Chasing Fireflies: A Novel of Discovery

by Charles Martin

  Uncle Jack turned, stepped into his car, and disappeared down the drive.

  I turned to Unc. "Why do you always let him do that to you?"

  Aunt Lorna stood on the porch, leaning against the house. Her silence told everyone that she agreed with me.

  Unc cleaned his glasses on the untucked front corner of his shirt. "You think I'm the one getting `done' here?"

  I nodded.

  He looked at Tommye. "That the way it looks to you?"

  "Unc, he's been walking over you all of my life and then some."

  He stared at the dust sweeping over the road. "Never corner something you know is meaner than you."

  I was out of line, but I'd had about enough of speaking in code. "Is he meaner, or are you just a lifelong coward?"

  He chewed on his lip. "I've got more to lose."

  I laughed. "Like what? He took everything you ever thought about having."

  "You sure?"

  I flicked a piece of paint that was flaking off the railing. `Just look around you."

  He looked at all of us. "I did."

  "Well ... maybe your eyes need checking."

  Unc slipped on his glasses and watched Uncle Jack turn left onto Highway 99. "Chase ... perspective often depends on where you're standing."

  Chapter 30

  had applied to every school I could think of, but while my academics weren't too bad-my high school GPA was a 3.2-my SAT was miserable. A combined 1080. Florida State flatly refused me. Unc read the rejection letter, looked at my face, and said, "Is this where you want to go?"

  "Yes sir."

  He looked at the letter. "Load up."

  We got in the car, drove four hours, and stepped out in front of the admissions building about four o'clock. Unc took off his hat, walked up to the receptionist, eyed the bottom of my letter, and said, 'We'd like to see Ms. Irene Sullivan."

  The receptionist looked at us over her glasses. "And this is regarding?"

  He pointed at me. "My boy here."

  "Do you have an appointment?"

  "No, ma'am."

  "I'm afraid you'll have to make an appointment."

  Unc looked through the glass at a lady sitting at her desk, talking on the phone. 'When is the next available?"

  The receptionist eyed the computer in front of her. "Tuesday, nine thirty AM."

  Unc eyed his watch. "You mean tomorrow morning."

  "No, I mean Tuesday week."

  Unc said, "Well, I don't need that much time. If you'll just tell her we'd like five minutes, I'd be grateful."

  She shook her head. "I'm sorry, sir."

  I turned to leave, but Unc was having none of that. "You don't mind if we wait for an opening." He sat in a chair along the wall next to her desk, knees together, spinning his hat in his fingers. I could tell his mind was spinning too. I sat next to him, looking over my shoulder for a security guard.

  A few minutes later, the receptionist dialed a number and turned her head, and the lady behind the glass picked up the phone. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but I had a pretty good idea it had something to do with us. She hung up, and an hour passed while the lady behind the glass saw people into and out of her office. She was busy-there was no getting around that.

  About 5:30 PM the receptionist gathered up her things, closed down her computer, and left without a word. Unc didn't budge. A few minutes later, the lady behind the glass walked around the corner to the water cooler, poured herself a cup of water, and then walked into the waiting room, where we immediately stood up.

  She looked at us and then motioned to the cooler. "Can I offer you two a drink?"

  Unc shook his head. "No ma'am. We don't want to take up any more of your time than is necessary."

  She smiled and motioned us into her office. We sat down, her on one side and us on the other. Unc's right leg was bouncing. She leaned back, looking half-amused, and said, "How can I help you?"

  Unc slid the letter across the desk. "Ma'am, my name is William McFarland." He spun his hat in his hand. "For nearly half my life, folks have called me Willee." He looked at me. "This is Chase, and"he eyed the letter again-"well ... he'd ..."

  She typed something into her computer, brought up a file, and read quietly. "Mr. McFarland. While his grades are not too bad, his test scores are quite short of what we require. He needs another two hundred points. I'm sorry, I can't-"

  Unc stood up and handed her his business card. "That's my personal number, comes in right here." He tapped the cell phone in his shirt pocket. "If he doesn't make straight As, or at least your dean's list, every semester, call me, and I'll make sure. He's a good kid, a hard worker."

  I stared at him like he'd lost his mind. He shrugged in my direction.

  "Mr. McFarland ..."

  "Ma'am. Can't you make an exception?"

  She shook her head. "I'm sorry."

  Unc twirled his hat in his hand and lowered his voice, almost as if he were talking to himself. "Ms. Sullivan, my life hasn't turned out exactly as I'd hoped. In one sense, I've lived two lifetimes. Please give him a chance. Just one. If he screws it up, then he'll have to live with that, but please don't take him out of the game before he gets his chance at bat. You won't be disappointed. I can promise you that."

  She looked at the computer, back at Unc, and finally at me. "Is he always like this?"

  I nodded and twirled my own cap in my hand. Looking back, we must've looked like twins. "When it's important."

  She leaned forward on her desk, folded her hands, and bored a hole right through me. "Well, is it?"

  "Yes ma'am."

  She chewed on her lip, leaned back, and looked out the window. Then she looked at Unc. "What do you do?"

  "Ma'am, I'm a farrier ... I shoe horses."

  "I imagine you're used to hard work."

  "I've known it a time or two."

  She looked at me. "Probation." She typed a few sentences into her computer, then grabbed a sheet off her printer and handed it to me. "You've got one semester to prove yourself." She smiled and looked at Unc. "When he makes the dean's list, I'll be the first to call you."

  Two months later Unc and Lorna moved me to Tallahassee and rented me a room in a little house just off campus. Late in the afternoon, we stood on the front porch, all three afraid to say good-bye.

  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

  -ighttime 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 141AS 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 intra- coastal. 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 Tshirt, 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 himself. 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."

  \Tater 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 storyreading 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.