The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Before he realized it, Rodney was crunching to a stop on the gravel next to his new panel van. He stepped out onto the once-asphalt driveway, which now resembled the gravel roads he remembered from childhood trips to his grandparents’ in Nebraska. The unmaintained drive had seen both the grinding metal tracks of a bulldozer and of an army tank, which had proved too heavy and harsh for the loosely packed pavement. He looked down the drive toward the road, wondering how long it would be until anyone would have the leisure to care that his driveway wasn’t much more than gravel, with a thin strip of old asphalt running down the middle.

  This idle question opened a door to a memory of his former home in town. Rodney recalled the warm June day when he heated oil for resurfacing his driveway, a mere twenty yards of tar-black pavement that needed some sprucing up. Rodney didn’t mind the hair-line cracks and lighter-colored patches that showed the underlying gravel, but he knew that it bothered Anna. She had mentioned it casually once and then flashed a look that betrayed the internal scolding she gave herself for complaining while Rodney was still recovering from several minor combat wounds.

  He, on the other hand, was glad she had slipped. He wanted so much to do something for her, something just for their family and not for some greater national cause. The simplicity of blacktopping the drive was a perfect remedy for the malaise he was feeling, the reticence to get comfortable at home, even though his commanding officer had insisted that he take an extended leave.

  Colonel Meyers knew battle fatigue when he saw it and wanted to keep his veteran captain out of the fight long enough to shake free from those spider-like fears and traumas that clung to any soldier on extended and desperate combat duty. Fighting for the survival of their own nation raised the pressure on troops even higher than the combat stress of previous generations, who generally fought in foreign lands to prop up one preferred government or another. The sane part of a man that urges him to stay out of harm’s way, to stay home, to sleep with his wife, to eat meals with his kids—was losing ground to the patriot who feared that cowardice was his real reason for leaving the fight. The loyal commander—whose troops every day faced a well-equipped and devious enemy, while he stayed safely at home—was bursting out of his own skin with this internal struggle.

  Blacktop, an old mop and the bright sun would distract him from the conflict that pulled his soul apart like a brittle bone between two dogs. Better yet was the cheerful audience he attracted. Davey was not content to merely sit and watch, so he stood near his father, wielding a broken-handled broom and wearing a very old pair of his dad’s boots. His father joked that it looked more like the boots were wearing him.

  Anna and Olivia, for their part, pulled up lawn chairs and sat in the shade of the house, offering praise and cheers for the artists at work. Olivia, whose doll-like face reflected the golden glow from the sun that had bleached her curly blonde hair, looked just like her mother when she was young, though her hair glowed brighter and less red than Anna’s. A few locks fell around Olivia’s face that day, free from the hasty ponytail her mother had lassoed after breakfast. At six years old, his little girl seemed no bigger than a rabbit to Rodney. Yet she could fill a room with her spritely personality. Both he and Anna wondered where Olivia got so much perky charm, looking at themselves and at each other. It was as if their little girl had absorbed all of the pioneering optimism of her father, and all of her mother’s patient appreciation of the moment, and melded them into an intense little ball of pure hope.

  Davey was more serious. In him, his parents could see more obviously the strain of military deployments, his father saying goodbye and the family trying not to think of it as the last goodbye. Rodney felt honored that his eight-year-old wanted to be with him every possible moment, though that ambition made it difficult to hustle Davey off to school each morning. Rodney kept the treasure that lay beneath his son’s obstinate struggle in mind and never allowed his impatience to take over from his gentle determination to get his son out the door.

  School was out now. June seemed willing to stay around for as long as they wanted and Rodney absorbed its life-giving promise like the solar cells on top of his house, empowering themselves from the longest days of the year. Ever handy with elemental resources, such as wood, iron and concrete, Rodney could actually enjoy a task like resurfacing his drive, even if he had to do it by himself, with no fans to cheer him. And yet, the satisfaction of the purification process that turned that pocked and cracked drive into a smooth black runway down to the street, provided the perfect backdrop for the intense discipleship of his son, the sparkling joy of his daughter and the luxurious love of his wife.

  Davey’s triumphant fist pumping, the frolicking dance in the grass and clover by Anna and Olivia and his own peaceful fulfillment at a job well done, marked the final mop and broom strokes at the bottom of the driveway. Not even war, plague and death could rip that from his soul.

  Tears running down his face, drawing a map of loss through the dust on his stubbly cheeks, brought Rodney back to the present, when they began to drip from his chin onto his chest. He sniffled violently and wiped at his face with both hands.

  So much to lose. Why couldn’t he have been content to stay at home to protect his greatest source of meaning and purpose? Who gives a damn about governments and empires? Surely, he could have saved his family. He had saved so many men through his creativity and cool perceptiveness in battle. He could have saved Anna and the kids too.

  He snorted and released an exasperated growl, cursing himself for surrendering to regret, for giving in to self-pity. His primal noise startled the big coyote who had settled down to watch the man, his tongue hanging out, his bright eyes alert, his long legs stretched out and fearless, until that growl disturbed his peace. Rodney looked up, noticing the coyote only when the creature sprang to his feet, ready to run if the man should turn violently against him.

  Rodney snickered. His new friend reminded him of a farm dog, awaiting his master’s attention when the work of the day was done. The coyote seemed to sense the nonthreatening mood of the man and settled back down to his shady rest, keeping an eye on the man nevertheless. Rodney wrapped up his work on the van, closing all the doors, bagging all the junk to be discarded.

  Returning to working on the house for the rest of the day, Rodney stopped before the setting sun complicated constructing a meal. He headed for his lean-to and what supper he could scrape together before nightfall.

  He thought immediately of the apples he had harvested from the unkempt orchard a hundred yards behind the house. Fried apples sounded good to him, especially when he remembered a bit of cinnamon in a small spice bottle at the bottom of one of his boxes of the stuff salvaged from his old house.

  He had never met anyone who saw the house torched and could only guess at the circumstances. As far as he could tell, it had happened months after Anna and the kids were gone. Why anyone bothered to burn their house after the family had already been scattered and destroyed, eluded Rodney. From the cinnamon to the house, to a picture of his little family, his mind bounced from stepping-stone to stepping-stone. In the lean-to, an unquenchable desire to see them again drew him beyond the box with sparse kitchen supplies, to another box with a few books and two pictures, framed and covered with glass. One photo of his parents had survived the fire. The other was a formal family photo, taken by a local professional photographer. Davey was seven and Olivia five when they sat for that family portrait.

  Rodney held the eight-by-ten frame in his hands, dust from his work powdering the glass where he touched it. He swiped the tan dust off the glass as he stared at Anna’s face. She had always looked better to him in real life than in any photo, but this one had been one of her best. She looked young and full of joy. What a beauty she was. Rodney sighed and put the picture away hastily, as if afraid of its gravitational pull, if he should hold on to it much longer.

  Days growing rapidly shorter now, dusk washed in around Rodney and his lonely little home. He wiped hi
s frying pan with a kitchen rag, scraped a bit of shortening into it with a short-handled spatula and set it on a salvaged cinderblock next to his sleeping fire. The coyote caught his eye as he stood up and jogged toward the house, then stopped and looked to his right, toward the county road. Rodney looked that direction but saw and heard nothing. He squatted to stir up the coals, finding half a dozen live ones the size of grapes. He placed some pine needles from his kindling box onto the little circle of orange glowing embers. Within a few minutes, he had a good blaze going, with enough wood arranged to provide the genesis of a bank of coals for cooking his supper.

  As he sat down to rinse and peel apples in the combined light of another clear sunset and the blazing fire, he noticed that the coyote still stood at attention, looking down the driveway. Rodney knew now that someone was walking toward him from that direction, though he had not consciously heard any noise. He set a half peeled apple down and took one step to his right, squatted and reached his right hand into his military-green backpack. He flipped the safety off on his semi-automatic pistol and left it at the opening of the pack, the handle facing him for a quick grab, if needed.

  Now he began to listen for the footsteps, to learn what he could about his visitors. He could tell there was more than one, as soon as the scraping of dirt and gravel first penetrated the late bird songs and the wind pulling at the fall grass. Soon he could also tell that the walkers were just that, walkers and not enemies sneaking up on him. He guessed that they might be children, light steps, tired and irregular. He relaxed only by one notch, knowing that anyone could be an enemy and that he had only himself for protection. That was, of course, the way he had wanted it, why he chose a new home away from town. He wouldn’t be farming this land. He was a carpenter, not a farmer. Out here, however, he was free to rely on himself and the simplicity of that arrangement suited him just fine.

  With night falling, his best rifle broken and a dizzying list of odd occurrences still reverberating in his head, he did pause to wonder whether his lonely independence wasn’t a bit foolhardy. His only ally seemed to be the lone coyote.

  His converted farm dog stood watching the approaching walkers but did not growl. He seemed anxious but not frightened. As the footsteps reached where the van stood in the driveway, the coyote turned and jogged into the shadows at the edge of the yard. Rodney could still see the glow from the firelight in his new friend’s eyes, when he heard a woman’s voice out of the darkness.

  “Hello,” she said, warning of her approach before Rodney could see her, or her companion. This precaution told Rodney a good deal about the wisdom and experience of his guest.

  “Hello,” he said back in as friendly a voice as he could muster, out of his solitary silence. The coyote barked, but his voice lacked conviction, if he meant it as a threat.

  “Is the dog safe?” the woman asked, a bit of doubt in her voice. It was, after all, an unusual sounding bark.

  Rodney laughed, which was the best thing he could have done to assure the cautious voice in the darkness. “Not really a dog,” he said. “Just a coyote that thinks he’s a farm dog.”

  The woman made a mild noise of surprise, just as her face became clear in the firelight, along with the face of a fourteen-year-old boy. The boy’s face, in the orange glow of the fire, seemed nearly square, but for a little knob of a chin. He wore a Saint Louis Cardinals baseball cap that had once been red, but now looked nearly black in the low light. Rodney guessed that he was small for his age.

  The woman slowed to a stop just inside the glowing circle around the fire. Rodney could see the barrel of an old semi-automatic hunting rifle, the kind ranchers used to carry in Western Nebraska when he was a boy.

  For a moment, Rodney lost track of the boy and the rifle, however. The woman’s large, dark eyes captured his attention, as did a wide smile from lips that reminded him of the elegant scrolling on the antique doorposts of his parent’s house. She seemed at once taut and weathered and yet delicate and feminine. He could imagine her in the seat of a pickup truck herding cattle and at a candle-lit table in a fine restaurant.

  The woman self-consciously pushed a lock of hair off her forehead, as Rodney stared at her just a bit too long, before smiling and standing up from his seat by the fire. “Come on by the fire, I was just getting supper ready.” He invited them without yielding to the tempting apology about the coarse menu he had to offer. He did note a look of disappointment when the woman saw the state of the house and, perhaps, the lone man by the campfire. But she seemed as willing to lower her defenses as the coyote had been on his first visit.

  The pair of travelers approached the fire. “I thought the town was up this side road, but looks like I made a mistake,” said the woman. “Then we saw your fire, as we were turning to go back to the highway. Our car ran out of juice back a ways, the solar panels didn’t seem to work for recharging anymore.”

  Rodney nodded and extended his hand. “I’m Rodney,” he said meekly.

  “I’m Emma,” the woman said, taking his hand briefly, then motioning to the boy, “this is my son, Daniel.” Daniel shook Rodney’s hand, as well.

  Through the years of war and chaos, Rodney had met many strangers in uncertain circumstances. The anarchic environment tightened his vigilance from year to year, but lately he had breathed more freely and watched a bit less suspiciously, even when strangers came down the road. Part of this new freedom came from having very little to lose these days, but much of it came from that lightness that he had tried to address with Pete.

  The coyote stood up from his post in the shadows and walked closer to the fire, his head down and his ears forward, but no sense of menace in his approach. He now sought to include the woman and the boy in his trust relationship with the man, edging close and raising his tail with expectation of a welcome.

  The woman and the boy eyed the coyote warily. Again Rodney laughed. Deep behind that laugh, lay a memory of shooting at a coyote one morning in Nebraska, his grandfather’s whispered instructions close at his ear. Farmers and ranchers had been at war with coyotes then and Rodney had been a trainee in that fight, before he trained to kill men.

  On this night, his gun remained in his pack and Rodney tried to fit his weary soul into a new era of peace, with both man and beast.

  Daniel tipped his head to the side as he met the coyote’s eyes. The coyote mirrored the boy’s head tip. Rodney and Emma both laughed this time, as they witnessed the instant connection between Daniel and the coyote.

  “A strange companion,” Rodney said, voicing what he had been saying to himself every time he saw the coyote.

  “What’s his name?” Daniel asked.

  Rodney smiled and shook his head. “No name, we haven’t been hanging out together for long.”

  Daniel looked at Rodney in surprise. “Really, he seems so friendly.”

  “It seems to be something going on with animals these days,” Rodney said.

  Emma turned toward Rodney brightly. “Do you really think so?” she asked. “We saw a deer the other day, that almost looked like it knew us, or something. It was very strange.” She paused. “I used to hunt deer with my father and I didn’t even begin to think about venison when I saw her.”

  Again, Rodney felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he accepted another oddity onto his list of unexplained happenings. “I’ve been hearing some strange things lately,” he said aloud, without intending to speak.

  “So have I,” said Emma, again elevating her voice with excitement. “I heard the war in the Middle East ended, and the Dictator was killed, along with all of his followers.”

  “You heard that? Who did it?” Rodney said, his own voice rising with hesitant hope. He and Emma had edged a bit closer than the strangers’ handshake had required.

  Her voice and face changed slightly, revealing that she was not willing to tell everything she had heard. “I don’t really know,” was all she said.

  Rodney shook his head at the familiarity of her tight-throated t
one. Hadn’t he heard just that tone from Pete when he asked more questions than his friend was willing to answer? Jay also sounded much the same when he tried to describe missing an entire house with a spray of automatic weapon fire. The lift of those neck hairs was beginning to feel annoying to the carpenter and soldier. Something he could not grip in his hands was gripping him and he didn’t like that powerless feeling.

  Emma sensed his discomfort, though she couldn’t really know it’s meaning, and she tried to recover from her previous non-answer. “I just don’t know what to believe. It feels as if everything is somehow new. Like the world we used to know has completely gone away.”

  Her ardent attempt to satisfy Rodney’s questions endeared her to him as much as those eyes, and that always-lurking smile; but when they both sensed an open connection with the other, they backed off, hearing reminders of old pains from love lost and trust destroyed.

  When the flames had died and the coals were ready, Rodney added some crackers to his menu of fried cinnamon apples, and Emma contributed a bit of cheese and some raisins. What exactly to call the resulting mixture was a source of some amusement, when Rodney stirred the fire to flames again, and after they had given the coyote a small share.

  Daniel sat silently, but listened intently, as Rodney told his story and then his mother told hers. He knew the latter, of course, but closely noted what she included and what she left out, especially about recent years, when the two of them, along with a lost father, had been on the run from the Dictator. The boy wandered a bit to memories of their farm in southern Illinois, where corn fields now lay fallow and barns stood charred and abandoned. But mostly Daniel contemplated the tone of growing intimacy in his mother’s voice, a tone he had not heard for some time, not since he lost his grandparents, many months ago. This seemed fitting to Daniel, however, because he too felt safe in the presence of this battle-scarred carpenter and his coyote.