The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (20 page)

Only, they never got a chance to implement the plan. They had just crawled under a barbed-wire fence that they reckoned (rightly) marked the boundary between Grandma Calla’s land and the Ballenger place when they heard a voice. The boys didn’t recognize it, although they could figure out who it belonged to. Swan didn’t have to figure. She knew for sure.

“Whoops!” Ras Ballenger was saying.
Taunting.
“Where you think you’re goin’? Nope. Not that way.” And then, “Not that way, either.”

Swan and her brothers got still as statues, afraid to even breathe. After a moment, they crept along toward the sound, which was coming from the other side of a bank of weeping willows.

They had to scrunch down low and pick their way through the drooping branches. Careful not to rustle the leaves on the trees, or the ones underfoot. When they were almost to the other side, they spied a clearing up ahead—a big open space where a couple of large pines had been uprooted, probably in the storm. The pines had fallen crossways, snapping off several of each other’s limbs in the process. Broken branches littered the ground.

There in the middle of the mess was Blade. Not a hundred yards away. He was wearing clothes that were grime-encrusted, and he was just as dirty, his fine black hair matted to his scalp. He was gathering wood. Scurrying about, this way and that, faster and faster, as his father popped his hateful bullwhip and barked instructions.

“Missed a piece there!” Ballenger yelped, herding the boy back and forth. “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you do anything right?”

Swan was so stricken at the sight that she reached out and grabbed hold of Noble’s arm to steady herself. Bienville was on the other side of Noble, and he grabbed hold of his big brother’s shirttail. Noble let the others hold on to him, but he himself was having trouble standing up.

Then it happened. Blade couldn’t move fast enough to escape the whip, and it caught him about the face. He let out a piteous bleating sound and stopped darting around. Stopped moving at all.

Swan and her brothers stared in horror at their friend’s startled look. At the blood that was leaking from where his right eye
had been.

Swan fainted.

Noble felt his sister letting go of his arm, and he managed to catch her before she hit the ground. Managed to let her down easy, so she wouldn’t get hurt in the fall, or hit with a thud that would alert Ballenger to their presence. Bienville had turned loose from Noble’s shirttail and was standing rigid, with his eyes squenched shut and his lips clamped together, so Noble was the only one who saw what happened next.

Ras Ballenger got a look at what he had done and he shook his head more like he was inconvenienced than like he was sorry. Still carrying the whip in his right hand, he went over and scooped Blade up and carried him under his left arm like a farmer might carry a squealing pig. Out of the clearing. Out of sight.

Gone.

Chapter 24

Willadee saw them coming when they topped a rise far out in the pasture and headed into the homestretch. They were following an old, worn cow path, the one they always took. She’d seen them make that trek dozens of times and never felt her heart seize up inside her chest, but that’s the way it felt this time.

She was out in the backyard shelling purple hull peas, her thumbs and fingers stained all to glory and the dishpan in her lap half full. She set the dishpan aside and stood up to get a better look. Something was wrong. She knew it. For one thing, Swan wasn’t in the lead, and that hardly ever happened. For another thing, she was holding Noble’s hand.

Bienville was tagging along behind. Nothing unusual about that, he was always tagging along behind. But his shoulders were hunched, and he kept swabbing at his eyes and nose with his shirtsleeve.

“Toy!” Willadee hollered out. “Toy, come quick, something’s wrong with the children!”

Toy was inside Never Closes when he heard Willadee shouting his name. It wasn’t time to open yet. It wasn’t even time for supper. He and Bernice had just arrived a few minutes before, and he’d gone into the bar early to clean it up a little. He went rushing out and saw Willadee running toward the pasture. By the time he caught up with her, she and the kids were already meeting in the middle, and Willadee was flinging her arms around all three of them at once.

“It was horrible,” Noble was saying. Shuddering.

Bienville looked as if he might get sick all over his mother.

“His eye was gone!” he cried. “Just—
gone.
”

Swan balled up her fists and started pounding them against her legs. “We let him down!” she shrieked. “We were right there, watching, and we let him down!”

“You didn’t let anybody down,” Grandma Calla said, emphatically.

They were all in the living room now. Calla, who had left the store without anyone to watch it as soon as she knew there was a family crisis, and Samuel, who had come home from work while the kids were spilling out their story, and Bernice, who had just known something this bad or worse was going to happen, and Toy and Willadee and the kids. Calla sat in her rocker, holding Swan. Bienville was in Willadee’s lap with his face pressed hard against her shoulder. Noble sat by himself on a hassock, holding on to the sides with both hands.

“We let him down something terrible,” Swan sobbed. “We never even got the clappers unwrapped.”

“What clappers?” Willadee wanted to know.

“We were going to try to scare Mr. Ballenger by ringing cowbells and blowing on duck calls,” Noble explained. You could tell he was embarrassed to admit it. After all, he was the oldest, and should have been the voice of reason.

At the word
cowbells,
Samuel cocked his head to one side, looking heartsick through and through.

“Like the priests with the trumpets at the Battle of Jericho,” Noble continued. “Only we had to wrap the clappers with rags so they wouldn’t make any noise until we were ready.”

At the word
rags,
Willadee and Calla cocked their heads, too. The pieces were falling into place, and the picture that was emerging would have been beautiful—if only it hadn’t all turned out so badly.

“And then, when Blade needed help the most, I just lost the use of myself,” Swan grieved. “If we’d stuck to the plan, we could have saved him.”

Willadee said, “You couldn’t have saved him, honey. You’d just have all gotten yourselves killed.”

“There’s wickedness in this world,” Grandma Calla told the kids, taking them all in with her glance. “And you might as well know it now. There are people who are evil to their core, and nothing they do is your fault.”

Noble said, “Well, somebody needs to stop him.”

It was quiet for a moment. The kids, waiting for one of the grown-ups to promise that somebody would, indeed, stop Ras Ballenger. The grown-ups, knowing that wasn’t a promise they could make.

Samuel got up silently and walked outside. The rest of them could hear him when he raised his voice, calling on God.

Toy Moses didn’t bother with calling on God, since he’d had so little practice at it and had never been convinced that it carried any benefit. Instead, he just picked up the phone and called the law.

Later that night, two deputies dropped by Never Closes and filled Toy in on the details of their investigation. Yes, the Ballenger boy had lost an eye that afternoon, but the father claimed the kid had fallen on a stob while he was picking up firewood, and the mother backed up his story.

“The mother wasn’t even there,” Toy pointed out.

“Were you?” one of the deputies asked. This particular deputy, Bobby Spikes, was a newcomer to the area (he’d lived in the county for only eight or nine years). He was also one of the few officers around who had never once raised a glass in Never Closes.

“If my kids say she wasn’t there,” Toy said, “she wasn’t there.”

“
Your
kids?” Spikes said.

The other deputy, a fellow named Dutch Hollensworth, had known Toy Moses since God made dirt, and he didn’t much care for the way Spikes was talking to a man whom he personally respected and got a lot of free drinks from.

“They’re his
kin,
” Dutch told Spikes. “And they’re Moses to the bone.”

“Right,” said Spikes, kind of dry. “And a Moses will not lie.”

So at least he knew the local lore, even if he didn’t put much stock in it.

“Anyway,” Spikes went on, “the Ballenger boy wouldn’t say a word, one way or the other. But his parents got him medical attention, the way any caring parents would, and the doctors wrote it up as an accident. In a case like this, there’s nothing the law can do.”

“Not in Columbia County, right?” Toy Moses said. He didn’t really mean for it to come out sounding like it did, but Spikes had gotten under his skin.

The deputy gave him a look and licked his tongue around the corner of his mouth for a second. “Once in a while, a crime goes unpunished.”

Which was about as close as anybody had ever come to accusing Toy Moses, to his face, of having committed a murder he never had to pay for. That wasn’t what Toy thought about, though, after the deputies had gone. What he puzzled over, off and on for days, was whatever had possessed him to say “my kids.”

Two weeks went by.

The kids had nightmares. Noble woke up once, in the middle of the night, to find Bienville crawling into bed with him. Shaking like a leaf.

“You, too, huh?” asked Noble.

“You mean I’m not the only one?”

“Not by a long shot,” Noble told him.

As for Swan, she took to sleeping in a chair. That way, when she jarred awake after seeing Ras Ballenger’s face in her dreams, at least she didn’t find herself trapped and tangled in her covers, unable to escape.

During the daytime, the boys stuck close to the house. Swan stayed to herself as much as possible. Willadee tried to draw them all out by offering to let them help her make tea cakes, and Calla offered the most precious gift she knew—the chance for them to help her with her flowers. Samuel offered to take them into town for ice cream. Calla kept ice cream in the store, but he figured ice cream is more of an event when you go a few miles to get it.

Nothing worked. The kids didn’t know what had become of their friend, and their misery was all they had to hold on to. In their heart of hearts, it felt as though letting go of their hurt, even for a little bit, would be the same as letting go of Blade. Forever.

“You can’t keep on like this,” Willadee told Swan one day, when she caught her moping in her room.

Swan, who had never heard the word
can’t
without arguing it to death, didn’t say a word.

“I know you’re worried about Blade,” Willadee said. “We all are. But we mustn’t draw up in a shell and shut the world out. That’s no way to live.”

Swan turned away.

Willadee came over and stood beside her. She didn’t try to put her arm around her daughter. Didn’t try to draw her close. Swan had been shrugging off every hand that reached out to her lately, and Willadee could understand. Sometimes a sense of loss can be so great that anyone who offers comfort seems to be making small of it.

“Well, here’s a list of chores,” she said, and she laid a slip of paper on the windowsill. (She had two more of those in her apron pocket—one for each of the boys.) “When you’re done, you can come back up here and be sad until supper if you need to.”

The kids hadn’t had to do any work around the place since the day Snowman arrived, and Willadee had come up with the idea of putting them back to work now as a last resort. To be honest, she wished that every day of their childhood could be endless summer, filled with play-pretend and make-believe and enchantment. But this summer was turning out to seem endless in a different kind of way. Endless in that the kids were all running one horrible scene over and over in their minds. Maybe giving them some responsibility would force them to think about something else.

So the kids all did chores, and they thought about Blade Ballenger while they worked.

Samuel found Swan sitting out in Calla’s glider by herself one evening, and he told her how sorry he was for not paying more attention the other day when she ran that idea past him about the cowbells. If he’d taken her seriously, he said, he might have been able to help her understand things better, and maybe she wouldn’t have turned out having to be a witness to such a terrible thing.

“Me not being a witness wouldn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Swan said. “What we needed was a miracle, and we didn’t get one.”

Samuel thought he knew where she was going with that, so he asked her if she felt it was God’s fault, what had happened to Blade.

Swan thought about that for a minute before she answered. Obviously this was an issue she’d been wrestling with.

“No, sir,” she said finally. “I’m the one who cut the fasting short so we wouldn’t miss out on the banana pudding.”

On Friday morning, another horse showed up at Calla’s, this one brought in a trailer by Mr. Odell Pritchett and paid for in cash by Toy Moses. Odell had called Toy to say he’d like to do something to thank him for taking care of Snowman, and Toy had told him no thanks were necessary, but he’d appreciate it if Odell could tell him where he might find a good horse for the kids. One that didn’t have any bad habits, and preferably not much in the way of speed.

“I’ve got just the animal for you,” Odell had said. “Her name is Lady.” They’d wrangled awhile about the price (Odell wanting to give Toy the horse for free, and Toy refusing to take anything for nothing), and finally they had reached a compromise. Only they knew the terms. As a matter of fact, only they knew that there was a deal in place.

About the middle of the morning, the kids had finished their chores and were doing what they normally did when they finished, which was nothing much. Noble and Bienville were lying on a patch of bare dirt in the front yard, trying to get doodlebugs to come out of their holes. The way you did that was, you took a twig, and you stuck it in the hole, and you turned it round and round.

“Doodlebug, doodlebug, your house is on fire.” That was what you were supposed to say, so they were saying it. They’d never really seen it work, and it wasn’t working this time, but it was something to do.

Out back, Swan had climbed up on top of the chicken house, because that was the easiest way to get into the mulberry tree that grew right alongside it. From the chicken house roof, she had pulled herself into the branches. She was sitting there straddling a limb, with her back resting against the trunk of the mulberry. The way the tree was leafed out, she couldn’t see what was going on in the world, and that suited her just fine. Nobody could see her, either, and that suited her even better.

Swan heard the rattle and clatter of Odell’s truck and trailer driving up, but she didn’t pay the slightest attention. Vehicles rattled and clattered into the Moses yard all day and most of the night. She did take notice, though, when her brothers commenced to whooping like Indians on a scalping raid.

“A horse?” Noble was hollering. “A horse for
us
?”

And Bienville was yelling, “You mean we’ve got a horse we won’t have to give back to anybody?”

Well, you don’t hear a thing like that without getting curious. Not if you’re eleven years old. Having a horse was not going to heal her broken heart, or stop her from grieving over Blade. But it did get her attention.

She got down out of the tree.

Horses don’t walk out of trailers headfirst, they back out, so the first part of Lady that Swan and her brothers saw was her behind. Which was as good a start as they could have asked for.

“Man, she is beautiful,” Noble whispered.

“Yeah,” Bienville breathed reverently.

“What? Her butt?” asked Swan, who wasn’t going to allow herself to be made happy by one look at the south end of a horse.

Then came the rest of her. She was just the right size—not too little, not too big. Dappled gray, all the way. If she was a little sway-backed, they never noticed. Past her prime? Well, they couldn’t see that. They did notice that her mane was a bit unfortunate. It looked as if some child had taken a scissors to it, which turned out to be the case.

“That mane will grow out,” Odell was saying apologetically. “My daughter got a little carried away.”

The kids all nodded understandingly. They couldn’t care less about the haircut.

Odell said, “She’s a good, sweet horse, Lady is. She’s going on eighteen, so she doesn’t have as much flash and dash as she used to. But she’s giving.”

Bienville had a feeling that the term
giving
meant something different than the ordinary when it was used to describe a horse, so he asked Odell to elaborate.

“It means if you ask her to do something, she will plumb outdo herself trying to please you,” Odell said.

The kids all smiled. Every one of them. Even Swan. Toy Moses didn’t smile, though. He looked gruff as all get-out, and told those kids if they asked that horse to do too much, he knew where he could cut a good keen switch off of a piss elm.