Read The Patron Saint of Butterflies for Free Online Page B
Authors: Cecilia Galante
bottles still run the length of each downstairs wall, and wide wooden beams meet in a V across the ceiling. When it rains, a smell like damp hay and violets fills the rooms.
When I was first sent to live in the loft here at the age of seven, which is the cutoff age for the nursery, I cried for a week. It was the first time since I had been born that I was going to be separated from Agnes, who was going back to live with her parents. (Another Mount Blessing rule dictates that all children be separated from their natural parents at six months of age and raised in the nursery until the age of seven. This is supposed to ensure that Emmanuel remains the primary parental figure.) I would still spend the majority of my days in school, and Christine was instructed to come down every night to make sure that I was in bed, but without Agnes next to me in the little cot we shared for so long, I literally thought I was going to disappear. Even worse than that, now I was going to have to share space with Winky Martin.
I saw Winky just about every day as he pushed a mop around the floors of the Great House, but I, like the rest of the kids, had always kept my distance. I wasn’t really sure what it was, but there was definitely something wrong with Winky. In the head, I mean. Some people even said he was retarded, but I just found him frightening. He grunted and wheezed, his meaty face shining with perspiration as he moved his mop back and forth across the floor. Even under his blue robe, his heavy, awkward shape was apparent, and when he walked, he led with his head, swaying it back and forth like a giant agitated bear. Agnes clutched me when we heard the news, herblue eyes big and round. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. Just hide under the covers whenever he comes in.”
I did just that for the first week, listening to his muffled grunts from under my blankets, squeezing my eyes shut and clutching George so hard my palms got sweaty. I stared at my little yellow night-light and waited for Winky to climb the steps up to my room and do something horrible to me. But the dreaded footsteps never came. In fact, it seemed as if Winky didn’t even realize—or much care—that I was there in the first place. And then one night, after I climbed into bed, I noticed a strange book under my pillow. It was large and heavy, like a dictionary, with an enormous orange and black butterfly on the front cover. Over the picture, in an arc, was the title The Encyclopedia of Butterflies . The inside was jammed with information about every butterfly known to man. It was the most beautiful book I had ever seen. I pored over it, savoring every drawing and photograph, memorizing whole passages about the flight patterns and mating habits of the tiny insects. There were butterflies with fantastic names, words I had never even heard before: whirlabouts, skippers, emperors, sulphurs, and monarchs. It took me two weeks to read the book from cover to cover, still under my blankets, with George perched on the mattress next to me.
After that I began to poke around downstairs. There wasn’t much to look at, since Winky’s entire room consisted of a dresser with four drawers, a single bed (unmade and wrinkled), and a chair covered with a green corduroy material. The items on top of his dresser consisted only of a blue hairbrush (minus half its bristles), a clock, and three other books about butterflies. But his bed was messy. I liked that. My bedspreadupstairs, stretched taut the way Christine had taught me, was just another reminder of the “strive for perfection” rule we had to follow, which, in my book anyway, is complete crap. Who in their right mind seriously thinks that a human being can go through life without making a mistake? It’s impossible! I’m constantly trying to get this through Agnes’s head, but she just won’t listen. She doesn’t listen when I point out some of the other inconsistencies of the Big Four either,
When I was first sent to live in the loft here at the age of seven, which is the cutoff age for the nursery, I cried for a week. It was the first time since I had been born that I was going to be separated from Agnes, who was going back to live with her parents. (Another Mount Blessing rule dictates that all children be separated from their natural parents at six months of age and raised in the nursery until the age of seven. This is supposed to ensure that Emmanuel remains the primary parental figure.) I would still spend the majority of my days in school, and Christine was instructed to come down every night to make sure that I was in bed, but without Agnes next to me in the little cot we shared for so long, I literally thought I was going to disappear. Even worse than that, now I was going to have to share space with Winky Martin.
I saw Winky just about every day as he pushed a mop around the floors of the Great House, but I, like the rest of the kids, had always kept my distance. I wasn’t really sure what it was, but there was definitely something wrong with Winky. In the head, I mean. Some people even said he was retarded, but I just found him frightening. He grunted and wheezed, his meaty face shining with perspiration as he moved his mop back and forth across the floor. Even under his blue robe, his heavy, awkward shape was apparent, and when he walked, he led with his head, swaying it back and forth like a giant agitated bear. Agnes clutched me when we heard the news, herblue eyes big and round. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered. “Don’t worry. Just hide under the covers whenever he comes in.”
I did just that for the first week, listening to his muffled grunts from under my blankets, squeezing my eyes shut and clutching George so hard my palms got sweaty. I stared at my little yellow night-light and waited for Winky to climb the steps up to my room and do something horrible to me. But the dreaded footsteps never came. In fact, it seemed as if Winky didn’t even realize—or much care—that I was there in the first place. And then one night, after I climbed into bed, I noticed a strange book under my pillow. It was large and heavy, like a dictionary, with an enormous orange and black butterfly on the front cover. Over the picture, in an arc, was the title The Encyclopedia of Butterflies . The inside was jammed with information about every butterfly known to man. It was the most beautiful book I had ever seen. I pored over it, savoring every drawing and photograph, memorizing whole passages about the flight patterns and mating habits of the tiny insects. There were butterflies with fantastic names, words I had never even heard before: whirlabouts, skippers, emperors, sulphurs, and monarchs. It took me two weeks to read the book from cover to cover, still under my blankets, with George perched on the mattress next to me.
After that I began to poke around downstairs. There wasn’t much to look at, since Winky’s entire room consisted of a dresser with four drawers, a single bed (unmade and wrinkled), and a chair covered with a green corduroy material. The items on top of his dresser consisted only of a blue hairbrush (minus half its bristles), a clock, and three other books about butterflies. But his bed was messy. I liked that. My bedspreadupstairs, stretched taut the way Christine had taught me, was just another reminder of the “strive for perfection” rule we had to follow, which, in my book anyway, is complete crap. Who in their right mind seriously thinks that a human being can go through life without making a mistake? It’s impossible! I’m constantly trying to get this through Agnes’s head, but she just won’t listen. She doesn’t listen when I point out some of the other inconsistencies of the Big Four either,