The Firefly Dance

by Sarah Addison Allen

  When I get down to the bottom of the hill, I take a long, iron-cold drink of water from the pipe. Then I go into the robing house and put the sandwiches in the corner and stretch out on my stomach to rest awhile before I go off in those hot woods to look for the Brawny-Paper-Towel-man/Dr. Livingstone-Jesus.

  I look down through the cracks between the planks at the shallow water rippling easily over white sand and the little pebbles down at the bottom that have gotten round and smooth from the water running over them for more years than anyone can remember. I can see tadpoles and salamanders in the branch and hear a far-away splash from the creek, where the otters are playing. Birds are chirping a little, and the squirrels are really going at it something fierce, running around and fussing in the tree tops because they know I’m in the robing house, and they want to tell each other all about it.

  I lie there watching tadpoles and thinking about maybe staying there all day and all night long, and maybe never going back home. But I’m too afraid to sleep there all alone in the dark, so I know that in the late afternoon, I’ll have to go back to where Danny chews and swallows and Papa watches every big bite of red meat that goes into his mouth and Mama wipes her eyes and Grandmama wears dirty pink bedroom shoes and holds onto the remote control so nobody can change channels or turn down the sound.

  I watch through the crack in the floor and see three little tadpoles facing into the current and twitching their tails hard to keep from being swept away downstream. I know how they feel.

  But in the next moment, something blocks my view, and it takes me a few seconds to realize I’m looking down through the crack right at the top of someone’s head. Someone small enough to stand under the robing house.

  “Hey!” I jump up, run down the wooden steps, and peer under the house.

  It’s a little boy—hardly more than a baby, just good walking age and still not too steady on his feet—starting to wade into the branch under the robing house, and with his arms held out to balance himself, but when he steps into that shallow, ice-cold water and his toes sink into the smooth white sand, he stops and looks over his shoulder at me with a very surprised look on his face.

  “It’s cold,” I say. He smiles and gazes at me very comfortably, just as if he knows me. But I’m sure I’ve never seen him before. He’s brown as a berry, like he’s been out in the sunshine for the whole summer long, and has mahogany-colored hair and it all thick and curly and a solid body that seems to grow out of the earth like a stout little tree. Eyes that are big and round and the color of good soil in bottomland.

  I look around, to see if his Mama or Papa is somewhere nearby, because nobody—not even the Todeys—would let a toddling baby go off alone like that. Besides, he sure doesn’t look like any of the Todey children. They’re all tow-heads and have watery eyes and weak chins. This little boy is dark and strong-chinned and solid.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  He gazes at me, and one of his hands almost comes up, as if to wave at me. Then it drops back by his side. He is wearing only a pair of blue shorts, and he’s so little, he still has a poking-out stomach, like babies have. And a smell about him like warm sunshine against a new fencepost.

  “Who are you?” I ask again, squatting down. “Where’s your Mama and Papa?” He pauses for a few seconds and then bends over and starts picking up smooth, round pebbles from the bottom of the branch.

  “Where’s your folks?” I try again, but he just keeps picking up pebbles.

  I waddle under the robing house, ducking my head and watching out for the terrible black spiders that live there. And wasp-nests too. When I reach him, he has so many pebbles in his hands that every time he tries to pick up another one, he drops some. But he just keeps on doing it anyway.

  “Come on with me,” I say. “I’ll help you find your folks.” Because maybe he belongs to someone visiting somewhere near or some family that’s come to clean up their plots in the cemetery—although I didn’t see anyone when I came through.

  He turns and comes right to me, holding out all the smooth pebbles he’s gathered. I hold out my hands and he gives them all to me, smiling as big as if he’s just given me something very wonderful.

  “Pebbles,” I say, looking at the glistening white and gray and yellow stones and then back at him.

  He blinks.

  “Peb—bles.” I break the word down so maybe he can say it. But he just smiles at me and lifts up his eyebrows, as if what I’m saying sounds pretty funny.

  “What’s your name?” I ask, but he just puts his hands on top of his head and sways a little from side to side, pursing his mouth and watching me.

  “I guess you’re too young to talk,” I say unnecessarily, and he nods, as if I have just discovered some amusing secret.

  “Come on with me then,” I say again. “I’ll help you find your folks.” I drop the pebbles back in the branch and hold out my hand to him, but he makes no move to take it. I remember the sandwiches.

  “Hey! You hungry?” I ask, and without waiting for an answer, I scurry from under the robing house, run up the steps, and grab one of the sandwiches.

  When I come back, he’s gone. Just that fast.

  “Where’d you go?” I yell. My empty shout echoes back to me from the dark trees.

  “Where’d you go?” I yell again, because the deep creek is so near, and he’s so small and doesn’t know anything. I dart out from under the robing house and run down to the creek and look all around and then I run back past the robing house and halfway back up the hill toward the cemetery, sending a whole cloud of tiny, brilliant green grasshoppers bounding away in all directions in the tall grass, my breath catching against my ribs and something inside hurting so bad, it’s almost like having a serpent’s tooth stuck in me.

  But I can’t find him.

  I run back down the hill, and all of a sudden, there he is—under the robing house right where I left him, waiting in exactly the same place, with his feet in the branch.

  I crawl back under the house. With my breath catching against my ribs, I unwrap the waxed paper so that the perfume of peanut butter drifts out. I tear the sandwich in two and hold a piece out to him.

  He makes no move to take it, but he starts to smile and then to laugh, and finally, he laughs so hard, his eyes water.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask, looking at the sandwich to see if there’s something wrong with it.

  He looks down at his feet and laughs again, a deep, belly-wrenching sound.

  I look down.

  Hundred of tadpoles are wriggling around his toes in the clear cold water, so many tadpoles, they look like a fat, gray bouquet of wriggling flowers, all pushing each other and struggling to get to his toes.

  “Tadpoles,” I say, almost singing the word and starting to laugh myself, because I’ve never seen so many of them in one place before and none of them afraid at all.

  He stands in the branch for a long time, while we laugh at the squirming mass of tadpoles around his feet.

  But at last, he comes out, and a few of the tadpoles wriggle themselves up onto the sand at the edge of the branch.

  I give him his half of the sandwich, and he takes it as if he doesn’t know what to do with it. He smells of it and looks at me.

  “It’s good,” I say, biting into my half. “M-m-m!” I add, rolling my eyes and smiling.

  He bites into his, and the dark eyebrows shoot straight up.

  “M-m-m!” he mimics me, rolling his eyes.

  We eat and say M-m-m-m! and roll our eyes and laugh.

  When we finish, he looks at the peanut-butter stuck to his fingers and then reaches up and wipes it off into his hair.

  I lead him to the baptismal pool and wash his hands under the flowing water and wet the tail of my shirt so I can wipe the peanut butter off his face. I make a cup of my hands and give h
im a drink of water, and his mouth is warm against my palms. There’s still peanut butter in his hair, but I can’t do much of anything about that.

  “Now listen,” I say. “We have to find out who you belong to.” The way he draws his eyebrows together and looks at me so hard, you’d think he could understand what I’m saying.

  “Maybe we ought to take you to my house and get my Papa to help us find your Mama and Papa,” I say. But the thought of taking him to my house makes my stomach lurch in alarm. It wouldn’t really be much different than catching one of those little brown otters and taking him away from the creek. Put him in a cardboard box out on the back porch, with all the spare tractor parts and old feed bags and Grandmama’s canning jars and the steak bones.

  “Or maybe we could find them ourselves,” I suggest. “Of course, the only place near enough for you to have come from is the Todeys,” I say. “Your Mama and Papa visiting over there?”

  He smiles and tilts his head.

  So that’s what we have to do, then. It’s the only way. So I take his hand and we start up the hill toward the cemetery, because I have in mind that if we double back up to the crossroads, we can cross the creek at the wooden bridge and go over to the Todey place. See if any of them knows anything about a lost little boy.

  Don’t you ever go anywhere near the Todey place, I can hear Mama’s voice just as clear as day, but there’s nowhere else near enough for this little boy to have walked to the church.

  So go to the Todeys, I must. No matter what Mama says.

  As we pass through the cemetery, he spots all those garish angels and the concrete Mary standing in the Todey plot. He points to them.

  “Yes,” I say. “They’re pretty ugly, aren’t they?”

  He doesn’t answer me, but as we pass on and start up the road, he keeps looking back over his shoulder. Finally, I pick him up and carry him.

  We go all the way back to the crossroads and turn left, to follow a road that leads down to the wooden bridge over the creek. He leans a little in my arms and looks down into the black water.

  “That’s the creek,” I say. “You don’t ever want to try and wade in that. It’s too deep.”

  I start up the hill on the other side, walking in the sun-dried ruts that were made the last time it rained good and hard. Carved into the baked clay are all kinds of slip-and-slide marks made by big truck tires. The Todey truck, I am sure, since no one else I know of ever comes this way. And even the trees and the bushes look different here—dry and brown and with more brambles.

  He must sense it too—the change in things once you’re over the creek, I mean—because his arms tighten around my neck.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “I won’t let anything happen to you,.”

  Finally, I gain the top of the hill and look down into a big chinaberry thicket standing in the middle of the wild grasses that grow all around in what was once a field of corn. But the corn is long gone and the yellow-silver weeds go almost as far as the eye can see. In the middle of the Chinaberry thicket, part of a rusted tin roof shows through the dark green leaves.

  The Todey house.

  I walk down very slowly, and then I stop and put the little boy down, pushing on his shoulders until he sits snug up against an old tree at the very edge of the thicket. “You stay here,” I tell him. “And don’t you make a single sound, you hear?”

  For good measure, I press my finger against his mouth and say “Sh-h-h!”

  The deep, sober eyes question for only a moment before I see obedience flicker through them.

  I walk up to a rusty chicken-wire fence that goes all the way around the tilted house, and suddenly, a big pack of dogs—all of them a dirty yellow color—come tearing out from under the porch, yowling and snarling. Slowly, I walk along the fence until I come to an iron gate.

  “Mister Todey?” I call. It’s a high, girl-sounding shriek.

  “Mister Todey?” I call again, even higher pitched.

  A yellowed curtain at the front window moves. The barking dogs come right up to the gate, and one big mongrel curls back his upper lip and shows me an array of sharp, yellow teeth.

  “MISTER TODEY!!”

  The front door opens and Mr. Todey comes out. Behind him, in the dark room, two other hollow-eyed men who don’t even blink when the screen door closes in their faces.

  “Whutchuwont?” he asks, and then he yells, “SHUT UP! YOU DOGS!” in a voice that almost knocks me off my feet. The dogs shrink in unison and slink back under the porch, the big mongrel glancing at me once more over his shoulder and showing me his teeth. Mr. Todey is like a faded leather string, all thin and with yellow skin and yellow teeth.

  “I SAID WHATCHUWONT?” he yells.

  “Please, sir,” I start, even though I know I’m not supposed to say sir to any of the Todeys. “You all got anybody visiting you that’s lost a little boy?”

  “Little boy?”

  “Just a toddling baby, sir,” I add.

  Mr. Todey scratches his stubble on his chin.

  “Got nobody visiting,” he finally says. Then, “Where’s this little boy at?”

  “He’s . . . he’s at my house,” I lie. “My Papa sent me over here to see if you all’s got any visitors he could belong to.”

  “Got nobody visiting, I told you,” he repeats.

  “Well, thank you then,” I say, taking a relieved breath and turning to go, but just then, two Todey boys about my age—only big—come around the side of the house. They are younger versions of Mr. Todey. Yellow hair, yellow skin, yellow teeth.

  “He bothering you, Papa?” one of them asks.

  “Maybe,” Mr. Todey answers, and I feel the hair coming up on the back of my neck.

  “You want us to run him off for you, Papa?” the other one asks.

  There is a long, long pause, and my heart thuds hard against my chest, and my feet feel like they’re already running.

  Mr. Todey’s mouth twitches a couple of times and then slowly webs out into a terrible grin.

  “Do whatcha like,” he says so low I can hardly hear him, and then I know the words, and they explode in my ears, like a starter pistol.

  I lunge away from the fence and around the side of the Chinaberry thicket, the high grass swishing against my legs and I hear the gate slamming behind me and I run harder and faster than I have ever run in my whole life toward where I left the little boy. From a distance, I see his head pop up out of the tall grass and then go back down again, like a baby deer that’s hiding because its Mama said that’s what it should do.

  Closer and closer I come to him, with my breath tearing through my chest and the terrifying sounds of running feet behind me. He sees me coming, stands up, and steps out into the clearing, holding up his arms to me.

  I don’t stop for a moment when I grab him, but just snatch him right off his feet and tuck him under my arm like you do a football and keep running.

  Down the pitted hill, stumbling and clutching for a hold in the dried ruts and across the bridge, my feet sounding a loud tattoo on the sun-warmed wood and then up and across the flank of another hill and over the edge of a ravine and sliding down and down in old pinestraw until I manage to grab a sapling and stop the slide.

  I don’t move a muscle, listening for the footsteps behind me, and my breath tears through me like a tornado. The child doesn’t make a single sound, so I loosen my grip on him and let him rest against the side of the ravine.

  I listen for a long time, but no one is following us. I’m sure of it. The Todeys would never follow anyone over the bridge.

  And at that very moment, I know what a real football player must feel like after he runs into the end zone with that ball tucked under his arm, and the referee throws up his arms in a victory sign and the air is filled with the white-hot sizzle-sound from hundreds of clapping
hands.

  “Boy! Would my Papa have been proud to see how fast I ran just now,” I say. But while I am smiling and imagining Papa clapping me on the back and saying, “Way to go, son!” I look at the child, who has his eyes screwed shut and is shaking all over.

  “Did I scare you?” I ask. “I sure didn’t mean to. Just that the Todeys are awful mean folks, and we had to get out of there fast. You understand?”

  Silence and a couple of hiccoughs.

  I pull him to me and snuggle him against my chest. He is willing and pliant and burrows against me.

  “I’ll bet you’re missing your Mama, aren’t you?”

  Because after all, he’s only a baby and all alone. Except for me.

  He pushes away from me and gets to his feet. I study him hard.

  “You think you can show me where your Mama is?” Maybe this is the way to get him to help me find his folks, asking him something very specific, like Show me where your Mama is.

  He nods and takes my hand. I stand up and let him lead me down into the bottom of the ravine and up the other side, going ever so slowly and following his clumsy baby-steps.

  When we come out of the woods, we’re back where we started, about midway between the robing house and the cemetery, and he doesn’t even hesitate but leads me up the hill and in among the white stones until we come to the barbed-wire fence around the Todey plot.

  He holds his arms up to me, and I pick him up. He points toward the fence.

  “What do you want?” I ask. “I thought you were going to show me where your Mama is.”