The Returned

by Jason Mott

  The feeling made Lucille uneasy. She remembered reading newspapers or seeing things on the television about some terrible tragedy that began with too many people crowded together in too small of a space. Nobody would have anywhere to run, Lucille thought. She looked around the room—as best she could on account of all the people cluttering up her eye line—and counted the exits, just in case. There was the main doorway at the back of the church, but that was full up with people. Seemed like almost everybody in Arcadia was there, all six hundred of them. A wall of bodies.

  Now and again she would notice the mass of people ripple forward as someone else forced entry into the church and into the body of the crowd. There came a low grumbling of “Hello” and “I’m sorry” and “Excuse me.” If this were all a prelude to some tragic stampede death, at least it was cordial, Lucille thought.

  Lucille licked her lips and shook her head. The air grew stiffer. There was no room for a body to move but, still, people were coming into the church. She could feel it. Probably, they were coming from Buckhead or Waccamaw or Riegelwood. The Bureau was trying to hold these town hall meetings in every town they could and there were some folks who’d become something akin to groupies—the kind you hear about that go around following famous musicians from one show to another. These people would follow the agents from the Bureau from one town hall meeting to another, looking for inconsistencies and a chance to start a fight.

  Lucille even noticed a man and a woman that looked like they might have been a reporter and a photographer. The man looked like the kind she saw in magazines or read about in books: with his disheveled hair and five-o-clock shadow. Lucille imagined him smelling of split wood and the ocean.

  The woman was sharply dressed, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her makeup flawlessly applied. “I wonder if there’s a news van out there,” Lucille said, but her words were lost in the clamor of the crowd.

  As if cued by a stage director, Pastor Peters appeared from the cloistered door at the corner of the pulpit. His wife came after, looking as small and frail as she always did. She wore a plain black dress that made her look all the smaller. Already she was sweating, dabbing her brow in a delicate way. Lucille had trouble remembering the woman’s first name. It was a small, frail thing, her name, something that people tended to overlook, just like the woman to whom it belonged.

  In a type of biblical contradiction to his wife, Pastor Robert Peters was a tall, wide-bodied man with dark hair and a perpetually tanned-looking complexion. He was solid as stone. The kind of man who looked born, bred, propagated and cultivated for a way of life that hinged upon violence. Though, for as long as Lucille had known the young preacher, she’d never known him to so much as raise his voice—not counting the voice raising that came at the climax of certain sermons, but that was no more a sign of a violent soul than thunder was the sign of an angry god. Thunder in the voice of pastors was just the way God got your attention, Lucille knew.

  “It’s a taste of hell, Reverend,” Lucille said with a grin when the pastor and his wife had come near enough.

  “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Lucille,” Pastor Peters replied. His large, square head swung on his large, square neck. “We might have to see about getting a few people to exit quietly out the back. Don’t think I’ve ever seen it this full. Maybe we ought to pass the plate around before we get rid of them, though. I need new tires.”

  “Oh, hush!”

  “How are you tonight, Mrs. Hargrave?” The pastor’s wife put her small hand to her small mouth, covering a small cough. “You look good,” she said in a small voice.

  “Poor thing,” Lucille said, stroking Jacob’s hair, “are you all right? You look like you’re falling apart.”

  “I’m fine,” the woman said. “Just a little under the weather. It’s awfully hot in here.”

  “We may need to see about asking some of these people to stand outside,” the pastor said again. He raised a thick, square hand, as if the sun were in his eyes. “Never have been enough exits in here.”

  “Won’t be no exits in hell!” Helen added.

  Pastor Peters only smiled and reached over the pew to shake her hand. “And how’s this young fellow?” he said, aiming a bright smile at Jacob.

  “I’m fine.”

  Lucille tapped him on the leg.

  “I’m fine, sir,” he corrected.

  “What do you make of all this?” the pastor asked, chuckling. Beads of sweat glistened on his brow. “What are we going to do with all these people, Jacob?”

  The boy shrugged and received another tap on the thigh.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Maybe we could send them all home? Or maybe we could just get a water hose and hose them all down.”

  Jacob smiled. “A preacher can’t do stuff like that.”

  “Says who?”

  “The Bible.”

  “The Bible? Are you sure?”

  Jacob nodded. “Want to hear a joke? Daddy teaches me the best jokes.”

  “Does he?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Pastor Peters kneeled, much to Lucille’s embarrassment. She hated the notion of the pastor dirtying his suit on account of some two-bit joke that Harold had taught Jacob. Lord knows Harold knew some jokes that weren’t meant for the light of holiness.

  She held her breath.

  “What did the math book tell the pencil?”

  “Hmm.” Pastor Peters rubbed his hairless chin, looking very deep in thought. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “What did the math book tell the pencil?”

  “I’ve got a lot of problems,” Jacob said. Then he laughed. To some, it was only the sound of a child laughing. Others, knowing that this boy had been dead only a few weeks prior, did not know how to feel.

  The pastor laughed with the boy. Lucille, too—thanking God that the joke hadn’t been the one about the pencil and the beaver.

  Pastor Peters reached into the breast pocket of his coat and, with considerable flourish, conjured a small piece of foil-wrapped candy. “You like cinnamon?”

  “Yes, sir! Thank you!”

  “He’s so well mannered,” Helen Hayes added. She shifted in her seat, her eyes following the pastor’s frail wife, whose name Helen could not remember for the life of her.

  “Anyone as well mannered as him deserves some candy,” the pastor’s wife said. She stood behind her husband, gently patting the center of his back—even that seemed a great feat for her, with him being so large and her being so small. “It’s hard to find well-behaved children these days, what with things being the way they are.” She paused to dab her brow. She folded her handkerchief and covered her mouth and coughed into it mouselike. “Oh, my.”

  “You’re just about the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,” Helen said.

  The pastor’s wife smiled and politely said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Pastor Peters patted Jacob’s head. Then he whispered to Lucille, “Whatever they say, don’t let it bother him…or you. Okay?”

  “Yes, Pastor,” Lucille said.

  “Yes, sir,” Jacob said.

  “Remember,” the pastor said to the boy, “you’re a miracle. All life is a miracle.”

  Angela Johnson

  The floors of the guest bedroom in which she had been locked for the past three days were hardwood and beautiful. When they brought her meals, she tried not to spill anything, not wanting to ruin the floor and compound her punishment for whatever she had done wrong. Sometimes, just to be safe, she would eat her meals in the bathtub of the adjoining bathroom, listening to her parents speaking in the bedroom on the other side of the wall.

  “Why haven’t they come to take it back yet?” her father said.

  “We never should have let them bring her…it to begin with,” her mother replied. “That was your idea. What if the neighbors find out?”

  “I think Tim already knows.”

  “How could he? It was so late when they brought it. He couldn’t have been awake at that time of
night, could he?”

  A moment of silence came between them.

  “Imagine what will happen if the firm finds out. This is your fault.”

  “I just had to know,” he said, his voice softening. “It looks so much like h—”

  “No. Don’t start that again, Mitchell. Not again! I’m calling them again. They need to come and take it away tonight!”

  She sat in the corner with her knees pulled to her chest, crying just a little, sorry for whatever she had done, not understanding any of this.

  She wondered where they had taken her dresser, her clothes, the posters she had plastered around the room over the years. The walls were painted a soft pastel—something all at once red and pink. The holes left by pushpins, the marks left by tape, the pencil marks on the door frame indicating each year of growth…all of them were gone. Simply painted over.

  Four

  WHEN THERE WERE so many people and so little air in the room that everyone began to consider the likelihood of tragedy, the noise of the crowd began to grow silent. The silence began at the front doors of the church and marched through the crowd like a virus.

  Pastor Peters stood erect—looking as tall and wide as Mount Sinai, Lucille thought—and folded both hands meekly at his waist and waited, with his wife huddled in the shelter of his shadow. Lucille craned her neck to see what was happening. Maybe the devil had finally grown tired of waiting.

  “Hello. Hello. Pardon me. Excuse me. Hello. How are you? Excuse me. Pardon me.”

  It came like an incantation through the crowd, each word driving back the masses.

  “Excuse me. Hello. How are you? Excuse me. Hello…” It was a smooth, dark voice, full of manners and implication. The voice grew louder—or perhaps the silence grew—until there was only the rhythm of the words moving over everything, like a mantra. “Excuse me. Hi, how are you? Pardon me. Hello…”

  Without a doubt, it was the well-practiced voice of a government man.

  “Good evening, Pastor,” Agent Bellamy said gently, finally breaching the ocean of people.

  Lucille sighed, letting go of a breath she did not know she had been holding.

  “Ma’am?”

  He wore a dark, well-cut gray suit very similar to the one he was wearing on the day he came with Jacob. It wasn’t the kind of suit you see many government men wearing. It was a suit worthy of Hollywood and talk shows and other glamorous things, Lucille mused. “And how’s our boy?” he asked, nodding at Jacob, his smile still as even and square as fresh-cut marble.

  “I’m fine, sir,” Jacob said, candy clicking against his teeth.

  “That’s good to hear.” He straightened his tie, though it had not been crooked. “That’s very good to hear.”

  The soldiers were there then. A pair of boys so young they seemed to be only playing at soldiering. At any moment Lucille expected them to start chasing each other around the pulpit, the way Jacob and the Thompson boy had once done. But the guns asleep at their hips were not toys.

  “Thank you for coming,” Pastor Peters said, shaking Agent Bellamy’s hand.

  “Wouldn’t have missed it. Thank you for waiting for me. Quite the crowd you’ve got here.”

  “They’re just curious,” Pastor Peters said. “We all are. Do you…or, rather, does the Bureau or the government as a whole have anything to say?”

  “The government as a whole?” Agent Bellamy asked, not breaking his smile. “You overestimate me. I’m just a poor civil servant. A little black boy from—” he lowered his voice “—New York,” he said, as if everyone in the church, everyone in the town, hadn’t already heard it all in his accent. Still, there was no sense in him wearing it on his sleeve any more than he had to. The South was a strange place.

  * * *

  The meeting began.

  “As you all know,” Pastor Peters began from the front of the church, “we are living in what can only be called interesting times. We are so blessed, to be able to…to witness such miracles and wonders. And make no mistake, that’s what they are—miracles and wonders.” He paced as he spoke, which he always did when he was uncertain about what he was saying. “This is a time worthy of the Old Testament. Not only has Lazarus risen from the grave, but it looks like he’s brought everyone with him!” Pastor Peters stopped and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck.

  His wife coughed.

  “Something has happened,” he belted out, startling the church. “Something—the cause of which we have not yet been made privy—has happened.” He spread his arms. “And what are we to do? How are we to react? Should we be afraid? These are uncertain times, and it’s only natural to be frightened of uncertain things. But what do we do with that fear?” He walked to the front pew where Lucille and Jacob were sitting, his hard-soled shoes sliding silently over the old burgundy carpet. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow, smiling down at Jacob.

  “We temper our fear with patience,” he said. “That is what we do.”

  It was very important to mention patience, the pastor reminded himself. He took Jacob’s hand, being sure that even those in the back of the church, those who could not see, had time enough to be told what he was doing, how he was speaking of patience as he held the hand of the boy who had been dead for half a century and who was now, suddenly, peacefully sucking candy in the front of the church, in the very shadow of the cross. The pastor’s eyes moved around the room and the crowd followed him. One by one he looked at the other Returned who were there, so that everyone might see how large the situation already was. In spite of the fact that, initially, they were not supposed to be there. They were real, not imagined. Undeniable. Even that was important for people to understand.

  Patience was one of the hardest things for anyone to understand, Pastor Peters knew. And it was even harder to practice. He felt that he himself was the least patient of all. Not one word he said seemed to matter or make sense, but he had his flock to tend to, he had his part to play. And he needed to keep her off his mind.

  He finally planted his feet and pushed the image of her face from his mind. “There is a lot of potential and, worse yet, there is a lot of opportunity for rash thoughts and rash behavior in these times of uncertainty. You only need to turn on the television to see how frightened everyone is, to see how some people are behaving, the things they’re doing out of fear.

  “I hate to say that we are afraid, but we are. I hate to say that we can be rash, but we can. I hate to say that we want to do things we know we should not do, but it’s the truth.”

  * * *

  In his mind, she was sprawled out on the thick, low-hung bough of an oak tree like a predatory cat. He stood on the ground, just a boy then, looking up at her as she dangled one arm down toward him. He was so very afraid. Afraid of heights. Afraid of her and the way she made him feel. Afraid of himself, as all children are. Afraid of…

  * * *

  “Pastor?”

  It was Lucille.

  The great oak tree, the sun bubbling through the canopy, the wet, green grass, the young girl—all of them disappeared. Pastor Peters sighed, holding his empty hands in front of him.

  “What are we gonna do with ’em?” Fred Green barked from the center of the church. Everyone turned to face him. He removed his tattered cap and straightened his khaki-colored work shirt. “They ain’t right!” he continued, his mouth pulled tight as a rusty letterbox. His hair had long since abandoned him, and his nose was large, his eyes small—all of which conspired together over the years to give him sharp, cruel features. “What are we gonna do with ’em?”

  “We’re going to be patient,” Pastor Peters said. He thought of mentioning the Wilson family in back of the church. But that family had a special meaning for the town of Arcadia and, for now, it was best to keep them out of sight.

  “Be patient?” Fred’s eyes went wide. A tremble ran over him. “When the Devil himself shows up at our front door you want us to be patient? You want us to be patient, here and now,
in the End Times!” Fred looked not at Pastor Peters as he spoke, but at the audience. He turned in a small circle, pulling the crowd into himself, making sure that each of them could see what was in his eyes. “He wants patience at a time like this!”

  “Now, now,” Pastor Peters said. “Let’s not start up about the ‘End Times.’ And let’s not go into calling these poor people devils. They’re mysteries, that’s for certain. They may even be miracles. But right now, it’s too soon for anyone to get a handle on anything. There’s too much we don’t know and the last thing we need is to start a panic here. You heard about what happened in Dallas, all those people hurt—Returned and regular people, as well. All of them gone. We can’t have something like that happen here. Not in Arcadia.”

  “If you ask me, them folks in Dallas did what needed to be done.”

  The church was alive. In the pews, along the walls, at the back of the church, everyone was grumbling in agreement with Fred or, at the very least, in agreement with his passion.

  Pastor Peters lifted his hands and motioned for the crowd to calm. It dulled for a moment, only to rise again.

  Lucille wrapped an arm around Jacob and pulled him closer, shuddering at the sudden recollection of the image of Returned—grown folks and children alike—laid out, bloodied and bruised, on the sun-warmed streets of Dallas.

  She stroked Jacob’s head and hummed some tune she could not name. She felt the eyes of the townspeople on Jacob. The longer they looked, the harder their faces became. Lips sneered and brows fell into outright scowls. All the while the boy only went about the business of resting in the curve of his mother’s arm, where he pondered nothing more important than glazed peaches.

  Things wouldn’t be so complex, Lucille thought, if she could hide the fact of him being one of the Returned. If only he could pass for just another child. But even if the entirety of the town didn’t know her personal history, didn’t know about the tragedy that befell her and Harold on August 15, 1966, there was no way to hide what Jacob was. The living always knew the Returned.