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“Yes,” Bellamy said. “I know exactly what you mean. It’s like when I hear a doctor or nurse telling me something in all that hospital talk. I don’t understand a thing they’re saying most of the time but, from the way they’re saying it, I can tell they mean it in a nice way. You know, Jacob, it’s amazing how much you can tell about a person just by how they say things. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, sir.”
They then talked more about what had happened after Jacob was found by the river in that small fishing village just outside Beijing. The boy was delighted to tell it all. He saw himself as an adventurer, a hero on a heroic journey. Yes, it had been painfully terrifying for him, but only in the beginning. After that, it had actually become rather fun. He was in a strange land with strange people and they fed him strange food, which, thankfully, he quickly acclimated to. Even now, as he sat in the office with the man from the Bureau and his lovely mother, his belly rumbled for authentic Chinese food. He had no idea of the names of anything he had been fed. But he knew the scents, the tastes, the essences of them.
Jacob talked at great length about the food in China, about how kind they had been to him. Even when the government men came—and the soldiers with them—they still treated him kindly, as if he were one of their own. They fed him until his stomach simply could not hold any more, all the while watching him with a sense of wonder and mystery.
Then came the long plane ride, which he held no fear of. He’d grown up always wanting to fly somewhere; now he was given almost eighteen hours of it. The flight attendants were nice, but not as nice as Agent Bellamy when they met.
“They smiled a lot,” Jacob said, thinking of the flight attendants.
All these things he told his mother and the man from the Bureau. He did not tell them in such an eloquent form, but he said them all by saying, simply, “I liked everyone. And they liked me.”
“Sounds like you had yourself quite a good time in China, Jacob.”
“Yes, sir. It was fun.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.” Agent Bellamy had stopped taking notes. His grocery list was complete. “Are you about tired of these questions, Jacob?”
“No, sir. It’s okay.”
“I’m going to ask you one last question, then. And I need you to really think about it for me, okay?”
Jacob finished his lollipop. He sat up straight, his small, pale face becoming very serious. He looked like a little, well-dressed politician—in his dark pants and white, collared shirt.
“You’re a good boy, Jacob. I know you’ll do your best.”
“Yes, you are,” Lucille added, stroking the boy’s head.
“Do you remember anything before China?”
Silence.
Lucille wrapped her arm around Jacob and pulled him close and squeezed him. “Mr. Martin Bellamy isn’t trying to make anything difficult and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. He’s just curious, is all. And so is your old mama. But I’m less curious and more just plain ol’ nosy, I suppose.”
She smiled and poked a tickling finger into his armpit.
Jacob giggled.
Lucille and Agent Bellamy waited.
Lucille rubbed Jacob’s back, as if her hand against his body might conjure whatever spirits of memory were contained within him. She wished Harold were there. Somehow, she thought this moment could be helped if Jacob had his father rubbing his back and showing his support, as well. But Harold had launched into one of his rants about “the damn fool government” and was being generally disagreeable today—he behaved the way he did when Lucille tried to drag him to church during the holidays—and it was decided he should just stay in the truck while Lucille and Jacob spoke with the man from the Bureau.
Agent Bellamy placed his notepad on the table beside his stool to show the boy that this wasn’t simply about the government’s need to know. He wanted to show that he was genuinely interested in what the boy had experienced. He liked Jacob, from the first time they’d met, and he felt that Jacob liked him, too.
After the silence had gone on so long as to become uncomfortable, Agent Bellamy spoke. “That’s okay, Jacob. You don’t have to—”
“I do as I’m told,” Jacob said. “I try to do as I’m told.”
“I’m sure you do,” Agent Bellamy said.
“I wasn’t trying to get into trouble. That day at the river.”
“In China? Where they found you?”
“No,” Jacob said after a pause. He pulled his legs into his chest.
“What do you remember about that day?”
“I wasn’t trying to misbehave.”
“I know you weren’t.”
“I really wasn’t,” Jacob said.
Lucille was weeping now, silently. Her body trembled, expanding and contracting like a willow in March wind. She fumbled in her pocket and found tissues with which she dabbed her eyes. “Go on,” she said, her voice choked.
“I remember the water,” Jacob said. “There was just water. First it was the river at home, and then it wasn’t. Only I didn’t know it. It just happened.”
“There was nothing in between?”
Jacob shrugged.
Lucille dabbed her eyes again. Something heavy had fallen against her heart, though she did not know what. It was all she could manage not to collapse right there in the too-small chair beneath her. She felt that would be painfully rude, though—for Martin Bellamy to have to help a collapsed old woman. So, as a matter of etiquette, she held herself together, even when she asked the question upon which all of her life seemed to hang. “Wasn’t there anything before you woke up, honey? In the time between when you...went to sleep, and when you woke up? Was there a bright, warm light? A voice? Wasn’t there anything?”
“What’s an owl’s favorite subject?” Jacob asked.
In reply to this there was only silence. Silence and a small boy torn between what was he incapable of saying and what he felt his mother wanted.
“Owlgebra,” he said when no one answered.
* * *
“That’s some boy you’ve got there,” Agent Bellamy said. Jacob was gone now—in the adjoining room being kept company by a young soldier from somewhere in the Midwest. Lucille and Agent Bellamy could see them through the window in the door that linked the two rooms together. It was important to Lucille that she didn’t lose sight of him.
“He’s a blessing,” she said after a pause. Her gaze shifted from Jacob to Agent Bellamy to the small, thin hands that sat in her lap.
“I’m glad to hear that everything has been going so well.”
“It has,” Lucille said. She smiled, still looking down at her hands. Then, as if some small riddle had finally been sorted out in her head, she sat erect and her smile grew so wide and proud that it was only then that Agent Bellamy noticed how thin and frail it had been. “This your first time down this way, Agent Martin Bellamy? Down south, I mean.”
“Do airports count?” He sat forward and folded his hands on the grand desk in front of him. He felt a story coming.
“I suppose they wouldn’t.”
“Are you sure? Because I’ve been in and out of the Atlanta airport more times than I can count. It’s odd, but somehow it feels like every flight I’ve ever been on has had to go through Atlanta for some reason. I swear I took a flight from New York to Boston once that had a three-hour layover in Atlanta. Not quite sure how that happened.”
Lucille barked a little laugh. “How come you aren’t married, Agent Martin Bellamy? How come you don’t have a family to call your own?”
He shrugged. “Just never really fit in, I suppose.”
“You should see about making it fit,” Lucille said. She made a motion to stand, then immediately changed her mind. “You seem like a good person. And the world needs more good people. You should find a young woman that makes you happy and the two of you should have children,” Lucille said, still smiling, though Agent Bellamy couldn’t help but notice that her smile was a little dimmer now.
Then she stood with a groan and walked over to the door and saw that Jacob was still there. “I believe we just missed the Strawberry Festival, Martin Bellamy,” she said. Her voice was low and even. “Happens about this time every year over in Whiteville. Been going on as far back as I can remember. Probably wouldn’t be all that impressive to a big-city man like yourself, but it’s something folks like us like to be a part of.
“Just like it sounds, it’s all about strawberries. Most people don’t think about it, but there was a time back when a person could have a farm and grow crops and make a living off it. Doesn’t happen much nowadays—almost all the farms I knew of as a child been gone for years. Only one or two still around. I think that Skidmore farm up near Lumberton is still running...but I can’t say to a certainty.”
She came from the door and stood behind her chair and looked down at Agent Bellamy as she spoke. He’d gotten up from his position when she hadn’t been looking and that seemed to throw her off. He had looked almost like a child at the desk before, the way he had been sitting. Now he was a grown man again. A grown man from a big, faraway city. A grown man that had not been a child for a great many years.
“It goes on all weekend,” she continued. “And it’s gotten bigger and bigger over the years, but even back then it was a big event. Jacob was as excited as any child ought to have the right to be. You’d think we’d never taken him anywhere! And Harold, well, even he was excited to be there. He tried to hide it—he hadn’t really learned how to be an obstinate old fool just yet, you understand. You could just see how happy he was! And why wouldn’t he be? He was a father at the Columbus County Strawberry Festival with his one and only son.
“It was something! Both of them behaving like children. There was a dog show. And there wasn’t anything Jacob and Harold liked more than dogs. Now, this wasn’t any dog show like you see on the TV these days. This was a good old country dog show. Nothing but working dogs. Blue ticks, walkers, beagles. But Lord, were they beautiful! And Harold and Jacob just ran from one pen to the other. Saying this and saying that about what dog was better than the other and why. This one looked like he might be good for hunting in such and such place in such and such weather on such and such kind of animal.”
Lucille was beaming again. She was onstage, proud and wonderfully rooted in 1966.
“Sunlight everywhere,” she said. “A sky so bright and blue you could hardly believe it or imagine it these days.” She shook her head. “Too much pollution now, I suppose. Can’t think of a single thing that’s the way it used to be.”
Then, quite suddenly, she stopped.
She turned and looked through the window in the door. Her son was still there. Jacob was still alive. Still eight years old. Still beautiful. “Things change,” she said after a moment. “But you should have been there, Martin Bellamy. They were so happy—Jacob and his daddy. Harold carried that boy on his back for half the day. I thought he was gonna pass out. All that walking we did that day. Walking and walking and more walking. And there was Harold carrying that boy slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes for most of it.
“The two of them made a game of it. They’d get to some booth or other, take it all in, say whatever they wanted to say about things. Then Jacob would cut off at a run and there was Harold right after him. Running through folks, almost knocking people over. And there I was yelling after them, ‘Cut it out, you two! Stop acting like animals!’”
She gazed at Jacob. Her face seemed unsure what stance to take, so it became neutral and waiting. “It really is a blessing from God, Agent Martin Bellamy,” she said slowly. “And just because a person don’t quite understand the purpose and meaning of a blessing, that doesn’t make it any less of a blessing...does it?”
Elizabeth Pinch
She knew he would come. All she had to do was wait and believe. He had always been better than he gave himself credit for, more disciplined, smarter. He was all the things he never told himself he was.
She had come close to finding him. She’d made it as far east as Colorado before they caught her. A local police sheriff saw her at a highway rest stop. She’d been riding with a trucker who was fascinated by the Returned and kept asking her questions about death. And when she didn’t answer his questions, he left her at the rest stop where everyone that saw her treated her with uncertainty.
She was transferred first to Texas, where she asked the interviewers from the Bureau, “Can you help me find Robert Peters?” over and over again. After holding her for a while in Texas, they sent her to Mississippi, where she’d lived originally, and placed her in a building with others like her and placed men with guns around them.
“I need to find Robert Peters,” she told them at every opportunity.
“He’s not here” is the closest thing she ever got to an answer, and that was given with derision.
But he would come for her. She knew that, somehow.
He would find her and everything would be the way it was always meant to be.
Six
PASTOR PETERS GRUMBLED in concert with the keystrokes. Only God knew how bitterly he hated typing.
In spite of still being a young man, just forty-three—youngish, at least—he’d never been any good at typing. He had the bad luck of being born into that ill-timed generation of people for whom the epoch of computers was just far enough away that they were never given any reason to learn to type and, yet, the rise of the machines was just close enough that they would be forced to always suffer for their lack of understanding in regard to QWERTY and its arrangement of home keys. He could only wield two fingers at the keyboard, like some huge, computer-dependent mantis.
Peck. Peck-peck. Peck, peck, peck, peck-peck, peck.
He’d begun the letter four times now. And he had deleted it five times—he counted the time he’d deleted everything and turned off the entire computer out of frustration.
The problem with being a poor, mantis-fingered typist was that the words in Pastor Peters’s head always ran far, far in front of the words his index fingers took entire eras to construct. If he didn’t know any better, he would have sworn on any stack of consecrated tomes that the letters on the keyboard shifted position every few minutes or so, just enough to keep a person guessing. Yes, he could have simply written the letter longhand and then taken the time to type it through only once, but that wouldn’t make him any better a typist.
His wife had come into his office once or twice, offering to type the letter for him, as she oftentimes did, and he had politely declined, as he oftentimes did not.
“I’ll never improve if I keep letting you do it for me,” he told her.
“A wise man knows his limitations,” she replied, not meaning it as an insult, only hoping to start a dialogue, a powwow, as he himself had said to the Arcadia townspeople not long ago. He was distant in the past few weeks, more so in the past few days. And she did not know why.
“I prefer to think of it more as a ‘loose boundary’ than a limitation,” he replied. “If I can ever get the rest of my fingers to play along...well...just you wait and see. I’ll be a phenomenon! A miracle unto myself.”
When she began walking around the desk, politely asking to see what he was working on, he quickly deleted the few precious words that had taken him so long to assemble. “It’s just something I need to get out of my head,” he told her. “Nothing important.”
“So you don’t want to tell me what it is?”
“It’s nothing. Really.”
“Okay,” she said, holding up her hands in submission. She smiled to let him know that she was not angry just yet. “Keep your secrets. I trust you,” she said, and left the room.
The pastor’s typing was even worse now that his wife had said that she trusted him, thereby implying that there might be something in his writing of the letter that required not only her trust but, even worse, a reminder of that trust.
She was a very skilled spouse.
To Whom It May Concern,
That was how far back he’d gone. All the way to the beginning. He huffed and wiped his furrowed brow with the back of his hand and continued.
Peck. Peck. Peck. Peck-peck. Peck...
I am writing to inquire
Pastor Peters sat and thought, realizing now that he knew very little about exactly what he wanted to ask.
Peck-peck-peck...
I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch. I received your letter stating that Miss Pinch was trying to find me.
Delete, delete, delete. Then:
I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.
That was closer to the truth of it. He thought, then and there, about simply signing his name and dropping the envelope in the mail. He thought so hard about it that he even printed the page. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at the words.
I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.
He placed the paper on his desk and picked up a pen and marked a few things out.
I am writing to inquire about the status of Miss Elizabeth Pinch.
