Welcome to the continuation of Jerome’s story. If you missed parts one or two they can be found here:

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The Good Shepherd Pt. 3

     The spring has come at last. The snows have melted and I have been able to turn the ground and sow the cold weather vegetables into the garden. It’s amazing how what I always thought would be just a hobby has become a life-saving necessity. Mother, Anna and I have been living off of our stockpiled dry goods and freezer meats packed in the remnants of winter snow for the last three months. We are the lucky ones.

     Once the initial shock of the black out wore off, Anna wanted to go back home fearing burglars would steal her mother’s Hummel collection. I didn’t want to tell her Hummels were not going to be on the top of any cat burglar’s list but having a pantry full of food might just get her killed. Instead I told her that mom and I needed her to combine her food with ours if we were all to survive. At eighty-seven she’s not going down into our cellar to see that our pantry will hold us a good year with or without her help. Thinking she had to help her impoverished neighbors she agreed and let me empty out her pantry and freezers. It wasn’t much. Anna would have starved after the first month.

     Word came from Boston by the first of February that the black out was at least nation wide. It was a truth we had already guessed at, but the confirmation darkened the town ethos like a total eclipse of the sun. By week’s end we heard reports of homes being broken into in the outlying areas of town. It was in the second week of February that Roy, the owner of  Central Supermarket, was beaten to death by a gang of kids while he was loading  free groceries into a wheel barrow for an elderly man. When the police arrived they found the old man clutching a box of cereal over Roy’s dead  body.

   “It’s all they would let me keep.” Was all the old man could say when questioned.

   The store had been spray painted with a skull and cross-bones underscored with the words “The Bone Brothers”

    Winchendon has been under martial law since. The Bone Brothers have broken the law like clock work on Friday nights. each time they move into town from a different direction. Each time they lose a member. Once I was asked to come to the station because the boy who had been shot was asking for a pastor. When I got there the waif was breaths away from eternity. I prayed. He gulped down his last feeble mouthfuls of oxygen and was gone. A thin line of peach fuzz  coated in spittle and blood lay across his top lip like a squashed caterpillar. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen.

The officer next to me swore softly. “They’re like a pack of wolves testing the edges of a camp for weakness. They’re gonna find it soon enough. What’ll we do then? We can’t kill ’em all.”

“We shouldn’t be killing them at all!” I countered. “They’re just kids and they’re hungry.”

“They’re animals Pastor and make no mistake about it. They’d eat your mother if you left her on the front step overnight.”

Dear Lord how could we have lost so much humanity in just a month? Is this all it takes for us to forget who we are?

When I got home that morning a midnight mare stood in the front yard  tied to the tree growing in front of the stone porch. The beast didn’t even acknowledge my presence as it munched the sweet grass poking up through the melting snow.  I  trudged up the steps wondering which parishioner I would be consoling next.  My daughter Renee threw open the stormer and flung herself into my arms.

“Daddy!” She wept.

Hot rivers ran down my cheeks. Hope I had buried burst forth like a geyser too long plugged.

“I sent a messenger for you after the first week.” I said between my tears.

“I got the message. But I knew I would make it  back here before he would.”

” Where is Sara? How did you get a hold of a horse? Have you gotten word to your mother?” The questions tumbled out of me like an avalanche touched of by the vibrations of relief.

“Come inside,” my mother hissed from the doorway. The initial geniality she had held in the first days of the black-out had been melted by a hot paranoia since Roy’s death.

 We went inside and sat around the dinner table as mother brewed herbal tea on the wood stove. Renee’ was thinner than the last time I had seen her. Her eyes were ringed by black circles and her thick curly hair was pulled back in a tight unwashed bun. It was evident she had been some days without changing clothes.

“I am so glad you’re home safe sweetheart,” I said laying my hand over hers.

“I can’t stay Dad.” She said.

“What? Why?” I asked.

“I have a job to do. When the lights went out we all thought it would be for just a few days but after a week passed and word started reaching us from Boston that it was all of the Eastern seaboard and then all of America, maybe the world we knew we had to get ready. Dean Lexington organized us into work committees to get the school ready for survival and to help the community. Sara has been sent to the North Shore with a team to help the rural communities there cope with the effects of the black out. She’s working with Pastor Carpenter from Seacoast Church.” Renee’ said.

“And you?”

“Those horseback riding lessons have turned out to be useful after all Dad. My job is to take messages to all the families of the students telling them about what the college is doing to minister.”

“You have to stop this Renee’. You can’t go back out on the road. It’s dangerous out there people are dying.” I countered.

“More people are going to die Dad unless we do something to stop it. It’s why we went to Bible college.”

I looked at her dubiously.

She sighed then smiled slightly, “Do you remember when I asked you why God was having us go through all this training if He was just going to come and rapture us all in the next few years?”

I nodded and frowned. I remembered the conversation and saw that my own words were about to snare me.

“You said that we couldn’t be sure when the rapture was coming and that we didn’t know what was coming before that. You said in times of trouble it’s  the minister’s job to release the blessing and the peace of God over a community. You also said that if God was calling us to train then there must be a reason.”

I sighed as she sat staring at me, “I guess we know the reason now, don’t we ?”

She nodded. She stayed two more days then rode out on the fifth of March headed for Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania. I only know that she made it safely out-of-town because I pressed one of the police officers to see her safely to the border crossing into Templeton.

It was shortly after Renee left that the town council asked all the churches to pool their emergency food rations together at the town food pantry to protect them from the Bone Brothers. Guards are now posted at the Community Action Building around the clock. The wolves haven’t stopped their circling. Captain Tyson’s officers killed five more, but reports from town citizens indicate that the Bone Brothers aren’t wanting for lack of members. With each raid they seem to become larger.

We stand on the brink of war and my daughter’s words keep ringing in my ears.”In times of trouble it’s the minister’s job to release the blessing and the peace of God over a community.”

Is that really my job? I  struggled with those words until last night.

It was midnight when the officer came knocking at my door. Another boy was asking for a pastor. I dressed and went down to the station expecting to pray a  prayer over some half dead Bone Brother. I was tired and prepared only to usher some starving waste of food into a cold eternity. The cell was filled with the smell of released bowels and urine emanating from a pile of wet blankets arranged in a heap on the palate by the wall. I knew the boy was already dead but pushed the blankets aside prepared to pray some religious nonsense over the dead body. The lump gagged in my throat and exploded into a cry that shattered me against the back wall of the cell as I recognized the body of Teddy. The Bone Brother Tyson’s boys had shot was eleven, the son of one of my deacons.

As I write my daughter’s words have become an accusation. How is it that she was so ready to fulfill a role that’s not even officially granted to her yet while I hold back afraid to keep the commitment I made what seems like a thousand years ago? The world has changed but my calling has not.

I am packed. When I put down this pen I will set off towards Sandy Hollow. Someone told me that’s where the Bone Brothers live.