Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man

by Marie Conway Oemler

My mother had been frankly delighted to have my creeping friends moved out of the Parish House, and Clélie abated in her dislike of the one-legged man because he had, in a way, removed from her a heretofore never-absent fear of waking up some night and finding a caterpillar under her bed. More yet, he entailed no extra work, for he flatly refused to have her set foot in his rooms for the purpose of cleaning them. He attended to that himself. The man was a marvel of neatness and order. Mesdames, permit me to here remark that when a man is neat and orderly no woman of Eve's daughters can compare with him. John Flint's rooms would arouse the rabid envy of the cleanest and most scourful she in Holland itself.

Now as the months wore away there had sprung up between him, and Mary Virginia and Laurence, one of those odd comradely friendships which sometime unite the totally unlike with bonds hard to break. His spotless workroom had a fascination for the youngsters. They were always in and out, now with a cocoon, now an imago, now a larva, and then again to see how those they had already brought were getting along.

The lame man was an unrivaled listener—a circumstance which endeared him to youthful Laurence, in whom thoughts and the urge to express these thoughts in words rose like sap. This fresh and untainted confidence, poured out so naïvely, taught John Flint more than any words or prayers of mine could have done. It opened to him a world into which, his eyes had not heretofore been permitted to look; and the result was all the more sure and certain, in that the children had no faintest idea of the effect they were producing. They had no end to gain, no ax to grind; they merely spoke the truth as they knew it, and this unselfish and hopeful truthfulness aroused his interest and curiosity; it even compelled his admiration. He couldn't dismiss this as "hot air"!

I was more than glad to have him thus taught. It was a salutary lesson, tending to temper his overweening confidence and to humble his contemptuous pride. In his own world he had been supreme, a figure of sinister importance. Brash had been crook or cop who had taught or caught Slippy McGee! But in this new atmosphere, in which he breathed with difficulty, the young had been given him for guides. They led him, where a grownup had failed.

Mary Virginia was particularly fond of him. He had as little to say to her as to Laurence, but he looked at her with interested eyes that never lost a movement; she knew he never missed a word, either; his silence was friendly, and the little girl had a pleasant fashion of taking folk for granted. Hers was one of those large natures which give lavishly, shares itself freely, but does not demand much in return. She gave with an open hand to her quiet listener—her books, her music, her amusing and innocent views, her frank comments, her truthfulness, her sweet brave gaiety; and he absorbed it like a sponge. It delighted her to find and bring the proper food-plants for his cages. And she being one of those who sing while they work, you might hear her caroling like a lark, flitting about the old garden with her red setter Kerry at her heels.

Laurence no longer read aloud to him, but instead gave Flint such books as he could find covering his particular study, and these were devoured and pored over, and more begged for. Flint would go without new clothes, neat as he was, and without tobacco, much as he liked to smoke,—to buy books upon lepidoptera.

He helped my mother with her flowers and her vegetables, but refused to have anything to do with her chickens, remarking shortly that hens were such fools he couldn't help hating them. Madame said she liked to have him around, for he was more like some unobtrusive jinnee than a mere mortal. She declared that John Flint had what the negroes call a "growing hand"—he had only to stick a bit of green in the ground and it grew like Jonah's gourd.

Since he had begun to hobble about, he had gradually come to be accepted by the town in general. They looked upon him as one who shared Father De Rancé's madness, a tramp who was a hunter of bugs. It explained his presence in the Parish House; I fancy it also explained to some why he had been a tramp!

Folks got used to him, as one does to anything one sees daily. The pleasant conservative soft-voiced ladies who liked to call on Madame of an afternoon and gossip Christianly, and drink tea and eat Clélie's little cakes on our broad shady verandah, only glanced casually at the bent head and shoulders visible through the screened window across the garden. They said he was very interesting, of course, but painfully shy and bashful. As for him, he was as horribly afraid of them as they would have been of him, had they known. I could not always save myself from the sin of smiling at an ironic situation.

Judge Mayne had at first eyed the man askance, watching him as his own cats might an interloping stray dog.