The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  That night, Rodney slept in his new white van and Emma and Daniel took over the lean-to, with its twin bed mattress and slightly warmer shelter. Rodney had added a solar powered heater less than a week ago. He had foraged it from a motor home that had been cracked open like an egg and left on the side of the highway, east of his farm. The heater’s reserve didn’t last through to the morning, after straining to warm even the little lean-to for a few hours, but it offered a small promise of the cozy home he was building.

  In the van, Rodney spread his military-issue bedroll next to the toolboxes he had moved in there. He felt fortunate that he had worked hard that day, so that his harried mind could not keep him from falling asleep. His awareness that mother and son slept in his little bud of a new house, added a sort of comfort to his sleep, as well.

  As his final “good night” he responded to the coyote’s howl, marking that creature’s place in the night after all the human noises had died down. After howling, Rodney laughed at himself and fell promptly asleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the course of his life, Rodney had often felt the shock of those dreams that left him certain that they were real, only to be deeply disappointed to discover otherwise. When he woke to a woman’s voice, he first thought he was having one of those hyper-realistic dreams. Then, as he lay tense and silent, trying to decide if he had actually heard something, he remembered Emma and grew more alert. Was she in trouble? But the voice had toned a homey, not an urgent, note.

  Then he heard it again.

  “Rod,” she said. “Rod, it’s me.”

  Every inch of his skin electrified at that voice. How could it be?

  “Anna?” he said back, his voice childlike and shaking.

  Then he nearly screamed when the handle on the van’s rear door turned. Some breaker in his brain quickly kicked in and assured him that this was a dream and he didn’t have to be so vigilant. “It’s only a dream.”

  The door swung open slowly and there she stood. Rodney sat up and gawked, his mouth half open. There in the moonlight, Anna looked in at him, more stunningly beautiful than he had remembered. He had always relished her beauty, but her appearance now transcended the woman of his memories. He stared wide-eyed at Anna, dressed in white, perfect and vibrant.

  She smiled, apparently reading his mind. “No, it’s not a dream. I’m really here. But I’m not here in the way that I used to be.” She paused and allowed her introduction to find receptive brain cells.

  Ignoring any subtleties in her words, he stared at how straight she stood and how easily she stepped, as she swung the door outward. It was as if she weighed nothing, as if she literally moved without effort. How could this be? Alive? And even more than just alive?

  Obviously, this was just a dream, which explained the changes in her, though it didn’t explain the tactile experiences of the moment—the cool night air coming in the door, his hand sweating where he gripped his pistol behind him, and the smell of fresh flowers. How could he smell something in a dream? He never remembered such a compelling odor in any previous dream…and so heavenly.

  He began to shake, as if a small shiver in the night air had multiplied to a violent quaking. Then, for the first time in his life, Rodney fainted. A man who had stayed conscious through a dozen bleeding traumatic injuries, who had held a soldier a in his arms with nothing left of the lower half of his body, fainted now at the sight of his wife, somehow returned to him from the dead.

  He awoke from his faint with a headache. Ann knelt in the van, holding his head on her lap. She stroked his head once, from the back forward, and the pain suddenly disappeared. Anna didn’t look concerned, even at his uncharacteristic lapse of consciousness. Her lack of concern seemed strange, yet did not answer whether this experience was unreal. He sensed that she understood what he was going through and that she had absolutely no fear about his reaction, or about anything else, for that matter.

  She had always been courageous, willing to risk losing her heart whenever she sent it with him into battle, but he had held and comforted her numerous times when she released cascades of sobs and confessed her fears. This Anna, this new manifestation of his wife, seemed invulnerable to such doubt and insecurity.

  “Are you real?”

  “Yes, Rod, I’m as real as you are. But I’m different from who I was when you knew me before. I’ve been changed.”

  “Yes,” he said, “you are different.” He stared at her perfect skin there in the dimness. She seemed illuminated from within, yet he could feel her hands, he knew his head was resting on her knees.

  Even as he thought about this physical connection, she gently laid his head back on his pillow and withdrew to the side of the van, taking a seat on a red, metal tool box, her knees pulled up to her chest, her cloud-like dress falling to the top of her bare feet.

  “My God, she’s beautiful,” was all Rodney could think. He actually felt the same urge that men have felt through all the millennia, when inspired to worship some deity. Again she seemed to sense his thoughts.

  “Don’t worship me, Rod. I am just a creature, not the creator.”

  The authority with which she said this, combined with the clairvoyant accuracy of her response to his thoughts, extended his disorientation. His heart bursting within him, he did another uncharacteristic thing; he began to weep uncontrollably. Rodney did not cover his sobbing face, as he had when he first learned of her torturous death, or when he heard about the loss of his children. For those tears, he had withdrawn himself from the eyes of everyone. Here, in her presence, he felt that he need not hide and, in fact, could not hide. For her part, Anna did not avert her eyes, nor did she melt into tears, as she would have in that other life they had lived together.

  Even in the midst of his catharsis, Rodney remained fascinated by her composure and that this poise seemed to require no great effort on her part. She simply appeared satisfied, no sense of loss, no doubt or fear. That serene beauty attracted him even more. If the look on her face had been cold, mechanical numbness, it would have chilled him to his core. If she had succumbed to his emotions, then he would have attached himself to her as before, man and wife, two vulnerable humans, dependent on each other. The secure and fulfilled woman before him now, however, would not need him in any circumstances.

  “What,” he began to ask, regaining his breath to speak. “What happened to you?”

  The question invited a broad range of answers. Anna started with the most basic. “You know that the Dictator’s men came and took me away. You don’t need to know all that they did to me,” she said. “You were supposed to think the worst, to fear the worst. They captured me in order to get to you, initially. But then they discovered my faith and that was reason enough to prosecute me for disloyalty. I refused the chip and that was all they needed to justify my imprisonment, torture and execution. They seemed to give up on the idea that I would help them get to you and contented themselves with punishing me.”

  She took a deep breath. “The children, then, became their leverage against you. Fortunately, I was able to get them out before the police came for me. My cousin Ginny took them and hid them at the farm of a friend of theirs, Mennonites who stayed out of the war.” She looked at Rodney, assessing how much she could tell him. “It was the hardest thing I ever did, sending them away.”

  He watched as she became perfectly still, as if she momentarily turned deep inside herself, the dim light from the van door glinting in her eyes as she glanced down briefly. She shed no tears, however. She seemed to need only to allow Rodney to catch up, free from guilt that one might find in a mother who had sent her children away, children who died in hiding.

  “I didn’t know about their deaths at the time. I’m glad I didn’t know. I was suffering enough already. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it.” She connected honestly with that past experience without being consumed by it. Then she looked to Rodney.

  “Did you blame yourself?” she asked.

  He took a deep breath.
He had always felt free to speak from his heart with Anna, but often waited until she would ask the hard questions. Now, more than ever, he knew he could trust her. “Of course,” he said quietly.

  She nodded and repeated his answer. “Of course.” Her eyes lowered and then she looked at him lovingly. “It was always an illusion, especially for us parents, that we were to blame for anything, or praiseworthy for anything.”

  That statement seemed strange to Rodney, coming from one so content and free. He couldn’t absorb the freedom that she seemed to celebrate in acknowledging her lack of ultimate control, even in the lives of her own children. He still owned weapons and counted on defending himself, though more reticent to take on responsibility for protecting anyone else than he had been in the past.

  Then, without the desperation of one that needs to persuade, she attempted to envelope him with her own liberating sense of finitude. “Do you remember the time Olivia turned to you at the breakfast table and told you not to worry about her when you were away at the war? She was only four years old and yet she seemed to be imparting such comfort and wisdom. Remember when we talked about it that night? You said, ‘where did she get that?’” She waited for him to enter that memory with her.

  Rodney could see the look in Olivia’s blue-green eyes, a bit of milk in the corner of her mouth, her spoon held over her bowl of cereal. He nodded and Anna knew he was back there in that moment.

  “What you knew then was always true. The best of them came not from you and me, but from the one that created them. And just so, we couldn’t be held ultimately responsible for the length of their lives or the depth of their joys.”

  Rodney looked at Anna the way one does when his mind starts to wander from a very important point, as if the persuasiveness of her explanation overwhelmed him into withdrawal, instead of agreement. But, in his defense, Rodney now observed an Anna that he had never seen before. He knew no one in the world more intimately and fully than he did Anna. Even his most shock-disrupted self could not deny that this really was Anna, yet she was completely changed.

  As a carpenter with an artist’s eye, Rodney assessed Anna’s frame and curves, the weight and strength of her body. Then he knew he must actually be dreaming, the way you know when something is entirely out of place in your nighttime wandering. He could see, for instance, that the bunion, which had misshapen her right foot, was gone. Her back, as well, was now perfectly straight, without any strain on her part to fight against the scoliosis she had suffered from birth. Her eyes and nose no longer bore the red and weary look of a woman allergic to an array of things all her life.

  While he surrendered to this corporeal assessment, Anna sat still, looking at him like a sympathetic scientist, observing a favorite subject in some pacific animal experiment. When Rodney noticed her patient attention, he asked the question again. “Are you real?”

  She smiled. That smile answered his teaming doubts.

  “But how can this be? You died.”

  Anna nodded and her sympathy turned to compassion. The narrowed eyes and slightly pursed mouth did not say, “poor Rodney,” but rather signified a concern that somehow left her contentment intact. She was not concerned for herself, for how he would react and how that would impact her. She thought only of Rodney and what her startling presence would mean for him.

  “So, how can this be?” Rodney asked, his voice constricted with emotion.

  “I did die, as you know. Now I’m alive again, but not as before. This is my new body and my spirit lives on.” She let that settle, in the same way that Rodney used to allow the rings on a pond to diminish after casting a fishing lure. When she saw blank acceptance rest on his face, she persisted, keeping it personal.

  “This is a new life for me, the life I was meant for, a life of perfect peace and fulfillment.”

  Anna was addressing Rodney’s deepest questions, but she was not really communicating the sort of tranquility she was experiencing. The more of this conversation they lay down around them, the more Rodney felt her spinning out of his grasp. She could sense his growing distance and compounding confusion, but could not solve it for him and did not try. Instead of saying more, Anna began to say less, though patiently pressing through his questions.

  “This new life, what is it, what are you doing?” he asked.

  “I haven’t really asked that question, myself, yet,” she said with a smile. She could see his understandable dissatisfaction with that answer. Still smiling, she looked at him with all her familiar affection for him and said, “It’s different, Rod. It’s not just about doing things now. I have such freedom and joy in just being whole, being well and knowing that I am accepted just the way I am.”

  “I always loved you completely,” he said, protesting.

  She touched his face again, but only briefly, leaning back as soon as she did it. Still smiling lovingly at him, she said, “You were a wonderful husband to me, Rod, even through the hardest of times. You loved me as much as any mortal man ever could.”

  He was not so delirious with shock as to miss that word “mortal.” Whatever she was now, Anna was not the same mortal woman he had lived with, loved and lost.

  Anna looked into Rodney’s child-like expression and said, “I have new work, new responsibilities; those responsibilities no longer include being a wife.” Again she seemed to wait for her words to soak in. Rodney, however, had not wrapped his arms around what was happening enough to even formulate the question of whether Anna would return to being his wife. He thought of only one very practical question.

  “Will you stay around here?” Even as he asked this, he couldn’t guess which would be more painful, to not see her, or to see her but not be able to be her husband.

  “I’m not sure yet,” she said. “That answer goes with my new role, my new responsibilities.” She thought a moment, as if she was listening to some sort of inner voice. Then she said, “I don’t expect I will be staying around here.” Again, she looked through his eyes, into his soul, and said, “I don’t know how much more I will be seeing you.”

  From Anna, this was a simple statement of fact, that didn’t seem to worry her by its uncertainty; but, for Rodney, it was the voice of fears that he had long ago assembled and enshrined on an internal emotional shelf.

  Then Anna stepped through the next doorway to finalize their alienation. “You need to consider yourself free from our marriage, as you were already, before I came to see you tonight,” she said. After looking for a sign of acceptance of this statement, Anna continued, her voice softening a bit more. “The reason I’m here tonight is to make sure that you don’t miss the opportunity that sleeps now in your new house.”

  Rodney raised his eyebrows and shifted to a more comfortable sitting position, as if unsettled by his deceased wife finding him with another woman sleeping in his house. Very little of what Rodney said or did that night had rational underpinnings, instead surging from one searing emotion after another.

  “How did you know about her?” he asked, sounding a little perturbed.

  Anna smiled, a playful smile of enjoyment and adventure. “There is so much that has changed for me, Rod, you will not even begin to understand. I’m connected with something so much bigger than myself, and now, I can communicate over thousands of miles, without any electronic means at all. It’s a whole new life with new capabilities beyond your wildest dreams.”

  Then she settled down to answer his question. “I guess I’m a logical messenger to let you know that you should look to your new life now, to make sure that you feel free to enter new relationships, if that’s what you want. I’m not telling you what to do, of course, no one is, just delivering a message of freedom and new hope.”

  Rodney thought for a moment about the prospect of Emma and Daniel becoming part of his life. Before this conversation, he hadn’t even begun to assess that possibility, though he did, of course, notice how attractive Emma was and how lonely he was. Was it time for him to contemplate a new family? Really?


  Then it suddenly occurred to him to ask, “what about the kids, then? Are they, are they . . . a . . . alive too?”

  Anna smiled a more guarded, tight-lipped smile, having known this question would arise eventually. She nodded. “They are happy and content just as I am. They are alive and will never die again.”

  “Will I get to see them?” He tried to withhold the pleading from his voice.

  “I’m not sure of the answer to that,” Anna said, again seeming truly sympathetic but not pained. “There is much for me yet to learn about this new life, but I know not to expect things to be the way they were in our old lives. The children, like me, are alive in a new way, with a new kind of life ahead of them, including responsibilities of their own. We can content ourselves with the knowledge that everything will be taken care of, whether we understand it or not.”

  More than any other time during this conversation, Rodney now felt that she was trying to tell him as much as she thought he could absorb, but wasn’t telling him nearly everything that she knew. This bit into him like a pair of stiff, new shoes on a long, hard walk. He sighed audibly.

  “I wish I could give you all the comfort you need, but that’s not up to me,” Anna said. “You will find your way and you will learn all the things you need to know, including about the kids. Be patient and keep an open mind, is all I can really tell you now. I surely don’t understand it all myself.”

  She knew that she had said enough and that it would take Rodney a good deal of time to compute all that she had presented, and even more that she had implied. She nimbly rocked forward on her toes, stood up two-thirds of the way, keeping her head just clear of the van ceiling. She reached out her hands to Rodney, who still sat in his sleeping bag. He took her hands in his, but she slipped free effortlessly and stepped toward the door. Rodney rose and pursued her.