James Gardner: Reaper

At my feet, the boy lifted himself groggily on one elbow. Slowly shaking his head, he took the Name of our Lord in vain.

That was the kind of boy she had chosen to save.

For weeks afterward, I tried to put the incident out of my mind, but it repeatedly ambushed my thoughts. If I had one complaint about my role as a Reaper, it was my inability to affect the living world and guide it toward the path of righteousness. Now I had seen a way to have such an effect, but one I dared not use. Still, it fascinated me.

Standing at the bedside of a ninety-five-year-old woman, I suddenly wondered what would

happen if I just walked away. Would her hourglass refill itself, her cancer vanish, her senility uncloud? Or would she remain a near-empty husk requiring a few more years of feeding and bathing? What sort of change would either alternative make in God’s divine plan?

Watching a fool and his snowmobile crash through thin ice in the middle of a lake, I asked what would happen if I left him. Would he be rescued in some unforeseen way? Would he make medical headlines: Man Survives Hours of Icy Immersion. Would his doctors believe they could work marvels, when in fact it was my doing?

As I kept vigil with a family around the crib of a fevered infant, I thought of how easy it would be to answer their prayers, to give them their miracle. I imagined their jubilation, their relief, their effusive gratitude. With scarcely an effort, I could change their lives profoundly. I could grant them joy.

Oh, it was hard to cut that tiny cord.

In late June, I was relieved to gain a respite from the torment that lured me toward disobedience. I arrived on a Call in a quiet tree-shaded neighborhood, only to find my hourglass still gave my Charge abundant time to live. Three weeks, perhaps? A month? It was possible. Heaven sometimes arranged such interludes as vacations from the stresses of Reaping. Or perhaps it was simply a reward for me, recognizing my faithful ministry in death as in life. In the meantime, I would not be forced to choose between death and life. For a while, I had no tempting decisions to make.

My Charge was one Louis Gerard, a man who lived with his sister Anne in a grand house more than a century old. I already knew Louis by reputation: he was a celebrated pornographer whose photos of naked women sold as High Art because he used black and white film and cropped their heads from the picture. Sometimes he used Anne as his model — she was unflamboyantly lovely and worshipped Louis as a genius. More often, he would bring home sleek young bundles of ambition who were only too eager to flaunt their flesh if it would look good on their rйsumйs.

I say I knew Louis Gerard by reputation, but in a few days, I knew him by his very stench. I sat in on his photo sessions and watched him exhort his women to caper for the camera. The foolish ones let him have his way with them afterward; the more astute did the same, but extracted letters of recommendation first. I watched his insatiable animal rutting and was appalled to the core of my soul.

I watched Anne too: Anne cooking, Anne cleaning, Anne listening to the giggles coming from the studio and keeping her face blank. She developed all of her brother’s photos, making print after painstaking print until she was satisfied with the result. For hours, I watched her working under the red developing light, its glow softening the intensity of concentration on her face.

She worked diligently on her brother’s lurid photographs, but more happily on her own. Her subjects were simple: melancholy landscapes, rusted machinery, sometimes gravestones. She never showed them to Louis — he would certainly have mocked her for wasting film on such sterile material. She showed them to me, though, even if she never knew it; and I saw more worth in one of them than in her brother’s entire portfolio.

I often contemplated the gift I would be giving Anne when I Reaped Louis. She would inherit his wealth and build a life of her own. I fancied her as a cherished protйgйe whom I would launch on a

photography career more wholesome than her brother’s. There was justice in that; and it led me to see justice in all acts of the Almighty. Could I interfere with that justice by refusing my duty? No. I would Reap those who must be Reaped, without questioning. That was the way of the righteous man. That was the path of faith.

Thus I reflected to myself as Anne quietly read photography magazines and I watched her lovely face. But I had forgotten it is a law of Heaven that every faith must be put to the test.

One sunny morning, as I sat on the patio and Anne pulled up weeds from the garden at my feet, a Reaper walked nonchalantly through the back hedge. It was the snow-angel boy from the highway, and he gave me an impudent wave as he sauntered up. “Hey, Reap! How’s the scythe hanging?”

“Do you have business here?” I asked.

“Give me a sec to check my bearings,” he said. With a great show of rummaging through the pockets of his raiment, he located his compass and flicked the case open. “And our next contestant is... the little lady crawling around here in the dirt! Let’s have a big hand for her from the celestial audience. Yay!”

He applauded derisively under Anne’s nose. She continued to pull weeds calmly.

Inwardly, I shuddered.

The boy called himself Hooch and he would not go away. I demanded to check his instruments, of course, but he was telling the truth. From all angles, his compass pointed directly at Anne. The hourglass for her seemed to have precisely the same amount of sand as her brother’s.

“Mutual suicide pact?” Hooch suggested. I tried to slap him, but he skipped away, laughing.

The serenity of my past few weeks quickly shattered into nightmare. Hooch proved inescapable. If I chose to watch Louis and his obscene photo sessions, Hooch was there, shouting, “Grind that pelvis, woman! Make it wet!” If I slipped into Anne’s bedroom to savor her quiet breathing as she slept, Hooch would barge through the wall and shout, “Hot damn, she sleeps in the raw!” He lewdly intruded into her most private moments; he mocked her face, her voice, her clothes, her walk; and when he saw her photographs, he burst into laughter. To his crass intellect, they were “stupid, ugly, and boring.”

In my heart, I cried, Where is justice? Why was Hooch not burning in hell? Why was he, of all Reapers, called to Reap Anne? And why did Anne have to die now, when the death of her brother would free her for a new and better life?

Then, in the depth of my despair, the answer came to me. Justice does not merely happen. Justice is made.

The morning came when my hourglass showed Louis had less than a day to live. He was not making the best of his brief time — he sat at the breakfast table, holding his head in his hands and staring blankly at his coffee mug. His eyes were bloodshot, his face flushed and unshaven; if his woman from the night before could see him now, she would have laughed and shouted just to cause him pain.

Anne was at the stove, making French toast. I had watched similar scenes before and knew Louis would refuse to eat what she served; nevertheless, she always made the effort.

Hooch sat on the edge of the stove and watched Anne work, her hand occasionally passing through his body. “She’s burning this toast, you know,” he told me. “She’s standing right here, she’s watching it all the time, and she’s letting it burn.”

“Hooch,” I said, “let’s trade.”

“Trade what?”

“People. Just for fun. You Reap Louis. I’ll Reap Anne.”

“You have the most colossal hard-on for this broad, don’t you?”

“I merely think it would be interesting,” I said, pleased how I kept the anger out of my voice. “Doesn’t it bother you we Reapers have to toe the line all the time? We have to Reap who we’re told when we’re told. That certainly annoys me.”