The Firefly Catcher
A World War II love story
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Below is “The Firefly Catcher”, a short story set at the tail end of World War II. “The Firefly Catcher” is based on a true story, although names of people and places have been changed and some details have been fictionalized. At the bottom of this post, you can read more about the true story behind this little tale.
When she was eight, Alice Henderson briefly held the world record for filling her mouth with marbles. She swallowed one of them and for a moment thought she would choke, but the smile on the face of the World Record representative was worth every drool-covered little glass sphere.
“At least you’re finally putting that big mouth to good use,” her father said with a smirk.
Her glory had lasted only a week before a ten-year-old boy in Sweden bested her, but what a glorious week. Three different newspapers ran stories about her, with photos and everything. Miss Sullivan, her first-grade teacher from last year, stopped her in the supermarket with My, if it isn’t the woman of the hour! And her father carried the newspapers around in his pocket, showing them to everyone, from his boss to the bank teller.
But when the momentous week had passed, and she went from Alice Henderson, world-record-holder, to loud-mouth-Alice-Henderson-who-once-fit-sixty-seven-marbles-in-her-mouth, Alice slunk away one evening to escape the disappointment of her fading stardom. Just before dusk, she and her little sister crept off toward the creek, where, if the rumors were true, there were fireflies.
Alice held out her hand, letting the tall grass and delicate blue flax brush her fingertips. “I see some! They’re coming out already, Billie! Hurry up, will ya?”
Billie barreled along behind Alice, her short, chubby legs struggling through the underbrush. “Slow down,” she wailed.
Beside the creek, trees sprouted up, disrupting the flat, summer-dry meadow. The early evening shadows darkened beneath the branches, and a legion of lazy, winking lights brightened the deepening gloam. Alice smiled her wide grin in anticipation, the breeze whistling past her newly-missing baby teeth.
Then she skidded to a stop.
A group of boys was already there. By her creek. Darting about in the shadows, with a net and a jar, catching her fireflies. A surge of anger bubbled up in her, igniting like a match upon the injustice of her short-lived fame.
“Liss?” came Billie’s timid voice behind her.
Alice stomped up to the three boys, hands on her hips. “Excuse me,” she hollered. “Whatchy’all think you’re doing hogging this spot? This creek’s public property.”
One of the boys, who she vaguely recognized as one of those troublemaking almost-fourth graders, stopped, the net clutched in his hand. He cocked his head at her, the crescent-shaped scar on his eyebrow giving his face a lopsided look, like Alice’s doll Charlotte that was missing one button-eye. “And?” he said.
“You’re taking all the fireflies! Did you ever think that maybe other people wanted some too, huh? You’re not leaving any fireflies for the rest of us!”
A warm little glow appeared beside the boy’s ear, blinking into existence in the darkness. The boy’s eyes flickered toward it for a moment. Then he lifted his hand and gently pinched the insect between his thumb and forefinger just as the light winked out again.
With a crooked smirk, he took a step toward Alice, holding out the captive firefly. “Here you go.”
Alice glowered at him. When he didn’t retract the offered creature, she warily produced the mason jar that she’d swiped from the pantry. The crescent-scarred boy dropped the firefly into the jar, and Alice covered the mouth with cheesecloth.
Her eyes snapped back up to the boy.
He grinned, his face lit with a joke that she didn’t get. “You’re welcome.”
Alice narrowed her eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Lee Morton. You’re the marble girl, right? We go to the same school, you know.” He straightened his shoulders with an older-kid confidence that rankled Alice. “I’m in fourth grade.”
That liar. He wouldn’t be a fourth grader until school started up again in two weeks. Alice sniffed and turned her back. “Well, I don’t like you, Lee Morton.”
“There’s a train full of soldiers coming in right now.”
“What?” Alice startled out of her reverie. She had started off contemplating the best phrasing for the scathing resignation letter that someday soon she would give to Mr. Bryant, editor of The Port Helen Chronicle, but her mind had wandered, as it was wont to do.
Cassie pointed out the office window to the street below, where a train was pulling into Port Helen’s only station.
Even in a town as small as Port Helen, several train cars full of their young men had returned from the Pacific in recent weeks, their families waving signs and ribbons. Alice watched out the window as the cars unloaded, making note of each familiar face.
Boys she’d known her whole life, gone to school with, gone to church with, gone to dances with, some of whom she’d even kissed – all of them looked older now, their cheekbones sharper and their eye sockets deeper and their baby fat gone. There was nothing soft about them now.
There was one face she hadn’t seen yet, in all the train loads that had arrived.
But she wasn’t looking for him. She wasn’t.
Alice turned her head back to her typewriter.
Cassie squinted out the window. “Is that Lee Morton? My older sister had a huge crush on him in high school.”
Alice’s chair screeched against the floor as she darted to the window.
Her eyes took only a moment to scan the faces below. There was Lee Morton, standing in the Port Helen train station in his crisp uniform. He was leaner than last she’d seen him, his hair shorter, but he was intact.
Without a word to Cassie, Alice started for the office door. Her shoes tap-tapped down the stairwell, echoing against the walls.
Why shouldn’t she go say hello? She’d do that for any old high school classmate, wouldn’t she? So they’d gone to one uncomfortable dance together four years ago; so they’d quarreled about she didn’t even remember what. What did that matter in the great scheme of things? Water under the bridge. Surely she could welcome him home. They’d been school fellows, after all.
She pushed through the door onto the street, golden in the late summer sunlight, and stopped.
Lee Morton. She despised him; it was a defining facet of her personality. His knowing, crooked grin, the look in his eyes that seemed to say, I see you, Alice Henderson. You don’t fool me.
What was she doing, running out onto the street for Lee Morton?
It was at that moment that she felt his eyes on her.
Alice looked across the street, at the smiling, red-eyed families flocking around their returning sons, and locked eyes with Lee Morton. He grinned. The same crooked, infuriating grin.
I see you, Alice Henderson.
He raised his hand in a mock salute and winked at her.
Alice’s cheeks flushed, and an angry pit brewed in her stomach.
With a huff, she turned her back on him and strode back into The Port Helen Chronicle office building.
“You look nice, Liss.” Billie leaned against Alice’s bedroom door. “Who’s your date?”
“George Oswald. Michele Jones is coming too, but I don’t know who her date is.” Alice frowned at her hair in the mirror. She had long since despaired of ever having the sleek, tame, gently waving hair that every other girl seemed to have, but her curls were especially wild tonight. Little auburn corkscrews popping out from her scalp, making her head appear twice as large as it should and her body even smaller than it was.
Billie snorted. “George and Michele? You’re in for a fun night.”
Alice tried to scowl at her sister, but her face cracked into the hint of a smile. Billie wasn’t exactly wrong.
“I’ll bet you five dollars she gets George to pay more attention to her than he does to you.”
A car horn beeped outside. Alice stood and pulled on her sweater. “I’m not taking that bet.”
“I wouldn’t go out with a guy who honked at me,” Billie said.
“It’s been four years with one boy for every ten girls. I’ve lowered my standards.”
Alice bounced down the stairs, said a hasty goodbye to her parents, and burst out into the warm summer evening.
The sun still lingered above the mountaintops, casting a deep glow on the world, the chirps of crickets and the heady smell of night already sneaking their way into Port Helen.
Alice jogged to the street, where George’s old Ford was parked, and hopped inside. In the driver’s seat was George, with his slick hair and his petulant mouth.
“See, I told you I didn’t have to go to the door. She came,” George said over his shoulder.
“Hey, Alice,” came Michele’s simper from the backseat.
George gestured toward the backseat as the car rumbled to life. “Al, you remember Lee Morton, right?”
Alice turned around, her stomach suddenly hollow. There in the backseat, with Michele cozied up next to him, was Lee Morton and his crooked grin.
“We saw each other the other day,” Lee said with a smirk. “At the train station.”
Alice gave a curt nod and faced forward again.
George’s noisy engine sputtered as he pulled into the road, heading for Port Helen’s modest Main Street.
“Where are we going?” Alice said.
George shrugged. “What’s the place called again?”
“Donaghue’s Diner and Dance Hall,” Lee said. “Just off Main and Hyacinth.”
“Sounds cozy.” Michele fixed her hair in the rearview mirror, where she and Alice had an awkward moment of eye contact before Alice looked away.
“There’s a jazz band playing there tonight,” Lee said.
“Just remember,” George said with a snort, “if tonight is a bust, the place was all Lee’s idea.”
“I’m gonna go out for a smoke.” George, who had not once invited Alice to dance despite her numerous pointed glances at the crowded floor, hooked his thumb toward the door. “Care to join me?”
Alice wrinkled her nose and shook her head.
“I’ll take one,” Michele said. “That trumpet’s so loud you can’t hardly hear the singer anyway.” She flounced after George, tugging at her flimsy, clinging summer dress.
Alice could never get away with that. If she ever tried to wear that dress, she would spill out of it and turn heads in exactly the way her mother told her not to. Lithe, leggy girls like Michele floated around in thin cotton dresses without earning withering stares from their mothers’ friends. But Alice was too short, too curvy, too much.
The jagged, staccato wail of a trumpet melded into a tune that burst like a growing seed in Alice’s memory. The jazz singer, his voice pleasant but too smooth to compete with the trumpet, crooned the opening line.
Gonna take a sentimental journey
Alice glanced at the front door of the diner as it swung shut behind George and Michele. In view of the wide windows they stood on the pavement, and tendrils of cigarette smoke curled up between them, wispy in the last bruised light of the summer evening.
“Guess it’s just us.”
Alice started. Lee was standing in front of her, holding out his hand.
“It’s a nice song,” Lee said. “Don’t wanna waste it.”
He smiled that same crooked, cocky smile, so sure she’d say yes. But Lee Morton didn’t have her figured out. Lee Morton didn’t know anything about her.
But he did have a nice smile, crooked though it was.
And it would be a shame to waste this song.
So she stood up, and Alice Henderson and Lee Morton slid into the crowd of swaying couples. A gray-haired couple smiled at them and winked.
Countin’ every mile of railroad track
That takes me back
The trumpet was too loud, the singer too soft, but Lee’s shoulder was just the right height to rest her hand. The syncopated rhythm, the jaunty saxophone, the melody that jostled for attention, began to sink into her skin.
Lee smelled like shampoo and pine needles and summer grass shavings.
His smile was crooked but perhaps not so cocky as she’d thought. Up close, there was a tilt to his grin that looked almost bashful.
And beneath the crescent-shaped scar that she’d never asked him about, his eyes were Sunday-morning-coffee brown.
For a few minutes, it didn’t matter that George and Michele were outside puffing smoke into the night air. It didn’t matter that Alice had spent most of her life telling herself she despised Lee Morton. It didn’t matter that the singer couldn’t compete with the rest of the band. It didn’t matter that Alice had no explanation for the hard little seed of insecurity that had made her shun Lee Morton all their lives.
Alice wasn’t sure what did matter, but she swayed with Lee Morton as the sun dipped below the jagged, rosy line of the mountains.
“Your stop, Michele.” George slowed to a stop outside a red brick house.
Lee climbed out and opened the door for Michele.
“Let’s go to Clydesdale’s next time,” Michele said, flicking the last smoldering butt of her cigarette onto the ground. “At least they have decent music.”
While Michele made a show of ignoring him, Lee walked her to her front door.
George put his hand on Alice’s knee, his fingertips brushing just under the hem of her dress. Alice pushed his hand away.
With a scowl, George put his hand back on the steering wheel.
Alice snuck a glance at Michele’s front door, where Michele shut the door without so much as a goodbye to Lee.
The fury and doubt in Michele’s eyes when she’d come back inside to find that not only had Lee not been bereft in her absence, but that he was sharing a dance with loudmouth Alice Henderson, had been enough to give Alice a twinge of guilt in the midst of her satisfaction.
Striding back to the car, Lee opened the passenger side front door. “Can I slide in front? Feels odd being in the back by myself.”
George gave a surly shrug.
Alice scooted closer to George to make room, and Lee squeezed onto the bench seat.
They rode in silence, with the whooshing wind and the whispers of summer nighttime crickets filling the quiet.
Alice fiddled with a piece of lint in the pocket of her light cotton sweater and tried to keep her leg from brushing up against George. He didn’t need any help getting ideas.
Then, slowly, cautiously, fingers stole over to hers in the dark, warm and calloused, holding her hand inside the pocket of her sweater.
Alice caught Lee’s eye, and he smiled his crooked smile in a question.
Alice shifted her gaze and looked straight ahead into the night and the yellow, glowing streetlamps.
But she didn’t move her hand.
“Liss!” Billie’s voice drifted up from the living room. “Phone for you!”
Alice squinted at her fingernail, painstakingly applying a second coat of mauve. She’d been working hard all summer and fully intended to revel in her lazy Saturday morning. The phone could wait. “Who is it?”
“Lee Morton.”
Alice lurched to her feet, toppling the little mauve bottle.
“Oh!” Swiping up the mess with a wet rag, Alice took a breath to compose herself.
She had no reason to get in a tizzy over a call from Lee Morton. Boys called her all the time. Sort of. They called her sometimes.
This was no different. They’d had one dance the night before and made both their dates mad. That was all.
Alice took her time walking down the stairs, noting the gentle scratch of the worn carpet on her bare feet, the flowery wallpaper that her dad had accidentally glued upside down but realized too late to change it. It wasn’t obvious, but if you got up close to the wallpaper, you could see that the pretty little bouquets all had their blossoms pointing at the ground and their stems sticking up toward the ceiling.
Billie stood in the hall, cradling the telephone in her hand. She raised one eyebrow at Alice. “At your leisure, madame.”
Alice snatched the phone. “Hello?”
“Alice? This is Lee Morton.”
“Oh?”
From the kitchen, Billie mocked Alice’s Oh? with a doe-eyed Betty Boop expression. Alice turned to face the front door instead.
“I had a lot of fun last night.”
“So did I,” Alice said. Why was her throat suddenly tight? It was just Lee Morton. Firefly-catching Lee Morton who smelled like summer wind and pine needles.
“I was wondering if you wanted to do it again sometime. You know, dinner and dancing,” he said. “Except, I was thinking this time maybe you could go with me, and George and Michele could stay home.”
“Oh?” A rosy heat grew from somewhere within Alice, making the morning sun that poured through the eastern windows as warm and yellow as butter, the sky a deep robin’s egg blue, the mismatched colors of her childhood home brighter and sweeter.
“You think you’d like to do that sometime? Maybe tonight?” Lee said.
Keeping her face turned toward the front door so that Billie couldn’t see her, Alice smiled. “Yes. Yes, Lee Morton, I sure would.”
Thank you so much for reading “The Firefly Catcher”!1 Read on to learn more about the true story behind Alice Henderson and Lee Morton.
This story is not fiction. It’s fictionalized, but it’s not fiction.
I grew up thousands of miles away from my nearest extended family. Up in the middle of nowhere Idaho, it was just my parents, my siblings, and myself, while all of our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were half a continent or more away.
I’m sure we weren’t the only isolated family, but at the time it sure felt like all of my friends saw their grandparents every week and got to bring them along to birthday parties and school functions, while I…didn’t.
But across the street from my family, in a little red brick house with a lamppost and a literal white picket fence, were Alice and Lee.2
They were a sweet older couple who invited us three squirrely neighbor kids over to their house for snacks, showed us their custom-built birdhouse in the backyard, and made sure they were the first neighbors to see our Halloween costumes every year. When my dad woke up one night to the smell of something burning, my parents carried us, still in our pajamas, across the street to Alice and Lee’s house while the fire department dealt with the electrical fire behind the stove.
Alice was short, bouncy, talkative, and recklessly creative. All of the paintings hanging in their house were oil paintings and watercolors that she had painted herself. Decades before self-publishing was cool, she published a book of her poetry, complete with her own hand-drawn illustrations, which included a friendly caterpillar hiding on every page. Lee was quiet and unobtrusive and looked like Rex Harrison, if Rex Harrison was friendlier and less of a diva.
Over the years, my siblings and I spent hours upon hours in Alice and Lee’s house, eating their cookies and listening to their stories, and our favorite story, by far, was their love story.
They really did meet for the first time when Alice scolded Lee for stealing all the fireflies, and he caught one for her. Alice really did spend an inordinate amount of energy despising Lee for no apparent reason. She really did run out to the train station when he came home from the war, only to turn right back around when he winked at her. And the sneaky handholding on the ride home from a double date? That really happened too.
They were married three months later.
As kids, my siblings and I loved hearing the beginning of their story, but, eventually, we were there for the end of it too.
I was away at college the night that Alice came to my family’s home, terrified and saying that a strange man in her house was claiming to be her husband. Her muddled memory knew my family, but she didn’t recognize Lee’s face.
She remembered him, though, for a little while, in the last few days before he died. Less than a year later, she followed him.
My sister wrote a one-act play called “Fireflies” which tells this later part of their story. I’m giving this bittersweet context because Alice and Lee’s first years are bound up for me with their last days, but today, in “The Firefly Catcher”, I chose to tell just a tiny part of their story. The part without hearing loss from gunfire in the Pacific, without dementia and nursing homes and quiet slipping away.
It’s a snapshot of two lovely people at one of the most pivotal moments of their lives, and, for now, that’s all it needs to be.
Click below to hear Ella Fitzgerald’s lovely rendition of “Sentimental Journey”.
A couple anachronisms to note: I didn’t specify that Alice held a Guinness World Record because after writing the story I belatedly Googled Guinness World Records and realized that they weren’t created until 1955. Oops!
Also, the version of “Sentimental Journey” linked in this story is not the 1944 version that Alice and Lee would have heard, but is instead Ella Fitzgerald’s 1947 rendition. I just like Ella’s version better. ☺️
Not their real names
This was a heartwarming story and it only warmed up on reading the real story behind the story. Absolutely beautiful. What a blessing to have known them and their story.
This was lovely. You told their story so well, and.. it's just beautiful. I'm a softie and I love stories like this.