Wildcat Fireflies (17 page)

The conversation was pleasant but not heady, until Rumi asked all of us to share a little more about ourselves.

Gus began, his full white mustache that curled at the ends bracketing his mouth. “I’m a retired history professor from Butler University. These days, I teach occasional classes. But mostly I’m a reenactor.” He pushed his wire-framed glasses up his nose with every other word.

“I’m sorry?” Tens asked my question, while everyone else nodded.

“I dress up and reenact battles from Indiana’s past. Jolly times. Uniforms, guns, cannons. Good fun.” He rolled up his sleeves, exposing sinewy, freckled forearms.

“Like the Civil War guys?” I asked.

He beamed, flashing cigarette-stained teeth. “Exactly, only around here there are more options than blue versus gray.”

Faye chuckled and shook her electric-red chin-length bob. “If you consider sleeping on the ground and eating hardtack fun … maybe.” Her manicure was an unmarred coral and she wore multiple rings on each finger. Her olive complexion hinted at Greek or Italian roots, but her accent was one I was coming to associate with Hoosiers.

“Ah, you’re just jealous of our state-of-the-art washing facilities,” Gus teased her.

She spoke directly to Tens and me, gesticulating wildly. “They’re making them use Porta-Potties for the environment these days, or they’d still be peeing behind trees. I’m so happy I’m not a pioneer woman with all those layers of skirts. Can you imagine trying to defecate with dignity back then?”

I snorted cider bubbles up my nose. Not what I had expected to hear from that wrinkled, good-natured mouth. I shook my head because she seemed to be waiting for my answer.

The conversation lulled while we ate. But at Rumi’s urging, the introductions continued: “It’s terribly hard to
follow that mental image, but I write historical Indiana fiction, mostly about teenagers.” Sidika’s white hair reminded me of dandelion fluff. Her eyes sparkled with humor and her pastel pink chamois shirt was unbuttoned at the neck, revealing a chain with a gold wedding band hanging close to her heart.

“Fabulous novels,” Rumi boomed.

“You’re too kind.” She blushed with an honest humility and patted his hand.

Nelli, the youngest adult, picked up the conversation. “I’m Gus’s niece, and I worked for Rumi when I was in high school.” She laughed. “I tried to keep him stocked in pens—”

“Now, now!” Rumi interrupted. “Don’t be telling all my faults.”

Nelli’s dimple flashed. “I used to carry around a little dictionary to sort out his vocabulary, but while I was trying to find one word he’d throw out the next one and I’d get all confused.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “Don’t bother, just go with the flow and if you don’t understand a word ask him for a synonym until he says a word you know.”

Rumi’s laughter erupted. “That’s the impertinence that got you fired.”

“I went to college.”

“Same difference!” he called.

Gus turned his full attention to Tens. “Tell us about your name. Is Tens short for something?”

Tens wiped his mouth with his napkin and set down his fork. “Hmm, yeah, it’s, um … Tenskawtawa.”

Gus’s face lit up, as did Sidika’s. “Oh. For Tecumseh’s brother?”

“Who?” Tens asked, his eyes widening in question.

“Are you from around here?” Sidika clucked.

“No, I grew up mostly in Seattle.” His expression said that wasn’t quite the whole story.

“Your parents, then, must be from the area?” Gus asked.

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Strange. Do you have Native American ancestors?”

This question helped Tens relax a minute amount. He hated being in the spotlight, but I couldn’t rescue him because I didn’t know the answers to give. Frankly, I was just as curious as everyone else about what he might say.

Tens nodded. “My mother’s family. My grandfather was Cherokee and my grandmother was Shawnee. My grandmother named me, I think.… ”

Gus nodded his agreement. “That’s it, then. You’ll see a lot of Tecumseh’s name around here. On schools and roads and monuments. The brothers formed a town called Prophetstown. Up until the interests of Tecumseh’s people clashed with those of the fledgling American government—this wasn’t a good thing. His brother, Tenskawtawa, is much less understood and documented.”

“Figures,” Tens muttered.

“What else?” I asked, to keep the conversation heading in this direction.

“His name came to be synonymous with ‘the Prophet,’ and he had quite the band of followers. He was steadfast
in his beliefs, not given to compromise, didn’t see the need to change for the sake of his people. He was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. Some might say he was not quite right in the head. Others suggest he had religious visions. But that tends to be what historians conclude when they’re writing from the opposite point of view of their subject.”

The entire table nodded. “True. Much easier to say someone is crazy, then it is to try to understand their perspective,” Sidika concurred.

“And if I may ask your last name, child?” Gus gesticulated with his fork.

“Valdes.”

“With an accent mark, or no?”

Why does that matter?

“No,” Tens answered.

“Cuban?”

“I think so. Maybe. It’s murky. My father’s parents came from there. I don’t know much.”

I needed to bring Tens to dinner parties more often. Who knew he’d open up when questioned by other people? Why didn’t he answer my questions this easily?

“Do you know the history of your surname, then?”

“No. Is there one?”

“Of course. All names have history. That’s what gives us scholars something to study.” Gus smiled.

There was a collective chuckle and Rumi proposed a toast to scholarship and study. “You don’t grow old when your mind is busy,” he added.

“Pshaw. My knees and knuckles grandly disagree with you!” Faye said with a smile. “Now, tell us more about this Valdés history, Gus.”

He swallowed and wiped his spotless mouth precisely with his napkin before saying, “Infants at a particular orphanage were placed in a turnstile door and a bell was rung. The nuns would come out to retrieve the baby; they’d take care of him and educate him until he reached adulthood. It was founded by Bishop Valdés of Cuba. Male children were taken in on the condition that boys who were raised at Casa de Beneficencia be given his surname, but without the accent on the
e.
”

“Why not?” I asked.

“That way, his biological relative who kept the accent would remain recognizable. They did this until the nineteen fifties, when they started picking surnames randomly from the telephone directory. Much less romantic.”

“So perhaps your paternal grandfather was an orphan?” Sidika asked.

Tens shrugged. “It’s possible, I guess.”

I knew he wasn’t trying to be evasive.

“And Meridian, where are you from originally?” Faye seemed to deliberately direct conversation away from Tens’s obvious discomfort.

“Portland.”

“And are you still in school?”

“No, I’m taking some time off.”

Rumi turned the conversation to the town’s politics and public education. Then a heated discussion erupted about the war, the attorney general’s new investigative
branch into child and elder care, and an even hotter dissection of global warming legislation.

I enjoyed listening. I admired passionate people with strong opinions. They made life more interesting. I found the more I let myself be myself, the stronger I felt about almost every subject. I didn’t know if that was being a Fenestra and getting pieces from other people, or if that was me alone claiming my own skin. What my father might have referred to as growing up. I wasn’t sure I knew how my father or my mother felt about any of these issues. They didn’t just ignore my Fenestra fallouts, they kept our interactions as shallow as possible. Fear made people do the unthinkable.

Rumi asked Nelli about her current caseload. She was slammed with reports of missing children lost in the system. Her job was more puzzle and private investigator than social worker at the moment. I started to eavesdrop, but didn’t catch much before Faye turned to me and asked, “Will you be going to the Feast of the Fireflies along the Wabash?”

Tens and I shared a questioning glance. “What is that?”

The other conversations died away as everyone gave their attention to our ignorance. I think we were the entertainment for the evening in the way visitors allow residents to be tourists for an hour, or a week.

“It’s a grand celebration that commemorates the French and Native American traders who met together annually at Fort Ouiatenon in the mid–seventeen hundreds.”

“There’s more to it than that.” Rumi refilled the adults’
glasses with wine and ours with sparkling cider. “Miss Sidika, tell us the story?”

“Oh, well—”

“Please. A favor to me. Our new arrivals should know the histories we celebrate in these parts.” Rumi winked at me.

She settled back in her chair, contemplated where to begin, and said, “Okay then, the lore says that a French settler child got lost in the woods along the Wabash River. It was late winter, around this time of year, and unusually snowy, quite cold.”

Gus interrupted. “So cold, the Wabash itself froze over solid.”

Sidika nodded and continued. “The animals all went to earth or fled. Food was not plentiful in the best of winters, but in this one, food was scarcest. Bark was boiled for teas; people even started to make mud griddle cakes, simply to put weight in their bellies.

“Now, the division of labor was rather simple in those days. Gender roles were clear when possible, but not always. The hard life on the frontier made it so everyone, all ages, carried a huge burden for survival. The children checked the traps for small animals like muskrats and beavers, while the men went out after bigger game like deer, bear, or wild turkey. These kids—who we’d consider young, probably between ages seven and ten, maybe younger—bundled up in furs and set out as usual. Hungry, cold, but determined to bring home some tiny morsel of food for their families.”

“The ladies?” Faye asked.

“Stayed behind tending the youngest, but also very much in charge of security at the fort. By that time there was nothing worth stealing, except lives.”

Sidika paused for a sip of wine, then picked up her story. “The men set off in the opposite direction from the kids, trying to follow deer tracks. Hours later, all the boys came home, save one. No one remembered seeing him and they’d stayed tightly together, so not one of them knew when he’d become lost.

“Now, this lost boy was the son of a lieutenant, the mayor of sorts for the fort. He was the son of an important man, a man who understood and respected the ways of the indigenous peoples. The boy, and his father, had several friends among the local tribes. At first, the settlers believed that he must have set off to visit his friends.”

“A typical kid.” Rumi smiled his words and sighed.

Sidika shrugged. “He was in big trouble, but no one worried too much until the men came home. With them was a warrior. He was said to be brave and strong and connected to the spirit world. He came to find the men because fireflies had appeared to him. They’d told him that the boy was injured and had an important destiny. It was too early in the seasons for fireflies to appear, but this man didn’t make up stories, so the lieutenant believed him.”

“What was the boy’s destiny?” I asked, imagining all kinds of possibilities.

She smiled at me and waggled her eyebrows. “That’s part of the story. By this time, the winds had picked up,
and blown snow into chest-high drifts, which made footprints and tracks impossible to find. It was very dangerous for anyone to set out in the storm, but the boy’s father refused to abandon him. The rest of his family had perished the winter prior; his son was all he had left. So the father left the fort, knowing he might very well freeze to death before finding his son.

“The warrior knew the pain this father felt as his own; he asked the fireflies to guide them to the little boy.

“A swarm of fireflies appeared and lit up the sky. They created so much light and so much heat that the two men didn’t need their lanterns; instead they followed the glow of the insects, along the banks of the Wabash. They hiked over downed trees and through thickets of brambles. The father thought they were going too far—what little boy could walk that far in chest-high snow and survive? But giving up was not an option. He kept plowing on, taking turns with his friend to break the path, trying to find his child.”

I pictured Tens and me, searching for Celia, the little girl lost in the woods behind Auntie’s home in Colorado. Celia had been lured into those woods and tricked into stepping into a brutal foot trap. The trap mangled her leg. By the time we found her she was dying from loss of blood and hypothermia. She tried to use me to pass into the afterlife, but we found out afterward that Perimo had sucked her through to hell—which was why she hadn’t killed me in her attempt. I will never see Dora the Explorer without also seeing Celia’s twisted, shredded leg. I knew
what plowing through the snow hoping to find a child alive felt like. I knew what finding a child critically ill and dying felt like too. Perimo had used my grief against me in the caves. Tens and I shared a brief frown—he’d picked up on my feelings.

Sidika continued. “In the distance, the sun rose. The father began to lose all hope. For what little boy could survive all day, and all night, out there alone? The man broke down and wept. The warrior pulled him to his feet and told him that the sun didn’t rise in that direction—the sun rose behind them, so whatever was glowing up ahead was not the sun. It was still night.

“The snow around them began to disappear, melting in patches. The closer they drew to the light, the less snow there was, and the more bare earth was visible. At the brightest point, where the fireflies numbered thousands their light was constant and not a pulse, fresh shoots of wild onion and greens broke the earth like on a June afternoon. Berries, already ripe, hung heavy on limbs of vines and honeycombs dripped in the hollows of trees. Persimmon and black walnut trees bent under their edible burdens. Birds sang in the trees and fat rabbits hopped under the men’s feet. They heard water rushing close by; unsure what they heard, it took them a moment to realize they’d forgotten the sound of the Wabash River at its springtime peak.