Fireworks Over Toccoa
Read Fireworks Over Toccoa Online
Authors: Jeffrey Stepakoff
Over
TOCCOA
Billion-Dollar Kiss
Over
TOCCOA
Jeffrey Stepakoff
FOR ELIZABETH
In the fall of 2003, I made a trip to Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, to research a TV pilot about a multigenerational fireworks family. Known as the Fireworks Capital of America, Lawrence County is still home to some of the world’s biggest pyrotechnics companies. These are family-owned businesses that brought their art and craft with them from Italy a century ago.
Most memorably, I had dinner in a local restaurant with George Zambelli, founder of the great Zambelli Fireworks Internationale, his wife, Connie, and his daughters. What I didn’t know at the time was that George was dying. When I read about his passing a few weeks later, I understood why he had been so candid and emotional during my interview with him at dinner. And why Connie cried through much of it.
He talked a great deal about the magic of his work and the “engraving effect” of fireworks. As I listened to him speak with great passion and zest (even as sick as he evidently was) and watched the way he looked at his wife of sixty years, it was clear to me that Connie was the inspiration for George’s magic. This was the only woman George Zambelli ever loved, and his work, I believe, whether for presidents, popes, or Pittsburghers, was a constant tribute to her.
The pilot did not go into production, but I had stumbled onto a story that I couldn’t let go of. And the more I continued following it, the more I realized that it was in fact much deeper than I originally suspected.
What follows is inspired by my original research in Lawrence County, especially in the town of New Castle, as well as extensive interviews conducted a few years later in and around Toccoa, Georgia. What could not be learned, what voids remained in the narrative, I filled with what I know to be true from my own heart.
—Jeffrey Stepakoff
Fall 2009
There are no ordinary lives.
—Ken Burns
A moment in the sky, forever in the heart.
—Ernesto Russo
Toccoa, Georgia, 2007
The two boys rode their mountain bikes along the soft uncovered lake bed between the Bartam’s Field subdivision and the old Holly Hills property.
In 1955, the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Savannah River, creating Lake Hartwell and flooding nearly fifty-six thousand acres, pretty much everything for miles along the Georgia–South Carolina border. There were stories of people refusing to give up their land—some reportedly met work crews with shotguns—but in the end, the government won out. The low-lying pine forests were cut down and any outbuildings in the floodplains hastily bulldozed. Where creeks once rambled through quiet woods to the northeast of Toccoa, gated golfing communities now rimmed the wide fingers of the massive artificial reservoir.
This history was lost on the two boys. To them the lake was simply a backyard, a place for waterskiing and motorboating, a selling point for the area’s multitudinous new developments spiraling out from the waterfront. But the record drought that had plagued Georgia since mid-2006 now made water sports, and even swimming in some areas, potentially hazardous. Rotting sorrel stumps jutted through the water. Mud-covered rocks lay exposed.
So on this day, because playing in the water was not an option, the two ten-year-olds rode their bikes along the dirt of the lake bed that had been submerged just a few months ago. It was sludgy and uneven, and though their knobby tires were designed for such things, riding was difficult. The muddy moonscape was peppered with granite and decayed roots and the occasional beer can oxidized through with rust.
As they were navigating and trying to maintain enough speed to stay upright, something caught their eyes. A glint of metal. A shiny sparkle off glass.
They fishtailed their bikes to a stop. Both looking intently, they saw sunlight reflecting off something wedged under a stack of large, smooth river stones. The low waterline lapped at the stones, the sort the boys had seen imbedded in chimneys in multimillion-dollar faux-rustic cabins.
They dismounted their bikes, dropped them, and headed toward the river-stone pile, following the glistening light that shone off something that looked very much out of place here. It was something that no one had seen for more than six decades—something that, if not for this record drought, may never have been seen again, as the cabin and its bulldozed river-stone chimney had been underwater since the summer of 1955.
Buckhead district of Atlanta, six months later
And I think we should get pregnant right away,” Drew Candler said, turning off Peachtree onto a tree-lined side street.
“We?” Colleen turned in the leather bucket passenger seat and playfully raised an eyebrow at him.
“Well, I’m a participant in this process, too.”
“So you’ll be carrying a bowling ball in
your
belly?”
“I’ll be rubbing your back.”
“Will you be changing diapers?”
“Every chance I get.”
“Midnight feedings?”
“Wouldn’t miss ’em.”
“And what happens when you’re on call?”
“Nannies.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. He always had the right answer to everything. “See, this is why my friends’ husbands hate you.”
“Because I’m the sensitive type.”
“You’re raising the bar too high for these poor guys.”
He feigned a worried expression. “Oh man, you didn’t tell anyone about the little love notes, did you?”
“Well…”
“I’m gonna get whacked,” he joked. “They’re gonna invite me out for a beer and beat me. I can see this coming.”
Drew drove up to the front gates of an elegant new housing development, punched a code into the call box, and drove in as the gates opened.
“Hey, I’ve told them about your affinity for lying around all Sunday in your boxers watching football and eating nachos, but I get no sympathy.”
“I can be more of a jerk. Really, I know I can.”
“I know, my dear. You can do anything you set your mind to. That’s one of the things I love about you. But I’m good with the football and the nachos.”
He broke into a broad smile and turned his eyes toward Colleen for a moment, taking her in as he had from the first day he saw her. She was so beautiful, he thought, as he always did. Even with her black hair pulled back in a casual ponytail away from her dark eyes as she had it today. How could anyone look at her and not think the same thing? Somehow this notion was reassuring to him.
They pulled up in front of an expansive new house, a little too big for its lot but stunning nonetheless. Where once a single ranch-style home sat on two wooded acres, there were now nine estate homes. Hundreds of containers of azaleas and dog-woods and Cherokee roses, ubiquitous in these kinds of North Atlanta communities, were lined up along the curb, ready to be planted in the smallish yards.
“What do you think?”
“Wow.” She just stared at the residence, at a loss to articulate any kind of detailed response.
“‘Wow’ is right. Come on.”
Drew hopped out, jogged over to Colleen’s side of the newly leased luxury sedan, and opened the door for her. With a boyish glee that belied his tall build, he grabbed her arm and marched her up the front walkway and through the open front door. They were hit with the intoxicating scent of fresh paint, new appliances, and sawdust.
He watched as she took in the house.
“Five bedrooms up. One below. And the master suite is off the main, around that way,” he said, pointing. “Oh, and just off the kitchen, over there, they call it a family studio.”
Colleen peered into a large room with washer-dryer hookups, a worktable, a message center desk with cell-phone docks, and three built-in child-size lockers with coat hangers and space for boots and books.
“There’s room for more than three lockers. You know, just in case one ever wanted to expand.” Drew couldn’t be happier.
Colleen continued looking around at the house for a long time. It was as though Drew had extrapolated everything she had ever mentioned in passing about the future and what he had seen on the dog-eared pages of the house and style magazines she’d recently been perusing and what he heard discussed at dinner parties and golf outings and silent auction cocktail events by those who had their names on wings of buildings vital to the community, and then put it all together and come up with this house. Her friends would most likely describe the house in the same terms they talked about Drew. It was an ideal house.
However, to stand awake in the middle of such a thing, to hear the wraithlike echoes of children to be born and days to be lived and nights to be pondered among these planked halls, was to stand in the future, to see it and know it plainly. No more hazy morning daydreams about what life might be. No more giddy talk over lattes or margaritas. This was it.
It was a gorgeously plated meal that was ordered for her, one she was reluctant to disturb with immutable matters rendered by the fork, but even more loath to send back untouched. What Drew happily took for overwhelming excitement was in fact apprehension over the sudden reality set before her.
She hadn’t known him for very long, but what she did know seemed very right. What ever doubts or questions she might have had about the future and what she wanted out of it were always allayed by his certainty. He was always so sure about everything, about a life that would be very much like that of the most senior partners in his practice, and about how she fit seamlessly into that. Along with his other attributes, Drew possessed a kind of confidence that could sweep a girl off her feet. But there was something about standing here in this house that made her realize how quickly the future was happening, and just how little thought, of her own, she’d really given it.
His BlackBerry rang and involuntarily he snapped it off his belt and answered it. “Yes…. How many centimeters?…Yes, that’s fine, page the anesthesiologist. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.” He hung up and snapped the phone back on its belt cradle.
“I have to get to Northside. I’ll drop you on the way.”
“You go ahead. I’ll call the office and have someone pick me up. I want to stay here for a little while.”
“You know, it might be time to give them your notice.”
“We’ll talk about that.”
“What ever you want. I just hate seeing you working at a job you don’t need or love.”
He gave her a kiss.
“When I saw this place and thought about us here,” he said, “I felt like all the pieces were just snapping into place. So what do you think?”
“What do I think?”
“About the house! Do you like it?”
“It’s amazing.”
“But?”
“No but.”
“Come on, Colleen. This is your fiancé you’re talking to. What’s wrong with the house?”
“Honestly…,” she said, looking around, searching for words to describe her complicated feelings. She settled on simple truth. “Absolutely nothing. It’s perfect. It’s a perfect house.”
“Good. Because I put an offer in last night.” He gave her a broad smile and then walked out, his footsteps echoing as she stood alone in the enormous empty house.
Watching him hurry down the walkway and hop in his new car, Colleen wondered what was wrong with her. She never had a problem committing to things. She made plans weeks in advance, bought multiyear magazine subscriptions, she was someone who turned in term papers
early
. She knew how to make choices and act on them. Then again, this house, she wasn’t really being asked to make much of a choice about it.
But how much did that matter?
Lifting her head, she rotated it again. Yes, it was like looking at a model home picked out for a magazine shoot. So what was the problem? What else was there beyond perfect? What was there to think about?