The Road To Hebron

Fiction

A story of America, 2040

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Prologue

If you give the people a choice, they will want to decide for themselves what is good.

That is how it began, long before anyone in this story was born. The people sent the king away, and the Father with him. Somebody still had to make the rules, so the people made them. And when the rules came from a vote, the people wanted the rules to change whenever they changed their minds.

They changed their minds about a great many things. About babies, and whether a baby was a gift or a plan. About marriage, and whether it needed to make a family. About the family, and whether it needed a father. At last they changed their minds about the body itself, and after that they could not agree on the meaning of the plainest words.

By 2040 the people had decided nearly everything for themselves. They had never been so free, and they had never been so lost.

This is the story of how they came home.

Part I

The Night of Two Presidents

Jonah Keller was fourteen the night the country broke, and he spent most of it in front of the bathroom mirror.

He did that a lot. The counselor at school had told him he could decide who he was, and she had said it kindly, the way you hand someone a present. Jonah had tried a few answers. None of them held. He would stand at the glass and study the thin face, the narrow shoulders, the dark hair that fell into his eyes the way his father’s used to, and wait for the reflection to tell him something. It never did. He did not want to be whatever he chose. He wanted to be somebody’s.

Downstairs his mother watched the election returns with the sound turned low. By midnight the map on the screen had stopped moving. By two in the morning both candidates had declared victory, each in front of a flag, each in the name of the people. Rachel Keller turned off the television and sat in the dark kitchen with her hands around a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour before.

It never got settled. Three states sent two slates of electors to Washington. The House voted eleven times and failed eleven times. On January 20, 2041, two men took the oath of office, one on the steps of the Capitol and one in a football stadium in Atlanta, and each called the other a usurper.

“So who’s the president?” Jonah asked that night.

His mother kept her eyes on the window. “I don’t know, baby. I don’t think anybody does.”

The newscasters kept saying that the people had spoken. The trouble was that the people had said two things at once, and there was no one above the people to say which one they meant.

Jonah’s father had been gone seven years. He left the summer Jonah turned seven, with a duffel bag and an apology that sounded practiced. He needed, he said, to figure out what was good for him. Jonah had not heard his voice since the Christmas he was ten.

He lay awake that night thinking that if nobody knew who the president was, then nobody was in charge of anything. It should have frightened him. Mostly it felt familiar.

Part II

The Dark

On the night of February 9, 2041, the sky over Kansas caught fire.

It came in curtains, green and red, rippling from the horizon to straight overhead, and people stood in their yards and filmed it on their phones. Jonah stood in the driveway beside his mother, their breath smoking in the cold. It was the most beautiful thing either of them had ever seen, and it lasted about forty minutes.

Then the lights went out.

Not the way they usually did, for an hour, with an apology from the power company. They went out the way a candle goes out. The phones held on for three days, until the batteries in the cell towers died. After that, every screen that had told the people who they were, what to want, and what to say fell silent at once, across the whole continent, as if someone had simply taken them away.

It was a storm on the sun, the battery radios said, the kind that comes once in a hundred years. It had burned out the great transformers from Manitoba to Georgia, and there were nowhere near enough spares to replace them. The man in Washington said help was coming. The man in Atlanta said help was coming. Neither of them had any power, in either sense of the word, and by March the stations stopped carrying their speeches.

On the fortieth day, the man in Washington went on the air and said the only true thing anyone in Washington had said in years.

“I can’t help you,” he said, and his voice broke. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

He resigned the next morning. No one heard from the man in Atlanta again.

After that it was only the cold.

Rachel burned the dining table in the fireplace one leg at a time. Jonah hauled water from the creek behind the soccer fields in two buckets and learned what water weighs. The Lutheran church on 95th Street opened its doors and its pantry, and the pastor, a tired man with a gray beard, read the Psalms by lantern light every night to whoever came. Rachel had not been inside a church since her grandmother’s funeral. She went every night. She told herself it was for the warmth.

At night they heard gunfire, far off, and sometimes not so far.

···

Six hundred miles west, in a dark apartment in Denver, Daniel Keller sat on the floor wrapped in every blanket he owned and discovered that nothing in his life had any weight. He had a job he was good at, a girlfriend who had left in January, and a closet full of expensive shoes. He had spent seven years deciding for himself what was good. Now, in the dark, with the city groaning outside his window, he could not name one thing he had chosen that was worth keeping, except the boy he had left.

He found the photograph in a kitchen drawer: Jonah at six, gap-toothed and grinning, riding on his father’s shoulders at the state fair.

In the morning Daniel laced up the only boots he owned that were made for walking, filled a backpack with what food he had left, and started east.

He did not know whether they were alive. He did not know whether they would open the door. He walked anyway.

Part III

The Shepherd of Hebron

There is a small town in the corn country of southern Nebraska, a few miles above the Kansas line, that was named for the city where David was made king. Nobody in Hebron thought much about the name until 2041.

Caleb Morrow ran sheep and cattle on the land his great-grandfather had homesteaded east of town. He was forty-four, broad through the shoulders and slow to speak, a deacon at the little brick church at the edge of town, with a wife named Anna, two grown sons, and a daughter who could outride all three of them. He was the man the neighbors called when a calf came breech or a marriage came apart. He usually came. He usually did not say much.

Nine years before, in the spring of 2032, an old preacher named Hollis Reed had driven out to the Morrow place without calling first. He was nearly eighty then, a man who had pastored little churches across three states and buried most of the people he had married. He found Caleb in the lambing barn at dawn, took a small bottle of olive oil from his coat pocket, and asked if he could pray for him.

Caleb said yes, expecting a prayer.

Instead the old man poured the oil over his head, right there in the straw, laid his hands on him, and said, “The Lord has a work for you, son. Tell no one. When it’s time, you’ll know. So will they.”

Then he climbed back into his truck and drove away. Caleb washed the oil out of his hair that night and told no one but Anna. He assumed the old man was losing his mind.

···

When the dark came, Hebron had what the cities did not. It had wells and windmills and hand pumps, grain in the elevator, cattle and sheep on the grass, and people who knew how to use their hands. And it had Caleb, who did not wait for anyone to tell him what to do. He and the sheriff and the elders of four churches organized the town inside a week. They rationed the grain, butchered in rotation, turned the school gym into a hospital, and ran horse patrols on the highways.

The refugees came from Lincoln first, then from Omaha and Kansas City, then from farther than that, on foot and on bicycles and in wagons pulled by men. Caleb turned no one away. He fed them the way you feed sheep: first, and without asking whose they were.

Word traveled by shortwave, the way all word traveled now. If you can get to Hebron, you’ll eat.

···

In the first week of March, one of Caleb’s patrols found a man face-down in a ditch along Highway 36, just south of the state line, in the middle of a blizzard. His pack was empty. His boots had worn through. Two of his toes were black. His name was Daniel Keller.

He woke three days later on a cot in the church basement, under a quilt, with a bowl of broth beside him and a big man in a sheepskin coat sitting on a folding chair, watching him.

“Where were you headed?” Caleb asked.

“Kansas City. My son’s there.” Daniel’s voice cracked. “I think he’s there.”

“How long since you’ve seen him?”

Daniel looked at the ceiling. “Seven years.”

Caleb was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Then you’d better get strong fast.”

It took until fall. The toes had to come off, and the fever that followed nearly took the rest of him. When he could stand, he worked, mending fence and stacking hay beside Caleb’s sons. In the evenings he sat on the back step of the church and watched how Caleb was with his daughter, and with the refugees, and with the old people who were dying faster than anyone could bury them. Sometime that summer Daniel understood that he had never once in his life watched a man simply be a father, and that it was not complicated, and that it was the hardest thing in the world.

Twice he sent word toward Kansas City by radio relay. No answer came back.

“You’re afraid they won’t open the door,” Caleb said one night.

Daniel didn’t deny it.

“Doesn’t matter,” Caleb said. “You knock anyway.”

Part IV

The Refusal

By summer the country had become a patchwork of counties that had made it and counties that had not. Governors issued orders that could not be heard beyond the edges of their capitals. In some places the Guard kept order. In others nobody did.

And everywhere people talked about Hebron.

On the Fourth of July, eleven governors, or the men who now spoke for them, came up Highway 81 in a caravan of horses and battered pickups burning ethanol. Thousands followed them. They packed the courthouse lawn shoulder to shoulder in the heat, and Caleb stood on the steps in his work clothes with his hat in his hands.

The governor of Kansas did the talking. He was a good speaker, and he had written it out.

“Mr. Morrow, you have done what no one in Washington could do. You fed us when we were starving. You kept order when there was none. You saved us.” He turned to the crowd, and the crowd roared. “We are asking you to lead us. You, and your sons after you. We’ll draw up whatever papers you need, and as soon as there’s a way to count ballots again, we’ll put it to the people, and the people will make it official.”

The roar went up again, and this time it did not stop. People were weeping. People were chanting his name. Daniel, standing at the back with Caleb’s sons, felt the whole square lean toward the man on the steps the way a wheat field leans in the wind.

Caleb waited until it was quiet. It took a long time.

“I didn’t save you,” he said.

The silence changed.

“I know what you think you saw this winter. You saw sheep and grain and a man giving orders. I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw the Lord take away every machine we had, so we’d know it wasn’t us. There were too many of us, and we were too strong, and we’d have said our own hand saved us. So he took it all away. He didn’t do that so you could crown the first man who fed you.”

He put his hat back on.

“I will not rule over you. Neither will my sons. The Lord will rule over you. Go home and ask him to.”

Then he walked down the courthouse steps, through a crowd that parted for him in total silence, and went back to his sheep.

The governors left the next morning. The newspapers, printed on hand presses now and passed from town to town, called it the Hebron Refusal. A few called it humility. More called it cowardice. A woman spat at Anna Morrow in the grain line. That night Anna sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Caleb, they needed you.”

“No,” he said. “They needed God. They wanted me instead.”

···

It was a long autumn, and the second winter came early and hard. In November an offer came over the radio from the powers across the oceans: transformers, fuel, and doctors, in exchange for the ports, the grid, and the right to station soldiers to guard them. Half the governors wanted to sign. It would be warm, they said. It would be safe. Nobody had to love it. They only had to say yes.

On the fifteenth of December, Caleb saddled a bay mare named Mercy and put the reins in Daniel’s hands.

“The roads south aren’t safe,” he said. “Nothing’s safe. Go anyway. Go home to your boy.”

Daniel rode out of Hebron at first light, into the snow.

Part V

Father, We Were Wrong

On the last night of 2041, Hollis Reed lay dying in Hebron.

He was eighty-nine. He had come back to town in September, riding in the back of a refugee wagon from somewhere in Missouri, and asked for a cot in the church basement, and he had been failing ever since. On New Year’s Eve he asked to be carried upstairs into the sanctuary, where two hundred people were keeping watch by candlelight, and he asked for the radio.

Hebron’s shortwave operator was a retired schoolteacher named Marjorie Hale. She carried the microphone to him on its long cord and held it near his mouth. The old man did not preach. He had preached for sixty years. He only said, in a voice so thin that the room held its breath to hear it:

“Father, we were wrong. Please come back.”

Marjorie let go of the key, not knowing what else to do. For a moment there was only static.

Then a voice came back, from a station in Grand Island. A man, crying. “Father, we were wrong. Please come back.”

Then Salina. Then a Guard armory in Topeka. Then a ranch outside Cheyenne, a hospital ward in Des Moines, a prison chapel in Leavenworth, a nursing home in Tulsa, and a boy’s voice from somewhere in Arkansas who never gave a call sign. The operators relayed it station to station as fast as they could key their sets, and it crossed the dark continent the only way anything could cross it anymore, one voice to the next. Nobody voted on it. Nobody could have counted it. It was the first thing in living memory that the whole country said together.

The Father heard them. He always does.

···

In Overland Park, Rachel Keller heard it on a hand-crank radio in her cold living room. She got down on her knees on the carpet, and after a moment Jonah knelt beside her.

“Father, we were wrong,” Rachel whispered. She was not sure which father she meant, and then she understood that it did not matter. “Please come back.”

Jonah said it too.

Half an hour before midnight, someone knocked on the front door.

They both froze. Nobody knocked anymore, not after dark. Rachel reached for the fireplace poker. The knock came again, slow, three times.

Jonah got there first. He opened the door an inch, and then all the way.

A man stood on the porch in the falling snow, holding the reins of a bay horse. He was thin in a way that looked permanent, he leaned on a stick, and his beard had gone gray. But Jonah had studied that face in a photograph every night for seven years, and in the mirror too, without ever knowing it.

“Son,” Daniel said.

That was all. He had tried for two hundred miles to write a speech, and every version of it had sounded practiced.

Jonah stood very still. Then he walked into his father’s arms and held on, and his father held him, and neither of them could say anything at all. Behind them Rachel let the poker fall and sat down on the stairs with her hands over her face.

Much later, when the fire was built back up and the mare was tied under the carport, Jonah carried a candle into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The face was the same. But for the first time in years it told him something, and what it told him was simple. He was Jonah Keller. He was his father’s son. He had not chosen it and could not have, and that was exactly why it held.

···

The governors never signed the treaty. When a reporter asked the governor of Kansas why, he read a verse from Hosea over the air, and within a week it was painted on barns from Nebraska to Texas: Asshur shall not save us.

Part VI

The King

In April of 2042, the governors came back to Hebron.

There were twenty-two of them this time, and they did not come in a caravan with banners. They walked the last mile in from the edge of town, the way you approach a house you are ashamed to have left. Thousands followed them. Nobody chanted.

The governor of Kansas did the talking again. This time he had not written anything down.

“Mr. Morrow,” he said. “We didn’t come because you saved us. We know who saved us. We came because we have sinned against the Lord and against our fathers. We told ourselves we had the right to rule ourselves. We never had it. We need a shepherd who will rule in God’s name, not ours. If he has chosen you, we’ll follow you. If he hasn’t, tell us to go home, and we’ll go.”

Caleb said nothing. He looked out over the crowd for a long time, and those close enough to see his face said afterward that he looked afraid.

Then a voice at the side of the steps said, “He has.”

It was Hollis Reed, in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets. He had not died on New Year’s Eve after all. The doctors said he had lived out of pure stubbornness. Now he pushed himself up on the arms of the chair, trembling, and told the whole crowd what he had done in a lambing barn ten years before.

“I told you you’d know when it was time, son,” he said to Caleb. “So would they.”

Anna Morrow was weeping. Caleb took off his hat.

Then he did something nobody expected. He walked down the steps, past the governors, out to the middle of the lawn, and knelt in the grass.

He did not kneel to the governors, or to the people. He lifted his face to the sky and prayed out loud, and the prayer was short. He said that he was not worthy and did not want this. He said that if the Lord would have him rule, he would rule as a servant under the Lord’s hand and answer to him for every soul. He asked for wisdom, because he had none of his own.

When he opened his eyes, the people were kneeling. All of them, across the courthouse lawn and down the side streets as far as the grain elevator, thousands on their knees in the April mud. The governors were kneeling. Daniel Keller was kneeling, with Rachel on one side of him and Jonah on the other, and the bay mare Mercy stood behind them, waiting to be taken home.

The governors made a covenant with Caleb Morrow in Hebron that day, before the Lord. No one cast a ballot. The old preacher poured oil on his head a second time, in front of everyone, while Marjorie Hale held the microphone so the whole country could hear. And when it was done the people did not shout his name. They shouted, “God save the king.”

A man near the front, whose wife had died the first winter, stood up and shouted that the men who had ruled in Washington ought to hang for what they had done to the country. A few voices joined him.

The king raised his hand.

“No one will die today,” he said. “Vengeance belongs to the Lord. I have enough of my own to answer for.”

Then he asked for a Bible, and he opened it on the courthouse steps and read aloud, the way the kings of Israel were commanded to. He read the Ten Commandments, all of them, slowly. When he came to Honour thy father and thy mother, Daniel put his hand on Jonah’s shoulder and did not take it away.

The king closed the book.

“We were told we could decide for ourselves what is good,” he said. “That was the lie. It’s the oldest lie there is, and we believed it for a long time. From now on, we listen to what the Father said.”

Epilogue

Not every state came that spring. Some came the next year, and some the year after that. A few have not come yet, and the king has said he will not send an army to make them. “Sheep aren’t driven,” he told the governors. “They follow.”

The lights came back slowly, one town at a time, on transformers built in American shops. The screens came back too. But they never held the people the way they once had, because the people had learned in the dark what could save them and what could not.

In the second spring of the kingdom, Daniel and Rachel Keller were married again, in the little brick church in Hebron, and the king stood up with Daniel. A year later their second son was born. They named him Samuel, because they had asked him of the Lord.

A boy was a boy again. A girl was a girl. A husband was a husband, and a wife was a wife. And a baby was a gift again.

···

Years later, on a summer evening, the king rode through Overland Park on his way east, and the children ran out to see him the way children have always run to see a king. A little girl pushed to the front of the crowd and asked him, very seriously, who made the rules.

The king smiled. He did not answer with a word. He only lifted his hand, and pointed up.

At the back of the crowd, Jonah Keller, twenty-one, stood with his little brother on his shoulders, the way his father had once carried him at the state fair. He saw the king’s hand go up. He looked where it pointed, and so did Samuel.