Welcome back to That Mystic Road, where I am telling stories from when I was a young girl long, long ago. I’ve always been intrigued by the mysterious images that remain in my memory, like the time we found this Luna moth in the barn and the winter the train fell into the river. I tried to chase these stories down only to be told by my siblings all the little details I got wrong according to their memories. But stories want to tell themselves the way they want to be told, and sometimes I just can’t control them, facts be darned. This is how I remember these winter events from sometime in the 1960s.
The afternoon had been a successful one in terms of spiders, moths, and bugs. After school my brother Lisle and I tramped down through the heavy snow to the Wenatchee River. Crossing the railroad track, we stopped to wonder why the snow never stuck to the ribbons that shone like the silver traces of two wandering snails. They curved through the apple orchards, met the river, then disappeared into a narrow gorge that held only the river and the rails.
Lisle bent down to test the steel with a mittened hand. “Too slippery,” he pronounced, “the snow falls off.” He gazed thoughtfully at the rails a moment longer. “And too bright. The snow melts when it sees the rails.” Everyone in my family knows a lot about nature.
High and noisy, the river rushed out of the gorge and into the bend, fast-moving rollover water with a steep cliff on the far side and a rocky bar on ours. We made our way up the shoreline, turning over rocks, poking in side pools of still water, breaking open rotten branches. In that cold weather, it took a trained eye to pick out the periwinkles clinging to the side of fist-sized granite chunks and quick fingers to catch a water skipper suddenly exposed to the air when a cottonwood log was moved.
Our collection went in little jars or bags squirreled away inside our powder pants and ski parkas. At the mouth of the gorge, we clambered onto the railroad tracks and slowly walked them home. We hopped off on our side, heading for the stable and evening chores.
“Listen,” I said. We could hear the train whistle in the gorge where sometimes the sound caused little avalanches off the cliffs. Daddy said it was dangerous to sound the whistle inside the gorge, but I always liked to hear the echo ring from cliff to cliff. A minute later, the train raced around the corner and tore a thousand miles an hour through the apple trees toward us. It ripped by within feet of us, the engineer waving out the window. Sound filled our whole bodies, making them shake in rhythm with the engine. We could see the gold light inside the dining car where heads turned briefly toward the window, then back again. In the orange Pullman cars, kids like us with faces pale as moths waved briefly as they hurtled by like blown leaves.
If I focused just right, for an instant I could freeze time. I could see the green banker’s lamps, the swinging fringe of the raised curtain, the white-coated waiter placing a glass of water on a white linen tablecloth. The curious eyes of the children, the turned faces of adults caught in a scrap of frozen conversation held suspended between the cliff and the river, then the dining car with its doll house detail ripped out of my gaze and went streaming by in a pennant of gold.
Lisle and I kicked the snow off our boots before we unlatched the stable door. It took both of us to break the seal of ice. The metal latch freed with a jerk ,and we fell inside together. The stable was much warmer with Lance, Cheryl’s horse, breathing in it. Lance was 16 hands tall, half quarter horse, half thoroughbred. His hair gleamed a burnished Irish red. His black tail flowed out behind, but we kept his mane roached into a crew cut I loved to run my hands along. His red ears had black tufts at the tips. They flipped and turned to follow the conversation, and his intelligent, dark eyes always seemed to understand what I was saying. A white blaze ran gracefully down his nose ending in a silvery gray-black muzzle that he pushed at me for apples or a rub or just to say, “Hi. Let’s go for a ride.” I have his smell in the deepest hay mows of my memory; in the summer, it is pungent with sage and sweat and dried river water, in the winter, steaming gently, intimately in the snowy pasture or inside the stable on freezing nights.
Lance welcomed company, turning his head to butt us on the shoulder and whicker in our ears as we ran the stiff-toothed currycombs through his shaggy winter coat. The work of currying had us down to our sweaters.
There were more bugs to be found in the stable, a big, sleepy looking spider, and in between the oat sacks a clawed beetle peered up out of the floorboards to see what all the racket was. It took some work to persuade him to travel in my jar; meanwhile, Lisle disappeared. I had just begun to wander around looking for him when I heard him call, “Sandy, c’mere, look at this.” His voice was full of awe, but for him that could mean reverence for anything from owl pellets to wood ticks. It would be something worth seeing, that was for sure.
Lisle was crouched down in a corner behind a sawhorse with a faded red and blue stitched saddle slung over it, smelling of years of well-handled leather. It was an obscure corner, but still, no one would have missed this beauty with a glance at the right angle: against the dark grain of the barn wood balanced a green Luna moth with six-inch wings. In each pale-green, translucent wing was etched a luminescent silver bore eyespot. The top edge of the forewings was a deep maroon. It had dark-pink legs on a stocky body covered with white hairs. The wings trailed elegant, long swallowtails, like an exaggerated green moth tuxedo. We both recognized it from Daddy’s Field Guide to Butterflies and Moths, but we’d never actually seen one. I knew for a fact it belonged neither in this geographical area nor in the dead of winter. Lunas were wild silkmoths, exotic even in their east of the Rockies home territory.
“A Luna,” Lisle breathed softly.
“Impossible,” I said positively, but there it was in the corner of the tack room, bathed in a glow of green and silver, carrying in its very existence the stories we’d read about hot, dark evenings, screen doors banging as laughing women came and went carrying trays of green drinks in silver-frosted glasses.
“D’ya think its alive?” Lisle asked.
I shook my head. If the moth were cold there was no way I knew to tell if it was just too cold to move or frozen to death. It was colder on this external wall, but the room had the heat of its enclosure and the animals. Carefully, handling it like the royalty it was, we took the Luna home to Daddy.
We unloaded everything else first. Daddy oohed and aahed appropriately. He explained where the periwinkle was in its life cycle, and immediately christened the fuzzy, brown spider Suzy.
“Make sure she goes back exactly where you found her,” he said, “These domestic spiders are the best friends a barn can have. Except gopher snakes,” he added as an afterthought.
All the little jars and bags went into the refrigerator door. Suzy got the butter compartment all to herself. “A note of suppressed excitement is in the air,” Daddy said. I nodded, climbing up into one of our wooden captain’s chairs and putting my elbows on the round oak table. Lisle opened the cellar door and came back with a #10 tin can behind his back.
“Close your eyes, Dad,” I said. We’d played this game a hundred times before.
Daddy obligingly shut his eyes. “What is it?” he asked. “I’ll bet it’s a blue-footed booby. No, my extra-sensory perception tells me it’s a talking yellow-fronted Amazon parrot blown off course and talking filthy pirate language. Don’t you be listening, Sandra Mardene!”
I giggled, “Dad, this is serious.”
“Okay, I’m serious now.”
“You can open your eyes,” Lisle said.
Daddy stared at the Luna on the table, gently resting on the black velvet cloth used as a backdrop to photograph insects. Each scale was tipped in gold, the silver filigree of the eyespots a lacy etching like frost on a green window. The swallowtails trailed behind like Chinese scarves, all stiff-brocaded glisten.
“All that way,” Daddy said in Lisle’s same tone of awe, “How could it happen? Impossible. Look, it’s a male. You can tell by the broad, feathery antennae. They’re always wider on the males than on females. No mouth, isn’t that amazing?”
That’s what I liked about my father. When things could be explained, he explained them to us in precise detail. But he let a good mystery stand on its own two feet.
After dinner dishes were cleared away, the dining room table was draped with more black velvet and accoutered with an assortment of high-powered lights and umbrella reflectors. In the winter Daddy photographed bugs especially. The bugs we gathered for him stayed dormant in the refrigerator, but they warmed up and became active under the lights. When Daddy or one of us could no longer control the shot, the glamorous model went back in the fridge to cool down. In the summer, Mom strictly forbade snakes in the fridge door.
That night I dreamed of the Luna moth, or perhaps I awoke in the night and padded in the chill air over to the window. The snow was falling again. The Luna was lit on a black maple branch. I think the Luna caught my reflection in the window, for it moved, a quick start, as of recognition. Then it lifted silently up, spreading filigree wings into the snow.
“Impossible,” Daddy said, and I said it now, too.
When I awakened again, it was to another silence. The 3:00 a.m. train hadn’t gone by. The whole household was accustomed to the roar and rock that came nightly, reassuring as a ship’s engine. Drifting in and out of sleep, I heard other motors, saw the reflected slant of headlights on my wall, climbing wildly to the ceiling as I knew it did when trucks crossed the tracks at night. Men's voices, muffled, then Mom’s sharp, clear as she directed her voice up the stairs. “Lisle. Sandy.” Just our names, but we knew the tone. Toren is still mad that no one woke her up and that she slept through the entire adventure.
I pulled jeans, sweater and boots on over the pink longjohns I slept in and raced down the stairs. The house was full of strangers.
“Go downstairs and get the camping blankets, Lisle. Sandy, make sandwiches out of anything you can find.”
Mom’s order didn’t include going into the living room or the piano room, but I could hear low voices like the distant river filling the house. Men, women and children, many of them wet and wrapped in blankets, sat and stood everywhere. Daddy’s photography lights were on over the dining room table where I thought I could see the bright splash of blood on Mom’s beige lace tablecloth. A dark-haired man worked with tools that winked back the brilliant light.
I sliced made venison-and-cheese sandwiches on Brannola bread. When the venison was gone, I switched to peanut butter, cheese, and pickle sandwiches, which were a favorite of mine. The Dutch oven had half a tamale pie in it, so I made tamale pie sandwiches like Mom would put in our sack lunches on school days. I stacked the sandwiches on oval platters and Mom or Lisle would take them away.
The fire was going in the river rock chimney. The house was an island of warmth surrounded by the snow, the orchards, the fast, black river, and the distant mountains. After a while, a woman came to make sandwiches with me and to put on pot after pot of coffee. I was too shy to speak to her, but she was very nice, asking where everything was and admiring the Dutch oven. Finally I blurted out, “What happened? Who are all these people?”
She looked at me, astonished. “Why, the train,” she said, “We’re the people from the train that fell into the river.”
The snow had stopped and the first orchid dawn flushed when Mom sent Lisle and me back to bed. At the top of the stairs I waved to the strange lady in the kitchen, and looked back at all the people still shuffling quietly about in our blankets. Many were sleeping rolled up on the floor or were staring into the fire or out the wide, front windows into the dawn. One man wearing a rescue worker jacket held a peanut butter, cheese and pickle sandwich in his hand. He was looking at it with an odd expression on his face that I couldn’t interpret. He didn’t glance up. I went back to bed and to the sleep that reached up and pulled me down into morning.
Lisle and I were up by seven. Downstairs all the people were gone, and Mom was vacuuming the front room. Oatmeal simmered on a back burner of the stove. I could hear the washing machine going in the basement. Lisle and I ate our oatmeal, then went out into the gem-hard brilliance of the day.
The tracks the trucks had made were partially filled with new snow. We hopped on the ice that had thick skinned the puddles, the crack reverberating with a satisfying snap. We climbed up on the rails that shone pure and silver against the black wood of the crossties. At the mouth of the gorge, we caught glimpse of Pullman orange. At the curve, we stopped and stared down. The train had slipped like a toy off the tracks and fallen sideways toward and partially into the river. The water was green with depth and black with cold, the rollover water tossing up white manes where it collided with the dining car.
“C’mon,” Lisle said, “Let’s look inside.”
We negotiated the wet, slippery boulders carefully until we could stand with one foot on the rocks and another across to the train linkage.
That peculiar, glassy green wavered down the aisle of the dining car, eddying out partially opened or cracked windows. Curtain fringes were salmon fins waving back and forth in one place, as if steadying themselves in the unfamiliar current. Deeper down on the floor at one end a pile of white crockery, all intact, tumbled slowly in place like gravel in a spawning redds.
Loose linen tablecloths flattened themselves like pale white cabbage moths fluttering here and there against a tilted table, a window. I saw one slowly edge its way out a cracked window, then with a jerk, it was whisked away by the river.
“Listen,” said Lisle, “It’s the 8:10.”
We stayed where we were as the 8:10 streamed by on the slippery, shiny rails. The people were back in the cars, warm and travelling fast through the wintry world. They looked out at the lovely train on its side, resting in the river, the children waving. I was happy that they were all alive. I wondered if they remembered us in the kitchen last night, spreading peanut butter and slicing pickles, or if our faces were no more than pale oval moons flashing against the green darkness of our river. Their faces passed like a flight of Luna moths flying southward into the snow.