The kill-jar smells like a hospital. Even in these piney woods its chemical scent rises up out of his little canvas rucksack and tempts him to open it. He can feel it there on his hip, knocking softly against the balsa-wood mounting blocks, a gentle clunk, clunk, clunk and the faint crinkle of aluminum foil - the two warm baloney sandwiches they will eat for lunch under the bee tree. He loves the smell of the ether and he stops to unscrew the lid again. His brother is far up the trail, swatting at the brush with his father’s machete, they are supposed to share it now, but Benny will never let him hold it because he says it is too sharp and that he would cut himself.
     He can hear the whooshing of the blade, the snapping of branches up ahead, as he unscrews the o-ring and lifts the little tin sealer cap with a cracked rubber gasket the color of old gum. The smell overwhelms him. His head swims and he drops the net into the pine needles and watches the sunlight dance against the closed lids of his eyes. Tiny specs of orange and bruise-red swarm and dance like moths. He lies there for minutes that pass like hours and waits for the voice of his father to urge him on but it doesn’t come and he simply stands and moves drunkenly through the trees and into the light of the clearing beyond them. 
    The meadow is waist high with wildflowers. Electric blue chicory and columbines the color of old blood, and the air is thick with dragonflies and cicadas big as house sparrows. Following the trail his brother cut through the milkweed, white sap thick as glue oozing from the broken stems, a dizzy feeling in his head, a soft ringing in his ears. 
    Grasshoppers rattle and click in the tall weeds and they bounce off his thighs and his chest as he walks through the meadow alone for the first time. His brother is nowhere to be seen, and he dare not yell.. Their father forbade shouting in the woods and that voice still speaks sternly to him.. 
    He is alone, but he is not afraid because he is in the meadow, their meadow. It was here that he learned how to stalk butterflies, crawling on his belly like a soldier, and here that he caught the big yellow and black swallowtail that hung on the dining room wall --  and here, in the butterfly meadow, they shared a hundred picnics under the bee tree with the mounting kit spread out before them, studying the contents of the kill-jar like apothecaries and playing pick-up-sticks with long steel pins beneath the droning bees.

There is a swooshing sound ahead and he hears the tread of his brother in the thick grass. He hears him swear an oath to Jesus Christ and then another one to God and his brother comes down through the high grass holding the mouth of net closed with one hand, clutching the other to his chest, and through its fine white mesh he can see a big yellow butterfly trapped inside.
     Gimme the jar, his brother says. The machete askew in his belt, its duct-taped handle sticking up high above his waist. He looks like a buccaneer, with their father’s red bandanna wrapped around his head, sucking the blood out of a cut on the pad of his thumb.
     Get the jar you idiot, I cut my finger on this damn blade.
     The boy struggles with the rucksack and it pops open, spilling out all manner of gear onto the ground: the sandwiches, the mounting blocks, a bone-handled jack-knife, a plastic box of pins. He stares up at his brother, who is not smiling.
     For Christ’s sake Tim can’t you just do one thing we tell you? 
The boy kneels to pick up what he has spilled. The grass is cool and soft like hair and it tickles his fingers.
     The jar, Tim.
     He reaches into the bag and feels for it. He wants to make sure that he screwed on the lid. The glass feels cool against the palm of his hand and he can smell the ether as he hands his brother the jar -- and strangely, he also smells wool, though there is no wool, and then it passes. He can only smell ether.
     Do you see me bleeding here? Open the damn lid, and don’t you take no more whiffs of that ether, his brother says.
    The boy does as he is told. He readies the kill-jar, and the smell of the ether grows even stronger as he watches his brother work it into the net. He can smell the wool again, and he sees in his mind’s eye a red and black checked jacket, the old hunting coat once worn by his father that he now wears as a robe, with deep blue quilted lining that feels so cool against his skin and smells like mothballs and pipe-smoke and there is a tear in the lining from which a fine white substance leaks, fibrous and soft like tiny clouds. It spills out onto his bed during the night and when he wakes it covers him like snowflakes. 
     Here, his brother says. Screw this on.
    He watches the insect trying to fly inside the jar, its legs grappling on the ether-soaked cheesecloth. The glass is smudged with bloody thumbprints. It’s a Tiger Swallowtail, almost as big as the one he caught the last day they came here more than a year ago. As the ether takes effect, it begins to lose its footing on the cheesecloth and its wings beat slower and the antennae twitch and it falls off the cloth and onto its side where its abdomen pumps and wags obscenely at the bottom of the kill-jar.
     Mom’s gonna love this one, it’s bigger then yours.
    He does not say that his was the first butterfly he ever caught and the last they all caught together. He does not speak at all because he no longer cares whose butterfly is bigger. It doesn’t matter. His butterfly is gone now and there is nothing left to compare.
     He packs the little army rucksack and makes his way up along a rise to a tree that stands at the center of the meadow, a gnarled and stunted crabapple that leans like a storm blown palm, the home for a nest of honey bees. He sits beneath this tree and he listens. He listens to birdsong, and the wind in the grass, and deep inside the tree he can hear the voices of the bees as he unpacks the bag, sets out the jar and checks his legs for ticks.

He would watch him, from behind the garage, peering through a knot-hole and standing on a pile of bricks, he’d peek through and watch his father mount butterflies. Bent over his drafting table with the magnifying glass, picking gently at them with tweezers and taking short but powerful sniffs from the tall brown bottle he kept high on a shelf next to the paint thinner and the linseed oil, all the while humming old songs that didn’t sound like songs at all but more like moans. And he’d rock there under a dangling bulb on a beaded chain, he’d rock and sniff it, he’d sway and hum there on the shop-stool looking very old, and very strange, bobbing and moaning, the bottle in his hand. A tall and narrow bottle, with no label, made of brown glass the color of baked yams. And it glowed there on the shelf, back-lit by the sun or the flickering citronella candles he sometimes lit at night. It had a black screw-on top and sometimes he’d see him there on all fours searching for the cap on the ground. 
    In the garage his father would speak. To the butterflies he’d quote verses from the Bible and whisper to them their Latin names and make up funny songs where every word ended in S and he’d laugh alone and cough and sniff at the bottle and sometimes he'd doze.
     Danaus plexipus, he would say, holding up an orange Monarch, moving it through the air, feigning flight.
    The flying soul, he’d say. 
    Holding it to the swinging bulb, clasped there in the tweezers, watching the light glowing through its black lattice wings like sunlight through stained glass. 
    From his bedroom he could see flickering. Through the glass-block windows on the side of the garage the shifting light changed color every time his father moved, making watery patterns of blues and greens on the thick glass that mesmerized him as he stood with his face pressed against his own window, drawing pictures in the fog made by his breath, pictures of butterflies, like the one he’s drawing now in the dirt under the bee tree chewing slowly on the sandwich that he made the night before. The drone of the bees sounds like moaning, and their pollen sacs are full, and inside the kill-jar the Swallowtail lies unmoving, and it is time to take him out before the ether curls his wings, before the harsh chemical destroys his beautiful wings.
    But first, he peels open his sandwich and lifts out the baloney slices with bites taken out of them, and they look to him like human skin and he lowers them into his open mouth like a cannibal delicacy and throws the mustard stained crusts into the grass for the ants. He licks his fingertips and wipes them on his pants, unscrews the lid and slides the lifeless Swallowtail onto the ground next to him and he sniffs at the mouth of the jar, all sweetness and fumes, and leans back against the tree with his eyes closed, the jar balanced in his lap, the honey bees moaning.
    Flying souls.

His mother showed up at the door of the classroom just before his turn at show 'n tell. She was wearing her uniform. Everything white except the stethoscope. And she wore her quiet white shoes that did not squeak in the empty halls and she held his hand so tightly that his knuckles hurt and then she stopped. She stopped and kneeled there on the shiny waxed floor and pulled his head into her breast and she cried against his cheek and he could feel the warm tears running down his neck, and he smelled the hospital on her, in her hair and on her skin and embedded in her rayon whites he could smell the odors of the emergency room. He left the butterflies inside his desk.

Beneath him, Benny stalks the lower meadow. Slicing at the brush with the machete and waving the net at anything that moves. He sits alone under the bee tree and sniffs at the kill-jar and closes his eyes and then turns his face to the high sun and watches the butterflies dance.  They come to him in hordes -- fluttering, floating, turning in sunlight like a thousand petals tossed into the wind. 

Image: "Cloudless Sulpher," from Butterflies of Southeastern Arizona