The Calling

by Robert Swartwood

  Moses named him Joseph, the name both he and Sabrina had decided on in case they had a boy (their choice for a girl was conveniently Josephine). He took his baby home to a house he knew he wouldn’t be able to afford much longer. Not with Sabrina gone, as her job had really been what kept them afloat financially. So Moses had no choice but to sell the house. They moved into a condominium three months after Joey was brought home from the hospital. One bedroom, one bathroom and a kitchen—it was almost like a bachelor pad, only there was a crib in the corner and a child seat at the table, as well as a closet filled with diapers and baby wipes and baby food.

  “I believe it’s obvious that all women have some maternal instinct. They know when their children are hungry, when they’re scared, when they’re happy or sad. But most men just don’t have that. When I went home from the hospital and then sold the house and moved into the apartment, I was doing it with a baby and a responsibility that scared me to death. Sabrina was the one who was supposed to know what to do, not me. But I tried my best and did everything I possibly could, and I think in the end Joey took more care of me than I took care of him.”

  Moses kept his job at the church, which of course mourned the loss of Sabrina. Even the people at the movie theater were sensitive. Joey went into daycare as much as Moses would allow (which meant as much as he could afford), but the rest of the time he stayed at home. On the weekends, if the church didn’t require his time, Moses would just sit on the couch—which was pretty much the only piece of furniture in the entire place—and lay there with Joey on his chest. Joey, a pacifier in his mouth (what he would in a year or so call a “nub-nub”), slept peacefully, simply content to listen to his father’s constant heartbeat. Even at night, when he awoke crying, Moses would lie down and hold his son’s ear to his chest, and within minutes the baby would be asleep again, lost in the world of dreams.

  But had Moses known just what kind of world that truly was, he may have stopped doing that nightly ritual right there and then. As it was, he had no idea, and continued doing so. All babies awoke in the middle of the night crying. It was just what babies did. Surely it wasn’t anything else.

  “Oh God, how I was wrong,” Moses murmured. He had finished off all the rum in his glass and now just stared at it. With his thumbnail he scratched at Big Bird’s yellow face. Not once had he looked up at me since he started talking. “I was so wrong, but how was I supposed to know it at the time? I couldn’t. But still I felt guilty later, when I understood. Before that though ...”

  Joey was almost three years old when it first happened. One morning, while Moses was giving him his bath, Joey said, “Maine.” He’d been speaking for a little over a year now, and was pretty good with his words. But hearing his son just then Moses thought Joey had said main as in the adjective and not Maine as in the noun—or, in this case, the state. Moses didn’t think much of it at the time—his son, like most babies, would sometimes say random things—and continued giving Joey his bath. But then after a moment, when Joey realized his father didn’t quite hear him, he said, “Daddy, we go Maine.” Right then it clicked that it wasn’t the adjective Joey meant.

  “Why do we have to go to Maine?” Moses asked him. No one he knew lived there. No family, no friends, no one. But his son only repeated what he had said before, and when Moses asked one more time why, Joey said, “Seven.” And that was it. The issue was dropped at once. Joey went about his business like nothing had happened.

  Moses decided to do the same and didn’t even think about it again until a week later, when he saw something in USA Today. (“I had become accustomed to reading it every morning,” he said; “Besides Joey, it was the only family I had.”) A bank robbery in Portland, Maine had gone terribly wrong. It seemed the cops had arrived before the three robbers were able to make it out. Over thirty people were in the bank at the time, both customers and employees. At first the robbers used them as hostages, but then as time went on they started killing them off. Executing them one at a time. When the cops finally got inside, the robbers had killed seven people. The story itself, while tragic, wouldn’t really have caught Moses’s attention had it not been for that number. The same number Joey mentioned a week before—both seven and Maine in the same egregious context.

  “But I couldn’t say anything to my boy.” Moses lit another cigarette. “After the bathtub incident, which I later started calling it, he hadn’t even brought up the subject of us having to go to Maine, or the number seven. He went on like any normal three-year-old. Besides, what did he know of death, except the fact that his momma was no longer living? Nothing, so I decided to chalk it up as a coincidence and leave it at that.”

  But then, four months later, it happened again. This time though it wasn’t just something small like Joey mentioning it out of the blue while taking his bath, or while Moses strapped him into his car seat to take him to daycare. This time it was late at night and Joey had begun screaming. Moses, hearing this from where he slept across the living room on the couch, jumped straight awake. The shrillness of his child’s screams scared him, actually caused gooseflesh to break out over his body. Moses had heard Joey cry before in the middle of the night, but never like this, never with so much intensity. He figured his son had had dreams before, but never nightmares.

  This was only the beginning.

  “When I got across the room Joey was shaking. Tears were all over his face. He stood up and jumped into my arms. Just kept crying and hugged me real tight, wouldn’t let me go. When he finally got settled, I asked him what was wrong. He looked up at me—he didn’t need glasses then—and said, ‘We go Richmond, Daddy.’ I said, ‘Richmond? Richmond, Virginia?’ He just nodded.”

  Moses asked him why they should “go Richmond,” but Joey shook his head. He only held on tight to his father, and with his son against him Moses felt Joey’s body trembling. He knows, Moses thought. He knows but he won’t tell me. He’s scared. I can see it in his eyes, the fear. So Moses stood there holding his son, who continued shivering against him, as if he were freezing, while the temperature in the apartment was set at a comfortable seventy degrees. For whatever reason Joey believed they had to go to Richmond, Virginia, and in the back of his mind Moses kept thinking about the morning he was giving Joey his bath, how Joey had told him seven and Maine and then what he had later learned in the newspaper.

  For the rest of the day Moses tried to ignore it. Tried to push any thought of it out of his mind. But he couldn’t. Last time it had been a week before those three men executed those seven helpless, innocent people. One woman had been pregnant. And now his son was telling him they had to go to a place over four hundred miles away. Moses spent a lot of time that day and night praying to God. Asking Him for courage and to give him a sign.

  “But I had already gotten my sign,” Moses said, and now, for the first time in maybe the last half hour, his eyes met mine. They looked very much like Lewis Shepherd’s eyes—scarred and lost—that I understood what happened the moment I stepped foot inside this RV. Just as I had back on the second floor of Shepherd’s Books, I had somehow produced a key that unlocked that door of terrible memories. Only this door was in Moses Cunningham’s head, and though I had no grounds to make this assumption, I assumed everything inside had been told it would eventually see the light of day once more. And now, as promised, it was making an appearance.

  “Look,” I said, because more than a few moments of silence had passed, giving me the opportunity to jump in with what I felt compelled to say. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “But that’s the thing, Christopher. I do. I have to tell you everything so that you can understand what’s happening.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough. But first I need to tell you the rest. Like I said, I’d already gotten my sign. I knew it then but just didn’t want to admit it to myself. The next morning I made arrangements for Joey to get out of daycare for a few days and called off work. Then we packed our things.” H
e paused, swirled nothing around in his glass, and asked, “Would you like some more?”

  I noticed my glass was empty. I nodded, held it out, and as Moses poured, I said, “What did you mean by that before? That you knew you’d already gotten your sign but didn’t want to admit it.”

  “You mean that isn’t obvious by now?” Moses smiled weakly as he filled his own glass and then capped the bottle. “My son was a prophet from God.”

  Chapter 17

  When they arrived to Richmond, Moses didn’t know what to do. He kept asking Joey why they had come here, but his son hardly even acknowledged him. They’d never gone farther than twenty miles away from home before; coming to Virginia was not just a vacation, it was an adventure. They spent their nights in a cheap motel just off the turnpike and drove around most of the day, Moses hoping that Joey would see something that might trigger a memory from his nightmare.

  On their third night in Richmond, Moses decided it was a lost cause. They’d traveled all this way for nothing, and while they had spent time at some local attractions—St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Patrick Henry voiced his famous seven words; the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, housed in Richmond’s oldest home—they had also spent more money than they could afford to lose. (And here is where I begin to really see Joey as a child, not even four years old yet, looking around with wide eyes at everything he can take in at one time because this is so much different than home, so much different than the stale wallpaper and stained carpet.) Tomorrow, Moses told himself, they would head back home and try to forget this nonsense.

  Then, lying in bed that night beside him, Joey said one word very softly in his sleep, as Moses stared up at the ceiling and wondered whether God was punishing him for the sins of his past.

  “And that one word,” Moses told me now, seven years after their failed visit to Virginia, “was fire.”

  “Fire,” I repeated softly. “What fire?”

  As it turned out, the next morning a mile east of their motel an International House of Pancakes caught on fire. Most of the people made it out safely, but a few had gotten trapped inside. Five people: four adults and a child. Each of them died.

  Moses stood outside the restaurant he and his son had been eating breakfast at for the past two days and watched the firemen work. At his side, Joey stood holding his hand. He didn’t seem affected by what was happening at all. He didn’t say anything to his father, he didn’t even point when part of the building collapsed. He simply stared with what would soon become his trademark: dark solemn eyes.

  “And as I stood there, I wanted to look down at him. But for some reason, I couldn’t. Because I kept thinking about what he said just that night in his sleep. Somehow he knew. Not completely, but somehow he sensed it. And at that moment, as I watched along with those other bystanders, I understood that we’d been sent there to somehow stop those five people from dying.”

  Months passed. It began happening more frequently. Joey would get a vision or have a nightmare and he would tell Moses they had to go someplace. Sometimes it was to a small town Moses had never heard of. Other times to a major city a few states away. Joey never knew exactly why they were going there, but he always said a number—and unless he and Moses managed to reach their destination in time and figure out what was wrong, the news the next day would announce the deaths of whatever particular number of people Joey had first mentioned days, sometimes weeks, before.

  Moses ended up quitting both of his jobs. He gave up the lease on the condominium. He’d taken some education classes in college and knew he could teach his son the basics. Besides, in only a few short years Joey had proven himself much more mature and intelligent than Moses had ever thought possible.

  They purchased an RV—“Very similar to the one we’re sitting in right now”—and started out. Moses had only four thousand dollars to his name, everything that was left of his savings, but he wasn’t worried. He knew God would provide. When Joey had a vision that they needed to go to a certain place, Moses would call ahead to one of the local churches and ask them if they needed a guest speaker for the next week or two. And while most churches, as a rule, don’t allow outside speakers to come in out of nowhere (especially with no credentials whatsoever), Moses and Joey were almost never turned away.

  Months would go by and Joey would have no visions or dreams or signs at all. When that happened Moses found a job that paid under the table, usually working the back of a local diner or restaurant. He always told his employers not to expect him around for very long, so they wouldn’t be surprised when one morning he just didn’t show up. Whether any of those employers suspected anything suspicious, nothing was ever said and the local law never came around asking questions.

  “When Joey had his visions I didn’t want to waste any time. I got our things together and we were on our way.”

  The older Joey got and the more visions he had—“nigh-mares” he called them until he was five years old—the clearer those visions became. Moses wasn’t forced to piece everything together as he had before. Joey knew exactly where they had to go—what town, suburb, sometimes even what street—and how many people were going to be harmed. What Joey never knew was what was going to happen or who would be responsible.

  Sometimes they weren’t able to succeed in their work—or missions, as Moses had begun calling them. The Oklahoma City Bombing was one of their first major failures. They were called there two weeks before it happened. But Joey couldn’t piece it together fast enough. He’d only been five at the time, a month and a half away from his sixth birthday, and he was so innocent and naïve, but he understood that they needed to work quickly. Then suddenly the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building blew.

  “The following month was the worst for my son. Until then we’d only been called to a few different places to save a handful of lives. The largest number was nineteen, when I believe a tractor-trailer whose brakes had failed would have slammed into a K-Mart had we not intervened. But now over one hundred and fifty lives were lost, and Joey felt responsible for each and every one of them. It’s no wonder that was when his stuttering began.”

  Obviously the event had scarred Joey, both emotionally and spiritually, but Moses didn’t notice his son’s stutter until a few weeks later. Not until he began to recognize the patterns of the speech impediment, how Joey no longer spoke clearly like he had before. The only times Joey’s stammer disappeared was when he was “in the zone,” as Moses later called it—when Joey was so deep in concentration and attuned with the calling he had been sent that he was in another state of mind.

  “It was also around that time that he started watching Westerns,” Moses said, his eyes momentarily lifting to a shelf against the wall above the couch. My own eyes shifted that way and I saw, among some books, various videotapes, namely Once Upon a Time in the West, The Magnificent Seven, and High Noon. “I never understood why—to be honest, I don’t think I ever truly understood my son—but he loved them. Every time we left for a new place he’d say we were riding off into the backwards sunset. Because in Westerns the good guys are always riding away into the sunset at the end, away from all that bad stuff. But we were doing just the opposite. We were riding toward all that bad stuff head-on.”

  After the bombing Joey sobered up to the responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders. At almost six years old, he began to understand his place in life. (“Can you imagine that?” Moses asked. “Most people in their forties still don’t know their place just yet. Some never do.”) Even Moses, who was there every step of the way, couldn’t fathom how his son managed it. Never once would Joey talk about his feelings. In fact, he pretty much kept himself closed up, and while Moses would never admit this to anyone else, he was thankful. He didn’t want to hear just what his son was feeling, or thinking, because Moses didn’t think he could handle it. Just having the knowledge that something terrible was going to happen was bad enough. But then also knowing that it could be avoided, and being given the chance to try to make it happ
en? That, in Moses’s opinion, was insanity.

  How Joey was able to continue, Moses had no idea. Sometimes he wondered if his son ignored the visions he received, but he never asked. At least once every couple of months Joey would tell him that they had to go to a new place, along with what Moses had begun to think of as the magic number of how many people were going to die. Then they went.

  “I could tell it was draining him, but he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he never seemed to mind. There are times when you have to do something because no one else is going to do it. Maybe that’s how Joey felt, I don’t know. All I know for certain is that it was different for me. For me, the only reason I kept going was because I didn’t think I could live with myself if I stopped.”

  Four years after Oklahoma City they were called to Jefferson County, Colorado (“What half this country mistakes for Littleton, thanks to our savvy media”). It seemed close to twenty people were going to die. The morning Joey awoke from his latest vision—no longer were they called “nigh-mares”—his face had been so pained, so full of fear. His son’s eyes reminded Moses of the night he first cried out in his sleep, and how he had held onto Moses, shivering like it was freezing. Moses knew at that moment there would be something different about this calling, but he couldn’t quite comprehend the importance until after.

  They never did make it. Right before Joey was able to piece everything together—he actually managed to run into Eric Harris two days before the shooting—one of the tires on the RV blew. They ran off the road and hit a tree. They were both knocked unconscious. By the time the police and paramedics arrived and brought them to, it was already too late. It was noontime and already the killing spree at Columbine High School had begun.

  It was then that Moses understood the role he and Joey were playing. He had no idea why it had taken him this long to figure it out. He’d always assumed God was using them to save these people (so of course it made sense why they never had to worry about money or food or shelter), but he never understood why.