Jason Mott - The Returned

“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.