The two Koreans finally provoked Jay to throw them out of his store one day, by their arduous insistence on assuring him that they would not be harming his business in any way. Jay’s annoyance at them evaporated as they left him, smiling and wishing him well, in spite of being shown the door, with threats and profanity.
To the remaining citizens of Somerville, the two Koreans offered a fascinating mystery, much of which surrounded the question of where they lived and how they took care of themselves. No one had seen them negotiate for food, or any other supplies and they did nothing to secure a house. They did procure a truck in which to carry building supplies that they gathered from trips around the area. Unlike Jay, there were no reports of the Korean’s stumbling into an occupied house and disturbing its residents. They filled the former farm and garden center with nails, wood, and other building supplies, with astonishing efficiency.
Rodney approached the Koreans, to find replacement floorboards for the ground level of the house, as well as heavy boards for stairs to the second story. He pulled the van into the parking spaces along the highway in front of the new building supply store and looked at the new sign, which had been expertly hand-painted, “Reconstruction Building Supply and Salvage.” Rodney assumed one of the Koreans had painted the sign himself, unaware of any of the Somerville residents who could have done so skillful a job. A ten-mile-an-hour wind from the west cooled the late November day, but at fifty-five degrees, it left Rodney quite comfortable in a light denim jacket.
As soon as he put his hand to the door of the new store, it opened and Hyo stood smiling at Rodney. “Hello Mr. Stippleman,” he said. “How are you today?”
Rodney startled slightly at the sudden appearance of the proprietor and at the fact that Hyo remembered his name. He stuttered, before recovering. “Ah, oh, I, I’m fine.” He smiled back weakly. “I’m here to see if I can make a deal for some wood.”
“Well, then you have come to the right place.” Hyo smiled ingratiatingly. “I hope we have what you need, if we don’t we can certainly find you something before long.”
Rodney stepped past Hyo, ushered by the sweep of the shorter man’s left hand. Throughout the following interaction, Rodney accumulated an impression that Hyo was about a half a step ahead of him, until Hyo stopped him with a question.
“Tell me, if you will, Mr. Stippleman,” he said. “Why are you building a house from the ground up, instead of just taking over one of the many empty houses in the area?”
Rodney liked the little Korean and felt compelled to confide in him. “Bailey was a friend of mine. We served together in the resistance. I saw him killed in Texas. I knew his family and heard that all of them had been killed or disappeared. I know he would be glad someone was keeping the family farm in friendly hands,” he said. “And I didn’t want to stay in town where I used to live with my family. I guess I really wanted a clean start.”
“Yes, I see,” said Hyo.
Then Young appeared out of the back room with a sudden gust of air that ruffled Rodney’s hair and shirt collar. “Oh, so sorry to interrupt,” Young said, as he spotted Rodney and Hyo.
Rodney stared at Young for a moment. For the first time he noticed that purple scar on Young’s right temple, just at eye level. It looked like a bullet hole. Hyo smiled and bowed to his business partner, Rodney just catching a slight roll of the eyes between the two. Young looked like he had been caught at something.
Though he liked these two men, Rodney didn’t fully trust them yet. He thought of the stories he had heard about them in the last week, from Jay and from Pete, so he decided to try to go to the source.
“If you don’t mind me asking, where are you two living?” Rodney asked.
Hyo looked at Rodney, once again with that assessor’s eye. He seemed to be calculating rapidly how much he should tell. The rumors Rodney had heard began to fill the moments of hesitation, but Hyo finally answered.
“Well, you see we are here now during business hours,” Hyo said, in a tone that implied he was just getting warmed up. His mouth never lost the basic shape of a smile and his dark eyes always seemed to dance. This produced a strange impression, of a man straining to keep a secret that he was glad to tell.
“But you are wondering where we sleep at night and take our meals, of course.” Hyo continued, acknowledging that he hadn’t even begun to answer Rodney question. Perhaps the Korean-American had been preparing for this moment, aware that his living arrangements raised questions among the locals. “I want to answer you honestly, Mr. Stippleman, but I expect you may not believe the truth.”
“You can call me Rodney,” he said. “Well, it’s your own business, of course, but you have to know that this is a small town and we do get used to knowing everybody’s business, sooner or later. There are rumors.”
“Yes, yes, of course, there would be,” said Hyo, as Young came back into the show room. Hyo looked at Young and then proceeded to answer Rodney. “You see, Rodney, our home is not here, this is just where we have been assigned to serve. Our home is where the Great King has his throne, in Jerusalem.”
“The Great King?” Rodney’s brow curled in confusion. To a rebel with battle scars, that title set off sirens of distrust.
Young spoke up in support of his friend. “The King of Kings has taken up his throne in Jerusalem, after defeating the Dictator and his followers. They have all been destroyed, and the followers of the Great King have been sent into the world, to bring it under the influence of the Lord of all creation.”
For Rodney, a military man who had stayed away from church for many years, and who had fought in wars for presidents and secretaries general, and against the Director—whom he called the Dictator—the titles Young used seemed a nest of twisted confusion.
While Rodney tried to sort through this jumble, Hyo continued to pursue the answer to Rodney’s original question. “Our home is in Jerusalem, it is where we go to be in the presence of the King and his other followers. That is where we get out nourishment and energy. We come back here to work each day.”
“You fly back and forth? But how?” Rodney left the governmental puzzle and latched on to the transportation mystery that confronted him.
Hyo’s smile stretched a bit more. “It is not really flying, though some of our friends have been doing that for fun. Rather, I think of it as being transported, from that place to here, in an instant. It is more efficient, though perhaps less entertaining.”
“In an instant?”
Both Hyo and Young could sense that they had overloaded Rodney’s circuits with too much information that lacked firm anchors. But Hyo was determined to push forward.
“I will demonstrate. Let me go to your house and retrieve some small thing and bring it back here immediately.”
Rodney looked skeptically at Hyo. “You’re going to do this instant transport thing to my house and back?” He surrendered to the numb, dream-like, sensation with which he had grown familiar lately, and offered no objection.
“What should I pick up?” Hyo asked.
Rodney scratched his neck and thought a moment, relieved to have a decision he could understand. What should he pick up? For some reason, Rodney thought of the hat that he had left hanging on the mirror of the old PFV. He described it to Hyo and told him where to find it. Then Hyo made a slight bow, first to Young and then to Rodney, and he disappeared. A second later, he was back, holding the hat out to Rodney.
When they both saw the look on Rodney’s face, the two Koreans looked at each other. Hyo shrugged and Young shook his head, feeling that this was too much, too soon, for Rodney to deal with.
Rodney stood holding his hat, looking at it, wondering what he had just witnessed. His mind jumped to Emma’s story of the woman suddenly appearing in the back of the pickup.
“Are you alright, Rodney?” Hyo asked, his voice filled with genuine concern. His assignment in Somerville would necessitate honesty with his customers and neighbors, but he also held an obligation to judicious reve
lations, without alienating those neighbors.
Rodney’s dizzied mind stumbled in a new direction. “You said you have an assignment in Somerville? This assignment is from this King you serve?”
“Yes, that is right,” Hyo said. He was pleased that Rodney had listened to what he had told him, even if the stunned carpenter skipped a few mental beats in the effort.
Young took up the explanation. “We have the great joy of being his servants, unlike in our previous lives, where we seldom served him with joy at all.”
Unfortunately, for Rodney, he kept latching onto words or phrases that begged a hundred questions.
“Previous lives?” he said, in a sort of brown study.
Both Koreans could only conclude that they should pause their lesson until another time. Hyo took the lead again.
“We have given you more information than you can absorb right now, that is clear. But we would like very much for you to understand what is going on. Do you want me to come and visit you at the house tomorrow, or the next day? Or would you prefer coming here to see us, to ask more questions?”
This openness assuaged a bit of Rodney’s discomfort with the odd lot of things he had just witnessed and learned. In contrast, the Dictator’s people had never been anxious to answer questions about their loyalties and activities. But something about Hyo “transporting” to the farm in the next forty-eight hours disturbed Rodney more than having to make the drive into town.
When he expressed this preference, Hyo also remembered the original reason for Rodney’s visit, and he led the way past the strain of their intervening conversation, back to the mundane matter of floorboards and stairs. Young, with remarkable strength and dexterity, helped to load wide two-by-twelves into Rodney’s van and Hyo took a careful description of the floor boards Rodney wanted, so they could find them via salvage, or some other supply system, which he didn’t explain.
They sold Rodney the wood on credit and assured him that this was no problem for them. Young recorded the purchase on a new looking computer with just a few touches of his hand.
The miles out of town and back to Rodney’s house, echoed with every word the Koreans had spoken, and with dozens of questions that those words provoked. Rodney was so disoriented by the conversation, that he didn’t even think to stop and tell Pete about what he had just heard and seen. That stop would have made it all easier to process. He also forgot to stop at the new electronics store to see about a computer for Daniel.
When he rolled to a stop on the driveway, Daniel and Emma ran to meet him. They interrupted each other repeatedly, trying to tell him of the sudden appearance of an Asian man, who took Rodney’s hat and then vanished just as quickly. Rodney held up the hat. This silenced both of them, which allowed Rodney to attempt to reproduce, as accurately as possible, the whole conversation with Hyo and Young. The retelling of it, which was at least ninety-five percent accurate, helped Rodney to sort out some of his unanswered questions.
Emma ventured a response. “If it wasn’t for the vanishing trick, I’d say they just sound like a couple of religious fanatics.”
Rodney agreed. Whatever one thought of the Korean’s loyalty to whatever King they served, one had to include the transporting trick in the assessment.
“Have you ever heard of anything like that? Just popping from one place to another? Could that be some new physics breakthrough or something?” Rodney asked.
Both Daniel and Emma shook their heads. But Daniel speculated. “I wouldn’t be surprised if scientists were working on something like that. I know teleporting was something in science fiction stories, and I think I heard of some experiments with moving particles from one place to another.”
Rodney felt old when Daniel started talking technology. Even in that solar-powered, digital age, Rodney remained an analog man. His comfort with technology extended to guns and power tools. In the wars, he had relied heavily on tech staff, or rebel hackers, for anything involving bits and bytes. Younger men generally considered Rodney a man from the past, wedged into their age of wireless global communication against his will. When that infrastructure faltered under the power of earthquake, volcano or flood, or slipped into the hands of the Dictator, Rodney felt justified for counting primarily on his wits and good old-fashioned bullets.
Emma still pursued an explanation to the trick that they all witnessed: “Did he seem to be using some sort of machine to do this transport thing?”
That hadn’t occurred to Rodney yet. On the other hand, now that he thought of it, Young had appeared suddenly in the back room of the store. Perhaps that was the reason for the Koreans’ surreptitious exchange of looks, Young nearly giving away their transporting trick, before they were ready to reveal it.
“I didn’t see any sign of a machine that would do that,” Rodney said.
“If it wasn’t by some kind of machine, how could they do it?” Daniel said.
Rodney threw out a wild idea that he had heard from someone. “I know that the first thing we heard about the end of the war in the Middle East involved aliens invading. I suppose, if these guys were aliens from another planet, they might have some built-in ability to do things we can’t do.”
He looked at the incredulous expression on Emma’s face and smiled. “Well, it’s a pretty crazy trick. I’m just trying out all the crazy explanations I can think of.”
Daniel didn’t look incredulous at all. He seemed to be calculating something.
“Mom, you told me that, when you were a kid, you never would have dreamed the USA would disappear, or that there would be one Dictator over the whole world, and about all the bad disasters that happened. So maybe, just because you didn’t see aliens invading when you were a kid, you shouldn’t make fun of Rodney for saying it might have happened now.”
“I wasn’t making fun of him.” Emma protested weakly. “Just because strange things are happening doesn’t mean we have to believe every rumor.”
“Well, I saw that Chinese guy pop up and then disappear with my own eyes,” Daniel said, “and it seemed like a pretty alien kinda thing to do.”
Emma looked at her son’s freckled face and tousled his straight brunette hair with admiration. “Well I’m glad you’re thinking, my son, you just keep that up and we’ll all be fine.”
Rodney could tell by her tone that this was something she had said to her son before. It occurred to him, out of left field, that he didn’t feel fully prepared to be father to this techie kid. Then he scolded himself for getting ahead of the rotation of the earth. Being Daniel’s father wasn’t a problem for today, so it required no solution today either.
Later that night, Rodney sought relief from the strain of having to understand unprecedented events, by asking Emma about their family. Daniel was playing with Socks, just out of earshot, while Rodney and Emma were scraping together a dinner of canned beans and canned corn, along with some newly harvested feral apples.
Looking at Daniel, Rodney asked Emma, “What was his father like?”
Emma took a deep breath, finished cutting up the last apple and tossed it in with the baked beans. “When I met him, he was a dreamer and a poet, studying engineering. He grew up on his family farm and was determined not to be the last family farmer in Southern Illinois. We dated through two years of college and got married right after graduation. He went on to graduate school up near Chicago. He was sort of like that character, George Bailey, in It’s a Wonderful Life, that old black and white movie. He wanted to change the world, to do big things. Then his father died and his mother was left on her own. As they worked things out, it was either Mike took over the farm or his mom would lose all the equity she had in it. It was a real bad time to sell a farm.” Emma stopped and wiped wisps of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand.
She looked at Rodney, a bit of spark in her eyes, clearly reliving some cherished memories. “He really transformed himself, took all of that ambition and intelligence and turned it toward being the last family farmer in Southern Illinois.�
�� Emma looked at Rodney, weighing how much he wanted to hear, but she could read little from the friendly, and controlled, face of her fellow cook.
“He grew organic crops for sale in the Saint Louis and Chicago suburbs, building a profitable business out of a struggling old farm, selling off land where necessary, putting in wind turbines and making it all work,” she smiled ironically. “His mother retired to Fort Lauderdale on the profits he made. So I guess you could say he was a dreamer, but he also figured out how to get back down to earth and make a difference for his own family, if not the whole world.”
Rodney smiled. “That makes it easier for me to understand Daniel.” He was also thinking it helped him understand Emma and her expectations of a man. Where such a high bar might intimidate most men, Rodney’s self-confidence had been tempered in the fire of battle, as well as in a good marriage and rewarding family. He had not given any thought lately, however, to what he might have left of his heart to offer a woman.
The next day, Rodney drove into town again, this time to talk to Jay about helping with the plumbing in the house. With Emma and Daniel there now, he made this a higher priority than it had been. After arranging for Jay—who had the most experience with plumbing of anyone in town—to come out to the farm early the next day, he visited the Koreans to see about plumbing supplies that Jay didn’t have on hand. While there, he planned to ask more questions about what Hyo and Young were doing in Somerville.
A bright clear morning, warm for the last days of November, presented Somerville at her best. The remaining handful of residents had all taken responsibility for clearing the roads and keeping the town looking inhabited and civilized. This had contributed to the reputation of Somerville that had attracted Emma and Daniel, among many others. Rodney, and other resisters like Jay, had also contributed significantly to the town’s reputation for staunch opposition to the Dictator. Their history together explained why Jay would agree to close his store one morning to help Rodney repair his plumbing.
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 8