Читать книгу The Returned - Jason Mott, Jason Mott - Страница 10

Three

THE TOWN OF Arcadia was situated along the countryside in that way that many small, Southern towns were. It began with small, one-story wooden houses asleep in the middle of wide, flat yards along the sides of a two-lane blacktop that winded among dense pines, cedars and white oaks. Here and there, fields of corn or soybeans were found in the spring and summer. Only bare earth in the winter.

After a couple of miles the fields became smaller, the houses more frequent. Once one entered the town proper they found only two streetlights, a clunky organization of roads and streets and dead ends cluttered with old, exhausted homes. The only new houses in Arcadia were those that had been rebuilt after hurricanes. They glimmered in fresh paint and new wood and made a person imagine that, perhaps, something new could actually happen in this old town.

But new things did not come to this town. Not until the Returned.

The streets were not many and neither were the houses. In the center of town stood the school: an old, brick affair with small windows and small doors and retrofitted air-conditioning that did not work.

Off to the north, atop a small hill just beyond the limits of town, stood the church. It was built from wood and clapboard and sat like a lighthouse, reminding the people of Arcadia that there was always someone above them.

Not since ’72 when the Sainted Soul Stirrers of Solomon—that traveling gospel band with the Jewish bassist from Arkansas—came to town had the church been so full. Just people atop people. Cars and trucks scattered about the church lawn. Someone’s rust-covered pickup loaded down with lumber was parked against the crucifix in the center of the lawn, as if Jesus had gotten down off the cross and decided to make a run to the hardware store. A cluster of taillights covered up the small sign on the church lawn that read Jesus Loves You—Fish Fry May 31. Cars were stacked along the shoulder of the highway the way they had been that time back in ’63—or was it ’64?—at the funeral of those three Benson boys who’d all died in one horrible car crash and were mourned over the course of one long, dark day of lamentation.

“You need to come with us,” Lucille said as Harold parked the old truck on the shoulder of the road and pawed his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “What are folks going to think when you’re not there?” She unfastened Jacob’s seat belt and straightened his hair.

“They’ll think, ‘Harold Hargrave won’t come in the church? Glory be! In these times of madness at least something is as it always has been!’”

“It’s not like there’s a service going on, you heathen. It’s just a town meeting. No reason why you shouldn’t come in.”

Lucille stepped out of the truck and straightened her dress. It was her favorite dress, the one she wore to important things, the one that picked up dirt from every surface imaginable—a cotton/polyester blend colored in a pastel shade of green with small flowers stitched along the collar and patterned around the end of the thin sleeves. “I don’t know why I bother sometimes. I hate this truck,” she said, wiping the back of her dress.

“You’ve hated every truck I’ve ever owned.”

“But still you keep buying them.”

“Can I stay here?” Jacob asked, fiddling with a button on the collar of his shirt. Buttons exercised a mysterious hold over the boy. “Daddy and me could—”

“Daddy and I could,” Lucille corrected.

“No,” Harold said, almost laughing. “You go with your mama.” He put a cigarette to his lips and stroked his chin. “Smoke’s bad for you. Gives you wrinkles and bad breath and makes you hairy.”

“Makes you stubborn, too,” Lucille added, helping Jacob from the cab.

“I don’t think they want me in there,” Jacob said.

“Go with your mama,” Harold said in a hard voice. Then he lit his cigarette and took in as much nicotine as his tired old lungs could manage.

* * *

When his wife and the thing that might or might not be his son—he was still not sure of his stance on that exactly—were gone, Harold took one more pull on his cigarette and blew the smoke out through the open window. Then he sat with the cigarette burning down between his fingers. He stroked his chin and watched the church.

The church needed to be painted. It was peeling here and there and it was hard to put a finger on exactly what color the building was supposed to be, but a person could tell that it had once been much grander than it was now. He tried to think back to what color the church had been when the paint was fresh—he’d most certainly been around to see it painted. He even could almost remember who had done the job—some outfit from up around Southport—the name escaped him, as did the original paint color. All he could see in his mind was the current faded exterior.

But isn’t that the way it is with memory? Give it enough time and it will become worn down and covered in a patina of self-serving omissions.

But what else could we trust?

Jacob had been a firecracker. A live wire. Harold remembered all the times the boy had gotten in trouble for not coming home before sunset or for running in church. One time he’d even come close to having Lucille in hysterics because he’d climbed to the top of Henrietta Williams’s pear tree. Everybody was calling after him and the boy just sat there up in the shaded branches of the tree among ripe pears and dappled sunlight. Probably having himself a good old laugh about things.

In the glow of the streetlights Harold caught sight of a small creature darting from the steeple of the church—a flash of movement and wings. It rose for a second and glowed like snow in the dark night as car headlights flashed upon it.

And then it was gone and, Harold knew, not to return.

“It’s not him,” Harold said. He flicked his cigarette on the ground and leaned back against the musty old seat. He lolled his head and asked only of his body that it should go to sleep and be plagued by neither dream nor memory. “It’s not.”

* * *

Lucille held tightly to Jacob’s hand as she made her way through the crowd cluttered around the front of the church as best as her bad hip would let her.

“Excuse me. Hi, there, Macon, how are you tonight? Pardon us. You doing okay tonight, Lute? That’s good. Excuse me. Excuse us. Well, hello, Vaniece! Ain’t seen you in ages. How you been? Good! That’s good to hear! Amen. You take care now. Excuse me. Excuse us. Hey, there. Excuse us.”

The crowd parted as she hoped they would, leaving Lucille unsure as to whether it was a sign that there was still decency and manners in the world, or a sign that she had, finally, become an old woman.

Or, perhaps they moved aside on account of the boy who walked beside her. There weren’t supposed to be any Returned here tonight. But Jacob was her son, first and foremost, and nothing or no one—not even death or its sudden lack thereof—was going to cause her to treat him as anything other than that.

The mother and son found room in a front pew next to Helen Hayes. Lucille seated Jacob beside her and proceeded to join the cloud of murmuring that was like a morning fog clinging to everything. “So many people,” she said, folding her hands across her chest and shaking her head.

“Ain’t seen most of them in a month of Sundays,” Helen Hayes said. Mostly everyone in and around Arcadia had some degree of relation; Helen and Lucille were cousins. Lucille had the long, angular look of the Daniels family: she was tall with thin wrists and small hands, a nose that made a sharp, straight line below her brown eyes. Helen, on the other hand, was all roundness and circles, thick wrists and a wide, round face. Only their hair, silver and straight now where it had once been as dark as creosote, showed that the two women were indeed related.

Helen was frighteningly pale, and she spoke through pursed lips, which gave her a very serious and upset appearance. “And you’d think that when this many people finally came to church, they’d come for the Lord. Jesus was the first one to come back from the dead, but do any of these heathens care?”

“Mama?” Jacob said, still fascinated by the loose button on his shirt.

“Do they come here for Jesus?” Helen continued. “Do they come to pray? When’s the last time they paid their tithes? When’s the last revival they came to? Tell me that. That Thompson boy there...” She pointed a plump finger at a clump of teenagers huddled near the back corner of the church. “When’s the last time you seen that boy in church?” She grunted. “Been so long, I thought he was dead.”

“He was,” Lucille said in a low voice. “You know that as well as anyone else that sets eyes on him.”

“I thought this meeting was supposed to be just for, well, you know?”

“Anybody with common sense knows that wasn’t going to happen,” Lucille said. “And, frankly, it shouldn’t happen. This meeting is all about them. Why shouldn’t they be here?”

“I hear Jim and Connie are living here,” Helen said. “Can you believe it?”

“Really?” Lucille replied. “I hadn’t heard. But why shouldn’t they? They’re a part of this town.”

“They were,” Helen corrected, offering no sympathy in her tone.

“Mama?” Jacob interrupted.

“Yes?” Lucille replied. “What is it?”

“I’m hungry.”

Lucille laughed. The notion that she had a son who was alive and who wanted food still made her very happy. “But you just ate!”

Jacob finally succeeded in popping the loose button from his shirt. He held it in his small, white hands, turned it over and studied it the way one studies a proposal of theoretical math. “But I’m hungry.”

“Amen,” Lucille said. She patted his leg and kissed his forehead. “We’ll get you something when we get back home.”

“Peaches?”

“If you want.”

“Glazed?”

“If you want.”

“I want,” Jacob said, smiling. “Daddy and me—”

“Daddy and I,” Lucille corrected again.

* * *

It was only May, but the old church was already boiling. It had never had decent air-conditioning, and with so many people crowded in one atop the other, like sediment, the air would not move and there was the feeling that, at any moment, something very dramatic might occur.

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.”