The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (28 page)

He thought about heading down the hallway and finding the bedroom and looking in, just to make sure that his theory was correct, but he had certain qualms about that. What if Bernice waked up and thought he had broken in and was intending to do her harm? What if Toy came home and misinterpreted the whole situation and Bootsie wound up like Yam Ferguson, with his head facing in the wrong direction?

As far as Bootsie was concerned, he had done what he was sent to do. He tiptoed toward the front door.

And then he heard something. A low, guttural moan.

He turned and followed the sound. The first room he looked into was the one where Toy kept all that liquor, and Bootsie almost didn’t make it to the next room. There were cases of bourbon and sour mash and scotch and vodka and gin and rum and God knew what else—everything a truly dedicated drunk could dream of, and all of a sudden Bootsie thought maybe he’d had enough of being semi-sober.

He took a guilty step toward a case of Wild Turkey. This was going to change everything, he knew that. Nobody would ever trust him again, but dammit, he wanted a good chug of Bombed Tom, and he wanted it now. He reached into the case, took out a bottle, and opened it, forgetting why he was here.

He was just about to take a drink when he heard another, louder moan. The sound jarred him back to reality with such a start that he spilled a couple of precious ounces all over himself.

“Well, hell,” he said plaintively, as he set down the bottle and backed out of the room.

He found Bernice sprawled facedown on the bathroom floor, wearing nothing but the clothes God gave her. She was every bit as flawless as he and every other man who’d ever laid eyes on her had imagined, but Bootsie didn’t even notice that, because of all the blood. There were thick red stains on the side of the tub and matted in Bernice’s hair and more streaks here and there on her skin.

Bootsie felt like he’d been hit with a two-by-four. He couldn’t even breathe. He hung there for a couple of seconds, unable to make his legs work at all. Then he bolted into the kitchen and grabbed up the phone. What with barking at elderly ladies to please get off the party line so he could make an urgent call, it took forever to get hold of Early Meeks. He was so torn up he didn’t even hear the telltale clicks when those old biddies picked up their phones again to find out what all the excitement was about.

Early listened to Bootsie’s babbling long enough to make out that Bernice was badly hurt, maybe dying, and there was blood all over the place.

“Is she responsive?” Early asked.

“Is she what?”

“Can she talk? Can she open her eyes and look at you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know!” Bootsie was crying now, scared to death and sick inside. “She’s facedown, and I’m afraid to touch her.”

“Well, how do you know she’s still alive?”

“Dead people don’t moan,” Bootsie said. “She keeps moaning.”

“I’ll call for an ambulance and be there directly,” Early told him. “Don’t you go anywhere, do you hear me, Bootsie?”

Bootsie heard him all right, and he knew what Early was really saying. He was saying that, whatever had happened to Bernice Moses, Bootsie Phillips stood a really good chance of getting the blame.

When Early got out to Toy’s house, he found Bootsie dry-heaving on the front porch.

“Where is she?” Early asked as he came up the steps.

“Bathroom,” Bootsie managed between spasms.

Early strode past, into the house. Bootsie listened to his footsteps, and when they stopped, he braced himself for whatever would come next. There was a full minute of awful silence, and then Early’s voice boomed like a cannon.

“Bootsie! Get in here!”

So this was it. Bernice must have died, Bootsie was the prime suspect, and if he ran, there’d be no place to hide. This, he told himself grimly, was what came of going around semi-sober. If he hadn’t adjusted his drinking habits, he’d be holed up in Never Closes right now, safe as a baby in its mother’s arms. He’d be gloriously drunk, and quite possibly asleep under the pool table. But no. He’d let himself care what other people thought of him, and had mended his ways to impress them, and that had been the start of his troubles. Now there was nothing he could do except face the music.

Reluctantly, he went inside the house. Sirens sounded in the distance, getting more and more shrill as they screamed closer. Bootsie felt his legs buckle but managed to keep putting one foot in front of the other. At the door to the bathroom he stopped, unable to make himself take another step.

Early was standing beside Bernice (
beside Bernice’s body
), holding an empty liquor bottle.

“You know what this is?”

“I didn’t drink a drop of liquor,” Bootsie protested. “I started to, but I didn’t.”

“Maybe you didn’t,” Early grunted. “But she sure did.”

He turned the bottle upside down, and blood dripped out onto the floor. Well, it looked like blood.

“Sloe gin,” Early said. “Looks like she got drunk as a skunk and tripped getting out of the bathtub, and passed out lying on top of the bottle. If you didn’t reek of whiskey yourself, you’d have smelled it.”

Bootsie backed up to the wall and leaned against it, going weak with relief.

“So she’s not gonna die?”

“Not unless the hangover kills her. What were you doing over here, anyway? Another man’s house—another man’s wife—”

“The preacher sent me,” Bootsie said. “He was worried about her because she didn’t make it to church.”

“He better not send anybody to check on my wife when she doesn’t make it to church,” somebody said from behind them.

Bootsie and Early both looked over at the same time to see two medics standing in the doorway. The one who had spoken was a short, muscular loudmouth named Lawrence something or other who’d been in the bar a few times lately while his wife was over at the revival. The other one was Joe Bill Rader’s brother Ronnie. They’d heard enough to understand that there wasn’t any real crisis here, and they were feeling chafed about it.

“Sorry to get you boys out here on a wild-goose chase,” Early said. “Y’all can head on back to town. And I imagine the family will appreciate it if you two don’t go tellin’ everything you know.”

“Don’t worry,” Ronnie assured him. “The first thing you learn on this job is how to keep your mouth shut.”

Of course, they didn’t keep their mouths shut, and neither did the women who had eavesdropped on Bootsie’s phone call. Between the four of them, phone lines were buzzing all over the county with the juiciest tidbit to hit the area in quite some time. There wasn’t enough information available for anyone to piece the whole story together, so everybody formed their own conclusions, the most common one being that Bernice was a secret alcoholic and Samuel must have known about it. Why else would he have sent a disreputable character like Bootsie Phillips out to see about her, when there were plenty of good, God-fearing people who would have been more than glad to go?

Naturally, there were also those who assumed there must be something illicit going on between Samuel and Bernice. After all, those two had been spending an awful lot of time together for months now, not to mention they used to be sweethearts, and neither one of them was the kind that anybody could ever really get over being in love with.

The one thing nobody anywhere ever thought of even once was that perhaps Bernice Moses had for a single moment considered suicide.

By the end of the service, several cars had pulled in at the revival grounds bringing individuals who weren’t there for the music or the spiritual awakening. Some of the drivers sat in their cars, keeping the motors running and the heaters on, waiting for the moment when the last prayer was said and the worshipers came out of the tent. Others got out and stood around smoking near the entrance, determined to be the first to enlighten the congregation.

Across the road, another car was parking out beside Never Closes, and this driver didn’t wait for anything.

Willadee wondered what was taking Bootsie so long, and shortly after Hobart Snell arrived, she found out. Hobart was an old-timer who was bent at the waist from arthritis and crooked from head to toe in his business dealings. He didn’t often come to Never Closes to drink or for anything else, but tonight he hobbled in and headed straight for the bar.

“Gimme some sour mash,” he told Willadee. “I don’t care what kind.”

Willadee thought if he didn’t care what kind, she shouldn’t care, either, but she poured him a glass of Jack Daniel’s just to be nice.

Hobart took the drink and held it under his nose, sniffing it, while he looked around the room, sizing things up. “I see your permanent fixture’s not back yet,” he said.

“What permanent fixture?”

“The logger. The drunk. Bootsie Phillips.”

Hobart’s voice had a snide overtone that Willadee didn’t much care for and didn’t feel obliged to tolerate.

“For one thing,” she said, “Bootsie is a friend of mine. For another thing, since you just got here, how’d you know he’d been gone?”

Hobart snickered and took a sip of Jack.

“I reckon near ’bout everybody in these parts knows where Bootsie’s been tonight,” he said. “How come your husband picked a fool like him to send to check on his girlfriend?”

“Looks like my tent revival days are over,” Samuel told Willadee later, when they were lying in bed side by side.

The rumormongers had had themselves a time spreading the word after church that the reason Bernice Moses hadn’t been there to sing was because she was passed out drunk on her bathroom floor, naked as a jaybird and so covered in sloe gin that Bootsie Phillips, who had found her, thought she was bleeding to death.

“You don’t have to close down the revival just because of Bernice,” Willadee told him. “There are plenty of people around here who can help you with the music.”

“Not every night,” he said. “And anyway, revivals aren’t supposed to go on forever. The way attendance has been falling off, pretty soon I could be in debt to the rental company, and then I’d be in worse shape than I was to start with.”

They were quiet for a moment, and then he said, heavily, “I swear, I can’t figure out what God wants from me anymore.”

Willadee didn’t know what to tell him, but she knew he needed comfort, so she wrapped herself around that man and rocked him like a baby.

In the coming days, Samuel returned the tent and folding chairs and the sound equipment to the rental company, and threw himself into cleaning up Calla’s neglected land. Cutting brush and burning it. Sawing up fallen trees for firewood. There was a certain pleasure in the hard physical work, and it gave him plenty of time to talk to God, but honestly, it seemed to him that it was God’s turn to do the talking.

Nobody in the family talked much about Bernice. Instead of leaving town, she went on a kind of rampage, throwing herself at males of all ages, and making sure the whole world knew about it.

Toy was flattened. With the truth too obvious to be ignored, everything that had mattered most to him was over. Except for the kids. He loved those kids so much it hurt, but he couldn’t stand to be around them or anybody else right now. He still had to go into Never Closes every night and stay until daylight, but he didn’t talk to the customers much, and they understood. Every one of them realized that what Toy felt like doing was going on a rampage of his own—just lashing out every which way—and that he was afraid if he got to feeling crowded, he might do it.

So Toy stayed to himself. Every minute he wasn’t either working or sleeping, he took to the woods and the water, but that made it all worse, somehow. Every beautiful thing that he saw reminded him of beauty lost and gone.

He couldn’t even stand to be comfortable, so after a while, he stopped sleeping in his room upstairs and took to sacking out on an old Army cot in the back of the shed. There was hardly enough room in there to turn around, but the only turning around he ever did was to come back out every evening, the same way he’d gone in. He had all the space he needed.

Willadee brought his meals, and she left his food outside the door of the shed. If they happened to see each other, they’d talk for a few minutes, not about much of anything. There wasn’t anything much Toy cared to talk about these days, and Willadee respected that.

The kids were desolate. Sometimes Blade would “draw the uncle a letter,” using pictures instead of words to communicate. These he would leave outside the door of the shed. The next day the drawings would be gone, but Toy stayed as remote as before.

Swan haunted the shed and tried a couple of times to talk to Toy through the walls, but Willadee told her to leave him alone. He worked all night and didn’t need his sleep interrupted.

“It’ll take him some time,” she explained to the kids when they pestered her about the change in the man they adored.

“But he doesn’t even like us anymore!” wailed Swan.

Willadee said, “Oh, yes, he does. He loves you more than anything. One day he’s going to come out of that shed, and you better just be ready for all the love that man will show you.”

Chapter 36

February rolled around, and God still hadn’t shown Samuel what to do, so he asked Calla what she thought about him planting some potatoes.

“Why, I think that any man who has land available is falling down on the job if he doesn’t get some potatoes in the ground by Valentine’s Day,” she told him. “How many potatoes are you thinking of planting?”

“A couple of acres,” Samuel said.

Calla pulled a surprised face. “That sounds like a kind of in-between amount of potatoes to plant. Too many for a family to eat but not enough to call a real crop.”

Samuel said, “Actually, I wanted to use about five or ten acres to do it.”

Well, Calla looked as confused as she was beginning to feel, so he explained that he’d noticed the way she gardened over the years, and it seemed to him she had a system that could be duplicated on a larger scale.

“You don’t just plant one big stretch of any one thing,” he said. “You mix everything up, and throw in some flowers where they’re least expected, and you get more food from less space, without any insects or plant diseases. It’s like the bugs get so bumfuzzled they don’t know where to go to dinner.”

Calla said, “Why, that’s just the reason I do it, but you’re the first person who ever noticed.”

Samuel knew that real farming cost real money. Money for seeds—but Calla saved more seeds every year than she could plant in ten, so he figured he could get those from her for free. Money for fertilizer—but Calla’s chickens provided more droppings than she could ever use, plus the calf lot was rich with old, rotted manure and Lady was doing her part every day, so all that would be free, too. Money for equipment—but Samuel didn’t need the kind of fancy equipment that mauled the land into submission, not for what he had in mind. John’s old tractor and a few hand tools would do just fine. Samuel had seen enough of his own daddy living on farm loans to know he didn’t want to go that route. By the time a man got in his crops and sold them and paid everything off, he’d have to start living on the next year’s loan. What Samuel wanted to do—what he thought might work—was make the soil happy with dried manure and fish scraps and wood ashes, and see if it didn’t give something extra back in return.

Calla said, “You don’t have to stop at fish scraps. I bury table scraps out there all winter long. By spring, the earthworms have got the ground worked up so good, all I have to do is punch holes in it with my finger and drop in the seeds. Why are you stopping at five or ten acres?”

“Because I’m still expecting God to give me a church.”

Calla just nodded. She hated to think about God giving Samuel a church, as much as she knew he still wanted one. Once he got a new church, he’d be gone. And Willadee and the kids would be gone along with him.

“I’d hate to leave you with the whole place planted in all manner of crops that somebody would just have to plow under,” he went on. “And I don’t reckon there’s a farmer in the county who’d take over tending to a bunch of marigolds.”

“You don’t have to tend to marigolds, Samuel. Marigolds take care of themselves.”

“That makes it even better,” he said.

So he planted potatoes. Half a row here, half a row there, with cabbages and pole beans in between. The more the weather warmed, the more different vegetables Samuel planted. Greens and squash and corn and tomatoes and onions and okra. And flowers, everywhere, flowers. He planted in blocks and patches that didn’t run in straight lines, like crops were supposed to. There were odd-shaped plots, blending and running together, connected by winding paths, with short stretches of fence here and there for climbing plants to latch on to. Some of the land, he didn’t even plow. He just covered it with old hay, or with oak leaves or pine needles. Other farmers would drive by and see Samuel out there covering up perfectly good field dirt with all manner of dead plant matter, and they’d just figure he’d finally lost it. His field didn’t look like anything those men had ever seen, but to Samuel, it looked promising.

The second week of March, Calvin Furlough (who wasn’t a farmer but had opinions about everything) stopped by the store on Monday morning and told Calla he was worried about Samuel.

Calla said, “You’re not worried about Samuel, you’re worried about Willadee. Why don’t you go home and worry about Donna?”

Donna was Calvin’s wife. To tell the truth, he didn’t pay her anywhere near enough attention, and everybody knew it.

“Donna’s all right,” he said. “I just bought her a new Chevy.” By “new” he meant one she hadn’t had before. He was good about buying wrecked cars and fixing them up. Donna got a new one every time she turned around, but they always had For Sale signs in the window.

“Samuel’s all right, too,” Calla told him. She never had had much use for Calvin Furlough.

“Well, he’s sure acting like a crazy man. What is it exactly that he’s doing out there?”

“You’ll see when everybody else does,” Calla said.

Calvin wasn’t the only one who stopped by the store asking questions. Ras Ballenger stopped by the same day and asked about Blade.

“It’s been right hard on his mama and me,” he said, sounding anguished, “having him over here instead of at home with us. But if this is where he wants to stay, so be it. At least we know he’s taken care of.”

Calla said that taking care of Blade was no trouble. They all enjoyed having the boy around. Ras went on about how that was a relief, and how he hated for any of his blood kin to be a burden to anybody, and how he knew what a handful Blade could be.

“It was gittin’ to where we couldn’t hardly keep him at home anymore,” he said. “He hasn’t tried runnin’ off from here, has he?”

“No,” Calla said. “He seems to be pretty happy.”

Ras nodded humbly, as if to indicate that this all made him feel bad, but he guessed it was his lot in life. As he left, he said, “You don’t have to tell him I came by or nothin’.”

Don’t worry, I won’t, thought Calla.

For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what Ras Ballenger was doing in her store after all these months, acting like he was concerned about his son. The mother she would have expected to show up, bawling and begging the boy to go home with her. Or just grabbing him up and taking him. Back when Calla’s children were little, she for sure wouldn’t have let one of them be gone so much as overnight without permission. But then, she wouldn’t have stood by a man who harmed one of them, either. If John Moses had put out one of her kids’ eyes with a bullwhip, he’d have gone to sleep that night in one world and woke up the next morning in another.

After Ras was gone, she pondered over what it could all mean. Maybe he was just trying to improve his image in the community. Probably that was what he’d been doing that day when he helped Millard and Scotty get Toy out of the woods and into town to the emergency room. She’d been cordial to him ever since. They all had. As grateful as they’d been to still have Toy alive and among them, they hadn’t questioned his motives.

She was questioning them now, though.

“I don’t know what it could mean,” Willadee said that evening, after Calla told her about it. “I don’t trust him, though. Seems like every time we start forgetting he’s around, he rears up his head to remind us.”

They had just put the kids to bed and were sitting in the living room. Willadee was turning the collar on one of Samuel’s shirts, so the worn part wouldn’t show. She’d just gotten all the stitches out and was pulling off loose bits of thread.

“Well, I think we need to start watching Blade closer again,” Calla told her. “We’ve gotten lax.”

Here of late, the kids had been playing all over the place. Not as far back as the creek, but they stayed out of sight a lot, especially when they were riding Lady. Which was generally from the time they got off the school bus until it was too dark to see.

Willadee eased the collar back between the yoke and the facing, with the good side up, and started pinning it in place.

“I hate to wish harm to anybody, Mama, but I don’t know why people like that man get to live on this earth.”

“If he bothers that boy again, he won’t, for long.”

Willadee gave her a look. That was strong talk, coming from Calla Moses.

Calla said, “And don’t think I don’t mean it.”

Ras Ballenger sat on his front steps that night with a fresh chew of Bull Durham in his jaw and a peaceful smile on his face.

He hadn’t been asking questions at Calla Moses’s store because he needed answers. No sirree. His appearances at the revival, and that little charade about taking Blade presents at Christmas, and now this visit to the store today, had all been done for the same reason he did half the things he did to Geraldine. He just liked to make people squirm.

All the answers he needed, he’d picked up by observation—when no one had been observing
him.

The door creaked behind him now. Geraldine stepped out of the house and sat down beside him. She didn’t sit close enough to touch him, and he knew that the only reason she had come out at all was because she had no one else to talk to who was over five years old. Just to get her goat, he reached over and began feeling the little fat rolls around her middle. She went stiff as a board, immediately.

“What’s the matter, you don’t like me feeling your fat?”

She edged away from his hand. “Don’t do that.”

“Well, all right, if you don’t want my lovin’. You really oughta take it where you can find it, though, a lump like you.” He goosed those fat rolls again. “You wasn’t hardly lumpy at all when I married you.”

She pursed her mouth and sighed resignedly. Ras patted her on the back as if she were a good old dog and gave her a cheerful smile.

“I went by and asked about your boy today.” That was what he called Blade these days, when he was talking to her. “Your boy.” Little one-eyed bastid.

Geraldine looked away, like she always looked away when he talked about Blade. Ras couldn’t tell whether she missed the boy or whether she was simply glad the kid was over there instead of over here, and she didn’t want him to see it in her eyes. Maybe she thought a child would be safer at the Moses place. He almost laughed out loud, thinking about that.

He reached up and took a clump of her limp hair in his hand. Not pulling on it, the way he sometimes did. Just holding on hard enough so she couldn’t jerk her head away.

“Looks like you’d do something with this hair,” he told her. “You look like a plow horse with this hair.”

On Tuesday afternoons after school, Blade took art lessons from Isadora Priest, who had a major in art and a minor in education, and knew artistic ability when she saw it. Isadora was sixty-three years old and did a little substitute teaching in Emerson when any of the salaried teachers were sick. The first time she’d laid eyes on Blade and his artwork, Isadora knew she’d found a diamond in a turnip patch. The way she discovered the artwork was that she was patrolling the room to make sure all the kids were writing their spelling words twenty times each, and she found that Blade was not. He was drawing. She confiscated his notebook and instantly decided that it was no wonder the boy’s spelling was faulty. As many sketches as there were in that book, he couldn’t possibly have had time to work on his spelling.

Isadora didn’t work
all
the time, and she didn’t like talking on the phone, so she had shown up at Calla’s the next day and had told Willadee proudly that the boy had “an eye.” After she said it, she realized how it sounded and altered her statement to indicate that he had genuine talent, the kind you don’t see every day.

“It’s like whatever he sees goes in through his eye and comes out through his hand,” she said. She also said she thought she should work with him. She thought Tuesday afternoons would be good. She thought that she could walk over to the school on those afternoons to get Blade and walk him back to her house. She thought the lessons should last about an hour. And she thought that Willadee could drive over and pick him up afterward.

Willadee asked her whether she’d thought about how much she would charge, and she said that she had indeed. The lessons would be free. Willadee argued with her about that, and Isadora finally admitted that a pint of whiskey from Never Closes once a month would be nice. She never had the nerve to go out and buy it for herself, and there were just so many uses for it.

So it was settled.

From then on, Blade walked with Isadora to her house every Tuesday afternoon, and Willadee drove over later and picked him up, which meant that, not too long after the other kids got off the school bus, Willadee left the house. She always visited for a bit with Isadora, but she was usually back home in less than forty-five minutes.

The day after Ras stopped by the store, Willadee went to get Blade from Isadora’s, just like always. Swan watched her drive away and waved to her from the porch. Samuel waved from the field. Toy didn’t wave, because he was asleep in the shed. Calla had a customer, but she looked up and saw Willadee leaving, and she said to the woman she was waiting on, “There goes Willadee. Gone to pick up Blade.”

Ras Ballenger saw Willadee leave—saw her from where he was crouched, hidden, at the edge of the woods. He was holding a gunnysack.

He glanced over to Samuel’s Crazy Patch, which was what the locals were now calling the farming project, and there was Samuel, carting a wheelbarrow of manure from the calf lot over to where he had plowed up some new ground. Those two boys of his were trotting out to join him—none of them aware that they were being watched.

Ras headed toward the back of the Moses yard, keeping out of sight. Going thicket to thicket. Thicket to fencerow. Fencerow to outbuildings. When he got over behind the chicken house, he opened the gunnysack and turned loose a kitten.