He was twelve. A few years younger than Brooks. His father had dragged him ten stops on the bus out to Cherryville. There were no cherries there; Jules had known that because even the toughest kids on his block, like Fireman Timmy’s son, Clive, called Cherryville the ghetto, and when neighborhood moms stopped to chat on one another’s stoops, they talked about the C-ville gang wars. He knew it was a bad place where bad shit happened because when his pops talked about Them, he meant the blacks who lived in Cherryville.
His pops said there were two kinds. Those trying to make a life for their families. And Them. Them let their kids run around in dirty diapers and too-small shoes. Them were late with bills and got their heat turned off midwinter but leased shiny cars with neon tubes lighting up the undercarriage and stereos that boomed bass so it made your stomach roll. Them let their dogs crap on the sidewalk, counting on the rain to wash it away. Them dumped old furniture, stoves, cracked sinks, and stained toilets on the sidewalk without calling sanitation for a pickup so the garbage sat for weeks.
It was his view, his pops said. Jules’s too.
Now his dad was dumping Jules there with them to teach him a lesson.
Get off the damn bus, his pops ordered.
The tired passengers turned to stare. They were all brown-skinned like him and his dad but felt foreign. Jules was in his fancy school uniform and the gray cashmere overcoat his mother had taken on extra mending work to pay for, wanting him to fit right in at school. The faces on the bus were slack, uninterested, and years later, he’d understand that they’d practiced that look of not caring to protect themselves from all the shitty things they had and would witness.
His pops’s eyes had been rolling mad since he’d picked Jules up from Mrs. Lee’s corner convenience store, where Jules worked a few hours after school twice a week. Mr. Lee had gone through Jules’s backpack and found the pack of baseball cards he’d swiped. Mr. Lee called his pops. Who was throwing Jules into the dark streets of C-ville, among the gangs of murderous thugs his dad had warned him about—spinning stories rich with guns and beheadings and heroin and man-rape and dirty switchblades, stories darker than any Grimm fairy tale. A skinny motherfucker in a private school blazer. A crybaby. ’Cause he was crying, whispering through his tears and snot. Never again, Pops. Never. I swear.
He huddled inside the bus shelter—the tips of his school shoes, polished by his mom every night, shining in the streetlight. He sweated through his clothes and when the bus came back on the opposite route twenty minutes later and he climbed on and sat next to his father, his pops’s nose wrinkled from Jules’s stink.
His father’s hand reached between Jules’s legs and pinched the soft inner skin of his thigh.
Hope you learned your lesson, son. Fear is your best friend. You stay scared. Hear me?
Jules heard him now.
* * *
His father visited. In the hour Jules walked the prison yard watching, waiting, for someone—a relative of the boy or a hit man hired by the boy’s family—to kill him. Stab him in the liver with a jail-made knife, break his neck with a finely placed grip-squeeze-twist. He spoke with his father in the yard, figuring it didn’t hurt that he looked crazy arguing with himself. Hell, maybe he was crazy. Not crazy enough, his lawyer had told him after the psychiatrist from court visited.
His lawyer, Stan—a jittery twentysomething in thick, black-framed glasses—had asked so many questions. About Jules’s parents, his grandparents, stretching way back when, to great-great grandparents he’d only seen in yellowed photos in his mom’s albums. Stan was digging, Jules realized, for a story. An offering for the judge. Stan asked Jules if anything bad had happened to anyone in his family, any victims of racially incited crime. Jules had almost laughed. Shit, what black man didn’t have a bucketload of stories to tell?
They had meeting after meeting. Jules recounting stories his mother and father had told him years ago, or he’d overheard as a kid at his great-aunt’s dining-room table. Jules ate half-cooked Hot Pockets and cherry Coca-Cola Stan bought from the vending machines in the visitors’ area, and the small gray meeting room filled with ghosts. His father’s. His mother’s. His great-aunt Eunice, who’d been raped by a gang of white men at the hotel she’d cleaned uptown. The further back, the bloodier the stories, the happier the lawyer seemed—nodding as he took pages of notes on yellow legal pads. More, Stan demanded, more. Jules’s grandfather Samuel had lost three fingers in a machinery accident at a lumber mill down in North Carolina. His grandmother Laverne’s daughter Susanna had drowned in the Ashepoo River floods when she was four, Eva’s age. And there was Grandpa John, his pops’s father, a sad old man with a crooked back who Jules remembered visiting when he was a boy. He’d had a cane top made from the hoof of a deer, the fur blond and silky.
Sad how? Stan asked, and Jules felt the lawyer lean forward in his chair. Hungry for a story.
He told how Grandpa John’s shop—a general store that sold packets of seeds and dry goods and other sundries to the blacks of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania—was burned down to its posts one night by a group of men Jules’s dad claimed were KKK. The lawyer pumped a sleek suited arm in the air. Like they’d bet on the right horse. PTSD, his lawyer explained. Handed down through generations. Trauma so powerful it changes a man’s DNA.
Jules wanted this to be true, and when he visited with Stan each week, the man’s enthusiasm when he spun that tale (Jules knew the story no longer belonged to him, not to Grandpa John either) almost made Jules believe he hadn’t known what he’d been doing when he grabbed the rifle from the glass case in the Castle entry hall, pointed, and fired.
He should have known it would be loaded. What gun on that island wasn’t? He should’ve seen it coming, starting with the Cattleya labiate. The fragile orchid bobbing up and down on that cow’s bosom at the fair. The demented Colonel asking Jules if he was the admiral’s man in the tower as the cold stone floor vibrated with the bell’s tolling. Should’ve, should’ve, should’ve circled Jules’s head like those bluebirds did Tom the cartoon cat’s head after he got bonked by the teeny mouse who looked like he couldn’t hurt a fly.
Jules lived for his talks with Pops, who seemed to enjoy them too. Some led to spats, insults, silent grudges that lasted two or three days—Jules sitting on the cold floor of his cell wishing for his father to return.
Julius. He felt his father shaking his balding head.
“You told me to follow the rules. I did that. And look where it got me.”
His father laughed. You call moving to an island thick with white people playing by the rules? Son, you strutted right into the lion’s den.
It was her, Jules thought. Scheherazade. Leslie had led him. He wouldn’t admit to it in front of his father—give him the pleasure of saying, again, I told you so.
“What good are the rules,” Jules asked, “the laws, moral this and that, when you can’t follow them and protect your family at the same time?”
His father’s voice was slow and dreamy, like he was half asleep. Or was it Jules who was falling asleep? Oh, is that what it was? Self-defense? I told you, he began.
Jules threw a plastic cup against the wall. Someone—a guard, an inmate—shouted Shut the fuck up down the cell block.
Tell me what I said. His father’s voice was stern. Disappointed. Had his father seen Leslie wail when she visited, the social worker dragging her from the visiting room so as not to upset the other families? Did he know about Brooks refusing to talk to Jules even over the phone? And Eva’s tiny voice telling him she loved him just before the pay phone timer cut out so he couldn’t say it back.
What did I tell you?
“Get off the island,” Jules mumbled.
Every night, in the garden, as Jules had picked the caterpillars until his blisters wept. Every night, as he’d scraped the furred egg clusters off his chestnut tree. His pops had whispered the same command.
Get off that island. Grab your son and get gone. Go. Go now.
He should’ve known when he saw that tar-faced lawn jockey the night of the traveling dinner party, tucked among the crimson Spigelia marilandica blooms. When he listened to Veronica make excuses, prattling on about George Washington’s devoted servant who’d given his life for his master. He tried to imagine what Jocko would’ve seen if he hadn’t perished, hadn’t frozen to death with the reins of Washington’s horses in his hands. The praise, the hurrahs. All those white men acting as if, for a moment, he was their equal. How beautiful Jocko’s reflection would’ve seemed staring back at him, mirrored in those white men’s eyes.
Jules sat crosslegged in his cell (crisscross applesauce, he heard little Eva say) and recited the Latin names of plants. Digitalis grandiflora (yellow foxglove), lonicera caprifolium (honeysuckle), myosotis sylvatica (forget-me-not). Named two thousand years ago by Carl Linnaeus, a God-fearing man who believed in a divine plan, and whose rigid classification system—Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order … had always made Jules feel safe. More now than ever.
He closed his eyes and imagined a cell within his cell but one whose walls were living, breathing, growing. Blooming. Vines and tendrils stretched across the scarred cement—pink twining clematis and Heavenly Blue morning glory. His mind was a magic wand. One flick and fiery vitis coignetiae’s heart-shaped leaves striped a wall; another draped with fragrant starry jasmine.
He smelled the boxwood’s oily leaves heating in the sun, heard the rustle of fern fronds. He was in the secret garden, the room at the heart of the maze. The buttery forsythia was in bloom, the peonies bursting and spotted with ladybugs. Plenty of time to replant. Grow from seed. Heal. He dug his naked fingers into the soil, past the blind earthworms and pill bugs and even a scuttling millipede. Deeper, deeper, he hit sand and silt, and, deeper still, cool damp clay. He dug until he himself was buried—his mouth and nose filled with a dark earthy odor. When he opened his eyes, he felt spent, his muscles aching, as if he’d worked his land all day.
Many species of birds have been observed feeding on gypsy moth larvae or adults. Nuthatches, chickadees, towhees, vireos, northern orioles, catbirds, robins, and blue jays are probably more important in sparse gypsy moth populations. Cuckoos and flocking species such as starlings, grackles, red-winged blackbirds, and crows may be attracted to areas where the gypsy moth exists in large numbers.
Some mammalian predators of the gypsy moth include the white-footed mouse, shrews, chipmunks, voles, and squirrels. Shrews, which are often mistaken for mice, are voracious insect feeders that consume their own weight in prey each day.
—“The Homeowner and the Gypsy Moth: Guidelines for Control,” United States Department of Agriculture, Home and Garden Bulletin, No. 227 (1979)