Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

  Finally Unc turned to me. “You say you want to study journalism?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded and tongued the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “You can put your boots in the oven, but that doesn’t make them biscuits.”

  I didn’t need a translation. But then he surprised me by offering one.

  “You can say whatever you want about something, but that doesn’t change what it is.” He put his hands on my shoulders, looked out over campus, then back at me. “You tell the truth . . . the first time . . . every time.”

  I nodded, but no words came. My throat wouldn’t let them out.

  Three and a half months later, Ms. Sullivan kept her word, and his phone rang.

  Chapter 31

  Nighttime fell across the Zuta, bringing the sound of two hoot owls shouting at each other across the treetops. I leaned against the front porch post not knowing if they were setting up to mate or telling each other to stay off their property. Eyes closed, I heard the screen door creep open. Tommye had gone up to bed shortly after her dad left, and Unc was paying bills at the kitchen table with Aunt Lorna. Sketch shuffled out of the house wearing his Spidey pajamas. He sat down next to me, his notebook on his lap. He scribbled quickly and held it up for me.

  WHO WAS THAT LADY TODAY?

  “She’s a momma . . . looking for her son.”

  DID SHE THINK I WAS HIM?

  “Yes.”

  He wrote without looking at the page. AM I?

  His question pressed me against the railing. Men spend their lives asking Who am I when the real question is Whose am I? I don’t think you can answer the first until you’ve settled the second. First horse, then cart. Identity does not grow out of action until it has taken root in belonging. The orchid speech taught me that.

  Across the pasture, fireflies sparked inside the fog that had drifted in.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He rested his head on top of his arms, which were folded across the top of his knees. I hadn’t said much to Unc since Uncle Jack left. None of us had. Supper was quiet, and Sketch had picked up on the tension.

  The screen door creaked. Unc walked out in his slippers and sat down on the steps opposite me. He was carrying a white chunk of marble, about the size of a Rubik’s cube. It was mostly white with a single smoke-colored vein running through the middle. Two sides were jagged—where it’d broken off the slab—and the others were smooth and flat. The topside had been polished to a high shine.

  He turned the marble in his hands and rubbed at it with his thumbs. “I was working the other day at this new barn on the north side of the island. Folks there are building a house. Real nice, too. Big. From their crow’s nest they can see both the ocean and the intracoastal. They’ve got this big trash pile out back. Sort of a place where they throw all their scraps. I found this, and the foreman said I could have it.”

  Sketch’s interest piqued, and he looked into Unc’s lap.

  He handed it to the kid, turning it onto its flat end. “Careful, don’t let it cut you.”

  Sketch ran his palm flat across the top.

  Unc looked at him down his nose. “You ever heard of Michelangelo?”

  Sketch shook his head.

  “He was an artist.”

  The kid looked up.

  “Yeah . . . like you, but I think you might be a bit better when it comes to that pencil. Michelangelo was also a painter.” He chuckled. “Pretty good one too. Even painted the ceiling in a church.” He pulled a small flat-faced hammer and wood chisel out of his back pocket and set them on the porch between them.

  “But he was also a sculptor. I heard it told once that he used to go to these huge quarries where they get rock, and he’d instruct the masons to cut out a gigantic piece of marble, about the size of a Buick, then roll it back to his workshop, where he’d spend a couple of years chipping away at it. He’d cut all kinds of things from those stones. People. Horses. Even kings. He’d bang away with a huge hammer and chisel, taking off huge chunks. Then he’d come back with a smaller hammer, smaller chisel, maybe a file, then some sandpaper, and finally a damp velvet cloth.

  “Admirers used to ask him, ‘How did you create that out of a chunk of rock?’ He’d shake his head and say, ‘I didn’t. It was there all along. I just let it out.’ He called it ‘releasing the form inside.’ People used to buy his statues and then put them in the center of their house or someplace they could shine a light on them. It was special to have one, and they’d put it in a place of honor.”

  Sketch looked up at him, eyes curious.

  Unc tapped him gently on the chest. “Inside you is a thing worth putting on a pedestal—worth putting out there for all the world to see. That piece of rock might have been knocked around, roughed up a bit, considered scrap, and thrown on the trash pile . . . but that’s only because they don’t know what’s on the inside. They can’t see like Michelangelo. ’Cause if they could, they’d know that there’s something in there that’s just waiting to jump out. Like there is inside you. I’m sorry for the hammer and chisel. I wish life didn’t work that way.” He pulled a small scrap piece of velvet out of his pocket, unfolded it, and laid it across Sketch’s leg. “Just remember . . . the velvet cloth ain’t far behind.”

  Sketch looked up at Unc, wanting more. Unc pulled him closer, but he was done. He’d said what he came to say. The three of us sat on the porch watching the fireflies dance across the pasture. Aunt Lorna, who’d been eavesdropping at the screen door, stepped out and handed me a mason jar with holes punched in the top.

  I walked off the porch and began skipping across the pasture, snatching at the stars. Sketch watched me with a tilted head. Then my jar lit up like a riverboat lantern. We spent an hour running across the pasture chasing fireflies. Unc too. By the time all three of us were out of breath, we’d shoved half the Milky Way into that jar.

  When we tucked him into bed, he set the jar next to his bed where every few seconds it would flash like a meteor.

  Unc and I stood in the doorway. He whispered, “You want to talk to him, or me?”

  “I think he needs to hear from you.”

  He walked into the room, squatted, and looked into the glass. I lingered outside my old room, listening, remembering.

  “You ever wondered why God made light come out of a firefly’s butt?”

  I shook my head and smiled—laughter for pain.

  I had a strong need to sit on my boat, so I grabbed my keys off the hook and headed for the door. When I reached Vicky, I heard the screen door close behind me. I cranked her up and slid the stick into neutral. Unc leaned on Vicky and waited for me to get the rest of it off my chest. I was angry, but when I looked at him—his yellowed T-shirt, red neck, freckled shoulders, and honesty painted across his face, I couldn’t aim it at him. Least of all at him. “How do you know about Michelangelo?”

  He smiled and pushed his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “What I know might surprise you.”

  I didn’t often get uppity with Uncle Willee. He had lived too much, through times that were too hard for me to think I knew better than him. But sometimes the pressure in the cooker needed venting.

  “What’s eating you, boy?”

  “Honest answer?”

  He nodded.

  “You.”

  “Oh, that. What is it that you believe about me?”

  “Uncle Jack took everything you had or dreamed of having. Why haven’t you ever hired an attorney? Pleaded your case, struck back, hit him where it hurts?”

  “So what then? What would I have?”

  “Respectability.”

  “Then what would I have?”

  “A good name.”

  “Then what would I have?”

  “People’s respect.”

  “Then what?”

  “Some dang dignity.”

  “But I have all that.”

  “You do? How? You’re a doormat, and his Italian leather shoes
have left prints all over your face. Why don’t you get in his face and tell him what you think?”

  Unc had a way of hammering nails in the coffin of your argument when you least expected it. He stared at me, then spoke softly. His tone told me he was talking more to me than about his brother. “Words that soak into your ears are whispered, not yelled.”

  “Unc—I don’t doubt you—or what you know. What I doubt is why you keep it a secret.”

  “I know. But you’re gonna have to trust me on this.”

  “I have. My whole life. But”—I stared up at Tommye’s window—“it’s getting harder.”

  “Chase, I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Won’t.”

  “Why?”

  There was a long pause where I could see him arguing with him-self. Finally, the side that won spoke.

  “Because . . . I love you that much.”

  He blinked, and for the first time in my adult life, I saw something I’d never seen.

  “Always have.”

  Water lapped the side of the boat, which was pointing west and tugging on its two anchors. That told me the wind was out of the west and that tomorrow would be warm. Even hot.

  I spent most of the night working on my article. Red said he wanted a story of life with the kid, where he is and how he’s doing, mixed with the life of an orphan. Sort of a window into the orphan’s plight, using Sketch’s eyes as our telescope. I went over my story—reading it aloud several times—tweaked it in a few places and, at two in the morning, e-mailed it to Red.

  He called me ten minutes later. I flipped my cell phone open.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Not much. It’s too quiet here. I miss the sounds of taxis, horns, sirens, and people screaming at one another. All I’ve got out here is the sound of bullfrogs, owls, and the occasional cat in heat.”

  “You don’t know how good you’ve got it.”

  I heard his screen door squeak, which meant he’d read my story on his porch.

  “You’ve got something different going on in this story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The detached, cold, hard journalist of fact has been replaced by someone with a pulse.”

  I wasn’t sure how to take that. “You want me to rewrite it?”

  He chuckled. “Not hardly.”

  “What then?”

  “Keep looking. And yes, I’ll buy the Braves tickets.”

  An hour later, I turned out the lights—after my computer had beat me three times in a row at chess.

  Chapter 32

  THE POWER OF A NAME: DISCOVERING THE IDENTITY OF JOHN DOE #117

  Though mute, he is anything but silent.

  John Doe #117 was moved to the Brunswick Boys’ home last week following his release from the hospital. A mute boy of unknown identity—whose age is believed to be somewhere between eight and ten—was discovered nearly two weeks ago next to a railroad track. Authorities believe he had been kidnapped and thrown from the car just before the driver was hit and killed by a southbound freight train. DNA testing determined that the driver of the car was no relation to the child. Following a week’s stay in the hospital, where he displayed a penchant for pizza and ice cream, the boy—who, though mute, is anything but silent—was moved to a local boys’ home while authorities worked to secure a suitable foster home. Authorities are trying to find the boy’s relatives, but are cautious given the many scars of physical abuse marring the boy’s body. Since leaving the hospital he has proved adept at jigsaw puzzles and chess—which he seems to have mastered better than most in Glynn County.

  John Doe #117 is one of more than 500,000 unadopted children living in foster care in the United States. Each, like Little Orphan Annie, lives with the inextinguishable hope that Mom or Dad will walk through the door at any moment and reclaim their baby. Yet, in truth, for every child that is adopted, three more are passed over. Their average age is eight. Most can wait three to four years to be adopted, while others reach eighteen and the wait is over. Statistically, when a child reaches eight or nine years of age, their likelihood of remaining in foster care becomes higher than the probability they will be adopted.

  The emotional effects of a seemingly parentless life can plague them for a lifetime—abandonment, rejection, low self-esteem. “Adoptees suffer from a fear of loss. They see loss all over the place,” stated the late Dr. Marty Hernandez, who was a psychiatrist at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine and a nationally recognized expert on adoption.

  Abandonment bleeds into every area of their lives, permeating their psyches and whispering the lie that others in their lives will also abandon them. Most children feel there must have been something shameful about their past and begin to feel ashamed of themselves. As a result they fear rejection, have trouble making commitments, and avoid intimacy—even sabotaging their relationships out of self-preservation in an attempt to insulate themselves from further abandonment. Why? Vulnerability costs too much. “They fear that a person they invest in will leave them, just like their birth parents,” said Dr. Hernandez. “If it happened once, it can happen again.”

  Milestone events—such as graduation from high school or college, marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of an adoptive parent—can prove especially difficult for adoptees because they spark commonly asked questions: Why did my parents put me up for adoption? Was something wrong with me? Did I enter the world defective? What would life have been like had I not been adopted? Some rationalize their feelings with monologues such as, “My birth mother was not able to care for me, and she wanted me to have the best home possible,” or, “At least they didn’t abort me,” but these arguments are easily worn out, and most know better.

  One question commonly shared by all adoptees surrounds their name. What was/is their real name? Language philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Langer and Percy suggest two primary modes of thought on language. The first holds that language had meaning before humans got hold of it, i.e., an Edenic language discovered when Adam and Eve first entered the garden. They pulled words off the shelf as needed with the meaning inherent. The second philosophy says that words have no meaning except that which we give them. Any combination of letters can mean anything we want. Meaning is obtained through use.

  So what does an ivory-towered academic discussion have to do with unadopted children? More than you might think. A name tells them not only who they are but, maybe more importantly, whose they are. Every adoptee lives knowing that at one time he or she had a real name—the one their mother or father whispered the nine months before they were born. Some were recorded on birth certificates, some not, but all were known by the parent and believed in by the child. A change in paperwork can’t erase words stamped on the human heart.

  Recent history records many famous orphaned, fostered, and adopted kids—Babe Ruth, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe—but it’s those from fiction that mean most to those passed over and still waiting. They carry the stories with them: Superman, Luke Skywalker, Oliver Twist, Peter Pan, Mowgli, Huckleberry Finn. They read, tell, and retell the stories of the heroic and the happy because the ending has already been written—and they know it by heart.

  Chapter 33

  I’d been home from Florida State just under a year when I pulled the orange crate out from under my bed and tacked my collage back up on the wall. While I had passed with honors, I still could not crack the story that had gotten me started in the first place. Too many pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit. For so long I had buried it, held it at bay, closed my ears to the rumors and whispers, that finally the pressure cooker just exploded in my lap. I had grown up under the shroud of two indecipherable mysteries: I didn’t know about me, and I didn’t know about Liam McFarland. I figured I couldn’t know about me, but I had an idea the truth about him could be found if I knew where to dig.

  Have you ever been in a boat on a river or lake and been approached by peop
le in another boat? They throw you a rope and then, in order to help, you pull the two together and place one foot on each boat, holding the two off each other but close enough so that passengers can jump from one to the other. That’s what my life was like: standing on two boats, anchored to nothing, with constant waves and wind—just one wave short of going over.

  Together, it was just too much static—like a radio dial that would never tune into the Braves game. While the newspaper gave me a job and put me to work writing all the stories nobody else wanted, I spent late nights, early mornings, and all-nighters obsessed with a twenty-year-old secret. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I requested old court documents, transcripts, the official pardon, and I even interviewed one of the guards who drove Unc from prison to bury his son.

  Six months later, I laid it out for him. I told him his own story—at least what I knew of it. For two hours he nodded and dug his hand into a grocery sack of boiled peanuts. I think he was proud of my work. When I finished, he sat rocking, sucking the juice out of an unopened peanut, his feet propped up on the front porch railing. Throwing a shell over the railing, he sipped some water and studied the peanuts in his hand. “And?”

  “What?”

  “You still haven’t asked me your question.”

  “Which question?”

  “The one question you been wanting to ask me for twenty years.”

  I looked out through the pecan trees and watched a black fox squirrel jump from one branch to another, ferrying an uncracked nut in his mouth. I leaned against the railing and grabbed a handful of peanuts. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “It’s hard to beat the evidence.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “You were the last one in the vault.”

  “That’s not either.”

  “You, Perry Kenner, and Ellsworth McFarland were the only ones with access to the bonds, because I don’t think Ellsworth or Perry trusted Jack, given his affinity for both poker and leverage.”