Firefly Rain (6 page)

A small part of me thought he just might.

“You get one of those, son, and that’s all.” With a lanky man’s grace, he climbed to his feet. I stayed down in the dust. “It’s a small town. People talk, even police. And you’d best have some proof before you accuse a man of stealing around here. That’s something you didn’t learn at your Boston college, now, is it?”

Without another word, he strode off, back toward his truck. I watched him go, heard the cab door slam and the engine growl to life. He threw it into gear ungently, and I saw the tires on his truck churn up the dust and rock where any clues might have been.

Stop him
, a voice in my head screamed, but I didn’t move. Couldn’t, really. He might have stopped the truck, after all, and gotten out, and Lord knows what would have happened next. But I still hated myself for my cowardice.

An uncomfortable pressure in my pocket reminded me of the payment that had brought Carl out here. A whole batch of questions hopped into my mind, most of them about how exactly he’d managed to cash a check made out to me that he shouldn’t have known about in the first place.

The whole thing stank to high heaven, but I didn’t know where to start pulling at it. So I did the only thing I could, which was stand up, open the envelope, and count the money.

A fat wad of bills was waiting for me when I popped the envelope—sealed so recently that the glue was still wet—open. There was a lot of money in there, more than I expected. I pulled the cash out and riffed through it. Twenties, fifties, hundreds—there was quite a bit of money in my hands, though that would have been true even if it had been all small bills. I did a fast calculation in my head, got a number that had some round numbers behind it, and whistled. With the house long since paid for, it was
enough to live on for a good long while. Good fortune had surely smiled on me, at least in this hour. I hadn’t thought my furniture was worth quite so much, but if the insurance company had, who was I to argue? I counted the money again, came up with a number slightly larger than the one I’d guesstimated, and started back toward the house. Whistling.

It was only then that I remembered the conversation I’d had with the man from the moving company. He’d given me a number. I’d agreed to it. And there was far more than that in my hands.

Insurance companies didn’t make mistakes like that, and they sure as hell didn’t give you more money than they said they were going to. Carl, the money, the things I’d been told by that man Douglas—the pieces didn’t even start to fit.

I nearly called the police again right then and there, but common sense stopped me. What could I accuse the man of? Giving me money? Driving into my yard to do so? Stealing a car that couldn’t move? I’d just get laughed at, and I’d had enough of that already. I put the whole matter aside and went back in the house, stashing the money in a biscuit tin for something approaching safekeeping. There was a pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator—I’d made it the night before—and so I poured myself a glass and thought about chasing fireflies.

If there was nothing I could do about Carl, I reasoned, I might as well chase the other mystery of the place. So very carefully, I took down one of Mother’s old mason jars from a high shelf in the kitchen. I rinsed it out to clear out the dust, then used an old screwdriver to punch holes in the lid. When night fell, I was ready. Jar in hand, I walked up to the road and my property line.

Here the difference was stark and plain. Out in the road,
fireflies danced. On my side of things, they didn’t. You could draw the line with a stick in the dirt, and it would be straight and true.

I put the jar down in the driveway and reached my hands out across the line. Slowly I cupped them around a firefly, a poor little fella who was minding its own business in midair. Then, quick as lightning, I snapped my hands shut around it. I could feel it crawling around in there, signaling frantically through the cracks between my fingers.

And slow as I could, I pulled my hands back to my chest. Would it know? I wondered. What would happen when it crossed the boundary onto my land? I got my answer soon enough. As soon as my cupped hands crossed that line, the light went out and did not return. I could feel the little thing go frantic, ramming against my hand as hard as it could, trying to get back to the road.

I was cruel and didn’t let it go. Instead, I held my hands there against my chest for a long minute, until the wiggling stopped. Only then did I open my fingers to find a dead firefly resting on my palm. It made no motion, and its tail lacked the fading glow every child comes to expect. Instead, it just lay there like a thing long dead.

Respectfully, I set it down back in the road. Then I unscrewed the top of the mason jar. With the empty jar in my hand, I stepped into the road and started catching fireflies.

It was harder than I remembered. When you’re a child, you have a knack for these things. Once you get older you forget, or maybe the skill just leaves on its own. In either case, it took me a good half hour to get the dozen fireflies I wanted into the jar, even though the fields were ablaze with them. Maybe they saw what had happened to the other one. I don’t know.

Once the last one went in the jar, I screwed the cap on tight. Inside, the insects flared up like fireworks, one after the other. The light from them was bright enough to read by, or to walk without fear in the dark. One by one they shone out, brighter than even the remembered prizes from when I was a boy. I held them up a moment, just to see them. They might have been beautiful. I don’t know; it’s not a word I ever used much.

And then, careful as I could, I set the jar down on the boundary between the county’s land and mine. The bottom of the jar barely hit dirt before all the fireflies flew to one side like the other was on fire. There they stayed, crawling all over each other and flashing franticlike, fast on and fast off.

I watched for a while, then nudged the jar a half inch farther onto my land. They crammed closer still, lights flickering on and off fast. Every few seconds one would slip and fall onto the unwanted side. As soon as it hit glass, it would scurry back across like a scalded cat, pushing and forcing its way in with the others until another one fell.

Another half inch. There wasn’t space for them all now, and they knew it. One after another they slammed themselves against the glass, against the lid. They tried, wings flapping, legs flailing, but there just wasn’t enough room, not anymore.

Me, I watched until the losers stopped moving and the winners barely twitched for fear of being shifted again. “I’m sorry,” I told them, and I pulled the jar all the way over my property line.

It didn’t take long. Fifteen seconds later, I was pouring dead fireflies onto the ground, out on the road. Not a one recovered like I’d been hoping they would. Not a one moved.

“Goddamn,” I said, and I threw the mason jar off into the night. It hit a rock somewhere down the road and shattered, and I found myself hoping Carl would cut a tire on it.

I had proof now. It wasn’t something about the foliage, or the soil, or anything else a scientific mind might have proposed to me. Fireflies hated my land, hated and feared it. If brought onto it, they’d flee. If they couldn’t flee, they’d die. But under no circumstances would my parents’ graves ever see their light.

The thought started me moving. I didn’t believe the story Mother had told me all those years ago, but I did remember lights dancing on those tombstones. They’d flown over this land once, lighting it up so the angels in Mother’s mind could see it. Something had changed, had changed hard and unkind, and the only place I thought the answers might be was at the foot of those graves.

Wind whispered through the pine trees as I walked past them. The needles rustled against each other like the sound of Mother’s housedress when she walked, soft against the ear. Off at the back end of the property, I could hear the tree frogs calling, high and sharp. Underneath them was the noise of the bullfrogs, deeper and hungrier.

Mother had joked that Father was part bullfrog, especially when he was eating. He stopped finding that funny after a while.

I took the last few steps to where the stones were. Mother and Father were the first ones buried on this land, even though it had been in Father’s family for generations. My great-grandfather had farmed it, and so had his father before him. Fathers passed it down to sons, living here, marrying, growing old, and dying, but not a one had chosen final rest here. A church ten miles distant held most of my ancestors in its cemetery, though a few could be found in long rows of markers at Chickamauga and the poppy fields of France. That’s what I’d been told growing up, and I found no reason to disbelieve it now.

Father chose to be buried here, though, or so I once thought.
Years later, I learned it had been Mother’s decision to lay him to rest out back, keeping him near so she might not be so lonely. Maybe she’d felt guilty for the way they’d fought when he was alive and wanted to make it right after he was gone. I refused to speculate. All that mattered was that he was here, and that she was laid to rest beside him.

All this ran through my mind as I looked down on their markers in the moonlight. There was enough to read the inscriptions by, though years of heat and summer thunder had long since scoured away the tombstones’ shine. J
OSHUA
J
EREMIAH
L
OGAN
, said Father’s. B
ELOVED
H
USBAND AND
F
ATHER
. H
E
W
ILL
B
E
M
ISSED
. Mother’s read, E
LAINE
S
TOUDAMIRE
L
OGAN
, W
IFE AND
M
OTHER
. H
ER
S
OUL
R
ISES TO
H
EAVEN
. No dates marked either one. Let the ages try to figure out when they lived and died. Here in this place, they were timeless.

Their graves had been lit by fireflies once, fireflies I’d brushed away sure as I’d killed the ones out in the road. No fireflies lit the graves tonight, though, and if what I’d seen in the mason jar was any indication, they might never light them again.

All around me, the night got still. The wind hushed and the frogs held their tongues. It was silent, quiet enough that I could hear the rasp of my breath and the thump of my heartbeat, and nothing more. I turned and blinked in surprise. Off in the distance I could see the wind moving leaves. Not here, though. The silence was just around me.

And around those graves. I took a step forward, away from that hallowed soil, and then I cast my words out over the fields.

“What do you want?” I asked in a voice just this side of shouting.
“Just tell me what the hell is going on here!”

Nothing answered me, not that I’d expected anything or anyone to do so. My words faded into the distance, swallowed up by
the silence. I stared after them, and eventually the world came back to noisy life around me. It wasn’t much, just the wind in the pine trees and the frogs in the distance, but it was enough to drown out the beating of my heart.

Lacking anything better to do, I lay down on the cool, wet grass at the foot of those graves and slept.

Morning broke and carried away with it the strongest memories of the night’s dreams. Some stayed long enough for me to recognize them, though, and I found myself clinging to those fiercely.

They were images from when I was small, before Mother and Father were too tired to hide their fights from me. Saturday morning pancake breakfasts and games of catch out back, afternoons spent helping Mother with her strawberry patch and pushing a hand-powered mower across tough crabgrass and clover.

Good memories, mostly, and pleasant ones. I’d missed those—I hadn’t thought about them in too many years.

Right about then I realized I still rested on the ground. A blade of grass was tickling my ear, but otherwise it was as fine a bed as a man could ask for. Stretching out my legs, I decided
against getting up quite yet. I could smell the tang of the red clay, sharp and cold and mixed with the sweet scent of the crushed grass underneath my head. The dew off the leaves had soaked through my clothes here and there, but it wasn’t uncomfortable so much as it was refreshing. It was as if my skin had been drinking it in, taking water directly from the land that had cradled me.

I rolled over and stared straight up at the sky, a swath of true Carolina blue framed by the dark green of the pines. Thin lines of white cloud drifted past, grace notes on the music of the heavens. As for the stones, they hung there just outside of my field of view, but I could feel them. There was no heaviness to the knowledge, though, just an awareness of their presence as something right and proper.

And sleeping in their shadow had felt right and proper, too—at least for one night.

I stood and dusted myself off, more out of habit than out of hopes of brushing stray blades of grass off my legs. The rational part of my mind cursed me for a damn fool, but its voice was small and tiny, and I didn’t listen to it long.