(2007) Chasing Fireflies - A Novel of Discovery (7 page)

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 footlocker 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 browfull 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 waters, 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 somebody 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 magnetespecially 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 interaction with the customers, liked helping people buy homes, and even more, he liked helping people who, on paper, couldn't get help elsewhere. 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 handkerchief. 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 firstborn 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.

loo 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."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, last week, the day you were put in jail, he got a call from her. Two hours later he boarded a plane, flew out there, and brought her back."

"From Los Angeles?"

She nodded.

I looked up at the underside of my shower and listened as soapy shower water rushed through the exposed PVC drainpipe that dropped out of the floor and then fell alongside one of the timber supports inside the barn.