The Returned

The great oak tree, the sun bubbling through the canopy, the wet, green grass, the young girl—all of them disappeared. Pastor Peters sighed, holding his empty hands in front of him.

“What are we gonna do with ’em?” Fred Green barked from the center of the church. Everyone turned to face him. He removed his tattered cap and straightened his khaki-colored work shirt. “They ain’t right!” he continued, his mouth pulled tight as a rusty letterbox. His hair had long since abandoned him, and his nose was large, his eyes small—all of which conspired together over the years to give him sharp, cruel features. “What are we gonna do with ’em?”

“We’re going to be patient,” Pastor Peters said. He thought of mentioning the Wilson family in back of the church. But that family had a special meaning for the town of Arcadia and, for now, it was best to keep them out of sight.

“Be patient?” Fred’s eyes went wide. A tremble ran over him. “When the Devil himself shows up at our front door you want us to be patient? You want us to be patient, here and now, in the End Times!” Fred looked not at Pastor Peters as he spoke, but at the audience. He turned in a small circle, pulling the crowd into himself, making sure that each of them could see what was in his eyes. “He wants patience at a time like this!”

“Now, now,” Pastor Peters said. “Let’s not start up about the ‘End Times.’ And let’s not go into calling these poor people devils. They’re mysteries, that’s for certain. They may even be miracles. But right now, it’s too soon for anyone to get a handle on anything. There’s too much we don’t know and the last thing we need is to start a panic here. You heard about what happened in Dallas, all those people hurt—Returned and regular people, as well. All of them gone. We can’t have something like that happen here. Not in Arcadia.”

“If you ask me, them folks in Dallas did what needed to be done.”

The church was alive. In the pews, along the walls, at the back of the church, everyone was grumbling in agreement with Fred or, at the very least, in agreement with his passion.

Pastor Peters lifted his hands and motioned for the crowd to calm. It dulled for a moment, only to rise again.

Lucille wrapped an arm around Jacob and pulled him closer, shuddering at the sudden recollection of the image of Returned—grown folks and children alike—laid out, bloodied and bruised, on the sun-warmed streets of Dallas.

She stroked Jacob’s head and hummed some tune she could not name. She felt the eyes of the townspeople on Jacob. The longer they looked, the harder their faces became. Lips sneered and brows fell into outright scowls. All the while the boy only went about the business of resting in the curve of his mother’s arm, where he pondered nothing more important than glazed peaches.

Things wouldn’t be so complex, Lucille thought, if she could hide the fact of him being one of the Returned. If only he could pass for just another child. But even if the entirety of the town didn’t know her personal history, didn’t know about the tragedy that befell her and Harold on August 15, 1966, there was no way to hide what Jacob was. The living always knew the Returned.

Fred Green went on about the temptation of the Returned, about how they weren’t to be trusted.

In Pastor Peters’s mind were all manner of scripture and proverb and canonical anecdote to serve as counterargument, but this wasn’t the church congregation. This wasn’t Sunday morning service. This was a town meeting for a town that had become disoriented in the midst of a global epidemic. An epidemic that, if there were any justice in the world, would have passed this town by, would have swept through the civilized world, through the larger cities, through New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Paris. All the places where large, important things were supposed to happen.

“I say we round them all up somewhere,” Fred said, shaking a square, wrinkled fist at the air as a crowd of younger men huddled around him, nodding and grunting in agreement. “Maybe in the schoolhouse. Or maybe in this church here since, to hear the pastor tell it, God ain’t got no gripe with them.”

Pastor Peters did something then which was rare for him. He yelled. He yelled so loud the church shrank into silence and his small, frail wife took several small steps back.

“And then what?” he asked. “And then what happens to them? We lock them up in a building somewhere, and then what? What’s next?

“How long do we hold them? A couple of days? A week? Two weeks? A month? Until this ends? And when will that be? When will the dead stop returning? And when will Arcadia be full up? When will everyone who has ever lived here come back? This little community of ours is, what, a hundred and fifty? A hundred and seventy years old? How many people is that? How many can we hold? How many can we feed and for how long?

“And what happens when the Returned aren’t just our own anymore? You all know what’s happening. When they come back, it’s hardly ever to the place that they lived in life. So not only will we find ourselves opening our doors to those for whom this event is a homecoming, but also for those who are simply lost and in need of direction. The lonely. The ones untethered, even among the Returned. Remember the Japanese fellow over in Bladen County? Where is he now? Not in Japan, but still in Bladen County. Living with a family that was kind enough to take him in. And why? Simply because he didn’t want to go home. Whatever his life was when he died, he wanted something else. And, by the graces of good people willing to show kindness, he’s got a chance to get it back.

“I’d pay you good money, Fred Green, to explain that one! And don’t you dare start going on about how ‘a Chinaman’s mind ain’t like ours,’ you racist old fool!”

He could see the spark of reason and consideration—the possibility for patience—in their eyes. “So what happens when there isn’t anywhere else for them to go? What happens when the dead outnumber the living?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Fred Green said. “What happens when the dead outnumber the living? What’ll they do with us? What happens when we’re at their mercy?”

“If that happens, and there’s no promise that it will, but if it does, we’ll hope that they’ll have been shown a good example of what mercy is...by us.”

“That’s a goddamn fool answer! And Lord forgive me for saying that right here in the church. But it’s the truth. It’s a goddamn fool answer!”

The volume in the church rose again. Yammering and grumbling and blind presupposing. Pastor Peters looked over at Agent Bellamy. Where God was failing, the government should pick up the slack.

“All right! All right!” Martin Bellamy said, standing to face the crowd. He ran a hand down the front of his immaculate gray suit. Of all the people in the church, he seemed to be the only one not sweating, not suffering in the tight air and heavy heat. That was a calming thing.

“I wouldn’t doubt if this was all the government’s fault to start with!” Fred Green said. “It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if we find out the government had a hand in all of this once it all washes out. Maybe you weren’t really trying to find some way to bring back everyone, but I bet them Pentagon folks could see a whole lot of benefit in being able to bring soldiers back from the dead.” Fred tightened his mouth, honing his argument on his lips. He opened his arms, as if to take all of the church into his train of thought. “Can’t y’all just see it? You send an army to war and, bam, one of your soldiers gets shot. Then you push a button or you inject him with some needle and he’s right back on his feet, gun in hand, running headlong at the son of a bitch what just killed him! It’s a damned doomsday weapon!”

People nodded, as though he just might have convinced them or, at the very least, opened the door of suspicion.

Agent Bellamy let the old man’s words settle over the crowd. “A doomsday weapon indeed, Mr. Green,” he began. “The type of thing nightmares are made of. Think about it—dead one minute, alive the next and getting shot at again. How many of you would sign up for such a thing? I know I wouldn’t.

“No, Mr. Green, our government, as large and impressive as it is, doesn’t control this event any more than it controls the sun. We’re all just trying not to be trampled by it, that’s all. We’re just trying to make what progress we can.”

It was a good word: progress. A safe word that you snuggled up against when you were nervous. The kind of word you took home to meet your parents.

The crowd looked at Fred Green again. He hadn’t given them anything as comforting as progress. He only stood there looking old and small and angry.

Pastor Peters moved his large frame to Agent Bellamy’s right side.

Agent Bellamy was the worst kind of government man: an honest one. A government should never tell people that it doesn’t know any more than everyone else. If the government didn’t have the answers, then who the hell did? The least a government could do was have decency enough to lie about it. Pretend everything was in hand. Pretend that, at any moment, they’d come through with the miracle cure, the decisive military strike or, in the case of the Returned, just a simple news conference where the president sat down fireside, wearing a sweater and smoking a pipe, and said, in a very patient and soft voice, “I have the answers you need and everything will be okay.”

But Agent Bellamy didn’t know a damned thing more than anyone else and he wasn’t ashamed of it.

“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.