The Swallowtail

The Swallowtail

In the fall, there is a ghost that haunts my garden. She sings through the multicolored leaves that swing about my face. And I sing with her. My mother hears the voice and tells me I remind her of her mother—always singing. "It is her ghost that speaks through me," I say. "Must be," my mother replies and continues over to the clothesline to hang the wash. The song I hear awakens something inside me, leaves rustling long forgotten memories of people and places I will never know.

I look for grandmother in the swallowtail butterfly that seems the only remnant

left of summer. It floats, a faded yellow and black origami fragment, over baby roses that bloomed several weeks ago. I am only here to help you sweep, it says in its silent movements. It flies like the dried leaves when the wind occasionally picks up.

My grandmother was a Missouri farm girl, born in the summer of 1882. I see her as a little girl with her long red hair that reaches the tops of her black-eyed ankle boots. She carries the honey from her father's bee cages; she whispers so that the busy creatures hear every word. Everyone knows that bees never tell a secret and she has plenty of secrets, all wishes and dreams. She waits patiently for several drones to untangle themselves from her red strands. She is delicate yet strong, a pretty red­headed 12 year old girl with a heart ready for adventure. Yet in a year or two, the adventure almost ends. She grows sick with fever. Her red hair falls away and soft brown replaces it.

I rake the voice into a large pile and cease my song. Here the people are gathered— some buried, some yet alive. Here inside my heart, the memories lay awake at night spilling dreams into my pillow. But they are far away, those memories—stories told to me by my mother and not of my own conscious experience. A twilight realm of ghosts and flesh, all gathered in my garden as I rake and think and sing and wonder. Only the swallowtail is real, and yet it too indiscriminately disappears from view when it flies over the neighbor's fence or loses itself amidst the baring walnut branches.

I wonder a lot about my grandmother. I wonder whether or not she would have liked me. I see her face in old photographs, in that black and white and sometimes sepia toned world of so long ago. And I see my mother in her face.

I do not have my grandmother's face. I share only my grandmother's eyes. Eyes that always look so sad or perhaps lost in thought. I am never quite sure. Meaningful, dark eyes that sink into my thoughts like the walnut stains I notice on the decorative wooden perimeter around my garden.

What did she think of love, my grandmother? What did she think of life? The parched leaves are gathered before me, yet so many are already tattered and broken. Aged brown in a world of autumn.

My mother says there is no doubt my grandmother would have liked me. She would have been proud of my accomplishments. The swallowtail returns from the neighbor's yard, plays amidst the shadowed slips of vinca growing beneath the birdbath. After I rake, I must give the birds fresh water.

She had had seventeen children of her own, my grandmother. She knew so much of life, yet also, so much death and hurt and pain.

I see her pregnant with my uncle, due in April; while in February and then in March- -just a month or two before my uncle's birth—childhood illnesses snatch her two small daughters: life and death in an instant. Coffin and crib paradoxically set in a whirlwind of confusion, like some surrealistic nightmare. How could it happen? Why?

Where the leaf crumbles, I see the tears—Sing, the autumn voice urges, Sing with me at this time of year. It is the time of change, for listening to old stories told round evening fires, for remembering old souls, and for wishing the youthful will make a difference in the tune. Touch all those years—hold them like my children, for that is what they are. Children of another age, yet children still, taken from earth before their time; whispers for future generations to nourish and make whole. One moment, we are here on the earth; the next, we are gone. One smile, one flash of colored leaf, changes life. In an instant, we are transformed! Sing with me! Be my eyes!

The tears, the struggle, the futile questions—the pain, the anguish must surely have been unbearable. Black and white and sometimes, sepia toned—-the emotions, the pictures rise and fall away from my vision. But the eyes—they stay the same. Their meaning: eternal.

She would not give up fighting against what ultimately she had no real control over: her poverty and bad marriage. Indeed, she would struggle until she gave birth to other children, her last being my mother—a precious little girl. Even then, she would struggle for her life and for her daughter's. Beaten so badly by a drunken husband that she nearly died, still she clung to life, defying her doctor's diagnosis she would not make it. Determined, she was, to give my mother breath, which ultimately led to more life in my brothers, sister and me.

My mother finishes hanging the wash out: my mother whose face is so much like my grandmother's. I look at the many colors gathered at my feet. I notice the brittle and pliable collection of moments: not mine and yet collected in me, for they are a grandmother's, a mother's, and then my very own legacy. The swallowtail plays amongst the purple lantana. The wind blows more colors about my face; moments catch in my light wool sweater. The leaves seem endless. My mother assures me one more good windstorm should set them to rest until next year when we can start all over again. I laugh and ask why we need to worry about them then.

"Because the leaves will eventually bury the garden, if we don't remember to rake them," says my mother. "You wouldn't want all your plants to die now, would you?"

"No," I reply.

"And all your hard work—that would go to waste as well," she says. I smile.

"I know," I say. "I figured you'd be able to remind me again." She smiles back and walks into the house. The swallowtail swings and flutters toward the bougainvillea, then dances over the garage roof.

It is August first, my grandmother's birthday, and I am sitting at my grandmother's grave here in Napa California, very far away from Missouri. It is some 60 to 70 miles away from where I was born and raised. The weather is hot and peacocks yell from time to time. Peacocks in a cemetery. They must mean something, for I heard once that birds are the soul's messengers and even now they seem to be crying between worlds. While growing up, I knew many birds, as my brother brought one after another home for pets. We even had peacocks. I recall the males' beautiful tail feathers and the Greek myth of the Argus killed by Hermes, whose eyes had become those magnificently stained orbs brushed in florescent curves and strokes on the ends of those tail feathers. When I was young, I collected many of those feathers strewn about the yard. God's Eyes they were called by some from the Old Country. And they were not to be brought into the house until after the First of May, when everything would be in bloom and the warming spring and summer sun had returned to chase away the cold. Then, the earth would be filled with joy and life, and God would be watching.

I begin to sweat in the August heat. My eyes begin to haze. I lose focus for an instant as tears well in my eyes. It is the first time I have come to my grandmother's side: the first time anyone from my generation has come to visit. Is God watching now? Is my grandmother? The tombstone, pale gray set with two plaques, sleeps in shade. On one plaque, an Emily Matthews' poem, whose first four lines catch in my throat: Look for the rainbow when things go awry And remember the beauty you’ve seen in the sky— I wonder how many rainbows Napa's skies have offered through the many years. I wonder if there could have ever been enough to mend my grandmother's broken heart.

On the other plaque, the caption: DEDICATED IN MEMORY OF ALL THOSE WHO ENTERED INTO REST 1924 - 1964, with smaller letters as though in a whisper, napa

state hospital.

Napa State Hospital—a fog of mother's memories collapses around me. It is the shroud I wish to take off her shoulders and put in a box: the moment when my fourteen- year-old mother was escorted into a police car, while grandmother was carried away in an ambulance; the moment when mother's best friend whispered to classmates that grandmother had gone crazy, when what she had suffered was a nervous breakdown; the lies social workers told mother that when she was old enough to be on her own, she could take grandmother from the hospital and they could be a family again, when all the while those workers knew mother would never have the income to support both herself and grandmother; and the worst moment, when mother was pregnant with my oldest brother and the hospital informed her by letter that grandmother had died and the body had already been "disposed of' two weeks prior. She hadn't even known grandmother was sick. I picture myself folding and wrapping this shroud into a neat package: storing it where mother can no longer be hurt by it. Yet in storing it away, I also see myself embracing those scars, for in embracing them I break the cycle of pain.

The Napa State hospital where my grandmother died still exists about a mile down the road. The vault that once held her ashes, along with all the other faceless ashes, now lies vacant of those decades between 1924 and 1964. Only the memory exists. Across the street from the hospital lies an old grocery shop where once a little girl made friends with some of those nameless inmates who, being allowed brief moments of freedom, used to come shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables. Would grandmother have walked across that street? It was this little girl, grown to adulthood, who erected the tombstone. As my gaze wanders, I hope the old belief is true—-that a child can heal what adults cannot.

The cemetery is swept clean of leaves. My grandmother stands before me: a stone image without a name. For everyone else, she is the "all those" on the inscription. For me, she is the mystery of my past, the hand never touched, the cheek never kissed, the woman I love because she gave birth to such a wonderful mother. Just blue and dust and yellow fields surround the two of us in the summer heat.

The others buried here are with us too. I can feel their presence. But though they inhabit the same plot of land, they do not share the strange far away bond my grandmother and I share. She has been waiting half a century for someone to hear her song. Now that I am attending, her vigil can end.

The fields are dappled with scrub oak. I am here, I whisper to the quiet earth. The chatter and jabber of blackbirds and blue jays arguing in the heat disturbs the air. I am here, I say.

For some time, I sit on my knees on grandmother's earth, the sun against my back. It could be a few minutes or even an hour. I don't keep track. The birds, the heat, the dust all fade into light. Sound ceases. I shut my eyes, aware of the white sky, the misted world beyond the lids. When I open them again, a movement flickers in the growing shadows. It is evening. A lone tiger swallowtail dances back and forth above the gravestone, then flies into the branches of one of the scrub oaks nearby. I try to follow, but as quick and fleeting as the moment, it is gone.

I am with you Grandma.

Here in my garden once again, it is autumn. The sun is cooler, the mourning doves have arrived at the feeder. The leaves of the walnut are just turned yellow. They have only fallen in sparse amounts—not yet time to rake them. It will be a later autumn than usual. I begin to trim the roses, the lavender, the germander. The horrors and joys of everyday life spill around the outside of my fence, yet in my garden I am inside myself and for a short while I am not touched by the realm beyond my plants. It falls away like the discarded cuttings.

I work, I hum and grandmother's voice returns through the leaves that have not yet fallen.

I am with you, it sings. I have felt your footstep and touched your hand; caught your tears and felt your sunlight. I am deep inside. Just listen.

Through the branches the sun glows cool and sharp. Not long now, the last tiger swallowtail of the season will ride the changing wind.

The bees gather the last bit of pollen from the lantana. Late afternoon shadows speckle the lawn. Mother comes out to hang the wash.

"Not yet time to rake," I say.

"Give it a week or so," she replies. "There's no point in rushing anything. You'll have plenty to do soon enough." I glance upward into the fifty-foot tree. She is right.

But I am impatient for the leaves, for the memories and stories, for grandmother's children at my feet, and for the promises that make raking the leaves all worthwhile. I am impatient for the return of the last tiger swallowtail, and for the memories I have yet to create. I know the winter will bring another spring of daffodils and larkspur, climbing roses and jasmine. It will bring the summer all the more close when grandmother's birthday shall rise in the August heat, a mirage that causes me to remember. Then in the fall, mother will hang the wash, the black walnut leaves will turn to shades of yellow and brown; the birds shall look to their feeder and bath; and the people will gather. A different song will catch the wind, and the visions that seep into my pillow will flood my dreams again.

How endless life seems before the last appearance of the swallowtail.

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