The Firefly Dance

by Sarah Addison Allen

  “Have you ever met your grandfather?” Sue asked me. Sue thought my family was fascinating. Until Reverend Joe married my mom, we were girls, all of us. Me, Mom, Great Aunt Sophie, Great Aunt Anna who died five years ago, and Great Aunt Anna’s daughters who drove over from Tennessee every August for the church homecoming. Sue resented her brothers, all six of them, for not being girls.

  “Nope,” I answered. “My mom was only ten when her mother died. Mom was sent here to live with Great Aunt Sophie then.”

  “Didn’t her dad want her?”

  “I don’t know.” What I did know was that when my grandmother took off to marry my grandfather, Sophie and Anna got really mad because they didn’t like him. But when they heard that their sister had died, Great Aunt Sophie wanted Mom to come here to Clementine, North Carolina, to live. I suppose my grandfather didn’t argue too much. Mom said it’s been forever since she’s seen him. She keeps the eleven letters he’s written her, though. I’ve seen them. That’s where Reverend Joe got his address. It was Reverend Joe who invited him, and it had taken weeks for my mom and Great Aunt Sophie to get over the shock and forgive him. And I still wasn’t sure Great Aunt Sophie had.

  “Are you excited about seeing him?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. Everyone else seems a little...” I shrugged. I watched Robert Junior lift the ax and swing it down on a log, splitting it cleanly in half. He wasn’t wearing a shirt. “Everyone else seems afraid, I guess.”

  “Afraid of your grandfather?” Sue turned to me, her eyes wide and mischievous. “Why? Did he do something bad? Was he in jail? Did he kill your grandmother?”

  Robert Junior looked over at us and I was embarrassed. “No! Stop it. My grandmother died of cancer. My grandfather was a fisherman up north. I guess he was on the ocean a lot and couldn’t take care of my mom.”

  “Then why is everyone afraid? Is he mean?”

  “No.” I thought about it for a minute. “He’s unexpected.”

  That evening Reverend Joe tried to build a fire. I was sitting on the couch doing my math homework in a loose, goofy, too-girlish dress my mother made me wear. She had bought it at Staler’s department store with her employee discount, which was her excuse to dress me in frilly things I hated. Sue wanted to be there that evening to meet Charlie, but Mom said no. Mom wanted Great Aunt Sophie to be there, but Sophie said never in a million years.

  Reverend Joe proved to be an interesting distraction and I watched behind my textbook as he fumbled through his attempt to create and maintain a fire. The first time he burned his fingers with the matches because he couldn’t find a place to light the paper, even through the gaps in the grate, because he used heavy wood that flattened everything beneath it. The second time he used too much newspaper and the outside papers burned then flickered out, leaving the tightly bunched papers in the middle untouched. The third and final time he successfully trapped a fire and made it burn in one place, but then the big blackened log on top rolled off and onto the brick hearth. In the time it took for him to freeze, then make a panicked dash for the fire tongs, the flames had burned down all the kindling.

  He finally declared that this particular November evening in the southern Appalachians was not nearly as cold as the ones Charlie was accustomed to way up north, and he would probably want to go straight to bed anyway. Reverend Joe shrugged on his coat and left for the airport.

  My mother came out of the kitchen. She stood there in the arch separating the living room from the dining room for a few seconds, long enough to hear the car door shut, then she moved quietly to the fireplace.

  She cleaned out Reverend Joe’s mistakes with the ash shovel and pail he had proudly bought that day at the hardware store, and in minutes a fire burned so hot I could feel it from across the room. It made shadows move and roll on the wall behind me.

  My mother amazed me. She knew exactly how much paper to wad, how much kindling to stack and just the right size log to top it all off. And she seemed completely unaware that she had mastered an enviable skill. She reminded me of how Great Aunt Sophie always seemed to know exactly how much a pinch or a handful of any given condiment measured without ever checking. It was hard to believe I was related to these women. I wondered if I would ever do anything enviable.

  My mother clopped another log into the fireplace, sending sparks crinkling. Turning around, she said with a nod, “That should do it.” Anticipating my remark she said, “Your stepfather has never spent a winter in Maine. I spent most of my childhood there. Joe can teach you math. I can teach you how to build a fire.” She smiled as she left the room, leaving me to wonder about the part of her childhood that didn’t take place in Clementine, North Carolina. The part I didn’t know, the part she would never tell me.

  It didn’t take long for me and my dog Lazarus to gravitate to the fire. Drugged by the hissing whirl, I stretched out in front of the hearth and put my head on Laz’s stomach. He didn’t seem to mind his pillow status; he only opened his eyes for a moment to make sure it was a familiar head.

  I dozed off soon after, lulled by Laz’s breathing. I was occasionally aware of my mother stepping over us to place another log in the fire, but when I heard the front door open, even half-asleep, I could tell that my grandfather had arrived. It wasn’t because he banged his boots on the hallway floor in any peculiar manner—my mother had trained us all to do that. No, I knew because he moved differently. He swished.

  He slowly walked into the living room and I stared at him. He stopped, not yet spotting me, and swung his heavy dark blue cape over one shoulder with more grace than a man of his size is ever reckoned to have. The movement revealed most of his large, compact body and his two thick arms doughed to thick red hands. He leaned heavily on a walking stick as he unfastened the throat clasp of his cape and Reverend Joe appeared from behind him to take it. The gesture wasn’t meant to be grand, but it was to me anyway. I’d never in my life known anyone who wore a cape.

  “Where’s my Margaret?” he said in a flaky voice like he was talking into the wind. Lazarus lifted his head.

  “She’s probably in the kitchen,” Reverend Joe said, walking past him with a hard leather suitcase in his hand. “I’ll get her.”

  Left in the living room with him, I had no idea what to do. Should I move or talk? Would I startle him? I panicked when he began to walk to the fireplace. Would he step on me? Would he trip over me and into the fire? I couldn’t imagine trying to explain a situation like that to my mother.

  He stopped, however, right at the place where Lazarus and I began. I stared at his scuffed black boots with the small silver buckles at the ankles for a moment, long enough to ascertain that he wasn’t going to kick me, then I cautiously looked up to his face. His hair was dark blond like my mother’s, only thinner.

  His face, as he looked into the fire, was a red weather-beaten color, nearly the same as his hands. The balls of his cheeks were glossy. He stared into the fire like something he hadn’t seen in a long, long time.

  Lazarus, after some half-hearted scrutiny, decided there was no immediate danger and dropped his head back down to the floor with a thud. Charlie looked down and immediately stepped back with an exclamation that sounded something like, “Iche!”

  I didn’t move.

  “I thought you were a dog,” he said.

  I opened my mouth and discovered I had nothing to say. Finally, I answered, “No.”

  “You’re Louise, aren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m your granddad, Charlie.”

  My mother walked into the room. He turned around and they studied each other very carefully, like they wanted to make sure they were the right people before this reunion went any further. Very hesitantly Charlie held out his heavy arms because, it seemed, he didn’t know what else to do.

  My mom hugged him and cried for a long time. She was ve
ry quiet about it, her head tucked into his shoulder. It struck me as strange, my mother crying to her father. It was as if everything that had troubled her mind since she was ten came out at once now that her daddy was there. Her daddy. Her mother was gone, and Great Aunt Sophie was okay, but never a person you could cry to.

  Reverend Joe stood near the couch and watched them. I didn’t want to move and disturb them but my neck was cramping and I wanted to get up. I started to sit up but Reverend Joe shook his head adamantly, so I was stuck on Lazarus’s stomach.

  My mother finally stepped away and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. “I’ll go get the tea. You sit.” She took a step and leaned over me. “Louise, get up. Your grandfather is here,” she whispered, as if I had no idea what was going on just a foot in front of me.

  It wasn’t but a short time later that I think I loved my grandfather for the first time—the only time, really, because I didn’t know it then but I would never see him again. All he did was hand me his walking stick. Without stopping his conversation with my mother about his fifth ex-wife Terry, without even looking at me, he handed me his walking stick. I had been staring at it, wishing for a closer look. He acknowledged my presence with that gesture. Without ever saying a word, he told me he knew I was there.

  There was a beautiful masthead lady carved in the wood. She was buxom to the point of mythical proportions and had long hair that swirled around her torso coyly. Her expression was sad, though. Sort of homesick. For a long time I sat on the arm of the couch with my hand on the top of the walking stick where it was worn from lots of leaning, and gazed into the fire.

  “That fair lady was Charlotte Naomi,” Charlie finally told me. “I sailed her for thirty-two years. Wrecked on the rocks at Pemaquid, though, and shook that lighthouse good.” He laughed and set down his tea. The tiny cup had looked ridiculous in his large hand, anyway. “And that,” he nodded, “that, is very nearly a difficult thing to do.”

  My mother suddenly stood and walked over to the fireplace. I watched as she shooed Lazarus out of the way and pushed a log onto the low flames.

  “Look here,” Charlie said, drawing my attention back to him. He pushed up the right sleeve of his thinning black sweater and revealed another Charlotte Naomi tattooed in green-black ink on his inner forearm. But she looked only penciled in. His walking stick was real and round and sad.

  When my mother didn’t sit back down, one by one, we went to join her by the fire. I stood by Charlie and offered him his stick back. He shook his head and instead rested a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  All four of us stared silently for a while. My mother then said quietly, “Mama used to say that you can always tell a wayfarer by how he stands to the fire, that the first thing he does when he sees a fire is walk up real close to it because he knows he’ll eventually leave again to the sea, and he wants to remember the warm.”

  Charlie glanced at my mother, but then focused back on the fire.

  He left Sunday afternoon. Reverend Joe had to go to church that morning, but Mom and I got to stay home with Charlie. He made blueberry pancakes for us for breakfast.

  Great Aunt Sophie knew the moment he was gone. She called my mother nine minutes after Reverend Joe and Charlie left—the exact time it took from our driveway to her house, which they had to pass on their way to the interstate, which led to the airport in Asheville. I was helping Mom fix dinner when the phone rang.

  “Hello?” my mother said. “Oh, hello Aunt Sophie. I was expecting you to call.” Mom winked at me as if to say she knew what Sophie was up to. She was in a good mood. “Oh, really?” she said, looking surprised. “All right, here she is.” Mom held the phone out to me. “Aunt Sophie wants to talk to you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why does she want to talk to me?”

  “I don’t know, Louise.” She shook the receiver. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  Mom took the knife from me and began peeling the potatoes I had started. She was much faster at it. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Louise.”

  “Is something wrong, Aunt Sophie?”

  “No, nothing’s wrong,” she said shortly. “Does something have to be wrong for me to call you?”

  “No ma’am, but you usually talk with Mom, not me.”

  “Well, I want to talk to you,” she said decidedly, even though it still sounded a little odd. “Is your mama in the same room with you?”

  “Yes, she’s right here. She’s peeling potatoes.” Mom looked like she was trying not to laugh.

  “Oh.” Great Aunt Sophie paused. “Well, Louise, why don’t you stop by my house on your way home from school tomorrow? I’ll make you some of your favorite cookies.”

  “Great! Thanks, Aunt Sophie. Can Sue come, too?”

  “That will be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  “Okay. Bye!” I hung up the phone and walked back to the kitchen sink, amazed. “Aunt Sophie is going to make me some cookies. I’m stopping by her house tomorrow after school. Is that all right?”

  Mom threw her head back and laughed at the ceiling. “She’s shameless!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mom wiped at the tears in her eyes. “Aunt Sophie didn’t like that I’d known she was going to call me as soon as Dad left. So, determined to prove me wrong, she didn’t ask me a thing about him. But she’s going to give you the third degree about him tomorrow, Louise. I’m giving you fair warning.”

  I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me. I was getting cookies.

  Sue and I stopped by Great Aunt Sophie’s house on our way home, as promised. Sue had been looking forward to it ever since I told her that morning in homeroom. Great Aunt Sophie was stubborn and vocal, but she cooked like nobody’s business. Her house was the first house on the right, the second street off of Main. It was a well-known house for two reasons: the constant smell of cooking coming from it which seemed to make evening walkers pass by her house more often than the others, and her beautiful roses which, in a good year in these mountains, lasted until the end of October. When that happened, she would stick the roses in a carved pumpkin, like a vase. Mom and I used to live beside her, before we moved into the parsonage with Reverend Joe, and sometimes I dream about my old house.

  Great Aunt Sophie let us in and led us to her kitchen where, sure enough, there on the oilcloth-covered table was a big plate with a stack of cookies on it. The cookies on top were just out of the oven, the chocolate just warm enough to feel on your lips, like a quick kiss from someone not sure how to say I love you.

  Sue and I sat down and immediately started in on the cookies. Aunt Sophie poured us glasses of milk. “Thanks, Aunt Sophie,” I said.

  And Sue repeated, “Yeah, thanks, Aunt Sophie!”

  Sophie poured herself a cup of coffee and came to sit at the table with us. “So, Louise, did your grandfather have a nice visit?” She took one of the cookies for herself. She broke it in half but didn’t eat it.

  “I think so. Mom made some special dishes and he ate a lot. He asked about you. He didn’t know that Great Aunt Anna had died and he said he was sorry about that. Why didn’t you ever come over?”

  “I was busy,” she said dismissively. “Did you like your grandfather?”

  “Yes ma’am. He told me about his adventures on the sea. I wanted him to tell me more but sometimes Mom wanted me to leave him alone. I think he and Mom talked a lot when I wasn’t there. Reverend Joe stacked wood against the garage all weekend.”

  “What did he look like?” She sipped her coffee then set the cup down and twirled it in a slow circle.

  I took a moment to swallow some milk. “Didn’t you ever see him, Aunt Sophie?”

  “A long time ago, dear. He was just a young man, as handsome as all get-out, when he married my sister. He moved her up north, away fr
om her family and all she knew, and I never saw her again.”

  “Well he’s old now.” I couldn’t believe I said that to her. I felt my face grow warm. “I mean, not old, but older. He’s big, but not fat. And I’m almost as tall as he is. He’s got Mom’s blond hair.”

  “Your grandmother had blond hair, too. Your mother is more like her,” Great Aunt Sophie said defensively.

  “And he walks with a cane.”

  I had told Sue everything I could remember about his visit, which is why she said, “Tell her about the cane, Louise.” She crushed another cookie, whole, into her mouth. With the way we were eating you’d think we’d never had cookies in our whole lives. We were twelve. We should have known better. But we didn’t know whether to try to stay kids as long as we could, or go barreling into adulthood. We were kind of like Reverend Joe when the traffic light turned yellow on Main Street. He never knew what to do. He’d go from brake to gas, brake, gas, brake, gas. He’d usually end up stopping right in the middle of the intersection and have to go forward anyway because there wasn’t any choice then.

  I nodded and turned to Great Aunt Sophie. “He has this beautiful cane, Aunt Sophie. It’s got a masthead lady carved into it. She’s beautiful and she looks so sad. Her name is Charlotte Naomi and he’s got a tattoo on his arm of her, too. Charlotte Naomi is the name of his ship, the one he wrecked. That’s how he hurt his leg. He sailed her for thirty-two years. Did you know that all boats are called ‘she,’ Aunt Sophie?”

  Great Aunt Sophie wasn’t looking at me anymore. She was silent for a good many minutes. Sue and I looked at each other curiously as we continued to stuff ourselves.

  “Aunt Sophie?” I finally said again.

  She looked startled. “Yes, girls.” She pushed herself away from the table and started to fuss around in her kitchen cabinets. Her fingers were clumsy in her haste, slipping and letting the cabinet doors close with a bang. “Here, let me get you some bags and you can take the cookies home.” Then we were dismissed.