(2007) Chasing Fireflies - A Novel of Discovery (9 page)

Tillman Ellsworth McFarland had always shoed his own horses. Doing so taught him how to read them. Unc says he remembered many a day when his daddy pulled his horse's leg through his and began scraping the V or pulling off a shoe and putting on a new one. Before he put on a new one, he'd hold the old up to the sunshine and read it-how it wore and where it was worn. "Horses are always talking. The shoes coming off their feet are akin to a scream at the top of their lungs."

Unc took this to heart, and I guess pretty soon he was reading more than just horses.

Shortly after I realized this, I also got clued in to the contrast between Unc and his older brother, Jack. It was midsummer, hot as Hades in the shade, and a mile above us six or eight buzzards floated in wide circles, riding the heat rising off the earth. Tommye and I were swinging on the tire swing, our faces sticky with watermelon juice, trying to stay away from Unc's crazed pet turkey, Bob. Unc had just pulled into the drive, covered in horse smell, dirt, and honesty. He kissed Lorna and was repacking his trailer for the next day when Uncle Jack pulled in behind him. He drove a new dark-blue Cadillac and wore a striped silk suit, cuffed pants, Italian leather loafers, Armani tie, and gold cuff links through French cuffs. The town zero and the town hero-as different as sunshine and rain.

Unc was working paycheck to paycheck, known around town as the prodigal who'd never come home and who'd robbed both his family and most of the town blind. The pardon had done little to change that. Upon his incarceration, Unc had been fired from the bank and Zuta Lumber, removed as a junior elder in the church, and kicked out of both the Rotary and the country club. Uncle Jack was the respectable one-president of the bank, president of Zuta Lumber, elder in his church, and founding member of the Glynn County Rotary, not to mention being rather wealthy.

He'd come to pick up Tommye.

At midnight the night before, Tommye had appeared at our kitchen door. And because she was just eight, that meant she'd run across the Zuta through the dark to get to us. I stood in the bathroom, running her a hot bath and wondering, Ran across the Zuta? What could be worse than five miles of darkness and lightning? Whatever it was had written itself all over her face. She walked in, her hair streaking down over her face, her feet covered in gumbo clay, and her long flannel gown dirty and torn from falling.

Aunt Lorna got her bathed and fed her some soup, and Unc put her in my bed and spread a pallet on the floor for me. I lay awake most of the night watching her twitch and listening to her talk in her sleep. The next morning the police showed up, sat Tommye on the porch, and started asking her a bunch of questions. She just sat there, said nothing, and looked at me. That same morning, the front page of the paper showed a picture of her dead brother. He'd had an accident, and a bullet went up through his head. The article went on to say that medics had to give Jack a sedative to calm him down. Witnesses say he was pretty distraught. The paper described him as "inconsolable."

Pretty soon Unc built bunk beds, and for the next several years, Tommye slept in the bottom bunk more nights than not. I don't know if this heightened the strain between Unc and his brother or just brought it out of the closet, but at any rate, whenever they were in the same room you could cut the tension with a knife. I think Willee and Jack would just as soon forget each other, but the fact that Tommye spent more time at our house than her own forced an uneasy truce between them.

Short of building a prison, Jack couldn't stop his daughter from escaping their house. For some reason, the two of them were like oil and water. She-along with an older brother-were given to him by his first wife. After her, he'd courted four more-somehow escaping more children. He never made much of a fuss over Tommye not staying at home. As more and more women became his wives, matched by the number who quietly filed for divorce, he became less vocal about it. Maybe it was easier to not have to explain a little girl running around to future prospects.

If Uncle Jack ever beat her, I never saw any signs of it. He was a lot of things-mostly a mystery-but violent was never one of them. And I looked. As did Unc-and I'm pretty sure if he had found any signs, that uneasy truce would have ended.

Tommye was something special-a quiet, pug-nosed, country girl with an accent that could melt butter and make old men forget their aches and pains. She made all As without really trying, was named allstate as pitcher on the girls' softball team, played the leading role for three years running in the school drama production, and was elected homecoming queen her senior year. If her internal and private life seemed shrouded in secrecy, her public persona was touched. Few of my childhood memories don't include her, and in truth, she was as much-if not more-Willee's daughter than Jack's.

Sometime in high school it hit us that I was a foster child in her uncle's home-so I moved into the apartment above the barn, and we quit living like brother and sister. It was never anything physical, just something that shifted in our heads-how we thought about each other. And the moment that happened, an odd distance, palpable as an anvil, wedged itself between us.

She had all kinds of offers for our senior prom, yet, for reasons I never understood, she asked me. The girl I wanted to take was already going with somebody else, so why not?

That's when I realized how many looks Tommye got from other guys. Their eyes walked up and down her as if she were an interstate highway. And while she liked it, and to some extent fed off it, she had invited me for a reason. It's a good thing I didn't know much about fighting, because that night convinced me that a man's eyes can hurt almost as much as his hands. We made an appearance, danced, and then left early and ate a sack full of Krystal burgers on the beach in our tux and evening gown.

parked Vicky, hopped into my canoe, and paddled the twentyseven strokes from my landing to my boat. I tied up, unloaded a bag of groceries, and leaned against the mast, staring out across the marsh. At four o'clock in the afternoon, the shade was turning from dull gold to light root beer.

One of the interesting things about living on a boat is that unless you live at a dock where power and phone lines are wired in, you have to think ahead. Like getting back and forth to shore. For carrying stuff, I use the canoe. It's sturdy, stable, and minimizes the number of trips. For simple transit, I use the kayak. It's quick and, given the drop-in rudder, maneuvers better in stronger currents-which occur every time the tide turns. On board, most everything runs off propane, so hot water and cooking are never really a problem. But anything electric-like cell phones and laptops-requires a generator if you don't want to run down the battery. I cranked the generator and charged my phone while I checked my e-mail and researched a few ideas online. While my boat borders on the primitive, Red can't stand the idea of my being totally unplugged, so he splurged and bought me a wireless broadband card.

An hour later, I gave him a call. "It's me."

"You been to see the kid today?"

"I'm going now. Thought I'd call you first."

"What have you got so far?"

"I called the Georgia Department of Family Services. Based on the appearance of chronic and prolonged physical abuse-and because they don't know whom he belongs to-they've filed an Emergency Shelter Petition, which will put him in foster care as soon as his doctor releases him. It makes him a ward of the state, giving them full custody."

'When's that happen?"

"Any day. Depends on the kid."

'What else?" Red asked.

"The DA's office assigned one of its own to investigate, see if they can find out who this kid is and possibly look into terminating parental rights."

"Can they do that?"

"Only if they find cause."

"One look at the kid's back will give them cause."

"Yeah, well, I'm meeting her at the kid's room in an hour."

"Her?"

"The attorney."

"Keep me posted."

I stepped off the elevator and into the pediatric ward. The same guard sat outside the door, reading a Louis L'Amour novel. He looked up at me and moved his huge shoulders out of the doorway. "He's in there. Scribbling."

I walked in and pulled up that stainless steel stool that doctors use to slide around in exam rooms. He stopped drawing long enough to adjust the new glasses on the end of his nose and look up just slightly. Not at my face, but maybe at my toes. He was still wearing Unc's Braves cap. Before I went in, I'd decided to call him something other than Snoot, "the kid," or "hey you." Every kid ought to have a name. I rolled up next to him, careful not to get too close.

"Hey, Sketch."

He paused, scanned the floor as if he was allowing the name to roll around the inside of his head, and then gave it permission to rest on him. He looked across the room and wrote in his book without looking either at me or the page. Then he turned the page toward me. It read Hi.

If my handwriting were half as legible as his, I might actually write letters to people. "The hat looks good on you. You like the Braves?"

He shrugged without taking his eyes off his page.

"Where did you learn to write so ... so perfectly?"

His hand began moving before his eyes ever looked at the page. He drew what looked like a hospital bed with an older woman lying in it. Her face was wrinkled, she had oxygen tubes in her nose and a pencil in one hand. On the other side of the bed sat a small kid. The kid was watching her draw. On the page in her hand, she'd written half the alphabet.

I pointed. "That you?"

He nodded. I noticed that his face was fuller, like maybe he'd gained a pound or two.

I pointed again. "Who's that?"

Everything he wrote was in small block caps. MISS MYRLENE.

"She related to you?"

Just then, a late-twenties, brunette female wearing jeans, running shoes, and a white oxford button-down appeared in the door. I looked up while the kid looked through the tops of his glasses at her feet.

I stood and held out my hand. "I'm Chase Walker."

"Mandy Parker." She pulled up her shirttail and flashed the DA's badge looped over the waist of her jeans but hidden from view.

I stepped out of the way so she could get a look at the kid. She walked up, leaned over, quickly took in his bare back and arms, and then placed her hands on her knees and spoke softly. "Hi."

He had flipped to another page in his notebook and was shading in the wings on what looked like a male cardinal hanging from a birdfeeder. I looked out his window and saw the birdfeeder, but no bird. He didn't look up, but stopped shading long enough to look out the corner of his eyes.

She spied a chair in the corner. "Go ahead. I don't want to interrupt you."

I scooted up next to the kid again just as he broke the tip of his pencil. On the nightstand behind him lay a package of new black No. 2 pencils and an electronic sharpener. He stuck the pencil in and worked it 'til he was satisfied with the point, then he began drawing detail around the cardinal's beak and eyes.

I pointed to the drawing supplies. "Somebody give you all this?"

He nodded slowly, as if unsure whether I was baiting him just before I planned to snatch it off the table.

"Somebody must like you."

He raised his head slightly, showing me the tops of the whites of his eyes. The look told me he thought I knew. He flipped to a clean page and quickly sketched the outline of Unc's face and hat.

"Uncle Willee brought you all that?"

A quick nod.

"When?"

He drew a clock face, with the hour hand pointed at six and the minute hand on the one.

I sat back and spoke to both him and me. "I thought he left a little early this morning."

The kid closed his notebook and looked over his shoulder at Mandy Parker.

I pointed to her. "Oh, she's an attorney."

He sketched the top of a pair of pants, two belt loops, and a leather-cased badge hanging over the belt between the two loops.

I studied the drawing and said, "You don't miss much, do you?"

He shrugged. I looked at the bald spots atop his head; a few of them were starting to show signs of hair.

"She's with the state. What they call the DA's office."

He immediately crossed his arms, pulled his knees up into his chest, and clung to the notebook, turning his knuckles white.

I read the body language. "But she's one of the good guys."

He pulled his knees in tighter to his chest. He wasn't buying it, and Mandy Parker saw it.

She stood and said, "I'll come back." Then she pulled a DVD out of her back pocket and quietly set it on the bed. "It's one of my favorites. Thought you might like it, too." Then she looked at me. "Coffee sounds good. I'll wait outside."

I nodded. "Yeah, give me just a minute."

I looked at the DVD. It was Disney's Jungle Book. I handed it to him. "You seen this one?"

He shook his head.

"You want to?"

He paused like I'd asked him a trick question. I slipped it into the DVD player below the television and pushed PLAY.