The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (18 page)

The chinaberry thicket ran back to a stand of loblolly pines, which gave way to what used to be a cornfield, back when John Moses was still farming, but was just an overgrown mess nowadays. Blade cut through the brush and scrabble until he came to the creek, and he followed it to the Old Swimming Hole.

There’s something about being in the water that makes life feel right, and Blade almost forgot for a while that it wasn’t that way at all. He’d left Bienville’s clothes on the creek bank, so he felt free as the minnows that were darting around in the shallows. He dove and he swam and he floated and he thought. Thought about those kids he’d been playing with earlier, and about how he almost got to be a deputy for a United States marshal. Now that would have been fine.

He had a notion that he might stay in the swimming hole all day, and then go back and sleep in those people’s barn, just like last night, and in the morning, Swan would come for him again, only this time she wouldn’t let anybody take him away. She was smart, Swan was, and Blade didn’t think that anybody could put the same thing over on her twice.

That’s what was going on in his mind when, all at once, every bird stopped singing, and every cricket stopped fiddling, and every frog stopped advertising for a mate. The world got too quiet too fast, and it was too late to hide before Blade Ballenger even realized he needed to.

Chapter 22

Willadee knew that Samuel was going to get a cool reception that evening from his children. As far as they were concerned, what he had done that morning was out of character for him. The Samuel they knew stood up for what was right, no matter what. The fact that he’d done what he
thought
was right escaped them. Willadee tried to explain it to them that afternoon, when she came out of the garden with a bucket of fresh tomatoes and found them sitting on the porch steps with their chins in their hands and sullen looks on their faces.

“Your daddy did what had to be done,” she told them. “If we’d kept Blade here, there would have been trouble.”

None of that made Samuel look any bigger in their eyes. They’d always seen their daddy as a man who persuaded people to change, not the other way around.

“Just because he’s not a preacher anymore doesn’t mean he should be as bad as everybody else,” Swan blurted.

“He’s still a preacher,” Willadee said. They all hunched their shoulders and shut her out. She was on their bad list, too. “What on earth makes you think he’s not a preacher anymore?”

“He doesn’t have a church. Where’s he going to preach?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Then how can he be a preacher?”

Willadee felt like maybe she ought to say that Samuel was a preacher because God had called him to preach. But that wasn’t how Willadee saw it. The way she saw it, Samuel had called himself. He’d fallen in love with God, and when you’re in love you can’t keep from talking about it, it’s as simple as that.

That’s not what she told the kids, though. To them, she said, “He just is.”

Swan hugged her knees to her chest and glared off at the road. “Well, I hope he doesn’t expect me to go to church anymore,” she declared. “Because I don’t have to do right if he doesn’t.”

Willadee had to smile. When a kid threatens something she can’t possibly go through with, an adult feels easier about a situation. Like maybe it’s not as bad as it seemed. Toy had not yet told her that the man Blade had run away from and the man who had mistreated the horse were one and the same, so she was thinking that, likely as not, everything had turned out just fine. The kid might have gotten a licking for running away like that, but his folks had to be glad to see him when he got home. And Samuel surely would have brought out the goodness in everybody concerned.

“Yes, you do,” she said.

“Well, I don’t see why.”

“You don’t have to see why. But you do have to mind your daddy and me. If you think that’s changed, you’ve got another think coming.”

Swan still wouldn’t look at her, but Willadee didn’t care. A child that doesn’t have strong opinions is one that won’t amount to much. She did care how Swan and her brothers treated Samuel, though.

“Now, I don’t want you acting like this when your daddy gets home,” she told them. “He’s got enough on him right now without having to feel like his kids are disappointed in him.”

Swan said, “Well, we are.”

And Noble said, “I wish he could have figured out another way to handle it.”

Bienville shook his head like an old man who’s decided that the world is going to the dogs. “We may be the only kids in the world who ever lost a horse and an Indian scout in one day.”

Swan said, “He wasn’t an Indian scout. He was my friend.”

Samuel had figured the kids would have a hard time forgiving him over Blade. He was having a hard time forgiving himself. The fact that Blade had escaped was something he felt as both a relief and a burden, and he said as much at the supper table, when he was telling what had happened.

Swan, who had avoided looking at him since he got home, met his eyes hopefully.

“You mean he got clean away?” she asked.

“Clean as a whistle.”

“Then maybe his daddy didn’t get him.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

There were smiles lighting faces all around that table, everybody except Bernice becoming suddenly animated. Even Toy looked glad, and he wasn’t one to let his feelings show on his face.

“Maybe he’ll sleep in our barn again tonight!” Bienville yodeled.

“Maybe he will.”

They didn’t talk about whether they’d have to give him up again if he did come back. Some things you take a step at a time, and how they’d get to keep Blade Ballenger was one of them.

“Well, if he comes in this house to steal food tonight,” Grandma Calla announced, “he’s going to get a big ole jar of Willadee’s chicken and dumplings.”

She went over to the stove and got the buttermilk pie that Willadee had made and brought it back to the table.

Samuel said, “Don’t cut a piece for me, Calla. I’m so full, I don’t believe I’m going to have any room for pie.”

Noble said, “Me, neither. I reckon I’ll have to pass up pie tonight.” And buttermilk pie was his favorite.

It turned out that everybody was too full, so the pie never got cut and was transferred whole back to the stove, where a small child stealing leftovers couldn’t possibly miss it.

“I hope he don’t eat the whole thing at once,” Calla worried aloud. “I’d hate for him to get sick out there all by himself.”

“Oh, he won’t be by himself,” Swan assured her.

Willadee wasn’t certain what she thought about Swan’s idea of sleeping out in the barn, but Samuel said he figured she’d be all right, since her brothers were determined to stay with her. Toy offered to check on them, off and on, since he’d be up working all night anyway, and the kids made him promise that he wouldn’t be too obvious. They didn’t want to scare Blade off. If he showed up and things looked out of the ordinary, he might cut and run.

Willadee and Samuel loaded the kids down with blankets and pillows and flashlights and toilet paper, and went out to the barn to help them settle in. By that time, the offering on the stove had grown somewhat larger than usual. There were leftovers from the supper Willadee had cooked, plus an all-day sucker that Calla had brought in from the store and an old cat’s-eye marble that Swan had found half-buried out in Calla’s yard. Noble had added a stack of baseball cards, and Bienville had donated a
National Geographic
with foldout maps of South America. Samuel thought every little boy should have a Bible, so he laid a pocket-size New Testament on top of the
National Geographic.
Toy didn’t contribute anything as long as anybody was watching, but sometime along the way, a hand-carved slingshot got added to the mix, and it was a safe bet that Bernice hadn’t put it there.

Swan didn’t intend to sleep. Did not intend to sleep at all. Not until Blade showed up. Willadee and Samuel spread several blankets over the old hay, and the kids crawled between the blankets with their heads toward the barn door. They lay on their bellies, and propped on their elbows, and watched their parents heading back to the house—Willadee and Samuel, talking and laughing, their voices high and deep, and soft and strong, all full of contrasts and harmonies. It was the finest music in the world.

There was other music, reverberating from Never Closes, but none so sweet. Swan and the boys listened until Samuel’s and Willadee’s voices faded, and then they watched until the two disappeared into the house. After that, they watched for Blade.

In her faded bedroom, Calla Moses was watching, too. She pulled her rocker over beside the window and drew the curtains back, so that nothing would obscure her view. When the boy showed up, she wanted to see him. Wanted to be a witness when he hauled his loot down to the barn and got the surprise of his life at finding the other kids there to welcome him. She wouldn’t be able to see it all from where she sat, but she planned to see all she could, and imagine the rest.

All her life, she’d been a practical sort. Nonsense and Calla Moses didn’t go together. These days, though, something was turning loose inside her. Maybe it was having the kids around that was making it happen. Them, with all their games and foolishness. Or maybe it was the horse, appearing like that, out of nowhere, looking, except for the stripes he wore, like something out of a storybook. And now that night-eyed boy had come and captured them all.

Whatever it was, Calla’s imagination had waked up from a long sleep, and these days she had the feeling that magic and miracles might be hovering in the air all around, waiting to happen. She wasn’t a great believer in such things, but she didn’t push the thought away.

Willadee and Samuel watched for Blade from the living room. They’d have waited in their bedroom, but the windows opened onto the wrong side of the yard. If they’d looked out from there, all they’d have seen would have been the cars pulling in and out of Never Closes. And they couldn’t very well watch from the kitchen, since that was where they hoped Blade Ballenger would go first, when he arrived.

If he arrived.

In the meantime, they talked about everything else. About how school would be starting before they could hardly turn around, and the kids were outgrowing their clothes, but Willadee could sew, and could draw patterns on newspaper that worked as well as the store-bought kind. The dresses she’d made for Swan in the past had always turned out prettier than the ready-mades. She guessed she could make a shirt for a boy as easily as she could make a dress for a girl, and in less time, too, because there wouldn’t be so much handwork. You want to totally ruin a boy’s life, just try sending him to school in a shirt that shows off your cross-stitch and smocking.

Sometime in the night they went to sleep, there on Calla’s settee, with their clothes on and their shoes off, and more on their minds than they were apt to let on to anybody besides each other.

Bernice didn’t watch for Blade, but she watched herself in the mirror for the longest time. She sat at the little dressing table in her bedroom, and brushed her hair out over her bare shoulders, and studied the curve of her cheekbones and the hollow at the base of her throat. She stood up and stretched her arms and gazed at the reflection of her body, and she just wanted to bust out bawling, because she was every inch perfection, and it was all going to waste.

Toy Moses made a lot of trips outside that night, leaving the regulars to drink on the honor system. The customers would get themselves drinks and adjust their tabs in John’s old ragged notebook, which Toy still kept. Nobody asked him why he kept stepping out into the night and standing around in the shadows, and Toy never offered an explanation. The two best things about Never Closes were that nobody owed anybody information about anything and everybody looked out for everybody else.

Half a dozen times, Toy skirted around the yard and stole down to the barn to see about the kids. They were always all right, but the last time he checked, which was just before daybreak, there were still only three.

Blade had never thought much about mice, but he thought about them now, because his daddy had told him that the room might be full of them, and that they could chew through walls, so they wouldn’t have any trouble chewing through a boy.

That’s where Blade was. In a room with a dirt floor, where he had been for hours. He wasn’t sure how many.

The darkness in there was beyond black. Beyond endless. When Ras Ballenger built something, he built it airtight and solid. There was no way for light to get in, even if there was light outside, so Blade didn’t know whether it was day or night. He thought it must be night, because he couldn’t hear Blue jabbering. Or his daddy answering. Or the cur dogs barking and baying. Or anything at all.

He was naked. As naked as he had been in the swimming hole, when there was a sudden splash and he jerked his head around to see the water erupting the way it does when something or someone has hit the surface hard and gone under. When he saw that, his heart nearly jumped out of his mouth, because he knew what it meant. Thought he did. He started swimming for shore, but then something came up beneath him and grabbed his foot, and pulled him under, and kept him there forever.

He fought. For all the good it did. The depths of the swimming hole were clear, and he could see his daddy’s face through the pale green water. His daddy, grinning at him, like this was a game and he was winning.

Blade had seen his daddy catch a catfish once with his bare hands. The man was that quick. And that’s how Blade felt. Like that catfish. Caught without hope.

And then it was over. Blade’s daddy, dragging him out of the swimming hole, and dumping him on the ground, and noosing a lead rope around his neck while he lay there sucking air and puking water. A lead rope. Like he was a horse that was about to be led into the barn to be cross-tied. Ras left the end of the lead rope lying on the ground while he got dressed (he’d shucked his clothes before he dove into the swimming hole), and Blade tried once to get the thing off his neck. But Ras lunged for the rope and jerked it, hard, and Blade’s head threatened to come right off his shoulders, so he didn’t try that again. Just stayed still and looked for chances.

But there weren’t any chances. Ras drove him in front of him through the woods and home, leaving Bienville’s clothes scattered on the creek bank.

And now here he was.

He was cold. It was the middle of summer, but he was lying curled in a ball, and he was shivering. His hands wanted to trace patterns in the dirt, because that always helped his feelings, but he was scared to move. Terrified of what he might brush up against, and of the thousand furry things that might come out of hiding. Swarming, hungry things. He wondered whether mice made noises while they ate, or whether his screams would be the only sounds, and whether his mother would hear and come to help.

She hadn’t come yet, and he had screamed aplenty. Screamed and beat on the walls until his voice played out and his fists were bloody. He couldn’t see the blood, but he could taste it when he sucked on his hands to stop the hurting.

There hadn’t been any sound for the longest time, but now he heard a bobwhite call, so maybe it was morning. He sat up. Everything hurt. His hands, his arms, his legs, his neck. His skin, and his muscles, and his bones. He listened for that bobwhite to call again, and it did, and that gave him a peg to mark his place in the world. He could call this moment “day.”