Fireflies in Connecticut

The old Bernard place was the biggest house in town, but only one person lived there, and it had been that way for as long as anyone could remember.

Each Friday, at six o’clock precisely, Reverend Moore would make the trip up there, to see Mrs Bernard and hear her confession. Reverend Moore was an Episcopalian minister, but the nearest Catholic church was almost forty miles away, and the priest there, a Father Langella, was half blind and practically immobile, so it made sense for Reverend Moore to step in and help out where he could. The arrangement had been happening for so long that Reverend Moore felt half-Catholic himself, though he never could abide the smell of incense.

The routine was always the same. At around 5.30pm he would make his rounds of the small church and churchyard, only to find things were much the same as they were any other week. Then he would check himself over in the mirror — Mrs Bernard was a stickler for appearances — before getting in his car, a rusted but still reliable Buick, and make the drive up to the house. The route was simple. A right out of the church parking lot; past the gas station where Hal would be finishing up for the evening; over the railroad line and up Main Street. He would invariably stop at the stoplights — the only set in town — and wonder briefly if he’d be late. Then the lights would change and he would carry on out of town, before taking a left up the Milford Road, all the way out of the valley until he reached the gates of the Bernard estate. You could tell the gates by the two stone lions that stood guard outside, tamed by time and the New England weather.

Pulling up outside the house, Mrs Bernard would already be stood in the doorway waiting to receive him.

“Good evening, Father.”

“Madame,” replied Reverend Moore in his customary greeting, smiling and touching his hat as she ushered him indoors. They would walk through to her sitting room, where they would sit in two salmon-pink armchairs on either side of an unlit fireplace, each drinking a small glass of sweet red wine.

This evening, Mrs Bernard had been quieter than usual. Reverend Moore knew from his years of roleplaying to listen more than he spoke, but the silences seemed longer tonight, the ticks of the hallway clock more conversation than punctuation. It was early spring, and the sky outside was already tinged with a watercolorist’s midnight blue. Reverend Moore shifted in his seat, trying not to spill his wine.

“You know,” Mrs Bernard said after a particularly long pause, “that I had two sons?”

Reverend Moore nodded. He knew her son Francis, a doctor, who lived in a three-storey townhouse in Boston and rarely came back home to visit his mother. And he knew there had been another son, one who hadn’t made it past childhood, but Mrs Bernard spoke of him so rarely that he couldn’t recall his name.

“Philip,” Mrs Bernard said, anticipating his difficulty. “No reason you’d know that. I don’t talk of him much. Most days I don’t even think of him, truth be told. It’s been so long since he died and I don’t like to dwell on the past. Even when you live as lonely a life as I do, I’ve never been one to dwell on things. I don’t find it becoming.”

Reverend Moore nodded again. “But lately, you’ve found yourself thinking of Philip?”

“No, no,” she said dismissively. “Only today. Today is the anniversary of his death. It’s been forty years today. The thought struck me just before you arrived.”

“I’m sorry. It must be very hard for you.”

“Must it? Forty years is a long time to deal with these things. I lost a husband in that time too. I’m quite used to being alone. Even prefer it, you might think.” She took a sip of wine. “I don’t, you understand.” She glanced at him, “Prefer it, that is. But I can understand why you would think that way. I’ve been alone so long that one might assume it was out of preference. But I have no particular preference. Things just worked out the way they did, and here we are.”

Mrs Bernard was seventy years old, pencil thin with spun-steel hair drawn up in a bun. She had rarely, in all the years Reverend Moore had been visiting with her, seemed upset. But he could see, now, in the yellow gaslight, that she seemed sad, in a way he had not noticed before, and he felt a pang of guilt spring through his body.

“A woman is meant to lose her husband, of course,” she went on. “Or at least, that seems to be the way of things. They exert themselves, doing whatever it is they do — their businesses, their interests — and pass on, and we remain behind. A child is different though. No mother is meant to lose a child. I’m sure it happened all the time in the past — one thinks of all the terrible things people endured in days gone by — but I don’t think it was ever meant to be how things happened. One isn’t built for it, you know.”

Revered Moore eased forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees. “I’ve known many bereaved families,” he said softly. “I know it can’t be easy.”

“Easy?” She smirked. “Easy. No. It wasn’t easy. It was scarlet fever, you know. Francis and Philip both had it. It came like a thief in the night. One morning they were both fine, rampaging through the hallways and scaring the animals in the barn, the next they were laid up in bed, barely able to stay awake. We thought it would take them both. But Francis was bigger, and stronger. He got better. Philip had always been sickly though. He was never the most robust child. Never even cried as a baby, like he was afraid he might wake up the whole world. He was too gentle, really. Too gentle.”

She stared into the unlit fireplace and fell back to silence. Revered Moore did not speak either. He tried to judge whether she wanted to hear reassuring words or be left in her grief, but once again she spoke before he could make up his mind.

“You needn’t worry. I’ve never stopped believing, Father. I understand there’s a plan to it all, even if we can’t fathom it, even if we can’t see what it all might mean. I’m happy to keep on believing with all the instinct of a blind old bug, burrowing in the dirt. That’s always been enough for me. But it wasn’t easy, you should know. There were times when it was very hard.” She finished the wine in her glass and signed, as if to signal that the matter was at an end. “Anyway,” continued. “You didn’t come up here to listen to my whinings. You came for my confession. I know you’re a busy man who doesn’t have time to spend on indulging a silly old woman’s whims, so let’s proceed so you can be on your way.”

Reverend Moore smiled at her bluntness, the easy rudeness that a decade of familiarity can bring. “Of course, Mrs Bernard,” he said. “Let’s begin. How long has it been since your last confession?”

***

The spring sky had dimmed to the inky blackness of a funeral suit by the time Reverend Moore left his appointment and made his way back into Bernard’s Crossing. There was no traffic now troubling the road over the Housatonic River, and as usual, Reverend Moore thought that the view must not be so different from when Mrs Bernard’s ancestor, a French fur-trapper, had settled in the valley all those years ago.

His second regular appointment of the evening was at Ferguson’s, on the corner of Milford and Main. Parking the Buick back by the darkened church, he walked the five minutes past the shuttered gas station, over the bridge, and up Main Street, to the convivial glow of the lighted bar.

After the snap of cold outside, the bar was warm, and full of the hum of chattering people. All the usuals were there — Dusty Zeigler in his fashionable grey fedora, Morten Anderson with his unlit cigar (legend had it that it was the same cigar he’d been quietly working on for the past twenty years), and old Greg Comelia, who ate three eggs every day — one soft, one hard, one raw — before running five miles along the river and back. Revered Moore settled into his normal stool along the bar, ordered his whiskey from Patrick, and took a moment to enjoy the cocoon of noise and light and heat.

After a few minutes of silent reveries, he became aware of a presence at the stool next to him. Gus Newsom, a young man who Reverend Moore remembered from Sunday school lessons, was hunched over the bar, his stubby fingers worrying the label of a bottle of beer. Realising he was being watched, he turned with a start, finding his politeness at the sight of the old man’s dog collar.

“Father,” he said quickly, glancing back at this bottle, focusing on tearing the label off in a single piece.

“Gus,” Reverend Moore replied, nodding slightly and raising his glass. “Don’t usually see you in here on a Friday. I wasn’t sure you still lived in town. I haven’t seen you at church in a while,” he added with a half-smile, as if to show he meant nothing by it.

The young man didn’t notice the smile. “Oh I’m sorry, Father. I haven’t been around, otherwise I’d be there regular. I’ve been down in Newtown. I’m still there, really. I just came back to see mother. I should be there now, but she wasn’t feeling so well so went to bed early, so I thought I’d come out for a drink.”

“Well, it’s good to see you,” Reverend Moore replied. “I trust everything is well,” he said, nodding at the bottle, naked now, surrounded by a shredded pile of damp confetti.

Gus followed his eyes. “Oh, I’ve been fine,” he said, his voice wavering in a way familiar to a man like Reverend Moore. “Working hard, keeping busy. You know how it is.”

The two men fell into a companionable silence, washed over by the general fuss and buzz of the Friday bar. In the background, Zeigler let out a yell at the peak of another story, and his friends fell about in laughter.

“Father,” Gus said after a few minutes, in a questioning tone that Reverend Moore also knew well. “Would you mind if I asked you something?”

“Not at all, son. What else am I here for?”

“It’s only-” Gus stopped short and resettled himself on his seat. “It’s just… I”ve been seeing this girl, you know? In Newtown. She worked as a secretary in the office before she got another position, but I kept seeing her around, and eventually I asked her out on a date, and we’d seen each other a few times. And I treated her right, I promise, you know my mother, sir, you know I wouldn’t act in any other way. And I liked her and I thought things were going great, and I was almost thinking that maybe she might be the kind of girl I might think to propose to, when all of a sudden, she cut me off. Just told me, flat out, she didn’t want to see me any more. I thought that she might be my wife one day, and now I can’t even speak with her. It shook me. I don’t know what to do.”

Reverend Moore sipped his drink slowly before speaking. “Do you know why she didn’t want to see you again?”

Gus shook his head, but his eyes seemed certain. “I think she met another man, Father. I don’t like to think ill of anyone, but I really do. To go from being so nice and friendly to me, to suddenly acting all cold like that? What else could it be?”

The minister shuffled on his stool and leaned in to Gus. “Now son, I know it hurts to feel like that, but you can’t take it personally. You don’t know what might have happened in her life for her to change attitude. You’re a young man. You have a lot going for you. You’re upset, but you’ll move on. This is just a bump in your road.”

“I lost my job too, you know.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Just up and fired me, no cause, no nothing. Cut backs, they said. Don’t take it personal, they said. Hard not to, though.” Gus looked straight ahead now, at the shelf of liquor behind the bar, and all the way through it. Reverend Moore realised that the almost empty beer bottle in his hands was not his first.

“The way I see it,” Gus continued, “is that at some point, you have to take it personal. When bad things keep happening to you, it might be that they happen because it’s you. Like you deserve it somehow.”

“I’m not sure about that, Gus. Any of us can have a run of bad luck.”

Gus turned to him, his eyes both fixed and glassy. “It’s easy for you, Father. You have your faith. But a man like me… Sometimes I don’t feel like anything but a bug being whacked with a newspaper. Like they should scrape me off a window.”

Reverend Moore said nothing, but his eyes and mouth were sympathetic. Another round of laughter sprang from Zeigler and the boys, and Gus took it as his cue to stand up. Throwing money on the bar, he nodded at the older man, and smiled. “Sorry for burdening you, Father. I’ll be alright, I suppose.” He collected his hat and moved towards the door, raising a hand in a parting gesture. Once outside, the fogged-up windows made him just a silhouette in the street lights, another dark figure walking away in the night.

It was time for Reverend Moore to go, too. The bed in the small wooden house next to his church was calling him. After wishing Patrick behind the bar goodnight, he found himself another figure in the night, walking slowly along Main Street, past the grocers and the bakers, past the shuttered gleam of Morrison’s hardware store, and out onto the bridge, where a cool breeze ruffled the silver of his hair.

Beneath him, the slow shallow bend of the Housatonic drifted warily by, creeping through the valley between Waterbury and Danbury, as shy of people as a skittish bird. Beyond, the wooded, untouched hills sloped up, out of the town, a crown of dark trees around the little hollow of light of which he felt at the very centre. Around the river bank, and slowly rising, he could see the season’s first fireflies, patiently pulsing with their honeyed glow, swaying in disparate constellations across the water and up to the bridge, in front of him, around him, scorching into the sky, leaping across the hills and bounding away into the great night of America. As he followed them, he caught the light of the distant Barnard place, a single lamp in a single window, burning, fixed, a firefly pinned and pinioned to a black velvet cloth. He thought of Mrs Barnard and her sons, of Greg and his woes, of all of his flock, their hopes and fears, and of himself. And as the lights of the fireflies danced in the darkness around him, he felt a strange kind of peace, a peace which stayed with him for a very long time.