The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (21 page)

They rode the horse bareback. Toy had an old saddle out in the barn, but the leather was cracked, and the saddle was too big for Lady anyway. Plus, the kids figured if riding bareback was good enough for Indians, it was good enough for them. Toy bridled her for them and showed them how to “rein soft,” so that the bit didn’t cut into her mouth. After that, they were on their own.

They rode doubles, because Swan refused to get off, and the boys were agreeable enough to take turns. Around the yard. Then around the barn. Then out across the pasture. But not to the creek. The creek was like a meandering line that marked the end of safety and the beginning of unthinkable peril. They weren’t ready to deal with the creek again just yet.

Lady got the royal treatment. It was carrots from the kitchen, and sugar cubes from the store, and watermelons straight from the patch out beside the smokehouse.

“Y’all are liable to colic that horse with kindness,” Grandma Calla told them when she caught them sneaking apples that she had set aside for making fritters.

Colic sounded like something babies get, and they’d never heard of one dying from it, but Calla told them they couldn’t burp a horse, so they’d best not give it a bellyache. After that, they cut back on stealing food for Lady and concentrated on her grooming.

Toy taught them how to use a brush and a currycomb, and how to clean her feet with a hoof pick.

“A horse’s feet are the most important thing it’s got,” he told them. “A human being can get around just fine on an artificial leg, but a horse has to have the wheels God gave it.”

The kids laughed at the idea of a horse having wheels, but there was something else in what Toy had said, and they didn’t know what to make of it. This was the first time they’d ever heard him mention his artificial leg. The very first time. The way he had said it, kind of offhanded and casual, it was like he was saying something else. That he was taking them into his confidence, maybe. That he was opening a door and waving them in. Of course, they all knew that was a stretch. More than likely, he had just let it slip. He wasn’t really the type to let anything slip without meaning to, but he wasn’t the type to get too cozy with a bunch of kids that didn’t belong to him, either, so they didn’t want to read too much into it.

The Lake children all rested better that night. Swan even slept in her bed again, instead of in the chair. She did turn on the night-light that her daddy had bought for her the day after Blade got hurt. She was not at all sure that she’d ever be able to sleep without a night-light again, as long as she lived.

Chapter 25

Swan was dead asleep. The little scuffling sounds of someone coming in her window didn’t wake her, but when that someone crawled under the covers with her, she sat up with a start. Before she could open her mouth to scream, she saw who it was, and that was the best minute of her life so far.

“How’d you
get
here?” she gasped.

Blade Ballenger pointed at the window. He had shown up wearing his sleepers again, and the bandage that covered his eye socket bore a suspicious yellow tinge. Swan threw her arms around him and held on. Blade relaxed, letting his head rest on her shoulder, so that his face was against her neck.

“I saw what happened,” Swan told him, hating herself all over again because she hadn’t done anything to help.

Blade pulled out of her arms and stared at her. So much had happened to him lately that he didn’t know which thing she was talking about.

Swan explained, “Out there in the woods that day. My brothers and I had come to save you, but we were too late.”

Blade’s one beautiful dark eye widened in amazement, and his mouth dropped open. Someone coming to save him had never happened before.

Swan said, “We were gonna scare your daddy slap to death, but I fainted and ruined the miracle.”

Blade squinted at her. He for sure didn’t know what she was talking about now.

She said, “A miracle is something that can’t be done, but you ask for it, and it’s given. Only—there’s generally a whole bunch of requirements that don’t make a lick of sense, and you have to do everything to the letter. If you mess up, no miracle.”

He still didn’t understand, and it showed on his face. Swan patted the pillow, and he settled onto it. Then she stretched out beside him, propping her head on one hand and laying the other arm across his stomach, gathering him close to her.

“So what happened with your eye? Did the doctor sew it back in?”

Blade looked away, like he had a guilty secret and she’d discovered it. That was answer enough.

She said, “How’d you get away?”

“Waited till a cat came.”

It was her turn to squint.

“My daddy kills cats,” Blade said. He didn’t explain that when his daddy was killing cats he was too engrossed to pay attention to anything else, but Swan got the message. Blade glanced at the window, as if afraid he might see his daddy coming through it any minute.

“I’m not letting anybody take you away again,” Swan promised. “I don’t know for sure yet how I’m going to keep them from it, but I’m not letting it happen.”

Toy Moses had just locked the bar and was helping his mama open the store when Ras drove into the yard and jumped out of his truck like his pants were on fire. Calla looked up from sweeping the steps, and Toy looked over from propping the wood door open with a couple of Nehi cases, and both of them looked as exasperated as they felt at the moment. Which was plenty.

“Lord help my time,” Calla said.

Ras Ballenger stomped over to within about three feet of them and glared at Toy malevolently.

“I’ve come for my boy,” he said. Not snapping and yelling, like usual. His voice was kind of deadly calm.

Since Toy was unaware that Blade was on the place, he was surprised, but he didn’t show it. He shook his head and also didn’t show how glad he was that Ballenger’s boy had gotten away from him again.

“Looks like you’ve come to a goat’s house after wool, Mr. Ballenger. We ain’t seen your boy in over two weeks.”

Well, Ballenger didn’t believe that, and he said so. Toy just shook his head again and told him that he sure hoped the boy was all right.

“You never know what can happen these days,” he went on. “It’s hard to believe, but there are people in this world who are low enough”—he paused for emphasis—“sorry enough”—he paused again—“pure pig shit worthless enough to maliciously harm a child.”

Toy lit a cigarette and took a couple of deep drags before continuing. Then he said, “Me, I think those people ought to have the same things done to them that they’ve done to the child. An eye for an eye, you might say.”

There was no way that Ras could miss Toy’s meaning, and he had to wonder how the man knew so much. Like as not, the deputies who had come out to question him had driven straight over here and had sat around in Never Closes, drinking and jawing about things they should have kept to themselves. Which just about made Ras Ballenger foam at the mouth. A man was innocent until proven guilty, after all, and he was getting tired of having to pretend to be innocent of things that were nobody’s damn business.

He said, “I didn’t come here to hear what you think, I came for my boy. Now, are you gonna bring him out, or am I gonna have to go in and git him?”

Toy flicked his eyes real quick at Ballenger, giving him the kind of look that says, “You just try.”

Out loud, he said, “What you’re gonna do, Mr. Ballenger, is get back in your truck and leave. You’ve got five seconds.”

Ballenger came undone. “I’ll have the law on you, you see if I don’t! You may think you’ve got the sheriff in your pocket, but a man has rights, and I reckon I know mine.”

Toy said, “Make that three.”

The first place Toy checked after Ballenger left was the barn, but nobody had been in there lately. The blankets were spread out nice and neat, with Blade’s presents right in the center, the way they’d been since shortly after that Battle of Jericho thing. Nobody knew for sure when the kids had put them there, but they’d made a lot of pilgrimages to the barn, so it could have been any time.

Toy looked next where he had figured all along that he would find the boy.

Swan and Blade were sleeping like puppies, both curled up every which way, their bodies touching here and there. Nothing could have been more innocent, but it bothered Toy when he eased in the door and saw them like that. He might not be a father himself, but he had the kind of feeling fathers get about their daughters, which is that kids grow up and things change awfully fast, so sometimes adjustments need to be made ahead of time by the grown-ups who are in charge.

Not that he thought he was in charge of Swan. But he was about to take charge of this situation.

He stood at the foot of the bed and cleared his throat. Swan and Blade both jumped just about out of their skins, and all the way out of bed. Since the bed was so high, they made a pretty good commotion when they landed on the floor.

Blade started to dive for the window, but Toy stepped over and blocked his path.

“Let’s not go through that again,” he said. “I’m not sending you home this time.”

Blade swallowed hard and looked at Swan, who was looking at Uncle Toy with sudden worship in her eyes.

“You’re not?” she asked.

“No, ma’am, I am not,” Uncle Toy said ceremoniously. And Toy Moses had been known to go for years without saying anything ceremoniously.

Swan blew out a huge breath and sat smack down on the floor. Blade was still watching her for a sign, and this seemed to be one, so he sat down beside her. Toy stood there looking them both dead in the eye.

To Blade, he said, “I can’t promise you that the law won’t intervene, because they probably will. But I can promise that, as long as I have anything to say about it, you’re welcome here, and you’ll be safe.”

He bent down and reached out his hand, and the boy, who had probably never gone through this ritual in his life, took it and gave him a manly handshake.

Then Toy said to Swan, “Now, we’ve got to figure out where your friend here is going to sleep. Because it’s not going to be with you anymore.”

So that was it. Blade Ballenger could stay until the law intervened. That sounded fine to Swan, since the only way she’d ever heard of the law intervening around here was by making sure that no liquor went to waste.

As for where Blade would sleep, that was decided democratically in a family meeting, which took place in Willadee and Samuel’s bedroom. Toy led Swan and Blade from Swan’s room to her parents’ room, and Noble and Bienville must have been roused from sleep by the excitement in the air, because they both slid in the door before Toy got through explaining that Blade was back and needed accommodations. Pronto.

“You’ll bunk in with Bienville,” Samuel told Blade. “If you can find a spot among all his books.”

That was democratic enough to suit all concerned.

Since Toy figured that Ras might come back, and there could be trouble, he didn’t go home to sleep. He just went into his old bedroom and sacked out beside Bernice. Which was one way of getting her out of bed early.

Bernice popped into the kitchen before Willadee could even get the biscuits in the oven and said she understood the little Ballenger boy was back. Willadee said he sure was, and wasn’t it wonderful. If there was anything at all wonderful about it, Bernice couldn’t see it.

As soon as breakfast was over, Bernice was in the car and gone. Toy wasn’t going to wake up for hours unless Ras Ballenger showed up again, and in either case, she’d rather be somewhere else. It was a Saturday, so Samuel would be around, but he was taking even less notice of her than usual, what with that little mongrel boy hanging around again, and she plain couldn’t stand being around the rest of them, they’d all gone crazy.

She was the only one who wasn’t happy about Blade being there. The rest of the family was elated.

Underneath all the euphoria, there was the feeling that there was no telling what might happen next, so Samuel and Willadee told the kids to stay where the grown-ups could see them.

“You don’t have to worry about us getting out of pocket,” Swan vowed fervently. “This is one time that you can believe us when we promise to be good and act right.”

And they were good. All of them. Blade let Calla change his bandage and give him the scrubbing of his life, and he kept trying on the clothes of Bienville’s that Willadee kept altering to fit him, and the other kids didn’t get into the least bit of mischief while they waited.

Later on, when Samuel headed out to the pasture to bring Lady up, so they could ride her around the yard, Swan and Blade sat in the glider, Blade with his legs drawn up and a pad of paper propped on his knees. Calla had given him the paper and some pencil nubs when she noticed him drawing in the dirt. It turned out the kid didn’t draw like a kid. He drew things so that you could tell what they were. The house, the fields, Calla’s endless sea of flowers. Swan took turns watching his flashing hands and watching Noble and Bienville arm wrestling over at the picnic table. Noble was winning, because he was stronger, but Bienville kept messing up his concentration by asking him what he was thinking about.

“There’s something preying on your mind,” he would whisper mysteriously, like somebody at a séance. “I can sense it.”

And every time, Noble would falter for just a fraction of a second. Just long enough for Bienville to strengthen his grip or brace his elbow a little better. There was no way he was going to win, but he was pretty good at making Noble work harder.

Bienville’s teasing would ordinarily irritate Noble no end, but today he just laughed about it. Blade stopped drawing and laughed, too. All these people being so easygoing was enough to make a person downright giddy. At least a person who’d been living with Ras Ballenger all his life.

“I’m gonna stay here forever,” he whispered to Swan. Not whispered mysteriously, as Bienville had done. He whispered the way you do when you want something so much you don’t dare say it out loud.

“Well, you’ll have to leave someday,” Swan said. “We all will. This isn’t really where we live. It’s just where we are right now.”

Blade couldn’t make heads nor tails of that, so she gave him a little background.

“See, when your daddy’s a preacher, you move around a lot, only we didn’t have anyplace to move to this year, and Grandma Calla was lonesome because our grandpa”—how should she put this?—
“died unexpectedly,
so we moved in with her. But before long, we’ll get another church, and then we’ll be moving, and if everything works out, you can go with us.”

Blade was floored by that one. “We’re gonna live in a church?”

“No, we won’t live
in
it. We’ll live in a parsonage. Generally, those are right beside the church, or right across the street, so the church members can see what you’re doing all the time.”

Blade said, “Ohhh,” like
now
he understood.

“Church members are funny,” Swan went on. This was a subject she knew well. “You can’t hardly please ’em, and there’s always a faction—that’s a bunch of people that get together and drink coffee at somebody’s house after church, when the message was too strong and they got their toes stepped on—anyway there’s always a
faction
that’s trying to get rid of the preacher for one reason or another. That’s why you move so much. Because sooner or later the faction wins out. But mostly, church members are pretty nice. Even the faction people are nice, to your face.”

“Swan, what are you telling that boy?” That was Samuel talking. He’d just gotten back with Lady.

Swan looked up and smiled proudly. “I’m just telling him what to expect when we get a church and a parsonage.”

Samuel handed Lady’s reins to Noble and came over to sit in the glider.

“Well, now, we don’t know for sure how this will all turn out,” he told them. “We don’t want to start making promises we may not be able to keep.”

Blade had been looking up at Samuel, but now he started drawing again, moving his hand slowly and mechanically. Like that was one thing he could control. He might not know what Swan was talking about half the time, but he for sure knew what her daddy was saying. Samuel saw the hurt in his face—saw the way he was already so good at hiding hurt—and he hated like everything not to be able to say exactly what that little boy wanted to hear. But he couldn’t.

“I think what we have to do,” Samuel said, “is just enjoy this time together, and trust God for the outcome. He has ways of doing things that are better than anything we could even imagine on our own.”

Blade looked to Swan for translation. As always.

“Who’s God?” he asked. He was whispering again.