The Returned

by Jason Mott

  No, she convinced herself, it wasn’t her fate to help the Returned. Maybe it wasn’t even her fate to help Jacob and Harold. Someone else would do it. Maybe Pastor Peters. More likely it would be Agent Bellamy.

  But Bellamy wasn’t a parent enduring an empty house. Bellamy wasn’t the one the Returned, Lucille felt, seemed to gravitate toward. It was her. It was always her.

  “Something has to be done,” she said to the empty house.

  * * *

  When the house had quieted and the echo of the television was gone, Lucille returned to her life as though little beyond the realm of her senses had changed. She washed her hands in the kitchen sink and dried them and cracked more eggs into the frying pan and went about the business of lightly scrambling them. The first of the too-much bacon she was cooking was done so she scooped it out of the pan with a spatula and placed it on a paper towel and patted it to take off some of the grease—her doctor was always going on about grease—and then she plucked a piece from the plate and stood there crunching it as she scrambled the eggs and stirred the grits from time to time.

  She thought of Harold and Jacob, locked away inside the belly of that school, behind the soldiers and fencing and razor wire and, worst of all, government bureaucracy. It made her angry to think how those soldiers had just come along and plucked her son and husband up from the river, a river they practically owned considering the history the two of them had there.

  As she sat at the kitchen table eating and thinking to herself, Lucille did not hear the footsteps moving over the porch.

  The grits Lucille ate were warm and smooth. They slid into her stomach with just a hint of butter left behind. Then came the bacon and the eggs, sharp and salty, smooth and sweet.

  “I’d build a church for you,” Lucille said aloud, speaking to her plate of food.

  Then she laughed and felt guilty. Even a little blasphemous. But God had a sense of humor, Lucille knew—though she would never let Harold know she thought so. And God understood that she was just an old, lonely woman alone in a large, lonely house.

  * * *

  She was halfway through breakfast before Lucille realized the girl was there. She nearly jumped out of her chair when she finally saw her, thin-framed and blonde, standing muddy and unkempt on the other side of the kitchen’s screen door.

  “Dear Lord, child!” Lucille shouted, covering her mouth with her hand.

  It was one of the Wilson children—Hannah, if Lucille’s memory served her, which, most times, it did. Lucille hadn’t seen them since the town meeting at the church all those weeks ago.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said.

  Lucille wiped her mouth. “No,” she said. “It’s okay. I just didn’t realize anybody was there.” She walked to the door. “Where’d you come from?”

  “My name’s Hannah. Hannah Wilson.”

  “I know who you are, honey. Jim Wilson’s daughter. We’re family!”

  “Ma’am.”

  “Back down the line your father and I are cousins. We share an aunt…I can’t quite remember her name, though.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hannah said tentatively.

  Lucille opened the door and motioned for the girl to come in. “You look half-starved, child. When’s the last time you ate?”

  The girl stood in the doorway calmly. She smelled of mud and open air, as if she had both fallen from the sky and risen from the earth just that morning. Lucille smiled at her, but still the girl hesitated.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, child,” Lucille said. “Unless, that is, you don’t come in here and eat something. Then I’m going to find the biggest switch I can and whup you until you sit down and eat yourself lazy!”

  The Returned girl returned her smile, finally, in that casual, slightly detached way. “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

  The screen door clattered gently behind her as she entered the house, as if applauding the reprieve in Lucille’s loneliness.

  * * *

  The girl ate as much as Lucille would give her, which was a great deal considering all that she had cooked. And when it looked as though the girl would finish off everything that she had made for breakfast, Lucille began rummaging through the refrigerator. “I don’t care for any of it. Leftovers. It just ain’t right.”

  “That’s okay, Ms. Lucille,” the girl said. “I’m full. Thank you, though.”

  Lucille thrust an arm into the back of the refrigerator. “No,” she said. “You’re not full yet. I’m not even sure if that stomach of yours has a bottom to it, but I plan to find out. I’m gonna feed you until the grocery store runs out!” She laughed, her voice echoing through the house. “But I don’t cook for free,” Lucille said, unwrapping the sausage she’d found in back of the refrigerator. “Not for anyone. Even the Lord Jesus would have to earn His keep if He planned to get a meal out of me. So I’ve got a few things that I need you to do around here.” Lucille placed one hand on her back—suddenly looking the part of a very old and very rickety woman—and made a great groaning sound. “I’m not so young as I used to be.”

  “My mama said I shouldn’t beg people,” the girl said.

  “And your mama’s right. But you ain’t begging. I’m asking you for help, that’s all. And, in return, I’ll feed you. That’s fair, ain’t it?”

  Hannah nodded. She swung her feet back and forth as she sat at the table in a chair too large for her.

  “Speaking of your mother,” Lucille said, still fussing about with the sausage. “She’s going to be worried about you. Your daddy, too. Do they know where you are?”

  “I think so,” the girl said.

  “What does that mean?”

  The girl shrugged, but since her back was turned and she was busy unwrapping the sausage, Lucille did not see it. After a moment the girl realized this and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Come on now, child.” Lucille oiled the cast-iron pan for the sausage. “Don’t start behaving that way now. I know about you and your family. Your mother…Returned just like your daddy did. Brother, too. Where are they? Last I heard all of you had disappeared from the church after those soldiers started arresting folks.” Lucille placed the sausage in the pan and turned on a low heat.

  “I’m not supposed to say,” the girl said.

  “Oh, my!” Lucille replied. “That sounds very serious. Secrets are always very serious.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I generally don’t care for secrets. They can lead to all manner of trouble if you’re not careful. In all the time I’ve been married, little girl, I’ve never kept a secret from my husband,” Lucille said. Then she walked to the girl and whispered softly, “But you want to know what?”

  “What?” Hannah whispered back.

  “Secretly, that’s not true. But don’t tell anybody. It’s a secret.”

  Hannah smiled, wide and bright, and her smile was very much like Jacob’s smile.

  “Did I tell you about my son, Jacob? He’s like you. Just like you and your whole family.”

  “Where is he?” the girl asked.

  Lucille sighed. “He’s at the school. The soldiers took him.”

  Hannah’s face went pale.

  “I know,” Lucille said. “It’s a frightful thing. He and my husband were both taken. They were down by the river on their own when the soldiers came for them.”

  “By the river?”

  “Yes, child,” Lucille said. The sausage was already beginning to sizzle. “The soldiers like the river,” she said. “They know there’s lots of places for people to hide, so they go through that area a lot, trying to find folks. Oh, they’re not bad people, those soldiers. I pray they’re not, at least. They never hurt anybody, not other than locking them up away from their families. No. They don’t hurt you. They just take you away. Take you away from everyone you love or care about and…”

  When she turned, Hannah was gone, with only the clapping of the screen door left in her wake.

  “I’ll see you when you get back
,” Lucille said to the empty house, a house which she knew would not be empty much longer.

  Just the night before, hadn’t she dreamed of children?

  Alicia Hulme

  “What happened to the boy was just a fluke. There is no sickness. But there have been disappearances.” The young girl was nervous delivering the message to the dark-skinned man in the well-cut suit on the far side of the desk. “I don’t understand any of this,” she said. “But it doesn’t sound good, does it?”

  “It’s okay,” Agent Bellamy said. “It’s a strange situation.”

  “What happens now? I don’t want to be here any more than I wanted to be in Utah.”

  “You won’t be here long,” Bellamy said. “I’ll see to that, just as Agent Mitchell promised you I would.”

  She smiled at the memory of Agent Mitchell. “She’s a good woman,” she said.

  Agent Bellamy stood and walked around the desk. He placed a small chair next to hers and sat. Then he reached into his sleeve and retrieved an envelope. “Their address,” he said, handing the envelope to Alicia. “They don’t know about you, but from what I’ve been able to dig up, they want to. They very much want to.”

  Alicia took the envelope and opened it with trembling hands. It was a Kentucky address. “Dad’s from Kentucky,” she said, her voice suddenly trembling. “He always hated Boston, but Mom didn’t want to leave. I guess he finally wore her down.” She hugged the dark-skinned agent in the well-cut suit and kissed his cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  “There’s a soldier outside named Harris. He’s young, maybe eighteen or nineteen, not much younger than you. Stay with him when you leave my office. Do what he says. Go where he tells you to go. He’ll get you out of here.” He patted her hand. “It’s good that they went to Kentucky. The Bureau is busy in the more populated areas. Lots of places to hide you there.”

  “What about Agent Mitchell?” she asked. “Are you going to send me back with another message?”

  “No,” Agent Bellamy said. “That wouldn’t be safe for you or her. Just remember to stay with Harris, do what he tells you. He’ll get you back to your parents.”

  “Okay,” she said, standing. When she was at the door she hesitated, her curiosity getting the better of her. “The disappearances,” she said. “What did she mean by that?”

  The agent in the well-cut suit sighed. “Honestly,” he said, “I don’t know if it’s the end or the beginning.”

  Eleven

  FRED GREEN AND a handful of other men convened on Marvin Parker’s lawn nearly every day now, gathering beneath the sweltering sun, letting their anger boil up as, one after another, buses of Returned came down Main Street into Arcadia.

  For the first few days, John Watkins kept count of the Returned on a small piece of wood that he found in his truck. He made tick marks grouped in fives. In that first week his tally was well over two hundred.

  “I’m gonna run out of pencil before they run out of Returned,” he said to the group at one point.

  No one replied.

  Now and again Fred would say, “We can’t stand for this.” He would shake his head and take a gulp of beer. His legs twitched as if they had somewhere they needed to be. “It’s happening right here in our own town,” he said.

  No one was quite able to put a finger on exactly what “it” Fred spoke of but, somehow, they all understood his meaning. They all understood that something larger than anything they had ever imagined possible was happening right in front of them.

  “You wouldn’t think a volcano could just grow, would you?” Marvin Parker said one afternoon as they all stood watching another bus being unloaded. He was tall and lanky, with pale skin and hair the color of rust. “But it’s true,” he continued. “It’s the God’s honest truth. Heard tell one time about this woman that had a volcano grow up in her backyard. Started out just a little bump in the lawn, like a gopher hole or something. Then the next day it was a little bigger, and a little bigger the day after that. And so on.”

  No one spoke. They only listened and constructed the deadly mound of earth and rock and fire in their minds while, across the street, the Returned were off-loaded, counted and processed into Arcadia.

  “Then, one day after this hill was about ten feet tall or so, she got scared. You wouldn’t think it would take that long before a person got scared of something like that, would you? But that’s how it happens. Take your time, let things happen slowly, and it’s a long time before you get your wits.”

  “What could she have done?” someone asked.

  The question went unanswered. The story continued: “By the time she called someone, all around her place there was the smell of sulfur. Neighbors got involved then. Finally took their heads out of their asses and decided to look into the molehill that was growing into a mountain right there in their neighbor’s backyard. But by then it was too late, wasn’t it?”

  Someone asked, “What could they have done about it?”

  But this question, too, went unanswered. The story rolled on:

  “Some scientists came out there and took a look at things. Took readings, did tests or whatever it is they do. And you know what they told her? Told her, ‘We guess you’d better move.’ Can you believe that? That’s all they had to say to her. Here she was losing her home, the very thing in this world that every person deserves, the only thing in this world that anybody really has—their God-given home!—and they turn around and tell her, ‘Well, tough luck, toots.’

  “Not long after that, she up and moved. Packed up her whole life and just lit out. Then other people from the town followed. All of them running from the thing that started growing in her backyard, the thing she and each and every one of them had watched grow.” He finished his beer, crushed the can in his hand, tossed it onto his lawn and grunted. “They should have done something at the very beginning. Should have made more of a fuss when they first saw that unnatural lump in her lawn, when their souls told them that something wasn’t right about it. But, no, they all hesitated—the woman whose house it was especially. She hesitated and each and every one of them was lost for it.”

  The buses came and went for the rest of that day with the men watching in silence. They were all gripped with a feeling that something about the world was betraying them, right at this very moment, and perhaps it had been betraying them for years.

  They felt that the world had been lying to them for all their lives.

  It was on the very next day that Fred Green showed up, carrying his picket sign. It was a square of plywood painted green and, in bright red lettering, was the slogan Returned Out of Arcadia.

  Fred Green had no idea exactly what protesting would do. He wasn’t sure if it had any merit, what kind of outcome it guaranteed. But it felt like action. It felt like he was giving form to whatever it was that was keeping him up at night, whatever it was that chased sleep away and left him feeling wrung out each morning.

  This was his best idea for now, come what may.

  * * *

  Agent Bellamy sat at the table with his legs crossed, his suit jacket open and his silk tie half an inch looser than usual. It was the closest Harold had ever seen the man come to relaxed. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about Bellamy, but he figured if he didn’t hate the man by now, that meant he probably liked him very much. That was generally how it worked.

  Harold slurped at boiled peanuts with a cigarette propped between his fingers, a chalk-white line of cigarette smoke rolling over his face. He chewed and wiped the briny juice from his fingers against the legs of his pants—since Lucille wasn’t there to protest—and, when he felt like it, he took a puff of his cigarette and exhaled without coughing—the not-coughing part took effort these days, but he was learning.

  This was one of the few chances Agent Bellamy had to speak with Harold alone since things had progressed the way they had in Arcadia. Harold wouldn’t often be talked into being away from Jacob. “She’ll never forgive me if something happens,” Haro
ld had said.

  But sometimes he would agree to let Jacob sit with one of the soldiers in another room—so long as he knew which it was—long enough for Bellamy to ask a few of his questions.

  “How are you feeling?” Bellamy asked, notebook at the ready.

  “I’m alive, I suppose.” Harold flicked the end of his cigarette, dropping ashes into a small, metal ashtray. “But who ain’t alive these days?” He took a puff of his cigarette. “Elvis make it back yet?”

  “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  The old man chuckled.

  Bellamy sat back in his chair, shifted his weight and watched the old Southerner curiously. “So how are you feeling?”

  “You ever play horseshoes, Bellamy?”

  “No. But I’ve played boccie ball.”

  “What exactly is that?”

  “It’s the Italian version.”

  Harold nodded. “We should play horseshoes sometime. Instead of this.” He opened his arms to indicate the small, stuffy room in which they sat.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Bellamy said with a smile. “How are you feeling?”

  “You already asked me that.”

  “You never answered.”

  “I did so.” Harold looked around the room again.

  Bellamy closed his notebook and placed it on the table between the old man and himself. He placed his pen atop the notebook and made a show of patting them both as if to say, “There’s only the two of us here, Harold. I promise you. No recorders or cameras or secret microphones or anything else. Only a guard outside the door who can’t hear you and wouldn’t want to if he could. He’s just there because of Colonel Willis.”

  Harold finished off the bowl of peanuts in silence, then finished his cigarette with Bellamy sitting across the table saying nothing, only waiting. The old man lit another one and took a long, dramatic pull from it. He held the smoke in his lungs until he could not hold it anymore. Then he released it with a cough, a cough that rolled into a string of coughs until he was panting, beads of sweat welled up on his brow.