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The Leaf Moths
by Elizabeth Genovise The husband and the wife are twenty-four, newly wed and freshly ensconced in a rented house in Clinton, Tennessee. The mountains curve around the house from behind like two great arms, and the road that winds its way from the main thoroughfare to their home looks like a glimmering river when the moon is out. It is May, and the wife, finished with the school year, delights in waiting for her husband to come home from the highway crew. She stands on their front porch with its five concrete steps and moves her hand along the warm brick of the wall where they have arranged a family of miniature cacti, each one wearing a pink or coral blossom like a showy little hat. “Quite a fashion statement, that,” the wife whispers, bending low over one of them. She could kiss it, prickles and all. She is in that stage of love when all things have the power to call up both joy and sympathy; earlier, checking the mail and finding a small brown envelope from the postman with a note asking for twenty cents to cover postage due please for a package a cousin had sent, she had a wild impulse to leave the postman a big tip along with the two dimes, or maybe a card, thanking him for his faithful service. The envelope, so quaint in this time of phones and flickering screens, seemed to need her protection. On a wicker table purchased at Goodwill is a stack of books from the used bookstore. The wife has not opened any of them, as it is their policy to wait for each other when they open books. They have a strange luck when it comes to used books; frequently they unearth mementos in the old pages, everything from plane tickets to letters to bank notes. They cherish these odds and ends, talk about the people who at one time possessed them. Once, finding a note tucked in a book that stated, Margot and Dean: We hope this sparks the renaissance you’ve been waiting for, they wound up talking long past midnight on this porch, plotting out their future, one in which renaissances always came, always revived what the years threatened to subdue. At twenty-four, they claimed to know all about it, love’s depreciation. They said it to each other: I know what can happen. Warming in the kitchen now is a carefully-gathered dinner, meatloaf and baby carrots and sweet potato fries the wife has prepared while dancing to music blaring from a 1940’s radio they found in an antique store. She likes to see her husband eat enormous quantities of food after his long day. She likes his posture as he eats, and the way he takes off his cap and moves one hand over his eyes first as though to wipe from his mind the parts of his day he doesn’t want to bring to their table. He is a good man, a descendant of ancient kings, she sometimes thinks. Quietly noble, even plastered in grime. Her husband’s battered truck is now visible, coming around the bend where a stream meanders beneath the road. The truck rumbles its way across the planks of the old bridge, making the boards murmur coming for you, coming for you. A storm is gathering in the distance, behind the truck—bruised clouds huddling together as though seeking safety in numbers. The wife can smell rain. She turns swiftly to press her nose to the mesh of the screen door, which always wears the scent of wet pennies when the air is damp. The husband snaps off the radio in his truck as he pulls into the gravel drive. He’s been listening to two people talk passionately about the disappearance of bees from bee farms across the Southeast, and it troubles him enough that he’s been talking back at the radio for ten miles: “Where are you, bees? What’s happened to you?” He has a memory of his father stroking the furry back of a bee and telling him, “They’ll surprise you, with this patience.” His father has been gone a year—went into a coma after a stroke and didn’t come out—and this morning, penciling out directions to a worksite on the back of a gas receipt, the husband saw that over the years his handwriting had become a perfect match for his father’s, down to the last letter. He wanted to tell his wife about it but she was so sensitive, so easily moved to tears, that he knew he couldn’t. Just last night they got to talking about childhood toys and obsessions, and he told her about a careworn GI Joe figure he’d had, a plastic man whose arms and legs had repeatedly fallen off and been tied back on with rubber bands and string. “I always got him working again,” he told his wife, whose eyes were large and wet. He, too, caught himself blinking fast when she spoke of a troll doll she’d gotten at a piano recital, when her teacher was handing out prizes after all the performances were done. “Nobody wanted her prizes,” his wife said. “That poor lady had no idea what kids liked. Everything was so strange.” She’d made a point of choosing the ugly thing and had kept it in her hands for the duration of the party so that her old teacher would see. His wife is waiting on the top step of the porch, wearing a fluttery white blouse. When he climbs out of his truck, she moves quickly toward him, arms open. He tries to warn her about the dust and debris on his clothes but she wraps herself in his limbs in that way she has, like a gift wiggling its way into the paper and the bow. He smells vanilla in her hair. “Shower with me?” he mumbles into the sweetness. “Oh, yes.” “Any headaches today?” Over her head, he scans the porch rail for the damp cloth he sometimes finds draped there when she’s been in pain. “I finally had a day without one.” “Good. Good.” They start up the steps together, awkwardly because he is so much taller than she is, her hips so much wider than his. One day soon, he thinks, they will have children. Children who will look like them and like the parents they have lost. Those children will plant jelly beans in the garden in hopes of growing candy flowers and they will scribble maps to hidden treasure in the mountain laurel. They will hide in closets and under beds, falling asleep there until the husband or the wife taps them on the shoulder to awaken them. “Stop,” his wife says suddenly, grabbing his forearm. “What?” She motions him to crouch down with her on the steps. She points; motionless on the concrete is what at first looks like a stray autumn leaf, palest brown, veined and delicate, a ghost of its once-vibrant self. But when the husband leans forward, he sees that it is actually a moth. The creature’s wings are outspread but utterly still. He can see its rounded body and head, its fragile antennae. “Is she dead?” his wife asks, turning her wide eyes on him. “I don’t know.” With exquisite gentleness his wife takes one wing between finger and thumb. She lifts. The creature does not move. “She’s fighting me,” his wife says in surprise. The moth shakes her off, hopping to the left and then taking sudden flight. The husband watches it move on the wind until it vanishes into the woods behind the house. “She’s okay,” his wife breathes. “She’s okay.” They go inside together, arm in arm. “I wonder who they are, where they go,” his wife says. “The leaf moths.” “You mean, what they are,” the husband teases as they begin to undress each other. “I mean who.” He is forty-four now, married to another woman, hiking in the Smoky Mountains with their eight-year-old son. The two of them kneel together in the shallow waters of a trailside stream. It is May and the river stones glitter blue, rose, and gold beneath the tiny rapids. Something catches the man’s eye. It is a lizard, under the water, camouflaged among the stones. The man thinks he can see its tiny pulse, or perhaps it is only the current, bobbing with the sunbeams over the lizard’s silken skin. The boy follows his father’s intent gaze. His hand shoots out to grab the creature—a child’s instinct—but the man seizes his wrist with such force that the boy lets out a little cry. “Don’t,” the man says. “Leave it be.” He doesn’t want to know if it is dead. And yet he can’t bear to see it dart away, out of sight. |
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