After the Rain

“I didn’t see you in church this morning, Brother Richard,” Lindsey said.

Stevens thought that he would fall as his fear leaped into terror, his legs suddenly too weak to support his weight. His fear had been mounting since he had heard Lindsey and the other men squelch through the wet grass as they came around the side of the house to where he was working in the garden, and now fear was tearing at him in a blind ravenousness.

Lindsey had brightly made some small talk as the other two men, whom Stevens did not know, remained silent. He had been working all morning to try and repair the damage to his garden from the previous night’s thunderstorm, as the garden brought what little extra money he was able to make in the ruined economy, and Lindsey and he had briefly discussed the damage that the storm had caused to the young plants. Lindsey had bent and helped him for a few minutes, gently replanting the young green beans where the heavy rain had washed miniature gullies through the planted rows.

Then he had straightened and said that he had not seen Stevens in church that morning, and now Stevens stood afraid of falling from the fear that almost engulfed him.

“The garden….” He managed to say, thinking that the others must surely see that he was going fall.

“I was busy with the garden this morning.”

Lindsey glanced down briefly at the damaged garden, as if lowering his head in an apologetic bow.

“Yes,” he said, “the Lord sent a powerful storm last night. The lines went out again,” he added. “This morning when they came back up, there was a list from Wichita.”

“A list,” Stevens repeated softly. “Yes.”

“It’s just for a few months. The congregation will care for your garden and home.”

Stevens knew that any protest would be useless. He had the urge to run, but felt that he could not operate his terror-stricken body correctly – and, in any case, the silent men were there to stop him.

“Do we leave now?” he asked. “My clothes are in rather a mess.” He gestured at his muddy work clothes, wondering if it was the fear that was stilting his speech into odd formality.

“You can clean up at the Center. Brother Samuel is packing for you.”

As it waiting for his queue, Brother Samuel opened the back door of the house, and came up to them carrying a small overnight bag that Stevens recognized as his own.

“I packed for you so that you wouldn’t have to worry about it,” he said. “I put in that brown shirt that I’ve seen you wear, so I know that it’s one of your favorite shirts.”

Stevens worked on the same scrap crew as Brother Samuel, slowly dismantling the local college’s buildings into piles of differentiated scrap to be either sold or reused, but he knew him from several years before, when Samuel was one of his students and his name was Jason. He must have been in Stevens’ house since they had arrived, going though his closets and drawers to pack the bag.

Stevens took the bag and apologized for the condition of the messy house, too afraid to be angry about the intrusion.

“I’m not a very good housekeeper,” he said.

“It’s difficult when a man’s wife leaves him,” the younger man said.

Stevens could only look past him at the house behind him. His wife had not left him; everyone in town knew that he had sent her and the children to live with her family in Japan. She was a researcher, not a housewife, and the thought of them made Stevens feel somewhat less afraid. Then he looked back at his garden, at the sodden ground and beaten plants, and he worried about the green beans.

But now there was no more that could be done, and Stevens walked among the men as they went back around his home into the front were there were a big, windowless van and an SUV waiting. He knew why he was on the list from Wichita, because the list from Wichita always had the names of the same types of people, and those people were atheists, or Muslims, or women who’d had abortions, or gay, or any number of things that people were or did that they weren’t supposed to be or do anymore.

Brother Samuel opened the van door, and Stevens got inside and sat on one of the bench seats. Brother Samuel followed him in and sat alone on the rear-most seat. One of the silent men got into the front passenger seat; there already was a driver, who was wearing a National Guard uniform. There were two other passengers – a young woman wearing a hijab, and a man who looked like a derelict or a drug addict.

Lindsey smiled pleasantly as he peered into the van and then closed the big sliding door. Stevens heard him walking on the wet gravel towards the SUV behind the van. He didn’t look back to check and see if Lindsey climbed into the SUV. He knew that he had, just as he knew that the SUV was following the van as it drove away from his home and out of the small town.

The Help and Care Center to which they sent the people on the list was to the north, and the van picked up speed as it traveled along the two-lane blacktop that went north out of town. But the presence of the Guard driver and the derelict and the young woman told Stevens that they would not be going to the Center.

He sat with his overnight bag on his lap and tried to fight down his fear. The woman jerked spasmodically as she cried silently, the tears following down her face and soaking the delicate hijab fabric under her chin. Stevens suddenly had the desperate fantasy that Samuel had packed his grandfather’s old police revolver into his bag but knew that he had not. He wanted to scream and run, and he hated the woman for crying. The drug addict was visibly shaking, and he wondered if it was from fear or withdrawal. Stevens had never had much toleration for people with addictions, and the memory was now bitter in his mind.

The van slowed and pulled off of the blacktop onto a sloppy wet gravel road. Stevens knew that they would turn here, and he felt a kind of pride when his fear lessened now that he knew their destination, although he also knew that it would return very soon. He pretended that Brother Samuel had packed the old revolver in the bag for him as the van splashed along the rutted road which ended at the old quarry.