AfterShok

I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Angels, and ministers of grace, defend us!

Not mad, but bound more than a madman is…

The Saga of Neils and Susan

And all my mother came into mine eyes. And gave me up to tears.

Come Live With Me And Be My Love (So I Can Kill You)

 

The Summer passed happily enough. Happily enough for a Summer that had a pall cast over it by the killing of a boy thought of, universally, as a saint-in-the-making. The Joergensens had been devastated, of course, but the entire family had a bit of what had made Asgeir so special and they put on a brave face that was not a front. Their faith was a thing to behold. A month after Asgeir’s remains were burned on a barge, Viking style, the Joergensens held a large party in the main square of First Village, celebrating their son’s short, but very bright life, to which the entire archipelago’s population was invited.

Asgeir’s mother loved to think on the times she and her son had gone out playing in Winter. He loved to play in the snow making snow-forts and having snowball fights. Sometimes, he would make a snow angel and a few minutes later it would be gone. His mother, who always accompanied him on his wintry excursions, would ask him what happened to the snow angels that had disappeared. He told her that sometimes they were needed somewhere else, so they became real angels to help someone.

Around the time of the party, Caleb was having terrible dreams. He was also having visions. Not during the bad dreams, mind you, but full-blown visions during the day. The dreams and the visions were driving him a little crazy.

In his visions and sometimes his dreams, he saw a girl, but never her face, and he saw a man with his hands around Asgeir’s throat. Asgeir looked at peace, crazy as that sounds. It was a look that conveyed that Asgeir knew he was going to die and, also, that he was happy in that knowledge. Caleb was not happy in that knowledge. Asgeir was dead and there was nothing that Cal could do about that fact, but he could catch the killer.

For months the visions came. For months the bad dreams came and got worse. Sometimes Caleb saw only the girl from the neck down as she encouraged the man to choke the boy. Other times he saw he saw her from behind, as if through a mist or a veil. Sometimes she walked up to him wearing an actual veil and a white wedding dress, but a sexy, form-fitting wedding dress, too short to be terribly modest. Every single time, as she was about to turn to face him, or the mist cleared, or she was going to lift the veil, the vision or the dream just stopped.

Caleb was neither sleeping nor eating, until one day, the visions and dreams ended abruptly. He was sitting on his bed in his dorm room at Ashdown House at MIT throwing a tennis ball against the opposite wall wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He still could not sleep, but at least he was eating a little. The visions and dreams, when he did sleep, were as bad as ever. To top it off, though others did not understand how this could be a problem, he had skipped his entire undergraduate career, gone straight to graduate school and was now the proud owner of a shiny, new Ph.D. in electrical and bioengineering. All before his nineteenth birthday.

In his spare time, he had taken some classes at Williams College “to break things up”, he told his friends and family. Without paying much attention to what was going on, he had managed, in that same space of time, to earn a BA in history and Latin. Frankly, Caleb thought that the Latin was a little more demanding than his doctorate had been.

The Latin instructor had been brilliant. He recognized Caleb’s own brilliance right away and so had constructed a special course of study just for Caleb. Caleb, absent-minded about certain things, anyway, or was it the dreams and visions of a girls strangling a boy, did not really notice. The Latin was all graduate-level stuff, with research on how the Etruscan language had influenced Latin. Caleb had made some very important discoveries about that relationship, and so was granted a BA in the time it takes most students to stop partying and settle down for some real work. This was all well-and-good, but he was bored. Research in bio-engineering was ok if you were happy being a Poindexter, but Caleb was not, at all. He had slept with about half the females in Cambridge and maybe all of them at Radcliffe, in particular. He had not thought about Ora for a while, but her sister, well, she was another story.

Why? She had a beautiful face, but she was fat. Not side-show-geek fat, but fat. He had always liked her, and Patty had told him that Gemma was in love with him, but those feelings had never been reciprocated. So, why now? Why did her weight not seem like an issue, any longer? In fact, he realized that he liked it, “after a fashion”, he told himself. But, it was more than that. He really liked her curves; the way her thighs touched; the way that she had a belly that she tried to hide under her jeans and over-large sweaters. Her boobs. Oh, man her boobs. Did the alphabet go up that high? Then, the thought crossed his mind, “I like her belly. I would sure like to put my hands and lips on it.” Then he erased that thought from his mind, but it came back, just like the dreams and the visions. It dawned on him, the eighteen-year-old Ph.D., that he had noticed Gemma right around the time the terrible dreams began. Then, another revelation; he was in love with Gemma Dufaigh. Oh, no. It couldn’t be. He was hot for Ora. Or was he? He had not really given her a second thought since beginning school. With that, Ora appeared before him, sitting on the bed opposite him.

“You’re a smart one. Took you fourteen months to figure out what should have taken fourteen minutes.”

Cal sat bolt upright, letting the tennis ball bounce on the floor and under the bed.

“Look, seeing you is a blast and all that, but I’ve been haunting you these many months and, well, I’m bored, too. I have things to do and people to kill so I will make this short and sweet, I killed Asgeir. Had him killed, actually. I had him strangled like the little bitch that he was. Left him on the beach. Walked away from his body and went to the barbecue after we all left the swimming hole. Ha! I killed a boy and I liked it!” Then, she was gone. So were the dreams and visions.

 

Welcome To The Badger State

He lived in a small town in Wisconsin. It was about as Americana as you could imagine. If Norman Rockwell had visited this town in the early nineteen-fifties, he might have thought that this town was too unbelievably prototypically American to appear on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. The Clevers would have been considered a little on-the-edge-avant-garde. Ok, maybe the author is taking a little literary license here, but you get the idea.

The town had, and has, a real Main Street with a barbershop, a general store, a “notions” shop, people sitting on benches solving the problems of the world, and the parking was diagonal to accommodate more of the sort of people who would come to Main Street to get a haircut and a “notion”.

Outside of town dairy farms, selling their own cheese and yogurt, dotted the countryside. Mixed in were even a few horse-farms and one or two crop-farms. The people drawn to this near-mythical place did not come here accidentally. Each town, each city, village, burg, and hamlet has an aura. Yes, each one has an aura; a real, honest-to-goodness aura. In fact, each family and household has an aura, and within each family, separate clusters of people and even individuals have their own aura. These auras are unique to each town, family, and person.

Before birth people are attracted to certain families because the auras of the people in that family produce a family aura that will allow for the most harmonious fit for the individuals in the family. Sometimes, though, sometimes things don’t always work out. Sometimes, the system is gamed by those with an agenda. When this happens, we find families with that one member who doesn’t quite fit in. This is not about those families where a musical prodigy is born to a tone-deaf couple who wouldn’t know a tune if it came up and kissed them square on the mouth. No, in those cases, mostly, the child comes to that family to care for them in some way or to pay back some great kindness from a previous existence. What we are talking about is when a perfectly nice family with genuine, child-like faith, that goes to church Sunday mornings, volunteers at the local food-pantry and tithes their income welcomes a baby who grows up to be an ax-murderer, a gang member or a Democrat.

One day, a young demon, not such a bad demon, but a demon who wanted to be bad, was sitting around waiting for a nice family to become available. This sounds kind of cute and maybe a little sweet. It was not. The young demon had been around a while without making much progress when he caught the attention of a much older demon whose job it was to move the slackers along.

“Why don’t you do it?” she said, as the young demon sat in the room with dirt on the walls, watching the family he had picked as his target. He was hesitating, not out of a sense of possibly doing the right thing, but, rather, because he was a slacker. He knew that, once he committed to a physical life, he was stuck with it until either he completed his given objective or died in the trying. If he did something stupid, such as kill himself, to get out of his assignment early, well, that was too scary to think about. What could be worse than being condemned to Hell for all Eternity? First, no one, human, angel or demon, is ever condemned forever. Not if they don’t want to be. Second, there are things worse than Hell. Marriage, for example.

“I can’t. I just can’t, is all.”

“You can.”

“I really can’t.  I don’t know why.”

“I know why. You’re a lazy shit.”

“I am not a lazy shit!”

“That’s right. You’re stupid, too. You’re a stupid, lazy shit who can’t commit to anything, even something that will ultimately do you some good. Or at least keep terribly bad things from happening to you.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I just told you what’s wrong with you. You’re a stupid, lazy, shit. There are so many nice people in Wisconsin. Especially in the town, your intended family lives in. It’s time to mix things up a little down there. These people, especially your intended family, are nice. Too nice. The sick-making thing about it is that they are truly nice, decent people without the love of money or other things that most Christians love more than God, Himself. This town, this family, especially, is the Real McCoy. They’re not faking it.  They love the Lord and other people; puke. Other people love them. The Lord loves them. Puke, puke, puke. This has got to end. These people have got to be ended. You savvy?”

“I savvy. Ok, I’m going.” And he was gone, off to be born to the nice family.

The Birth of The Small Man

It all started out almost-innocently-enough. He didn’t do anything that was awful. He would pull the wings off flies just for the fun of it. If he had known that he was tormenting his cousins who would get their revenge at some point when it was least convenient for him, it wouldn’t have mattered to him. He lived in the now.

Then he would torment his little sister because it would make her cry and watching her cry filled him with a sort of warmth that he got only from watching his mother undress as he hid in her closet. He would watch her come out of the shower in the bathroom attached to his parents’ bedroom masturbating as she let her towel fall to the floor.  He could never finish, though. The only thing that brought release after watching his mother was torturing his sister. He would come up behind her and steal her dolls and break them in front of her while the toddler cried helplessly. Or, he would see her playing outside, walk up to her with a smile on his face and push her down in the dirt as hard as he could. Anything he had done up to this point might possibly be explained by a boy’s curiosity about the opposite sex or sibling jealousy. He had made sure of this. Things were about to change.

Caleb, All Grown Up

On the west wall of his house was the stereo system purchased by his grandfather and manufactured by a company named McIntosh in an era long before the geeks in Cupertino had stopped wetting their beds. The equipment had tubes that lit up with a fiery red glow and gave off a warmth that always made Cal nostalgic for a time that had all but ended before he was even conceived.

This marvelous example of mid-twentieth-century high technology was flanked on both sides by banks of real, honest-to-goodness, 33 1/3 rpm long-playing records sitting in mahogany racks fashioned by Caleb’s own hand.

On the uppermost rack were Duke Ellington and Art Tatum records. Just below were the Allman Brothers Band and Jean-Luc Ponty, and on the lowest rack, just about at waist level, were the Beatles albums, the first of which, Beatles for Sale, was given to Caleb by his brother.

Caleb’s record collection was a reflection, not only of his musical tastes but of who was inside of himself. Caleb was a man of few words. He preferred to let his work—and when needed, his fists—do his talking.

On his wrist, he wore a very expensive, self-winding Swiss watch with a blue dial and no numerals. On his face, titanium-framed eyeglasses, blue, to match his watch, partially hid piercing blue-green eyes.

This night, he had just returned from a “business trip” abroad. He wore black cashmere trousers and a dark-gray button-down shirt with a matching knit tie. His feet sported American-made black leather penny loafers with Mercury dimes, minted in the year of his father’s birth, inserted in each tongue. When Caleb traveled he did not feel comfortable unless he was properly dressed—proper yet not stuffy.

A pistol lay on the shelf next to his turntable. It was a custom-built .45 caliber. He favored forty-fives because of the round’s tremendous stopping power. Cal did not like the gun, but it had saved his life on several occasions.

It was late evening, and Caleb was tired. Flying always drained him. As he stood in front of the German-made turntable, he appreciated that it was crafted with all the precision that he demanded of his things.

His strong, masculine hands at the ends of tanned, muscular arms held his newly purchased LP pressing of The Beatles, popularly known as The White Album.

He carefully removed the pristine vinyl disc from the cover and inner sleeve, quietly taking in that beautiful new-record chemical smell.

He loved LP records because vinyl LPs had become almost as rare as rotary phones, which he also owned. The man used digital photography because it served his work. He was also a computer programmer, but he had decided years before that he would never brook digital music in any of its ghastly forms.

So, there he stood, balancing the record between his middle finger and the meaty part of his square hand, thinking, almost dreaming, silently sifting through the data in his head and the emotions in his heart.

He placed the disc on the spindle on the platter and carefully cleaned its grooves. He moved the tonearm over to the lead-in for the first track lowering the stylus. The beautiful, empty quiet of diamond needle on black vinyl played through the speakers; the reassuring ticks and pops were just about audible from the cool, dark surface of the record. The jet engines of “Back in the USSR” began to soar into the room, rattling stemware on either side of the speakers.

The sounds were old and familiar and soothed his tired brain. Cal had been listening to this record since he was a small boy, and he loved the sound of it.

He walked over to his sofa, sitting down in the space left him by his two dogs, and listened to the tight, well-rehearsed band.  The Fab Four had toyed with the idea of breaking up and had even taken a two-year hiatus from releasing any music.  During that two-year period, they had been very hard at work in the studio, changing their musical direction and, once again, changing music history forever.   Caleb was very glad that they had decided against breaking up.

His phone rang, jolting him out of his musical trance. Cal looked at the name of the caller. He knew the man well, as well as he knew his own father. “Hello, Jonas. I had hoped I would not hear from you.”

After a moment, Cal said, “I know. I know. After what I went through in Russia, I knew that the time was soon. I had hoped I was wrong.”

Cal listened to the old man’s reply. “I understand.” He switched off his phone. He did not want any more calls that night.

He again drifted into a reverie, as he always seemed to do when recovering from a case—whenever he had a free two minutes, even—thinking of this and that and nothing at all.

“You don’t know how lucky you are, boy, back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR…” came from the speakers, bringing him back to himself.

Cal had just finished his job in Saint Petersburg. It had been the worst of his career: two dead priests, gruesomely murdered by what turned out to be an itinerant madman. Caleb was very glad to be out of Russia.

It was already getting toward daybreak, and as he listened, his exhausted eyelids began to close. He reached for the rosary brought to him from the Vatican by one of his best friends. In the Rosary, Caleb had always tried, usually without success, to find strength and peace. He would need some measure of strength, for he was not alone in the room.

As Caleb got closer to the sleep he so badly wanted, his left hand relaxed, and the rosary fell to the floor. Just before he finally drifted off, he heard the softly dreamy, chillingly seductive voice of someone calling his name—the gray figure present at his birth.

“Caleb Smith? Caleb?”

Cal stirred on the couch, and the two dogs growled in the low tones that dogs have when they sense danger.

A gray hand waved itself over the dogs, and they fell silent. “Tonight is your lucky night, filthy mongrels.” Then the voice said, in Russian, “Dirty scum. “Snuffing you now would be too easy. It would give me away too soon. You get to live your wretched lives for another day, so shut up now.”

The rotting gray hand reached down to the floor and picked up the beads Caleb had dropped earlier. The other hand moved to Caleb’s face and caressed it almost lovingly. A wave of nostalgia from experiences had over many centuries swept over the gray form standing beside the sofa. This feeling was instantly replaced with a homicidal anger. The hand was quickly withdrawn.

“I ought to kill you for that, dear Caleb. Those days were long ago and far away.”

The form’s empty eyes soaked in Caleb’s visage, while dark bile dripped slowly from toothless gaps in its jaw onto the floor. Festering lesions oozed pus from the creature’s cheeks and lips. Great empty spaces showed where flesh once was.

The gray hand returned to Cal’s face, and the creature spoke in a soft, soothing voice these words: “Caleb Michael Smith, what I am going to do to you would make the worst in history cringe.”

Then, with a sigh, it continued in gentle but deeper, more powerful tones. “I am going to kill your dogs. I am going to kill your parents and your brothers and sister. I am going to kill that fat cow, Gemma.

“However, today is not your day, either, dead man. When your hour comes, then, oh then, Cal, I am going to slowly drain the life out of you. I am going to suffocate your soul. You will die in such pain that you will beg for death. I will not give you death, not right away, but you will die, my old friend, Caleb.”

A loud boom echoed throughout the house, and every window in the little place imploded, scattering shards in all directions, and the creature was gone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

He slept on the large Mission-style sofa, a dog behind him, a dog in front of him. He slept in fits and starts. The dogs had been restless all afternoon, as well.

Dark dreams clouded and racked his slumber, and he awoke before sunset to the sound of a boom and the hiss of a million scalpels of glass flying from the window frames into the house. Petunia and Jacob began to bark loudly and were yelping as if in pain.

He lay there, staring into the room, stunned, still trying to get his bearings. His ears were ringing. His head was pounding. Small bits of window were standing at attention on the exposed skin of his arms, legs, and face.

Caleb put a hand out in the dark and felt for Jacob’s head. Jake let out a yelp, and he knew that his dogs were hurt, too.

Caleb called out, feeling the sting from dozens of cuts on his face, “Lights on, one hundred percent.”

The lights illuminated sheer destruction. He was foggy and disoriented from the dream of the crazy gray woman. He wondered if he was still dreaming. Then he looked straight up and saw it: a cross, drawn upside down from his point of view, drawn in what looked like ash from a fireplace. He steeled himself to act. This would not go unanswered.

Caleb carefully put his hands around Jacob, brought the little dog to his chest, and slowly sat up. The sharp sting of literally a thousand cuts made him wince, and little Jacob cried out in his own pain. Petunia had been curled up in a tight ball when the glass flew and was at least spared shards in her nose and near her eyes. Cal reached for his phone, which lay on the end table behind his head.

He spoke into the phone: “Call Patty.” The phone responded in Gemma’s voice: “Calling Patty.” In his parents’ house, his sister saw her phone move across the kitchen table as it vibrated.

Cal had, as a joke to annoy his baby sister, programmed her phone to ring with the phrase “Patty, youah wicked cute!” and had “fixed” the phone so that Patty could not un-fix it herself. He refused to put it back the way it was because it annoyed her so. She caught the phone just as it was going to fall off the table.

“Caleb, when the hell are you going to put my phone back to the normal ringtone?”

Cal spoke in a normal voice. “Patty, I need you to come over.”

“What’s the matter, Cal?”

“Nothing big. Just come over, OK?”

Patty put her phone in her jeans pocket, walked into the living room, craned her neck around a corner, and called up to her parents, “Mom, Dad! I’m going to see Cal.”

Artie and Mary Smith had gone upstairs late in the afternoon this day to, in the words of Artie, “do their stamp collecting.” The couple had been very dedicated to stamps lately.

These two have got to have the best stamp collection in the continental United States by now, she thought. Come to think of it, I need my postage canceled, too.

Her father yelled down from his place next to his wife. “Why are you going to see Cal?”

“He called me and asked me to come over.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No. He just wants me to mind the dogs while he goes out. You know how he is,” she lied.

Artie Smith rolled onto his side, pulled his wife’s back close to him, and said, “When is that girl going to learn that I know when she’s lying even before she opens her mouth?”

“She’s just trying to protect you or cover for her brother. You know that,” his wife replied through giggles.

“I do know that she’s a good girl. She’s been a good girl to a lot of men on this island. She also has a good heart. She was made that way. No matter how wild our child is, I know that she’s good underneath it all.”

Patty was in her car by then, racing toward her brother’s house. She was filled with anxiety, mostly because Cal was not answering his phone.

Cal had negotiated his way through broken glass to the bathroom. The sight of his face in the mirror was frightening; his face was cut in dozens of places. There is not enough toilet paper on North Island to stop this bleeding, he thought somberly. He tweezed the glass splinters and stood there, watching himself bleed.

Cal washed and dried his face, put a couple of small bandages on the larger cuts, and went back to the sofa to continue to pick points of glass out of his dogs, who steadfastly endured this torture.

Patty ran up to his door and burst through. What she saw stopped her cold. The inside of the house was strewn with shards of glass. She looked to her left to see her brother holding Jacob’s snout in his hands as he pulled glass from the little dog’s nose.

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know. I feel that something doesn’t want me to probe any deeper into things. I was asleep, really deeply asleep but having bad dreams, dreams of a being who is like a walking corpse. This same dream haunted my nights in Saint Petersburg. These dreams have haunted me since I was a boy.”

“I remember,” said Patty.

“I thought I was rid of the dreams. I was, for a long while.”

“I had hoped that you were rid of them.”

“Well, I can’t remember most of it, but it felt so real like she was here in the room. Then the glass exploded, just the way you see it. I’m still a little dazed.”

“I’m sure you are. What can I do?”

Cal, lost in his own thoughts, replied, “I’ve been chasing evil all over the world for ten years. Now it’s chasing me.”

Patty looked at her brother with bewilderment and concern in her eyes. “OK, well, this is no time to figure it out. Let’s start cleaning up.”

Cal stood up, again picked his way through the glass, and handed the tweezers to Patty. “Take this; tend to the dogs. Jacob is worse off than Petunia. I’ve got to get dressed and get these windows boarded up. Damn, first I need to clean up the glass, at least the bigger shards.”

He went to his bedroom and changed his clothes, making sure to put on his heaviest work boots. He went outside, grabbed a flat shovel and his shop vac from his workshop, and went back to the house to start the cleanup.

After the glass was mostly cleared away, Cal said, “I want you and the dogs to come with me, Patty. Got to take care of some business.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ve got some work to do for some cases, and I do not want you and the pups here alone. Also, I don’t want to leave them in the car alone, so I want you to take them back to Mom and Pop’s place to look after them. I will bring back all the rocky-road ice cream you can eat. Deal?”

“Deal,” said Patty.

Dogs tended to and vet appointments made, windows and doors boarded over, Cal, Patty, and the dogs made their way outside and breathed in the cold November air. The frigid wind stung the cuts on Cal’s face and hands. Still, it was good to be outside. The cold air focused his mind.

Cal thought he knew what had been behind the events of the day. He felt—somewhere very deep in a place that gave him vertigo to look at—that he had been fighting the gray demon forever and ever and ever. Fatigue welled up from that place, so Caleb hardened himself against the fatigue; he beat the tiredness into a submission that would last for many hours.

The screeching of an eagle came diving out of the sky, and Caleb looked up but could not see it. He heard it again directly above him and still saw nothing. He did, however, feel better. He found that iron place within and set his jaw. A new energy took hold of him, and he leaped off the porch, skipping four steps, and ran for his Jeep, with Patty, carrying Jacob and Petunia beating everyone else to the car on her short, but very nimble legs.

When he and Patty and the pups were sitting in the car with the engine warming up, he felt a presence beside him. That is when he remembered his friend Father Konstantin Orlov and that Orlov means “eagle” in Russian.

Cal looked up. “Koni, you Ruski bastard, was that you?” He put the car in gear, drove to his parents’ house, and walked Patty and the dogs inside.

His father and mother took one look at him and the dogs, and his father asked, “Good Lord, son. What happened to you?”

Cal replied, “Pops, before I go, I want to talk to you about something.”

“What is it, Cal?” his mother asked.

“Something between Pops and me, Mom. Please try to understand.”

“I do, sweetheart, I do. There are some things that men must keep ‘men things.’ You two go and talk. Patty and I will make sure the dogs are all right.”

Caleb and his father walked into the backyard and sat down at a picnic table across from each other.

“I have a feeling I know what this is about, son,” Caleb’s father said.

“I bet you do, Dad.”

“‘Dad’ is it now? You are upset. You call me ‘Dad’ only when you’re really ’round the bend.”

“You’re goddamned right I’m upset! I hate this ridiculous Bible-faith-angel mumbo jumbo.”

“Now, son, I know how this sort of thing sticks in your craw, but this is who we are. You’re just going to have to accept it, for now, hold your nose, and do what you’re supposed to do according to prophecy.”

“Another word I hate. Whose prophecy, anyway?”

“God’s.”

“‘God’s,’ he says! I pray and pray and pray, and it feels like I’m pissing up a rope for all the good it does.”

“And still you pray.”

“Yes.”

“Why is that, do you suppose?”

“Because you and Mom and Gemma say that I ought to.”

“Cal, you’re a grown man. You don’t do anything that you don’t want to do. Never have. Not even when you were a child, really. So why do you pray?”

“This conversation is taking a wrong turn, Pops. I brought you out here to talk about Jonas.”

“I know, my boy. Believe it or not, we are talking about Jonas.”

“How’s that?”

“Because Jonas Smith is a praying man and your grandfather’s brother, my own uncle. He’s as close to you as any man alive, and he must have called you last night, or you wouldn’t be here. He would not have called you if he had not been praying and got a sign that now was the time.”

“I don’t want to do it, Dad.”

“I know, son, but you must. You’ve done much worse in your profession, haven’t you?”

“That’s different, Pops. Those guys deserved what they got.”

“Well, think of it that way, then. Jonas deserves this, too. Not because he’s a bad man, but because he’s a good man, a good and faithful servant of the Lord, and this is his reward.”

“Why isn’t he scared?” asked Caleb.

“Because when he was your age, longer ago than you think, he got the same call, though it wasn’t a phone call, and he’s been waiting for this his entire life.”

“What? That means that someday…” Caleb trailed off, everything becoming clear and his stoicism and sense of duty returning.

“Yes, son, I see that you understand. You always did. You simply did not want to acknowledge it.”

“Yeah, Pops. I have to go.”

“Go with my blessing and Jonas’ blessing, too.”

Cal and Arthur stood up from the picnic table. Cal hugged his father and left without going back into the house.

As Cal’s hand touched his car door, he spun around, went back to his parent’s front door, opened it and yelled for his doggy buddies to come with him.

The dogs came running with Patty not far behind them.  “I thought you wanted Jacob and Petunia with me?”

“I do”, said Caleb, “but I want them with me for just a little longer.  I need them.  I will bring them back very soon.”

Cal turned and left without further explanation.  He did not want to explain to the women where he was going, because they were not to be privy to this part of his life.