Jason Mott - The Returned

“Damn fool,” Fred said. Then he turned on his heel and left, the dense crowd parting as best they could to allow him through.

* * *

With Fred Green gone, things were calmer in that Southern kind of way. Everyone took turns speaking, asking their questions both toward the Bureau man as well as the pastor. The questions were the expected ones; for everyone, everywhere, in every country, in every church and town hall and auditorium and web forum and chat room, the questions were the same. The questions were asked so many times by so many people that they became boring.

And the replies to the questions—we don’t know, give us time, please be patient—were equally boring. In this effort, the preacher and the man from the Bureau made a perfect team. One appealed to a person’s sense of civic duty. The other to a person’s sense of spiritual duty. If they hadn’t been a perfect team, it’s hard to tell exactly what the town would have done when the Wilson family appeared.

They came from the eating hall in back of the church. They’d been living there for a week now. Mostly unseen. Rarely talked about.

Jim and Connie Wilson, along with their two children, Tommy and Hannah, were the greatest shame and sadness the town of Arcadia had ever known.

Murders didn’t happen in Arcadia.

But this one had. All those years ago the Wilson family was shot and killed one night in their own home, and the perpetrator never found. Lots of theories floated around. Early on, there was a lot of talk about a drifter by the name of Ben Watson. He had no home to speak of and moved from town to town like some migratory bird. He came through Arcadia usually in the winter and would be found holed up in somebody’s barn, trying to get by unnoticed for as long as he could. But no one had ever known him to be the violent type; and when the Wilsons were killed, Ben Watson was two counties away, sitting in a jail cell on charges of public drunkenness.

Other theories came and went with an ever-degrading scope of believability. There was talk of a secret affair—sometimes Jim was to blame, sometimes Connie—but that didn’t last very long on account of how Jim was only ever at work, church or home and Connie was only ever at home, church or with her children. More than that, the simple truth was that Jim and Connie had been high school sweethearts, only ever tied to each other.

Straying just wasn’t in the DNA of their love.

In life, the Wilsons had spent a great deal of time with Lucille. Jim, who had never really been the type to do as much family research as some others, took Lucille at her word when she told him they were related by way of a great-aunt (the name of whom she could never quite pin down) and came to visit when Lucille asked.

No one turns down the chance to be treated as family.

For Lucille—and this is something she did not allow herself to understand until years after their deaths—watching Jim and Connie live and work and raise their two children was a chance to see the life that she, herself, had almost had. The life that Jacob’s death had taken away from her.

How could she not call them family, have them be a part of her world?

In the long years that followed the murder of the Wilson family, it was eventually agreed upon by folks—in that silent, unspoken way small-town people have of consenting to things—that the culprit couldn’t have been anyone from Arcadia. It had to be someone else. It had to be the rest of the world that had done it, that had found this special and secret part of the map where these people lived their quiet lives, that had come in and ended all the peace and quiet they’d ever known.

Everyone watched in a pensive silence as the small family emerged, one by one, from the door at the back of the church. Jim and Connie walked in front; little Tommy and Hannah followed quietly. The crowd parted like heavy batter.

Jim Wilson was a young man, barely past thirty-five, blond hair, broad shoulders, a stiff, square chin. He looked like the kind of man who was always building something. Always engaged in some manner of productivity. Always furthering the slow crawl of humanity’s progress against the perpetual hunger of entropy. This was why the town had loved him so in life. He had been what the people of Arcadia were supposed to be: polite, hardworking, well mannered, Southern. But now, as one of the Returned, he reminded them all of what they had not known they could be.

“You’re all walking up to the big question,” Jim said in a low voice, “the one you asked earlier on tonight and left hanging out there. The question about what’s to be done with us.”

Pastor Peters interrupted. “Now, now. There’s nothing ‘to be done with you.’ You’re people. You need a place to live. We’ve got room for you.”

“They can’t stay here forever,” someone said. Voices in the crowd grumbled in agreement. “Something’s got to be done with them.”

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Jim Wilson said. He had planned to say so much more, but it was all gone now—now that the entirety of Arcadia was staring at him. Some of them staring a bit less friendly than others. “I just...I just wanted to say thank you,” Jim Wilson repeated. Then he turned and, taking his family with him, exited the same way he had come.

After that, everyone seemed to have trouble finding what to ask or what to say or what to argue about. Folks milled about for a while, grumbling and whispering now and again, but to no real consequence. Everyone felt suddenly tired and burdened.

Agent Bellamy gave everyone a final round of reassurances as they began trickling out of the church. He shook their hands and smiled as they passed and, when they asked him, he would say that he would do everything he could to understand why all of this was happening. He told them he would stay “until things are sorted out.”

The sorting out of things was what people expected from the government, so they put their fears and suspicions away for now.

Eventually there was only the pastor, his wife and the Wilson family, who, not wishing to cause any more problems than they already had, stayed quietly in their room in the back of the church—away from everyone’s sight and remembrance—as if they had never returned at all.

* * *

“I imagine Fred had a fair amount of things to say,” Harold said as Lucille settled into the truck. She wrestled with Jacob’s seat belt, huffing and making hard movements with her hands.

“They’re just all so...so...irregular!” The click of Jacob’s seat belt punctuated her sentence. She turned the knob at the window. After a few hard tugs, it broke free and opened. Lucille folded her arms over her chest.

Harold turned the truck’s ignition. It started with a roar. “Your mama’s been biting her tongue again, I see, Jacob. Probably sat there that whole meeting not saying nothing, didn’t she?”

“Yes, sir,” Jacob said, looking up at his father with a smile.

“Don’t you do that,” Lucille said. “Just don’t you two do that!”

“She didn’t get a chance to use any of her fancy words, and you know what that does to her, don’t you? You remember?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m not playing with you two,” Lucille said, fighting laughter in spite of herself. “I’ll get out right now and you’ll never see me again.”

“Did somebody else get to use a really fancy word?”

“Doomsday.”

“Oh...that. It’s a fancy way word for sure. ‘Doomsday’ is what happens when you spend too much time in church. That’s why I don’t go.”

“Harold Hargrave!”

“How’s the pastor? He’s a good Mississippi boy, in spite of his religion.”

“He gave me candy,” Jacob said.

“That was nice of him, wasn’t it?” Harold asked, wrestling the truck up the dark road toward home. “He’s a good man, ain’t he?”