Silas and I walked in silence for a long time, and we stopped when the little purple flowers met a dirt road. A dented mail box sat on a slightly tilted pole. The hand painted words read, "Silas Peters and Sallie."
Silas opened the mail box and took out a small handful of envelopes and flyers. He flipped through them casually.
"Junk, junk, bill, catalogue, bill, junk." He opened a thick white envelope and read the first part of the enclosed letter. "Another newbie next month or so. Looks like they're fixing to have an earthquake in China again. It'll be busy around here awhile. We're getting a lady and her two children. Goodness, I hate working with newbie young'uns. But Sallie, she gets enamoured over the little ones." He slammed the stack of papers back into the mail box.
"Well," he said as he turned around and looked across the meadow, "this is the edge of my place. One hundred sixty acres of bluebonnets."
"It's beautiful," I said.
"Paradise," he replied with a smile, and he turned back around and faced the road. I turned with him.
Across the road was another field, a little more contoured than the bluebonnet farm. Short trees splattered the landscape of small hills and valleys. I didn't recognize the trees. Most of them were about eight to fifteen feet tall, and they barely had any leaves on them.
"What are those?" I asked.
"Rose of Sharon," Silas answered. "Minnie Lakes lives there with her Mama. There's always other folks coming and going, I can't keep up with them. Minnie raises these trees. They'll start budding out before long. Beautiful trees - bud out in late spring, stay in bloom pretty much all summer."
"So there are seasons in Paradise?"
"Oh, absolutely!" Silas said. "Want to go to town with me? I've got to pick up some yarn for Sallie. Something teal or aqua, she said."
I nodded, and we began walking, bluebonnets on our left and Roses of Sharon on our right.
"Of course, it's a little more mild around here," Silas explained as we walked. "Spring and fall, they're pretty similar to what you'd find in, say, Missouri or thereabouts. But the winters are pretty mild, doesn't usually get down below thirty or so. And summers, I don't think it's ever peaked out above eight-five. Now Heaven and the Basement, their seasons don't really fluctuate much. Heaven stays pretty much between seventy and eighty most of the time, and they don't ever have storms, just a few showers from time to time. And the Basement, well, it's all indoors anyways, and stifling as hell." He laughed suddenly and repeated, "'Stifling as hell!' Get it?" And he laughed again.
After a time, the Rose of Sharon trees stopped and the bluebonnets stopped. In their places were a field of tulips on one side of the road and a cedar grove on the other.
Silas nodded toward the cedars. "Now that," he said, "is work. Lots of pruning, and collecting, and thinning. Cornelius' place. He and his family run the place, when they're there anyway. Well, usually someone's there. But they like to keep reincarnating, and most times there's not more than three or four people on the farm at any one time. They love to reincarnate!"
"How many are there?" I asked.
"People?" Silas asked. I nodded.
"Oh, gosh, let me think a minute. Well, I'll tell you, I don't believe I've ever seen them all at the same time, but I guess there's at least eight, maybe nine altogether. Sallie'd likely know for sure."
"And when they die they always come back here?"
"Pretty much, eventually. Well," Silas corrected himself. "Now James, a few generations back, he met up with a little gal in Bogota, they got killed at the same time, set up a little bakery shop in town. Didn't hold, though, and she went back to life. James moved back to the farm, and that was that."
"So we can move around here?"
Silas looked at me like I was stupid. "Move around? Why, aren't we moving around right now?"
"I suppose we are," I conceded, then asked, "And do we always look the same?"
"No."
"Well, then, what do we look like?" I asked.
"We look pretty much like we do when we die in our most recent lives, except after we've been here a few months we can select what age we'd like to resemble."
"But, if you change how you look in between incarnations," I wondered, "how do your family, friends, neighbors recognize you?"
"Spirit eyes."
"How's that?"
"We see with our spirit, and we are known by our spirit. You cannot hide who you are from someone who sees with their spirit. So it doesn't matter what you look like. We always recognize one another by the spirit. You can hide from a lot of things, but you cannot hide from your spirit."
"And can you change your spirit?"
"Not up here, no. Little adjustments, maybe, as you come to learn more and more. But for major transformations you got to return to life. Circumstances down there, they can knock you on your spiritual axis if you let them. What some folks call trials and tribulations, problems, such as that - why, they ain't nothing but spirit opportunities, ways to help us grow. Takes a lot to see that, though, and most folks gotta live several lifetimes before they figure it out."
On the right side of the road, in the distance, I saw what seemed to be a rainbow carpet. We walked on, and the closer we got, the more radiant the carpet seemed. When we finally reached the field, I stopped, and Silas stopped with me. I gasped at the beauty.
"Gorganians," he said. "These flowers are indigenous to a planet I can't pronounce. Most colorful planet in the universe, I'm told. Purple sky at night, pink sky during the day, grass is kind of a blend of red and blue, and their water is pink. It rains in pink. Pretty little things, ain't they?"
The flowers were about five to ten inches tall, and each one had thick, multicolored petals with multiple shades of yellow, orange, green, violet.
"They're breathtaking," I whispered in awe. "I've never seen anything like it."
"Me, neither," Silas said. "Sallie, she wants our next life to be on that planet. She keeps inviting Stoilisk and his wife over for dinner, constantly pumps them for information."
"You don't want to go?"
"Not really," Silas answered quietly and sighed. Then, with a chipper in his voice, he added, "But I don't want to spend a lifetime away from Sallie. She wants to go, I expect we'll go. But not for awhile yet."
"When do you think you might leave?" I asked.
"Well, we've only been back here a few decades or so. We decided after our last life we'd stay around at least until the next Open House in Heaven, which comes up in a few more years. They've built a new wing on the Museum and we want to see it before we take off again."
"Museum?"
"Yes," Silas said. "Museum of Unnatural History. Very peculiar to my way of thinking, a lot of folks really enjoy it. Anyway, they've just finished their latest addition on the building. Sallie's dying to see it." Silas giggled. "Get it? 'Dying' to see it."
I rolled my eyes a little.
"So, I guess Heaven's got quite a bit of extraordinary architecture?" I asked.
Silas, his self-amusement waning, answered, "Architecture? Why, yes, they do get pretty exorbitant up there. A little too fancy for my taste, too palatial, if you want to know the truth. Very classy joints, restaurants, hotels, theme parks, libraries, museums, shopping malls, concert halls. All that gold and platinum and precious jewels, though, sort of bores you after awhile. But some folks, they just love it. Most folks, actually. Sallie's mad for it, goes there every Open House we're around for. Sallie wants to live in Heaven, at least for one eternity, but I don't, and she says she won't have Heaven without me. I'm going to surprise her someday, though, and we're going to have at least one eternity there. She'll like that fine."
"Guess they've got quite a few cathedrals and temples there?" I asked. "Mosques, synagogues?"
Silas looked at me blankly, then frowned at my ignorance again.
"What on earth would they need those for?" he asked.
I raised my eyebrows. "Religious services? Worship?" I suggested. "I mean, there must be an awfully lot of r
eligious folks in Heaven."
Silas laughed then, a little chuckle that barely shook his thin shoulders. "Not so many as you might imagine," he said. "In fact, in my experience, religion oftentimes impedes the path to Heaven. You get too wedded to a religion, it's liable to make you intolerant of other religions, or of no religions. Why, more people have been killed in the name of this or that ideology than all the disease and famine in history. No, little Newbie," he shook his head sadly. "Folks make it to Heaven despite their religion, not because of it. Takes a few lifetimes for folks to understand this, but most of them do. Eventually."
"But I thought…."
"Now, don't get me wrong," Silas said. "There are some decent folks who have strong religious fervor. Why, some of my best friends are religious. But you gotta remember, there's no real relationship between faith and morality. Oh, some folks of faith are very moral, no question about it. But there are many people with impeccable morals who have no adherence to any religion whatsoever. And I know some very devout people who would soon as tell a lie as say a prayer. They all find themselves neighbors in eternity. Heaven. Paradise. And the Basement. Ah," he said with a lift in his voice. "Here's our turnoff."
CHAPTER SIX