The Time of the Fireflies

by Kimberley Griffiths Little

“Wait!” Sophie said. “Please, don’t go yet. I have something I want to show you, and I just remembered it.” She walked down the hall for a moment and returned, holding a simple chain necklace with a gold heart on it. “I don’t know much about Dulcie Lamar, but this was something she possessed that was passed down through the generations, too, just like the doll. I got it from my grandmother a few years ago. I’ve always wondered where the necklace came from. They were dirt-poor back when she was growing up during the Depression. I can see why Dulcie and my grandmother would have treasured it, even though it’s not worth that much now. A nice little necklace for a girl. What makes it valuable is how old it is.”

  My necklace! The one that went missing the day I wore it to the island that last time! It must have come undone and fallen into the grass or dirt — right before Dulcie poked me with her finger to see if I was real. Dulcie had found it and saved it all these years. Tears pricked my eyelids. That strange, brief connection with Dulcie had lasted her whole life.

  Sophie gave me a quick look. “Have you seen this before, Larissa?”

  I didn’t know what to say. There were no words to explain. Time was colliding again, in new and bizarre ways.

  Grandma Kat spoke up. “May I see that necklace?”

  “Of course.” Sophie handed over the delicate chain, tarnished with age, but the gold heart had been polished and it shone under the sun coming through the window. “Looks like a friendship bracelet of some kind, don’t you think?”

  “I agree,” Grandma Kat said, staring straight at me. “My grandmother Miss Anna Normand had a necklace like this. She gave it to me and I gave it to my granddaughter, Larissa, as a keepsake only a few months ago on her twelfth birthday.”

  “Just like this?” Sophie said, her eyes seeing more than I wanted her to. “What a coincidence.”

  I still couldn’t talk. My brain buzzed with so many thoughts I was dizzy. I shook my head, trying not to let the lump in my throat grow even bigger.

  “I’m fairly sure that’s a story we’ll never truly know,” Grandma Kat said, gazing at me with her piercing eyes.

  The room grew quiet and Mamma finally rose to her feet. “Thank you so much for seeing us, Sophie. And thank you for the delicious brownies.”

  “My pleasure.” Sophie touched my hand, pressing the necklace into my palm with her warm fingers. “I have a feeling this belongs to you, Miss Larissa Renaud,” she whispered. “I want you to have it. Seems like a good exchange for the porcelain doll, don’t you think?”

  I moved my chin up and down, unable to speak. The next instant, Sophie put her arms around me and hugged me tight. “Thank you,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m so glad we met.”

  “Me, too,” I said, my voice choking.

  When we broke apart, Sophie pointed her finger at the corner of the sofa where the porcelain doll was sitting regally in her lace and ribbons. “Look, seems like she is smiling. It’s odd, but the doll looked quite unhappy when you first pulled her out of the box. You were holding her in your chair over there by the window, and I noticed. But now she’s happy, don’t you think?”

  “Definitely,” I said, my heart so full I thought it would burst.

  Sophie stroked the blond curls and ran a hand down the silk dress. The doll was smiling gently, not maliciously. Her eyes had lost the stormy, contemptuous stare. She’d been purged of the cursed soul. She was smiling, and I breathed the biggest sigh of relief of my life.

  Two weeks later, bulldozers arrived on the island.

  Alyson called me up to talk about it. “I can’t believe they’re really pulling it down. They’re tearing everything apart like it’s a bunch of sticks. It’s so sad. Makes me want to cry.”

  From afar, I’d already seen the walls crumple in and the roof collapse, but it hurt to hear Alyson say the words out loud. “I didn’t want to go and watch, but I had to. It’s like a piece of history lost. A piece of my family.”

  The whole island had been cordoned off. No public allowed due to falling chimneys and crashing bricks. There were warning signs and yellow Caution tape. Tractors with clawed arms taking bites out of the house. In the Bayou Teche, huge flatbed boats sat ready to carry the torn lumber and roofing away. An enormous pile of debris. It came down so fast I had cried, although I didn’t admit that to Alyson. I watched from a distance on the path with Mamma and Grandma Kat. They both were wiping their eyes but didn’t speak a single word.

  I’d never see the house again. I’d never see 1912 again. Even the fireflies had disappeared, leaving me lonely and melancholy.

  The next day I tried to get back into a routine. I offered to open the store by myself while Mamma took care of Emilie. It wasn’t the same because I was used to Daddy walking the store with me, checking on the price stickers while I dusted and made sure no stray books had floated off behind a lamp or inside a desk drawer.

  I had just turned the Bayou Bridge Antique Store sign to OPEN when Grandma Kat rang on the phone by the cash register. “Larissa! Get your mamma and the baby and get yourself out here to the bayou! Pronto! It’s an emergency!”

  Her frantic tone startled me. “What about the store? Daddy’s gone to Napoleonville — he’s picking up a truckload of antiques from an estate sale. I’m in charge.”

  “I know! That’s why I said to bring the baby!”

  I’d never heard my grandmother like this before. Excited, nervous, worried, all at once.

  “But —”

  “Emilie is almost six weeks old and healthy, and there ain’t no reason she can’t come, too.”

  “But where are you?”

  “Waiting for you at the bank by the bridge. Didn’t I say that already?”

  She snapped her cell phone shut, and I almost dropped the dead receiver I was holding. My grandmother had never acted like this in her life.

  When I told Mamma she gave me an odd look. “Grandma Kat really said that? Guess we better get on over there and see what all the fuss is about.”

  While Mamma strapped Emilie into the stroller and covered her with blankets and a sunbonnet, I locked up the register and the front door, quickly flipping the CLOSED sign out.

  We hurried down the sidewalk, past the bakery and post office and Verret’s Café and the town square where a bunch of kids were lounging around on the lawn.

  It was hard pushing the baby stroller on the dirt road, but Emilie fell asleep, her pink cheeks jiggling as we went over the washboard ruts.

  “Is this too much walking, Mamma?” I asked.

  “I’m fine, Larissa, truly. Better than I’ve been in a long time. It was like there was something strong and powerful and wicked holding me down. Making me angry and hateful all the time. I’m sorry for so much of the past year, Larissa, for so many unkind things I said to you.”

  “Were you scared? That night in the hospital? So far away in New Orleans?”

  She reached over to take my hand in hers, and we pushed the stroller together. “I don’t want to scare you, but I felt like there was something trying to kill me and Emilie. As if we were being yanked away from this world. I can’t even explain, it sounds so crazy now. Thank goodness I was in the best hospital in the state.”

  A minute later, we got to the broken bridge. Through the trees I could see backhoes and the steel flatbed boat piled high with the ruins of Mamma’s childhood home. I tried to speak, knowing the sight had to bother her, but no words came out. Her face was impassive, but I could see her jaw tighten and her knuckles whiten on the stroller handle.

  Rays of sunlight sparked across the water like golden firefly lights. I knew I’d never see the fireflies again. The time of the fireflies was over and they were gone. The past was dead and buried. Nobody would ever know who had lived here for so many generations. Miz Julianna and Miss Anna and Dulcie and Mister Lance and Uncle Edgar and Daphne and Gwen had been swallowed by time. Not I or anybody else would ever see the old plantation house rising out of the cypress grove again.

  A pang throbbed in my hea
rt and my eyes watered so bad I kept rubbing at them.

  Mamma fussed over Emilie, sticking a binky in her mouth to keep her asleep, and said, “How are we going to get over to the island if we don’t have a boat?”

  “We could borrow Alyson’s rowboat.”

  Mamma gave me one of her looks. “No way I’m taking a baby in a rowboat — even if it’s only a couple hundred yards across.”

  “Where’s Grandma Kat?” I asked. “She said she was right here at the bridge.”

  A drop of sweat trickled down Mamma’s brow. My hair burned on my neck under the sun. My question was answered two seconds later when a skiff came roaring down the bayou, hugging the shoreline. Grandma Kat stood next to Sheriff Granger, who was at the wheel.

  “What is going on?” Mamma asked when my grandmother threw us the towline to wrap around the piling while we boarded.

  Grandma Kat’s face had a strange expression. “I’m not sure, Maddie, but the sheriff called and said there was trouble when they pulled the old house down.”

  Mamma’s eyes darted toward Sheriff Granger. “What sort of trouble?”

  He pushed his hat back off his forehead. “When the main portion of the house came down, the brick chimney toppled into one of those hundred-and-fifty-year-old trees in the grove, busting up so many of the main limbs it killed the tree, unfortunately. The bulldozers had to take the tree down, which put them behind. Otherwise, they’d have cleared out of here today. The barge is ready to haul all this out of here, but they gotta chainsaw up the tree and get another boat to take it down to the sawmill.”

  Mamma shaded her eyes. “So what’s the problem?”

  “Oh, Maddie, get in the boat!” Grandma Kat burst out. “You have to see it to believe it! I’m so impatient I’m about to jump out of my skin, but I wanted you girls here with me. I just wish Preston were still alive.”

  I climbed into the boat and sat on one of the cushioned seats while Sheriff Granger helped Mamma in with Emilie and the stroller. “Didn’t Alyson come with you?” I asked.

  “Another time,” he said, smiling at me. “But she’s dying to know what’s going on.”

  The wind whipped my hair as we crossed in about sixty seconds flat. Then we were climbing out, and the engine of the barge lying along the shoreline was so loud I covered my ears. As we walked down the path and entered the clearing, a pile of concrete rubble, broken drywall, and insulation littered the foundation where the house used to be. A lump rose in my throat.

  Grandma Kat pulled on my arm. “Over here. Watch your step. There’s broken glass, too.”

  “I’ll wait here with Emilie,” Mamma said.

  “You sure?” my grandmother asked.

  “I am sure,” Mamma said firmly.

  Sheriff Granger put a folding chair down for Mamma and stayed with her. “You two go on,” he said. “You don’t need me any longer.”

  The backhoe turned off the machine and it grew quiet, like they were waiting for us to leave so they could get on with hauling out the last of the wreckage.

  With the house torn down, the island felt like a graveyard. My gut felt jumpy and sort of sick.

  Grandma Kat clasped my hand tight in hers. “Let’s cross over here, Larissa. All this used to be lawn back in the day.”

  I nodded. I knew that. I’d seen it with my own eyes.

  All of a sudden we came up to one of the big oaks that had been knocked over. Branches were everywhere. The trunk was huge, sprawled along the perimeter of the cypress grove. Its roots were humongous, like thick, giant veins sticking into the air. Clods of dirt and mud and spiderwebs clung to the gnarly underside.

  Grandma Kat stopped at the deep, wide hole the tree had left when it was knocked clean out of the earth.

  “Don’t touch anything,” one of the workmen said. “Might be unstable, although that tree ain’t goin’ nowhere until we chainsaw it up into pieces.”

  “How old do you think this tree is?” Grandma Kat asked.

  “At least a hundred and fifty years. Probably dates back before the war even, which would make it closer to two hundred years old.”

  My grandmother nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Why’d you drag us out here to look at a tree, Grandma?” Seeing the beautiful, ancient oak uprooted made my eyes prickle. I was surprised at my reaction. My heart had a deep hole, too, and I wanted to cry a little bit.

  Grandma Kat pulled me to her side. “Look down into that hole, my girl.”

  I leaned over. Roots as thick as my wrist crisscrossed deep into the earth. Then smaller roots, a whole web of them, as they spread even deeper into the ground. Many had been cut, though, and there were pieces of root lying all over the ragged grass, too.

  Then I saw it. A wooden box buried down inside the ground. A chest with leather straps and a padlock.

  Images of Mister Lance in his suspenders swam in front of my eyes. I got so dizzy I almost fell over.

  “Steady, Larissa,” Grandma Kat said.

  “It looks like a treasure box!” I breathed.

  “You think maybe all those rumors and gossip since the war weren’t just rumors and gossip?”

  My heart beat with a hundred emotions. “What if there’s truly something inside?”

  “Only one way to find out.” She motioned to one of the tree specialists, who came over and spent several minutes pulling up the chest.

  “How long has it been there?” I asked him.

  The man said, “From the looks of things, this box was buried under the tree when it was first planted. All these years, decades and decades, the tree has been growing taller and bigger. Even if you dug around it, you’d have never found it.”

  “Guess the person who buried this wooden chest didn’t want anyone finding it.”

  “That’d be my estimation,” the man said as a second man helped him heft the chest up onto the dirt. “It’s pretty heavy, actually,” he added, stepping back.

  “Ingenious way to bury your family treasure,” Grandma Kat said with approval. “If there’s anything of value actually inside. Maybe it was already confiscated and the location forgotten — or the person who buried it died somewhere else.”

  “Or nobody believed him,” I spoke up.

  My grandmother lifted her head. “You got a guess as to who that might be?”

  I rubbed at my scar. “Nope. Somebody who lived before Miss Anna’s time, but probably somebody like Uncle Edgar, who was rich. Maybe his own father. The Yankees came and took over the house during the war, so they buried the family gold so the soldiers wouldn’t get their hands on it.”

  “Okay, I can’t stand it,” Grandma Kat said. “Young man, will you do me the pleasure of taking your shovel to that padlock? I don’t assume the key is anywhere nearby.”

  Two whacks with a shovel and the archaic padlock shattered.

  I knelt on the dirt with my grandmother as she lifted the stiff, dirt-drenched lid. The wood of the box began to splinter, rotting after so long, but the inside of the chest was lined with a decaying royal-blue velvet.

  Nestled inside the box was a second slim mahogany box with gorgeous floral etchings. Grandma Kat lifted it out and opened the lid on its rusty hinges. “Oh, my Lord in heaven, Larissa, will you look at that!” Gently lifting the layers of tableware, she counted out loud. “Twelve sets of silver!”

  I stared at twelve forks and knives and spoons anchored by ribbons of burgundy.

  “Look, these are tiny cocktail forks,” Grandma Kat went on. “And big soup spoons. And a whole set of serving spoons. How large they are! Real silver, not plated. Real silver, Larissa. Only the best for those sugarcane farmers before the war. It’s got to be worth a fortune.”

  I peered into the bottom of the old chest and saw rotting velvet pouches shredding with age. “Look, Grandma, look! Silver coins and gold coins,” I breathed. “Piles of them. Falling out of their pouches!”

  With shaking hands, my grandmother retrieved one, holding it under the sun in h
er palm. “Perfectly minted,” she whispered. “The etchings still deep, as though they were never used. This is Confederate gold and silver, minted in the early days of the war.”

  I bent my head, the coins sparkling under the sun. “It says Confederate States of America! 1861 and 1862. So many of them.”

  Grandma Kat grabbed me up in a huge hug and we rocked back and forth for the longest time as she wept with shock and joy. Our knees got grass-stained. Perspiration dribbled down our faces. My grandmother closed her eyes, and I was pretty sure I knew what she was thinking because I was dreaming the very same thing.

  I was picturing the beautiful plantation mansion towering above the rise of the ground. Perfect emerald lawns rolling down to the water once again. The broken bridge crossing the Bayou Teche rebuilt, wide enough for a car this time.

  “The silver and the coins were here all this time,” Grandma Kat whispered in awe. “All during those years of tragedy and death. When we lost hundreds of acres of farmland. When the house burned to the ground. When we had to move away. Your parents barely scraping by.”

  “The rumors weren’t just gossip, then. Uncle Edgar talked about it, didn’t he?”

  “That’s what my grandmother Anna always said. But I also heard that Uncle Edgar was just a dreamer. A wanderer with a fat bank account, so what did he care about digging up the whole island to find some long-lost family forks!” Grandma Kat rocked back on her heels in wonder. “Sometimes we don’t know what’s right under our noses until it looks like all is lost. Not until all is lost does something wonderful rise out of the ashes.”

  “Or rises up from the ground!” I couldn’t help adding.

  Grandma Kat gave a big, wonderful laugh, and Mamma was suddenly next to me, holding Emilie in her arms. She fell to her knees, putting a hand against her mouth. “What does it all mean?”

  “It means,” my grandmother said, her voice shaking, “that the family curse is finally over.”

  “Just weeks after Dulcie got her doll back,” I added. “Our family finally gets a real home. On our very own island.”

  Grandma Kat’s eyes were misty. “It means the past has caught up with the future. Our ancestors were watching out for us all along.”