by Jason Mott
When she did sleep, it was only by accident. She would awaken all of a sudden with her body in uncomfortable positions. Most times there would be a book in her lap, staring up at her, holding its place diligently, waiting for her to return. Sometimes her eyeglasses would be crumpled in the pages of her book, having leaped from her nose as she slept.
Some nights she would go into the kitchen and simply stand, listening to the emptiness around her. In her mind, memories would come smoking up out of the darkness. She remembered Jacob and Harold throughout the house. She remembered, most often, one October night in Jacob’s youth, a night that had been nothing special but, by that same token, had become very special to her.
When the world was as full of magic as it was these days, it reminded Lucille that the normal moments were the ones that had mattered all along in life.
She remembered Harold in the living room, plucking clumsily at the strings of his guitar. He was always a terrible musician, but he had a great deal of energy and passion for it—at least, he once did, back when he was a father—and he practiced whenever he wasn’t at work or working on something around the house or spending time with Jacob.
Lucille remembered Jacob in his bedroom, thumping about, lifting toys from his toy box and placing them not so gently upon the hardwood floor. She remembered him sliding furniture around in his room, which, in spite of being repeatedly warned not to do it, he still did, anyway. When she and Harold would ask him about it Jacob simply said, “Sometimes the toys demand it.”
In this memory, while Harold maimed music with his guitar and Jacob went about the business of playing, Lucille was in the kitchen, in the throes of cooking some holiday dinner. There was a ham in the oven. Mustard greens and chicken cooking on the stove. Gravy, mashed potatoes, white rice flavored with thyme, corn and red pepper, butter beans, green beans, chocolate cake, pound cake, gingersnap cookies, roast turkey.
“Don’t make your bedroom into a mess, Jacob!” Lucille called. “It’ll be time to eat soon.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy answered back. Then: “I want to build something,” Jacob yelled from his room.
“What do you want to build?” Lucille yelled back.
Harold sat in the living room plucking at his guitar, killing the one Hank Williams song he had been trying for weeks to teach himself.
“I don’t know,” Jacob said.
“Well, that’s the first thing you have to figure out.”
Lucille looked out through the window and watched the clouds pass before the pale, perfect moon. “Can you build a house?”
“A house?” the boy said contemplatively.
“A great, big house with vaulted ceilings and a dozen bedrooms.”
“But there’s only three of us. And you and Daddy sleep in the same bed. So we only need two bedrooms.”
“But what about when people come to visit?”
“Then they can use my bed.” Something in Jacob’s bedroom fell and crashed against the floor.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
There came the broken chords of Harold abusing his guitar.
“It sounded like a lot of something.”
“It’s okay,” Jacob said.
Lucille checked the food. Everything was cooking perfectly. The smell of it wafted over the entire house. It seeped through the gaps in the walls, out into the world.
Satisfied, Lucille left the kitchen and went to check on Jacob.
His room was everything she imagined it would be. The bed was turned on its side and pushed up against the far wall so that the mattress stuck out like a barricade and the headboard and footboards were magnificent buttresses. Trailing out from behind the makeshift barrier was a wasteland of fallen and scattered Lincoln Logs.
Lucille stood in the doorway wiping her hands dry with a dishcloth. Now and again the boy reached out from behind the fort and plucked a particular log to contribute to some unseen construction project.
Lucille sighed, though not in frustration.
“He’s going to be an architect,” she said, coming into the living room and easing down exhaustedly into the couch. She made a show of wiping her brow with the dishcloth.
Harold banged away at his guitar. “Maybe,” he managed, though the break in concentration threw his fingers into even worse disarray. He flexed his digits and began the song again.
Lucille stretched out. She turned onto her side and pulled her legs into her body and tucked her hands beneath her chin and watched, sleepily, as her husband battled on against his musical ineptness.
He was beautiful, Lucille thought, most beautiful when he was failing.
His hands, though they did not enjoy the guitar, were thick and nimble. His fingers smooth and strangely plump. He wore the flannel shirt Lucille had bought him when the frost first came this year. It was red and blue and he had protested against how tightly the shirt fit, but the very next day he wore it to work and came home to tell her how much he loved it. “It stayed out of my way,” he said. It was a small thing, but small things mattered.
Harold wore jeans—faded, but clean—which she liked. She had grown up with a father who’d spent most of his life preaching sermons to people who hardly cared to listen. He wore extravagant suits that he and his family could not afford, but it was desperately important to Lucille’s mother that her husband look the part of Salvationist, no matter what the costs.
So when Harold had come along all those years ago dressed in his jeans and stained shirt with that soft, suspicious-looking smile, she fell in love with his wardrobe and, eventually, with the man that wore it. “You’re distracting me,” Harold said, adjusting the tune of the sixth guitar string.
Lucille yawned, drowsiness falling on her like a hammer. “I didn’t mean to,” she said.
“I’m getting better,” he said.
She laughed a little. “Just keep practicing. You’ve got thick fingers. That’s always a little more challenging.”
“Is that what it is? My thick fingers?”
“Yes,” she said, looking very, very sleepy. “But I like thick fingers.”
Harold raised an eyebrow.
“Dad?” Jacob yelled from the bedroom. “What are bridges made of?”
“He’s going to be an architect,” Lucille whispered.
“They’re made of stuff,” Harold yelled.
“What kind of stuff?”
“Depends on what kind of stuff you have.”
“Oh, Harold,” Lucille said.
Both of them waited for the next question, but it never came. There came only the clattering of a few stray Lincoln Logs tumbling across the hardwood floor as some construction project was undone and begun anew.
“He’s going to build houses one day,” Lucille said.
“He might change his mind in a week.”
“He won’t,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“Because a mother knows these things.”
Harold placed the guitar on the floor beside his leg. Lucille was all but asleep. He got a small blanket from the hall closet and placed it over her. “Is there anything I need to do to the food?” Harold asked.
Lucille only replied, “He’s going to build things.” And then she was asleep, both in memory and in the empty, lonely house.
* * *
Lucille woke on the living room couch, lying on her side with her hands tucked beneath her head and her legs pulled up into her body. In the chair where Harold should have been sitting and plucking away at his guitar, there was only emptiness. She listened for the sound of Jacob and his logs playing in the bedroom.
More emptiness.
Lucille sat up on the couch, still drowsy, with her eyes stinging from exhaustion. She didn’t remember lying on the couch or falling to sleep. The last thing she remembered was standing by the kitchen sink, looking out the window and getting ready to wash the dishes.
It was very late or very early now. There was a chill in the air li
ke that of autumn beginning to awaken. The crickets rattled on outside the house. Upstairs, one of their numbers had found its way inside and it sat in some dusty corner, trilling.
Lucille’s body hurt and, more than that, she was very frightened.
It was not the realism of the dream that had frightened her. Nor was it the fact that it was her first dream in weeks and her mind told her that there was something very unhealthy about that. What frightened her the most was the way she had been so suddenly thrust back into her old, tired body.
In her dream, her legs had been strong; now her knees ached and her ankles were swollen. In her dream there was a firmness all about her, the impression that any task could, in time, be overcome. And that had made the foreboding she felt in the dream more bearable. Even if it had suddenly turned into a nightmare, she would be able to handle it so long as she had her youth, which, in her dream, was guaranteed.
Now she was an old woman again. Worse than that, she was an old woman alone. Loneliness terrified her. It always had and, most likely, it always would.
“He was going to be a builder,” she said to no one. And then she began crying.
* * *
It was sometime later when the crying stopped. She felt better then, as if a valve somewhere had been opened and some invisible pressure released. When Lucille went to stand, arthritis pain struck her bones. She inhaled sharply and fell back onto the couch. “Dear Lord,” she said.
She stood more easily the next time. The pain was still there, but it was lessened by her expectation of it. Her feet shuffled as she walked, making a light, swishing sound as she moved through the house. She made her way to the kitchen.
Lucille managed a cup of coffee and stood in the porch doorway listening to the crickets. Soon they were quieting softly and the question of whether it was very late or very early was answered. Off to the east there was the dim glow of what would, eventually, become the sun. “Praise God,” she said.
There were things that she needed to do, plans she needed to make if she was really going to do this. And she didn’t need to be thinking about how quiet and empty the house was if she was going to be doing the hard work of planning. So the television, in spite of its babbles about nothing, was a welcome friend.
“It’ll be okay,” she told herself as she sat writing in a small notebook.
In the beginning she only wrote simple things, the things she knew, the things that were without question. “The world is a strange place,” she wrote. That was at the top of the list. She laughed at that a little. “I’ve been married to you too long,” she said to her absent husband. The television babbled back some reply about the dangers of erections lasting for four or more hours.
Then she wrote, “The just have been unjustly imprisoned.”
Then: “My husband and son are prisoners.”
She looked down at the paper. It all looked as simple as it did imposing. The facts were a good enough thing to have, but the facts seldom pointed the way to salvation, she thought. The facts did nothing but sit there and stare out of the darkness of possibility and look into the soul to see what it would do when it faced them.
“Should I do this?” she wrote. “Does any person in this world really try to save people? Does it really happen that way? Will going there do anything other than make me out to be a crazy old woman and get me arrested, or maybe worse? Will I be killed? Will Harold? Will Jacob?”
“Oh, Lord,” she said.
The television laughed at her. But still she continued.
She wrote that the town was a horror, in violation of all civility. She wrote that the Bureau was a tyrannical evil—then she erased that and wrote, instead, only that the government was in the wrong. Rebellion was new to her, new and hot enough to scald her if she let it. She needed to ease into it.
She thought of David and Goliath and every other Bible story she had ever heard of God’s chosen people battling against a powerful oppressor. She thought of the Jews and Egypt and the Pharaohs.
“Let my people go,” she said, and laughed a little when the television said, in a child’s voice, “Okay.”
“It’s a sign,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
She wrote for a very long time. She wrote until her list could not be held on a single sheet of paper and her hand began to cramp and the sun was well above the horizon and the television had gone to talking about the current news of the day.
She half listened as she went on with her writing. There was nothing new happening anywhere. More Returned were returning. No one knew how or why. The detention centers were growing larger and larger. Entire towns were being taken over, and no longer just in rural areas such as Arcadia, but in larger cities. The True Living were being usurped, or so one of the announcers said.
Lucille thought the news announcer was overreacting.
A woman in Los Angeles who was being interviewed thought that he wasn’t reacting strongly enough.
When Lucille had finished her list, she sat and stared at it. Most of it didn’t matter, she decided upon review, but those first things, those things in the beginning of the list, they were still important, even in the light of day. Something needed to be done about those things and, as much as she had prayed, she had to admit that nothing had been done about them.
“Dear Lord,” she said.
Then she stood and went to the bedroom. Her feet did not shuffle now. They marched. In the bedroom closet, far, far in the back, beneath a stack of boxes and old shoes that neither she nor Harold could fit anymore, beneath tax paperwork and unread books and dust and mildew and cobwebs, was Harold’s pistol.
The last time she remembered seeing that pistol was fifty years ago, on the night when Harold had hit that dog on the highway and they’d brought it home and, in the end, had to put it down. The memory came in a sudden flash and then was gone again, as if some part of her didn’t want to be associated with the details of it just now.
The pistol was heavier than Lucille remembered. She had only held it once in her entire life—the day Harold brought it home. He’d been so proud of it, for whatever reason. Lucille, at the time, had difficulty understanding exactly what it was about a gun that anyone would have reason to be proud of.
The barrel was a smooth, hard blue-black rectangle that mated perfectly with the handle of steel and wood. The grip was, at the core, solid steel—Lucille could tell by the heft and weight of it—but with wooden sections on each side that fit comfortably in her hand. It looked like a movie gun.
Lucille thought about all the movies she had seen and all the things that guns had done in those movies. Killing, making things explode, threatening, killing, saving, giving confidence and a sense of safety, killing.
It felt like death, she thought. Cold. Hard. Immutable.
Was this what it had come to? she mused.
* * *
The True Living Movement was all Fred Green had anymore.
The fields were overgrown. The house hadn’t been cleaned. He hadn’t gone to the sawmill and searched for work in weeks.
Marvin Parker was being held without bail and charged with a felony after the ruckus at the school. He’d come out of it with a dislocated shoulder and a cracked rib and, while they had both known the risks, Fred still felt bad about it. It had been a fool idea to begin with, Fred thought, looking back on it. At the time, he’d told Marvin, “It’ll teach them a lesson. Make them think about moving all those Returned to someplace else. Make them think about taking over somebody else’s town.” And Marvin had agreed wholeheartedly. But now Marvin was hurt up and behind bars and that didn’t sit well with his conscience.
There was nothing Fred could do for him just now. And, more than that, Fred felt that maybe what had happened—even with all its consequences—wasn’t enough.
Maybe they’d both been thinking too small. There was plenty still to do.
Other men had come and found Fred after that night. Locals who understood what Fred and Marvin had tried to accomplish and
who wanted to do what they could to help out. There weren’t many of them—and most of them were only good for talking—but there were two or three that Fred felt confident would do what needed to be done when the time came.
And the time was quickly coming. The whole town had been taken over. Everybody forced to either move out of their homes or live with the Returned. Hell, Marvin Parker’s very own house was a part of it now! Taken over by the Bureau and the damned Returned.
It was happening like this in other places, Fred knew: people being pushed too far by the Bureau and the Returned. Someone had to put an end to all this. Someone had to make a statement, for the sake of Arcadia, for the sake of the living. If the people of Arcadia had all made a fuss, had all come together against the Returned like they should have in the beginning, things wouldn’t have gotten this far. It was like Marvin had said about the volcano in that woman’s backyard. Too many people had sat idly by and watched it happen. Fred couldn’t let that happen. It was up to him now.
* * *
Later that night, after he had made his plans for what would come next, Fred Green went to bed and, for the first time in months, he dreamed. When he awoke, it was still very late in the night and his voice was hoarse, his throat sore. He could not say why. He remembered few details of the dream—mostly he remembered being alone in a darkened house. He remembered music, the sound of a woman’s voice singing.
Fred reached a hand into the empty space in the bed beside him, the space where no one slept. “Mary?” he called.
The house did not answer.
He rose from the bed and went into the bathroom. He switched on the light and lingered there, staring at the bare bathroom tiles where Mary once wept for the loss of their child, wondering what she would think of him if she were here now.
Eventually, he turned out the light and left the bathroom. He made his way to what, over the years, he had come to call his “Project Room.” It was a large room that smelled of mildew and dust, cluttered with tools, abandoned woodworking projects, all manner of unfulfilled endeavors. He stood in the door of the room, staring at all the things he had begun and not finished: a chess set made from redwood (he’d never learned to play, but he respected the intricacy of the pieces), an ornate podium made from rotted oak (he had never given a speech in his life, but admired the site of a speaker on a well-made podium), a small, half-finished rocking horse.