Chasing Fireflies

by Charles Martin

  In November 1732 a two-hundred-ton frigate named Ann carried 114 “prisoners” and their families to the New World. Led by a British hero by the name of Oglethorpe, the ship landed in “Charles Town,” where the sailors found their land legs and settled in. In 1736, Oglethorpe braved the hostile frontier, loaded his ship, and skirted the coast to Cockspur Island. With skilled blacksmiths, carpenters, and farmers, he ventured onto St. Simons and built a settlement, which they called Frederica. Knowing the flock would need spiritual leadership, Oglethorpe brought with him two brothers, John and Charles Wesley, to Christianize the Indians and build what is today Christ Church.

  The Spanish, headquartered in St. Augustine, saw the colony as an attack against the Spanish crown. So they mounted an offensive and marched northward. Outnumbering the English and feeling confident of victory, they retired for the day, built fires, and stacked their rifles in clusters around the campground. The English led by Scottish Highlanders, hid like guerillas in the palmetto bushes until they could smell the hint of dinner. The next day, when the marsh ran ankle-deep with Spanish blood, England’s claim to Georgia had been settled. Today the place bears the name Bloody Marsh.

  In 1782, hampered by the same taxes and tariffs they sought to escape, the Georgians declared themselves a state and kicked out any sign of English authority. For God and our new country.

  With Georgia on the map, a few key things occurred to cement her place in history. Because South Carolina farmers didn’t under-stand crop rotation, and because they were almost single-handedly meeting the world’s voracious cotton need, they soon depleted their soil. Finding the lands west of the Golden Isles fertile and nutrient-rich due to rivers such as the Satilla, Frederica, and Altamaha, South Carolina plantation owners acquired land, dug complicated drainage systems—which remain to this day—and began planting cotton. And not just any cotton. They developed a special, fine, long-staple cotton whose seed came from the West Indies island of Anguilla. It was an instant success. But with more yield came a greater need to separate the boll from the cotton, and human fingers could only do so much so fast. In 1786, the Georgia widow of Nathaniel Greene of Mulberry Plantation hired Eli Whitney to tutor her children. Seeing that Eli possessed mechanical skill, she asked him to invent some better way to extract the seeds from the cotton. And he did—inventing what was arguably, along with the printing press, one of the most transforming machines in human history. This came on the heels of the development of the spinning jenny in England. Eli’s cotton gin now allowed the plantations of Georgia and South Carolina to satisfy England’s appetite for cotton—en masse.

  The former prisoners’ colony soon became the talk of the States. Chasing white gold with black hands, expansive plantations arose under names like Hampton, Cannon’s Point, and Retreat. So attractive were their amenities that Vice President Aaron Burr fled here after he killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804.

  It wouldn’t be the last time that a murderer would seek refuge in this place.

  Along with cotton production, the area became a worldwide supplier of lumber. Given the intersection of so many large rivers whose mouths emptied in or near the Golden Isles, entrepreneurs mowed down entire forests and floated them to the coast, where the logs were planed at the mills and loaded onto ships bound for the Orient and the motherland. Much of the oak used in “Old Ironsides” was cut from Cannon Point. But like that of South Carolina, the soil gave out, as did people’s appetite for slavery. Amidst their own opulence and the scarred backs on which it was built, somebody finally looked around and figured out that not only does slavery kill those you enslave, but it kills you, too.

  For a while resourceful men tried to cultivate rice, but found that too complicated and not too profitable when the storm tide of 1898 flooded the marshes under nine feet of water. Living in the shadow of crumbling tumbleweed plantations, lumber production soared. Following the Civil War, lumber mills dotted the coastline. Toward the latter half of the nineteenth century, mills in and around Brunswick and St. Simons became a clearinghouse for lumber-laden steamers. Much of the Brooklyn Bridge was built from wood shipped out of Brunswick.

  While her natural resources had been tapped into and would one day be tapped out, the Golden Isles still had more to offer. In 1886, fifty-three members of what became known as the First Name Club bought Jekyll Island from John Eugene DuBignon. And while the members might have been on a first-name basis with each other, everyone else just called them “sir.” The membership fee was set at one million dollars each, and that was just to set foot on the island. Members included men like J. P. Morgan, William Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and my favorite, Joseph Pulitzer. At the turn of the century, when the fifty-three members met on the island, it is believed they controlled one-sixth of the world’s wealth. From the island they made the first transcontinental phone call and later, disguised as duck hunters, drew up a plan for what became the Federal Reserve System. The club flourished through the 1920s, survived the 1930s, and then sold the island to the State of Georgia after the imposed burden of an income tax. Funny how that works.

  In the absence of the First Namers, others moved in, and with the advent of the diesel powered, stainless steel Silver Meteor, they came in droves. The allure of the Golden Isles had caught on across the country, filling to capacity a new five-star club called The Cloister. Such famous names as Charles Lindbergh—who landed his plane on a hastily organized landing strip on Sapelo Island—and Eugenia Price all signed the guest book.

  In 1920, a twenty-four-year-old World War I hero named Tillman Ellsworth McFarland, carrying an honorable discharge and a foot-locker full of medals, hopped off a railroad car in Thalmann, Georgia. He had packed light but was carrying all he owned: a few handsaws, hammers, and hickory-handled axes; seventy dollars; and a brow-full of sweat and gumption. Not to mention a strong desire never to dig another trench. While some passengers stepped into cars that ferried them to the shoreline for a vacation, Ellsworth began knocking on doors and offering his services: cutting firewood, clearing land, building barns, whatever. Dressed in a white shirt, tie, and wool slacks, he’d shake their hands and state, “If you’re not happy, don’t pay me.”

  Locals felt the callused, muscled palms, stared into the sunken eyes, and gave him a chance. Word of his sunup to sundown work ethic spread, and within months he had bought an acre, traded a winter’s worth of wood for an old horse, begun the construction of a house, and opened a logging and turpentine business. This put money in his pocket and meat on his bones, and meant that he walked most every square inch of Glynn County. For eight years his business flourished, and when men started jumping out of windows on Wall Street, Ellsworth—who had saved the first penny he ever earned—lived by the idea that had brought him south. Buy dirt and you won’t get hurt. By 1931 he had acquired 26,000 acres in and around Zuta, Georgia—some twenty miles west of Brunswick—naming it simply “The Zuta.”

  To the locals, the Zuta was a messy mixture of sick pine trees and gnarly oak hammocks surrounding an immense swamp known as the Buffalo—tens of thousands of acres of virgin, uncut timber rising up out of the south Georgia gumbo that few dared venture into. Given the property’s relative proximity to the Altamaha River, the Buffalo flooded whenever heavy rains in the middle of the state overflowed the riverbanks. Folks in Thalmann, Popwellville, Jesup, Darien, and Brunswick heard about his acquisition and shook their heads. That boy ain’t right. Thing was, Tillman had spent years walking, studying, and learning what they’d forgotten. A hundred years earlier, the Zuta was the southeast quarter of a much larger plantation called Anguilla. The owners had limited success planting cotton because the soil was too wet and too sandy, and conditions were too unpredictable. Starting in 1856, in a decade-long effort to stem the floods and drain the land, slaves with mule teams erected dikes and dug drainage ditches big enough to float a canoe down. Then came 1865.

  In the following years, the property festered beneath a heavy cover of its own vines, pooling wat
ers, and Jurassic-sized mosquitoes. Due to the water, portions became inaccessible, and as a result, knowledge of the wealth contained there died with those who had seen it last. Over the next few decades, the property was sold off in small unrecognizable pieces to whoever would buy it. So undesirable was the land that in the late 1890s two competing railroads redirected their tracks and skirted the property to avoid the quagmire. This formed nearly perfect north, south, and west borders, and would prove fortuitous some thirty-five years later when Ellsworth pieced the land back together from the dozen or so fragmented owners who couldn’t wait to get rid of it. With the state of the economy, they nearly gave it away.

  Ellsworth assessed the dikes and drains and discovered that the previous attempt had actually made the problem worse—it now drew more water onto the property than off. He scratched his head, engineered a new solution, and rented heavy machinery. The way he saw it, the Buffalo—God’s drain for the Altamaha—had become clogged with several thousand years of silt, runoff, dead trees, and beaver dams. Add to that the spiderweb of half-completed, crisscrossing drains, and Ellsworth found a twenty-six-thousand-acre bathtub that needed some-body to pull the plug, plunge the hole, and snake the pipes.

  For six months, starting in 1932, he dredged, blew up the beaver dams, corrected the spiderweb, and cleared downed trees out of the deep water in the heart of the Buffalo. With the Buffalo flowing and the Zuta floodwaters receding, he got to work on the ditches feeding into and out of the Buffalo. Seeing his progress and the possibilities before him, he gambled with the remaining lumps in his mattress. Seven months later, given the advantage of dump trucks, tractors, large cranes, and eight-man crews, he laid down a road system and used it to complete what the slaves had started. Within a week, 60 percent of the property was dry. In another six months he rode horseback across the property and looked at the gold mine he’d uncovered.

  Trees.

  Given his drains, the road system, his natural access to the Buffalo, and the water highway it provided to the Altamaha, Ellsworth—at the age of forty—opened Zuta Lumber Company. The interesting thing about twenty-six-thousand acres is that if he managed it well and put back more than he took, he’d never run out of trees. Whenever he cut one down, he planted two in its place. Working day-in and day-out in such close proximity to the land, he stumbled upon six flowing wells that bubbled up through the earth and trickled into the Buffalo. The crystal water was clean, sweet, and attracted wildlife like a magnet—especially the more than one hundred wild Brahman cows long since forgotten within the Zuta borders. The same locals who’d laughed and called him Johnny Appleseed behind his back now knocked on his door, called him “sir,” and asked his opinion.

  By 1940, Zuta Lumber had become a powerhouse throughout the Southeast. Ships, homes, bridges, and even skyscrapers in New York City had been built with trees off the Zuta. In a decade when so many lost their shirts, Ellsworth created something out of nothing. In the process, he made a county full of friends and believers. This too proved beneficial, because when Ellsworth ran out of room in his mattress and decided to open his own bank on April 6, 1945, customers lined up around the block to make deposits.

  A few doors down from the Ritz Theater, Ellsworth bought a deserted church, an oddity given its placement in the Bible Belt. The church was a huge, gray stone building with a pitch so steep that roofers had to wear harnesses. When Russian Orthodoxy failed to catch on amidst so many Baptists, the church leaders had vacated and sold the building to the city. A decade later, Ellsworth bought it, gutted the interior, converted the covered portico into a drive-through for his tellers, and poured a vault on the first floor. And this was no ordinary vault. The walls were three feet of concrete, reinforced with steel beams and a one-foot-thick steel door that Japan’s best bombs couldn’t unhinge. Word quickly spread that Ellsworth had the safest safe in Georgia, and given the climate of general distrust for anything governmental, the vault brought business. And business boomed. With the postwar economy, and the need for both new construction and loans, the Zuta First National did something unheard of in the banking world—it made a profit in its second year.

  Ellsworth found he liked the banking business. He liked the inter-action with the customers, liked helping people buy homes, and even more, he liked helping people who, on paper, couldn’t get help else-where. And when those same people missed a payment or two, Ellsworth knocked on their door, gave them a side of beef, sipped a glass of tea, and worked them through their troubles. In 1948, Zuta First National had the highest loan close percentage, highest retention percentage, and lowest foreclosure rate of any bank in Georgia.

  And when the space behind his banker’s desk grew too tight, he slipped out the back door, drove home, and saddled his horse for an afternoon on the Zuta. For as much as he liked banking, he liked growing trees more. The bank grew and the lumber business exploded, and Ellsworth hired the right people to run both. At fifty-two, he looked at the balance sheet of his life and, for the first time, felt lonely. Maybe that’s why he noticed a thirty-eight-year-old piano teacher named Sarah Beth Samuelson when she walked into the bank to open a checking account. It was summer; she wore a tan hat, carried a shade umbrella, and dabbed the sweat off her top lip with an embroidered handker-chief. Ellsworth fell hard and fast.

  Three months later they married. They caught the Silver Meteor at Thalmann and rode it all the way to Grand Central Station, where they stepped off, strolled through Manhattan, and marveled at the towering buildings. After a tour that took them through the Catskills, the Finger Lakes, and the Adirondacks, then on up through New England, they returned to the Zuta. There Ellsworth built his bride a Georgian plantation house with a tin roof, wraparound porch, and a driveway lined with fifty-four pecan trees—one for every year of his life. A year later, she gave him Silas Jackson “Jack” McFarland—the first-born son of a wealthy man. Ellsworth could not have been prouder. A year later, he discovered he could be, when Sarah Beth gave him William “Liam” Walker McFarland. That would be the last gift she ever gave him. After her funeral Ellsworth placed a boy on each knee; Jack took one look at Liam, and that’s about when the trouble started.

  Ellsworth poured himself into his sons. He bought them each a pony, showed them every inch of the Zuta, and had little desks built alongside his at the bank. He even glued their names on the door. Seldom was the trio not together. But Jack and Liam could not have been more different. Physically, they were healthy, an equal match, but the similarities ended there. Jack, a quick wit and good with numbers, needed to be heard and often was, from a long way off. Further, he seldom filtered what came from his brain before it exited his mouth. He found identity and status in the possession of things. Liam was quiet, thoughtful, slow to speak, and always gave away more than he took in.

  Chapter 5

  Too tired to drive home, I slept in the apartment on the floor. I woke before daylight to the sound of Unc’s double-axle trailer rolling out of the drive—seven-ply radials on gravel. A sound I’d heard a thousand times. Having taken yesterday off to be with me meant he had some catching up to do. Most of his clientele live in gated communities from Pawley’s Island to Jacksonville. Given the amount of money they put into their horses and the stress of a weekend-to-weekend show season, they start to get itchy if you’re not there to put new shoes on their horses when they want you. They might have a quarter-million in one horse, and when they want new shoes, they want new shoes.

  I lay there on a hard, hastily made pallet on the floor of my room, listening to Unc disappear down the drive. My back felt good, but the sides of my hips hurt—the impact of wood floors and age. A second blanket beneath me would’ve been nice, but it was spread across Tommye, who was curled up in the bed. I watched her sleep. Her eyes—dancing behind her eyelids—dreaming, her hands tucked under her flushed face, the lines of her hips graceful beneath the blanket, and one foot slightly uncovered—her toenails bright red.

  She owed me a conversation. At least that
.

  I went out and tied Unc’s canoe on top of Vicky, then went back up to the loft and poured myself some orange juice. I turned around and found Tommye watching me.

  She pointed. “Nice boxers.”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling on some shorts, “they’re jail issue.”

  “What’d you do this time?”

  “Got caught.”

  “You guilty?”

  I nodded. “But not nearly as much as somebody else.”

  She smiled. “Didn’t I teach you anything?”

  “Evidently not.” I got the orange juice out again and poured her a glass.

  She shook her head and propped her chin on her knees. “You still digging around that vault?”

  I smiled and pulled on my Braves cap.

  Tommye stretched and looked out the window. “You’re looking in the wrong place.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  She walked to the counter and drank the juice. Refilling her glass, she opened her purse, shook a pill out of each of three separate containers, and swallowed all of them at once. She peeled a banana, ate it slowly, and then looked out the window at Vicky. She smiled, nodded, and said, “I’m gonna hop in the shower first.”

  “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  I was sifting through the barn, looking for nothing, when Aunt Lorna walked out and handed me a cup of coffee. She looked toward the sound of someone standing in the shower above our heads. “Go easy on her.”

  Both hands wrapped around the mug, I blew the steam off. “I will.”

  She wiped her hands on her apron and looked out the drive, eyeing Unc’s fresh tracks around the puddles. “He had to go out there and get her, you know.”