Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

can all gather and have a nice breakfast—a hot one for a change—and then make plans for our lives together.”

“I dunno’ about anyone else, but I’m taking my car out for a spin. Maybe there’s someone alive over the mountains. If there…”

“You will do no such thing, Francis. That is foolish. There will be time for that later, after we establish ourselves safely here. We’ll need to find a larger home. We’ll need to provide it with power, such as our resourceful Jerrick has done here. We have much to do before we run off—run out of gas a hundred miles away. You will wait until later for your adventures.”

“Bax, you ain’t my boss. I told ya’ that a hundred times already. My name ain’t Francis, either. It’s MUNSTER, now, and I’ll go any-damn-where I please, whenever I want!”

Mr. Baxter smiled and patted Munster’s head. I thought he would slap him, but he didn’t!

“Let’s go…Munster, my boy. Tomorrow comes early. We’ll take your car after the sun rises, and run to the store to get some fresh…oatmeal.

“Goodnight, children. Sleep well. I’m so happy we found you.”

I was surprised that Munster got right up! He did, and then he and Mr. Baxter began to leave the room. Another thought hit me as they went into the kitchen, and I called after them.

“Mr. Baxter!”

He stopped and turned. “Yes dear?”

“Why didn’t the lady tell you where we were? She knew we were here. She must have.”

Mr. Baxter smiled. For a minute I saw my daddy standing there smiling at me.

“Who knows, Amelia? Maybe she wanted us to have to search you out, so that when we did find you our joy would be the greater. But who can say how they think? We found you, that is the important thing, and that gives Munster and myself great joy. Isn’t that right, Francis?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said.

“Well then, Goodnight again.”

And then Munster and Mr. Baxter left.

 

CHAPTER-THE LAST

I woke this morning—the anniversary today of the event. Ten years to the day now, as closely as any of us can determine at least, since the creatures came and inadvertently stepped on us. That, in a nutshell, is what happened—we were stepped on.

As we did last year, and the year before, and the year before that, we dressed according to the weather, and then walked to the small park near the rectory to visit the graves.

Munster carried Jacob, six months old yesterday, under a sky depressingly tin-colored, threatening rain, arm around his dear Lashawna. Francis Jr. tagged behind, trying to skip rocks across the street pavement, cracked and buckling in spots, there sprouting ever-widening growths of grass and weeds. This slow deterioration of the world his parents and I once knew has not registered in his young mind yet. I suspect it will be Lashawna who reveals that old world to him as he grows. She has settled my wild old friend into our new life as easily and surely as though at her birth the focal point was set by God Himself. Her ultimate mission on this earth; to meet Francis and make him into a fine young Adam in the Garden. Is that what all women have always been for? To tame and redeem men? Mold them into what they were meant to be? She is glorious, my precious Lashawna.

I walked beside Jerrick, and the four of us talked. Small things of no great consequence, mostly. Of how and why we survived when nearly everyone else perished. The immunity granted by God or fate or blind luck, certainly not by the visitors. How many times have we wondered? Was it the doing of some extremely rare gene each of us possessed, maybe?

But why we survived is really of no great consequence to me any longer. We simply did. Our world died, but we escaped the ravaging.

I of course am most interested in the health and arrival in three months of our first child, whom I decided months ago to name Jerrick Jr. Lashawna will christen him, unless the him decides to enter this world as a her. And Lashawna will do the christening beneath the statue of Saint Therese, in our church, near our new home.

 

Those we loved lay in the center of the park, not far from the playground (which slides and swings and merry-go-round Munster has faithfully maintained for our children’s enjoyment). Not far, either, from the spot where Lashawna fell. Mother and Father are there, as are Munster’s and Lashawna’s and Jerrick’s parents. After the visitors left, we painfully decided to move their remains to a place dedicated to their memories. A place where their spirits can watch with delight as their grandchildren play. We did not place ghoulish headstones above the graves, rather planted a single Chinese Maple—a lovely tree, we all thought—surrounded by flowers that we all tend, season in and season out.

The four, no, the five of us moved within a week after Lashawna, Jerrick and I met Charles, into a home on Dahlia Street, two blocks south of the church and the rectory. A substantial old home sitting on a corner lot, with five bedrooms, a formal dining room, a TV that merely stares at us dumbly in the corner of the beamed-ceiling living room. Furniture that the deceased owners took great pride in, and which we do as well. A kitchen nearly as large as Father Kenney’s entire house! It is an elegant place, with large windows, and many of them. A fenced backyard, too, more than adequate in size for the children. We are all so very happy there. Between us, we gathered a ton of useful tools and objects of art from the abandoned stores and galleries across town. The lawnmower, for instance. Thinking back, I have to laugh—Munster would not settle for a simple gas-powered push mower. He HAD to have a sit down Mercedes model! Well, they were all free, so I suppose his fancy mower with its padded seat, steering wheel, and futuristic instrument console was okay. He loves those crazy kinds of vehicles—like his old Flame Car that finally died of mechanical hardening of the arteries a few years ago.

Mr. Baxter, Mr. Charles Devonshire Baxter, died 4-1/2 years ago. How we all cried, especially Munster. Well, no more than me. Along with the elderly couple who resided previous to us in our present home, we buried our wonderful Mr. Baxter in the backyard at the rectory. A solemn place; a place of respect and holiness. Fitting, we thought. Without a doubt it was he who saved us in the long term. Although Jerrick had read widely in Braille, although Lashawna mirrored her brother’s love of books and read much herself, it was Charles who brought that definite discipline regarding the acquisition of knowledge into our previously shattered lives. Our lives without the many companies manufacturing food, as unwholesome as it was, power—all those things we once took for granted—was rigorous enough, yet Charles entered our lives and insisted we read, and by reading, think. By thinking, survive and make our lives something meaningful.

As it turned out, Mr. Baxter was no more, nor less, than just another victim. Or survivor—as we were all victims in our survival. How often he corrected us in those early days, reminding us that we could be victims if we chose, and live our lives, however long or short they might be, as either. “Make the conscious choice,” he would say, and so for me, I learned, difficult as it was in those silent hours when thoughts of Momma and Daddy, my old schoolmates, of everyone I’d known and loved crept into my head to haunt me.

When we’d settled into our new home, lessons began. Each morning we gathered in the library—a smallish room, but filled with books gathered from the local schools. He read to us, and we to him, and questions inevitably arose. He answered them as best he could, sometimes as questions thrown back at us. Following our classroom routine, we would work the fields for several hours, tending a wide variety of vegetables. Seed was plentiful, stored by merchants in warehouses. Stack upon stack in sturdy burlap bags. Unspoiled like other perishables, waiting to be taken along with rich topsoil back to our square-block field behind the shopping center. By Fall of that first year we enjoyed a meager but wonderfully delicious harvest.

Munster left, as he’d threatened, or promised, in the Spring of 2016. This after many discussions with Jerrick and Charles, neither of whom agreed with him that is was safe or wise. But Munster won out. The backseat and trunk of his Flame Car were a virtual bomb, filled with can upon can of gasoline, and the condition of the gas was a major question, as it deteriorates after time, like everything else.

He was gone for over a month, traveling up the coast, through Los Angeles, the San Joaquim Valley, and then to San Francisco. He found no one alive anywhere, and so he returned, telling us in words punctuated with cussing about what he’d seen, that maybe we should pack up our things and move to the valley where the soil is rich and there still grow many trees that bear nuts, and even fruit to enrich our diet. But our lives are here, we said, and we would make our soil as rich, if not richer, and plant an orchard ourselves. And so we did.

We grew and prospered, unafraid and thankful for our lives together, and we fell in love in time, secure in our tiny universe. How often Lashawna and I have wondered in that regard about Charles, set apart from us by age and responsibility, alone in a way, and strangely sad at times for reasons he never verbalized. I’m convinced his celibacy contributed to his physical failing in the end. Of that I’m certain. How we all miss him, our father and friend.

                                                    *

I stand with Munster at my side, and Jerrick, Lashawna, and little Charles Jr. We’ve gathered in the bedroom before the gleaming black box, a pound or two of dust on its top. Munster forced the door a moment ago. I think it delighted him to finally be able to put his strong shoulder into it and break it in.

Charles possessed the only key with which to unlock the gift the Crinians had left. Seven notes to be sung in a particular cadence, ten years after the gift was placed in this room. How clever and secure! When he discovered that he was dying one rainy winter’s evening, Charles called me to his room and sat me down in a plain wooden chair beside his at his desk. He closed and locked the door, and then informed me, first of his imminent death, and then after gently drying my tears, he sang the notes to me.

“Memorize them, Amelia. I’ve chosen you to open the gift. Oh don’t be so sad, my precious girl, I’ll be near and watching.”

“Why me?” I remember asking. The box sat in Munster’s room. Jerrick was the wisest and oldest. Lashawna? Why not her?

“Because of all my children, I’ve loved you the most. Don’t ask me why—I am a psychologist, I should