Rodney nodded, uncrossed his arms and thought about his family in that isolated farmhouse east of town. He decided to work at home for the rest of the day, just to give that story another twenty-four hours to cool off. Warren endorsed that approach and promised to call later, to see if they had any other suspicious visitors.
No day on the farm unfolded more peacefully than that one, the only remarkable event being a rare sprinkle of rain in the late afternoon. Rodney finished some painting in the barn and fixed two sticky windows in the house. He even took a nap on the couch, with Joshua sprawled over his chest, the boy sleeping and sweating on his dad.
Daniel brought Tina home for dinner that evening and the teens did the cooking. Tina had grown more serious and matronly than when they first met her and her bond with Daniel seemed pure and permanent. Emma and Rodney had privately talked about the two getting married, even though Daniel was still sixteen—a very old sixteen, as Rodney reminded his wife.
Just before supper, Warren called and Rodney assured him that the day had been quiet and that the small storm of controversy had passed, just like the little rain storm that afternoon.
Dinner, featuring Jerusalem protein and an exotic vegetable called “gora” that the immortals had introduced to the markets in the area, had been an experimental success. That is, as an experiment it had turned out alright, but Rodney and Emma felt no temptation to add the sweet, spongy vegetable to their regular diet. Rodney had managed to suppress a laugh when Joshua agreed with his assessment by gagging when Daniel held up a bit for his little brother to suck on.
“We’ll just have to wait for the gora baby food to come out,” Rodney said.
Soon after they had finished the apple cobbler that Emma had made for dessert, Tina and Daniel drove back to town, leaving three well-fed and comfortable folks to enjoy some music together in the living room. While Emma knitted, Rodney poked and tickled Joshua gently and then held him swaying in front of the music player, humming to new songs clearly influenced by the Jerusalem worshippers.
Like a sudden noise exploding a peaceful sleep, a half a dozen men burst into the house through the front door, which stood open, the screen door slamming behind them. They wore black masks revealing only mouths and eyes. Rodney managed to cross the room and hand Joshua to Emma, as she sprang off of the couch, dropping her needles. But Rodney could not even begin to fend off all six attackers, some of whom clearly had as much hand to hand combat training as he did. As Emma tried to run for the back door, a black-clad attacker cut her off and wrapped her up, threatening to harm both her and Joshua in the way he clasped his forearm under her chin. Joshua cried vehemently.
“Tell us about the infiltrators you and the Jerusalem freaks have planted in our groups,” the leader demanded, his masked face just inches from Rodney.
Seeing Emma and Joshua held forcefully, blinded Rodney, yet part of his mind told him to relax, that help would soon arrive. He didn’t answer the interrogator.
“You want us to hurt your wife and baby? We’re desperate enough to do it,” the leader said.
Somehow, Rodney doubted the sincerity of the threat, something in the tone of voice, perhaps. He remembered, in that moment, his early conversations with Hyo and Young, about their concern that the mortals might hurt each other, even unintentionally, with their weapons. He determined to get Emma and Joshua out of the room as soon as help arrived.
With that thought firmly in his focus, and the leader starting to utter another demand, the doors and windows in the room all broke loose and burst outward into the twilight, though no explosive force affected the people inside the house. Instantly, six people that Rodney had never seen before flew through those openings. Some of them moved so fast that Rodney couldn’t see what they were doing. However, he took advantage of the surprise and jerked free of his captors, lunging toward Emma and Joshua. The man who had held them released his grasp and tried to dodge past a flashing figure that seemed to seize all of his limbs simultaneously.
Rodney grabbed Emma and Joshua, attempting to sweep them upstairs, away from the scuffle in the living room. One of the attackers leapt over the couch, in a dash to escape through the back door. In his haste, he landed on the back of Rodney’s leg, sending him sprawling forward so that Rodney, in turn, knocked Emma off balance. When the masked man tried to recover his balance, he flailed for something to grasp and found Emma’s arm. In the midst of her tumble forward, the attacker’s bruising grip wrenched open Emma’s embrace around Joshua. The tiny boy somersaulted through the air and landed on his head, bouncing off the corner of the doorway to the dining room.
Rodney saw, as if in slow motion, his son bounce off the floor and Emma scream and strain to recapture her son. The instant this picture imprinted on his mind, Rodney heard an internal voice rebuking him for doubting the immortals, for thinking he had to seize control and rescue his wife and son. He knew, in instant retrospect, that his role had been to simply stand still and allow the immortals to complete the rescue. But he had failed. That certainty burned into his mind, as he lay on the ground for half a second, before scrambling toward where Joshua lay limp and silent. No mortal man will bear any greater burden than the knowledge that his actions inflicted harm on his own child.
Emma surrounded Joshua with her arms but did not move him. He lay so limp, his head so awkwardly tilted and turned to the side. She dare not yield to her intense urge to wrap him up and hold him close. Rodney crawled to her side and reached a quivering hand to check the small crooked neck for a pulse. In that numb state, how could he feel anything, especially the birdlike pulse of his infant son?
Then Emma knew, she could see the perfect stillness, she could feel the life escape from the warm little body. She screamed, her voice piercing through the tumult of the subduing struggle around them. Even the attackers ceased their vain wrestling at the sound of a mother’s grief.
Rodney remembered the dead body of Jason Cooper lying in his bathroom. It was too late for Jason when the immortals arrived. A great fear inside him screamed, “Let it not be too late for Joshua now!” He couldn’t bear to see Joshua so unnaturally bent. He gently scooped his hands under that little body, and that tiny head, lifting his lifeless son to his chest.
Emma stared at him, then followed his gaze. Two of the immortals stood over them, looking compassionately at the broken family. The momentary sadness glancing across the eyes of one of them sank the hope with which both parents had turned toward these who bore the power of God.
Rodney wept, staring at the small, limp body in his arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Do you really think wearing ties is coming back into style?” Rodney said, a complaint emerging in his voice. He was looking at himself in the mirror.
Emma’s voice from the bathroom sounded inarticulate but reassuring.
There in the mirror, Rodney looked at himself, slipping into wondering at how little he had changed over the past twenty years. At age sixty-six, Rodney seemed the twin of that forty-six-year-old man who had emerged from the Dictator’s war into the brand new world of the Reign. He was like a twin, because anyone who knew either of them would be able to see the difference between them, even though he had not aged in any obvious ways over those years. The older version wore longer hair, as had become the style a generation after the war.
While he fidgeted with his necktie, a pretty, teenage girl entered the room carrying a chubby baby girl, her hip cocked to form a slight resting place for her little sister.
“Betsy is cranky,” said the older girl. “What should I give her?” She spoke not to Rodney directly but in the general direction which included her unseen mother in the bathroom, as well as her father in front of the mirror.
Rodney turned toward the two girls. “What do you think?”
The teenager had seen pictures of men wearing neckties, but her father’s version seemed somehow wrong, though she couldn’t say just how. “I don’t know. Do you really have to wear that?”
“Dad!” Miranda said.
“What’s that dear?” Emma asked, stepping out of the bathroom and looking at him.
Quaffed, cleaned up and dressed for a formal occasion, the woman standing in the bathroom door look the perfect image of the girl in the bedroom door. The baby saw her mother and renewed her quest for attention, cranking up her cry to an escalating wail.
Emma and Rodney both swept to the rescue. Miranda handed off her little sister and escaped her duties as baby sitter, so she could finish getting ready and send a quick message to her friend, Sandy. She walked toward her bedroom, typing speedily on her mobile device and ignoring the ruckus in the bedroom she passed.
Two boys wrestled on one of the beds in their shared room, the younger cackling uncontrollably under the tickling from the older. Pleading for mercy, he finally resorted to cries for help. “Dad! Dad!..” The rest of the plea became muffled under a pillow held by his older brother, who filled in his own version. “Dad, Dad, Jamie is picking on me,” he said in a squawky mocking tone, pretending to be the victim.
Suddenly the door flew open and there stood the commanding form of their father. “Jamie, stop picking on your big brother,” he said. Then, more seriously, he said, “Okay, you two, now you have to get your clothes back on straight and head for the car.”
The older boy released his captive and the younger took the opportunity for a final poke in the ribs; but his big brother only faked retribution, heeding his father’s warning. After all, this was a big day for him.
Within minutes, two parents, two boys and two girls all sat in the family van. Rodney punched the “On” button, and the quiet motor inhaled and hit its stride, prompting the driver to launch it down the driveway toward the county road.
As little as Rodney had changed visibly in twenty years, the landscape had been transformed in those two decades. No land remained unkempt and fallow as it had been directly after the war. Across the road from the Stippleman farm, a woman who lived in Vietnam during another life grew sunflowers, the fields bright yellow on that early June day.
The roads on which they rolled comfortably and silently, no longer bore any reminder of the craters and burned spots that had greeted Emma and Daniel when they first approached that farm. Along the side of the roads ran rows of flowers of every color, arranged in patterns too complex to discern, yet calming and captivating to the eye.
Rodney smiled at the beauty of his world. Then Jamie spoke up from the back seat.
“Dad, tell the story of when Joshua died.”
Emma looked at her husband and raised her eyebrows, then she turned toward the window and followed her thoughts away from the present day of celebration.
In the rear view mirror, Rodney checked for approval from the older children. They seemed amenable to him telling the old story once again.
“There once was a small family living on a farm outside of Somerville, Iowa,” he said, teasing a little. Then he fell into the familiar wheel ruts of the story, telling about his role in those days, as a National Guard commander and the interview with the troublemaking reporter. He looped back to his relationship with some of the refugees who fled the Reign to live in the Western wilderness, and an explanation of how they had been alienated from the King by his rapture of their small children.
Then he brought them all to that night in the farmhouse, when masked figures broke into the house, an aspect of the story so far from his own experience that ten-year-old Jamie regarded it the way children of his father’s generation thought of castles and knights. In painful detail, Rodney described his mistake, trying to rescue Joshua and his mother, when the King had sent people to take care of that, and how that mistake had cost little Joshua his life.
Miranda looked at Emma to see if she was crying at this point in the story, as she had many times before. She saw no sign of tears this time. When they passed dark stands of trees, she could see her mom’s peaceful, smiling reflection in the van window.
Rodney hesitated here, caught in that chasm of grief that had tried to inhale him on that night eighteen years ago.
“Dad, get to the best part.” Jamie urged him on.
The older children understood their father’s hesitation, having over the years come to embrace the grief and loss of that moment, and the weight he had felt at the realization that he had caused his little boy’s death. Rodney heeded Jamie’s provocation, however, and pushed on.
“Then, as I sat there on the floor holding that limp little body in my arms, two of the men who came to rescue us, stepped aside like two gates swung open. And there stood my daughter, Olivia, who is one of the immortals. When I saw her, at first I thought I was dreaming, so confused by my grief that I had fallen out of the present time into a time in my past. But she was real and she was there in the room where Joshua had died.”
He took a couple of deep breaths, trying not to drown under the emotion of the memory, since he was driving. He cleared his throat a little, but couldn’t begin to speak.
Miranda, seeing her father’s struggle, finished the story for him. “Then Olivia, who is our half-sister,” she said, looking over her shoulder at Jamie in the third seat, “reached out and gently took little Joshua from her father’s hands. Dad let him go, even though he didn’t even really believe that Olivia was actually there. He still had a little bit of hope that the immortals could bring his son back to life.”
She glanced over her shoulder at her older brother, to see how he was taking this remembrance. Like his mother, he looked out the window, but, unlike her, he looked solemn. Miranda vaulted over her own rising emotions and finished. “And, in Olivia’s arms, much to the shocked disbelief of both of his parents, that little limp form came to life. He squirmed and then looked up at his parents and made a gurgling sound, smiling as if nothing had happened.”
The van remained silent for a couple of minutes, even Jamie sensing the emotions choking the air around him. Rodney drove, remembering the way Joshua had looked up at Olivia as if he knew her. He cherished that knowing look exchanged between his two children, the one immortal and the other resurrected.
Finally, the older boy in the back seat broke the silence. “Thanks, Miranda and Dad, for telling the story again. It’s good to remember it today,” he said. “Thanks for requesting it, Jamie,” he added. “I was dead, but now I’m alive; and I plan to make it count,” he said, with the sort of resolution that had always heartened his parents, and that had inspired his younger siblings all of their lives.
They arrived at the high school, along with hundreds of others, many of them walking, many of the young people carrying their caps and gowns and some already wearing theirs. The high school, so empty the first day of school that classes resumed after the war, now brimmed with students. This would be the first year that graduation ceremonies would take place in the soccer stadium, due to the anticipated attendance.
Rodney dropped Joshua off in front of the school and then dropped the rest of his family by the stadium, before he went in search of a parking place. As he walked from his parking spot, a woman walking with her young son noticed him.
“Hello, Congressman,” she said waving. She looked at her son to make sure he had seen the local celebrity.
Rodney returned the greeting and wondered at the way titles stick beyond their practical use. Some folks still called him “Captain,” for his war years, others “Colonel,” for his years commanding the State National Guard, and then others, like this woman, thought of him as Congressman, from his two recent terms in Congress.
Still tracking this uncertain stream of thought, Rodney suddenly noticed Daniel dropping off Tina and their two girls near the Stadium.
“Gra
ndpa!” Rebecca shouted when she saw Rodney. The eleven-year-old ran to greet him, her curly brown hair bouncing behind her.
Debbie, the seven-year-old, followed her big sister and the two gave Rodney a combination hug, as he squatted down to meet them.
Daniel waved and then took his turn at searching for parking. Tina, a long-legged woman and a radiant mother, walked toward Rodney. She had grown more graceful in her maturity, blessed by motherhood and confident in her place in the world.
Tina and Daniel operated the Jerusalem protein shop in Somerville, now known as “The Lassah Shop,” for the name that the vegetable-based protein had acquired. Daniel had a very successful robotic counter clerk working for them there, allowing him time to tinker with his growing collection of robots, most of which he had salvaged from people who had disappeared.
As Rodney, Tina and the girls turned toward the stadium, Jamie emerged from the mid-morning shadows under the bleachers and waved, directing them toward the entrance that would lead them to Emma and the other kids. Marney saw Jamie waving and followed his directions to intersect with Rodney and Tina, exchanging hugs and compliments all around.
“Can I sit with you folks?” Marney asked.
“Of course,” Rodney said. “Emma’s staked out a spot inside.”
With Steve taking part in the ceremony, as a senior faculty member, Marney was glad to find Rodney and his family. She enjoyed Emma and Rodney’s children, as part of her decision with Steve not to have children. They were biologically unable to conceive and had decided not to seek healing for that condition.
Jamie and Rodney led the way up into the bleachers, which had thankfully been fitted with backrests that year. Rodney picked Emma out of the crowd before Jamie triumphantly revealed her location. To seat them all, the clan—plus Marney—had to sit in two rows, but that made it easier for them to talk with each other and to pass the baby around. Tina’s girls loved taking care of Betsy, cooing over her and talking to her as if she understood everything they said.
The REIGN: Out of Tribulation Page 45