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No one wanted to take the call when the reverend – the former reverend – complained that someone had messed with his crops. Ever since the accident and his subsequent defrocking (is that what one called it when a pastor took himself off the pulpit?) six months ago, Father Hess made pretty much everyone in town uncomfortable. It wasn’t that they didn’t like him; to the contrary, the father was one of the most trusted people in the community. It was just that no one knew what to say to the man they’d always looked to for the answers when it was so clear that he was lost himself.
So Caroline offered to take the call despite just returning from dealing with old Mrs. Kindelman and her absolutely disgusting spit tantrum. Maybe it was because she wasn’t much of a churchgoing woman. She believed in a higher power, but as an officer of the law, she was focused on planet earth, on what she could do to keep her part of the world as intact as possible. Because she wasn’t one of the father’s flock, she merely saw him as a widower trying to hold himself together with two children and brother. Caroline had rarely interacted with the Hess family while Colleen had been alive, so she’d never developed the awe that most of the town had for them. Not to say that she didn’t respect them, but she just saw them as good people rather than the town’s moral compass.
Or maybe it was due to the connection she’d felt for the Hess family after having to break the news to the father that he only had minutes to talk to his wife before she passed away. The raw emotion she’d seen on his face as she made sure he understood the situation had somehow reached out and wrapped itself around her heart and in the subsequent months had become part of her. Now she couldn’t not help him and his family.
Morgan was her favorite. Introspective and smart as a whip, he used logic to talk his father into letting him do all sorts of things, and Caroline enjoyed watching the interaction. He also considered taking care of Beau his responsibility. Caroline couldn’t count the number of times she’d seen the two children alone, walking down the road or around town, and she knew that Morgan would make sure they were both safe, even from dumbasses like Lionel Prichard and the Wolfington brothers.
Maybe Bo was her favorite. She always had to hold back a laugh at the way the little girl left glasses of water around the house, always with an explanation as to what was wrong with them. If nothing else, Bo had no trouble explaining herself. She probably watched way too much television, but it hadn’t harmed her imagination any.
Actually, Merrill was Caroline’s favorite. She prized family among all else, and she couldn’t help but be impressed at the way he just moved in with his brother when Colleen died. He was seen all over town helping usher them around, especially right afterward, when no one saw the father for weeks. And she liked the way he was respectful, if a little odd, to everyone who crossed his path. He had a kind of innocence that she found refreshing in a young man.
Caroline noticed how awkward the father was when talking to other people once he finally remerged from his mourning. She wished she could go back in time to see if Colleen’s presence had masked it or if it were a result of her death. Regardless, she felt like she was always forcing herself not to hug him, to give him a space to mourn and stop holding himself so stiff and controlled.
One of the first calls she’d had to take after Colleen’s death was at Ray Reddy’s house where a group of citizens had taken it upon themselves to try to run the veterinarian out of town. She’d been in the process of talking them down when Father Hess had appeared, his first appearance in public since Colleen’s funeral, and had spoken to them just as Caroline imagined he preached – with compassion and a gentle reminder that they were supposed to forgive and try to be the best people they could be. Chastened, the townspeople had dispersed, and Caroline noticed that Father Hess had made sure he’d never had to be in the same space with Ray Reddy. Caroline couldn’t fault him for that; even if it had been an accident, Ray was still the cause of Colleen’s death.
So, yes, she didn’t mind going out to the Hess farm to check on them. She tried to make it out there at least once a week just to say hi; she didn’t stay very long, just checked in with each of them to try to make sure they were doing their best to continue despite their tragedy. She didn’t expect them to get over it overnight; she just wanted to make sure that they were taking steps forward, not back.
As soon as she saw the way the plants were pressed down against ground, unbroken, she knew it wasn’t the work of Lionel Prichard and the Wolfington brothers. This required skill and some sort of special equipment; those boys tended to get drunk and make bad decisions, resulting in their being held at the jail until they awoke and were able to work to make enough money to pay for whatever damage they’d done while inebriated.
Everyone knew that the father said he was no longer a preacher, but they all also knew that it was who he was. It wasn’t something so easily discarded as his collar. He still lived by example, still forgave and listened, still helped even when unasked. And that was why, despite the way he always told them to stop calling him, “father”, they just couldn’t do it. Even Caroline found that she felt the same way.
Sometimes her mom would call from the small house she still lived in forty miles away, and ask when Caroline was going to get married. Never mind that she was a grandmother four times over from Caroline’s sister, who lived right down the road from their mom. Caroline always told her mother that she was perfectly happy on her own, and she was. And if there were times when a pair of large, mournful, brown eyes flittered through her mind, she admitted that to no one.
So she helped whenever she could, went out whenever they got a call from the Hess home, and generally made a nuisance of herself until she was sure that they were all doing okay.
She was surprised when she came into the station the next day with a note to head right back out to the Hess farm, that they’d had another visitor. Maybe she shouldn’t have been, because people – and animals – had been acting strange the last couple of days, and she wasn’t sure what was happening. She just had a feeling that it was going to get more complicated before it got easier.
Trying to get a statement was like pulling teeth, but she relaxed at the table, chatted with the kids, and watched in amusement as Father Hess gathered up Bo’s discarded water glasses throughout the house. She’d had to call Merrill on his attitude – although she’d felt a little like she’d kicked a feisty puppy –when she tried to use a roundabout way of letting them know that Lionel Prichard and the Wolfington brothers weren’t always the answer when bad things happened, and he’d apologized a moment later, just as she knew he would. She told the father about the research she’d done about what kind of machine would’ve been able to have damaged his crops, but the story on the television about extraterrestrials had her a little spooked. She wasn’t sure that the believed it, but as a cop she’d been trained to look at the clues and gather the proof. And so far, aliens had not been taken off the table.
Her suggestion that they go into town for a change of scenery hadn’t been just because they needed to be around other people. She’d also wanted them close, just in case, if only for a little while. She didn’t need to keep tabs on them herself; the grapevine was still in good condition, despite or maybe because of, all of the strange goings-on. She’d even heard that Merrill had stopped in at the Army recruiting station. Evidently, Lionel had started the paperwork to enlist and was in there at the same time, but no one called the police, so she knew nothing crazy had ensued.
Then all hell broke loose, and for the first time, she found herself scared. She’d been living in this town for years, knew all of the people in it and could tell when someone new stopped in for more than just to fill their gas tank. Now she was being confronted with calls about aliens, about scary naked men who spoke in clicks and had long, sharp nails. No one knew anything factual about them, especially how to stop them, so the mayor decided to gather as many as they could and keep everyone at the school. She’d tried to get out to the farm, but they were inundated with panicked people arriving in town, and she’d had to focus on them.
By the time the dust had settled, she’d been up for over twenty-four hours that felt at least thirty-six. She’d seen an alien in the flesh, but fortunately it had been killed when a few neighbors had banded together and fought it into a pond. Turned out, they were susceptible to water.
She drove out to the Hess farm as soon as she could, worried that they hadn’t called the police station. Her heart nearly stopped as she saw the father holding on to his boy and crying, Merrill standing over them sobbing into Bo’s arms as they held each other tightly. She’d barely put the car into park before she was out, racing toward them. She knew the ambulances were all busy, but she was prepared to throw Morgan into her car and take him to the hospital herself.
“Graham? Father?” She fell to her knees beside them. She’d already seen too many townspeople dead from some sort of poison the aliens had made them breathe, and she was worried that she was too late.
With a hiccup and a laugh, the father hugged his son closer to him, but Caroline only relaxed when she saw Morgan raise his arms to fold around his father’s neck. With a relieved whoosh, she sat back on her heels and smiled. “I guess you don’t need me here after all.” She still followed the family as they drove to the clinic to get Morgan checked out, took their statements, and arranged for the pickup of the alien body from their living room.
She did draw the line at organizing a clean up at their house, because that was way too far beyond her responsibilities for her to be able to explain it away in a small town with eyes everywhere.
The fallout from the invasion attempt continued for months, lots of government types invading their small town, scientists and suits filling the place with acronyms, but finally the dust settled and they slowly returned to their lives. Lionel Prichard convinced the Wolfington brothers to sign up with him for the Army, but he was back within weeks with a story about becoming injured. Everyone knew he’d actually washed out of basic, but most people were too nice to mention it out of respect for his father, Lee.
The most important change, as far as Caroline was concerned, was that the father returned to God and his flock, stepping back into the church for the first time since his wife had died. It hadn’t really changed much, because no one had accepted his rift from religion in the first place. They’d still called him father, still asked him for advice. Now they did it with his collar back in place.
Caroline still checked in on them, a little less frequently than she had before. It was obvious that they’d rounded some kind of corner in their healing, and she didn’t want to interrupt the process.
One day she ran into Father Hess outside of the grocery store, him shopping and her investigating some misspelled graffiti on the outside of the building.
“You look well,” she said truthfully. He smiled much more readily, the sadness in his eyes tempered with acceptance instead of anger. She still wanted to hug him, but it was no longer to make him feel better.
“The kids are growing like weeds,” he said. “You haven’t been out in a while.”
“Well, without the Wolfington brothers, Lionel Prichard’s being even more annoying.”
“He needs a job,” he mused.
“He’s going to have one for a little while when he cleans this up,” she said, shaking her head. “Father, the next time you talk to Lee, maybe you can suggest that he give his son a dictionary. If Lionel’s going to be a delinquent, the least he can do is spell correctly.”
She liked that her words made him smile.
“Caroline, stop calling me father.” He gave her a shy smile as he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “My name is Graham.”
The End