The Firefly Dance

by Sarah Addison Allen

  I move closer to the fence, the way he is leaning. He puts his small brown hand through the links in the white fence and touches his fingers to the clumsy, outstretched hand of the concrete Mary.

  The Todey boys burst out of the woods beside the robing house, screaming filthy things, sounds that just don’t register at first. I don’t know when I start running, but I do and feel the child’s body sway in my arms against the sudden movement, and right away I can tell that the Todey boys are going to catch up with us.

  Fast.

  I head straight into the woods on the other side of the road and suddenly see a big, stout tree-branch on the ground and I drop the child, grab up the branch, and spin around to face the Todeys.

  They stop, faces bright yellow-red and eyes glowing.

  Do whatcha like, their Papa said.

  They glance at each other, smile, and start moving apart ever so slowly. I wave the branch back and forth and watch them so hard that I don’t realize what is happening until the child walks around the side of me and toddles toward the Todeys.

  “NO!” I shriek, and he looks up at me as if he is surprised. He blinks slowly one time and then moves determinedly toward them.

  “You better let him come,” one of the Todey boys growls. “Else we’ll do something terrible to you.”

  “NO!” I scream, dropping the branch and running after him.

  The fist comes out of nowhere, crashing into my nose. Cartilage bends, bone creaks, a tear duct explodes and the earth itself tilts up hard and smacks me right in the mouth. Dead leaves and bits of old pine needles on my tongue.

  So that I watch through blood and the crossed fallen branches of some long-ago tree as the Todeys lead the little boy away, each one holding one of his hands so that his arms are spread as if in flight.

  I am alive but not alive for a long time, and when I start trying to get up, the ground tilts and whirls every which way, hitting me in the shoulder one time and the chin the next. Something’s gone wrong with time, because there’s nothing but solid darkness all around me.

  No sun. No moon. No stars. Just dark.

  On hands and knees, I crawl until I find the side of the road and then I get to my feet and start running toward home, clawing dried blood from my swollen eyelid and drooling through a big lip and giant nose that are no part of me, merely some kind of terrible, cold, hog-fat stuck to my face and my breath is a swinging jagged piece of glass inside me.

  I don’t know how long it takes me to get home, but all of a sudden, there is the house in front of me. I come stumbling up the back steps and hear Papa yelling, “Eat the damned steak!”

  I burst into the kitchen, letting the door slam behind me hard. Papa yells, “Dammit, boy! Where you been? And how many times I got to tell you about letting that door slam?” Mama’s stirring the iced tea.

  From the living room, Grandmama yells at the evangelist on television: “Tell ’em how they’ll burn in hell!”

  “Help me,” I gasp. “There’s a little boy . . .”

  They all turn look at me. No one moves. No one says a thing. Danny sits at the table with a big piece of blood-red meat on the fork halfway to his mouth. Mama stops stirring the iced tea. Papa’s eyebrows stick together in a dark V.

  Mama comes toward me.

  “My Lord!” she says. “What on earth!”

  “Help me!” I gasp. “There’s a little boy . . .”

  Suddenly, the ever-present roar of the TV is gone, and from the dark living room, Grandmama shrieks, “You found Jesus, didn’t you boy!”

  An explosion in me, then—louder and stronger and far more hurtful than any Todey could have given me from a fist.

  “YES!” I yell. “But the Todeys got him!”

  I don’t know where the word YES! comes from. All I know is that everyone is silent and very, very still. The only thing that moves is the terrible red juice dripping from the piece of steak on Danny’s fork.

  I bolt out of the back door and start back down the road to the church, knowing this was more than what it was. I would save Him. I would save Him! Even if the Todeys killed me for it!

  I am suddenly strong and not hurt any longer, and I run headlong into the deepest twilight, my breathing smooth and knees pumping, past the Kudzu-elephants, now a deeper dark against the dark sky and my feet on a familiar road still warm from the hot August-day sun that now has slipped down past the horizon, and nothing left of day except the faintest whitewash behind the trees. Running and running but not tiring. Knowing I could run forever, if I had to.

  As I get farther down the road, I see that the leaves on the trees are glowing like tiny quarter-moons, because of a brilliant-gold light that’s nestled in the next hollow. At the church. Or another sun rising or setting or the church itself burning with a glow that grows ahead of me.

  No! No! Even the Todeys wouldn’t hurt Jesus, and Him just a little fellow. And even the Todeys wouldn’t set the church on fire and maybe with Him in it!

  But the light grows with every step I run and me not knowing what I will find.

  Maybe the smooth, brown skin now blistering and erupting, and the shiny hair shriveled and crimped in the fire.

  No!

  Then hard-thumping heart glowing with a strange light all its own, when I know for sure it isn’t a fire at all making the glow.

  It’s beyond fire. And everything is more than what it is, because when I pass the Todey plot, I see the concrete Mary statue—only no longer concrete, but a marble Mary, beautiful, standing just beyond where the white-painted fence of the Todey plot used to be but the fence is gone. A pearl-bright, gleaming Mary, washed clean of the yellow hair and the neon-blue eyes and the rouge and the black-streaked eyelashes. A Mary as graceful as music.

  Delicate curve of slender fingers and gentle eyes lit from within.

  I stand, with a strange and terrible storm of wind and rain passing through my chest, and I wonder if maybe I’m dead. Maybe the Todeys killed me and my body is lying in the woods and whatever is more than my body is wandering around a churchyard cemetery at night. Like a ghost.

  But then I hear HIM laugh again, and I tear myself away from the questions and the wondering and the statue, because I am like the tadpoles—drawn to Him. Unable to resist Him. I race through the cemetery, dodging among the silent white stones and toward the impossible light that’s not coming from the church, but beyond it—the robing house.

  I come stumbling down the ragged hill, closer and closer to the light. Light, but not heat. And suddenly I can see Him, in silhouette at the very bottom of the hill, see Him in the dazzling light. Standing in the bog under the robing house with all that more-than-light coming out of Him, somehow.

  He looks at me, smiles, and holds out His hand for me to see something in it. I move forward and see that two smooth, Todey-yellow pebbles resting quietly in His palm.

  Cool air, then, against my flaming face, and without my lifting so much as a finger, I too become a rounded pebble in the cool, white sand. From beneath the water, I watch Him lean down, curls shining and dark eyes glowing, and I see the smile of delight as His small, brown hand comes down and lifts me into the light.

  Sarah Addison Allen

  In My Dreams

  Fly By Night

  I watched my house from the second story bedroom at Great Aunt Sophie’s. I could see that the lights were on in my living room. A shadow passed by the windows there, and the curtains moved like fingertips had brushed them.

  My mom was slowly walking around our house next door, in and out of each room, like she was looking for someone. The kitchen light went on once, then flicked back off.

  “Louise!” Great Aunt Sophie called from the next room, and my elbows jerked off the window sill where I was kneeling. “Go to sleep.”

  There was no door, just a doorway, be
tween Great Aunt Sophie’s bedroom and the one I was sleeping in that night. As I knelt at the open window, pretending I was in bed asleep, I could hear her turning the pages of her book, the low mumble of the radio station out of Asheville that still played big band music, and sometimes I even heard the rattle of ice cubes as she poured iced tea into a hard plastic cup from the thermos she brought up from the kitchen. They had the easy, sleepy echo of sounds repeated night after night. Great Aunt Sophie herself was like that. She was worn in the best possible way, like the way your oldest shoes fit, the shoes that wouldn’t slip when you ran on dewy grass and gave you traction when climbing hickory trees.

  I ignored Great Aunt Sophie with the hope that she was just checking to see if I was asleep. If I didn’t say anything, she would surely believe that I was. I turned back to the window I was kneeling in front of and continued to watch my house. The night outside was the thick black of a new moon, and lightning bugs ticked away in backyards as far as I could see. My bedroom next door was dark, but suddenly light spilled faintly into the room, as if the switch in the bedroom across the hall from mine had been turned on. The light covered my doorway and outlined the toy horses I’d placed on my window sill that very morning.

  “Louise,” Great Aunt Sophie called. “Don’t make me say it again.”

  I should have known that she knew. She knew everything. She knew things nobody else knew.

  I got up and walked to the doorway separating the two bedrooms. Her room had side-by-side twin beds, both covered with pink, quilted polyester bedspreads. She slept in the one on the left, farthest from the door and nearest to the open window. The bedroom I was staying in had one full bed with a knotty pine headboard pushed against the wall. The mattress was an old featherbed, and it felt a lot like sleeping on a nest of pine needles. I knew this because I fell out of a pine tree once and landed in a pile of needles, breath gone, thinking I was dead, and I looked up to see Great Aunt Sophie in her straw hat. I thought that was a horrible way to go, lying in resiny needles with Great Aunt Sophie’s frown the last thing I would see. She told me to go home because she was in no mood for my antics and she hadn’t raked that pile of pine needles just for me to jump in. I thought she had no respect for the dying, so I went home to tell my mother, who didn’t believe me because I was breathing again.

  Great Aunt Sophie and her husband Harry used to sleep in the featherbed room, but Great Aunt Sophie moved into the room with the pink twin beds after Harry died. My mom told my dad this once, as if trying to explain away some of Great Aunt Sophie’s peculiarities. I didn’t like the thought of sleeping in the featherbed room. I had never met my great-uncle and I didn’t know if it was possible to be haunted by someone you had never known, but I didn’t want to risk it.

  “Go to sleep,” Great Aunt Sophie said, laying her open book page-down on her chest and folding her fingers over it tightly, hiding the picture on the cover.

  “It won’t come. I tried.”

  “Then get yourself into bed. Sleep can’t come into your head if you’re sitting up at that window.”

  I walked into her room. There were places in Great Aunt Sophie’s house where certain scents pooled. As you walked in the front door, you smelled Blue Grass perfume right away. Great Aunt Sophie kept the spritzer in a table drawer beside the door and always sprayed her gloves once before going to church. Then there was that place on her staircase, about three steps up, that for no reason smelled like lavender, as if just moments before a beautiful lady had walked up the stairs ahead of you. And in the twin bed room, it smelled of yellowy paperback romance novels and Rosemilk lotion, the kind they advertised during The Lawrence Welk Show.

  I sat on the edge of the twin bed next to her. She had taken the thin pink bedspread off her bed and it was folded neatly at the bottom of the bed I was sitting on. She was on top of her sheets in deference to the cloying summertime heat, and her sunbrowned bare feet were crossed at the ankles. She had reddish-orange polish on her toenails and caked around her cuticles and skin, like she’d had trouble aiming the brush. For as long as I knew her, she’d always painted her nails this way, and I had no choice but to believe she did it on purpose.

  “Mom can’t sleep, either. I was watching her. She’s walking around the house.”

  “It’s understandable, Louise. Let her walk and tire herself out. Then she’ll sleep. You’ll see her tomorrow,” she said, as if tomorrow weren’t so far away.

  Great Aunt Sophie was as practical as a pin. She intimidated me sometimes with her perfect rightness. She never had any children. I never asked why, but sometimes I thought it was because she didn’t like kids. She didn’t have much patience with me. Her husband Harry died when she was in her forties, and she never remarried. My dad had once said he could never imagine Great Aunt Sophie married. My mom told him that there were certain hurts that Sophie chose not to show, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  “Do you ever miss Harry?” I asked her, just to keep her talking so I could stay longer in her room.

  Great Aunt Sophie looked straight ahead, not at me, as if seeing long ago things I couldn’t see, maybe even the ghost in the next room. “Of course I do.”

  “After so long?”

  “Yes,” she said shortly, closing up her secrets. “You shouldn’t be asking me these questions. You should be a-sleep.”

  “I miss my dad,” I finally said. I had been afraid to say it all day, afraid that I was the only one.

  Great Aunt Sophie paused, then nodded, just once. “I know you do.”

  I was surprised. Mom and Great Aunt Sophie had acted so normally that day. They smiled and accepted condolences as easily as they would have accepted a compliment, graciously and without fuss. I didn’t understand. I didn’t feel normal. It hadn’t been a normal day for me. “Do you miss him, too?” I asked, because Great Aunt Sophie and my dad didn’t get along and I was afraid that she was glad now that he was gone. They were friendly enough, I suppose, but Great Aunt Sophie couldn’t put the fear of God in him with just a look like she could with most people and I think that annoyed her.

  “Your daddy was a dreamer. He could dance, and that was in his favor.” She slanted her eyes my way. “Never marry a man who can’t dance, Louise.”

  Knowing how to dance was important to Great Aunt Sophie. Sometimes, when she took her bicycle out of the garage, she would do a little two-step with it if she was in a good mood. She loved her bicycle. I could remember seeing her once, dressed in her Sunday-go-to-meeting finest, pedaling past our house on her way to church. Then I remember seeing the back of her dress fly up right in front of old Harvey Williams, who had opted to walk to church that morning with his wife Annie because he was having one of his good days. From then until the day he died, he referred to that incident as his Sunday morning revelation. When my mom wanted to vex Great Aunt Sophie, she would bring this up.

  I scratched at a circle of poison ivy on my leg, just above my knee. It had been hard to sit still at the funeral service that morning and not scratch. I had tried to think of everything I could remember about the last time I saw my dad to take my mind off the itch. I was in my nightgown in the kitchen, waiting for my Lucky Charms. He had his steel lunch box. He checked the refrigerator again to see if he had forgotten his thermos of orange juice. I could remember things he usually said: Goodbye. I love you. Where’s my orange juice? But I couldn’t remember if he said those things that morning or, if he did, in what order.

  “Louise, stop scratching that or it will never get better,” Great Aunt Sophie told me.

  I did as she said. “I want to be home.”

  “Your mama needs to be alone tonight. You’re a yard away. It’s silly to miss a person who’s only a yard away.”

  I opened my mouth and thought about that for a minute, knowing Great Aunt Sophie didn’t suffer talking off the top of your head. “But it’s okay to miss the p
eople far off, right?”

  Great Aunt Sophie nodded twice. “That’s when you should miss them.”

  I’d never seen Great Aunt Sophie show an emotion stronger than indignation, and that one was her favorite. But I knew she loved me, just as I knew she loved my mom. She raised my mom from the time my mom was ten, when her mother died. My grandmother was Great Aunt Sophie’s sister and she married a “no-good sailor man” that Great Aunt Sophie didn’t like so much she never even said his name. He was still living, somewhere. No one ever mentioned where.

  Sometimes it seemed like she was still raising my mom. She participated actively in everything my mom did, except for when she married my dad. Defiantly, they went to South Carolina and eloped. My dad used to say it took the summer Mom discovered she was pregnant with me for Great Aunt Sophie to finally give her blessing. That was a grand summer, he’d said. Warm weather and the promise of only good things to come.

  It surprised me that Great Aunt Sophie wasn’t hovering around Mom now, giving her a break from thinking, tonight of all nights. But Great Aunt Sophie had talked to my mom only once since we got home, and that was to say goodnight. She didn’t even offer food. Great Aunt Sophie always offered food. Everyone knew that. In times of distress she could whip up green bean casseroles, broccoli cornbread and peanut butter pies, then be at the doorstep of the bereaved before most folks in the factory town of Clementine, North Carolina, even knew there had been a tragedy.

  I didn’t know whose idea it was for me to stay with Great Aunt Sophie that night. If I had been sure Mom was responsible, I might have been able to talk her out of it. But if it had been Great Aunt Sophie’s idea, I knew arguing with her would be like throwing a stone up to try to hurt the sky. She was that vast, that unshakable. She thundered only when she wanted to. So I didn’t say a thing as Sophie took a pair of pajamas out of my dresser and took my hand to lead me across our yard into hers after we all got home that afternoon.

  She gave me cream of tomato soup which she had made from her own tomatoes, and then she melted some shredded cheddar cheese on saltine crackers in the oven. While I ate at her kitchen table, which was covered with a printed oilcloth, she took her garden shears and went outside. That night I discovered that she’d picked some Shasta Daisies and put them in a vase in the featherbed room for me.