Beyond the Firefly Field (5 page)

“Yes, Father,” she dutifully agreed.

“A pleasant rest of the night to you all,” SanArEnDar wished as he gave a broad wave. Then his wings spread wide as he stepped off the branch and flew high into the branches, lifting out of sight, but leaving a trail of golden sparkles flowing behind.

Everyone looked at SeeLee. They remained in the throes of uncertainty, and a new round of eye-rubbing and arm-pinching began.

“Oh, stop it!” SeeLee demanded. “How are you humans called anyway?”

“Oh, I'm Penny, and this is my brother, Clayton.” She tugged on his arm, wobbling him about like a bobble head.

“This is Phil.” Penny reached around Clayton and slapped Phil's arm to get him to respond.

“This is Ron,” she introduced, whacking Ron in the stomach harder than she anticipated.

“And finally, this is Karl.” Penny reached over to him, but Karl quickly backed away, avoiding her slap. During the introductions, Penny never looked away from SeeLee.

“I'm so happy to be stuck with you,” SeeLee said cheerfully. “It's my first time at being the very first fairy a human sees. I'm so excited I don't know what to do next.”

“You can answer our thousand questions for starters,” Clayton suggested.

Penny led with the first question. “Where do you get those beautiful clothes?”

“We make them,” SeeLee proudly explained as she twirled around in a typical human-girly fashion. When she stopped whirling, the colorful stones and feathers gradually slowed their dancing motion.

SeeLee continued in a serious tone. “There has to be an order as to what and how you find out about us, otherwise you'll become too overwhelmed and go back into shock.”

“Not including the floating-in-the-air levitation and wing-color-changing stuff?” Karl questioned.

“Well, I guess you shouldn't have seen that first. You caught me off guard,” she admitted again, pacing back and forth across the branch. “I've been playing with the fireflies for years and got careless. It really would have been better if you had just found me standing on a branch and not discovered my wings until you were over that initial surprise.”

“Can we start over?” Phil implored. “Use your fairy magic to take us back in time or something.”

“I could blow the chafe that falls from my wings into your faces so you would forget everything,” she suggested as she rose into the air and spread her wings. As SeeLee's fingers gathered chafe from her wing's glowing edge, the five kids gasped and took a step back, covering their faces with their hands.

“Just kidding,” she said, landing again. “It doesn't work that way. And we don't have fairy magic, at least not that they let me play with.”

As SeeLee paced back and forth, her pacing suddenly took her past the rounded branch's edge and into thin air. Her wings immediately started to glow and rise upward, but fell as she paced back onto the branch. This happened several times before she turned back to Clayton and friends, her new charges.

“Before I can tell or show you anything else, I'll have to find out from the Old Ones if there is still a strict order for exposing our secrets. I have to go now, as I have some serious explaining to do. You must come back. I have many wonderful things to show and tell you, especially about how we've existed all these years. You can come back,” she paused, “whenever the fireflies gather.”

“Do you ever come out in the daytime?” Penny asked.

“No, the sun's light and heat damage our wings.”

SeeLee paused again, then said with a serious tone, “Tell as few others about us as possible. Mostly you will be ridiculed and laughed at when you do mention us. Until I see you again, be happy and well,” she concluded, then turned and walked away along the branch.

The veins of her collapsed wings started glowing as she took a step on the air. As her wings unfurled and the color glistened, she gave them a flap. SeeLee turned, waved, then propelled quickly up and out of sight as gold sparkles flittered down.

Clayton examined the branch SeeLee had been standing on. It was dead, as was the part of the trunk where it attached. He looked at other parts of the tree, and there weren't any small fairy figures or faint lights glimmering. The only things lighting the sky were fireflies. The group could only stand and look at one another. The astonishment registering on each face reassured them that they had all experienced the same thing. When they looked back at the tree again, it was as if nothing had ever been there.

“I guess this doesn't happen every day, and the fairies are as shocked as we are,” Karl offered.

For another minute they silently stared at the branch where SeeLee had stood. Everyone's thoughts were interrupted by Penny who abruptly said, “Let's go home.”

She pushed her way through the boys and started back along the thin path. Without much thought, the boys turned and followed, still somewhat dazed. Penny couldn't get the vision of SeeLee out of her head. Her beautiful wings, her fancy clothing—she couldn't wait to see her again.

They walked silently back through the field, ignoring the exciting light show the fireflies were performing—lost in their own thoughts. They didn't even brush away the fireflies landing on them, nor did they notice when they arrived at the field's edge. It wasn't until they reached the black trail tunneling into the woods that someone spoke.

“Paul's never going to believe this!” Phil exclaimed, flicking on his flashlight.

“Nobody will,” Clayton insisted. He gave the firefly field one last study before turning on his flashlight. With lights shining, the group headed back along the trail.

“I wonder if they all had to go back inside the tree because of us,” Karl mused.

“What if they're having an emergency meeting, and they got rid of us so they could run off to a new hiding place?” Penny worried.

“I don't think so,” Clayton offered. “Her father didn't seem to care about our presence, and it seemed like SeeLee really wanted us to come back.”

“I hope she doesn't get into trouble because we saw her,” Penny worried.

“Why would she? They seem to know nobody will believe us if we say we saw fairies. Stop worrying,” Karl advised with exasperation in his voice.

“I'm not even sure I believe it now that I'm not seeing fairies anymore,” Ron confessed.

“Well, Rose will believe me,” Penny said enthusiastically. She was always trying to get Rose, her friend from school, to come over to the tree house. With this added attraction, Penny was sure she couldn't stay away.

“Maybe,” Clayton cautioned, “although not telling anyone is sounding better all the time. If we tell people, they'll tell more people, and soon the whole firefly field will be full of curious onlookers and TV news crews.”

As their attention was diverted to managing the trail, they fell silent, each preoccupied with private thoughts. They wanted to tell, and then not tell, everybody they had ever known. Then the words of SeeLee echoed, “…mostly ridiculed and laughed at.”

During the hour it took to walk back to the tree house, the battle raged in their minds.

Tell. Don't tell. Tell. Don't tell.

Before they finished walking, each imagined telling friends and family and what their reactions would be. By the time the five crossed the bridge near the tree house, they jointly decided to keep the fairies all to themselves. It was quickly becoming a selfish obsession; they would share this treasure with no one.

Clayton cautioned in a low voice, “Don't tell anyone,
not anyone,
until we meet tomorrow and talk this over.” The others voiced their agreement, vowing to keep their secret.

As they neared the tree house, Clayton saw Wayne, Dillon, and Brian sitting on the lower deck. Their discussion centered on the fact that fireflies buzzing behind plastic caught in branches was the only thing the strange lights could possibly be. Surely, pieces of colored plastic could appear to move and change in the wind.

“Hey guys,” Brian called as the silent group walked under the tree house. Clayton briefly looked up at them as they leaned over the deck railing in anticipation.

“Hey,” he said as he kept walking.

“Well, aren't you going to tell us what it is?” Wayne asked with indignation.

“Fairies!” Clayton yelled back, knowing the others would be shocked at his nonchalant admission.

This unexpected breach in their agreement caused a gasp from the rest of the group, but Clayton knew he wouldn't be believed. “You'll have to see for yourselves,” he added.

“Thanks a lot for clearing that up,” Dillon yelled down to the departing group.

“Fairies. Of course! Why didn't we think of that?” Brian yelled sarcastically. “It's the fairies who get the fireflies to guide the aliens to the landing spot!”

Clayton and Penny continued walking toward their house, and the others parted ways. They remained silent, and only nodded in agreement that they needed to keep their secret a secret.

Nearing their back door, Penny turned to Clayton and said, “I'm really tired, but I'll never be able to sleep tonight. I hope I can keep from telling Mom about the fairies.”

“You better not. No adults can know. This is our secret,” Clayton demanded. “Just tell Mom there were millions of fireflies, and you're really tired and want to go to bed,” he whispered as they went into the house.

As Penny was getting her hair brushed, she was unusually quiet. Her mother had to pry the account of the incredible firefly display. Befitting the Queen of the Universe, Penny made a big drama of being exhausted from the walk so her mother would tuck her into bed right away. After her mother turned off the light and closed the door, Penny's eyes popped wide open.

For those who couldn't sleep that night, visions of what they had seen played over and over in their heads. It wasn't a restful sleep that finally overcame them. It was a sleep filled with dreams of what they had experienced. Dreams filled with an overpowering desire to tell everyone what they had learned, but also dreams warning them to guard the secret only the five of them possessed.

Clayton desperately wanted Wendy to see the fairies, but even if he could talk to her, he knew she would think he was crazy. Whenever he looked into her beautiful eyes, his mind went blank and his tongue grew thick, so there was little chance of being able to explain that fairies were real.

That night, the last thoughts Clayton had before falling asleep were his grandfather's wistful words,
“And, fairies danced in the air at sunset…“

Trying to Return

T
he next day came too early for the tired group. With the sun's rising, each of the five felt anxiety and doubt rising along with it, as well as a desperate, gnawing urge to talk with the others about what they had seen, or thought they had seen. It seemed as if everything had changed, and nothing would ever be normal again. From the moment they woke up, the five began experiencing life in a brand new way. Whatever they saw seemed sharper, brighter, and more defined, as if they were seeing it for the first time. They paid extra attention to everything, as if comparing its reality to the reality of what they had experienced the night before.

Life was suddenly overshadowed by an intense urgency and compulsion to meet with the others at the tree house to discuss what to do next. Of the five, Clayton felt the strongest sense of coercion.

Clayton and Penny had dreams of fairies, although the dreams never lasted long, each dream seeming to dissolve into a mist that quickly faded away, leaving them to wonder if their fairy dreams were even real.

This vague sense of reality versus imaginary, along with the “tell/don't tell” battle raging in their minds, only contributed to the doubts and anxieties all were feeling. None could expect any relief until they met at the tree house later that morning.

But when the group finally gathered, they found it difficult to begin talking about the fairies. Each wondered if they had imagined the whole thing.

“I told Paul last night, Clayton,” Phil finally said after a long period of everybody just looking at each other.

“Of course, he didn't believe me. Then we got into a fight about it. He was trying to make me tell him the truth, and he got mad when I just kept saying we saw fairies,” Phil concluded with frustration in his voice. Clayton stared at him as he rubbed his sore arm, probably where Paul had pummeled his twin during their fight.

“How did you get away from Paul to come here?” Ron asked.

“My mom took him shopping for school clothes. I said I didn't feel good, so I got to stay home.”

“I didn't tell anybody,” Ron said with a sigh.

“All our back and forth about telling or not telling was wasted, because even telling isn't telling,” Karl concluded.

“We really have to stop talking about this with the others or the fairies won't stay a secret. The woods will be crawling with strangers, and the fairies will go somewhere else,” Clayton insisted.

“Though it would be fun to be on the news and talk shows, telling how we discovered the fairies,” Ron admitted. “Hey, what if someone else stumbles across them and they get to be on TV? Maybe we
should
get a news crew out here,” he eagerly suggested.

“We can take pictures,” Karl added.

“No way! We don't have the right to expose the fairies. We must vow to keep this our secret,” Clayton demanded.

“Didn't you just love SeeLee's wings?” Penny exclaimed after Clayton got everyone to vow. “The colors were so beautiful. I don't even know what to call most of them. Some were kind of green, some orangey or purplish pink, some yellowish, and some were bluey-green. I just loved the way the colors swirled in the wings.” She looked off into space, reliving her memories of the fairies' wings, and once again became too spellbound to speak.

“Yeah,” Phil agreed. “I tried to look at SeeLee's whole wing, but some spot of color would grab my attention, and I couldn't look away from that one spot. Then it would shift and turn into another color, then reappear somewhere else,” he said.

“And the gold veins!” Ron exclaimed. “When they glowed, they looked like shiny gold coins.”

“Maybe we could collect the falling sparkles and make coins out of them,” Penny chimed in wishfully.

“Maybe we could, if they stayed sparkly, but they go out,” Clayton countered. “SeeLee did call it chafe, like it was just dead skin or tiny scales.”

“But they're still sparkles,” Penny insisted. “Just like in the
Peter Pan
movie.”

“Maybe we could collect a pile of chafe and electrify it back to life or something,” Karl added as his face lit up. Clayton knew that Karl was thinking of experiments he could perform.

“Maybe that Disney guy saw fairies when he was a kid,” Ron suggested.

“I don't think so,” Karl countered. “If he did, Tinker Bell's wings wouldn't look like dragonfly wings and flap like crazy. SeeLee's slow-motion wing-flap was the weirdest thing.”

“Maybe we can tell Disney how to get it right for his next movie,” Penny suggested enthusiastically. “I would choose SeeLee's wings over Tinker Bell's any time. I wish I could bring SeeLee to school with me to show my friends,” she admitted, still having trouble containing her excitement about telling others of the magical find.

“Let the Disney people and your friends get their own fairies; they're not getting ours,” Clayton insisted.

The others agreed and continued talking about the fairies for another hour. After including the fairies' different clothing styles in their discussion, there was nothing to talk about except the hundreds of questions they still wanted to ask. Talking about what they didn't know only frustrated them.

“We have to go back tonight,” Penny insisted with firm determination.

“We shouldn't go back unless we can all go together,” Ron stated firmly, “and tonight I have to go back to my old neighborhood with my parents for the Labor Day weekend.”

“And my family's leaving for a short trip tomorrow. You better not go without me,” Karl insisted.

“Okay, we'll wait until Monday night when everyone's back,” Clayton assured them.

As the end of summer neared, the pace in the neighborhood quickened. More houses had been built, and several families were using Labor Day weekend to move in.

The old campground saw increased activity, too. Cabins were being remodeled since the camp's sale. The new owners would open it next spring, and reconstruction had to be done before winter set in. In the back of his mind, Clayton worried that wandering camp kids would find the firefly field and the fairies. He tried to put that problem out of his mind since it would be many months before camp opened.

Clayton also worried about rumors that somebody was buying the old saw mill and other properties for sale in the area. He knew many long-time residents were glad the saw mill would be sold. They wanted a new business to open in its place to clean up the dangerous eyesore and to provide jobs for them and their children. Others didn't want any intrusion into their peaceful country setting. The increased activity meant more chances of the fairies being discovered.

While waiting for Monday to arrive, the days passed painfully slow. The longer the time spent without seeing the fairies, the more the kids needed to see them. It almost became an uncontrollable obsession.

During those nights of waiting, Clayton endured tortured dreams. His nocturnal story was always the same—seeing the fairies was just a cruel joke that Dillon, Wayne, and Wendy played on him and his friends. He dreaded those nightmarish dreams and hoped the next trip to the firefly field would put them to rest.

Monday rolled around, and Clayton, Penny, and Ron were in the tree house discussing the dreams they had all weekend. Then Karl arrived, and a minute later Phil showed up, but not alone. He was joined by Paul.

“I'm tired of fighting with Phil, who only tells me fairytales. I have no intention of believing him and his ridiculous story. You're probably playing a joke on me, so let's get it over with.”

Clayton noticed that as they shared their realities of the fairy world, their enthusiasm began to seep into Paul's mind. He wasn't so quick to dismiss their elaborate stories.

They headed out, bursting at the seams with excitement.

“This time we're definitely asking SeeLee more important questions than, ‘Where do you get your clothes?'” Clayton insisted while rolling his eyes at Penny.

“Well, they were very pretty,” Penny defended.

“Maybe you can make a deal with her for a fall-fashion fairy line of back-to-school clothing,” Karl offered half seriously.

“I am going to make my own fairy clothes,” Penny told the laughing boys.

“I'm asking how they levitate,” Karl noted.

“I'm going to ask what they eat when they don't have berries,” Phil said.

“I'm asking if they freeze in the winter. Their tiny bodies couldn't possibly put out enough heat to fend off the cold,” Clayton added.

“I wonder if they ever get eaten by animals or birds or snakes,” Ron questioned.

“Eeeww, that's gross,” Penny said with a shudder.

They carried on with their tales well over half the way to the far meadow when Clayton, who was in the lead, suddenly stopped short.

Ahead of them, the angry buzz of a chainsaw roared in the distance through the woods. Its intensity waxed and waned as it went faster, then slower through the tree in its way.

“Who's cutting trees in the middle of the woods?” Karl wondered.

“We better find out,” Clayton urged and started toward the noise.

The others fanned out behind him, proceeding slowly. As they cautiously went around bushes and trees, they kept their eyes toward the noise, trying to catch a glimpse of its source. As they closed in, they ran from tree to tree, using trunks as shields for hiding.

Soon they came to piles of branches on the ground, marking a newly cut road. The smell of fresh-cut wood filled the air. The friends turned to each other in alarm, then looked back at the road, which was wide enough for a pick-up truck. To the right, it went straight for a hundred yards, then curved out of sight. To the left, the road took a turn, which shielded them from seeing the noise-making monster.

Bravely but cautiously, the six walked along the side of the road toward the noise. They walked slowly for twenty yards when they heard a large tree snapping. They could see a man's red shirt weaving through the leaves. As he moved to the music of the saw, the six adventuring kids glimpsed the menacing threat.

But their attention was quickly diverted by a large tree top moving slowly and majestically downward past the tops of the other trees. The falling tree was coming directly toward them, and it was picking up speed fast. Running in panic from the large mass rapidly descending upon them, the group scattered frantically across the road. The unexpected movement caused the saw wielder to spot the interlopers.

Farmer Hawkins was staring straight at them.

The old farmer was known to be grumpy and gruff, with little tolerance for childhood foolishness. Having been chased from his orchards many times over the years, the boys were well aware of the old man's nasty moods. Penny, however, was oblivious.

When the crashing noise stopped, everyone turned to see how close they had come to being smushed by the big oak. It had been a very close call. Farmer Hawkins was now closing in fast, carrying the screaming chainsaw, but his angry voice could be heard over the deafening roar.

“I told you darn kids to stay off my land!” he shouted as the chainsaw's roar pulsated to accentuate his words. The old farmer continued to scream, but the kids couldn't hear his angry words as they crashed and crunched through the brush and dead leaves.

They ran to their trail in panic and headed back toward home through the woods. They didn't stop running until they crossed the first meadow and were a short way into the woods on the other side.

There they stopped to catch their breath. After a minute, Clayton walked back to the edge of the meadow to see if they had been followed. Other times, the old man had chased after them much further than they thought he could run. He sometimes set an ambush when they took a longer route to the orchards. The rumor was that if old Farmer Hawkins caught a boy out in the woods, he would take him home as a prisoner to replace one of his sons who had died falling off a crane boom.

Stories about Farmer Hawkins elevated him to local legend status, and older children delighted in scaring the younger kids with outrageous tales about the old man, especially around Halloween. Satisfied that he wasn't still chasing them, Clayton returned to the others.