The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  Something brushed against her leg and she bolted upright from the waist in alarm with hundreds of yellow dots whirling about her and above the rabbit that paused beside the dim coals of the fire. The moon made shadows of the rabbit’s twitching ears. She scrambled out of the green cave and stood, gulping air in fright, the rabbit shooting back into the thicket. She prayed for her heart to stop thumping and looked up at the moon, and there were fireflies above her. As her heartbeat slowed she still did not want to look down at her body or touch herself because she thought she might be seven again. The fireflies were thicker in some places above the thicket, blinking off and on, whirling toward each other so if you blurred your eyes there were tracers, yellow lines of light everywhere. She thought, Laurel should see this, Laurel would love this, and then she was no longer seven.

  Clare rebuilt the small fire to break the unearthly mood but the fireflies weren’t disturbed. She walked up the row fifty feet, turned and looked back, hoping that she wouldn’t see herself standing there. The countless thousands of fireflies stayed just outside and within and above the thicket. Quite suddenly she felt blessed without thinking whether or not she deserved it. She went back to her nest, lay down and wept for a few minutes, then watched a firefly hovering barely a foot above her head. She tried out Now I lay me down to sleep despite its failure to reassure. All souls will be taken, including the souls of fireflies.

  She closed her eyes and felt herself floating in memory from her beginning, as if on a river but more quickly along the surface than what had happened to her. Now she saw when it was she had slept on the ground without covers up at the cottage when she was seven, with Tess curled up in her arms, smelling like a skunk Tess had bothered. In March that year, 1947, there was a serious bout of pneumonia and the doctors had given her too much of the new wonder drug, penicillin. At first she was better, though she hated the hospital and asked her parents daily if she could go home and they kept forgetting to bring along her small ceramic dog. All her joints began to redden and swell and her fever rose precipitously. The doctors diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, a terrible disease, and then she lapsed into a coma for five days. All that she could remember from the coma was that her grandfather had brought into her hospital room his huge Belgian draft horse mare with the rooster perched on its back. When her grandfather left with the horse and rooster, her grandmother came in leading a black bear with a red leash. Her grandmother said nothing but the bear had sat down beside her and talked in a soothing language, and before the bear said goodbye she put Clare’s ceramic dog on the nightstand so it was there when she woke up with a big needle putting juice in her arm. No one was there when she woke up though she thought she still smelled the bear in the room. A specialist from the university said she was allergic to penicillin and the drug had poisoned her system. Her parents were happy she didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis (they kept saying it) but Clare felt things were never quite the same again. In her child’s mind she felt that they had abandoned her because she had frightened them with her illness, an almost imperceptible withholding of affection that became directed to her little brother, or so she believed. When she got out of the hospital it was nearly time to move up to the summer place, but when they got there she was told she was too ill to go fishing with her father. He kept saying, Maybe next month. One evening her parents went to a party down the lake, the babysitter was awful just sitting out on the porch with a boyfriend and her little brother had purposefully broken the tail off her ceramic dog by hitting it against the fireplace. She stayed up late to show the broken dog to her parents, but they came home a little drunk and spanked her for staying up late. She crawled out the window with Tess and slept under the bushes near the garage where the three-legged cat had visited them. Tess liked cats and tried to lick their fur. Early in the morning she was discovered when Tess started barking at a motorboat, and she was spanked for sleeping outside. She never did get to go fishing that summer though she happily threw her brother’s favorite teddy bear off the dock and stood there a long time until it drowned. Then her mother had to go to the hospital down near Ann Arbor, Mercy Wood, because she drank too much, though her dad said she was just sick. The good trip was to take Tess to Gaylord to find her a “husband.” That’s what he said though there was no church, just a farm with English setters. Then came the lunch, the big trees and the buffalo stumps.

  When Clare awoke again the fireflies were gone. She rummaged in the bag until she found her watch, lit a match and saw it was four A.M., with dawn less than two hours away. She felt drowsy and unafraid so didn’t bother to rekindle the fire. It was pleasant to know she had no idea what she was going to do other than wear a beret in Paris on at least a single walk, she hoped on a rainy August afternoon. Barring small children most women in her neighborhood in broken marriages ran afoul of sheer idleness. Clare knew she was bright enough to make herself useful somewhere, especially when she wouldn’t be running the house, which she tended at the moment to look upon as a preposterous imposition put on her by her mother. Her father tended to be naturally morose, taciturn, but the times her mother began drinking again after a supposed cure were hard on him. Once Clare came upon him crying in the den after her mother had fallen down the stairs. She hadn’t really injured herself but the family doctor thought it an opportunity for a quick cure. His eyes had also become moist when Clare was dressed up for her first formal dance at fourteen. He had just arrived home from a business trip to New York and stood in the hall with his ponderous briefcase, and as she was leaving, he turned and nodded to her boyfriend standing on the porch, kissed her and said, This can’t be, this is too sudden, and off she went. The last time was when, despite the pressures of business, he drove her up to East Lansing to enter college. Going to Michigan State was Clare’s first act of total defiance against her mother to whom the college was unmentionable. Her mother had insisted on her own alma mater, Smith, and Clare had said, You’re not much of a recommendation, the only thing I’ve seen you read is Vogue, and her mother had slapped her for the last time. Clare’s favorite teacher had gone to MSU and had set up a program with old professor friends so that after basics Clare would have clear sailing in comparative literature. She envisioned a career that allowed her to read world literature, think about it, and anything beyond that was an irritation. Her father was fairly strict about her spending but gave her free rein with books. Sadly, Clare thought, the only time he truly defended her against her mother was in the choice of a college. But he had become quite upset when he dropped her off at her dorm, and they had talked with an intimacy previously unknown to them about her mother. He nearly begged her to come home as often as possible, if only for his sake. It was an unnerving moment for her, this first time her father was not quite her father but an intimate. Why had he waited until she was eighteen to try to become close, a time when it was no longer achievable, though it might have been later, had he lived? Oh Father don’t worry I’m doing fine, and then she slept a pure, deep, dreamless sleep.

  At first light there were more birds than she had ever heard at one time. It was as if she were within the birds, and wrens fluttered skillfully through the branches of the thicket. She heard whip-poor-wills, mourning doves, the resurgence of the red-winged blackbirds from the marsh beyond the creek. She ran a finger through the dew on her face which was slick as fine oil, and her movement disturbed something beside her. She turned and her heart stopped as a very long, thick, black snake eased himself off into the deeper reaches of the thicket. Holy Jesus I have slept with a snake. She laughed as her heart restarted. She gathered up her bag, took a sip of the boiled creek water, which had settled somewhat during the night, and scrambled out into the dawn. If someone would just bring coffee she might stay a few hours more. She began to walk down the row, then turned around, having forgot the cranberry juice can. When she picked it up there was a clear view of her nest, and it reminded her in the first light of a swamp near their cabin where her father said a bear slept. She made a little goodby
e bow to the green cave, examined her filthy clothes and set off down the row toward the east where a burnished orange sun was rising. She thought that in the future any place she lived would have to have a clear view of the east.

  Two weeks later in a not altogether pleasant room in a small hotel a block off Rue St.-Jacques Clare’s view was a scant dozen feet in whatever direction, but the ceiling was high. The room was as close as she could get to the pension she had stayed in for three weeks thirty years before, and twenty times as expensive. She had had her walk in an August shower in her beret, without an umbrella, until she was quite wet, and then a coffee and calvados at Café de Flore, where she had overheard an American couple her age asking a waiter where Camus had sat. There are other pilgrims, she thought, without a trace of self-mockery. She read Guillevic and Sarraute in her room, reread Alain-Fournier’s The Wanderer and planned a train trip into the countryside. In the café where she took her lunch every day she knew she was referred to as “the schoolteacher.” This pleased her though it wasn’t meant to.

  On long walks in the overwarm city she had occasion to think of the cool breezes that came in the evening off Lake Michigan. If she had the whole thing to do over she would have done it differently, but then no one has anything to do over. Down near the end of the corn row a pickup truck passed and she hid as an old man turned off the irrigation for the soybean field which was tinged orange and glistened in the morning sun. She followed the path of the pickup to the back of a barn where there was a field of pigs with small, low-slung sheds in rows, and a smell that would take some time to get used to. She went through a gate into a barnyard where the old man had the hood up on his pickup and was tinkering. A collie mongrel rushed at her, barking, but Clare said a quiet hello and the dog wagged its tail. The old man looked at her without alarm and put his hands in his denim jacket.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’ve been misplaced. I’d like a cup of coffee.”

  “If it’s coffee you want, we got coffee. You must be the woman we heard about all evening on the radio. You’re supposed to be in a red car.”

  “I spent the night in your field.” Her voice began to quiver.

  “You had to get loose. The radio said he was beating on you.”

  The old man led her toward the porch where a very large old woman was standing with her arms crossed. “She looks just like Grandma, doesn’t she, Ed?” she said. At the screen door with a tuft of cotton on it to keep away flies the old man nodded in assent. Ed disappeared into the house and came back with an antique gold-leaf mirror with a photo portrait of a woman framed on the back of it. The woman wore a stiff-necked black dress and had an amazing resemblance to Clare who was momentarily disoriented.

  “That picture was took in 1890,” said the old woman.

  “I suppose I should make some phone calls,” Clare said.

  °

  Laurel arrived in two hours from Des Moines in a police car with a state trooper who talked farm prices and drank coffee with Ed while Laurel and Clare sat on a porch swing. Laurel had come down from Sioux Falls and spent the night in vigil with Donald in Des Moines. “I never thought you would do it,” Laurel kept saying.

  “How’s Donald?”

  “He’s unhappy but he’ll survive. He told the police you had a nervous breakdown, but I had them call Dr. Roth. You have to tell the trooper that he didn’t abuse you within Iowa state lines.”

  “The poor thing,” Clare said, and began to cry.

  Clare spent a scant hour talking with Donald in a room at a Best Western motel in Des Moines. There was more than a trace of the vulnerability in him that she once had cherished. He wanted to put off any decision “in depth” until Clare “came to her senses,” which is precisely what she thought he’d say. She sat next to her suitcase on the bed near the open window, as always. She couldn’t help but notice the day’s Wall Street Journal and a note pad covered with numbers on the nightstand. He was the same Donald, only paler, and she waited fearfully for some tremor to come, but it didn’t. There were a few surprises.

  “I can’t say I didn’t see this coming, but I hoped we’d carry on.”

  “I don’t have anything left to carry on.” It was so utterly painful to say it.

  “Is it Dr. Roth?” He looked away when he asked this, as if fearing a blow.

  “No. Don’t be absurd. You were always more than enough.”

  “What about the house? What about everything, for God’s sake?”

  “I hope you’ll still look after everything. I don’t care about the house. I want my books, but the house was Mother’s idea.” She found that she was three feet from her body again, but craving the immediacy of the thicket. What did fireflies do in the daytime? Perhaps Laurel would know.

  “I had a good talk with Laurel last night. Per usual she told me what was wrong with me. When she was little she even told me how to shave. She said you were tired of the life you were living and wanted to do something else. Is it as simple as that?”

  Clare looked up and saw that he had begun to cry, but it was Donald crying, not her father. She nodded yes, it was as simple as that. She got up and hugged him, and saw herself hugging him in the wall mirror, with a wave of claustrophobia sweeping through her body.

  “We’ll talk it over in October,” she said, because that was what Laurel told her to say.

  Laurel was dozing in the car and awoke with a start when her father put Clare’s suitcase in the back seat. Laurel got out and began to cry which was so untypical that both Clare and Donald were nonplused, though it seemed Donald might have felt some subdued pleasure. They consoled Laurel, and it occurred to a couple driving up to the entrance that they were seeing a happy, if tearful, reunion.

  In Paris at a newsstand Clare bought a Rand McNally Road Atlas of America. Due to the strength of the franc many prosperous French were visiting the States. In her room she spent a warm, humid afternoon looking at the locations that interested her, letting the maps bring back Zilpha, and Sammy sitting expectantly in the back seat waiting for a lunch break or a rest-stop stroll. Clare felt a little lost but then she always had, and supposed easily that it was the condition of life. Lying back on the bed, under the whir of the fan on the nightstand, she decided that she felt less lost than before her night in the thicket, and when the afternoon cooled she would write letters to Dr. Roth and Laurel. If it rained, she would wear her beret to dinner.

  JIM HARRISON is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, nonfiction, including Legends of the Fall, The Road Home, Returning to Earth, and The Summer He Didn’t Die. A member of American Academy of Arts and Letters and winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has had work published in twenty-five languages. Harrison lives in Montana and Arizona.

  A GROVE PRESS READING GROUP GUIDE BY LINDSEY TATE

  The Woman Lit by Fireflies

  Jim Harrison

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  We hope that these discussion questions will enhance your reading group’s exploration of Jim Harrison’s The Woman Lit by Fireflies. They are meant to stimulate discussion, offer new viewpoints and enrich your enjoyment of the book.

  More reading group guides and additional information, including summaries, author tours and author sites for other fine Grove Press titles may be found on our Web site, www.groveatlantic.com.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Begin your discussion of these three novellas by considering the differences and similarities between the protagonists of each. Set in far-flung geographical locations among various social milieux, the characters may at first glance seem quite different, but as they begin to tell their life stories certain themes and references emerge and echo one another. At what stage of life do the protagonists find themselves and, as they reflect on their lives, what do they hope to achieve? Imagine B.D., Gwen, Zip and Clare meeting for a drink in a bar. Where would they find common ground? What might they think of some of the other characters—Shelley, for example, or Donald?
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