Scattered Bones by Maggie Siggins

arrived unannounced, and managed this miraculous conversion? Harold explained that the grandparents were tired of the religious people nagging at them. “So they thought, might as well get baptised, then they’ll leave us alone.”
    At that very moment, Ernst Wentworth decided he had to take a stand. Sick onto death of the priest’s dirty tricks, he marched over to the Indian agent’s tent, and demanded a showdown. An astonished Bob Taylor promised that if Father Bonnald agreed, he would arrange a summit for later that afternoon. The little post office attached to the Hudson’s Bay Company store was deemed neutral enough territory. Ernst realizes that he must carefully prepare for what he has wrought, and so secludes himself in the lean-to attached to the rear of the church that is laughingly called his study.
    He is so tired of being bullied. Domineering men, so much tougher, self-assured and cunning than he, despots each and every one, have oppressed him his entire life. The first of these was that huge, jowly man, his father, a successful barrister famous for the patronizing, scathing manner in which he cross-examined his prey.
    At six months old Ernst fell out of his crib and bruised his forehead. He cried as though his heart, not his head, was broken. Douglas Wentworth decided right then that his son was a weakling, a judgement from which he never veered. Ernst’s mother was more sympathetic towards her third child, but she was so caught up in her multitudinous charities – the greatest moment of her life was when she was elected president of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, Toronto branch – that she had little time for him. His two brothers, William and James, big, manly fellows, years older than he, were interested in only two things: playing polo and hunting down the opposite sex. They gave him about as much thought as they did the family’s cocker spaniel – an absent-minded pat on the head on good days, a bad-tempered smack on his ear on bad.
    He was handed over to the care of a nanny, good-natured Betty Brun, a farm girl from Tweed, Ontario. She gave him the run of the family’s Rosedale home, a grandiose pastiche of brick and stone, soaring gables, peek-a-boo porches, wide lawns both front and back. A perfect place for a shy boy to play.
    His idyllic time with Betty ended all too soon. At age seven he was packed off to Upper Canada College, where he spent a miserable twelve years supposedly having his character moulded by an assortment of tyrannical teachers. He was not the worst scholar, but certainly not one of the brilliant set, as brother William had been. He played lacrosse and tennis decently, but did not shine as brother James had. He did take up a hobby though, grew passionate about it, and this turned his young years golden.
    The clouds of butterflies floating like coloured confetti over the vast garden at the family’s summer home on Lake Simcoe enthralled him. Here, at last, was something precious and beautiful that he could call his own. That he could master. He was judicious in the number and the kind of specimen he went after. And those he did net, he learned to mount properly. The corpse must be prepared quickly after death so as to remain soft and malleable. The pin must be thrust through very hard, very straight, right at the centre line of the thorax. The wings neatly, carefully spread. Twelve or twenty-four or thirty-six or even forty-eight of these beauties were then lined up in boxes and covered with glass. These were displayed on his bedroom walls. When every inch was covered, they were piled on the floor, one on top of the other, leaving only a pathway to the door. The maid complained that she spent more time dusting his room than any other in the house.
    Ernst picks up the glass case on his desk. It’s his very first collection. Each specimen is labelled neatly, printed in his childish hand: Papilio Canadensis (Canadian Tiger Swallow Tail), July, 1891; Limenitis