The Returned

by Jason Mott

  Fred Green went on about the temptation of the Returned, about how they weren’t to be trusted.

  In Pastor Peters’s mind were all manner of scripture and proverb and canonical anecdote to serve as counterargument, but this wasn’t the church congregation. This wasn’t Sunday morning service. This was a town meeting for a town that had become disoriented in the midst of a global epidemic. An epidemic that, if there were any justice in the world, would have passed this town by, would have swept through the civilized world, through the larger cities, through New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Paris. All the places where large, important things were supposed to happen.

  “I say we round them all up somewhere,” Fred said, shaking a square, wrinkled fist at the air as a crowd of younger men huddled around him, nodding and grunting in agreement. “Maybe in the schoolhouse. Or maybe in this church here since, to hear the pastor tell it, God ain’t got no gripe with them.”

  Pastor Peters did something then which was rare for him. He yelled. He yelled so loud the church shrank into silence and his small, frail wife took several small steps back.

  “And then what?” he asked. “And then what happens to them? We lock them up in a building somewhere, and then what? What’s next?

  “How long do we hold them? A couple of days? A week? Two weeks? A month? Until this ends? And when will that be? When will the dead stop returning? And when will Arcadia be full up? When will everyone who has ever lived here come back? This little community of ours is, what, a hundred and fifty? A hundred and seventy years old? How many people is that? How many can we hold? How many can we feed and for how long?

  “And what happens when the Returned aren’t just our own anymore? You all know what’s happening. When they come back, it’s hardly ever to the place that they lived in life. So not only will we find ourselves opening our doors to those for whom this event is a homecoming, but also for those who are simply lost and in need of direction. The lonely. The ones untethered, even among the Returned. Remember the Japanese fellow over in Bladen County? Where is he now? Not in Japan, but still in Bladen County. Living with a family that was kind enough to take him in. And why? Simply because he didn’t want to go home. Whatever his life was when he died, he wanted something else. And, by the graces of good people willing to show kindness, he’s got a chance to get it back.

  “I’d pay you good money, Fred Green, to explain that one! And don’t you dare start going on about how ‘a Chinaman’s mind ain’t like ours,’ you racist old fool!”

  He could see the spark of reason and consideration—the possibility for patience—in their eyes. “So what happens when there isn’t anywhere else for them to go? What happens when the dead outnumber the living?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Fred Green said. “What happens when the dead outnumber the living? What’ll they do with us? What happens when we’re at their mercy?”

  “If that happens, and there’s no promise that it will, but if it does, we’ll hope that they’ll have been shown a good example of what mercy is…by us.”

  “That’s a goddamn fool answer! And Lord forgive me for saying that right here in the church. But it’s the truth. It’s a goddamn fool answer!”

  The volume in the church rose again. Yammering and grumbling and blind presupposing. Pastor Peters looked over at Agent Bellamy. Where God was failing, the government should pick up the slack.

  “All right! All right!” Martin Bellamy said, standing to face the crowd. He ran a hand down the front of his immaculate gray suit. Of all the people in the church, he seemed to be the only one not sweating, not suffering in the tight air and heavy heat. That was a calming thing.

  “I wouldn’t doubt if this was all the government’s fault to start with!” Fred Green said. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if we find out the government had a hand in all of this once it all washes out. Maybe you weren’t really trying to find some way to bring back everyone, but I bet them Pentagon folks could see a whole lot of benefit in being able to bring soldiers back from the dead.” Fred tightened his mouth, honing his argument on his lips. He opened his arms, as if to take all of the church into his train of thought. “Can’t y’all just see it? You send an army to war and, bam, one of your soldiers gets shot. Then you push a button or you inject him with some needle and he’s right back on his feet, gun in hand, running headlong at the son of a bitch what just killed him! It’s a damned doomsday weapon!”

  People nodded, as though he just might have convinced them or, at the very least, opened the door of suspicion.

  Agent Bellamy let the old man’s words settle over the crowd. “A doomsday weapon indeed, Mr. Green,” he began. “The type of thing nightmares are made of. Think about it—dead one minute, alive the next and getting shot at again. How many of you would sign up for such a thing? I know I wouldn’t.

  “No, Mr. Green, our government, as large and impressive as it is, doesn’t control this event any more than it controls the sun. We’re all just trying not to be trampled by it, that’s all. We’re just trying to make what progress we can.”

  It was a good word: progress. A safe word that you snuggled up against when you were nervous. The kind of word you took home to meet your parents.

  The crowd looked at Fred Green again. He hadn’t given them anything as comforting as progress. He only stood there looking old and small and angry.

  Pastor Peters moved his large frame to Agent Bellamy’s right side.

  Agent Bellamy was the worst kind of government man: an honest one. A government should never tell people that it doesn’t know any more than everyone else. If the government didn’t have the answers, then who the hell did? The least a government could do was have decency enough to lie about it. Pretend everything was in hand. Pretend that, at any moment, they’d come through with the miracle cure, the decisive military strike or, in the case of the Returned, just a simple news conference where the president sat down fireside, wearing a sweater and smoking a pipe, and said, in a very patient and soft voice, “I have the answers you need and everything will be okay.”

  But Agent Bellamy didn’t know a damned thing more than anyone else and he wasn’t ashamed of it.

  “Damn fool,” Fred said. Then he turned on his heel and left, the dense crowd parting as best they could to allow him through.

  * * *

  With Fred Green gone, things were calmer in that Southern kind of way. Everyone took turns speaking, asking their questions both toward the Bureau man as well as the pastor. The questions were the expected ones; for everyone, everywhere, in every country, in every church and town hall and auditorium and web forum and chat room, the questions were the same. The questions were asked so many times by so many people that they became boring.

  And the replies to the questions—we don’t know, give us time, please be patient—were equally boring. In this effort, the preacher and the man from the Bureau made a perfect team. One appealed to a person’s sense of civic duty. The other to a person’s sense of spiritual duty. If they hadn’t been a perfect team, it’s hard to tell exactly what the town would have done when the Wilson family appeared.

  They came from the eating hall in back of the church. They’d been living there for a week now. Mostly unseen. Rarely talked about.

  Jim and Connie Wilson, along with their two children, Tommy and Hannah, were the greatest shame and sadness the town of Arcadia had ever known.

  Murders didn’t happen in Arcadia.

  But this one had. All those years ago the Wilson family was shot and killed one night in their own home, and the perpetrator never found. Lots of theories floated around. Early on, there was a lot of talk about a drifter by the name of Ben Watson. He had no home to speak of and moved from town to town like some migratory bird. He came through Arcadia usually in the winter and would be found holed up in somebody’s barn, trying to get by unnoticed for as long as he could. But no one had ever known him to be the violent type; and when the Wilsons were killed,
Ben Watson was two counties away, sitting in a jail cell on charges of public drunkenness.

  Other theories came and went with an ever-degrading scope of believability. There was talk of a secret affair—sometimes Jim was to blame, sometimes Connie—but that didn’t last very long on account of how Jim was only ever at work, church or home and Connie was only ever at home, church or with her children. More than that, the simple truth was that Jim and Connie had been high school sweethearts, only ever tied to each other.

  Straying just wasn’t in the DNA of their love.

  In life, the Wilsons had spent a great deal of time with Lucille. Jim, who had never really been the type to do as much family research as some others, took Lucille at her word when she told him they were related by way of a great-aunt (the name of whom she could never quite pin down) and came to visit when Lucille asked.

  No one turns down the chance to be treated as family.

  For Lucille—and this is something she did not allow herself to understand until years after their deaths—watching Jim and Connie live and work and raise their two children was a chance to see the life that she, herself, had almost had. The life that Jacob’s death had taken away from her.

  How could she not call them family, have them be a part of her world?

  In the long years that followed the murder of the Wilson family, it was eventually agreed upon by folks—in that silent, unspoken way small-town people have of consenting to things—that the culprit couldn’t have been anyone from Arcadia. It had to be someone else. It had to be the rest of the world that had done it, that had found this special and secret part of the map where these people lived their quiet lives, that had come in and ended all the peace and quiet they’d ever known.

  Everyone watched in a pensive silence as the small family emerged, one by one, from the door at the back of the church. Jim and Connie walked in front; little Tommy and Hannah followed quietly. The crowd parted like heavy batter.

  Jim Wilson was a young man, barely past thirty-five, blond hair, broad shoulders, a stiff, square chin. He looked like the kind of man who was always building something. Always engaged in some manner of productivity. Always furthering the slow crawl of humanity’s progress against the perpetual hunger of entropy. This was why the town had loved him so in life. He had been what the people of Arcadia were supposed to be: polite, hardworking, well mannered, Southern. But now, as one of the Returned, he reminded them all of what they had not known they could be.

  “You’re all walking up to the big question,” Jim said in a low voice, “the one you asked earlier on tonight and left hanging out there. The question about what’s to be done with us.”

  Pastor Peters interrupted. “Now, now. There’s nothing ‘to be done with you.’ You’re people. You need a place to live. We’ve got room for you.”

  “They can’t stay here forever,” someone said. Voices in the crowd grumbled in agreement. “Something’s got to be done with them.”

  “I just wanted to say thank you,” Jim Wilson said. He had planned to say so much more, but it was all gone now—now that the entirety of Arcadia was staring at him. Some of them staring a bit less friendly than others. “I just…I just wanted to say thank you,” Jim Wilson repeated. Then he turned and, taking his family with him, exited the same way he had come.

  After that, everyone seemed to have trouble finding what to ask or what to say or what to argue about. Folks milled about for a while, grumbling and whispering now and again, but to no real consequence. Everyone felt suddenly tired and burdened.

  Agent Bellamy gave everyone a final round of reassurances as they began trickling out of the church. He shook their hands and smiled as they passed and, when they asked him, he would say that he would do everything he could to understand why all of this was happening. He told them he would stay “until things are sorted out.”

  The sorting out of things was what people expected from the government, so they put their fears and suspicions away for now.

  Eventually there was only the pastor, his wife and the Wilson family, who, not wishing to cause any more problems than they already had, stayed quietly in their room in the back of the church—away from everyone’s sight and remembrance—as if they had never returned at all.

  * * *

  “I imagine Fred had a fair amount of things to say,” Harold said as Lucille settled into the truck. She wrestled with Jacob’s seat belt, huffing and making hard movements with her hands.

  “They’re just all so…so…irregular!” The click of Jacob’s seat belt punctuated her sentence. She turned the knob at the window. After a few hard tugs, it broke free and opened. Lucille folded her arms over her chest.

  Harold turned the truck’s ignition. It started with a roar. “Your mama’s been biting her tongue again, I see, Jacob. Probably sat there that whole meeting not saying nothing, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jacob said, looking up at his father with a smile.

  “Don’t you do that,” Lucille said. “Just don’t you two do that!”

  “She didn’t get a chance to use any of her fancy words, and you know what that does to her, don’t you? You remember?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m not playing with you two,” Lucille said, fighting laughter in spite of herself. “I’ll get out right now and you’ll never see me again.”

  “Did somebody else get to use a really fancy word?”

  “Doomsday.”

  “Oh…that. It’s a fancy way word for sure. ‘Doomsday’ is what happens when you spend too much time in church. That’s why I don’t go.”

  “Harold Hargrave!”

  “How’s the pastor? He’s a good Mississippi boy, in spite of his religion.”

  “He gave me candy,” Jacob said.

  “That was nice of him, wasn’t it?” Harold asked, wrestling the truck up the dark road toward home. “He’s a good man, ain’t he?”

  * * *

  The church was quiet now. Pastor Peters came into his small office and settled at the dark, wooden table. In the distance, a truck was gurgling down the street. Everything was simple, and that was a good thing.

  The letter lay in the drawer of his desk, beneath stacks of books, assorted papers needing his signature, sermons in various stages of completion and all the general clutter that slowly marches over an office. In the far corner, an old lamp stood throwing a dim, amber glow over the room. Lining the walls of the office were Pastor Peters’s bookcases, all of them stacked beyond capacity. His books gave him little comfort these days. A single letter had undone all their work, stripped away all the comfort that words can offer.

  The letter read:

  Dear Mr. Robert Peters,

  The International Bureau of the Returned would like to inform you that you are being actively sought after by one of the Returned by the name of Elizabeth Pinch. As is our policy in this situation, no information outside the family of the Returned is ever given. In most cases, these individuals seek out their families first, but Miss Pinch has expressed a desire to locate you. Per Code 17, Article 21, of Returned Regulations Policy, you are hereby notified.

  Pastor Peters stared down at the letter and was, just as he had been upon first reading it, uncertain of everything in his life.

  Jean Rideau

  “You should be with a young woman,” she told Jean. “She would be able to keep up with you during all of this.” She settled onto the small, iron-framed bed, huffing. “You’re famous now. I’m just an old woman in the way.”

  The young artist crossed the room and knelt beside her. He rested his head in her lap and kissed the inside of her hand, which only made her aware of the wrinkles and liver spots that had begun showing upon that hand in recent years. “It’s all because of you,” he said.

  He had been a part of her life for over thirty years—since she was fumbling her way through college so long ago and had come across the work of an overlooked artist who died by running into traffic one balmy summer’s night in 19
21 Paris—and now she had him, had not only his love, but his flesh, as well, completely. And that frightened her.

  Outside, the street had finally quieted. The crowd had been scattered by the policemen.

  “If I had only been this famous years past,” he said. “Perhaps my life would have been different.”

  “Artists are only ever appreciated posthumously.” She smiled, stroking his hair. “Nobody ever expected one would return to redeem his accolades.”

  She spent years studying his work, his life, never imagining that she would be here with him, like this, smelling the scent of him, feeling the wiry texture of a beard he desperately wanted but had always had poor luck growing. They sat up nights, talking about everything but his art. The press was doing enough of that. Jean Rideau: Return of the Artists, one of the more popular headlines had proclaimed.

  He was the first of the artistic deluge, the article declared. “A genius sculptor returns! Not long before the masters are back with us!”

  So he was famous now. Work he’d made nearly a hundred years ago, work that never sold for more than a few hundred francs, now went for millions. And then there were the fans.

  But all Jean wanted was Marissa.

  “You kept me alive,” he said, nuzzling his head into her lap like a cat. “You kept my work alive when no one else knew me.”

  “I’m your steward, then,” she said. With her wrist, she pushed loose strands of her hair from her face—hair that was a bit more gray and a bit more thin each day. “Is that what I am?”

  He looked up at her with calm, blue eyes—even in the grainy, black-and-white photos of him that she had studied for years, she had known they were this particular, beautiful blue. “I do not care about our ages,” he said. “I was only an average artist. I know now that my art was meant to lead me to you.”

  Then he kissed her.