Famine

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

   Jonah got up the next morning and prayed again.  This made him feel better, but he was beginning to feel hungry since he hadn’t eaten in two days.  How glad he was the he could still enjoy milk and breakfast cereal in this more sophisticated age.  The soy bacon he had to endure was passable with toast and jelly.  He felt much better but missed fixing the morning meal for Michelle.

   He still needed to sort things out.  He called the museum to apologize for missing work.  Rene had already come to his aid.  Warren Crabtree said she had told him that Jonah needed some post-orientation counseling and recovery time, rare but not unusual for someone back as long as Jonah.  He would need another two days at most before being back to work.  So no one would be question him upon his return to the museum.

   He thought of how he always felt more confident when Michelle was around.  Everything was okay when he was with her.  Sonny said that her grave was on Rose Hill Cemetery and gave him the coordinates that would make it easy to find.  That is if it was not too overgrown and if the committee had not removed her marker.

    Rose Hill was like a forest grown over with vines and trees nowadays.  In a way Jonah was surprised that it had not been destroyed and plowed under.  Once people had gotten used to the crematorium and the committee was in complete control, they lifted the official ban on visiting there.  Few people visited there except for research because no living person had buried anyone there in over fifty years. Now that people were officially atheist, they no longer cared one way or another about it.  Few visited there, and it cost money to destroy.

   Jonah would raise little attention if he went there.  He might have trouble finding Michelle’s grave just the same. Sonny could have been wrong because authority’s records were lax before the cemetery closed.  Jonah could not see more than fifty feet ahead once he was inside.  It was hard to make out the shape of the hill so familiar to him as a boy.  Fallen tombstones stayed in place unless an occasional family member put them back. 

   Jonah thought he knew where her grave was.  Sonny’s instructions agreed with he memory.  He had purchased double plots long before he had become ill.  He had no reason to doubt that authorities would have denied her burial there.  They would have been glad that she had died.  Jonah took a while to work his way over to the east side of the hill.  The narrow old paved roads through the cemetery were all but grown over but a great help to Jonah, who remembered where each one went.  It had always been peaceful there.  And today was no exception.  Since nature had reclaimed most of it, was even more so.  Now and then he scared the rabbits and squirrels.  They took to the nearest tree and scurried up in its customary spiral climb to remain out of his sight.  Nothing much else has changed here.

   At last there it was.  Jonah found a grave with both his name and Michelle’s on its tombstone.  It surprised him that the date of his death was not chiseled under his name.  Perhaps she knew he would be reclaimed to life and come back here someday.  Well, here he was.

   Now he felt so much better.  She had carried on without him over sixty years more.  She had said she would never remarry.  He was the man in her life.  What victories she must have had during her courageous struggle against the growth of secularism in America.  Childless all her life, she somehow had been mother to hundreds or perhaps thousands of Christians seeking refuge from persecution.  Life had denied him the ability to share this longer life with her.  Maybe he would have failed her during her long life just as he had failed her the other day.

   Her loving presence was strong here.  But this love was different from the physical closeness they had enjoyed or the companionship they had cherished.  She loved God as much as Jonah.  But he was never jealous of this.  It made her love for him even stronger.