The Returned

by Jason Mott

  “What is it?” she asked, feeling her heart take a sudden, southerly route. It was in Harold’s voice, all of it.

  “Would you just sit down!” Harold barked. He kept rubbing his mouth. His lips went back and forth in small, cigarette-size circles. He sat at the kitchen table. Then he stood. Then he sat again.

  “Shot,” he said finally, almost in a whisper. “All of them. Shot and killed. Jim found dead in the hallway. Shotgun just beyond his reach, like he was going for it but just didn’t make it. Wasn’t loaded, though, from what I hear, so I doubt he would have even gotten time to use it. He never liked to keep that gun loaded with the children there and whatnot.” Harold wiped his eye. “Hannah…they found her under the bed. Guess she was the last one.”

  “Dear Lord,” Lucille said, staring down at her still-soapy hands. “Dear Lord, dear Lord, dear Lord.”

  Harold grunted some manner of affirmation.

  “We should have visited them more,” Lucille said, crying.

  “What?”

  “We should have visited them more. Should have spent more time with them. They were family. I told you Jim and I were related. They were family.”

  Harold had never been sure if Lucille’s claim that she and Jim were kin were true or not. But it was the kind of thing that didn’t really matter, he knew. If she believed it, then it was true, which only made what happened to them hurt all the more.

  “Who did it?” Lucille asked.

  Harold only shook his head and tried not to weep. “Nobody knows.”

  There would be a lot of that going around Arcadia not only that night, but for years to come. The deaths of the Wilsons, while tragic and terrible in its own right, would have a secret influence on the town of Arcadia and its general sense of place in the world.

  It was after the deaths of the Wilsons that people began to take notice of petty thefts that occurred now and again. Or maybe they noticed that such and such was having marital problems—maybe even having an affair. There was a general sense of violence that rose up around the foundation of Arcadia after the Wilson tragedy. It flourished like mildew, creeping up a little more each year.

  * * *

  By the time Jim Wilson had finished washing the dishes in his strange manner, Lucille was done with her list. She went upstairs and washed up in the sink and dressed and gathered up her list and her purse and stood in the doorway. When she was certain that she was ready, with the truck keys in her hand and Harold’s old, blue Ford staring back at her, she inhaled deeply and reflected on how much she hated driving. And to make matters worse, Harold’s damned old truck was as biased and temperamental an animal as she’d ever seen. It started when it wanted to. The brakes squealed. The thing was alive, Lucille had told Harold more than once. Alive and full of contempt for women…maybe even for humanity as a whole, just like its owner.

  “I’m sorry about all of this,” Jim Wilson said, startling Lucille. She still couldn’t get used to how quiet and soft-footed he could be.

  Lucille nosed through her purse. Her list was there. Her money was there. Her picture of Jacob was there. But still she rifled through her belongings and spoke to the entire Wilson family without looking back. They were all there, standing together behind her like the cover of some Christmas card. She could feel them.

  “You sound just like that family of yours,” Lucille said. “It makes it easy enough to tell where she gets it from—all that apologizing without cause. I won’t hear it.” Then Lucille closed her purse, still not feeling settled.

  It was like a storm was on the way.

  “Sure,” Jim said. “I try not to be a bother. I just want you to understand how much we appreciate your help, is all. I just want you to know how grateful we are for all you’re doing for us.”

  Lucille turned with a grin. “Lock up when I’m gone. Tell Connie I’ll talk to her when I get back. I got a pie recipe I’d like to give her. Belonged to Great-aunt Gertrude…I think.” She paused to think. Then: “Keep those blessed children of yours upstairs. There shouldn’t be anyone coming by, but if they do…”

  “We’ll be upstairs.”

  “And don’t forget—”

  “Food’s in the oven,” Jim interrupted. He saluted.

  “Okay, okay,” Lucille said, and she marched off to where Harold’s old blue Ford was parked, refusing to look back and let them see how suddenly afraid she had become.

  * * *

  The grocery store was one of Arcadia’s last holdouts from the town’s renovation and reclamation project of 1974—the last time any substantial amount of money had come into the town. The old brick building was one of the last stops on the western edge of town before the town proper came to an end and emptied out into a two-lane road and fields and trees and houses dotting the land here and there. It sat at the end of Main Street, looking square and grand, the way it had been back when it was the town hall.

  In fact, all a body had to do was peel back the strategically placed banners and advertisements and City Hall, faded and timeworn, could still be seen in relief against the old stones. On a good day—back before the military set up camp in town—the grocery store was lucky to have thirty customers. And even that was optimistic, even when you counted the old men who sometimes loitered at the store and did nothing but sit in their rocking chairs in the doorway, swapping fictions.

  A young soldier offered his arm as Lucille made her way up the stairs. He called her “ma’am” and was gentle and patient—even as so many other young men buzzed past them as if the food might suddenly run out.

  Inside a cluster of gossiping men refused to be denied their sitting space. It was Fred Green, Marvin Parker, John Watkins and a few others. The past couple of weeks, she had seen them protesting—if that’s what they wanted to call it—over in Marvin Parker’s yard. It was a sad sack of protest, she felt. There was hardly a half dozen of them and they still hadn’t come up with any kind of decent slogan. One day when she was on her way to see Harold and Jacob she’d heard them shouting, “Arcadia for the living! Not for the giving!”

  She had no clue what the heck that was supposed to mean, and she figured they didn’t, either. They probably just said it because it rhymed and, as far as they knew, if you were going to protest, you had to rhyme.

  When the young soldier escorted her through the door, Lucille stopped in front of the men. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves,” she said. She patted the soldier’s hand to signal that she would be okay to continue by herself.

  “This is shameful,” she said.

  The men mumbled something among themselves, then Fred Green—that damned instigator, Fred Green!—spoke: “It’s a free country.”

  Lucille clucked her tongue. “And what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “We’re just sitting here minding our own business.”

  “Shouldn’t you be out there on the lawn, shouting that fool slogan of yours?”

  “We’re on break,” Fred said.

  Lucille had trouble pinning down Fred’s tone. She couldn’t quite tell if he was being sarcastic or if they really were all on break. They looked the part—half-sunburned, haggard and exhausted. “I suppose you’re doing a sit-in then? Like people used to do back when the Colored wanted equal rights?”

  The men looked at one another, feeling the trap but not quite able to catch sight of it. “What do you mean?” Fred asked, erring on the side of caution.

  “I just want to know what your demands are, is all. All sit-ins have demands! You have to ask for something when you organize like this.” A soldier bumped into her by accident. He paused to apologize, then she continued on. “You’ve succeeded in disrupting things,” Lucille said to Fred. “That’s plain. But what’s next? What’s your platform? What’re you standing for?”

  Fred’s eyes went full of light. He sat erect in his chair and inhaled a deep, dramatic breath. The other men followed his lead and sat straight as tombstones. “We stand for the living,” Fred said in a flat, even
voice.

  It was the slogan of the True Living Movement—those fools that Lucille and Harold had watched on television that day so long ago. The ones who’d gone from promises of race wars to full-on racial integration since the Returned. And now here was Fred Green quoting them.

  Without a doubt, Lucille thought, nut jobbery was afoot.

  The other men sucked in their breath the way Fred Green had done—seeming to get fatter as they did. Then they all said, “We stand for the living.”

  “I wasn’t aware the living needed someone to stand for them,” Lucille said. “But, anyhow, you might try chanting that instead of that ‘Arcadia for the living, not for the giving’ madness. Giving what? Giving to whom?” She waived her hand dismissively.

  Fred looked her over, the wheels in his head turning. “How’s your son doing?” he asked.

  “Just fine.”

  “Still over at the school, then?”

  “The prison, you mean? Yes,” Lucille answered.

  “And Harold? I hear he’s still at the school, too.”

  “The prison?” she repeated. “Yep. He’s over there.”

  Lucille adjusted her purse on her shoulder, somehow adjusting her thoughts, as well.

  “What are you shopping for today?” Fred asked. The men around him nodded, vouchsafing the question. They all sat inside the doorway in the small area before a person entered into the store proper. The store’s owner had tried using it as a place to greet customers—like they did at Wal-Mart—but it wasn’t long before the old men took to standing here and watching people enter and exit. Then the standing evolved into sitting when someone made the mistake of leaving a rocking chair near the door one day.

  Now there was nothing to do about it. The front of the store—what little store there was—belonged to the gossiping men.

  If a person could get past them cleanly, the building was charming only to someone who didn’t want much. Along what few aisles the store contained were canned foods and paper towels and toilet tissue and a handful of cleaning supplies. Along the walls of the store near the windows were hardware supplies hung from hooks and dangling from the rafters like a toolshed had exploded somewhere and cast them all asunder. The store owner—an overweight man called “Potato” for some reason Lucille never quite understood—tried to cover all of his bases in a very limited space.

  He failed most of the time, but it was good that he tried, Lucille believed. The store wasn’t a good place to find what a person wanted, but you could usually find what you really needed.

  “I’m shopping for what I need,” Lucille said. “How does that grab you?”

  Fred grinned. “C’mon now, Lucille.” He leaned back in his chair. “I was just asking a friendly question, is all. Didn’t mean no harm by it.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “That’s a fact.” He put his elbow on the arm of his chair and rested his chin on his fist. “Why would such a simple question make a woman like you so nervous?” Fred laughed. “It’s not like you’re hiding anybody up there at your place or anything, right, Lucille? I mean, the Wilsons have been missing from the church for a while now. From what I hear, the soldiers came to take them away and the pastor had done set them loose.”

  “Set them loose?” Lucille huffed. “They’re people, not some kind of animals!”

  “People?” Fred squinted as if Lucille had suddenly gone out of focus. “No,” he said finally. “And I’m sorry you believe that. They was people. Once. But that was a long time ago.” He shook his head. “No, they ain’t people.”

  “You mean since they were killed?”

  “I suppose soldiers would be glad to get a lead on where the Wilsons were hiding.”

  “I suppose they would,” Lucille said, aiming her body toward the interior of the grocery store. “But I wouldn’t know anything about it.” She was about to walk off, about to quit Fred Green and his contemptible ways, but she paused. “What happened?” she asked.

  Fred looked at the other men. “What do you mean?” he replied. “What happened to who?”

  “To you, Fred. What happened to you after Mary died? How’d you turn into this? You and she used to come over every Sunday. You helped Harold find Jacob that day, for goodness’ sake. When the Wilsons died, you and Mary were at their funeral just like everybody else. Then, when she was gone, so were you. What happened to you? Why do you got so much against them? Against all of them? Who do you blame? God? Yourself?”

  When Fred refused to answer her, she walked past him and entered the grocery store proper—quickly to be lost among the tightly spaced aisles—and left the men to gossip or plan or suppose among themselves. Fred Green watched her as she left. Then he stood, slowly, and made his way out of the store. He had something very important to do.

  * * *

  On the way home Lucille’s mind was flooded with all the ways in which people weren’t dealing with the Returned. She thanked God for granting her the grace and patience she needed to make it through all of this. She thanked Him for directing the small, Returned family to her doorstep in their hour of need—which was also her hour of need—because now the house was not quite so empty and now her heart did not hurt quite so much when she came home in Harold’s old truck with the passenger seat full of groceries and a warm house full of living bodies waiting for her at home…the way it was always supposed to be.

  The truck loped out of town and onto the two-lane road and out past the fields and trees. Once, she and Harold had talked about living inside the town proper, but decided against it just before Jacob was born. There was something in the idea of the three of them separated from the world—to a small degree, at least—hidden by forest and field, that she fell in love with.

  When she reached home she could clearly see the truck treads dug deep in the lawn. The soldiers’ boot prints were still clear as day. The front door hung off its hinges and there was mud tracked over the front porch and into the house.

  Lucille pulled the old truck to a stop beneath the oak tree and sat behind the wheel with the engine running and the cab full of food and the tears coming to her eyes.

  “Where were You?” she asked in a broken voice, knowing full well that, just then, only God could hear her.

  Samuel Daniels

  Samuel Daniels had been born and raised and taught to pray here, in Arcadia. Then he died. And now he was in Arcadia again. But Arcadia had changed. No longer was it the small, escapable town it had been. The town through which travelers came and went without pause or hesitation, having only a few moments’ thought devoted to pondering what it was people did with their lives in such a place. A place of flat, tired-looking houses. A place with two gas stations and only two stoplights. A place of wood and earth and tin. A place where people seemed to be born from the forests that butted up against the fields.

  Now Arcadia was no longer the detour, but the destination, Samuel thought, looking out through the fencing, seeing the slow unfurling of the town toward the east. Far off, the church sat, silent and still below the firmament. The two-lane blacktop that led into town was gnarled and chipped where it had, not so long ago, been smooth and even. Each day there was more traffic coming in. Less traffic going out.

  The people of Arcadia were not locals anymore, he mused. This was not their town. They were visitors, tourists in their own land. They went about their daily lives uncertain of where they were. When they could, they clustered together—not unlike the way the Returned were rumored to do at times—and they stood, looking out at the world around them with a look of somber confusion on their faces.

  Not even their pastor, with all of his faith and understanding in God, was immune. Samuel had gone to him, seeking the Word, seeking comfort and explanation for what was happening in this world, in this town. But the pastor was different than Samuel remembered him. Yes, he was still large and square—a mountain of a man—but he was far away, as well. He and Samuel had stood in the church doorway, talking of how the Returned were brough
t into Arcadia and transported to the school, which was already becoming too small of a place to hold them. And as the trucks passed and the Returned could be seen, now and then, peeking out—taking stock of this new place in which they found themselves—Pastor Peters would scrutinize them, as if searching for someone.

  “Do you think she’s alive?” the pastor said after a while, completely ignoring the conversation he and Samuel had been engaged in.

  “Who?” Samuel asked.

  But Pastor Peters said nothing, as if Samuel were not the one to whom he was speaking.

  Arcadia had changed, Samuel thought. The town was surrounded by fencing and walls, caged in and cut off from the world like a castle. Soldiers everywhere. This was not the town he had grown up in, not the small city that squatted on the countryside, open in all directions. This was something else.

  Walking away from the fencing, he gripped his Bible. Arcadia, and all within its walls, had been changed, never to go back to the way it was.

  Thirteen

  IT WAS REPORTED that a certain previously dead French artist was found there after weeks of the world community searching for him. He’d married the fiftysomething woman who’d given him a hostel to live in and who’d seen to it that the world knew his name.

  When he was discovered, Jean Rideau gave no statements to the press as to the reasons for his disappearance, but that didn’t stop the media from trying. The small almost-hut on the outskirts of Rio in which he’d managed to escape the world was overrun by reporters and investigators and, not long after, the soldiers sent to keep the peace. Jean and his wife managed to stay there for almost a week, cordoned off by policemen from the crowds—which were gathering each and every day.

  But it wasn’t long before the crowd was too large and the policemen too few and the famous French artist and his wife had to be taken out of the city. That was when the riot started. There were almost as many Returned as there were True Living that died that day. The allure of Jean Rideau and the potential of his postdeath art drew all.