Apocalypse Crucible (18 page)

Gray patches of thin fog wound like a river through the headstones and family crypts that jutted up from the hilly land. Twice, feral red eyes gleamed back at Delroy when the flashlight beam caught them. He never saw what the eyes belonged to; whatever the creatures were, they scampered off quickly into the underbrush that ringed the graveyard.

Sunshine Hills Cemetery was blatantly misnamed. Trees shrouded the area, towering over the hilly and rocky land so that shadows lingered even on the brightest day. Night never truly went away from the cemetery.

Generations of dead lay in the ground and in vaults all around Delroy. Josiah Harte had delivered several graveside services here during his tenure as preacher. Delroy had accompanied his father to those services only if the deceased was someone he knew from the congregation. Josiah Harte had buried several indigent and unclaimed bodies that occasionally had shown up in the medical examiner’s office. A lingering sadness had always accompanied Josiah from those funerals, and Delroy remembered his father had come home a little bit less of himself for a time.

When Delroy had asked his mother why the funerals had affected his father so when he hadn’t even know the men and women that were laid to rest, she had quietly taken young Delroy aside and told him, “He’s your daddy, Delroy, and sometimes maybe you just think of him only that way. But your daddy is a
special
man. A
good
man.” Etta Harte’s eyes had glistened as if she was going to cry when she’d spoken, and Delroy could still remember the lump that had risen in his throat.

“But though your daddy is a man and likes his music and his baseball on the radio and his son and his wife, first and foremost, your daddy belongs to Jesus. The Savior took your daddy into His family a long time ago. Gave him a calling that’s as strong as any hurricane you ever heard tell of. We’re just blessed that Jesus saw to it your daddy has a heart big enough to love all of us as much as he loves working for the Lord.” She’d paused and wiped away the tears that had trickled down Delroy’s cheeks.

Delroy still didn’t know why he had cried, but the emotion had come over him quick and strong.

“When your daddy has to bury one of those unmourned people,” Etta Harte had continued, “he feels like he’s missed his calling, like he hasn’t worked hard enough at what Jesus called upon him to do. He feels sorry for those people, because maybe they didn’t know the love of the Lord and that their souls would have been saved if they only had given themselves to Jesus.”

And here you come,
Delroy chastised himself as he walked across the cemetery grounds,
bringing your doubts and your fears to this place. To your father.
He felt nauseous, but he blamed it on fatigue rather than guilt.

Josiah Harte’s grave lay in the back of the cemetery. Other Hartes lay to rest there, as well as Delroy’s mother’s side of the family. The land also had a history. Even before the Civil War, ancestors of both families had worked in the cotton fields, living and dying on farms, then getting put into ground where no one wanted to plant a cash crop because of the trees and the rocks.

Sunshine Hills had started out as an unnamed black cemetery in its early years, but after the Civil War’s reconstruction brought the carpetbaggers from the North, poor whites were buried there, along with once-affluent whites who had lost all their wealth. Interment there was delivered as punishment and insult to the privileged white who had lived in Marbury and the surrounding areas.

Gradually over the years, the stigma had finally washed away, and the cemetery was no longer thought of as black. But only family members of longtime residents were ever buried there. Sunshine Hills remained small and special within the community, a tie to a way of life that was long past but never forgotten.

Josiah Harte’s murder nearly thirty years ago had stirred up all that turmoil again. The late sixties and early seventies had tried men’s souls as civil unrest had threatened to split a nation again.

Rain leaked down the back of Delroy’s neck under his slicker collar. It felt like an icy tentacle spreading against his skin. He rubbed his hand over the area and felt the moisture soak into his shirt. There was nothing comfortable about tonight.

Thunder suddenly broke loose in the dark skies. Lightning flashed and turned the landscape into a sharp relief of white and black. For a moment, no gray existed.

Delroy came to a brief stop, feeling his resolve start to shake a little. Then he took a firmer grip on the shovel and started forward again. What he had to do lay before him, and he knew he couldn’t avoid it.

Gravel covered the narrow path between the markers, but the constant rain had still managed to turn the earth to mud. Muck clung to his boots and made them feel clunky and heavy.

Another flash of lightning revealed Josiah Harte’s final resting place. Near the grave, a statue of Jesus held a shepherd’s crook and a small lamb. Weeks after Josiah’s brutal murder, the church had raised the money to place the statue. Etta Harte had planned on making payments on a small marker for her husband’s grave. She hadn’t asked for anything, even though everyone in the community knew how much the reverend had given to those who had needed.

The sight of the grave weakened Delroy’s resolve. How could he visit his father’s grave with the intentions he had in his heart? If Josiah yet lived, Delroy doubted he’d have had the nerve to ask his father’s blessing in what he was about to do.

But maybe he’d have had the answers to quiet the aching doubt in your heart,
Delroy thought.

He stopped for a moment in the shelter of a pecan tree twenty feet away. Standing still was a mistake, though. The wind cut more deeply and even the rain seemed to gain intensity. He let out a long gray breath that disappeared in patches, then walked to the foot of his father’s grave.

As Delroy stood there, hot tears filled his eyes. He worked to get his voice out. “Hello, Daddy.” He didn’t know if that salutation was right under the circumstances. This wasn’t a visit like the ones in the past. He wasn’t here to simply pay respects; he was here to do something unthinkable and possibly blasphemous. “Pastor Harte.”

Shame filled him because he didn’t know the proper way to address his father. Truth to tell, even at twenty-one Delroy hadn’t grown into a man’s responsibility and had remained a boy in so many ways. His life had consisted of Glenda and basketball, chasing a girl and playing ball.

Lightning flashed again and laid his tall, broad shadow across his father’s grave.

“Daddy.” Delroy’s voice was so thick he could hardly speak. “I miss you. Never have stopped missing you. I could have used your counsel a thousand times for every year that’s passed since you were taken from us.” He paused, feeling his hands shaking with fear and uncertainty. “I wish you were here now to talk with. But you’re not.”

Thunder pealed.

Deciding to be as honest as he could because he had always had that with his father, Delroy said, “Daddy, I’ve come to you now because I’m lost.” He let the tears come because he could no longer stop them, surprised that there were so many. Five years had passed since he’d honestly let himself go. All the grief had stayed bottled up inside. He’d kept it in so long that he’d gone numb. He’d seen other men do that and had counseled them not to, but he’d never thought that would happen to him. For him, keeping himself together was all about control.

But control was just an illusion, wasn’t it, Delroy?
He swept the flashlight beam over his father’s headstone, remembering how he’d had to touch the carved letters even many months after his father’s burial just to know that they were real.

JOSIAH C. HARTE
PASTOR, FATHER, AND HUSBAND
ABOVE ALL THINGS, BELIEVER

The sight of his father’s grave had made death seem so permanent. Delroy had struggled to find himself in the choking mire of pain and loss that had closed in on him for years afterward. It wasn’t until he’d decided to become a preacher that some of that misery passed.

“I’m sorry so much time has passed since I’ve visited you,” Delroy said. “I’ve not been a good son.” A sob broke at the back of his throat, and he waited for control to return before going on. “After Terrence—after I lost my boy—” His grief overcame him. He closed his eyes and wished that he could feel his father’s arms around him. No place in the world had ever felt safer.

Stained, pale white flower petals gleamed in the light near the headstone. Someone had visited recently.

“Daddy, you were a fine preacher,” Delroy said. “The best I’ve ever heard. I never told you—and God knows I should have—how proud I was to see you take that pulpit on Sunday mornings and sing and preach the Word of God. I swear I’d never seen anything like it, nor have I seen anything like it since. The Lord spoke to you and through you. I truly believe He did.”

Some of the petals broke away from the flowers the rain had beaten down into the mud. They floated away like small boats.

“But I don’t think even you could have explained what happened to Terrence,” Delroy went on. “A father should never outlive his son, Daddy. I tried to tell myself that Terrence had gone to be with you and the Lord. But, Daddy—” pain choked him up—“Daddy, he didn’t know you. You never took Terrence fishing the way you took me fishing. Never heard your stories or sat with you on a riverbank while you cooked our catch. Never heard you sing gospel songs in the quiet of the night when we camped out. Terrence didn’t know you, and I miss him so much. I
still
miss him. Taking him like that wasn’t right, Daddy. There’s a hole inside me that nothing can fill.”

Feeling weary and hopeless, Delroy knelt, no longer trusting himself to stand. He placed the flashlight on the ground so the beam washed over the headstone. He laid the shovel beside him. The muddy ground soaked the knees of his pants with wet and cold.

“Daddy, if you were here, maybe things wouldn’t seem the way they do,” Delroy said. “You knew all about the end times. You always told me they were just around the corner, that we would live to see them. You were right, even if I never believed it. You almost lived to see them, too.”

The heartbreaking images of his father’s body laid out on the stainless-steel table returned to Delroy with savage force. Since a murderer had taken Josiah Harte’s life, the state medical examiner’s office had taken the body for an autopsy. The funeral home, the people who had known and loved Josiah, hadn’t gotten his body until after the forensics investigators had finished.

“I know you’re in heaven, Daddy,” Delroy croaked. “And I know you’ve looked down on me from time to time. I swear I could feel you then. I can look back and probably name the days when I felt close to you. I only hope you’re not watching over me tonight.”

Delroy leaned forward and placed his hands on his father’s grave. He wasn’t surprised to find that he was shaking.

“I failed you, Daddy,” he whispered, too ashamed to admit that out loud. But he knew he had to say it. His father had always seemed to know even the things he had tried to hide. “I never once told you that I wanted to become a preacher. I didn’t know it myself. All I ever wanted for myself when you were alive was a career as a professional basketball player.”

Josiah Harte had sat in the bleachers at a number of county league, junior high, high school, and college games.

“I was selfish as a young man, Daddy, and I know you saw that in me. But I wouldn’t listen. The sad thing was that I didn’t learn enough then or even when you were taken from us.”

Delroy closed his fists in the mud at his father’s grave. “I was selfish in my grief, too, Daddy. When I lost Terrence, I just couldn’t see anyone else. Couldn’t see Glenda, couldn’t see Momma. Couldn’t see anybody but that hole that his passing left. His absence was too big, too painful. I couldn’t get around it.”

Delroy remembered how Glenda had tried to talk to him during those dark days. But he’d turned away from her, taking the first step of all those that had separated them over the last five years. Even on a ship halfway around the world from Glenda, he’d never put as much distance between himself and his wife as he had standing side by side on the day they had buried their son. He couldn’t give himself over to her because he’d feared that he couldn’t pull himself back together.

“And now I come to you tonight,” Delroy said in a hoarse whisper, “shamed and hurting because I don’t have the faith that you did. I’ve never had it. I never knew God. I can see that now. Not like you did. I don’t even have the faith that God cares about us.”

Grief and fear doubled Delroy over. He cried, dipping his head in close to his chest. Rain pelted the back of his slicker and ran down the back of his ears. He gave himself over to the emotion, letting it wrench him and tear him apart. The hours of flying, the miles of walking, and the days of worry and agony came together and taxed him to the point of exhaustion. He rested his head on his forearms, almost passing out.

“I’ve seen news reports since I’ve been back stateside, Daddy,” Delroy whispered. “People everywhere have disappeared. Unborn children were taken from their mothers’ wombs. Funeral homes and morgues have had the dead disappear on them, too.”

During the last few days, Delroy had concentrated his attention on stories concerning the missing dead. That was when the idea for his present course of action had called out to him.

“There’s no explanation for those missing bodies, Daddy. I have guessed that they were all God’s people called up to heaven, too.”