The Calling (17 page)

Moses asked him why they should “go Richmond,” but Joey shook his head. He only held on tight to his father, and with his son against him Moses felt Joey’s body trembling.
He knows
, Moses thought.
He knows but he won’t tell me. He’s scared. I can see it in his eyes, the fear
. So Moses stood there holding his son, who continued shivering against him, as if he were freezing, while the temperature in the apartment was set at a comfortable seventy degrees. For whatever reason Joey believed they had to go to Richmond, Virginia, and in the back of his mind Moses kept thinking about the morning he was giving Joey his bath, how Joey had told him seven and Maine and then what he had later learned in the newspaper.
 

For the rest of the day Moses tried to ignore it. Tried to push any thought of it out of his mind. But he couldn’t. Last time it had been a week before those three men executed those seven helpless, innocent people. One woman had been pregnant. And now his son was telling him they had to go to a place over four hundred miles away. Moses spent a lot of time that day and night praying to God. Asking Him for courage and to give him a sign.
 

“But I had already gotten my sign,” Moses said, and now, for the first time in maybe the last half hour, his eyes met mine. They looked very much like Lewis Shepherd’s eyes—scarred and lost—that I understood what happened the moment I stepped foot inside this RV. Just as I had back on the second floor of Shepherd’s Books, I had somehow produced a key that unlocked that door of terrible memories. Only this door was in Moses Cunningham’s head, and though I had no grounds to make this assumption, I assumed everything inside had been told it would eventually see the light of day once more. And now, as promised, it was making an appearance.
 

“Look,” I said, because more than a few moments of silence had passed, giving me the opportunity to jump in with what I felt compelled to say. “You don’t have to do this.”
 

“But that’s the thing, Christopher. I do. I have to tell you everything so that you can understand what’s happening.”
 

“And what’s that?”
 

“You’ll find out soon enough. But first I need to tell you the rest. Like I said, I’d already gotten my sign. I knew it then but just didn’t want to admit it to myself. The next morning I made arrangements for Joey to get out of daycare for a few days and called off work. Then we packed our things.” He paused, swirled nothing around in his glass, and asked, “Would you like some more?”
 

I noticed my glass was empty. I nodded, held it out, and as Moses poured, I said, “What did you mean by that before? That you knew you’d already gotten your sign but didn’t want to admit it.”
 

“You mean that isn’t obvious by now?” Moses smiled weakly as he filled his own glass and then capped the bottle. “My son was a prophet from God.”

Chapter 17

W
hen they arrived to Richmond, Moses didn’t know what to do. He kept asking Joey why they had come here, but his son hardly even acknowledged him. They’d never gone farther than twenty miles away from home before; coming to Virginia was not just a vacation, it was an adventure. They spent their nights in a cheap motel just off the turnpike and drove around most of the day, Moses hoping that Joey would see something that might trigger a memory from his nightmare.
 

On their third night in Richmond, Moses decided it was a lost cause. They’d traveled all this way for nothing, and while they had spent time at some local attractions—St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Patrick Henry voiced his famous seven words; the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, housed in Richmond’s oldest home—they had also spent more money than they could afford to lose. (And here is where I begin to really see Joey as a child, not even four years old yet, looking around with wide eyes at everything he can take in at one time because this is so much different than home, so much different than the stale wallpaper and stained carpet.) Tomorrow, Moses told himself, they would head back home and try to forget this nonsense.
 

Then, lying in bed that night beside him, Joey said one word very softly in his sleep, as Moses stared up at the ceiling and wondered whether God was punishing him for the sins of his past.
 

“And that one word,” Moses told me now, seven years after their failed visit to Virginia, “was fire.”
 

“Fire,” I repeated softly. “What fire?”
 

As it turned out, the next morning a mile east of their motel an International House of Pancakes caught on fire. Most of the people made it out safely, but a few had gotten trapped inside. Five people: four adults and a child. Each of them died.
 

Moses stood outside the restaurant he and his son had been eating breakfast at for the past two days and watched the firemen work. At his side, Joey stood holding his hand. He didn’t seem affected by what was happening at all. He didn’t say anything to his father, he didn’t even point when part of the building collapsed. He simply stared with what would soon become his trademark: dark solemn eyes.
 

“And as I stood there, I wanted to look down at him. But for some reason, I couldn’t. Because I kept thinking about what he said just that night in his sleep. Somehow he knew. Not completely, but somehow he sensed it. And at that moment, as I watched along with those other bystanders, I understood that we’d been sent there to somehow stop those five people from dying.”
 

Months passed. It began happening more frequently. Joey would get a vision or have a nightmare and he would tell Moses they had to go someplace. Sometimes it was to a small town Moses had never heard of. Other times to a major city a few states away. Joey never knew exactly why they were going there, but he always said a number—and unless he and Moses managed to reach their destination in time and figure out what was wrong, the news the next day would announce the deaths of whatever particular number of people Joey had first mentioned days, sometimes weeks, before.
 

Moses ended up quitting both of his jobs. He gave up the lease on the condominium. He’d taken some education classes in college and knew he could teach his son the basics. Besides, in only a few short years Joey had proven himself much more mature and intelligent than Moses had ever thought possible.
 

They purchased an RV—“Very similar to the one we’re sitting in right now”—and started out. Moses had only four thousand dollars to his name, everything that was left of his savings, but he wasn’t worried. He knew God would provide. When Joey had a vision that they needed to go to a certain place, Moses would call ahead to one of the local churches and ask them if they needed a guest speaker for the next week or two. And while most churches, as a rule, don’t allow outside speakers to come in out of nowhere (especially with no credentials whatsoever), Moses and Joey were almost never turned away.
 

Months would go by and Joey would have no visions or dreams or signs at all. When that happened Moses found a job that paid under the table, usually working the back of a local diner or restaurant. He always told his employers not to expect him around for very long, so they wouldn’t be surprised when one morning he just didn’t show up. Whether any of those employers suspected anything suspicious, nothing was ever said and the local law never came around asking questions.
 

“When Joey had his visions I didn’t want to waste any time. I got our things together and we were on our way.”
 

The older Joey got and the more visions he had—“nigh-mares” he called them until he was five years old—the clearer those visions became. Moses wasn’t forced to piece everything together as he had before. Joey knew exactly where they had to go—what town, suburb, sometimes even what street—and how many people were going to be harmed. What Joey never knew was what was going to happen or who would be responsible.
 

Sometimes they weren’t able to succeed in their work—or missions, as Moses had begun calling them. The Oklahoma City Bombing was one of their first major failures. They were called there two weeks before it happened. But Joey couldn’t piece it together fast enough. He’d only been five at the time, a month and a half away from his sixth birthday, and he was so innocent and naïve, but he understood that they needed to work quickly. Then suddenly the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building blew.
 

“The following month was the worst for my son. Until then we’d only been called to a few different places to save a handful of lives. The largest number was nineteen, when I believe a tractor-trailer whose brakes had failed would have slammed into a K-Mart had we not intervened. But now over one hundred and fifty lives were lost, and Joey felt responsible for each and every one of them. It’s no wonder that was when his stuttering began.”
 

Obviously the event had scarred Joey, both emotionally and spiritually, but Moses didn’t notice his son’s stutter until a few weeks later. Not until he began to recognize the patterns of the speech impediment, how Joey no longer spoke clearly like he had before. The only times Joey’s stammer disappeared was when he was “in the zone,” as Moses later called it—when Joey was so deep in concentration and attuned with the calling he had been sent that he was in another state of mind.
 

“It was also around that time that he started watching Westerns,” Moses said, his eyes momentarily lifting to a shelf against the wall above the couch. My own eyes shifted that way and I saw, among some books, various videotapes, namely
Once Upon a Time in the West
,
The Magnificent Seven
, and
High Noon
. “I never understood why—to be honest, I don’t think I ever truly understood my son—but he loved them. Every time we left for a new place he’d say we were riding off into the backwards sunset. Because in Westerns the good guys are always riding away into the sunset at the end, away from all that bad stuff. But we were doing just the opposite. We were riding toward all that bad stuff head-on.”
 

After the bombing Joey sobered up to the responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders. At almost six years old, he began to understand his place in life. (“Can you imagine that?” Moses asked. “Most people in their forties
still
don’t know their place just yet. Some never do.”) Even Moses, who was there every step of the way, couldn’t fathom how his son managed it. Never once would Joey talk about his feelings. In fact, he pretty much kept himself closed up, and while Moses would never admit this to anyone else, he was thankful. He didn’t want to hear just what his son was feeling, or thinking, because Moses didn’t think he could handle it. Just having the knowledge that something terrible was going to happen was bad enough. But then also knowing that it could be avoided, and being given the chance to try to make it happen? That, in Moses’s opinion, was insanity.
 

How Joey was able to continue, Moses had no idea. Sometimes he wondered if his son ignored the visions he received, but he never asked. At least once every couple of months Joey would tell him that they had to go to a new place, along with what Moses had begun to think of as the magic number of how many people were going to die. Then they went.
 

“I could tell it was draining him, but he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he never seemed to mind. There are times when you have to do something because no one else is going to do it. Maybe that’s how Joey felt, I don’t know. All I know for certain is that it was different for me. For me, the only reason I kept going was because I didn’t think I could live with myself if I stopped.”
 

Four years after Oklahoma City they were called to Jefferson County, Colorado (“What half this country mistakes for Littleton, thanks to our savvy media”). It seemed close to twenty people were going to die. The morning Joey awoke from his latest vision—no longer were they called “nigh-mares”—his face had been so pained, so full of fear. His son’s eyes reminded Moses of the night he first cried out in his sleep, and how he had held onto Moses, shivering like it was freezing. Moses knew at that moment there would be something different about this calling, but he couldn’t quite comprehend the importance until after.
 

They never did make it. Right before Joey was able to piece everything together—he actually managed to run into Eric Harris two days before the shooting—one of the tires on the RV blew. They ran off the road and hit a tree. They were both knocked unconscious. By the time the police and paramedics arrived and brought them to, it was already too late. It was noontime and already the killing spree at Columbine High School had begun.
 

It was then that Moses understood the role he and Joey were playing. He had no idea why it had taken him this long to figure it out. He’d always assumed God was using them to save these people (so of course it made sense why they never had to worry about money or food or shelter), but he never understood why.
 

He prayed about it, and after a few weeks he received a vision of his own. He saw the angels of Heaven in all their glory before the Fall. Each held a different responsibility or role in God’s plan. But when Satan and his minions fell, those angels with their appointed tasks fell too.
 

“You see, Satan’s always wanted to match wits with God. And since God is the Maker and Breaker of men, Satan thinks he’s up to the challenge too. He tries to take it upon himself to decide when certain people should die and not let their lives run the course God intended. He uses his own angels, I believe, demons that corrupt humanity’s life stream so that they die before their appointed time. I think every time Joey had a vision God had foreseen that the demons would do this and put us in charge of stopping them. It sounds crazy—like I said, a lot of what you needed to hear would sound crazy—but there’s no other way to explain it. And even though sometimes the demons think they’ve succeeded, they’ve also failed.”