An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [67]
There, at the twig’s top, the moth shook its sodden clumps of wings. When it spread those wings—those beautiful wings—blood would fill their veins, and the birth fluids on the wings’ frail sheets would harden to make them tough as sails. But the moth could not spread its wide wings at all; the jar was too small. The wings could not fill, so they hardened while they were still crumpled from the cocoon. A smaller moth could have spread its wings to their utmost in that mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was big. Its gold furred body was almost as big as a mouse. Its brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if there had been no mason jar. It would have been big as a wren.
The teacher let the deformed creature go. We all left the classroom and paraded outside behind the teacher with pomp and circumstance. She bounced the moth from its jar and set it on the school’s asphalt driveway. The moth set out walking. It could only heave the golden wrinkly clumps where its wings should have been; it could only crawl down the school driveway on its six frail legs. The moth crawled down the driveway toward the rest of Shadyside, an area of fine houses, expensive apartments, and fashionable shops. It crawled down the driveway because its shriveled wings were glued shut. It crawled down the driveway toward Shadyside, one of several sections of town where people like me were expected to settle after college, renting an apartment until they married one of the boys and bought a house. I watched it go.
I knew that this particular moth, the big walking moth, could not travel more than a few more yards before a bird or a cat began to eat it, or a car ran over it. Nevertheless, it was crawling with what seemed wonderful vigor, as if, I thought at the time, it was still excited from being born. I watched it go till the bell rang and I had to go in. I have told this story before, and may yet tell it again, to lay the moth’s ghost, for I still see it crawl down the broad black driveway, and I still see its golden wing clumps heave.
I had not suspected, among other things, that moths came so big. From a school library book I learned there were several such enormous American moths, all wild silk moths which spun cocoons, and all common.
Gene Stratton Porter’s old Moths of the Limberlost caught my eye; for some years after I read it, it was my favorite book. From one of its queer painted photographs I learned what the Polyphemus moth would have looked like whole: it was an unexpected sort of beauty, brown and wild. It had pink stripes, lavender crescents, yellow ovals—all sorts of odd colors no one would think to combine. Enormous blue eye-spots stared eerily from its hind wings. Coincidentally, it was in the Polyphemus chapter that the book explained how a hatched moth must spread its wings quickly, and fill them with blood slowly, before it can fly.
Gene Stratton Porter had been a vigorous, loving kid who grew up long ago near a swampy wilderness of Indiana, and had worked up a whole memorable childhood out of insects, of all things, which I had never even noticed, and my childhood was half over.
When she was just a tot, she learned how entomologists carry living moths and butterflies without damaging them. She commonly carried a moth or butterfly home from her forest and swamp wanderings by lightly compressing its thorax between thumb and index finger. The insect stops moving but is not hurt; when you let it go, it flies away.
One day, after years of searching, she found a yellow swallowtail. This is not the common tiger swallowtail butterfly, but Papilio turnus: “the largest, most beautiful butterfly I had ever seen.” She held it carefully in the air, its wings high over the back of her fingers. She wanted to show the fragile, rare creature to her father and then carry it back to precisely where she found it. But she was only a child, and so she came running home with it instead of walking. She tripped, and her fingers pinched through the butterfly