Fireworks Over Toccoa (2 page)

Toccoa, a few days later

What could you say to a young woman who thought she was in love when you thought she might be making the biggest mistake of her life? Lily chewed on this as she waited for her granddaughter.

Lily sat in a comfortable chair on her wraparound porch, looked out at the Blue Ridge foothills, and drank her morning Coke. It was in the traditional curved glass bottle, upon which the tiny words
HECHO EN MEXICO
were affixed. Every month since July of 1988, when the Georgia bottlers started using corn syrup, Lily had driven to a small Hispanic-owned shop in Gainesville and bought her stash of Mexican-bottled Coca-Cola, which was still made with cane sugar.

Lily liked living alone. She missed her husband, of course. But since his passing four years ago, an odd kind of restfulness had made its way into her days. She often told herself that this was simply the opportunity provided by more time on her hands. But deep down, she knew it was something more. It was as though the seams of her life had been let out just a bit.

Eighty-two years old, living alone in her big house, Lily was lonely at times. But this was a feeling, an exquisite bittersweet-ness, that she didn’t entirely mind. Simply put, Lily was at peace.

Her residence, a white Queen Anne–style classical revival, was built in 1901 on a hill just north of town. It was initially used as a “summer house” for well-to-do boarders escaping the heat in Atlanta. In July, during the day, they would sit out on this sprawling porch in high-backed white rocking chairs, sipping sweet peach tea and enjoying the cool Appalachian breezes. And at night they would drink gin and tonic and marvel at the wonder of a billion stars over Toccoa. Since then, everything had changed, and not much had changed. The world was such a different place, but there were the same stars, the same kinds of yearnings beneath them.

Lily watched as a large car pulled up the hill and parked in front of her house. Stretching her legs after the hour-and-a-half drive up from the city, Colleen got out of the shiny new sedan, which Lily thought was way too big and stuffy for her granddaughter. But these kinds of vehicles were apparently one of the enviable perks of working in sales for a huge pharmaceutical company.

“Grandma, the kudzu is nearly up to your front porch!” Colleen said as she bounded up the walkway in front of the house.

“It’s fine. I just trimmed it back this week.” The broad-leafed vine made its way out of the woods behind the house but was cut before it could invade the lawn.

“Why don’t you just have the gardeners get rid of it once and for all?” Colleen scooped up the newspaper resting on one of the stone steps leading to the porch. “You’ll wake up one morning and you won’t be able to get out your front door.”

“You leave my kudzu alone. We have an understanding.” Lily grabbed her granddaughter, hugged her quickly, and then held her back for examination.

“How’s life in the fast lane?” said Lily.

“Fast. In fact, I can’t stay too late. One of Drew’s partners bought a table at this silent auction black-tie thing at the Grand Hyatt tonight.”

Lily noticed that Colleen made very little effort to hide her lack of enthusiasm for the event. A million things rushed through Lily’s mind, but she just smiled.

“You ready to see it?” Lily said.

Colleen took a deep breath and nodded.

Lily had been cooking earlier in the day and the inside of the house smelled of something wonderful, risotto with summer vegetables, Colleen guessed. Lily was a famously good cook and Colleen always came here hungry, knowing she would be fed something simple but sublime.

Colleen loved the inside of this house as much as she loved the porches outside. In fact, with its massive quarter-sawn paneling, heavy oak pocket doors, lacquered walnut flooring, fine dentil molding, grandly carved staircase, and various fireplaces with their immense hardwood mantels, there was something about being surrounded by all this natural wood that made one feel right in the middle of nature, connected to it, even though it was all inside. They simply didn’t make houses like this anymore, and being here always transported Colleen from where she was in her life to a place where she could reflect on it. Along with the house, its connectedness to nature and history, her grandmother’s steadiness, and the small-town ease of Toccoa all contributed to make this a place of peace and perspective for Colleen.

Lily set the long rectangular box down on a knit rug in the center of the living room floor. Box cutter in hand, she slowly knelt beside it. Colleen just sat quietly, letting her grandmother tend to this long-awaited task. Colleen looked around the room, filled with memories of all the times over the years she had heard reference to the contents of this box rushing over her.

Along with framed photographs of a life well lived, the living room was filled with art. Colleen had been in this room so often since she was a little girl, but she never ceased being amazed by the fascinating pieces collected by Lily over the years. These were not the cold “fine art” paintings and objects that wealthy collectors mounted in their homes as evidence of business conquests and participation in the lineage of old money. Lily’s house was filled with what could best be described as folk art: vibrantly painted religious visions by Rev. Howard Finster, colorful wood-relief carvings by Eddie Owens Martin, strange and beautiful pottery by Lanier Meaders. These self-taught rural artisans whom Lily had met and befriended had been overlooked by the society matrons of high art until recently. Today some of the work was just as valuable as the Picassos that hung in Buckhead mansions, not that their financial value mattered much to Lily. Each piece was a cherished story to her, one that she was always ready to share.

Except for one piece. Perhaps the most magnificent of all. A mosaic made from broken and brightly colored pieces of glass depicting exploding blue fireworks on a starry sky. Colleen’s favorite, the piece hung prominently on the wall, but Lily had very little to say about it.

With the box-cutter blade on its lowest setting, protruding barely a quarter inch from its metal casing, Lily cut the heavy cardboard container open lengthwise. With the care and certainty of a surgeon opening a rib cage, Lily inserted her weathered fingers into the incision and broke the box open.

“It’s beautiful,” Colleen said.

Inside the box was a wedding gown, its satin bodice lifelike and full, bursting with acid-free tissue paper. Colleen knelt on the other side of the box and ran her hand down the side of the dress. She inspected the pale silk lace. Caressed several pearl beads. Then she pulled the dress out of the box, standing to reveal its full length, the soft fabric rising from the cardboard like mist over a creek at dawn.

For a long moment, Colleen just stood there, dress in hand hanging before her, feeling quite unsettled. For as stunning as the dress was, there was something ghostly, cadaverous, about it.

Sensing this, Lily said, “You’re not going to hurt my feelings if you don’t like it.”

“No, no, the dress is gorgeous. It’s just…suddenly all so real. I mean, I’m really doing this.”

“Yes, dear. You’re really doing this,” Lily said. “Unless you really don’t want to.”

“Of course I want to. I’m just a bit nervous about it all. That’s normal.”

Offered no rising inflection but a statement of fact to which retort was not welcome, Lily just looked long and hard at Colleen. There was something left unspoken between the two women—which both knew but neither needed to articulate.

“Drew is perfect, Grandma. Perfect.”

Perfect
. That could be the greatest flaw in the choice of a husband. Lily knew this quite well. For of course there was no such thing as perfection in marriage. Only a checklist of certain standards and attributes that, even when found in a man, are all rendered meaningless by the trials of a life together. No, joy came from somewhere that wasn’t on those premarital checklists. But this was not an easy thing to explain, particularly to someone who was not asking for an explanation.

“It’s your decision, dear. You can try it on. And we can get it altered for you. Or I can take it back to the dry cleaners, have it repacked, and put it back in the closet. What ever you want to do is fine, but it’s
your
decision, do you understand? About this, listen only to yourself.”

Allowing her granddaughter time to absorb this, Lily picked up the pieces of the cardboard box and headed for the kitchen, where the recycling bins and cases of empty Coke bottles were kept. On her way, she also picked up the newspaper that Colleen had brought in from the porch.

In the kitchen, Lily dropped the cardboard on top of a green bin near the back door. Then she dropped the newspaper on top of the pile as well. But before she turned, something caught her eye. She picked up the still-folded
Toccoa Record
and started reading. Without taking her eye off the paper, she opened it and placed it on the table.

Resting both hands on either side of the paper, she steadied herself. Slowly, she leaned over the paper, reading even more intently. An expression somewhere between disbelief and amazement began to sweep over her face. Her mouth fell open. As she finished the article, she looked up, off, as though she were someplace else, and as this information took hold, it set into her knees, which could no longer sustain her.

“Grandma?” Colleen walked into the kitchen just as Lily stumbled back and slumped into a chair, visibly transfixed by what she had read.

Concerned, Colleen went to the table, seeing the headline of the story in front of Lily: museum displays new finds.

“Grandma, what is it?” Colleen said.

Lily pointed to a picture in the paper. “This is mine.”

Capt. Carol Stokes was having a good day. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet and she’d had well over a dozen visitors to her little museum. Clearly, the local media efforts were paying off.

The Currahee Military Museum, as well as the office of its sponsor, the Stephens County Historical Society, was housed in an unused section of the sprawling Toccoa Train Depot. Built as the terminus for the tens of thousands of paratroopers who came to nearby Camp Toccoa for training during World War II, the depot was renovated at great expense by local area merchants a few years ago. The initial funds were not entirely difficult to garner. HBO had popularized the depot during the run of its
Band of Brothers
TV miniseries about the men of “Easy Company” who trained at Camp Toccoa. But since the show had aired several years ago and the population of World War II vets who regularly supported events and reunions at the museum continued to age, Captain Stokes thought a lot about the future. The key to both funding and public interest would be in continuing to expand the museum’s holdings and continuing to publicize them.

Captain Stokes was pleased to see Colleen and Lily as they entered the museum. A young woman and her grandmother were exactly the kinds of general public patrons Stokes was hoping to see more of at her museum. As Colleen and Lily went to one of the new exhibits, Stokes watched them. Near several permanent glass cases of military trinkets and historical memorabilia, five new pieces, all recently publicized in the local press, were on display together. These included a bullet-ridden parachute used on D-day, a complete uniform worn by a member of Easy Company during the Battle of the Bulge, never-before-seen photographs taken of training jumps made on Currahee Mountain, historically significant letters written home by members of the 101st Division during their push into Germany, and a formula for an Italian weapon, an explosive shell.

Stokes quietly approached as Lily read the small plaque next to the framed formula for the explosive, believed to be a mortar or artillery-fired shell used by the “Regio Esercito,” the Italian Royal Army, during World War II. It was handwritten in Italian on a six-inch-by-four-inch piece of yellowed paper. The plaque explained that the formula was discovered nearby and was believed to have been brought back from Europe, presumably by a local serviceman, around 1945. The explosive shell, the plaque explained, was called a “Stella di Lily” by the Italians, or “Lily’s Star.”

“Soldiers give nicknames to everything,” explained Captain Stokes as she walked over to Lily and Colleen. “Especially their weapons.”

“It’s wrong,” said Lily.

“Excuse me?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. This is not a weapon.”

“Well, we know from the watermark that the paper comes from 1940s Italy. The writing was carefully translated by an Italian professor at Clemson, and a retired U.S. Army Ordnance Corps officer was absolutely certain that it was the formula for an explosive device.” Stokes smiled politely. “The boys from the USAOC tend to know about these things. A mortar shell, in fact.”

“That is correct,” Lily said as she examined the writing closely. “But it was not designed for warfare. To the contrary.”

People were starting to gather, listening in on the conversation. Colleen just looked at Lily with increasing unease.

“With all due respect, ma’am, we’ve had several highly credentialed experts agree on what this is.”

“This really shouldn’t be on display.”

Stokes’ smile became openly patronizing as she attempted to hide her discomfort with the growing audience.

“Oh, I think there is very little danger of Italian-speaking terrorists coming to Toccoa to get an old bomb formula. Now perhaps you’d like to see some of our other new displays.”

Looking a little embarrassed, Colleen was starting to wonder if her grandmother had simply lost it. “Grandma, what is going on here?”

Undeterred, Lily considered Stokes, noting the officer’s name tag, and continued, “Have you figured out what magnalium is doing in a weapon, Captain Stokes?”

That shut Stokes up.
Magnalium? How does this old woman know about that?
Crossing her arms as though trying to keep control of the situation, Stokes stared at Lily, assessing her. But Lily just stared right back.

Finally, Stokes continued, “Why don’t you come with me, ma’am. And we can talk about this.”

“I think that is a very good idea,” Lily said.

“Grandma, please, what is going on?”

“Come along, dear.”

Colleen shrugged, following her grandmother and Stokes toward the back of the room.

“I have to confess, the magnalium did stump the officer from Ordnance,” said Stokes, ushering Lily and Colleen into chairs at a large wooden table.

“I am sure it did,” replied Lily as she took in the Historical Society office. The commodious room was cluttered with all manner of antique objects, some being readied for display, their stories to be made public; some headed for permanent storage, their accounts perhaps never known. The office looked out on the museum through big glass windows that also brought in natural light, illuminating particles of dust most likely from disparate artifacts mixing together in the rays.

“Do you think you might know something about this…?”

“Lily. Please call me Lily.”

“And I’m Colleen, her granddaughter.”

“Yes, I know something about this,” said Lily. “The formula is named for me. Lily’s Star. More to the point, it belongs to me. You see, I lost it.”

Stokes stared at her for quite a while, assessing and ultimately realizing that there very well could be some truth to this. “Lily, the formula was found in a container. Do you think you can tell me what kind?”

“I am sure I can. It would have been in a glass jar, the old Hoosier style they used to make in the Midwest.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Both Colleen and Stokes looked amazed. After a moment, Stokes rose, walked to a shelf behind her, and produced a large plastic Ziploc bag that contained an antique quart-sized ridged-glass canister jar with a tight-fitting rusted metal lid. She put it on the table in front of Lily. “Two boys found it near the lake and their families donated it to the museum.”

A rush of emotion, fueled by unearthed memories, swept over Lily’s face. Hands trembling perceptibly, she reached out for the canister with great care, as though it might dissolve to dust before her. Colleen had never seen her grandmother like this. Instinctively she reached out and touched Lily’s arm.

Lily spoke as her eyes washed over the jar. “Stewarts was the only coffee my father drank. When coffee was being rationed during the war, he had his Stewarts shipped down on the train from Chicago in burlap sacks, ground it, and stored it in these jars. Even when nearly all the coffee in the country, as well as the aluminum for the cans, was going overseas, he had his connections. That was my father, not even a world war could keep him from getting what he wanted.”

“Lily, can you tell me about the formula?”

Lily studied the old coffee canister as though it were a photo album filled with precious and irreplaceable snapshots. Finally, she looked up at Stokes. “If I can convince you that it belongs to me, will you return it?”

“I’m listening.”

Beneath them, the building shook as a train roared into the station, following the exact same tracks that had transported young men from all over the country to and from this small North Georgia town, during a time when the future for so many had never been more uncertain. It was scary and tumultuous. And exciting.