A TRAY OF BUTTERFLY WINGS
“Embarking for home from a voyage to Brazil, he brought with him in his seabag this small tray….”
Among many Amazonian tribes, the blue morpho butterfly is revered as a spiritual guide. In their traditional tales, the blue morpho reveals the truth about the world, sometimes granting wishes to supplicants. But other tribes, familiar with the uses of insect toxins, consider the poisonous butterfly an evil, death-dealing spirit. As if embodying this disagreement, the tops of morpho wings are heavenly blue while their undersides are brown as mud.
From the 1880s until the middle of the twentieth century, butterfly wings harvested from the floor of the Amazon’s rainforest were arranged in glistening designs on a thin backing of ipê (sometimes called Brazilian walnut), pressed beneath a sheet of glass, and inset in mahogany serving trays for the souvenir trade in Rio de Janeiro. For decades, that trade focused mostly on sailors from ships anchored in Guanabara Bay.
In 1946 or ‘47, one of those sailors was my father, who had joined the merchant marine near the beginning of World War II. Embarking for home from a voyage to Brazil, he brought with him in his seabag this small tray, smartly crafted with strips of inlaid hardwood framing a symmetrical mosaic of overlaid butterfly wings, many shimmering with the distinctive iridescence of the blue morpho.
When he married and came home from the sea for good, the tray was propped against the back wall of his bride’s china cabinet behind their wedding gifts of dinnerware and serving silver. Despite my fascination with its brilliant colors, I was not, as a boy, allowed to hold the tray, nor was it ever used, even when my father’s former shipmates were in port and came to our house for dinner.
The reminiscences of those sailors, swapping anecdotes of torpedo attacks on their wartime convoys and of drunken escapades in ports around the globe, hinted at my father’s adventures as a young man and made vivid the sea stories I favored in my childhood reading. I still remember tracing in an atlas at our public library his voyages across the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Indian Ocean—including the journey of the tray of butterfly wings from Rio to New Orleans.
When men in the South began to adopt the fashion of wearing wedding rings, my father hammered the ribbed edge of a fifty-cent piece with the back of a tablespoon, turning and tapping the coin as we listened to the cicadas evening after evening from our porch. Eventually satisfied with its shape, he mortised the center with an awl and a rat tail rasp, filing the metal smooth. Once fitted, the ring never came off his finger until his death.
For me, the tray and the ring are the emblems of his two lives, first as a seaman sailing distant oceans and then as a married man anchored to his family. When my brother and I walked through our parents’ home before the estate sale, I chose for myself not the ring but the tray. Year by year the wings continue to fade, indeed revealing the fundamental truth about the world: Everything—even what is most precious to us—dies. But I’ve discovered that, in the right light, one can still glimpse the marvelous iridescence of what we’ve lost.