The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (11 page)

Chapter 12

Ras Ballenger had better things to do with his day than chase around through the woods after a kid who kept wandering off. Lately, every time he’d needed Blade to go fetch him his Bull Durham, or to bring him a jug of ice water from the house, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Used to be, Blade disappeared only to put off getting a strapping when he’d done something he shouldn’t, or to keep from having to hear his mama blubbering when she’d gotten out of line. But nowadays, he was like swamp fire. Here, there, and gone. It looked like he’d have figured out by now that running off only made things worse, but that young’un had to learn everything the hard way.

Ras had made up his mind that, when he caught up to him this time, he’d get his point across good and proper. A horse wasn’t the only thing that could be cross-tied.

But here he was, standing high on the rise over the creek, and there Blade was down in the water, and there that little bit of a girl was hanging out over the swimming hole, with her skirts hiked up. All of a sudden, Ras wasn’t so mad anymore.

He had his whip all rolled up in one hand. He didn’t have to tell the little girl to get still, because she did that as soon as she laid eyes on him.

“Now, don’t be scared,” he said, real nice and soft. “I’m just gonna snag that vine with this whip and pull you over here and get you untangled.”

Swan’s eyes were big as saucers. She was trying hard to swallow, but her throat didn’t want to cooperate. She sure did wish she could fly.

Still, maybe Ballenger didn’t intend to hurt her. Maybe he was only mean to his own kids. A lot of people were like that—nicer to everybody else than they were to their own flesh and blood.

And anyway, the snakeman was rearing back with his whip, about to let it fly. If she moved a muscle, he might take her arm off.

The tail of the whip whistled through the air and popped as it wound around the grapevine, about two feet above Swan’s head. Ras jerked back on the whip and dragged Swan through empty space like she was on a trapeze. As soon as she swung into reach, he grabbed hold of the grapevine with his free hand and steadied it.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asked. Swan was trying to get free from the vine, but her hands were shaking, and her legs were like water. It was all she could do to stand up. She shook her head timidly.

Ras laughed and started easing her arm free from the vine. Her stomach lurched when he touched her.

“You ain’t got nothing to be afraid of, little pretty,” he said, just as cheerful as sunrise. He made sure not to put his hands anywhere except on her arm and shoulder while he worked. He made sure not to look as she tugged her skirt tail back down where it was supposed to be. He even patted her on the head.

The tough old vine had scraped and bruised the top of Swan’s arm, and now that she was safe, she could feel the pain. She gritted her teeth, trying not to cry.

Ras made a sympathetic clucking sound. “You need to git home and let your mama put something on that.”

She nodded and backed away from him.

Ras Ballenger bowed grandly. “Any time you need savin’, you just holler.”

She sure could holler. That’s what he was thinking later on, when he and Blade were headed back to the house. Ras was covering ground fast. The boy was trotting alongside, looking up at him and talking a mile a minute.

“That was something, what you did with the whip,” he was saying. “You just let ’er fly, and popped that ole grapevine a hummer. That was sure something, what you did with the whip.”

Ras reached down and patted his son on the head, just the way he had patted the girl on the head a few minutes earlier.

“Bet you’re hopin’ I don’t pop you a hummer, too,” he said.

The little boy gulped. He had been thinking maybe his father had forgotten that the reason he’d had to come off down to the creek and the reason he was carrying the whip had anything to do with each other.

Ras looked down at him and smiled. It wasn’t a bad smile, like sometimes. He sifted through the boy’s hair with his hand.

“Well, you’re wrong,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ to take the whip to you.”

Blade gulped again, this time from blessed relief. “You’re not?”

“Nawwwww,” Ras said.

Then, snake-quick, he knotted his fingers in the boy’s hair, yanked him up off the ground, gave him a toss off to one side, and kept on walking.

When Swan got back to the Revival Grounds, the deacons had the tent up and were constructing a pulpit out of rocks and deadwood. It wasn’t going to be a very high pulpit, Noble explained. If they tried to build it too high, it would fall down. But he had seen this one evangelist once who was so tall that he had to kind of hunker over the pulpit to see his sermon notes. Swan could, maybe, play like she was tall.

Swan told him he was crazy as hell if he thought she was going to hunker over anything. Then she slunk off toward the house. Which meant that Noble got to be the evangelist, and Bienville had to be the whole congregation.

Sid and Nicey and Lovey weren’t the only relatives who had shown up while Swan was off where she had no business being. Alvis was there, too, with Eudora. Their kids were all in town at the movies—something Swan and her brothers never got to do, going to the movies being a sin in Samuel’s eyes. The grown-ups were lolling around on the porch and in the yard, finger snapping and foot tapping while Samuel played “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on his five-string banjo.

When Samuel saw Swan scurrying past, he stopped playing and called out to her. “Hey, little girl. You want to sing a song with your daddy?”

She shook her head and kept walking.

He sweetened the offer. “We’ll do ‘Faded Love.’”

But not even the thought of those sweet harmonies could tempt her to join the fun.

Alvis, the worst cutup in the bunch, was leaning against the biggest old oak tree in the yard. He grabbed Swan, out of the blue, and started dancing her around. She jerked away from him like he was poison and kept on going.

Alvis looked perplexed, and sniffed his armpits, and said, “I can’t smell that bad.”

As a matter of fact, he smelled like Dial soap and Old Spice. Alvis Moses was an auto mechanic, who spent half his life covered with grease and sweat and the other half so clean he gleamed.

“She’s just going through a stage,” Grandma Calla said.

“Then y’all better look out,” Alvis offered. “Them stages can drain you.”

Swan stomped up onto the porch and stepped around Lovey, who was playing with a couple of walking dolls near the screen door. Lovey was allowed to wear shorts and had on a navy blue pair, with the cutest little white sailor top. For a second, Swan thought about hauling her back down to the swimming hole and baptizing her good. But no way was she going back to that swimming hole. There were dangers down there that even her parents didn’t know about.

Lovey didn’t ask her to come play dolls, which was just as well. Swan hated dolls. She slammed into the house and on to the bathroom, to doctor her scrapes with Mercurochrome—otherwise known as Monkey Blood.

She wished she could tell the men of the family that she was scared to death of Ras Ballenger, and ask them to be on the lookout for him and protect her from him. But she couldn’t. If she asked for help, she’d have to explain about breaking the rules, and that would take more courage than she had in her. You have to figure the percentages in these things. If she stuck close to home from now on, there was probably at least a fifty-fifty chance that she could avoid Ras Ballenger. But if her folks ever found out what she had done, the odds were double to nothing that she’d have no place to hide.

The Moses family was used to the ebb and flow of music from Never Closes. Used to car doors slamming and muffled voices, and voices that needed to be muffled. They never locked their doors at night, and never worried about anyone slipping into the house. After all, no one ever had. But several times that week, doors were eased open, and hallways explored, and stairs were climbed silently, and no one asleep in the bedrooms was any the wiser.

Sometimes the visits took place in broad daylight—although, in the daytime, the prowler stayed away from the house, peering through a chink hole in the shed, or hiding in the hayloft, or crouching at the edge of the woods. Patient, and observant, and silent as a stone.

On one sultry afternoon, Samuel was standing beside his and Willadee’s bedroom window, picking out a song on his guitar. It was a lonesome kind of song, and he knew he ought to switch over to something more upbeat, since it’s not good to stay in a melancholy mood too long, but the lonesome song kept winning out. He closed his eyes and rode the notes, and it was almost like a prayer, just feeling that sweet, sad music. When he opened his eyes, he looked out over the Moses farm. It was a comforting sight, even in its present state of neglect. Sam Lake had been a farm boy before he got to be a preacher. He loved good earth—the smell of it, and the feel of it in his hands. Loved what could be done with it when a person cared enough to sweat over it, and give to it.

Somebody ought to do something with this place. Somebody ought to lay into it and love it and woo it back to what it used to be. That’s what he was thinking. Then his thoughts were interrupted, because something caught his eye. Down there, in what used to be the hay meadow, half-hidden by the fuzzy, gray-green sea of goatweed. A small, dark-haired boy, gazing at the house.

Samuel went downstairs and out into the meadow, but there was no sign that anyone had been there. Nothing except a bare spot of ground where someone had been drawing in the dirt.

Other than that, Blade Ballenger had left without a trace.

Chapter 13

Bernice was wise enough not go on too much about the difference the Lord was making in her life. She knew full well that the more you talk about a thing, the less likely folks are to believe it, so her plan was to let her actions speak louder than words.

First off, she was determined to start being at church every time the doors opened. Willadee had never made a secret of the fact that she thought worshiping God and going to church were two different things altogether, and she had been known to miss a service now and then. Bernice was positive she could show Willadee up in that department.

Second, she was going to start singing solos, as soon as somebody noticed how pretty she could sing and asked her to.

Bernice hadn’t sung in a while, not so much as a note, because who wants to sing when they’re sad, and she had been sad so much for so long. But she used to sing, back before she lost Samuel to Willadee. That was one of the things that had gotten her and Samuel together to start with. Samuel used to come over and sit on the front porch with Bernice’s brother, Van, both of them picking on their old guitars. Bernice would sit out there with them and sing up a storm, and Samuel would just get lost in the music. And in her.

Third, she supposed she was going to have to start living differently, although the only thing she really wanted to change about her life was the man in it. Still, church people were forever talking about how God had made them over, so she guessed she could make herself over and let God take the credit.

She could handle that. A woman can handle almost anything when she’s got a good enough reason. And Bernice looked across the supper table at that reason every night. Sometimes it was all she could do to keep from reaching over and touching him.

But she was not that stupid. She could pass him the mashed potatoes, and let her fingertips brush his for an instant. Stand behind him, and lean across to set the corn bread on the table, and let her body press against his shoulder for one electric second. So easy. But not smart.

Good works were smart.

So she offered to help out more around Calla’s house, and wouldn’t you know, Calla put a mop in her hand. Far be it from Calla Moses to just let Bernice do the things that came to mind, such as—Well, nothing really came to mind, but she had offered to help, and it seemed to her that Calla could have thanked her for being so thoughtful and let it go at that.

She contemplated other good works she could do, such as visiting the sick and the elderly, but that wouldn’t help her to be around Samuel, unless she asked him to drive her, which she couldn’t get by with, since she knew how to drive. Besides, being around the sick and the elderly made her skin crawl.

Toy was surprised when Bernice started making over him again the way she had back when they were courting. Surprised—but so glad he could have cried. He knew that Bernice might be doing all this for show, just to impress Samuel with how virtuous she was becoming, and he told himself that no man should be as big a fool over a woman as he was over his wife. But his “self” didn’t listen. His “self” was just eating this up, like a kid sucking on candy.

Toy Moses couldn’t believe the
taste
life had these days. Bernice would be smiling when he woke up late in the afternoon. She would bring him coffee and talk to him while he drank it. When they were driving to Calla’s, she would sit right beside him instead of way over on the other side of the car—and when he’d slip his arm around her, she’d snuggle like a bird into a nest.

One night, at the supper table, about a week after her conversion, he caught her looking at him with this kind of glow, the way a woman does when she’s falling in love, or falling back into love. Toy wasn’t the only one who noticed. Samuel and Willadee both blinked, and Calla nearly choked on her collards.

Toy didn’t care. Let them all think that Bernice was building him up for another fall. Let them think any damn thing they wanted. Toy wanted more than anything to trust Bernice, and he was the kind of man who would risk everything for something he believed in.

“Shameless” was what Calla had to say about it. It was Thursday morning, and she and Willadee were hanging laundry on the line out in the backyard. Bernice had gone to prayer meeting the night before with Samuel and Willadee and the kids, and she had looked simply luscious, wearing this virginal smile and a modest little princess-style dress that showed off how much tinier her waist was than the parts above and below it. It had been all Calla could do not to drag her out of the car and tell her she could do her praying at home.

“We can’t say she’s not sincere,” Willadee said. Although she knew better.

“She’s sincere, all right,” Calla muttered. “And we know what she’s sincere
about.
”

Willadee hung a sheet, making sure to smooth it out and keep the corners straight. You hang a sheet right, it comes off the line looking like it’s been ironed.

“Mama,” she said, “it doesn’t matter what Bernice does. It’s what Samuel does that counts. And he’s too good a man to let go of his principles.”

Calla grunted under her breath. She believed in Samuel’s goodness, too. The trouble was, she believed just as strongly in Bernice’s ability to take anything good and flat-out ruin it.

Willadee felt guilty for talking about giving Bernice the benefit of the doubt when she wasn’t doing that herself. To tell the truth, though, she didn’t think her sister-in-law’s case of religion would last very long. Bernice would keep up her act for a little while, but when she saw it wasn’t going to get her what she wanted, she’d give it up.

The worst thing about it was that Toy was bound to get hurt again, and he’d been hurt enough. Willadee said as much to Samuel early one morning, right after Toy and Bernice had left for the day. Bernice had been especially attentive to Toy at breakfast, calling him honey, and buttering his toast, and laying her hand on his arm when she probably hadn’t touched him on purpose in years. Butter wasn’t the only thing she could spread on thick.

“I wouldn’t be too worried about him,” Samuel told Willadee. The two of them were in the bathroom with the door closed. She was perched on the side of the bathtub shaving her legs while he stood at the sink shaving his face. It had been three weeks since he’d come back from the Methodist conference, and he was about to go job hunting. He kept one side of his face taut while he drew the razor down across it. “He’s been looking pretty happy lately.”

“That’s what worries me. She’s got him fooled again.”

“Now, we don’t know that.”

Samuel’s voice was patient and kind—and just the slightest bit reproving. Willadee jerked around so fast she nicked her ankle.

“Don’t tell me she’s got you fooled, too,” she said. Her leg was stinging like crazy, but that sting wasn’t the one that was smarting the most.

“I’m not taking up for her,” he protested. “I’m just saying that we can’t possibly know what’s in somebody else’s heart.”

“I know what’s in hers.” Willadee hated herself for saying that. As a rule, she and Samuel were on the same wavelength about things. She waited for Samuel to say something else, but he was shaving again, paying close attention to what he was doing. Willadee turned back around and started shaving again, too. For the first time since she was fifteen years old, she cut herself in three different places.

Outside, the sky was dull gray, and the air felt heavy, like the elements were about to turn loose and do something terrible. Willadee tried to talk Samuel into staying home, but he wasn’t about to let his kids see him sitting around idle. He figured the weather was like a lot of people. Most of their threats never got carried out. Besides, the Bible said that a man who didn’t provide for his family was worse than an infidel. And even if the Bible hadn’t said a word about it, Samuel couldn’t stand the idea of living off of Calla.

Already, he had been making phone calls, and sending out letters, offering his services to other pastors he had known for years.

If they were wanting to go on vacation and needed a relief preacher …

If they felt the Lord leading them to hold a revival anytime soon and hadn’t yet selected an evangelist …

Try as he would, Samuel could not think of himself as an evangelist. To his way of thinking, an evangelist was kind of a lone wolf who roamed from flock to flock, driving strays into the fold. Maybe
wolf
wasn’t the right term, precisely, since the sheep were in no danger of being eaten alive. And they
were
being driven into the fold for their own good. But a shepherd didn’t drive his flock, he led it. And Samuel was a shepherd, pure and simple. All he wanted was to have a flock of his own, and lead it beside the still waters, and protect it from harm, and seek out the lost, and gently bring them home to peace and safety. Traveling from town to town, spending a week here and two weeks there, and leaving folks behind without really getting to know them—none of that appealed to him at all.

He needn’t have worried. All the ministers he contacted already had their vacations and revivals planned, and their pulpits filled. They seemed to feel bad about turning him down, though, and they all promised to keep him in mind, in case anything came up.

Sam Lake knew how to do a lot of things. He could sing, and make music, and help people to see the best in themselves and each other. He could get a couple who were on the verge of divorce to start talking, and he could guide the conversation along until they remembered why they had fallen in love in the first place, and forgot about whatever had convinced them that the love was gone. He could persuade a thief to give back what he had taken, and to be a man and come clean about it. He could talk a judge or a constable into going easy on someone who deserved a second chance. He could visit a teenage girl who had just given birth out of wedlock, and by the time he left, she would be feeling proud of her child instead of ashamed of herself.

But none of the things Sam Lake knew how to do were mentioned in the Magnolia
Banner-News
help wanted ads.

The first place he stopped was at the Eternal Rock Monument Company, in Magnolia, where they needed a salesman in the worst way. The man who ran the office, Mr. Lindale Stroud, took one look at Samuel and decided what everybody always decided when they looked at Samuel: that he was the kind of man nobody could say no to. He hired him on the spot.

The way Samuel’s new job worked was, he drove around calling on people who had recently lost a loved one, and he told them how he sympathized with them in this their time of grief—which was no exaggeration. He really did have compassion for people who were suffering. He would visit with them, just getting a feel for their circumstances, and then he’d ask them whether they had thought about picking out a monument to commemorate their beloved. If they hadn’t, he’d talk with them a bit more, helping them to see the importance of doing it now instead of putting it off, since time slips away when we’re not looking. Finally, he would open the three-ring binder that Mr. Lindale Stroud had provided and show the folks the glossy photos of all the various styles of monuments available.

To make it all easier for the families who couldn’t afford to pay in full (and most couldn’t), the monument company had an E-Z payment plan. The plan had a not so E-Z interest rate, which bothered Samuel. He would work it all out for the folks, showing them how they’d be paying the full price several times over if they took the E-Z plan, but nobody wanted to hear those explanations. It was just too tempting to sign on the dotted line and pay the small down payment. All those future weekly payments seemed worlds away.

By the time the storm hit, at 3:08
P.M.,
Samuel had already made his first sale.

Willadee had kept the kids inside most of the day, because she had a bad feeling about the weather and didn’t want to have to track them down if it turned ugly. Swan and her brothers had never lived in tornado country, and had never witnessed a twister during their visits to Arkansas, so they didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The ominous cloud banks hanging above the horizon didn’t seem nearly as threatening as the thunderheads they were used to back home in Louisiana. The long, lead-colored banks looked as if they had been sheared off, flat across the bottom, and regular sky showed underneath. Rain drizzled, and lightning feathered through the clouds, and thunder rumbled, and the treetops churned in the wind. None of this seemed especially scary to the kids, even when little tails dipped down out of the flat bottoms of the clouds and felt around, like they were looking for something to lock on to.

All day long, Willadee had kept going to the window and looking out, or stepping onto the porch and frowning at the sky, and saying she wished Samuel would hurry up and get back. About midafternoon, Calla came through the house from the store, and stood on the porch with Willadee, and frowned at the sky, too.

“I never saw a man had a lick of sense,” Calla said. Which wasn’t true at all. Her sons had plenty of sense, and so did Samuel. Even John had had a good head on his own shoulders, back before the liquor scorched his brain. But griping about men not having any sense was easier for Calla than admitting that she was worried about Samuel.

“Well, I know he’s all right,” Willadee said, trying to convince herself.

The kids had been hanging half in and half out the front door, and now they ventured out on the porch, to help with the weather watch.

“Why is the sky turning green?” Bienville wanted to know.

“Why is your bee-hind about to turn red?” Grandma Calla asked. Then she saved him the trouble of answering. “Because I’m about to swat it, that’s why.”

Swan said, “Well, the weather’s not doing anything. The wind’s not even blowing anymore.”

She was right. Willadee had been so busy watching the sky that she hadn’t noticed the sudden, eerie stillness. Now she looked at her mother, who was looking at her, and they both went grim around the mouth.

“Get inside, and get your pillows off your beds,” Willadee told them. “And go climb in the bathtub with the pillows over your heads, until I tell you.”