The Returned

by Jason Mott

  “Where are we going?” Harold asked.

  “How do mules get out of the barn?” Jacob asked.

  “We don’t want to get lost,” Harold said.

  “They use their don-keys.”

  Harold laughed.

  Soon there came the scent of water. The father and son continued on. Harold had a brief memory of the time he, Jacob and Lucille had gone fishing off a bridge near Lake Waccamaw. The bridge wasn’t high, which was good because about a half hour into fishing Lucille had decided it would be fun to push Harold off and into the water, but he saw her coming and managed to move aside and nudge her just enough to send her screaming into the water.

  When she finally made it out of the water and up the embankment she was a sight to see: her jeans and cotton shirt clinging to her, her hair dripping wet and decorated with a few leaves from the bushes along the bank.

  “Did you catch anything, Mama?” Jacob asked, grinning from ear to ear.

  And without so much as a word, Harold grabbed Jacob’s arms and Lucille grabbed his feet and they threw him, laughing, into the water.

  It seemed like just last week, Harold thought to himself.

  Then the forest dispersed, leaving only the river standing before Jacob and Harold, dark and slow. “We didn’t bring a change of clothes,” Harold said, staring. “What’ll your mama think? If we show up at the house sopping wet and dirty we’ll be in all kinds of trouble.” Even as he spoke, Harold was taking off his shoes and rolling up his pants, letting his old, thin legs see the light of day for the first time since he could remember.

  He helped Jacob roll his pants up above the knee. Grinning, Jacob removed his shirt and raced down the steep riverbank and into the water until it was up to his waist. Then he ducked below the surface and came up laughing.

  Harold shook his head and, in spite of himself, removed his shirt and, as fast as the old man could, ran out into the river to join the boy.

  * * *

  They splashed in the water until both of them were bone tired. Then they trudged slowly out of the river and found a flat, grassy patch on the shore where they lay out like crocodiles and let the sun massage their bodies.

  Harold was tired, but happy. He could feel something inside himself clearing.

  He opened his eyes and stared up at the sky and the trees. A trio of pines climbed up out of the earth and joined together in a cluster in a low corner of the sky, blotting out the sun, which was on the downside of its day. The way the pines tied together at their apexes was curious to Harold. He lay there on the grass for a very long time staring up at them.

  Harold sat up, a dull pain beginning to resonate throughout his body. He was, in fact, an older man than he used to be. He pulled his knees into his chest like a child, wrapping his arms around his legs. He scratched the rogue stubble on his chin and stared out over the river. He had been here before, to this exact place on the river, with its three pine trees pushing lazily out of the earth, joining together in unison in their small pocket of sky.

  Jacob slept soundly in the grass, his body drying slowly below the waning sun. In spite of what was being said about how the Returned hardly slept, when they did finally sleep, it seemed to be a wonderful, all-consuming rest. The boy looked as peaceful and content as anyone could ask. As if there were nothing at all going on inside his body except the slow, natural prosody of his heart.

  He looks dead, Harold thought. “He is dead,” he reminded himself in a low voice.

  Jacob’s eyes opened. He looked up at the sky, blinked and bolted upright. “Daddy?” he yelled. “Daddy?”

  “I’m here.”

  When he saw his father, the boy’s fear faded as suddenly as it had come.

  “I had a dream.”

  Harold’s instinct was to tell the boy to come and sit in his lap and tell him about the dream. It’s what he would have done all those years ago. But this wasn’t his son, he reminded himself. August 15, 1966 had taken Jacob William Hargrave away, irrevocably.

  This thing beside him was something else. Death’s imitation of life. It walked and talked and smiled and laughed and played like Jacob, but it was not Jacob. It couldn’t be. By the laws of the universe, it couldn’t be.

  And even if by some “miracle” it could be, Harold would not allow it.

  Still, even if this was not his son, even if it were only an elaborate construct of light and clockwork, even if it were only his imagination sitting in the grass beside him, it was a child, of sorts, and Harold was not so old and bitter a human being as to be immune to a child’s pain. “Tell me about your dream,” he said.

  “It’s hard to remember.”

  “That’s how dreams are sometimes.” Harold stood slowly and stretched his muscles and began putting his shirt on again. Jacob did the same. “Was someone chasing you?” Harold asked. “That happens a lot in dreams. At least in my dreams. That can be really scary sometimes, to have somebody chasing you.”

  Jacob nodded.

  Harold took this silence as a cue to continue. “Well, it wasn’t a falling dream.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you would have been kicking and flailing your arms!” Harold threw his arms up and kicked his legs and made a great, goofy show of it. He looked sillier than he had in decades—half-dressed and still wet—kicking and flailing like that. “And I would have had to throw you out there in the middle of the river just to wake you up!”

  Harold remembered then. With a terrible sharpness, he remembered.

  This place, here beneath the three trees that threaded together against the cloth of the open sky, this was where they’d found Jacob all those years ago. This was where he and Lucille came to know pain. This was where every promise of life that they had believed in came crumbling apart. This was where he’d held Jacob in his arms and wept, trembling, as the body lay lifeless and still.

  All Harold could do with the realization of where he now stood—beneath these familiar trees with a thing that looked very much like his son—was laugh.

  “It’s something,” he said.

  “What is?” Jacob asked.

  Harold’s only answer was more laughter. Then they were both laughing. But soon, the sound of it was broken by the footsteps of soldiers slipping from the forest.

  The military men would be polite enough to leave the rifles back in the Humvee. They would even go so far as to carry their pistols in their holsters rather than drawn at the ready. Colonel Willis would be the one to lead the soldiers. He would walk with his hands behind his back, his chest thrust forward like a bulldog. Jacob would hide behind his father’s leg.

  “It’s not that I want to do this,” Colonel Willis would say. “I really did try not to. But you both should have gone home.”

  This would begin a very difficult time for the Harold, Lucille, Jacob and countless others.

  But, for now, there was laughter.

  Nico Sutil. Erik Bellof. Timo Heidfeld.

  This quiet street in Rochester had never seen such excitement. The signs were written in both English and German, but all of the Germans would have understood perfectly well if there had been no signs at all. For days now they encircled the house, shouting, waving their fists. Sometimes a brick or a glass bottle would crash against the side of the house. It had happened so often that the sound did not frighten them anymore.

  Nazis, Go Home! many of the signs read. Back to Hell, Nazi! read another.

  “They’re just afraid, Nicolas,” Mr. Gershon said, looking out the window with his face knotted up. “It’s too much for them.” He was a small, thin man with a salt-and-pepper beard and a voice that trembled when he sang.

  “I’m sorry,” Erik said. He was only a few years older than Nico. Still a boy by Mr. Gershon’s standards.

  Mr. Gershon squatted to where Nico and Erik were sitting—being sure to stay clear of the windows. He patted Nico’s hand. “Whatever happens, it’s not your fault. I made this decision—my entire family and I made this
decision.”

  Nico nodded. “It was the decision of my mother for me to join the army,” he said. “She worshipped the Führer. I just wanted to go to college and teach English.”

  “Enough of the past,” Timo said. He was Nico’s age, but with little of Nico’s tenderness. His hair was dark, his face thin and sharp, like his eyes. He looked the way a Nazi was supposed to look, even if he did not act the way they were supposed to act.

  Outside, the soldiers worked to part the crowd. They had been keeping the protesters away from the house for the past several days. Then several large, dark trucks rumbled onto the Gershons’ front lawn. They came to a halt and soldiers spilled out, their rifles bristling.

  Mr. Gershon sighed. “I’ve got to try talking to them again,” he said.

  “It is us they want,” Erik said, motioning to the six other Nazi soldiers the Gershons had unsuccessfully hidden for the past month. They were mostly boys, all of them caught up in something larger than they could ever hope to understand, much like the first time they had lived. “It is us they want to kill, yes?”

  One of the men outside took up a bullhorn and began shouting instructions at the Gershon house. The crowd cheered. “Go back to hell!” they shouted.

  “Take your family and leave,” Nico said. The other soldiers voiced agreement. “We give up. This has gone on too long. For fighting in war, we deserve arrests.”

  Mr. Gershon squatted with a grunt, his thin, old body trembling. He placed his hands on Nico’s arm. “You’ve all died once,” he said. “Isn’t that penance enough? We won’t give you over to them. We will prove to them that wars are made of people, and people, outside of those wars, can be reasonable. They can live together—even a silly old Jewish family like mine and little German boys who a madman dressed in uniforms and said, ‘Be horrible or else!’” He looked at his wife. “We have to prove there is forgiveness in this world,” he said.

  She looked back at him, her face as resolute as his own.

  Upstairs there came the sound of a window shattering, followed by a loud hissing sound. Then something thumped against the side of the house near the window. More hissing. A white cloud began to blossom at the window.

  “Gas!” Timo said, already placing a hand over his mouth.

  “It’s okay,” Mr. Gershon said, his voice soft. “We will let this happen peacefully.” He looked at the German soldiers. “We must all let this happen peacefully,” he said to them. “They will only arrest us.”

  “They’ll kill us!” Timo said. “We must fight them!”

  “Yes,” Erik said, standing. He went to the window, peeked and counted the number of men with guns.

  “No,” Mr. Gershon said. “We can’t let it happen this way. If you fight, then they will kill you, and that is all anyone will remember—the houseful of Nazi soldiers, who, even after being returned from the grave, could only fight and kill!”

  There came a banging on the door.

  “Thank you,” Nico said.

  Then the door was breached.

  Eight

  THREE WEEKS AGO Lucille’s cantankerous husband and previously deceased son were arrested for what Lucille felt amounted to little more than a conflated and inflated charge of Being Ornery and Returned in Public. And while each of them were admittedly guilty of their individual charges, no lawyer in the world could have ever argued that Harold Hargrave was anything other than unlawfully ornery. And Jacob’s used-to-be-dead-but-no-longer-dead status was equally unequivocal.

  But Lucille soundly believed, in that part of her spirit that subscribed to the notion of certain general and inescapable rights and wrongs, that if there was anybody to blame, it was the Bureau.

  Her family had done nothing. Nothing except take a walk on private land—not government land, mind you, but privately owned property—and their walk just happened to take them past where there were Bureau men driving along the highway. Bureau men who followed them back and arrested them.

  Since their arrest, hard as she tried, Lucille had yet to manage a full night’s sleep. And when sleep did come, it was delivered like a court summons, at only the most unpredictable and discourteous times. Just now, Lucille was slumped in a church pew, dressed in her Sunday best with her head hung at that familiar angle of unconsciousness often times seen in young children who’ve missed their nap time. She was sweating a little. It was June now and every day was a sauna.

  As she slept, Lucille dreamed of fish. She dreamed she was standing in a crowd of people, all of them starving. At Lucille’s feet was a five-gallon plastic bucket filled with perch and trout and bass, spots and flounder.

  “I’ll help you. Here you go,” she said. “Here. Take this. Here. I’m sorry. Yes. Please, take this. Here you go. I’m sorry. Here. I’m sorry.”

  The people in her dream were all Returned and she did not know why she was apologizing, but it seemed vital.

  “I’m sorry. Here you go. I’m trying to help. I’m sorry. No, don’t worry. I’ll help you. Here.” Her lips were moving all on their own now, as she sat slumped there in the pew. “I’m sorry,” she said aloud. “I’ll help you. Don’t worry.”

  In her dream, the crowd pushed in closer, swarming her, and she could see now that she and the Returned were all encased in an incredibly large cage—steel fencing and razor wire—that was getting smaller. “Dear Lord,” she said in a loud voice. “It’s okay. I’ll help you!”

  Then she was awake. Awake and being stared at by almost the entirety of the Arcadia Baptist Church congregation.

  “Amen,” Pastor Peters said from the pulpit, smiling. “Even in her dreams, Sister Hargrave is helping folks. Now why can’t the rest of us manage to do it when we’re awake?” Then he continued on with his sermon—something having to do with patience from the Book of Job.

  Compounding her shame over sleeping in church was a small degree of shame over distracting the pastor from his sermon. But that, too, was tempered by the fact that Pastor Peters was always offering distracted sermons these days. There was something on his mind—something on his heart—and while none of his flock could diagnose the exact cause of it, it wasn’t difficult to tell that there was something affecting him.

  Lucille sat up and wiped the sweat from her forehead and mumbled a mistimed “Amen” under her breath in agreement with an important point in the pastor’s sermon. Her eyes were still very itchy and heavy. She found her Bible and opened it and drowsily searched for the verses Pastor Peters was preaching on. The Book of Job wasn’t the biggest Gospel, but it was big enough. She fumbled through the pages until she came to what seemed like the appropriate verse. Then she stared down at the page, and immediately fell asleep again.

  * * *

  The next time she awoke, church was over. The air still. The pews all but empty. As if maybe the good Lord himself had up and decided He had somewhere else to be. The pastor was there along with his small wife whose name Lucille still could not quite remember. They sat in the pew ahead, looking back at the old woman with soft, half grins.

  Pastor Peters spoke first.

  “I’ve thought a few times about adding fireworks to my sermons, but the fire marshal killed that idea. And, well…” He shrugged. His shoulders rose up like mountains beneath the jacket of his suit.

  His brow glimmered with small freckles of sweat, but still, he sat in his dark wool suit jacket looking the way a man of God was supposed to look: willing to endure.

  Then his small wife spoke in her small, forgettable voice. “We’re worried about you.” She wore a light-colored dress with a small, flowered hat. In typical form, even her smile was small. She looked not only ready, but fully willing, to collapse at any moment.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Lucille said. She sat up straight, closed her Bible and held it to her chest. “The Lord will get me through.”

  “Now, Sister Hargrave, I won’t have you stepping on my lines,” the pastor said, showing that wide, grand smile of his.

  His wife reached ove
r the back of the pew and put her tiny hand on Lucille’s arm. “You don’t look well. When’s the last time you slept?”

  “Just a few minutes ago,” Lucille said. “Didn’t you see?” She chuckled briefly. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t me. That was that no-account husband of mine speaking through me—the devil that he is.” She gripped her Bible to her chest and huffed. “What better place to rest than in the church? Is there any place on all this earth where I should be so comfortable? I don’t think so.”

  “At home?” the pastor’s wife said.

  Lucille couldn’t quite tell if she meant it as an insult or merely a genuine question. But because of how small the woman was, Lucille decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “Home ain’t home right now,” Lucille said.

  Pastor Peters placed his hand on her arm, next to his wife’s. “I spoke to Agent Bellamy,” he said.

  “So did I,” Lucille replied. Her face tightened. “And I bet he told you the same thing he told me. ‘It’s out of my hands.’” Lucille huffed again and adjusted her hair. “What’s the point of being a government man if you can’t do anything? If you’ve got no power just like the rest of us?”

  “Well, in his defense, the government is still a lot bigger than any of the folks that work for them. I’m sure Agent Bellamy’s doing everything he can to help out. He seems like an honorable man. He’s not keeping Jacob and Harold there, the law is. Harold chose to stay with Jacob.”

  “What choice did he have? Jacob is his son!”

  “I know. But some people have done less. From what Bellamy told me, it was just supposed to be the Returned who were going to be kept there. But then people like Harold wouldn’t leave their loved ones, so now…” The pastor’s voice trailed off. Then he began again: “But I believe that’s the best thing. We can’t let people be segregated, not completely at least, not like what some people want to have done.”