Firefly Rain

by Richard Dansky

  Ten o’clock had come and gone by the time I turned off the state route and found my way through the little town called Maryfield. Mother and Father’s house lay on the other side of it, well outside the city limits, and driving straight through was the only way to get there. There were more lights and shops than I remembered, but not many, and I didn’t feel like stopping to further consider the differences. Two days on the road had me bone tired. There’d be time enough to explore later if I felt the need.

  A quick left onto Harrison Farm Road led me right back out of town and into the dark. The road had been mostly gravel when I was growing up; now the asphalt extended farther, and the houses and streetlights with it. But soon enough the last of the lights faded behind me. The town had crept closer to the house, but it still had miles to go before it was knocking on the door—my door, really. For that I was thankful, and there was a smile on my face as I drove off into the dark.

  The road narrowed to one lane of hard-packed gravel, bounded on each side with a drainage ditch. Strangers had trouble with the road if they drove it after dark; watching neighbors winch station wagons back up onto the road had been a common pastime in my youth. I knew it, though, knew it well enough to take in the landscape as I drove. I could see the outlines of the trees that lined the road and not much else. The only things visible beyond them were the lights from the few houses I passed and the fireflies in the fields.

  It was going to be a good summer for them, I could tell. Already the ground was thick with gold-green light, and the air above the fields danced with those cold sparks. It had been a long time since I’d seen fireflies in that kind of abundance—Boston isn’t partial to that sort of thing—and for a moment I was tempted to pull over and catch one in my hands. Then I thought about the two stones standing out past the pine trees and the empty house waiting for me, and all temptation fled.

  The driveway came up on me suddenly, and I had to jam on the brakes to avoid overshooting the turn. Only the mailbox on the side of the road had let me know where the driveway was, and even then I’d nearly missed it. A dark house set well back from a dark road on a dark night is easy to miss, I told myself, and then I realized how truly dark it was. Even with the sky mostly clear and a half-moon shining down, the house I called mine was just plain wrapped in shadow. It had the look of a place that had gotten used to being ignored and liked it that way.

  And not only the house was dark; so was the land it stood on. From where I stood, I could just see the road and the neighbor’s property beyond it. There, in the distance, I could see little specks of light dancing in the air. A turn to the east, where the old Tolliver farm was, and I could see the same thing. Mr. Tolliver had been a mean son of a bitch and put up wire along the top of the fence at the property line, and near as I could tell, there were even fireflies crawling their way along that. And I was sure without looking that if I turned back west, toward town, I’d see them there, too.

  But on my land, nothing. I could hear the frogs out there in the dark, but sound wasn’t the issue. Light was, and I couldn’t see any clear over to the boundary. No fireflies crossed the line that separated my land from anyone else’s.

  I stayed out on the porch for an hour, watching, but none of them ever did.

  I finally got tired of waiting on the fireflies and decided to do something useful with myself instead. The hour was late enough that I didn’t feel like unpacking everything from the car, but I could certainly manage enough to get me through until daylight. With a bundle of clothes and a toothbrush tucked under my arm, I slid the old brass-colored key into the lock on the porch door. It went in smoothly, with no sound and no resistance. I unlocked it, looked around, and laid my hand on the knob.

  Feeling the weight of years, I twisted it and shoved the door open. It swung smooth and silent on the hinges without making so much as a single creak. I think I would have preferred the noise.

  Stepping through into the kitchen, I pocketed my keys and dropped my clothes on the kitchen counter. Even without turning on the light, I knew where everything was—counter to the right, kitchen table farther on and to the left, and light switch on the wall by the door.

  It felt the same, too. Ten seconds under that roof and it all came flooding back. Just big enough to feel hollow and just small enough to feel cramped; that was my parents’ house. Hot in the summer and cold in the winter, dark in the daytime and noisy at night—the sensations spun me around and tried to carry me away.

  I forced the thoughts out of my head and went back out to the car for a small bag of groceries I’d picked up at a convenience store on the way in. It wasn’t much, just enough to get me through a couple of days as I settled in. The fridge was running, much to my relief, so I tossed the entire bag in there—bread, beer, prepackaged cold cuts, and all—with the intention of sorting it out in the morning.

  I shut the door and, after a moment’s hesitation, locked it. It felt strange to do so here, where you never locked your door unless circumstances were strange and dire. It would have felt stranger not to, though. It would take more than one night to break a decade and a half of Boston habits. The car was locked up tight, too. There were things in there worth stealing, I was certain, even if there wasn’t anyone around to steal them.

  Satisfied and bone tired, I grabbed my clothes and toothbrush again, and let memory guide me to my old room. Tossing the toothbrush on the dresser, I swept the dust off my childhood bed and found a clean blanket to wrap myself in. There’d be time enough in the morning, I figured, to set myself up properly. Weary from the road, I turned out the lights and lay myself down.

  And no light came in through the window.

  two

  I woke up at half past nine, a positive luxury to a man used to angry alarm clocks at five thirty. It took me another lazy, enjoyable hour to make myself presentable to the world through the application of cold water and hot coffee. It was nearly eleven before I felt like shrugging into the clean clothes I’d brought in with me the night before. No shoes, though—I kept my feet bare as I walked out to the car to unload a few more armfuls of clothes and essentials. The grass and gravel felt good under my feet, and the occasional sharp stones bothered me less with every step.

  The clock said it was noon by the time I called Carl Powell, and I was halfway to waiting until supper or beyond when I did so. My memories of Carl were of a man who was a friend to Mother and Father both, but one with little use for their son. We’d had a few communications since Mother’s funeral, most of them brief and to the point. I sent him checks, he told me the house was fine, and most years I remembered to send him a Christmas card. That was about it, and both of us seemed happy with the arrangement.

  I’d wrestled, a time or two before I’d started on the road, with the decision not to call Carl. Warning him I was coming would have been the sensible thing to do, but the businessman in me told me not to do so, that I’d do better to get a look at the place before he knew I was on my way. That way, I’d see its real condition, see what sort of job he’d actually been doing and whether I’d gotten my money’s worth.

  That’s what the rational part of my head said, anyway. It was good cover for the fact that Carl scared the crap out of me, and that I wanted time to establish the house as mine again before I talked to him.

  Carl’s phone rang nine times before he picked up. I’d been just about to hang up when I finally heard his voice on the line, low and suspicious. Carl was not a friendly man, nor had he ever been. “Who’s there?” he said by way of greeting, and he sounded like he begrudged me the words.

  “Carl, it’s Jacob Logan,” I said by way of reply. “I have a question for you.”

  “You’re back, ain’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Might have let a fellow know you were coming.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Manners were everything with Carl. I remembered that too late, and knew I’d pay for the mistake. “It was a last-minute idea to come back here.”

  “Last minute a
nd too late, but you came back anyway.” There was silence at the end of the line for a good thirty seconds. “So why’d you call?”

  I cleared my throat twice, a nervous habit I’d picked up ten years previous and had never managed to break. “Like I said, I have a question for you. Did you ever go out to the house at night?”

  He made a sound that I assumed was him sucking his teeth for a good moment or so. “A couple of times, yes. When the house needed fixing. Why’d you ask?”

  “I noticed something odd last night, and I was wondering if you’d seen it, too.”

  “Odd, you say? Now let me think.” He gave a dry chuckle. “There’s a few odd things in that house, son. Only one out in the fields, though. Is that what you’re asking about?”

  “So you’ve seen it,” I interrupted. The hell with manners, I thought. Carl knew something. “What did you see?”

  He brought his chuckle under control and hid it behind a wheezy cough. “It’s not what I saw, you understand. It’s what I didn’t see, and what I haven’t seen on that land since the night they put your mother in the ground. You think on that. I’ll drop the key off by nightfall.”

  I started to say that I didn’t want him to return the key, but the line went dead, and I realized Carl had said all he wanted to say to me. The receiver felt heavy in my hand, so I set it down gently and went scrounging for one of the energy bars I’d brought in from the car with my clothes. By daylight, the bag of groceries I’d brought with me seemed even smaller and more pathetic in the empty expanse of the refrigerator. I’d have to rectify that, I realized. I’d have to do a lot of things to make the house livable, even for a little while.

  Originally I’d been planning on finishing my unpacking after breakfast, then running into town for some groceries, but my conversation with Carl somehow shot all that to hell. Instead, I spent a few hours simply wandering through the various rooms of the house, letting my memories wake up, holding favorite knickknacks, and admiring Carl’s housekeeping.

  As houses went, it wasn’t much, though some of our neighbors had grumbled about it being a little extravagant. Grandfather Logan had built the heart of it back before the Second World War, even as the house he’d grown up in had been crumbling to the ground. That was the way it went; one came down and another went up to take its place, and the children played in the old ruins when their parents weren’t looking.

  He hadn’t built it all himself, of course, though he’d done more work than one might think in raising it. Family legend had it that when it was finished, Grandmother Logan took one look at it and said, “Not bad for a first try. Where’s the one we’ll be living in?” What Grandfather Logan said in response was not recorded for posterity.

  Regardless of the opinion of grandmothers long dead, it was a well-built house, and more than adequate to the needs of Logans past. Modest upkeep was all it took, new paint every so often and a fool up on the ladders to clean out the gutters when they clogged with pine needles.

  Grandfather Logan had never liked people much, and as such the house had been built facing away from the road. Truth be told, the road side of the house had almost no windows in it at all, nor did it have any doors, or indeed any real evidence that the house wasn’t long abandoned. Two generations of Logan women had planted flowers there so that the view from the road would at least be pleasant, but their efforts had never been more than half successful. The house blocked the good light there, so most of what grew wasn’t that pretty. They sure had tried, though, every year without fail.

  The outside of the house was painted a faded red that had once been the color of brick. The sun had beaten the strength out of the color, though, and what was left was barely darker than the Carolina clay it rose up out of. A weathered wood porch painted that same clay red came off the kitchen door and faced the driveway, three steps above the ground. Most of the house was set over a crawl space, partly because the land sloped away toward the back of the property, and partly because the water table was high enough to turn the neighbors’ root cellars into foul-smelling ponds after a few days of rain. Grandfather Logan had been the cautious type, so the whole house was raised up on brick supports, with a fence in between and a locked gate that you could open up to let the plumber crawl through when you couldn’t do the job yourself.

  The porch had been Father’s favorite place. He liked sitting out there of an evening with a beer, watching the road out of the corner of his eye, at least when Mother would let him. The porch was wide, wrapping around the kitchen and to the back, and it had a high wood rail that was broad enough to rest a flowerpot or a beer bottle on. The kitchen door led out to that porch, and as long as I could remember, that was the main door we used for going into or out of the house. There was a front door, certainly, but it, like the shotgun Father had kept in the trunk at the foot of the bed, was used only on very rare occasions. I could recall the front door being opened twice, both times for funerals. Everyone who knew us knew to go round the side, and as for people who didn’t know us, well, they could stand out there all day if they wanted to.

  The kitchen was small by some standards, but it served well enough for us. A fat white gas stove sat on the wall by the door. Mother had always set her teakettle on the back left element, and I was not surprised to see it there when I walked in. There was a window over the sink, flanked by yellow curtains Mother had stitched herself, and an expanse of white counter that had been put in with great fanfare back when I’d been about twelve. Cabinets filled with pots and pans lined the walls, but the cast-iron skillet lived on top of the stove. In the corner was a round kitchen table that had rarely been graced by a tablecloth. It was Formica, with long metal legs and flecks of gold in the plastic of the table-top, and the chairs that had come with it were just as ugly. Father had bought it, brand new, when I’d been very young. When Mother had expressed her disapproval, Father had said calmly that we’d get a new one just as soon as this one wore out. Now they were ten years gone and more, and the table was still here. Father would have laughed at that. Mother, not so much, I think.

  The rest of the house was on the same level, all built spinning off a long hallway that ran out the back of the kitchen. Down at the end was the family room, which doubled as the dining room when we had guests. As a result, the table spent most of its time shoved against the outside wall and covered in papers. There was a fireplace, rarely used but still functional, and a ceremonial pile of firewood in front of it that looked like it would fall to dust with a touch. There was more out back, I knew. There was always more out back.

  The left side of the house, facing away from the kitchen, was Mother and Father’s side. Their bedroom was there, as was their bathroom. Those doors were not to be opened by the likes of me, and it was only on rare occasions that I had ever even knocked. My room, and the bathroom that served the rest of the house, was on the side of the house nearer the road. There was a small guest room as well that doubled as Mother’s sewing room. When we had company, however, more often than not I moved into the guest room, and the guest took mine. My room was the more comfortable of the two, and by far the cooler.

  What we called the attic was really more of a crawlspace over the long central hall. The attic door was set flush into the hallway ceiling, and you could pull it and its foldaway ladder down with a long white cord that dangled from one end. Being able to jump high enough to grab that cord had been a goal of mine from early childhood, and I spent years of frustration leaping from a crouch every chance I got, only to fall short.

  It was much later that I learned that Father had been steadily snipping the cord shorter to encourage me—so he’d said—to jump higher. He’d only stopped once the string had gotten so high that he’d had trouble pulling the thing down himself. Mother was more practical. She just stood on a chair to reach the pullcord, and once she yanked it open, she told Father to go up there instead.

  Everything unusual and unloved was up in that attic. Shells for Father’s unused shotgun sat in a box
next to baby clothes and stacks of magazines from before the war. Toys went up there when I outgrew them, to be stored against the day when I had children of my own. It was the family history, to be opened up again for each successive generation in turn.

  I’d thought about cleaning it out after my parents died, but I’d never gotten around to it. Instead, I’d simply left instructions with Carl that the attic was not to be disturbed unless the roof needed work. I might not have had the time to touch that stuff, but that didn’t mean anyone else had the right to do so.

  The last room in the house was a mudroom that had been added in the sixties, more of a shed tacked on to the main building than anything else. It held the washer and dryer, things Mother had insisted on, and about a thousand half-empty bottles of household supplies. Most of them were no doubt worthless, but I figured they had squatter’s rights. After all, they’d been there longer than I had. A door led to the outside, a relic of the days when the washing went outside to dry. To my knowledge, it hadn’t been used in years.

  There had been a shed once, but it had long since fallen in on itself. No barn, either, and don’t think the neighbors didn’t tut-tut about that. Good land going to waste, that’s what they thought about our place, but Father made enough money that he didn’t need to work the land. “Let it rest a few years,” he told me when I asked about it. “It’s certainly earned it.” And so the long grass grew tall and the pine trees and black locust shot up when they didn’t think anyone was looking. It would take a full summer’s worth of hard work to make the land ready for farming. Trees would need to be cut down, stumps would need to be pulled, and a whole lot of soil would need to get turned. Father had left that job for me, and I figured to leave it for whoever came after. In the meantime, though, it made things what might be called “scenic,” and that was good enough for me.