by Jason Mott
“We now go to the president of the United States,” he said suddenly.
“Here it is,” Harold said.
“Shush! You’re just a pessimist.”
“I’m a realist.”
“You’re a misanthrope!”
“You’re a Baptist!”
“You’re bald!”
They went back and forth this way until they caught what the president was saying. “…stay confined to their homes until further notice.” Then the bickering stopped.
“What was that?” Lucille asked.
Then the words were on the bottom of the television screen, just like most information in the modern world. President Orders Returned Confined to Their Homes.
“Dear Lord,” Lucille said, going pale.
* * *
Outside, far away on the highway, the trucks were coming. Lucille and Harold could not see them, but that did nothing to make them any less real. They carried change and irrevocability, consequence and permanency.
They rumbled like thunder over the asphalt, bringing all these things, rumbling toward Arcadia.
Gou Jun Pei
The soldiers helped him from the back of the van and led him silently into a tall, alabaster-colored building with deep, square windows and an overall impression of seriousness about it. He asked them where he was being taken, but they would not answer him, so he soon quit asking.
Inside the building, the soldiers left him in a small room with what looked like a hospital bed in the center. He paced around the room, still tired of sitting from the long ride to wherever he now was.
Then the doctors came in.
There were two of them, and they asked him to sit on the table and, when he was seated, they took turns poking and prodding him. They took his blood pressure and checked his eyes for whatever it was doctors check one’s eyes for. They tested reflexes and drew blood and on and on, all the while refusing to answer his questions when he asked, “Where am I? Who are you? Why do you want my blood? Where is my wife?”
Hours passed before their testing was done and still they had not answered him or even acknowledged anything he said. Eventually he found himself naked and cold and tired and sore and feeling like a thing more than a person.
“We’re done,” one of the doctors said. Then they left.
He stood there, naked and cold and afraid, watching the door shut and being locked into a room whose location he did not know, at the behest of people he did not know.
“What did I do?” he said to no one. But only the sound of the empty cell in which he was now left alone answered him back. It was a loneliness not unlike that of the grave.
Seven
HAROLD AND LUCILLE sat on the porch, just as they usually did. The sun was high and the world was hot, but a breeze rolled up out of the west from time to time to keep things from getting unbearable, which both Harold and Lucille thought was very considerate on the world’s part.
Harold sat and puffed quietly on a cigarette, doing what he could to keep the ashes off the new khaki pants and blue work shirt Lucille had bought him. Their usual quarreling and jibing settled into an uneasy silence of hard looks, body language and new pairs of pants.
It started around the time the Returned were ordered confined to their homes and the Wilson family had gone missing from the church. The pastor had said he didn’t know what happened to them, but Harold had his own thoughts on that. Fred Green had done a good enough job in the past few weeks of stirring everyone up about the Wilsons staying in the church.
Sometimes Harold thought about who Fred used to be. How, once upon a time, he and Mary came over for Sunday dinner and she would stand in the middle of the living room singing in that high, beautiful voice of hers and Fred would sit there watching her like a child that’s come upon a gleaming carnival in the middle of a dark and lonely forest.
But then she died of breast cancer that had developed when she was still so young that no one thought to check for such things. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, but Fred had taken all the blame on himself and, well, nowadays he wasn’t who he had been that day in 1966, when he trudged through the brush at Harold’s side, searching for the boy they would both have the horror of finding together.
* * *
The wind swept over the earth and there came the sounds of large, heavy trucks grumbling through their gears. Though the construction was all the way over at the school, over in the heart of Arcadia, it was clear and discernible, like a promise intended solely for the couple.
“What do you suppose they’re building?” Lucille asked, gently working her hands at fixing a blanket that had gotten torn at some point over the winter. Now was as good a time as any to repair broken things.
Harold only puffed his cigarette and watched Jacob mill about playfully in the dappled sunlight beneath the oak tree. The boy was singing. Harold did not recognize the song.
“What do you suppose they’re building?” Lucille asked, raising her voice a little.
“Cages,” Harold said, blowing a great, gray cloud of smoke.
“Cages?”
“For the dead.”
Lucille stopped sewing. She tossed the blanket to the porch and neatly placed her sewing tools in their containers. “Jacob, honey?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Go out farther in the yard and play, baby. Go look over in those bushes by the magnolias and see if you can find us some blackberries. That’ll be something tasty for after dinner, won’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
With the new quest from his mother, the boy’s stick became a sword. He shouted a small battle cry and raced off toward the magnolias on the western edge of the property.
“Stay where I can see you!” Lucille yelled. “Do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jacob yelled back; already he was assaulting the magnolias with his makeshift cutlass. He didn’t often get permission to wander off, even just a little, and it felt good.
Lucille stood and walked to the porch railing. She wore a green dress with white stitching around the collar and safety pins clipped into the sleeves because, at home, she often expected to suddenly need a safety pin. Her silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail. A few strands fell across her brow.
Her hip hurt from sitting so long—that and playing with Jacob. She groaned and rubbed it and sighed a small, frustrated sigh. She placed her hands on the railing and stared down at the ground.
“I won’t stand for it.”
Harold took a deep pull on his cigarette, then he outed it on the heel of his shoe. He let the last lungful of nicotine slide from his body. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t use that word. I’ll say ‘Returned’ instead, though I can’t say I quite understand exactly how that’s any better of a word for them. Would you want to be called ‘Returned’? Like some kind of damn package?”
“You could just try calling them people.”
“But they’re not pe—” He could see in his wife’s eyes that now wasn’t the best time to say such a thing. “It’s just that they’re a…unique group of people, is all. It’s like saying somebody’s a Republican or a Democrat. It’s like calling somebody out by their blood type.” He rubbed his chin nervously, surprised to find stubble there. How had he forgotten something as basic as shaving? “At the very least,” Harold continued, pushing the mystery of the stubble from his mind, “we need to be able to call them something so we know who it is we’re talking about.”
“They’re not dead. They’re not ‘Returned.’ They’re people, plain and simple.”
“You have to admit they’re a special group of people.”
“He’s your son, Harold.”
Harold looked her squarely in the eyes. “My son is dead.”
“No. He’s not. He’s right over there.” She raised a finger and pointed.
Silence then. A silence filled only by the sound of the wind and the sound of the construction happening in the distance and the light clatter of Jacob’s stick clacking
against the trunks of the magnolia trees along the ditch bank.
“They’re building cages for them,” Harold said.
“They wouldn’t do anything like that. Nobody knows what to do with them. There’s just too many of them. Everywhere you turn there’s more and more of them. As crazy as those fools on the television might be, it’s true that we don’t know anything about them.”
“That’s not what you said before. ‘Devils.’ Remember that?”
“Well, that was before. I’ve learned since then. The Lord has shown me the error of a closed heart.”
Harold huffed. “Hell. You sound like them fanatics on the TV. The ones who want to grant living sainthood to every one of them.”
“They’re affected by miracles.”
“They’re not affected. They’re infected. By something. Why else you think the government said for them all to stay at home. Why else do you think they’re building cages over there in town right now as we speak?
“I seen it with my own eyes, Lucille. Just yesterday when I went into town for groceries. Everywhere you look there’s soldiers and guns and Humvees and trucks and fences. Miles upon miles of fences. Stacked on top of trucks. Loaded up in piles. And every able-bodied soldier that wasn’t holding a gun was going about the business of putting up that fencing. Ten feet tall. Solid steel. Rolls of razor wire along the top. They got most of it surrounding the school. They done took over the whole building. Ain’t been a class held there since the president was on TV. I guess they figure we ain’t got all that many children in this little town, anyhow—which is true—so it wouldn’t be much harm in having us use some other place as a schoolhouse while they turned the real school into a death camp.”
“Was that supposed to be a joke?”
“A pun at least. Want me to try again?”
“Shut up!” Lucille stamped her foot. “You expect the worst out of people. You always have. And that’s why your mind is knotted up the way it is. That’s why you’re not able to see the miracle that’s laid out before you.”
“August 15, 1966.”
Lucille marched across the porch and slapped her husband. The sound of it rang out over the yard like a small-caliber gunshot.
“Mama?”
Jacob was there, suddenly, like a shadow grown out of the earth. Lucille was still trembling, her veins full of adrenaline and anger and grief. Her palm tingled. She clenched and released her hand, not certain, just then, whether or not it still belonged to her.
“What is it, Jacob?”
“I need a bowl.”
The boy stood at the bottom of the porch steps, his T-shirt forming a small pouch at the belly, full to bursting with blackberries. His mouth was stained blue-black and bent at a nervous angle.
“Okay, honey,” Lucille said.
She opened the screen door and ushered Jacob inside. The two of them went slowly into the kitchen, taking care not to spill any of the precious cargo. Lucille dug through the cabinets and found a bowl she liked and she and her son went about the business of washing the berries.
* * *
Harold sat alone on the porch. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t want a cigarette. Lucille had only slapped him once before. Years and years and years ago. So long ago that he hardly remembered why she had done it. It had something to do with a comment he’d made about her mother. This was back when they were younger and cared about such comments.
All he knew for certain was that then, just like now, he’d done something very wrong.
He sat in his chair and cleared his throat and looked around for something to distract him. But there was nothing. So he sat and listened.
All he heard was his son.
It was as if there was nothing else in the world but Jacob. And he thought, or perhaps dreamed, that this was the way it had always been. In his mind he watched years pass. Spiraling out from 1966. This vision terrified him. He’d gotten along just fine after Jacob’s death, hadn’t he? He was proud of himself, proud of his life. There wasn’t anything to regret. He hadn’t done anything wrong, had he?
His right hand went to his pocket. At the bottom of his right pocket, next to his lighter and some stray coins, Harold’s hand found the small, silver cross, the same one that seemed to appear out of nowhere weeks ago, the one rubbed smooth by time and wear.
There was an idea in his mind then. An idea or a feeling so sharp it felt like an idea. It was submerged in the murky depths of his memory, buried somewhere near thoughts of his own father and mother, who had become little more than a grainy still-image buried beneath dim lamplight in his mind.
Perhaps this thing, this idea or feeling that was on his mind, was something else more tangible, like parenting. He thought a lot about parenting these days. Fifty years of being off the job and now he was too old to run the thing properly, but he’d been drafted again by some strange turn of fate—Harold refused to give the credit to any particular deity on account of how he and God still weren’t on speaking terms.
Harold thought about what it meant to be a parent. He’d only done it for eight years, but they had been eight years that wouldn’t let him go once they had passed. He’d never told Lucille, but in that first decade after Jacob had died Harold had been prone to sudden bouts of indefinable emotion that would come crashing over him like an ocean swell, sometimes when he was driving home from work. Nowadays they called them “panic attacks.”
Harold didn’t like to think of himself being linked with anything having to do with “panic,” but he had to admit that panic is exactly what he felt. His hands would go to trembling and his heart beat like there was a herd of cattle in his rib cage and he would pull over to the side of the road and, body shuddering, light a cigarette and suck on it for all he was worth. His heart thumped between his temples. Even his damn eyes seemed to throb.
And then it would be gone. Sometimes, it left behind some fleeting memory of Jacob, like staring into a full, luminous moon and carrying it with you when your eyes closed and there was supposed to be only darkness.
Just now, with that little silver cross between his fingers, Harold thought he felt one of those attacks coming on. His eyes began to well up. And as any man does when faced with the raw terror of emotion, he surrendered to his wife and buried his thoughts below the anvil of his heart.
“Okay,” he said.
* * *
The two of them moved across the yard in tandem. Harold stepped slowly and evenly, Jacob circled. “Just spend some time with him,” Lucille had finally said. “Just the two of you. Go do something, the way you used to. It’s what he needs.” Now here they were, Harold and his Returned son, walking the earth, and Harold didn’t have the slightest idea what they should do.
So they simply walked.
They walked out over the yard, then past the end of the property and out to the dirt road, which eventually led them to the highway. In spite of the decree that all Returned should stay in their homes, Harold took his son to where the military trucks were passing along the sun-baked asphalt, to where the soldiers would look out from their trucks and Humvees and see the young Returned boy and the withered old man.
Harold was unsure if it was fear or relief he felt when one of the passing Humvees braked, turned in the median and came rumbling back down the highway toward him. For Jacob, it was certainly fear. He held his father’s hand and stood behind his leg, peeking around as the vehicle crept to a halt.
“Good afternoon,” a square-headed, fortysomething soldier said from the passenger window. He had blond hair, a hard jawline and cold, distant blue eyes.
“Hello,” Harold said.
“How are you gentlemen doing today?”
“We’re alive.”
The soldier laughed. He tilted forward in his seat, looking Jacob over. “And what’s your name, sir?”
“Me?”
“Yes, sir,” the soldier said. “My name’s Colonel Willis. What’s your name?”
The boy came out from behind hi
s father. “Jacob.”
“How old are you, Jacob?”
“I’m eight, sir.”
“Wow. That’s a really good age to be! It’s been a long time since I was eight. Do you know how old I am? Take a guess.”
“Twenty-five?”
“Not even close! But thank you.” The colonel grinned, his arm resting in the window of the Humvee. “I’m almost fifty.”
“Wow!”
“You’re darn right ‘wow!’ I’m an old, old man.” Then the colonel turned to Harold. “How are you today, sir?” His voice was hard now.
“I’m fine.”
“Your name, sir?”
“Harold. Harold Hargrave.”
Colonel Willis looked over his shoulder at a younger soldier in the truck. The younger soldier wrote something down. “Where are you two gentlemen headed on such a fine day?” the colonel asked. He looked up at the gold sun and the blue sky and the small pods of clouds lazily making their way from one end of the earth to the other.
“Nowhere in particular,” Harold said, not looking at the sky, but keeping his eyes trained on the Humvee. “We’re just stretching our legs.”
“How much longer do you think you’ll be out here ‘leg-stretching’? Do you gentlemen need a ride home?”
“We found our way out here,” Harold replied. “We can find our way back.”
“Just offering to help, Mr.—Hargrave, was it? Harold Hargrave?”
Harold took Jacob by the hand and they stood as statues until the colonel understood. Colonel Willis turned and said something to the young soldier in the driver’s seat. He nodded at the old man and his Returned son.
The Humvee rattled to life and drove away with a roar.
“He was nice enough,” Jacob said, “for a colonel.”
* * *
Harold’s instincts told him to head home again, but Jacob led them in a different direction. The boy turned north and, still holding his father’s hand, took them into the underbrush of the forest and then beyond, into the body of the forest itself. They strolled beneath the pines and scattered white oaks. Now and again they could hear some animal bound away in the near distance. Then there would be the sound of birds lifting off from the treetops. Then only the wind, smelling of the earth and the pines and a sky far off in the distance that might, eventually, turn to rain.