Edie McKechnie was digging in the woodpile searching for slaters, spiders, beetles, anything wriggly with lots of legs, when her brother, Robbie, came racing home with his friends: the show-off big kid, Billy, who always bossed the others around; Wally, who looked like he’d eaten a chelsea bun too many; some other silly, dirty boys.
‘Want to see a trick, Edie?’ Billy asked.
Edie glanced up, then ignored him. She lifted a piece of wood. Underneath, in the dirt and damp wood dust, she found four slaters. She flipped one onto its back with her nail, watched the pale eyelash legs wave, the soft grey armour curl.
‘Look!’ yelled Billy.
Edie noticed the stick for the first time when Billy reached out and flicked off Wally’s cap.
‘Hey,’ said Wally as he scrambled to catch it, then picked it up from the ground.
‘Let me, let me try,’ said Robbie.
As he grabbed the stick and aimed at Wally’s head, Edie noticed dirt all over her brother’s clothes, grass and who-knows-what in the mess of his thick red hair.
‘Ow! Ya bounder!’ yelled Wally. ‘I’ll knock yer blimmin’ head off!’
‘No blimmin’ way!’ Robbie laughed and ran off, with Wally and the other boys chasing.
‘Was that Robbie?’ Their mother stood in the doorway, her face flushed from thumping irons onto sheets, shirts, petticoats, skirts, swapping them as they cooled with a hot iron from the range.
‘He’s taken off with Wally and Billy again.’
‘Bother. I need him to chop wood. You’d better come in and help me cook dinner.’
Edie looked down. Her slaters had disappeared, even the one she’d flipped onto its back. She’d have to come out later with a jar. She wiped her hands on her skirt, stood up and went into the house, trying to remember what slaters ate for dinner.
*
Katherine McKechnie’s neck and shoulders ached. She still felt the effects of hauling yesterday’s wet washing and today the effort of lifting heavy irons. In winter, the range and the irons and the work kept her warm, but now sweat plastered her bodice, her petticoats, to her skin.
She stood at the bench and lopped the top and bottom off an onion, peeled away the skin. She should have started earlier, not finished ironing shirts that Donald wouldn’t need till Thursday or Friday . . . Ow! She examined her nail. Thank goodness, no blood. She blinked. What was God thinking when he created onions? She wiped her eyes, hurriedly chopped, shoved the pieces into the hot fat, tossed a second onion into the bottom of the pantry. Glanced at Edie.
‘Careful . . . If you cut off a finger it won’t grow back, you know . . . Here . . .’ She took the knife from her daughter and showed her again. ‘Keep your fingers out of the way. As you cut, you have to keep moving your hand down the carrot away from the knife . . . That’s more like it . . . When it gets too little, just leave it and start another. I’ll finish off.’
‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘What do slaters eat?’
Katherine looked up from the kidney she was slicing. ‘Well, I don’t know. What do other insects eat?’
Edie stopped chopping. ‘They’re not insects, Mum.’
‘What?’
‘Insects have six legs.’
Katherine stared at her daughter. She wasn’t even seven. ‘Where did you get that from?’ she asked.
‘You know – that book we got from the library.’
Katherine laughed. Of course. Both the children could read beyond their years. How could they not with their father a newspaperman, a purveyor of words, as he liked to say. But it was Edie, the youngest, who seemed the most eager, dragging Katherine to the Newtown library each week, bringing her novels by Jane Austen or George Eliot – surely she couldn’t really understand them – and non-fiction books with beautiful colour illustrations on any subject – ornithology, Egyptian history, Etruscan architecture. Robbie, on the other hand, seemed to thrive on the exploits of Revolver Dick or Jim, the Slayer of the Prairies. If he’d been old enough, one of his favourite pastimes would have been the games evenings at the library. But they were shut down for ‘destructiveness and rowdiness’. Katherine smiled grimly. Give him a few years and he’d likely be one of the chief culprits.
She scraped chunks of beef and kidney into the pot, looked across at Edie. ‘So how many legs do slaters have?’
‘Fourteen.’ Edie grinned. ‘I counted.’
‘So what do you call slaters if they’re not insects? Did it tell you that in—?’
The front door slammed and Robbie came running down the hall to the kitchen. Peered into the smoking pot. ‘Steak and kidney . . . Can I have something to eat?’ He reached for the biscuit tin.
Katherine smacked away his hand. ‘Go and chop some wood and bring it in, and then you can help yourself to a slice of bread and dripping.’ She looked at his filthy face, the grass stains and dirt on his clothes, his black-edged nails. ‘But wash your hands first. I don’t want dirty marks on the loaf.’
After he’d gone out, Edie asked, ‘Do you think slaters might like bread?’
‘I don’t know, dear. Ants do. And birds.’ She noticed a chunk pulled out of the loaf. ‘And naughty boys.’
An hour later, Robbie put down his fork after just one mouthful. ‘I’m not hungry,’ he said.
Katherine sighed. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have eaten so much bread then, should you? I did say one slice.’
Donald McKechnie spat into his plate. ‘No wonder the boy can’t eat! How long did you cook this for? Five minutes? How many times do I have to tell you?’
‘Then perhaps you shouldn’t insist on steak and kidney on Tuesdays. It takes all day to do the ironing and that doesn’t leave much time for cooking.’
‘Then put the dinner on in the morning, woman! Haven’t you got anything in that skull of yours?’
Katherine examined Donald’s red face, his twitching moustache. She had more teeth in that skull of hers than he did, that’s for sure. What did he say? Fed up to the back teeth? It was his back teeth, or lack thereof, that was the problem. She imagined his mouth stuffed full of tough, sinewy stew, his jaw working and working, gravy leaking from the corner of his mouth, from his ears. She looked down and tried not to smile.
‘Eat it tomorrow,’ she muttered without meeting his eyes.
She took his plate into the kitchen and scraped the stew back into the pot, sliced the last piece of Sunday’s roast, cooked till it fell from the bone (thank goodness on wash days they ate leftover roast), and laid it on the remains of Donald’s gravy. She could have told him that Mac had run out of kidneys, that he’d told her to come back in the afternoon. She could have told him to wait another hour for dinner instead of always insisting it be on the table at six. She spooned more gravy over the top and took the plate back out.
Donald was telling Robbie about some incident at work: ‘. . . and then the peabrain . . .’
Katherine could hear them laughing but she didn’t know, didn’t care why. She felt tired. Very tired.
She’d met him at her sister’s wedding. She noticed the way people listened to his stories, laughed at his jokes. The way women could not help but flirt with him. Even her mother and sister. She watched, fascinated, almost horrified at how he moved through the room, a steamer moving through water, leaving a wake behind him.
Did he feel her watching? He looked up, directly at her, made some excuse and made his way across the dance floor.
He told her the radiance of her dress brought out the light in her eyes like the wings of a Doxocopa cherubina. A butterfly, he said. From Venezuela. Peru. Had she heard of those places? Its uniqueness, he said, lay in its iridescence. You might look once and see only a plain but lovely green, but look again, down its wings, and it was like gazing into a prism – shimmering strips of blue and green.
‘What about the whites of my eyes?’ she’d said recklessly. ‘Do they remind you of cabbage butterflies?’
He’d stared at her, surprised, and she blushed. She turned to leave, but he caught her by the arm – she could feel the tingle of his hand on her skin. He looked deeply into her eyes and said, ‘You should come and see my collection. It is but a small affair, but the Doxocopa cherubina is well worth perusing.’
Within the week he was walking her around his parlour, stopping at each framed, winged body. ‘Katherine,’ he said. ‘Kate . . .’ He placed the palm of his hand upon her back as he guided her from one specimen to another, told her butterflies and moths belonged to the same order – only butterflies were the more beautiful. Later she discovered he’d bought them from a lepidopterist he’d interviewed for the Post. He’d memorised the Latin names, country of origin, distinguishing features of male and female.
The Doxocopa cherubina was still pinned and framed on the wall of their parlour. Breathtaking if, as he said, you looked down, not up, its wings. It was very still. It had lost the capacity to breathe.
As Katherine watched her husband eat soft meat and gravy and cauliflower boiled till its grey lumpiness mashed in the mouth like small brains, she saw very clearly – had she not always known, if not for a temporary madness? – all of Donald’s women were Lepidoptera: either a moth to the flame or merely part of his silent collection.
‘. . . the gravy’s not bad, I suppose, considering . . .’
Katherine felt Donald’s gaze.
‘. . . but put in some more onion, for godsake. Didn’t you learn anything when Mother came to stay? God bless her soul, may she rest in peace.’
Katherine gathered up the plates and took them into the kitchen – Donald’s and Edie’s eaten clean, hers and Robbie’s barely touched. She could hear Donald getting down the dictionary that had passed from McKechnie father to McKechnie son. ‘Procrustean,’ Donald was saying. ‘Robbie, what does procrustean mean?’
Katherine’s finger stung where a line of blood pooled beneath her nail. She scraped the uneaten food back into the pot. Left the onions to rot in the pantry.