by Randy Alcorn
After reading it Jake thought, “Isn’t that a coincidence? The common man thinks just like Marty.”
In his journal he’d labeled it “journalistic ventriloquism.” People became wooden dummies who said whatever the reporter wanted to say. Ask enough people and somebody will say it, you quote it, and no one ever sees the rest of your notes, if in fact you bothered jotting down the unwanted comments in the first place. He was glad to be a columnist, paid to give his opinion, not having to smuggle it in the back door.
From National’s coffee station, leaning against the big red Coke machine, he could see almost the whole floor, over two hundred journalists at work this moment. He considered what a large percentage of his colleagues were divorced. Many had remarried and divorced again. The single were between marriages, the married between divorces. Jake, himself a statistic, held this against no one. But the fact remained that journalism was hard on the family. Reporters kept weird hours and long ones, and when they weren’t working they were preoccupied with the thought of work. Jake’s efforts to advance his career had taken a toll on his own marriage, he knew. And the atmosphere at the Trib was, well, open and freewheeling. A lot of people thrown together, working next to each other, day after day, talking more with each other than with their husbands or wives. The thrill and rewards of work overshadowed the daily drudgery of home. A lot of romances, a lot of affairs. Most were short-lived, which made things a bit complicated, walking every day past people whose eyes you used to want to meet, and now you desperately want to avoid. Jake wasn’t speculating. He’d experienced it first hand. But, he supposed, it wasn’t that much different than any modern workplace. It had left him somewhat defensive in the “family values” debates, he had to admit.
Jake took his last gulp of coffee and summarized his musings. Journalists were like doctors, businessmen, mechanics, plumbers, attorneys, teachers, preachers, anyone. They were ordinary, imperfect people. There were those who cared deeply and did their best to be fair, and others who were arrogant and self-serving, using people to further their ideologies and careers. Journalism was no different than plumbing—except that it affected not only pipes and water flow but the minds and perceptions of society. Journalists were like everyone else—except that while others held in their hands pea shooters and slingshots, they happened to be holding a rocket launcher. Hence the saying, “Don’t get in a word fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”
It was a strategic position, Jake thought, one the careful could use to serve society, and the careless could badly abuse. He felt pleased to know he was part of the former group.
After a few more hours at his desk, Jake set out in his Mustang for a drive in the country, as he sometimes did to let a column gestate or to sort out the turns of life. Three years ago he’d taken such a drive to figure out whether he and Janet’s marriage had a future. Two years ago he’d had to decide whether to take an attractive job offer with the Boston Globe. He still didn’t really know why he hadn’t. It was a great career move. But his friends and his…family…were here, and here was Oregon. He just couldn’t bring himself to leave. If he had the same offer today, with Finney and Doc gone, he wondered if he’d reconsider it. Home had lost much of its draw.
It was a mid-November afternoon. The leaves were past their prime but still colorful on the country hillside, artfully herded by the gentle winds into piles up next to old barns and farmhouses. He took some new and different turns in the road today, tiring of the old paths, and curious where the new ones would lead. Barren roads beckoned ahead and receded behind, except for one car headed his same direction, barely visible in his rearview mirror had he looked carefully, which he didn’t.
Tonight was his date with Mary Ann. He’d told her he’d be working late at the Trib, and had intended to until just an hour ago, when he was overcome with the compulsion to get out, to get away. And here he was, in the middle of nowhere, knowing where he’d been but not where he was going.
Farm houses, few and far between, dotted the landscape. Smoke trailed out chimneys, dissipating into nothingness. Such is life, Jake thought. Over a rolling hillside, he suddenly saw on the left side of the road a plotted area with a short wrought iron fence. It was a graveyard. For a moment Jake looked away and wanted to speed on by. It was the last thing he wanted to think about. But it was as if an unseen force compelled him to pull over.
He could see no one in any direction, just farmland surrounding this cemetery, which itself was bordered by tall willows and maple trees trying in vain to hold on to their remaining leaves. There was no church here. Perhaps once there had been. Perhaps this had been the center of a little town. Jake’s face turned pale and clammy as he walked uncertainly to the edge of the graveyard. Suddenly it grew much darker. The hillside blocked the sun, and clouds obscured it as well, creating such an abrupt change it felt like an eclipse.
Black and white frames of Boris Karloff movies flickered in his mind, playing him as a private audience. Of all times to walk through a cemetery, a gloomy late afternoon twilight. This wasn’t at all like the symmetrical rows of Memorial Military Cemetery, where his father was buried. Here there seemed no rhyme or reason, with tombstones as varied, random and tilted as life itself. This seemed a more accurate reflection of death than the mock precision of Memorial. Death was random and purposeless, so why not the harbingers of death?
Jake noted the loveliness of the late fall flowers. Stooping low over a purple chrysanthemum, he saw a tiny droplet of water turning the last remaining gleam of sunlight into a miniature rainbow.
How could death and life exist in such close proximity? What could explain such a living vibrant world languishing under the sentence of death? Death would ultimately defeat life, of that he felt certain. He could almost hear the sounds of warrior insects chewing greedily, their mandibles devouring the splendor of each flower, racing to destroy them before the cold did. The flowers would not last, could not last, and their transitory beauty saddened Jake. Nothing could last in this world of destruction and decay.
Melancholy overtook him. Tree branch shadows became long spidery fingers threatening to grab his ankles and pull him under ground, which itself became a carnivore, a salivating T-Rex wanting to eat him alive. He shook off the chill of the moment, sensing that beyond the silly superstitions of graveyards, something real, something dark and sinister, did not want him here, for whatever reason.
The variegated layout of this graveyard left every next step unpredictable. Behind the next tree or the next tall tombstone, who knew what he would find…or what would find him. He wished he’d not seen the mad slasher movies whose graveyard massacres flooded his mind now. Death was not as unrelated to life as he wanted to believe. It was quiet, deathly quiet. Where were the animal sounds that should inhabit places like these? It was as if lesser creatures were keeping respectful silence for man their master, whose remains lay here.
Who were these people whose bodies were assembled like dead butterflies in a collection? Did their lives matter? Did anyone care? The cemetery was abandoned. No fresh flowers, only wild ones. No freshly turned mounds of dirt to show a recent burial. Only tombstones worn by the elements, fractured by decade after decade of water invading and freezing in their cracks, sinking and tilting as the earth underneath them grew too tired to hold them up.
The most recent date on a gravestone Jake could see was 1909. Before World War I. Before his own father was born. He studied the names and found himself wanting to weave tales about them.
David Elijah Rothman, born July 3, 1898, died July 3, 1898. To be born and die the same day, to know this world so briefly. How did little David die? Of cholera? Of some disease that no longer existed or would now be easily treated? If David had been born ten years ago, would he still be alive now? Was it his fault that he was born too soon? What is the purpose in a child’s death the day he was born? David had parents who loved him, who must have grieved terribly. Yes, there, that big tombstone with the military insignia…Rob
ert Rothman, born September 15, 1858. Wasn’t that around the Civil War? Did Robert’s father fight in that war? Died November 2, 1908. Fifty years old. Jake shuddered. Robert had been Jake’s age when he died.
Another stone, between father and child, belonged to Elizabeth Rothman, born June 12, 1869. Robert’s wife and David’s mother. Died—what was this? Died August 20, 1898. At only twenty-nine? Did she die in childbirth? No, it was six weeks after David’s birth and death. Jake shivered again, the cold moist air turning more frigid as the sun began to set. Did Elizabeth die of a broken heart at losing David?
What was the gravestone just the other side of Robert’s? “Sarah Staley Rothman. Born April 3, 1835.” Ah, this must be Robert’s mother. She must have made the journey on the Oregon Trail with Robert and Elizabeth. “Died June 23, 1898.” What? Only ten days before David was born and died. She didn’t even get to see her grandson. And poor Robert. The man had his mother, son, and wife all taken from him in a two-month period.
The senselessness of it all saddened Jake. What possible explanation would suffice? Why would God, if there was a God, take a child from his mother’s arms? And take a mother from a son who loved her enough not to leave her behind, but bring her with him down the Oregon Trail to the new land? And what kind of God would look at this man staggering in his grief, and then take his wife from him as well? How helpless and lonely he must have felt. As helpless and lonely—though perhaps not as angry—as Hyuk had felt at his own loss of mother, wife, and son.
Who knew or cared about the Rothman family? Who told their stories now? They were like pebbles dropped in a pond, whose ripples lasted only a moment. What difference had their lives made? None, it seemed to Jake. They were gone, long gone.
David’s little monument had been worn smooth by the hard Oregon rains and winds. Jake bent down to read the words, the moist dirt soaking into his knee. For a moment, he started to get up, remembering these were the clothes he would wear to dinner with Mary Ann. But curiosity pulled him back down.
“David Elijah Rothman. Taken by his Lord as he left the womb, as Enoch, beloved of God, taken before his time.” Then underneath, in small print, “Jesus said unto her, ‘I am the resurrection and the Life: He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’”
Ah, the hope and faith of parents. These were not modern people. If they were they would have held no hope for what lies beyond. The God they believed in was obsolete. He’d been replaced by…by what, Jake wondered.
Elizabeth’s monument was larger. Did Robert lay her body in the grave himself? Jake suspected he did. Back then people were not insulated from death by the middlemen, the funeral homes and undertakers, the brokers of death hired to keep the family at arm’s length from the stark realities of the final end.
Jake imagined Robert, dressed in his best suit, worn only on Sundays to the house of God, riding in the buckboard, his family in tow to the church that probably stood on this very spot. Did Robert believe what the country preacher said? Did he read the black book quoted from on his infant son’s grave? Or was the caretaker of the family faith really Elizabeth, the woman who taught the children virtue while the man plowed the fields and drank the whiskey and went to town to visit the saloon girls? Somehow he felt this assessment was wrong, that Robert was a man of faith, a man who believed and lived by a truth that shaped and guided a family he deeply loved. Still, did Robert manage to hold on to that faith after losing mother, son, and wife that cruel bitter summer?
Jake pulled out his pocketknife to scrape off the moss that had crept into the grooved letters on the gravestone of Elizabeth Rothman. Now the words, before obscured, became clear.
“Here lies the body of Elizabeth Rothman, beloved wife of Robert, mother of David. Until the resurrection.” The smaller print below read, “All that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.”
Robert must have written these words, this man who lived a hard life and trod his way through it in anticipation of a better life to come. Robert’s own tombstone had no inscription beyond his name and the dates. Perhaps because he was the end of the family line, and no loved one was left to give tribute on his tombstone. Jake could only guess about this man’s life. The only certainty was, it was a life now done. There was no revisionist history, no air brushing away the man and his warts and virtues. Whoever he had been, and wherever he had gone, his life here had been what it had been, no more and no less and no different.
Another tombstone caught his eye, this one all by itself, away from the Rothman cluster. It was dark and it looked newer and different than the rest. Jake read it, his eyes suddenly large and his heart pounding.
“Oh, my God,” he cried aloud. It said, “Jake Woods.”
Wait, no, “Jake Weads.” He heaved a sigh of relief. But why? His name would one day be on such a stone. He knew the first date it would say, the date of his birth. But what would the second date say? Would it be thirty years from now, or ten, or five, or next year? Next week? Tomorrow? Today, before he left this place?
And what would his tombstone say? Who would care enough to write something? Who would know what to write? Would he want the words of some song like Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way”? Or John Lennon’s “Imagine”? No, he was drawn to songs of greatness, songs with lasting meaning, songs such as those sung at Finney’s funeral. But as he searched his memory, he could not remember the words of those songs, or even their names. He could, however, remember many songs of Lennon and Sinatra. Could one live his life by one set of songs and expect to be associated with another in his death?
Was there really a God? Was there really a book of life, with some names written in it and others not? Where were the Rothmans now? Were they right there, beneath his feet? Or were they somewhere else? Jake did not know. It saddened him to think he would never know.
An old friend watched with great interest Jake standing in the graveyard. He saw every move, read each inscription, felt as if he was right there with him. He was unable to read Jake’s exact thoughts, yet he somehow sensed most of what was going through his mind. Zyor stood next to Finney, also intensely interested.
As Jake got in his car and drove back toward the city, the clear vision of the scene faded, as it often did when the strategic moments, the eternal hinges that demanded the attention and prayer of heaven’s inhabitants, faded into the routine and normalcy of earthly life. Finney had been seeing Jake with greater frequency and hoped this indicated something significant.
Finney prayed aloud for Jake, then Zyor followed his lead. They prayed at length, sensing that Jake’s next hours that evening would be hours of great warfare, with strategic and eternal importance.
After they had prayed, Zyor showed a slight smile and said to Finney, “Come with me.”
“Gladly, my friend. Where are we going?”
“To meet some people whose company you will very much enjoy.”
“Who?”
Zyor thought for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to tell him now or wait. He looked at Finney, not wanting to miss the first eruption of that ear-to-ear smile.
“Their names are the Rothmans—Sarah, Robert, Elizabeth, and David.”
Jake arrived at Anthony’s thirty minutes early. He went to spruce himself up in the elegant men’s room since there was no time to go home and change. Jake paid more attention than he had in a long time to the face looking back at him from the mirror. It was an older face, the hair graying on the edges, receding in a way that made him look more like his father. Grooves cut across it like furrowed land. He looked weathered, like a lonely sea captain whose face had long borne the brunt of furious winds and pounding surf. Who was the man in the mirror? It troubled Jake that he didn’t know the answer, and might find it only too late.
He bent over close to the mirror to inspect a discoloration on his skin. His warm breath fogg
ed the mirror a moment, then he watched the fog shrink and disappear as quickly as it had come. Someone, he didn’t remember who, had compared life to the warm breath that is here for a moment, then leaves. Life was moving quickly, too quickly. Fifty years old. He was already older than his father had been when Jake trudged off to boot camp. His dad had seemed so very old to him then. He’d died only five years later, at fifty. Fifty. Robert Rothman’s age. His age.
Those who liked to spend money for lots of drinks and little food loved to spend their evenings at Anthony’s. The Trib’s restaurant critic raved about the food, but after the one time he’d taken Janet to Anthony’s, Jake concluded he’d rather have a burger and onion rings at Lou’s Diner anytime. Jake asked for a table with a view of the front door.
When his date came in, he caught his breath. Mary Ann glided into the room. Her ruby red silk dress, matching fingernails, and red spiked heels took over, as if the restaurant and its other patrons were merely black and white background existing to accentuate her presence, as if only she had been colorized. Her diamond necklace sparkled even in the low light. Jake didn’t know much about clothes and jewelry, but he knew these had to cost a bundle.
In the hospital environment Mary Ann was a professional. Here she was all woman. Her desire for attention seemed strikingly evident, and the attention was well earned. She captured lots of eyes, not least of all Jake’s. He rose to walk toward her, but she caught his eye and eagerly swept up to him, putting her right arm around him in a teasing squeeze and kissing him on the cheek. Jake knew he was now identified to everyone as the fortuitous companion of this stunning woman. Much as he normally eschewed public displays, he very much enjoyed the feeling.
“Hi, Jake. I’m famished. Hope you’re ready for some fun tonight.” Mary Ann clearly was. Jake pulled out her chair for her, and before he could sit she was effervescing.