How would God respond to making a mistake? Would planets collide or mountains slide into the sea? Or would the ledger of all life simply remain out kilter until a series of small events forced that ledger back into balance again? It's probably the l...
Jésus was killed instantly. Maria was killed instantly. The crew and the rest of the passengers were also killed instantly. Incredibly, though, Francisco wasn't. The boy's landing was relatively soft. While that may seem miraculous, it wasn't anything of the sort. In fact, it was just a question of elementary physics. Prior to hitting the ground, Jésus, Maria, and Francisco were falling at a deadly rate of speed, but then Jésus threw his son into the air. Physics tells us that the latter speed is simply subtracted from the former.
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In effect, Jésus' mighty toss upward acted like an invisible parachute to slow his son's descent. It wasn't much, but it was just enough to be survivable. Even still, Francisco landed with a tremendous jolt. That jolt, however, was cushioned by his father's soft, spongy body. Once again, Francisco had become a bouncing baby boy.
It was only for a moment, though. After bouncing off his father, the boy rolled down a small embankment and came to rest between two burning islay trees. The fruit from the islay and its holly-shaped leaves were scattered around like a blanket. Fuel from the plane had ignited the trees. A quarter mile away, the bulk of the wreckage burned in a huge orange fireball.
The foreman of the Fresno County work crew and 99 of the 100 men ran toward the fireball. The 100th man crouched in a nearby ditch. From where he was hiding, he saw the magic of how humans miraculously separate themselves into groups. In the moment after the explosion, the men suddenly became the doers and the don'ts – the doers who ran into the flames to save the unsaveable and the don'ts who stayed close enough to tell the story but always far enough away to be sure that they were safe. They are the proud, the vain, the elusive, the quislings, the traitors to one another. They are all of us.
When the man was certain that no one was watching, he climbed out of the ditch. Commonsense told him to walk away from the flames. Along the path he took that day, he encountered the bodies of the men who had jumped from the plane. The first four bodies were horribly misshapen with arms and legs at angles that no one living could possibly emulate. Then he came upon Jésus and Maria. The couple was remarkably intact. They were lying side by side with their bodies embedded an inch or two into the dry California soil. At the bottom of the hill, the 100th man saw the burning islay trees and the infant boy between them. He was certain that the boy was dead. What else could he think. After all, the child had just fallen hundreds of feet to the ground.
Even still, the man paused for a moment to see if the child moved or cried. And truly, Francisco struggled to bring forward a breath. But just as that first breath was about to become a sound, the infant's body stopped moving. All that anyone might have heard was a gurgling sound from his chest as his lungs were filling with water. Filling with icy leaf-clogged water that had somehow was made its way from an abandoned Missouri well to a dry creek bed in California. After that, there was silence as a trickle of mud slid down the infant boy's cheek. It led from his eye to his ear and left a dark trail behind it. Although it looked a bit like a teardrop, it was clearly something else.
To the 100th man, it was signal to move on and keep moving until he was swallowed by distance and circumstance.
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Other than the crewmembers, all those who died that day were buried in the same mass grave near Fresno, California. It was decades before most of the bodies were identified. The others were placed in identical coffins distinguished only by lettered place cards. Jésus was assigned the letter L and Maria was given G. They would never be side by side again.
Little Francisco got no letter. He didn't get an A or a B or any letter all the way up to Z. In the search that followed the crash, the infant boy's body was hidden by the exhausted branches of the two scorched islay trees. The fire had weakened the top branches and eventually they snapped. The limbs fell across the infant boy's body hiding it from whoever might have looked. Then again, no one ever thought to look for a baby because Francisco was just a stowaway – a traveler from someplace he'd never remember to somewhere he'd never known.
Over time, the boy's body dissolved and became a part of the soil of Los Gatos Canyon. Simple loose, dirt. It was a bit coarser at first but then with the help of winter rains and summer winds, it became as powdery as all the soil that surrounded it.
