“Acceptable,” Halder said. “You need not bother with the eggs of this species.” He gazed at the image thoughtfully. “Do you know why it’s called a screwworm?”
“Uh…” I glanced at the page in his hand. “Because the spiral ridge resembles a screw?”
Halder grinned unpleasantly. “Indeed it does. As it burrows, those ridges anchor themselves in living flesh using tiny bristles. They become nearly impossible to extract. After a week, they burrow outward and fall to the ground, where they pupate into the next generation.” He reached out and tapped the jar on his desk. I glanced toward it and realized that the grubs inside were now familiar. Dead screwworms. Hundreds of them.
“Ah,” I said.
“Most interestingly, killing the host does not kill the screwworm. It will simply continue to eat. Few other parasites survive the death of their host in such a way.”
“Fascinating,” I said faintly.
“It is my great hope that if I can fully understand the life cycle of these species, it will unlock new ways to deal with them. I have already determined the optimal way to extract them from living flesh with the least damage. My monograph on the subjectis even now in circulation. But to learn more, one must study them exhaustively.”
He took my illustrations, rose, and locked them in the cupboard in his office. I felt a brief, nonsensical pang at seeing my work squirreled away like that.Don’t be absurd. What are you going to do, hang your art of screwworms on the wall? Show it off to Mrs. Kent?
I made a checkmark next toC. hominivoraxand started on the next name on the list.
Esther, my old roommate, had asked me once if I liked painting. I must have looked at her oddly, because she colored up and said, “I don’t like teaching French. IknowFrench, but I don’tlikeit.”
I told her that I loved painting, and then, out of both truth and sympathy, admitted that I didn’t like teaching it very much. Esther fell back into her chair with exaggerated relief and embarked on a tirade about how people don’t understand that being good at something does not mean that you have any skill at teaching it to other people. She was quite right, of course, but the question that stuck with me was the first one—did Ilikepainting?
Despite what I told Esther years ago, I didn’t always know the answer. Some things I loved painting. I could be on my deathbed and I would still leap up at the chance to paint a pitcher plant. The veins, the little translucent windows, the lids with their flares and ruffles… I found them endlessly delightful. Sometimes I even dreamed about doing a book of my own on the topic, though finding a publisher willing to risk money was the hard part.
Other things… well, I was good at painting, and I liked doing something I was good at. But with some subjects, it felt more like a bodily function than a grand passion. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It was just what I did.
The insects rapidly began to feel like that. I got up in themorning, I ate, I hunched over a tray of pinned flies, I sketched them out, I applied color. I could not have said that I was enjoying the work, but it was a great deal better than teaching had been. Occasionally I would manage a particularly fine sheen on a wing, and I would feel a certain artistic smugness. This would usually last until I glanced at my predecessor’s carrion beetle paintings, which took any of my pretensions and stomped them flat. I would go down to lunch. I would present Halder with the painting. I would start the next one.
Halder seemed content with my work. I started to think that perhaps he was simply not very exacting, until I handed him aNecrophila rufithoraxwhere the elytron was not sufficiently truncated—at least, that’s what I think he yelled—and he flung it back at me with a curt order to do it again, correctly this time. I slunk back to the studio, feeling about three inches tall, and spent an entire day doing sketches of the sample beetles in the case, wondering what an elytron was. I thought it might be the wing case? Their wings varied a bit, as it turned out, so I simply picked one and set about duplicating it exactly. Apparently the second time, it was sufficiently truncated, because Halder grunted, “Better,” and went back to his papers.
I still had no idea what a metathorax was.
My only break in the routine came on Sunday, when Mrs. Kent went to church. She told me what time we were leaving in the morning, with an obvious assumption thatof courseI was coming, so I put on my best remaining dress and was ready at the appointed hour. (Sunday service was mandatory at the school, of course. I had rarely gone to church when Father was alive. “Nature is better than any sermon,” he told me frequently, “and how better to honor the Lord than admiring His creation?” This was solid transcendentalist philosophy, though the fact that it allowed him to sleep in on Sundays and then go looking for interesting plants in the afternoon was not entirely lost on me.)
It was a Black church, and Jackson and I were the only whitepeople there, but everyone greeted me kindly. The service itself was brutally long, by my (admittedly lax) standards, but afterwards, there was an immense community meal. Two older ladies, hearing that I was working for Halder, made pained noises and urged me to sit right down next to them, poor child, howwasI holding up?
Their sympathy was far more comforting than I expected. Mrs. Kent was one of those aggressively competent souls who make you feel less competent simply by comparison, and while Jackson was entertaining company, I only saw him at dinner and sometimes not even then. Having two people ask, with every evidence of genuine interest, how I was managing in that big empty house with thatpeculiarman—good heavens, the stories they could tell!—and nobody but Rose Kent to talk to—not awordagainst Rose, no, certainly not, but such aseriousgirl…
“Not that anyone wouldn’t be serious,” the one on the right said, “with her poor mother going the way she did.”
“Lost her memory,” the one on the left said to me, “the poor dear. Would get lost in her own house by the end. Of course poor Rose couldn’t move her, so she was stuck there, working for that doctor. Even after his poor wife—”
Her companion slapped her on the arm with a napkin, interrupting the torrent ofpoors. “Jackson, good to see you!” she sang out.
“I see Miss Wilson has found the two loveliest ladies here,” Jackson said, sitting down at the table opposite me. Both of them laughed and all three embarked on an intense discussion of the weather as it related to gardening, which was doubtless satisfying for the participants, but left me with a severe case ofgossipus interruptus.
Even after his poor wifewhat?Died? Left? Ran off to Paris to become a burlesque dancer?
… Was drained by blood thieves?
Since I wasn’t going to get answers, I settled on getting a second helping of pulled pork, which was almost as satisfying.
I hadn’t realized that I’d been feeling lonely and a bit cast down until we left and I realized that I felt better. (It didn’t hurt that I was stuffed full of incredible food.) I leaned back against the bench of the wagon and closed my eyes, soaking in the spring sunlight and thinking that I had probably made the right choice in taking this job after all.
The sunlight, alas, did not last. Rain blew up that night and continued for three days. I huddled in the studio while rain splatted against the windows and wind rattled the doors. It was not nearly as windy as Wilmington had been, so the rattling didn’t bother me, although the thrashing branches on the nearby trees rather did. Jackson assured me that this “warn’t nothin’” and then regaled me with tales of past storms that had brought down massive oaks and how he had personally had to chop apart a tree with a trunk “near as tall as Sally here.”
Sally giggled. Jackson mimed swinging an axe. “Took two days,” he said proudly. “Had to cut it in two places and then hitch up Buckshot and roll the damn thing out of the way.”
“And spent four days afterward laying around moaning ’cause you couldn’t lift your arms over your head,” said Mrs. Kent tartly, sliding hotcakes onto her husband’s plate. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten that bit.”
