The Rapture of William Hadley
(c) 1998 by Jacob Williamson

When William Hadley came back from the dead, the neighborhood talked about it for weeks.

There had been such a nice funeral, it hardly seemed fair for Bill to upset things like he did. What, the houses along the corner of White Marsh and North Mountain wondered, made Hadley so special? He was forty-seven years of age, thinning of hair and soft of stomach. The great forces that moved the government had seen fit to give Hadley a stable job at the Department of Public Safety, a desk job which left weekends free for him to watch the Saturday sports programs. Beyond that, he was a short and unsuccessful man with an abused Toyota in his driveway, with a wife, Linda, whom everybody at the corner of White Marsh and North Mountain approved of. They had been decently shocked when Hadley had a short and ultimately unsuccessful affair with a short and unsuccessful woman from Quail Cove. Her friends were among the first to know. Now that years-ago affair came fresh to the minds of the Spring Valley community, making William's unexpected resurrection all the more unusual.

The funeral at the Church of the Advent on White Sands had been closed-casket. "Not," the Hadley's neighbor Sharon Seekamp noted, "that Bill had ever seen the inside of a church." He had turned too sharply on the freeway exit late one night. After a pickup truck in the far right caught his battered Toyota by the tail and spun the little car around twice, he wasn't in any shape fit to be displayed.

Three days after his last rites, he turned up in an agreeable mood in his living room. Linda hadn't even finished eating the casseroles the church wives gave her at the reception.

"He's obviously doing it for some kind of attention," Sharon Seekamp said. Her husband, Frank, disagreed.

"If I was trying to get everyone's attention, I'd have come up with a better story than that." He looked out the window to the Hadley's house across the street. "Did you read the story in the Times?" Sharon shook her head. "It made the third page of the 'State and Local.' Not good enough for the front page of that, even."

Sharon picked up her glass. She traced patterns in the ring of dew on her black-lacquered table, remembering the reporter's visit, the Tuesday after Hadley came back. A woman came knocking, asking if she knew Bill before the accident. Sharon told her. They had been neighbors eight years; it was the first time he'd done anything like this.

Frank snorted. "Bet he hadn't."

"No, I bet not."

Sharon looked thoughtfully at the ring on the table. Thin, parallel lines drew across her forehead. Her black hair was limp, the day's curls faded out.

"Well, if I was trying for attention, I would have done a better job," said Sharon.

They looked across the street, at the house set between their floral-print curtains. The sun had gone down; you could just see Mrs. Hadley in the kitchen's light. It was a wonder she found time to cook. With her new job at Lucy Barnes's flower shop and all, after her husband lost his job. It was a shame, really.

"They printed the story the next morning, but it wasn't much to read. I've seen some of the specials on TV, about people who…came back. They talk about tunnels and lights, or feeling this wonderful peace--Bill just came home, like any other day. Didn't remember being hit by that truck." Frank rubbed at his moustache under his red, Germanic nose. "If he'd ever been a better talker, it might have been news. But with that funeral, and nobody seeing his body--they probably thought it was a hoax."

Sharon's mouth twitched. "You couldn't blame them, could you?"

Three houses down, on the other side of North Mountain, Terry Jones sat in what she had come to think of as her sacred space. She had called it her altar once, but that conjured up images of saint-shrines and candles and signs of a religion out of control. She had a Bible, paperbound, on a shaky wooden table that had belonged to her mother, before she moved out. It was enough. It helped her calm down, a quiet place for her meditation, her journal, her prayer. After a long day relaying phone calls across three floors of cubicle and office, she had showered, eaten, and prepared herself for bed, but her journal came before sleep. Her fine blonde hair clung in loose tendrils to her back. With her thin, gentle features, she looked almost lost in the dim room, empty except for her bookshelves and her sacred place.

The journal rested, open on the carpet, between the table legs. The two pages she could see were blank, needing words. She filled them, a written communion. Be with Bill and Melinda Hadley tonight, Lord. You alone know why he was given a second chance at--she rubbed the last few words out. Given this gift. Be with them through their troubles, and help them to know, to see Your will in this time of crisis. Be with me too, Lord. Show me the path I must take to--Terry stopped, "to what?" She rubbed out most of the full sentence, tried again. Let me help them, too. Your servant.

Terry looked out the window, down White Marsh, towards the house.

Linda pulled back from the sink. Steam billowed up, noodles struggled to escape their pot and the pasta strainer. She flushed pink in the hot, humid air rolling from the scalding water. William stood at the stove, breaking up a panful of ground beef, mixing a packet of spice, and stirring the gray-brown meat. There were dots of grease on his shirt

"Bill, this can't go on." He looked up, startled. He had looked so peaceful, working "pasta helper" with the skillet of ground round.

"I don't understand."

It was true, he didn't. It was one of the things that had changed about him, so many weeks ago. When she was at her husband's funeral, Mr. Hennesey, William's employer, had given her his deepest sympathies. A day later, he gave her husband's job at the department to a co-worker. At the time, she wasn't upset. When Bill went back to the office he had no position; the department wasn't hiring, it was called attrition. Too full, the state was cutting back its hiring. Bill accepted this placidly, as if the money didn't matter.

Support from his life insurance company was a lost cause.

Each time she had brought it up, he nodded, and listened, and said that it would work out, it would all be well. And it was, though she worked thirty hours in a flower shop, the ends met, somehow.

"You have to go back to work. We can't live on my paycheck, it's not going to be enough. Lucy's only got a small shop, there isn't a health plan. She didn't really want to take on a second set of hands, but the neighborhood helps its own. What if something happens?"

"This'll be fine. Everything will be." He put down the spatula and stood beside his wife. No kiss, no embrace, only that warm, strange smile, that sense of peace that was not there before. "It really will."

Two o'clock, the darkest hour. The only light in the master bedroom came from the digital clock glowing redly on Bill's bedside table, two o'clock, then a minute past two. Linda timed her own breathing, nearly ten slow, deep breaths in a minute. But she couldn't hear Bill's.

She inhaled deeply, holding the air in her lungs, trying for total silence. Still no sound. She lifted her head, looked beside her. The red light of the digital clock reflected a sharp, sparkling point on Bill's wide-open eyes. For a nervous second, the bed feeling like it dropped out from under her, she thought her husband had been taken away from her again, that a cruel god had left his body lifeless, wide-eyed on the bed beside her.

Then his cheeks rose slightly, his mouth formed the slightest edge of a smile. He looked into the near-black of the ceiling; the stucco texturing picked up some of the sullen glow of the clock. His eyes closed, his breathing began again, slow and regular, as measured as the minutes of the radio alarm clock. His expression radiated peace, contentment, quiet joy.

In another room, the minute hand on the automatic drip coffee maker's clock swept past 7:00. Usually the seventh hour informed the machine of the moment of coffee-making, but Melinda had awakened the device before its hour, and sat at the kitchen table, resting her arms on the smooth glass surface. Steam rose from her mug. It was the fall. Soon winter would come, bringing the cold, and bringing bigger heating bills. Her husband assured her, it would work, yes, but for how long?

By 7:30 Bill came to join her at the table. Despite his five o'clock shadow his face was gentle and soft, still touched by that strange smile. With not a sound beyond the double-click of the carafe settling back in the coffee maker, he poured himself a cupful. He held the mug in two hands, carefully, as if he could break its wings if he squeezed too tight.

"I had such a dream last night."

Linda looked over her shoulder. Her husband didn't meet her eyes. He looked at something beyond the wall, beyond the window, beyond the Seekamp house across the street. Maybe beyond the dingy gray sky. She put her mug down noisily.

"I was in a big field--a really big field, it must have been the size of Spring Valley--bigger." He stared fixedly beyond the window.

"Really?" Linda said. It seemed like the right thing to say, though Bill didn't take notice.

"Bigger. But it wasn't a clearing, there was a mountain in the middle. You know how dreams are--as soon as I saw it, I was up in the air, looking at the peak. It wasn't like the mountains we saw when we went to Aspen--it was like this mountain was--everything. All the other hills and things were a part of it. Everything moved around the top, but I couldn't look at it--at the top, that is."

Linda looked into her coffee. A trace of oil spread in a thin film over the surface. She didn't speak.

"I looked around, and the sun was beneath me--that's how high I was. It started to rise, and the light spilled, like milk pouring out of a glass, spreading out over the field--mountain and field at the same time, it doesn't make sense, but it doesn't have to. It was like watching grass grow--where the light hit, this huge choir of people appeared, kind of like the sun wasn't lighting them, but making them be there. And they were singing. It was perfect."

He stopped, not searching for words, smiling, serene. "I could start looking up again--there were these huge creatures spinning around the top of the mountain, like big hoops of light, wheeling around through the sky, in time to the music almost. There were more choir-people, even happier, and they were singing, you could tell they were holding up the mountain with their songs--it's a dream, you just know these things."

In the house across the street, Linda thought, Frank Seekamp was getting ready for work. Sharon had already left--she was at the high school. She had to deal with tenth-graders, but she didn't have to deal with this.

"Anyway, there were these other creatures, like swirls of wings and eyes, they were singing too, the strongest of all. The sun went away, and the people in the field faded out, but the wing-things kept singing, stronger than ever. Then there were four--or maybe six, or twelve, they were like fire, it was hard to tell--things, and I could just make out their mouths moving, but couldn't hear the words. And they were surrounding the mountain, and then I could look at the mountaintop. When I was six, I tried to stare into the sun for as long as I could, but it burned so much I had to close my eyes--this hurt even more, but not because of the light. It hurt because of the love, the endless, endless love."

He finally looked down. Linda met his eyes, her head moved slowly from side to side, as tears built up in the corner of her eyes. Why? she thought. What did I do to deserve this?

It was a month since Bill had his accident. That was old news. From the set of Sharon's jaw, Frank wouldn't hear the end of this new one.

"Three months--three months, we've been setting up our kitchen," Sharon said. "We ordered stainless steel fittings, a huge table--it wouldn't fit into this room! I called six other churches to coordinate the volunteers. I won't even talk about getting the budget approved for the new fixtures. We finally get a date scheduled for the community kitchen, and he volunteers--"

"Bill Hadley?"

"Yes. They loved him. He was just smiling, serving soup to everyone. Came in off the street like one of the disadvantaged folk, and took over. Everybody would line up, then they'd look at his face when he filled up their bowls--it was so quiet! Thirty transients were in the place, each had this peaceful look to him, but nothing like Bill's. He wasn't there, not really. Dishing soup was the most important thing for him then, you could tell, but his mind--it wasn't there at all. I don't know where he went. It must have been amazing. Really nice."

She looked at Frank, waiting for a response. "So what happened?"

She nodded once. "They gave him the kitchen committee. I organized the damn thing, I got the paperwork written off, and somehow, the other volunteers gave him the committee chair. And…"

"And?" Frank said.

"And I can't take it from him! He just smiles, I can't even talk to him. He looks so damned thrilled just to…dish soup! How can I fight with that?"

Thank you for this day, Lord. Thank you for this chance to serve. Terry Jones quietly chewed on the tip of her pen, then put it back to paper. And for William. I met his eyes, we looked into each other's eyes when I put out silverware for the transients--she started to scratch that word out, but went on. Your children. I knew that I was beside someone who stood in Your presence. The soup kitchen was never so close to Your kingdom.

After a time, the words, her prayers, stopped. She blew out the single candle on her mother's little table and went to sleep.

Winter had blown in with a vengeance, temperatures dipped into the thirties before the season had officially begun. The bills were starting to mount up--at the grocery store, everything was so dear--within a fortnight, it seemed, the telephone would have to go to keep food on the table.

Bill was painting. It was a crude picture, Linda hadn't expected much better from him, art was never her husband's strong suit. But he laboriously added another stroke of yellow-gold to the sweeping ring around his mountain. It was his dream, childlike in his amateur brush strokes. Words, he said, couldn't describe it.

She told him: it was harder and harder to make ends meet. She had a little raise, and the holiday season was giving Lucy Barnes's shop a nice business boost, but the money had to run out. There was only so much strain a budget could take.

Her husband looked up from his painting. There was a surety in his eyes that she never would have found there three months before. It would work out, he said. "It'll all be well."

Ultimately, it was. But when January came and the soup kitchen reopened after the holiday, William Hadley wasn't at his post. Nobody ever saw him again. Danny and Robin, the Warren boys from Quail Cove, said a few years later that Mrs. Hadley finally took a frying pan to him, but the police never came by like the newspaper reporters had all those years ago--more likely, he just disappeared as strangely as he showed up. Melinda Hadley kept working at the flower shop, until she somehow became the manager.

Nearly seven years after Hadley had his accident, Terry Jones was diagnosed with cancer. Spring Valley turned up in a wonderful show of support, even though fewer than a dozen members of the little neighborhood knew Terry's name. Eight years to the day that Bill appeared in his living room, Terry called Linda with the news--her cancer had gone into an unexpected remission. For a few months, Sharon Seekamp said later, Terry was writing letters to the Vatican, to see if somehow Bill's name could be added to the list of the blessed communion of saints. But she left the neighborhood, and nobody ever heard what happened.