amazing than any majestic animal or bird. Then it got smaller, the gliding ovals tighter and tighter as it rose toward the blue ceiling distant as the sky.

It was then I remembered the Butterfly belonged to me, or I belonged to the Butterfly. When it left, I would die. I was Dolly Mable from Acacia. I remembered Aaron Markham and Dr. Bolger, then Ramon and I wondered who I would be in another life, if there really was another life. I didn’t want another life, another name or face, I wanted to remain who I was, as I watched the Butterfly, my Butterfly, grow faint.

“Don’t leave, my Madame Butterfly—”

Dr. Bennell! I grabbed the bars of the brass headboard, clenched my teeth as I pushed, staring up at the Butterfly until finally I made it stop.

Slowly, I brought it down, closer, closer, like a kite—like the hawk that had dived for my feathered hat near Monterey, the day we’d driven to see the butterflies—until I could feel the hot shadows of its wings and see the red velvet bristles along its striped face and breathe its strong scentless breath. Until it was large enough to cover me like a quilt.

Until Kyla was born . . . .

The second time was when Kyla was a child, before Kyla went to live with the Lawrences—

One of the girls had screamed, a door slammed somewhere. Footsteps rushed down the hall.

A woman burst into the room, a pointed gun in her hand.

“You witch! You stole my husband!”

It was true. At first I had firmly refused George, but then he had broken down, telling me how unhappy he was—

My sister Harriet fired twice, three times, four, the room filling with smoke and plaster dust, the sudden beating of wings.

“I’ll die young, at the hand of a woman. You’ll live a long time, until you want to die.”

For an instant, I thought Aaron had got our palms mixed up. In his white suit, with the bloodstain, now Aaron Markham stood in the open doorway to receive me—

I wrenched back the velvet dress.

The Butterfly quivered against my body. The shots had missed. Now the gun clicked, misfiring.

“Oh, you were always lucky!”

Harriet screamed at me, then threw the gun away and with raised fists lurched forward as I waited for her assault, almost longing for it.

I knew then, finally, that nothing human could hurt me.

But I had to send Kyla away—

“Wait a little longer,/ Till your little wings are stronger . . . .” said the mother bluebird in her story book.

After that the different seasons had turned to autumn, the years began to blow away like yellow leaves—

Something had died and after that I didn’t get any older.

One afternoon after wars and peace I woke and the piano didn’t play, Dr. Bennell was gone to heaven, the great busy house stood quiet as I hurried weeping and calling out and through the maze of deserted rooms I returned and stared an hour at the ageless Butterfly until I put on the purple dress and made up my face in the silver mirror and brushed my hair—only my hair had grown older—then took Ramon’s Spanish guitar from its shelf and played perfectly as I assumed the ghost of his voice and sang, “Mariposa, Mariposa, donde es mi esposa linda, linda como tu, Mariposa?”

When I’d lain in the stifling dress in the hot Cadillac in the barnyard, and Eddie Dodge tapped on the glass to wake me, I had opened my eyes to Kyla as a grown woman, all the years in between had been only an awful fever trance.

Kyla’s face looked kind, worried. She smiled—like the Lady in Gold who stood by my bed that morning in Acacia, after the Butterfly had perched on my hand mirror and flown slowly back and the Lady told me to try to find Kyla—everything was forgiven and made right, it was all along.

And at the farmhouse steps, as Eddie held me in his arms, I discovered her daughter Kate, my lost self, my perfect image, the Dolly that once I had been before Aaron Markham and the Butterfly—

I found my life that through all the secret days had flowed on without me, it was waiting, like a sweet ceaseless stream moving freshly toward the Kings River and the Valley to water the wide fields and turn them green . . . .

But Kyla insisted Kate mustn’t know I was her grandmother, I was too late and now my day was ending, it was time for the Butterfly to depart, the Big D—

On my death certificate and in my obituary in the paper Dolly Mable would be “Mrs. Grayson,” widowed, from town X or Y, wearing Kyla’s alias like a cloak.

To any neighbor who might ask or hear, any friend of the family—to any passing car or truck tuned to the morning news that delivered the night’s newly deceased—I would remain anonymous, unknown.

Why not “Mrs. Blossom”? Or “Elvira Grape Leaf”? Or scramble the letters, call me “Dolly Blame”?

Kyla had been cruel, stripping me of my identity, making me die with a stranger’s name, constantly complaining when I wouldn’t let her lift the window—as if she knew about the Butterfly and wanted it to escape . . . .

Geraldine Ferraro’s clippings Kate had cut from The Fresno Bee gave a ghostly flutter like white hands above the headboard.

I’d forgotten to turn off the fan, after Delmus had seen the Butterfly and run off down the vine row.

No, I’d stopped it earlier—when I lowered the bottle of Wild Turkey, when I’d heard him swearing about the bank and the farm going broke and saw him crouched over his broken bottle—so we could talk and not shout above its constant hum and the click of its turning, then play Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa” on the phonograph.

Now I breathed the scent of the roses on the trellis that were sweet again.

The night breeze through the torn screen blew the papers and touched my cheek.

Tomorrow the men would come to help Delmus butcher the pig, the grape harvest starting Wednesday, the election wasn’t until the 7th of November . . . .

At my side the I Ching, The Book of Changes, lay darkly on the night table, beside the silver monogrammed mirror and brush and the framed picture of my youth.

There was no use consulting the oracle. I knew what the answer would be if I turned on the lamp, posed my question and cast the pennies.

At the open window the lines of stars reflected the hexagram and the redwood trellis of yellow roses with its two broken slats at the top, the fractured steps of Kate’s stairway to Eddie Dodge who waited each night like Ramon in the ghostly plum orchard.

I began to climb down the starry ladder, toward freedom, until I was asleep—

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