(2007) Chasing Fireflies - A Novel of Discovery (6 page)

The kid's mouth showed no expression, but when he looked into the wall-length mirror, his chin lifted ever so slightly.

As we walked down the hall, my flip-flops smacking my heels, Dr. Johnson stopped us.

"Sir?"

We turned, hanging our thumbs in ourjeans-a habit of association.

"Did you say your name was Willee McFarland?"

Unc took a deep breath, slid his glasses off his nose, and let them hang over his neck. "Yes."

The doctor looked down at the floor, then back at us. He pointed west out the window-toward the Zuta. "You any relation to those two brothers?"

Unc slipped his glasses back up on his nose. "Yep."

The doctor nodded, raising both eyebrows. "Wow. Well ... okay."

I shook my head because I knew what was coming.

"Uh . . ." He had to ask. "Which one are you?"

Unc smiled and pushed the glasses halfway down his nose, looking over the tops. "I'm the one that went to prison."

"Oh."

Unc turned, then pointed toward the kid's room. 'Why haven't y'all gotten him some new glasses?"

The doctor looked toward the kid. "Didn't know he wore glasses."

Unc nodded. "The crown of his nose will tell you that he did."

We stepped into Vicky and within a few minutes were shifting into fourth. We crossed under 1-95, beyond the truck stop, and passed the ten thousand rows of planted pines-parallel, equidistant, and angling toward the road. Driving through the dusk of a falling sun, each stand of pines looked like a giant hallway to some Celtic cathedral. I drove, lost in the picture of that kid.

Unc read my face and put his hand on my shoulder, something he started doing twenty years ago and something that has told me more about myself than any report card, paycheck, or job title. Despite my unanswered questions, where I came from and who I am, that hand on my shoulder spoke to a part of me few words ever reached. And to be honest, when my demons rose out of the past and reminded me that I'd been left on some street corner and that I wasn't good enough even for my own parents, that hand told me otherwise.

"Yes sir?"

He turned back to face the windshield and rested his foot up on the side of the door. "Kids are like a spring, or a Stretch Armstrong. No matter how many times they're passed around, passed off, and passed on ... they snap back." He spit through his window. "Hope ... it's the fuel that feeds them." He shook his head and spit something off the end of his tongue. "God forbid the day they stop eating it."

\ Then Unc and Aunt Lorna first brought me home to their house, they sat me down and said something I'll never forget.

"Chase ... our home is what the state calls a foster home. That means you can stay here and live with us until your parents come get you." He patted the bed. "That means, until then, this is your room."

I looked around, my feet dangling a foot above the floor.

"But we probably ought to decide what you should call us. So. . ." He took Lorna's hand and swallowed hard. "Why don't you call my wife Aunt Lorna, and you can call me ... you can call me Uncle Willee ... or ... Unc ... if you like." He was quiet several seconds. "That way ... when your folks show up, you'll have room in your head for names like Mom and Dad."

The words "when your folks show up" sent shock waves through me that echo still. Uncle Willee did something no other adult had ever done. He gave credibility to the thought I'd had for as long as I could remember. He silently agreed with the simple notion They might ...

UnC was right. Kids hope.

All they need is a reason.

Moments passed before I said anything. "When do they quit?"

He leaned his head back against the seats. "That depends ... that depends."

the story of the McFarland brothers has nearly grown to mythical status around Zuta, Georgia. And after a generation of embellishment, it changes like a chameleon in the sun. It's the cause of endless speculation, volumes of courtroom proceedings, several federal investigations, and three murders-and is the reason I spent last week in jail. It's also the reason I became a journalist.

I first heard whispers of the trouble between William McFarland and his brother in my early teens. I had felt something funny, kind of like an electric charge in the air, a few months after Unc and Aunt Lorna brought me into their house at the age of six, but they did a good job of keeping it from me and every other kid who passed through their house. Living with Unc painted one picture, while the rumors painted another. When the two didn't add up, I started digging, and pretty soon my bedroom walls were tacked with a collage made from bits and pieces of the truth.

Getting through my senior year of college was predicated on writing a passing thesis. All journalism students rowed in the same boat. In the beginning of our junior year, they sat us down and gave us the game rules. The requirements were simple: Pick a national, newsworthy story or issue that has not been solved by the gathering of information or has been put to bed by disinterest, then investigate it and contribute new information to the discussion that the previous news networks have not. Do not summarize existing material. Put your talent to work and dig up something new. This was to be an in-depth piece, and bonus points were given for finding and using primary sources. Three keys stood out: national, newsworthy, and new. Many of the students spent months agonizing over a story topic that they would then spend the next ten to twelve months investigating. For me it was never really an issue.

The story I'm about to tell you comes from local papers, court documents, interviews, hearsay, gossip, carvings found on old swamp trees, and local legend. Knowing all this, Red-while he shares my passion for the story-has never let me print a single word of it.

Tillman Ellsworth McFarland was born in 1896. But that's a bad place to start, so let's back up. A lot.

No one's really sure how the Golden Isles of Georgia got their name. Some credit the Spanish, others claim the English, who were promoting their seventeenth-century settlement. Regardless, Sea Island is the richest zip code in the country today; richer than Beverly Hills or Aspen during the ski season. Tolerable winters, breezy summers, and expansive beaches make up the isles, the westernmost shore on the East Coast. The location makes it a low-risk storm area because it's so far removed from the hurricane highway, aka the Gulf Stream. From the three-hundred-year-old oaks draped in Spanish moss swimming with chiggers and red bugs, to the white sandy beaches glittering with sharks' teeth and sand dollars, the entire region is cradled in the palms of an ecosystem we like to call the marsh. It's a noman's-land made up of soft mud flats crested by jagged oyster beds and knife-edged wire grass that changes colors hourly and bathes twice daily in the rising tide. But the most inescapable aspect of the marsh is the smell. While tourists drive across the causeway, get their first whiff, and turn up their noses, locals wake up, walk outside, stretch their arms, inhale, and fill their fingertips. From dead and rotting organisms to new life bubbling up through the muck, the marshlike its history-is a daily continuum of death and resurrection.

The Creek Indians settled here first. Other than a few trash and burial mounds, the only remnants of their existence are found in the words they left: names like Satilla and Altamaha. In 1540, they greeted Spanish conqueror Hernando DeSoto and his troops with curiosity. DeSoto set one foot on the beach, claimed the coast for Spain, and returned the greeting with musket balls and disease. If that bugs you, don't worry. His achievement was short-lived, as he died in a return journey in 1542.

But with limited success the Spanish returned to St. Augustine, giving the French the opportunity to brave the mosquitoes and start their own colony. Unflinching, Spanish King Phillip II sent in a party of Jesuits, who were promptly hacked to pieces by the remaining Indians. By 1570, most of the Jesuits had tired of the warfare and moved to Mexico, making room for the Franciscans in 1573.

Now fast-forward a hundred years and hop back across the ocean to the motherland. Following years of war, debtor prisons in England were overflowing with often well-respected citizens who had overextended their credit in an attempt to pay their taxes. Looking at indefinite incarceration complete with filth, damp cells, starvation, and the beginnings of a smallpox epidemic, they jumped at the chance to settle Georgia under King George II's mandate to establish a colony between South Carolina and Florida. For God and country ... and the absolution of all debts.

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 understand 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 nutrientrich 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.