With a rod of iron a par.., p.16
With a Rod of Iron: A Parable, page 16
But there was the matter of the creek. He was on the wrong side and he couldn’t hop across again...
He stopped, thinking about what the creek was like in that direction. He could keep walking...and it would take him to the road. And the road went across the creek, there was a bridge...but he wasn’t allowed on the bridge—or the road. He might get run over.
So he couldn’t go that way. And the creek—it really got no narrower than where he’d tried to jump; in fact, it got wider at the road...
But the pond—he could walk around the pond...
“So, Morvan, how’s it going?” The voice hit his ear, sending his heart into wild flutters and making his whole body jump. He spun quickly, saw his grandfather, and wanted to run and hide, but his feet didn’t seem to work any longer.
“Uh, hi Grandpa,” he said, looking down and kicking at the grass. “Doing good.”
“You look like the creek got the better of you.”
So much for his story; he was in the field, he was wet, and he couldn’t hide. He let his head droop further.
“Your mother didn’t want you coming out here, did she? Especially not in your nice clothes.”
Morvan nodded.
“So what do you suppose we can do about it?”
He shrugged. Grandpa was going to take him by the ear and drag him off to his mother. “Look what I found,” he’d say, and then his mother would spank him.
“Well, there’re some dry clothes up at the house,” he said slowly, eyeballing him. “I think they’ll fit. Belonged to your dad when he was your age. We can put you in those and then send these clothes through the washer and dryer. You’re not leaving till late tonight, anyhow.”
Morvan gaped at his grandpa.
“Hardly fair, was it, bringing you out here, and then making you sit around listening to a bunch of grownups—what on a nice summer day like this, with the creek just calling out to you and all.”
Morvan felt a surge of hope well up inside him.
“But that doesn’t excuse what you did,” his grandfather continued. “You know what your mom said, and you know she was right. Just look at the mess you made of yourself! Now, if you had asked first, maybe we could have gotten you those old clothes of your dad’s and put you in them to begin with, and maybe I’d have taken you out here. As it is...” he shook his head.
Morvan let his shoulders droop again.
“Well, I’ll help you out of your troubles this time. I think you’ve learned your lesson.” He squinted at the boy. “From now on you’re going to do what your mom says, aren’t you?”
Morvan nodded.
“Course you are. You feel real sorry for what you did.” He paused. “That’s enough.” He clapped Morvan on the shoulder, then picked him up and set him on his back. With quick strides, the old man took him sailing across the creek as if it wasn’t even there. A few more swift steps, and they were at the back porch. “Now you take those wet clothes off, and I’ll be back with something dry in just a minute.”
His mother never found out he’d gone down to the creek. He showed up at dinner in the old clothes, and she asked him if he’d had fun that afternoon, but that was all. She never yelled at him or even asked him if he’d been down to the creek.
When they left at ten, he was back in his good clothes, clean and dry and none the worse for wear. Even his shoes weren’t squishing any longer. Grandpa had somehow dried and polished them, so they were as good as new.
* * *
Morvan blinked, staring at his grandfather—looking even younger than he had in Morvan’s memory.
“You remember that?”
Morvan nodded.
“Do you understand?”
He shook his head.
“Jesus didn’t just hide what you did from your heavenly Father—as if your heavenly Father didn’t know. But he took the rap for you. He volunteered—even though you didn’t know him at the time—to get in trouble for you.”
“He didn’t have to do that...”
“Of course he didn’t. But he loved you.”
“Why?”
“A mystery if ever there was one.” Morvan’s grandfather sat back, an odd look on his face. “It’s amazing to me, but that’s the truth. You see that, don’t you?”
And in point of fact, he did.
He saw the man who had ridden out of the clouds into Jerusalem; he saw the pierced hands and the smiling face and nothing had ever been so clear before in his whole life. His parents had not made him go to Sunday School past third grade. “Why should we make him go when we don’t go ourselves?” He hadn’t understood the word “hypocrisy” at the time, but he respected his parents now for recognizing it in themselves and doing something about it.
Although it had deprived him of ever learning about Jesus till now.
“We didn’t teach your father right,” said Morvan’s grandfather. “But now we have a second chance.”
Morvan smiled gladly and nodded—and with the nodding, he realized his life would never be the same again. Somehow, during the conversation, and almost without realizing it, he had let the Son of God have his life.
“I already knew Jesus loved me!” Christa’s voice rose happily, cutting into his thoughts. “With what Lori tried to pull, I almost forgot...” She paused, looking into his face. “Do you understand?”
“Grandpa just got done explaining it to me,” he pointed out.
“You know Jesus already?” asked Grandpa.
Christa nodded. “Just met him today.”
“You met him?” Morvan was amazed.
“He visited our school.”
“You’re kidding!”
She shook her head. “Not at all. It’s the weirdest thing, you know. But he can be in more than one place at a time.”
“What?”
“He was telling me about it. He said he came by especially to see me. You know, I hardly believed what I saw on television Saturday night. It seemed so...so incredible, you know? Like it was some kind of joke or something; I thought we’d get home tonight and they’d be talking about the scam—I figured it was some new Pepsi commercial. You remember what they did last year?”
Morvan nodded. Giving away a thousand dollars to the first million people who sent in a proof of purchase. Hardly anyone believed them; took almost six months before they gave away the last of the money. Pepsi was always coming up with weird commercial gimmicks. Came from being number two, he supposed.
“So anyhow,” she said, “Jesus came to talk to me. Said he’d talked to my parents already, and he said that they understood. He told me how much he loved me and how he wanted to take care of me. I started to say I didn’t need any man to take care of me...”
“That’s certainly true,” agreed Morvan. That’s what had attracted him to her in the first place. He’d loved her strength, her independence, her careerism...
“And he agreed with me,” she added.
“Of course,” said Morvan. “Jesus is a smart person.”
“But that’s when I realized he wasn’t just a man,” she continued.
Morvan nodded. “He’s God.”
“Exactly. And I sure need God to take care of me.” She paused. “Odd, how I’d never realized before.”
“Same here.”
“So he asked me if he could have my life and I told him ‘sure’.” She shrugged. “I’m not alone in here anymore.” She pointed at her head. “I can talk with God...”
Morvan nodded. “He did the same thing for me just now, too.”
“Jesus came and talked to you?”
“No. Grandma and Grandpa, what they said...”
“You didn’t need to talk to Jesus in the flesh, apparently,” commented Grandpa.
“Not to say that you were a tough case or something,” said Grandma quickly, smiling at Christa. “God works with different people in different ways, since each one is unique.”
Christa nodded. “At the same time he was talking to me, I found out he’d been talking to other people I work with. Funny thing, he came during lunch hour, and he left just before it was time to go back to work. It was like he didn’t want to take us away from our jobs.”
“Did you have time for lunch?” asked Morvan.
Christa looked at him funny. “I talked to Jesus and all you can think about is food?”
“Well, it is getting on toward supper time.”
* * *
“What’s it like to die?”
Christa asked the question just after Grandma had brought in the dessert, a chocolate cake.
She scratched her head, looked at her husband, then he scratched his head.
“It’s not like anything,” she said at last. “Death is all by itself.”
“Well I don’t mean that,” said Christa, quickly. “I know it’s got to be unique, but...”
“No,” said Grandpa, “She means that it’s all by itself. That’s what it’s like.”
“Huh?” Morvan looked up from his plate, where Grandma had just set a large slice of cake. The conversation had finally intruded itself upon his consciousness. It was hard to pay attention to conversations when there was so much else going on in his head. Jesus had come back, his dead grandparents had showed up, he had become a Christian and his wife talked to Jesus face to face. So something as mundane as death was hardly attention grabbing.
But now he was interested. Not for practical reasons—Jesus had already said on television that no one was going to die anymore. Old people were growing younger, just like young people used to grow older.
Some old fellow on television had been complaining about how he’d had to go to the druggist and get some teething medicine since his teeth were starting to grow back.
“It’s really a hassle,” he told the reporter, almost complaining. “Not only does it hurt, but now my dentures don’t fit right. It’s fine to be getting my teeth back, but in the meantime I got to be uncomfortable and I can’t eat much solid food.”
Grandpa was telling about dying when Morvan’s mind rejoined the conversation.
* * *
Alexander Lambert was ninety-three. In the course of his single lifetime, he had seen changes that seemed impossible, looking back on them. Born at the turn of the century, automobiles were rare to the point that he had never seen one himself. Living on a farm near a small town in Ohio, not only did they still use horses for plowing, they used wagons to haul the food into market, and folks, if they needed to get anywhere, either walked or rode horses.
At night, they went to bed an hour or two past sundown, and if they had to stay up, they lit candles and oil lamps. A fire in the fireplace kept them warm. Once a month a man came along with a load of coal and dumped it in the basement of some of the fancier homes in town. But that was only for the rich folk. Everyone else just burned wood.
In winter, ash coated everything with black soot; but you didn’t always notice the soot because the snow covered it up periodically.
The streets were dirt, if they happened to be dry. More often than not, they were mud.
That had been his world as a child, but the world had not stayed still. For his parents, only they had grown and changed: the world around them had remained static. The ceaseless rhythm of the seasons, of day following night, had loaned a sense of stability and continuity to existence. So true had seemed the words of the Preacher: “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, or the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
But in his life, he had begun to question the veracity of the ancient words.
Over the years, he’d seen the coming of the automobile, the airplane, and warfare on a scale that scared him silly; at eighteen, he’d been drafted by the army, shipped east by train, and boarded a ship that took him across the Atlantic in a couple weeks. That’s when he saw his first airplanes—saw them far more intensely than he would ever have wanted to. History said the planes in the First World War were mostly for observation and shooting at one another. He experienced one German pilot who must have been an innovator, then. Shot his machine gun at Alexander’s heels, chasing him like a hawk after a rabbit.
Alexander remembered shooting back at the plane; especially after the bastard killed his buddy with a bullet through his brain.
Electricity came to the old family farm about a year after he returned from the war. He still remembered the sense of wonder from flipping a switch and having the room suddenly turn bright. Then they’d added plumbing, with a bathroom inside and toilets... the list went on. Radio and then a few years later, television; the airplane by itself had been a wonder, then they got to going faster and faster.
Men on the moon.
Computers.
At the end of his days at last, he found himself lying in a hospital with clean white sheets, clean white walls, clean metal poking into his veins. He could hear the faint, beep-beep-beep of his heart monitor, telling a nurse or doctor someplace else in the building that yes, he was still alive.
Chemicals, genetically engineered, coursed through his veins, dripping from a bottle they kept above his head. Instruments monitored every vital function of his body, so that nothing was a secret to the damn prodders.
Many of his generation might resent the intrusion, speak grumpily of “newfangled whatsits;” he didn’t feel that resentment himself. He was in wonder of it all; as an old man, he had taken to using a computer, relishing the feeling of power it gave him, of amazement that a machine could exist that was capable of such marvelous things—and regretting that it hadn’t arrived until he was nearly too old. He’d gotten pretty good at Mario Brothers...
But not now, not today.
He was going to die, and all the wonders, all the gadgets, all the marvels could not prevent that inevitability. The Preacher spoke of that, too: “A time to be born, and a time to die.”
This was his time for the latter. It came to all people; if they experienced the former, the latter was inevitable.
The realization that death was coming upon him hit him suddenly, though it came as no particular surprise. He was, after all, old for a human being, and his health was no longer good. That’s why he was in the hospital. His wife was dead, all his friends were dead.
It was time for him to be dead, too.
The beep-beep-beep started to slow. He heard the change; soon, he could feel it.
Then the odd sensation in his chest faded too, and the whiteness of the room began to glimmer, fading in and out; like being pulled through a grating, sifted; he felt himself slide. A pressure tugged at him, as if someone were sucking him through a straw. The white of the room was suddenly replaced by unimaginable brightness. Then a face hung before him.
“Jesus?”
The face smiled.
“Of course,” he murmured to himself, looking around. He was standing now, feeling better than he had in years—perhaps better than he had ever felt in his life. Standing next to Jesus was his wife, Elaine.
“You got here before me,” he said, almost peeved.
“I was going to say the same to you,” she replied. She was young again, wearing white—same as his own clothes, except that she filled them better.
Odd, he hadn’t expected to feel horny in heaven.
“What?”
“I was looking up at you, you were holding my hand...and now Jesus leads me over here and here you are, like you’ve been here for a month. What happened? Did I go into a coma for awhile and then you went and died before me?”
“You’ve been dead for twenty years.”
Elaine blinked, surprised. Jesus grinned. “There’s no holding cell for dead people,” he said. “When you die, we bring you right here.”
“Where’s here?”
“The end; the Rapture; the finish line, the end of history. Everyone’s here and the Millennium is starting. Come, it’s time to eat the Marriage Supper of the Lamb—then we have an appointment in Jerusalem.”
“That’s right,” said Elaine. “The Tribulation...”
Jesus smiled.
She stopped, got a puzzled look, then shook her head. “No, that’s not quite right, is it?”
Jesus smiled again.
“I don’t understand how we both got here at the same time,” growled Alexander. He was finding it hard to comprehend that he had died. He thought he’d remember more of it; one moment he’d been in bed, old—now he was here, wherever here might be. Looked like a park, maybe. He glanced skyward.
It was bright blue and cloudless. He couldn’t see the sun, and there didn’t really seem to be any shadows. Trees dotted the green pastures that spread in all directions as far as his eyes could see. Nearby, a wall, perhaps of a building, perhaps of something else, blocked his view. Jesus began leading them toward it, along a path of flagstones.
“The Marriage Supper of the Lamb is in there?” he asked.
Jesus nodded.
“How many people?”
“Millions and millions,” the Savior replied. “Do you want the exact number?”
Alexander shook his head. “No. What does it matter to me? How long will we be here? Seven years?”
Jesus laughed. “It’s just one meal, Alexander. There aren’t any lines, either. Then we go to Jerusalem, where I’ll reign a thousand years. The Rapture was last night; we’ll be in Jerusalem by noon. You have to understand the nature of time—“
“Time? Like in physics?”
“The physicists had it right,” said Jesus. “Time is like space—it’s united with it, if you want to picture it that way.” Alexander could tell that Jesus was crafting his words to match Alexander’s level of education, so that he’d understand. Learning was something he could spend eternity working on. There was so much to find out, so much he didn’t understand. And, even though Jesus hadn’t said it, if he was going to know, if he was going to understand, he’d have to work it out himself. Heaven was not an everlasting party, an eternity of lying on couches eating bonbons or even—as some odd people had told him—standing on clouds plucking harps and singing praises to God.
He stopped, thinking about what the creek was like in that direction. He could keep walking...and it would take him to the road. And the road went across the creek, there was a bridge...but he wasn’t allowed on the bridge—or the road. He might get run over.
So he couldn’t go that way. And the creek—it really got no narrower than where he’d tried to jump; in fact, it got wider at the road...
But the pond—he could walk around the pond...
“So, Morvan, how’s it going?” The voice hit his ear, sending his heart into wild flutters and making his whole body jump. He spun quickly, saw his grandfather, and wanted to run and hide, but his feet didn’t seem to work any longer.
“Uh, hi Grandpa,” he said, looking down and kicking at the grass. “Doing good.”
“You look like the creek got the better of you.”
So much for his story; he was in the field, he was wet, and he couldn’t hide. He let his head droop further.
“Your mother didn’t want you coming out here, did she? Especially not in your nice clothes.”
Morvan nodded.
“So what do you suppose we can do about it?”
He shrugged. Grandpa was going to take him by the ear and drag him off to his mother. “Look what I found,” he’d say, and then his mother would spank him.
“Well, there’re some dry clothes up at the house,” he said slowly, eyeballing him. “I think they’ll fit. Belonged to your dad when he was your age. We can put you in those and then send these clothes through the washer and dryer. You’re not leaving till late tonight, anyhow.”
Morvan gaped at his grandpa.
“Hardly fair, was it, bringing you out here, and then making you sit around listening to a bunch of grownups—what on a nice summer day like this, with the creek just calling out to you and all.”
Morvan felt a surge of hope well up inside him.
“But that doesn’t excuse what you did,” his grandfather continued. “You know what your mom said, and you know she was right. Just look at the mess you made of yourself! Now, if you had asked first, maybe we could have gotten you those old clothes of your dad’s and put you in them to begin with, and maybe I’d have taken you out here. As it is...” he shook his head.
Morvan let his shoulders droop again.
“Well, I’ll help you out of your troubles this time. I think you’ve learned your lesson.” He squinted at the boy. “From now on you’re going to do what your mom says, aren’t you?”
Morvan nodded.
“Course you are. You feel real sorry for what you did.” He paused. “That’s enough.” He clapped Morvan on the shoulder, then picked him up and set him on his back. With quick strides, the old man took him sailing across the creek as if it wasn’t even there. A few more swift steps, and they were at the back porch. “Now you take those wet clothes off, and I’ll be back with something dry in just a minute.”
His mother never found out he’d gone down to the creek. He showed up at dinner in the old clothes, and she asked him if he’d had fun that afternoon, but that was all. She never yelled at him or even asked him if he’d been down to the creek.
When they left at ten, he was back in his good clothes, clean and dry and none the worse for wear. Even his shoes weren’t squishing any longer. Grandpa had somehow dried and polished them, so they were as good as new.
* * *
Morvan blinked, staring at his grandfather—looking even younger than he had in Morvan’s memory.
“You remember that?”
Morvan nodded.
“Do you understand?”
He shook his head.
“Jesus didn’t just hide what you did from your heavenly Father—as if your heavenly Father didn’t know. But he took the rap for you. He volunteered—even though you didn’t know him at the time—to get in trouble for you.”
“He didn’t have to do that...”
“Of course he didn’t. But he loved you.”
“Why?”
“A mystery if ever there was one.” Morvan’s grandfather sat back, an odd look on his face. “It’s amazing to me, but that’s the truth. You see that, don’t you?”
And in point of fact, he did.
He saw the man who had ridden out of the clouds into Jerusalem; he saw the pierced hands and the smiling face and nothing had ever been so clear before in his whole life. His parents had not made him go to Sunday School past third grade. “Why should we make him go when we don’t go ourselves?” He hadn’t understood the word “hypocrisy” at the time, but he respected his parents now for recognizing it in themselves and doing something about it.
Although it had deprived him of ever learning about Jesus till now.
“We didn’t teach your father right,” said Morvan’s grandfather. “But now we have a second chance.”
Morvan smiled gladly and nodded—and with the nodding, he realized his life would never be the same again. Somehow, during the conversation, and almost without realizing it, he had let the Son of God have his life.
“I already knew Jesus loved me!” Christa’s voice rose happily, cutting into his thoughts. “With what Lori tried to pull, I almost forgot...” She paused, looking into his face. “Do you understand?”
“Grandpa just got done explaining it to me,” he pointed out.
“You know Jesus already?” asked Grandpa.
Christa nodded. “Just met him today.”
“You met him?” Morvan was amazed.
“He visited our school.”
“You’re kidding!”
She shook her head. “Not at all. It’s the weirdest thing, you know. But he can be in more than one place at a time.”
“What?”
“He was telling me about it. He said he came by especially to see me. You know, I hardly believed what I saw on television Saturday night. It seemed so...so incredible, you know? Like it was some kind of joke or something; I thought we’d get home tonight and they’d be talking about the scam—I figured it was some new Pepsi commercial. You remember what they did last year?”
Morvan nodded. Giving away a thousand dollars to the first million people who sent in a proof of purchase. Hardly anyone believed them; took almost six months before they gave away the last of the money. Pepsi was always coming up with weird commercial gimmicks. Came from being number two, he supposed.
“So anyhow,” she said, “Jesus came to talk to me. Said he’d talked to my parents already, and he said that they understood. He told me how much he loved me and how he wanted to take care of me. I started to say I didn’t need any man to take care of me...”
“That’s certainly true,” agreed Morvan. That’s what had attracted him to her in the first place. He’d loved her strength, her independence, her careerism...
“And he agreed with me,” she added.
“Of course,” said Morvan. “Jesus is a smart person.”
“But that’s when I realized he wasn’t just a man,” she continued.
Morvan nodded. “He’s God.”
“Exactly. And I sure need God to take care of me.” She paused. “Odd, how I’d never realized before.”
“Same here.”
“So he asked me if he could have my life and I told him ‘sure’.” She shrugged. “I’m not alone in here anymore.” She pointed at her head. “I can talk with God...”
Morvan nodded. “He did the same thing for me just now, too.”
“Jesus came and talked to you?”
“No. Grandma and Grandpa, what they said...”
“You didn’t need to talk to Jesus in the flesh, apparently,” commented Grandpa.
“Not to say that you were a tough case or something,” said Grandma quickly, smiling at Christa. “God works with different people in different ways, since each one is unique.”
Christa nodded. “At the same time he was talking to me, I found out he’d been talking to other people I work with. Funny thing, he came during lunch hour, and he left just before it was time to go back to work. It was like he didn’t want to take us away from our jobs.”
“Did you have time for lunch?” asked Morvan.
Christa looked at him funny. “I talked to Jesus and all you can think about is food?”
“Well, it is getting on toward supper time.”
* * *
“What’s it like to die?”
Christa asked the question just after Grandma had brought in the dessert, a chocolate cake.
She scratched her head, looked at her husband, then he scratched his head.
“It’s not like anything,” she said at last. “Death is all by itself.”
“Well I don’t mean that,” said Christa, quickly. “I know it’s got to be unique, but...”
“No,” said Grandpa, “She means that it’s all by itself. That’s what it’s like.”
“Huh?” Morvan looked up from his plate, where Grandma had just set a large slice of cake. The conversation had finally intruded itself upon his consciousness. It was hard to pay attention to conversations when there was so much else going on in his head. Jesus had come back, his dead grandparents had showed up, he had become a Christian and his wife talked to Jesus face to face. So something as mundane as death was hardly attention grabbing.
But now he was interested. Not for practical reasons—Jesus had already said on television that no one was going to die anymore. Old people were growing younger, just like young people used to grow older.
Some old fellow on television had been complaining about how he’d had to go to the druggist and get some teething medicine since his teeth were starting to grow back.
“It’s really a hassle,” he told the reporter, almost complaining. “Not only does it hurt, but now my dentures don’t fit right. It’s fine to be getting my teeth back, but in the meantime I got to be uncomfortable and I can’t eat much solid food.”
Grandpa was telling about dying when Morvan’s mind rejoined the conversation.
* * *
Alexander Lambert was ninety-three. In the course of his single lifetime, he had seen changes that seemed impossible, looking back on them. Born at the turn of the century, automobiles were rare to the point that he had never seen one himself. Living on a farm near a small town in Ohio, not only did they still use horses for plowing, they used wagons to haul the food into market, and folks, if they needed to get anywhere, either walked or rode horses.
At night, they went to bed an hour or two past sundown, and if they had to stay up, they lit candles and oil lamps. A fire in the fireplace kept them warm. Once a month a man came along with a load of coal and dumped it in the basement of some of the fancier homes in town. But that was only for the rich folk. Everyone else just burned wood.
In winter, ash coated everything with black soot; but you didn’t always notice the soot because the snow covered it up periodically.
The streets were dirt, if they happened to be dry. More often than not, they were mud.
That had been his world as a child, but the world had not stayed still. For his parents, only they had grown and changed: the world around them had remained static. The ceaseless rhythm of the seasons, of day following night, had loaned a sense of stability and continuity to existence. So true had seemed the words of the Preacher: “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises. The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, or the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”
But in his life, he had begun to question the veracity of the ancient words.
Over the years, he’d seen the coming of the automobile, the airplane, and warfare on a scale that scared him silly; at eighteen, he’d been drafted by the army, shipped east by train, and boarded a ship that took him across the Atlantic in a couple weeks. That’s when he saw his first airplanes—saw them far more intensely than he would ever have wanted to. History said the planes in the First World War were mostly for observation and shooting at one another. He experienced one German pilot who must have been an innovator, then. Shot his machine gun at Alexander’s heels, chasing him like a hawk after a rabbit.
Alexander remembered shooting back at the plane; especially after the bastard killed his buddy with a bullet through his brain.
Electricity came to the old family farm about a year after he returned from the war. He still remembered the sense of wonder from flipping a switch and having the room suddenly turn bright. Then they’d added plumbing, with a bathroom inside and toilets... the list went on. Radio and then a few years later, television; the airplane by itself had been a wonder, then they got to going faster and faster.
Men on the moon.
Computers.
At the end of his days at last, he found himself lying in a hospital with clean white sheets, clean white walls, clean metal poking into his veins. He could hear the faint, beep-beep-beep of his heart monitor, telling a nurse or doctor someplace else in the building that yes, he was still alive.
Chemicals, genetically engineered, coursed through his veins, dripping from a bottle they kept above his head. Instruments monitored every vital function of his body, so that nothing was a secret to the damn prodders.
Many of his generation might resent the intrusion, speak grumpily of “newfangled whatsits;” he didn’t feel that resentment himself. He was in wonder of it all; as an old man, he had taken to using a computer, relishing the feeling of power it gave him, of amazement that a machine could exist that was capable of such marvelous things—and regretting that it hadn’t arrived until he was nearly too old. He’d gotten pretty good at Mario Brothers...
But not now, not today.
He was going to die, and all the wonders, all the gadgets, all the marvels could not prevent that inevitability. The Preacher spoke of that, too: “A time to be born, and a time to die.”
This was his time for the latter. It came to all people; if they experienced the former, the latter was inevitable.
The realization that death was coming upon him hit him suddenly, though it came as no particular surprise. He was, after all, old for a human being, and his health was no longer good. That’s why he was in the hospital. His wife was dead, all his friends were dead.
It was time for him to be dead, too.
The beep-beep-beep started to slow. He heard the change; soon, he could feel it.
Then the odd sensation in his chest faded too, and the whiteness of the room began to glimmer, fading in and out; like being pulled through a grating, sifted; he felt himself slide. A pressure tugged at him, as if someone were sucking him through a straw. The white of the room was suddenly replaced by unimaginable brightness. Then a face hung before him.
“Jesus?”
The face smiled.
“Of course,” he murmured to himself, looking around. He was standing now, feeling better than he had in years—perhaps better than he had ever felt in his life. Standing next to Jesus was his wife, Elaine.
“You got here before me,” he said, almost peeved.
“I was going to say the same to you,” she replied. She was young again, wearing white—same as his own clothes, except that she filled them better.
Odd, he hadn’t expected to feel horny in heaven.
“What?”
“I was looking up at you, you were holding my hand...and now Jesus leads me over here and here you are, like you’ve been here for a month. What happened? Did I go into a coma for awhile and then you went and died before me?”
“You’ve been dead for twenty years.”
Elaine blinked, surprised. Jesus grinned. “There’s no holding cell for dead people,” he said. “When you die, we bring you right here.”
“Where’s here?”
“The end; the Rapture; the finish line, the end of history. Everyone’s here and the Millennium is starting. Come, it’s time to eat the Marriage Supper of the Lamb—then we have an appointment in Jerusalem.”
“That’s right,” said Elaine. “The Tribulation...”
Jesus smiled.
She stopped, got a puzzled look, then shook her head. “No, that’s not quite right, is it?”
Jesus smiled again.
“I don’t understand how we both got here at the same time,” growled Alexander. He was finding it hard to comprehend that he had died. He thought he’d remember more of it; one moment he’d been in bed, old—now he was here, wherever here might be. Looked like a park, maybe. He glanced skyward.
It was bright blue and cloudless. He couldn’t see the sun, and there didn’t really seem to be any shadows. Trees dotted the green pastures that spread in all directions as far as his eyes could see. Nearby, a wall, perhaps of a building, perhaps of something else, blocked his view. Jesus began leading them toward it, along a path of flagstones.
“The Marriage Supper of the Lamb is in there?” he asked.
Jesus nodded.
“How many people?”
“Millions and millions,” the Savior replied. “Do you want the exact number?”
Alexander shook his head. “No. What does it matter to me? How long will we be here? Seven years?”
Jesus laughed. “It’s just one meal, Alexander. There aren’t any lines, either. Then we go to Jerusalem, where I’ll reign a thousand years. The Rapture was last night; we’ll be in Jerusalem by noon. You have to understand the nature of time—“
“Time? Like in physics?”
“The physicists had it right,” said Jesus. “Time is like space—it’s united with it, if you want to picture it that way.” Alexander could tell that Jesus was crafting his words to match Alexander’s level of education, so that he’d understand. Learning was something he could spend eternity working on. There was so much to find out, so much he didn’t understand. And, even though Jesus hadn’t said it, if he was going to know, if he was going to understand, he’d have to work it out himself. Heaven was not an everlasting party, an eternity of lying on couches eating bonbons or even—as some odd people had told him—standing on clouds plucking harps and singing praises to God.
