The Returned. Jason Mott

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.

      Lucille licked her lips and shook her head. The air grew stiffer. There was no room for a body to move but, still, people were coming into the church. She could feel it. Probably, they were coming from Buckhead or Waccamaw or Riegelwood. The Bureau was trying to hold these town hall meetings in every town they could and there were some folks who’d become something akin to groupies—the kind you hear about that go around following famous musicians from one show to another. These people would follow the agents from the Bureau from one town hall meeting to another, looking for inconsistencies and a chance to start a fight.

      Lucille even noticed a man and a woman that looked like they might have been a reporter and a photographer. The man looked like the kind she saw in magazines or read about in books: with his disheveled hair and five-o-clock shadow. Lucille imagined him smelling of split wood and the ocean.

      The woman was sharply dressed, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her makeup flawlessly applied. “I wonder if there’s a news van out there,” Lucille said, but her words were lost in the clamor of the crowd.

      As if cued by a stage director, Pastor Peters appeared from the cloistered door at the corner of the pulpit. His wife came after, looking as small and frail as she always did. She wore a plain black dress that made her look all the smaller. Already she was sweating, dabbing her brow in a delicate way. Lucille had trouble remembering the woman’s first name. It was a small, frail thing, her name, something that people tended to overlook, just like the woman to whom it belonged.

      In a type of biblical contradiction to his wife, Pastor Robert Peters was a tall, wide-bodied man with dark hair and a perpetually tanned-looking complexion. He was solid as stone. The kind of man who looked born, bred, propagated and cultivated for a way of life that hinged upon violence. Though, for as long as Lucille had known the young preacher, she’d never known him to so much as raise his voice—not counting the voice raising that came at the climax of certain sermons, but that was no more a sign of a violent soul than thunder was the sign of an angry god. Thunder in the voice of pastors was just the way God got your attention, Lucille knew.

      “It’s a taste of hell, Reverend,” Lucille said with a grin when the pastor and his wife had come near enough.

      “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Lucille,” Pastor Peters replied. His large, square head swung on his large, square neck. “We might have to see about getting a few people to exit quietly out the back. Don’t think I’ve ever seen it this full. Maybe we ought to pass the plate around before we get rid of them, though. I need new tires.”

      “Oh, hush!”

      “How are you tonight, Mrs. Hargrave?” The pastor’s wife put her small hand to her small mouth, covering a small cough. “You look good,” she said in a small voice.

      “Poor thing,” Lucille said, stroking Jacob’s hair, “are you all right? You look like you’re falling apart.”

      “I’m fine,” the woman said. “Just a little