by Jason Mott
* * *
When the emotion had died down and the hugging and all stopped in the doorway of the Hargraves’ little house—nearly a half hour later—Jacob was moved into the kitchen where he could sit at the table and catch up on all the eating he’d missed in his absence. The Bureau man sat in the living room with Harold and Lucille, took his stacks of paperwork from a brown, leather briefcase and got down to business.
“When did the returning individual originally die?” asked the Bureau man, who—for a second time—revealed his name as Agent Martin Bellamy.
“Do we have to say that?” Lucille asked. She inhaled and sat straighter in her seat, suddenly looking very regal and discriminating, having finally straightened her long, silver hair that had come undone while fawning over her son.
“Say what?” Harold replied.
“She means ‘die,’” Agent Bellamy said.
Lucille nodded.
“What’s wrong with saying he died?” Harold asked, his voice louder than he’d planned. Jacob was still within eyesight, if mostly out of earshot.
“Shush!”
“He died,” Harold said. “No sense in pretending he didn’t.” He didn’t notice, but his voice was lower now.
“Martin Bellamy knows what I mean,” Lucille said. She wrung her hands in her lap, looking for Jacob every few seconds, as if he were a candle in a house of drafts.
Agent Bellamy smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “This is pretty common, actually. I should have been more considerate. Let’s start again, shall we?” He looked down at his questionnaire. “When did the returning individual—”
“Where are you from?”
“Sir?”
“Where are you from?” Harold was standing by the window looking out at the blue sky.
“You sound like a New Yorker,” Harold said.
“Is that good or bad?” Agent Bellamy asked, pretending he had not been asked about his accent a dozen times since being assigned to the Returned of southern North Carolina.
“It’s horrible,” Harold said. “But I’m a forgiving man.”
“Jacob,” Lucille interrupted. “Call him Jacob, please. His name is Jacob.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Agent Bellamy said. “I’m sorry. I should know better by now.”
“Thank you, Martin Bellamy,” Lucille said. Again, somehow, her hands were fists in her lap. She breathed deeply and, with concentration, unfolded them. “Thank you, Martin Bellamy,” she said again.
“When did Jacob leave?” Agent Bellamy asked again softly.
“August 15, 1966,” Harold said. He moved into the doorway, looking unsettled. He licked his lips. His hands took turns moving from the pockets of his worn, old pants up to his worn, old lips, finding no peace—or cigarette—on either side of the journey.
Agent Bellamy made notes.
“How did it happen?”
* * *
The word Jacob became an incantation that day as the searchers looked for the boy. At regular intervals the call went up. “Jacob! Jacob Hargrave!” And then another voice lifted the name and passed it down the line. “Jacob! Jacob!”
In the beginning their voices trampled upon one another in a cacophony of fear and desperation. But then the boy was not quickly found and, to save their throats, the men and women of the search party took turns shouting out as the sun turned gold and dripped down the horizon and was swallowed first by the tall trees and then by the low brush.
Then they were all trudging drunkenly—exhausted from high-stepping through the dense bramble, wrung out from worry. Fred Green was there with Harold. “We’ll find him,” Fred said again and again. “Did you see that look in his eyes when he unwrapped that BB gun I gave him? You ever seen a boy so excited?” Fred huffed, his legs burning from fatigue. “We’ll find him.” He nodded. “We’ll find him.”
Then it was full-on night and the bushy, pine-laden landscape of Arcadia sparkled with the glow of flashlights.
When they neared the river Harold was glad he’d talked Lucille into staying back at the house—“He might come back,” he had said, “and he’ll want his mama”—because he knew, by whatever means such things are known, that he would find his son in the river.
Harold sloshed knee-deep in the shallows—slowly, taking a step, calling the boy’s name, pausing to listen out in case he should be somewhere nearby, calling back, taking another step, calling the boy’s name again, and on and on.
When he finally came upon the body, the moonlight and the water had shone the boy to a haunting and beautiful silver, the same color as the glimmering water.
“Dear God,” Harold said. And that was the last time he would ever say it.
* * *
Harold told the story, hearing suddenly all the years in his voice. He sounded like an old man, hardened and rough. Now and again as he spoke, he would reach a thick, wrinkled hand to run over the few thin, gray strands still clinging to his scalp. His hands were decorated with liver spots and his knuckles were swollen from the arthritis that sometimes bothered him. It didn’t bother him as badly as it did some other people his age, but it did just enough to remind him of the wealth of youth that was not his anymore. Even as he spoke, his lower back jolted with a small twinge of pain.
Hardly any hair. Mottled skin. His large, round head. His wrinkled, wide ears. Clothes that seemed to swallow him up no matter how hard Lucille tried to find something that fit him better. No doubt about it: he was an old man now.
Something about having Jacob back—still young and vibrant—made Harold Hargrave realize his age.
Lucille, just as old and gray as her husband, only looked away as he spoke, only watched her eight-year-old son sit at the kitchen table eating a slice of pecan pie as if, just now, it were 1966 again and nothing was wrong and nothing would ever be wrong again. Sometimes she would clear a silver strand of hair from her face, but if she caught sight of her thin, liver-spotted hands, they did not seem to bother her.
They were a pair of thin, wiry birds, Harold and Lucille. She outgrew him in these later years. Or, rather, he shrank faster than she so that, now, he had to look up at her when they argued. And Lucille also had the benefit of not wasting away quite as much as he had—something she blamed upon his years of cigarette smoking. Her dresses still fit her. Her thin, long arms were nimble and articulate where his, hidden beneath the puffiness of shirts that fit him too loosely, made him look a bit more vulnerable than he used to. Which was giving her an edge these days.
Lucille took pride in that, and did not feel quite so guilty about it, even though she sometimes thought she should.
Agent Bellamy wrote until his hand cramped and then he wrote more. He’d had the forethought to record the interview, but he still found it good policy to write things down, as well. People seemed offended if they met with a government man and nothing was written down. This worked for Agent Bellamy. His brain was the type that preferred to see things rather than hear them. If he didn’t write it all down now he’d just be stuck doing it later.
Bellamy wrote from the time the birthday party began that day in 1966. He wrote through the recounting of Lucille’s weeping and guilt—she’d been the last one to see Jacob alive; she only remembered a brief image of one of his pale arms as he darted around a corner, chasing one of the other children. Bellamy wrote that there were almost more people at the funeral than the church could hold.
But there were parts of the interview that he did not write. Details that, out of respect, he committed only to memory rather than to bureaucratic documentation.
Harold and Lucille had survived the boy’s death, but only just. The next fifty-odd years became infected with a peculiar type of loneliness, a tactless loneliness that showed up unbidden and began inappropriate conversations over Sunday dinner. It was a loneliness they never named and seldom talked about. They only shuffled around it with their breaths held, day in and day out, as if it were an atom smasher—reduced in scale but not in complexity or splendor—sud
denly shown up in the center of the living room and dead set on affirming all the most ominous and far-fetched speculations of the harsh way the universe genuinely worked.
In its own way, that was a truth of sorts.
Over the years they not only became accustomed to hiding from their loneliness, they became skilled at it. It was a game, almost: don’t talk about the Strawberry Festival, because he had loved it; don’t stare too long at buildings you admire because they will remind you of the time you said he would grow into an architect one day; ignore the children in whose face you see him.
When Jacob’s birthday came around each year they would spend the day being somber and having difficulty making conversation. Lucille might take to weeping with no explanation, or Harold might smoke a little more that day than he had the day before.
But that was only in the beginning. Only in those first, sad years.
They grew older.
Doors closed.
Harold and Lucille had become so far removed from the tragedy of Jacob’s death that when the boy reappeared at their front door—smiling, still perfectly assembled and unaged, still their blessed son, still only eight years old—all of it was so far away that Harold had forgotten the boy’s name.
* * *
Then Harold and Lucille were done talking and there was silence. But despite its solemnity, it was short-lived. Because there was the sound of Jacob sitting at the kitchen table raking his fork across his plate, gulping down his lemonade and burping with great satisfaction. “Excuse me,” the boy yelled to his parents.
Lucille smiled.
“Forgive me for asking this,” Agent Bellamy began. “And please, don’t take this as any type of accusation. It’s simply something we have to ask in order to better understand these…unique circumstances.”
“Here it comes,” Harold said. His hands had finally stopped foraging for phantom cigarettes and settled into his pockets. Lucille waved her hand dismissively.
“What were things like between you and Jacob before?” Agent Bellamy asked.
Harold snorted. His body finally decided his right leg would better hold his weight than his left. He looked at Lucille. “This is the part where we’re supposed to say we drove him off or something. Like they do on TV. We’re supposed to say that we’d had a fight with him, denied him supper, or some kind of abuse like you see on TV. Something like that.” Harold walked over to a small table that stood in the hallway facing the front door. In the top drawer was a fresh pack of cigarettes.
Before he’d even made his way back to the living room Lucille opened fire. “You will not!”
Harold opened the wrapper with mechanical precision, as if his hands were not his own. He placed a cigarette, unlit, between his lips and scratched his wrinkled face and exhaled, long and slow. “That’s all I needed,” he said. “That’s all.”
Agent Bellamy spoke softly. “I’m not trying to say that you or anyone else caused your son’s…well, I’m running out of euphemisms.” He smiled. “I’m only asking. The Bureau is trying hard to make heads or tails of this, just like everyone else. We might be in charge of helping to connect people up with one another, but that doesn’t mean we have any inside knowledge into how any of this is working. Or why it’s happening.” He shrugged his shoulders. “The big questions are still big, still untouchable. But our hope is that by finding out everything we can, by asking the questions that everyone might not necessarily be comfortable answering, we can touch some of these big questions. Get a handle on them, before they get out of hand.”
Lucille leaned forward on the old couch. “And how might they get out of hand? Are things getting out of hand?”
“They will,” Harold said. “Bet your Bible on that.”
Agent Bellamy only shook his head in an even, professional manner and returned to his original question. “What were things like between you and Jacob before he left?”
Lucille could feel Harold coming up with an answer, so she answered to keep him silent. “Things were fine,” she said. “Just fine. Nothing strange whatsoever. He was our boy and we loved him just like any parent should. And he loved us back. And that’s all that it was. That’s all it still is. We love him and he loves us and now, by the grace of God, we’re back together again.” She rubbed her neck and lifted her hands. “It’s a miracle,” she said.
Martin Bellamy took notes.
“And you?” he asked Harold.
Harold only took his unlit cigarette from his mouth and rubbed his head and nodded. “She said it all.”
More note-taking.
“I’m going to ask a silly question now, but are either of you very religious?”
“Yes!” Lucille said, sitting suddenly erect. “Fan and friend of Jesus! And proud of it. Amen.” She nodded in Harold’s direction. “That one there, he’s the heathen. Dependent wholly on the grace of God. I keep telling him to repent, but he’s stubborn as a mule.”
Harold chuckled like an old lawn mower. “We take religion in turns,” he said. “Fifty-some years later, it’s still not my turn, thankfully.”
Lucille waved her hands.
“Denomination?” Agent Bellamy asked, writing.
“Baptist,” Lucille answered.
“For how long?”
“All my life.”
Notes.
“Well, that ain’t exactly right,” Lucille added.
Agent Bellamy paused.
“For a while there I was a Methodist. But me and the pastor couldn’t see eye to eye on certain points in the Word. I tried one of them Holiness churches, too, but I just couldn’t keep up with them. Too much hollering and singing and dancing. Felt like I was at a party first and in the house of the Lord second. And that ain’t no way for a Christian to be.” Lucille leaned to see that Jacob was still where he was supposed to be—he was half nodding at the table, just as he had always been apt to—then she continued. “And then there was a while when I tried being—”
“The man doesn’t need all of this,” Harold interrupted.
“You hush up! He asked me! Ain’t that right, Martin Bellamy?”
The agent nodded. “Yes, ma’am, you’re right. All of this may prove very important. In my experience, it’s the little details that matter. Especially with something this big.”
“Just how big is it?” Lucille asked quickly, as if she had been waiting for the opening.
“Do you mean how many?” Bellamy asked.
Lucille nodded.
“Not terribly many,” Bellamy said in a measured voice. “I’m not allowed to give any specific numbers, but it’s only a small phenomenon, a modest number.”
“Hundreds?” Lucille pressed. “Thousands? What’s ‘modest’?”
“Not enough to be concerned about, Mrs. Hargrave,” Bellamy replied, shaking his head. “Only enough to remain miraculous.”
Harold chuckled. “He’s got your number,” he said.
Lucille only smiled.
* * *
By the time the details were all handed over to Agent Bellamy the sun had sighed into the darkness of the earth and there were crickets singing outside the window and Jacob lay quietly in the middle of Harold and Lucille’s bed. Lucille had taken great pleasure in lifting the boy from the kitchen table and carrying him up to the bedroom. She never would have believed that, at her age, with her hip the way it was, that she had the strength to carry him by herself.
But when the time came, when she bent quietly at the table and placed her arms beneath the boy and called her body into action, Jacob rose, almost weightlessly, to meet her. It was as if she were in her twenties again. Young and nimble. It was as if time and pain were but rumors.
She carried him uneventfully up the stairs and, when she had tucked him beneath the covers, she settled onto the bed beside him and hummed gently the way she used to. He did not fall asleep just then, but that was okay, she felt.
He had slept long enough.
Lucille sat for a while only watching him, watchi
ng his chest rise and fall, afraid to take her eyes away, afraid that the magic—or the miracle—might suddenly end. But it did not, and she thanked the Lord.
When she came back into the living room Harold and Agent Bellamy were entangled in an awkward silence. Harold stood in the doorway, taking sharp puffs of a lit cigarette and throwing the smoke through the screen door into the night. Agent Bellamy stood next to the chair where he’d been sitting. He looked thirsty and tired all of a sudden. Lucille realized then that she hadn’t offered him a drink since he’d arrived, and that made her hurt in an unusual way. But, from Harold and Agent Bellamy’s behavior, she knew, somehow, that they were about to hurt her in a different way.
“He’s got something to ask you, Lucille,” Harold said. His hand trembled as he put the cigarette to his mouth. Because of this she made the decision to let him smoke unharassed.
“What is it?”
“Maybe you’ll want to sit down,” Agent Bellamy said, making a motion to come and help her sit.
Lucille took a step back. “What is it?”
“It’s a sensitive question.”
“I can tell. But it can’t be as bad as all that, now can it?”
Harold gave her his back and puffed silently on his cigarette with his head hung.
“For everyone,” Agent Bellamy began, “this is a question that can seem simple at first but, believe me, it is a very complex and serious matter. And I hope that you would take a moment to consider it thoroughly before you answer. Which isn’t to say that you only have one chance to answer. But only to say that I just want you to be sure that you’ve given the question its proper consideration before you make a decision. It’ll be difficult but, if possible, try not to let your emotions get the better of you.”
Lucille went red. “Why, Mr. Martin Bellamy! I never would have figured you for one of those sexist types. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I’m going to go all to pieces.”
“Dammit, Lucille,” Harold barked, though his voice seemed to have trouble finding its legs. “Just listen to the man.” He coughed then. Or perhaps he sobbed.