An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [68]
There was a terror connected with moths that attracted and repelled me. I would face down the terror. I continued reading about moths, and branched out to other insects.
I liked the weird horned beetles rumbling along everywhere, even at the country club, whose names were stag, elephant, rhinoceros. They were so big I could hear them walk; their sharp legs scraped along the poolside concrete. I liked the comical true bugs, like the red-and-blue-striped leafhoppers, whose legs looked like yellow plastic; they hopped on roses in the garden at home. At Lake Erie I watched the solitary wasps that hunted along the beach path; they buried their paralyzed caterpillar prey in holes they dug so vigorously the sand flew. I even liked the dull little two-winged insects, the diptera, because this order contained mosquitoes, about several species of which I knew something because they bore interesting diseases. I studied under the microscope our local mosquitoes in various stages—a hairy lot—dipped in a cup from Molly’s wading pool.
To collect insects I equipped myself with the usual paraphernalia: glass-headed pins, a net, and a killing jar. It was insects in jars again—but unlike the hapless teacher who put the big moth’s cocoon in the little mason jar, I knew, I thought, what I was doing. In the bottom of the killing jar—formerly a pickle jar—I laid a wad of cotton soaked in cleaning fluid containing carbon tetrachloride, which compound I thrilled myself by calling, offhandedly, “carbon tet.” A circle of old door screen prevented the insects’ tangling in the cotton. I placed each insect on the screen and quickly tightened the jar lid. Then, as if sensitively, I looked away. After a suitable interval I poured out the dead thing as carefully as I could, and pinned it and its festive, bunting-like row of fluttering labels in a cigar box. My grandfather had saved the cigar boxes, one for each order of insect; they smelled both sharp and sweet, of cedar and leaf tobacco. I pinned the insects in rows, carefully driving the pins through chitinous thoraxes just where the books indicated. Four beetles I collected were so big they had a cigar box to themselves.
Once I returned to my attic bedroom after four weeks at summer camp. There, beside the detective table, under the plaster-stain ship, was the insect collection, a stack of cigar boxes. I checked the boxes. In the big beetles’ cigar box I found a rhinoceros beetle crawling on its pin. The pin entered the beetle through that triangle in the thorax between the wing-cover tops; it emerged ventrally above and between the legs. The big black beetle’s six legs hung down waving in the air, well above the floor of the cigar box. It crawled and never got anywhere. It must have been pretty dehydrated; the attic was hot. Presumably the beetle’s legs had been waving in the air like that in search of a footing for the past four weeks.
I hated insects; that was the fact. I never caught my stamp collection trying to crawl away.
Butterflies die with folded wings. Before they’re mounted, butterflies require an elaborate chemical treatment to relax their dead muscles, a bit more every day, so you can spread their brittle wings without shattering them. After a few grueling starts at this relaxing and spreading of dead butterflies, I avoided it. When on rare occasions I killed butterflies, I stuck them away somewhere and forgot about them.
One hot evening I settled on my bed in my summer nightgown with a novel I had looked forward to reading. I lay back, opened the book, and a dead butterfly dropped headfirst on my bare neck. I jumped up, my skin crawling, and it slid down my nightgown. Somehow it stuck to my sweaty skin; when I brushed at it—whooping aloud—it fragmented, and pieces stuck to my hands and rained down on the floor. Most of the dead butterfly, which still looked as if it were demurely praying while falling apart, with folded yellow wings in shreds and a blasted black body, fell out on my foot.