by Jason Mott
“Lucille?” Harold called, squatting down beside her with a grunt.
“He was family,” she said. “It’s all on me.”
Somehow Harold did not see the blood until he was kneeling in it.
“Harold Hargrave,” Lucille said in a thin voice. “Where’s my boy?”
“He’s here,” Harold replied.
Jacob walked behind Lucille and wrapped his arms around her. “I’m here, Mama,” Jacob said.
“Good,” Lucille said, but Harold was not sure if she really registered that the boy was there. Then she grabbed Jacob and pulled him close. “I’ve done something terrible,” she said, clutching him. “God forgive me.”
“What happened?” Harold asked.
“Someone was behind us,” Connie Wilson said, pausing to wipe the tears from her face.
Harold stood, slowly. His legs were heavy with pain. “Was it one of the soldiers? Was it that damned colonel?”
“No,” Connie replied calmly. “He’d gone already. It wasn’t him.”
“Which direction was Jim facing? Looking over into town or back that way?” He pointed in the direction of the road heading out of Arcadia. He could see where the city ended and the fields and trees began.
“Toward town,” Connie said.
Harold turned in the other direction. He looked off into the countryside. He saw only the long, dark road that stretched out of Arcadia, between the empty fields of corn. Along the edges of the cornfields there were grand, dark pines jutting up against the starry night.
“Damn you,” Harold said.
“What is it?” Connie asked, hearing a certain recognition in his voice.
“You damned son of a bitch,” Harold said, his hands balled into tight fists.
“What is it?” she asked again, suddenly expecting to be shot down herself. She looked off in the direction of the forest, but saw only trees and darkness.
“Get the children,” Harold said. He looked at his old pickup truck. “Put Jim into the back. You, too, Connie. Get in there and lie down and don’t get back up until I tell you!”
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Jacob asked.
“Never you mind,” Harold said. Then, to Lucille: “Where’s the gun?”
“Here,” she said. She passed it to him with disgust. “Throw it away.”
Harold stuffed the gun into his waistband and went around to the driver’s side of the truck. “Daddy, what’s going on?” Jacob asked. He was still holding his mother. She patted his hand now, as if finally admitting that he was there.
“Just hush up, now,” Harold said sternly. “Come over here and get in the truck. Get in and duck your head down into the seat.
“But what about Mama?”
“Jacob, son, just do as you’re told!” Harold barked. “We need to get away from here. Get back to the house where we can get Connie and the kids safe.”
Jacob lay down on the seat in the truck and Harold, to let him know that this was for his own good, reached in and patted the boy on the head. He did not apologize—because he knew he had not been wrong to yell at the boy just then, and Harold had always believed that a person shouldn’t apologize when there was nothing done wrong. But there was nothing in his beliefs that prohibited a person from affectionately rubbing a child on the head.
When the boy was settled in, Harold came around to help with Jim Wilson’s body. Lucille watched them lift the man and a sudden quote of scripture came to mind.
“My God sent His angel, and He shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent in His sight.”
Harold offered no rebuttal. The words sounded right.
“Careful,” Harold said as they carried the body, speaking to no one in particular.
“Penitently,” Lucille said, still kneeling. “Penitently,” she said again. “It’s all on me.”
* * *
When the body was safely in the bed of the truck, Harold told Connie to get in, as well. “Put the children up front, if need be,” he said. Then he apologized, though he couldn’t have said why.
“What’s going on?” Connie asked. “I don’t understand any of this. Where are we going?”
“I’d rather the children sat in the cab,” Harold replied.
Connie followed Harold’s instructions. The children squeezed into the cab beside Lucille, Jacob and Harold. Harold told all three of the children to put their heads down. They did as they were told, whimpering now and again as the truck roared to life and headed out of town.
Lucille only looked into the distance, her mind elsewhere.
In the bed of the truck, Connie lay beside her husband’s body—in much the way she must have lain beside him for all those years of life and marriage. She held his hand. She did not seem afraid or uneasy about being so close to the dead, or perhaps she simply did not want to leave her husband.
* * *
As they drove, Harold’s eyes scanned the darkness along the edge of the headlights, looking for the barrel of a rifle to poke out and sound off and send him on to the grave. When they were not very far from home, with the town dropping away into darkness behind them, he reached over and placed a hand on Lucille’s.
“Why are we going home?” Jacob asked.
“When you were in China by yourself and scared, what did you want to do?”
“I wanted to go home,” Jacob said.
“That’s what a person does,” Harold said, “even if they know hell might find them there.”
* * *
When they pulled off the highway and onto the dirt road that led home, Harold told his wife, “First thing we do is get Connie and the children inside. No questions asked. Don’t worry about Jim. You just hustle these children inside. You hear me?”
“Yes,” Lucille answered.
“Once you’re inside, get upstairs. Don’t stop for nothing.”
Harold stopped the truck at the end of the driveway, turned the headlights on high and let the glare wash everything of its color. The house was dark and empty-looking in a way Harold could hardly remember ever seeing it.
He pressed the accelerator and started forward. He gained speed coming up the driveway and swung the truck around in the yard and backed it up to the porch steps as if he were planning to unload a Christmas tree or a bed full of firewood and not the body of Jim Wilson.
He was possessed of a sense of being followed, a feeling that things had not been settled just yet and so he did everything in a hurry. When he listened, he could hear the low rumble of truck engines in the air—probably at the end of the dirt road now, Harold figured by the sound.
He opened the truck door and stepped out. “Get inside,” he said. He pulled the children from the cab, plopped them onto their feet like foals, and pointed them toward the porch. “Come on, now,” he said. “Hurry up and get in there.”
“That was fun,” Jacob said.
“You just get inside,” Harold said.
Suddenly the glare of headlights bounced up the driveway. Harold shielded his eyes and pulled the pistol from his waistband.
Jacob and Lucille and the Wilsons were scuttling through the door when the first truck slid to a stop in the yard just below the old oak tree. The three trucks that followed parked beside one another, all of them with their headlights on high.
But Harold already knew who they were.
He turned and climbed onto the porch as the truck doors opened and the drivers stepped out. “Harold!” a voice called out from behind the wall of lights. “Come on now, Harold!” the voice said.
“Turn those damned lights off, Fred!” Harold shouted back. “And you can tell your friends to do the same thing.” He stepped in front of the door and switched the safety off the pistol. Inside the house he could hear the sound of everyone scrambling upstairs the way he’d told them to. “I can hear that Clarence still ain’t got that belt tightened on that truck of his.”
“Don’t you worry none about that,” Fred Green replied. Then the ligh
ts on his truck went out. Shortly after, the lights on the other trucks went out, as well.
“I imagine you still got that rifle with you,” Harold said.
Fred walked around to the front of his truck as Harold’s eyes were adjusting. Fred carried the rifle cradled in his arms.
“I didn’t want to do it,” Fred said. “You got to know that, Harold.”
“Oh, come on now,” Harold said. “You just saw a chance to do something you always wanted to do, and you did it. You always been a hothead, and with the world the way it is now, you finally get to be the hothead you’ve always wanted to be.”
Harold took another step back toward the door and raised his pistol. The old men who’d come with Fred raised their rifles and shotguns, but Fred didn’t raise his rifle.
“Harold,” Fred said, shaking his head, “just send them out and let’s put an end to all this.”
“By killing them?”
“Harold!”
“Why’s it so important that they stay dead?” Harold stepped back again. He hated leaving Jim’s body there in the bed of the truck, but there was little choice. “How did you get like this?” he asked. “I thought I knew you better.” Harold was almost inside the house.
“It’s just not right,” Fred said. “None of it.”
Harold entered the house and slammed the door. A silence settled in around everyone for a moment. The oak tree at the front of the house rustled beneath a sudden wind that came up out of the south like a promise of misfortune.
“Get the gas cans,” Fred Green said.
Patricia Bellamy
He found his mother alone in the schoolroom sitting at the end of her cot—waiting and waiting and waiting—with her hands in her lap and her eyes aimed straight ahead without commitment to any one particular thing. When she saw him at the door, there came the sudden light of recognition to her eyes. “Oh, Charles,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m here.”
She smiled then, brighter and with more vibrancy than she ever did in Bellamy’s memories of her. “I was so worried,” she said. “I thought that you had forgotten me. We’ve got to make that party on time. I won’t stand us being late. It’s rude. It’s downright unkind.”
“Yes,” Bellamy said, easing down onto the cot beside her. He sat with her and took her hands into his own. She smiled more and rested her head on his shoulder. “I’ve missed you,” she said.
“I’ve missed you, too,” he said.
“I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said. “Ain’t that the silliest thing?”
“It is.”
“But I knew you would come back to me,” she said.
“Of course you knew,” Bellamy said, his eyes slick with tears. “You know I can never get away from you.”
“Oh, Charles,” the old woman said. “I’m so proud of him.”
“I know,” Bellamy said.
“That’s why we can’t be late,” she said. “This is his big night. The night when he becomes a fancy government man…our son. He needs to know that we’re proud of him. He needs to know that we love him and that we’ll always be here for him.”
“I’m sure he knows,” Bellamy said, the words catching in his throat.
For a very long time, they sat like this. Now and again there was the sound of some commotion coming from outside, small battles being fought here and there—as is the nature of things. Some soldiers were still loyal to Colonel Willis—or, at the very least, still loyal to what he represented. They couldn’t quite put it together that everything he’d said and done, all of his opinions about the Returned, could have been wrong. So they fought a little longer than others, but that was fading, moment by moment, and soon it would all be over. Soon there would only be Martin Bellamy and his mother, trying to live through things one more time, until death—or whatever it was that took the Returned away like whispers in the night—came for her, or for him.
He would not repeat his mistakes.
“Oh, Marty,” his mother said then. “I love you so much, son.” She began searching her pockets, the way she had done when trying to find candy for him when he was a boy.
Martin Bellamy squeezed his mother’s hand. “I love you, too,” he said. “I won’t forget that again.”
Nineteen
“YOU DON’T SUPPOSE I’m foolish enough to come in there, do you?” Fred yelled, his voice barreling through the thin front door and thin walls of the house like the ringing of a bell.
“I’d hoped as much,” Harold replied. He’d just about finished dragging the couch to block the front door.
“C’mon, now, Harold. Let’s not do all this. Me and the boys will burn you out if we have to.”
“You might try,” Harold said, turning off the house lights, “but that’ll involve coming close to the house. And I’m not too sure you’ll want to do that, what with me having this pistol and all.”
When all the lights were out and the doors all locked, Harold settled in behind the couch in front of the door. He heard them at the back of the house already, splashing gasoline against the walls. He thought about heading back that way, maybe firing off a round but if things went as bad as he thought they might, he’d hate himself for wasting an opportunity to shoot one of them.
“I don’t want to do this, Harold.”
Try as he might, Harold couldn’t help but hear something that sounded like sincerity in Fred’s voice, though he wasn’t certain how much he could trust it. “It’s just something that has to be done.”
“I guess we all got things we have to do, huh?”
Harold looked in the direction of the stairs. Above him he heard the sound of someone moving about. “Stay away from the damned windows!” he yelled. Lucille came to the stairs and shuffled her way down in an awkward, slightly arthritic-looking crouch. “Get the hell back upstairs,” Harold barked.
“I’ve got to do something,” Lucille replied. “This is all my fault. It’s all on me!”
“Gracious, woman!” Harold huffed. “Don’t that book of yours say that greed’s a sin? Stop being stingy and share some of that guilt. Just imagine how our marriage would have gone if you’d been so prone to taking all the blame as you are now? You would have bored the hell out of me!” He thrust his chest out at her. “Now get back upstairs!”
“Why? Because I’m a woman?”
“No. Because I told you to!”
In spite of herself, Lucille laughed at that.
“That goes for me, too,” Connie said, working her way down the stairs.
“Aw, hell,” Harold groaned.
“What are you doing down here, Connie?” Lucille asked. “Get back upstairs.”
“See how it feels?” Harold said to Lucille.
“What are we going to do?” Lucille asked.
“I’m sorting that out,” Harold said. “Don’t you worry.”
Connie low-walked into the kitchen, avoiding the windows as best she could, and plucked the largest knife she could find from the carving block.
“What is it with women and knives?” Harold asked. “Remember that Bobbitt woman?” He shook his head. Then: “Let’s just put a stop to all this, Fred.”
“This can’t end well,” Lucille said.
“That’s just what I was going to say,” Fred yelled. From the sound of his voice, he was almost on the porch. “Harold,” he called. “Harold, come to the window.”
Harold stood with a groan.
“Please, Harold,” Lucille said, reaching for him.
“It’s okay.”
“Let’s talk about this,” Fred Green said. He stood on the porch in front of the window. Harold could have shot him clean through the gut if he’d been inclined to. And, with the sight of Jim Wilson’s body lying there in the bed of the truck—so perfectly performing its rendition of death—Harold felt a strong and undeniable urge to pull the trigger. But Fred was standing there without his gun, looking genuinely upset. “Harold,” he said. “I really am sorry.”
“I want to believe that, Fred.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I do.”
“Then you got to understand that I don’t want any more bloodshed.”
“Not from the True Living, right?”
“That’s right,” Fred said.
“You just want me to hand over this family to you, these children.”
“That’s right, but you got to understand that we’re not out for a killing. It’s nothing like that at all.”
“Then what do you suppose it is?”
“It’s a reckoning, a repairing of things.”
“Repairing?”
“We’re just putting things back the way they’re supposed to be.”
“The way they were supposed to be? Since when was killing one another the way they were supposed to be? Ain’t it bad enough they been killed once already? Now they got to die again?”
“We didn’t kill them!” Fred yelled.
“We who?”
“I don’t know who did it,” Fred continued. “Some stranger. Some crazy fool passing through town. They just happened to be the ones who got the bad luck that day. That’s all. It wasn’t us. It wasn’t Arcadia. We don’t kill people here!”
“I didn’t say you did,” Harold replied.
“But it happened,” Fred said. “And this town ain’t never been the same.” He paused. “They don’t belong here,” he said. “And if we have to root them out one family at a time, then that’s what we’re gonna do.”
Neither Harold nor Fred had to look over at Jim Wilson’s body. Simply by being there and being dead, Jim Wilson seemed to say too much about the state of Arcadia, too much about the state of both Harold’s and Fred’s lives. “Do you remember what it was like before everything happened?” Harold asked finally. “Remember Jacob’s birthday party? The sunlight. Everybody buzzing around, smiling and whatnot. Mary was going to sing that evening.” He sighed. “Then, well, then everything just went a different way, I suppose. We all did.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Fred began. “Certain things are supposed to happen in certain places. Muggings, rape, people getting shot and killed, people dying before their due. Those things don’t happen here,” he said.