The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (8 page)

Bernice had gotten herself engaged to Toy, trying to teach Samuel another lesson, which he also refused to learn. He’d just gone ahead and married Willadee, and Bernice had had no choice but to go through with marrying Toy; it had just been awful.

Poor Toy. He was the kindest thing, and he was so crazy about her he couldn’t see straight. But when a person loves you so much that he asks for nothing in return, it’s only to be expected that that’s about what he gets. It’s like a Law of Nature.

So here Bernice was, sitting in the swing, thinking about how things had gotten to the sorry state they were in, when all of a sudden—springs started creaking upstairs. Not actually all of a
sudden.
It came on kind of gradually, and just increased in tempo.

That first little sound sliced Bernice’s heart almost in half, and the rest of them—coming louder and faster like they did—finished the job. It was absolutely enough to make a woman do Things She Wouldn’t Ordinarily Do.

What Bernice did was, she leapt out of the swing so fast that the contents of her glass flew upward like steam out of a geyser, and she had to cram her fist in her mouth to keep from screaming. There was tea and ice showering down around her, not to mention soggy lemon wedges, some of which lodged in her hair. Bernice groped for the lemon wedges, and flung them at the ceiling, and commenced to stamping her feet like a child having a hissy fit.

What’s important here, though, is that, all in all, Bernice Moses was too caught up in the moment to even notice when Swan crept up the steps and into the house, followed by a wide-eyed eight-year-old boy, who was dressed in just his underwear.

That kid was marching along behind Swan like she was the path to salvation.

Chapter 8

The bed Swan slept in was so high she always used a stool to climb up onto it. The little boy was sitting on the bed, backed up against the headboard. His legs stuck straight out in front of him like sticks. Swan had stretched out on the other end of the bed and was lying there propped up on one elbow, wondering how this deal was going to come out.

She said, “Okay. I’ve got you here, now what am I going to do with you?”

The black eyes gazed steadily back at her.

She said, “Well, what’s your name?”

“Blade.”

“That’s not a name.”

He nodded. It was so.

Swan turned the name over and over on her tongue, getting the feel of it. “Blade Ballenger. Blade Bal-len-ger. Your name is bad as mine.”

With a perfect lead-in like that, most folks would have asked her name, but Blade didn’t, so she volunteered it.

“Swan Lake. You laugh, I’ll cream you.”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even change expressions. Swan sat up, and bounced on the bed a little, and tried to think of something else to talk about. Finally, she said, “This is where I live. This week. That lady you saw a while ago—out on the porch? Don’t worry, she’s not crazy or anything. I think she’s mad ’cause her husband works nights.”

Still nothing.

“How come you followed me home?”

He lifted his shoulders, and let them fall.

“You know you’re going to have to go back.”

He slid under the covers and pulled the sheet up to his chin, as if he were putting on armor.

She said, “I didn’t mean right now. I meant sometime.”

He settled back into the pillow and closed his eyes. He must have been awfully tired. His little hands loosened their grip on the covers, and his body seemed to relax one section at a time. Blade Ballenger, at eight years of age, was too cautious to let go of consciousness all at once.

A lump formed in Swan’s throat. No way could she have explained just why. Slowly, carefully, she stood up on the bed, never taking her eyes off the kid’s face. There was a knotted string dangling from a bare lightbulb overhead. Swan tugged at the string, and the room went dark. For a minute, she just stood there. Later on, years down the road, she would look back on this moment as a time when the world had changed. All the moves she would make from now on would be in a different direction than she’d ever been headed before. But she wasn’t thinking about that now. She wasn’t even thinking that Blade Ballenger had changed anything, although he had. And he would. She was thinking about the fact that her daddy didn’t have a church, so she wasn’t technically a preacher’s kid anymore, and now she could be normal.

Through her open window, she could hear the music from Never Closes. Some country song. “Gonna live fast, love hard, die young—and leave a beautiful memory.” Why in the world would anybody write a song about a thing like that when nobody, but nobody wanted to die young?

Swan eased herself down onto the bed, and felt her way along, and crawled under the covers. Blade stirred slightly, then got still again. Sometime later on, when Swan was drifting into sleep, she heard him murmur drowsily, “Swan Lake. That’s a goofy name.”

In the wee hours before daylight, Willadee and Samuel did come up with a plan, which Samuel announced the next morning at breakfast.

“We’d like to stay here for a while. Until we can make other arrangements. If it’s all right.”

Noble and Bienville sure thought it was all right. They both let out war whoops. Swan thought it was all right, too, although she didn’t holler. You don’t holler when you’re sneaking food off the table to take upstairs to a Fugitive, and hoping nobody will notice.

Calla said it was all right with
her,
she wouldn’t have it any other way. She just hoped Samuel could cope with living in a house that had a bar attached. Samuel assured her that the bar wouldn’t bother him, he didn’t see how a bar could bother him if he didn’t go in it, and anyway, he was going to find a job of some sort, somewhere. It wasn’t as if he’d be lolling around the house making judgments about things.

What about preaching, Calla inquired. She knew Samuel well enough to know that, if he wasn’t preaching, he wouldn’t be happy. And she knew Life well enough to know that if one person in a house gets really miserable for any length of time, the misery spreads like smallpox.

“We’ve got that figured out,” Samuel informed her. “On weekends, I intend to do some relief preaching.”

“What on earth is relief preaching?” Bernice purred. It was a good southern purr, designed to tweak heartstrings. She was sitting there at the breakfast table, in this sleek white satin robe that must’ve been designed for the same purpose. Her hair was all brushed out over her shoulders—gleaming—quite possibly from the lemon juice. She looked for all the world like a picture out of the Sears and Roebuck.

Willadee gave Bernice a patient look and explained that sometimes a pastor needs some time off, like for a family vacation, or an emergency, or whatever. She went on to say that someone like Samuel, who was licensed to preach but didn’t have a congregation, could hold services in another pastor’s absence, and it could be very helpful and beneficial to all concerned.

“Lots of churches need relief preachers,” Willadee finished brightly.

Calla thought about that, and sipped at her coffee, and shook her head mournfully. “They won’t get any relief if they get Samuel,” she said.

Swan was in a terrible hurry to get back upstairs after breakfast. She was worried that Blade Ballenger might wake up alone in a strange place and be afraid. Or that he might come tumbling down the stairs any minute, and then everyone would discover that she had been hiding him. But her anxiety was nothing compared to something else she was feeling. Blade Ballenger had chosen her as a refuge. Hadn’t she been wishing fervently for someone to bond with? All of a sudden, her wishes were coming true right and left.

Just as she was about to bolt out of the kitchen, Samuel nabbed her. He and Willadee led her and her brothers into the living room, and closed the door, and gathered them into a circle, just like a scene from
Ideals
magazine.

“Our lives are about to change in a lot of ways,” he told them. “We’ll have to work at keeping our equilibrium. But I don’t want you to worry or feel afraid. Whatever is about to happen to us, it’s going to be good, because all God’s purposes are good.”

“Will one of the changes be that I can wear blue jeans?” Swan wanted to know. “Because I think that would be good. Us being here on a farm and all.” (She had gone back to wearing dresses the day before. Naturally. When Samuel came back from conference, the kids always immediately stopped breaking all the rules they’d been breaking while he was gone.)

“You know better than that, Swan,” Willadee said. Swan blinked indignantly at her. Willadee gave her back a placid look. She could look mighty innocent when she wanted to.

“Well, it’s not like there’ll be a whole church full of people watching every move we make anymore.”

“We don’t decide how we’ll live according to what other people think,” Samuel said. “We just try to live by the Bible.”

Swan argued, reasonably, that the Bible never said one solitary word about how a kid should dress to play in a cow pasture, but Samuel was already moving on to other things. They wouldn’t have much money—not that they had ever had much money—but their income would be uncertain now, so they’d all have to make sacrifices. And he hoped they would understand, and pitch in, and do their part without complaining.

Swan wasn’t sure what the word
sacrifice
signified, in present-day terms. In Bible times, it had meant offering something precious on the altar in order to gain God’s favor. In Abraham’s case, that something had been Isaac, but God had sent a scapegoat, so Abraham didn’t actually have to slay his son. Swan had always secretly thought that sounded just a little too convenient. She didn’t say this out loud, of course. You don’t go around questioning the Bible, not if you want to go to Heaven one of these days. Besides, once you start picking holes in things, it’s hard to figure out which parts to throw away and which parts to keep.

Still, if Samuel was asking them not to complain, that meant there might be something to complain about. This not being a preacher’s kid was sounding less and less appealing. What worried her most was the niggling thought that maybe her father had fallen out of God’s favor. She couldn’t imagine how that could have happened. Nobody tried harder to do the right thing than Sam Lake. Surely God was aware of that.

Naturally, Blade didn’t hang around waiting until Swan got back to her room. By then, he’d already slipped out of the house and trotted home. He told his mama he’d been playing down by the creek, and she said he must’ve followed it north to Alaska, he sure didn’t answer when she called him half an hour ago, and since when did he go out to play before the rest of the family got their eyes open.

Geraldine had the ironing board set up in the living room (she took in ironing for pay), and she was smoking a Pall Mall. Her face was about five different colors, mostly shades of blue, with cuts and scrapes crisscrossing each other along her jaw. What had happened the night before was, Blade’s daddy had been teaching his mama how to behave right, and Blade had just wanted to get away. It was scary when his daddy taught anybody about anything. Sometimes, when it happened, Blade pretended to be asleep, but last night, there’d been no pretending. Ras had been pulling Geraldine around the kitchen by the hair of her head and whacking her with a metal spatula. Geraldine had gone from crying and begging him to stop to trying to fight back, which was never a good idea. Blade had tried not to hear, and tried not to hear, and finally, he had just climbed out the window.

At first, he had sat huddled against the well shed, drawing pictures in the dirt with his fingers, which was something he did a lot at times like this. He didn’t have to see what his hands were doing when he was drawing, and he didn’t have to be looking at something to draw it. He’d always drawn in the dark, usually without even thinking about it. Anyway, he could still hear everything, so he had walked out farther in the yard, and then down the lane, until he was far enough away that it all got pretty quiet. And then that girl had come along.

Blade didn’t know why he had decided to follow her. Maybe it was because he had the feeling that, wherever she was headed, nothing scary was going to happen. She sure didn’t seem afraid of anything—except for when she first fell down. She was awful scared then, for a minute, like she thought the devil was about to get her. But once she got over that, she was solid as a rock.

Anyway, he was glad that he had trailed along behind her. In his own mind, he had already laid claim on Swan Lake. She was a safe place—and something more that he was too young to understand or put into words. All he knew was that he wanted to hold on to the feeling he’d had the night before, and to let it wrap around him like a warm blanket on a cold night.

Chapter 9

Bernice could hardly stand the way she felt the next few days. For one thing, she kept imagining the whole family knew about her throwing that fit the other night. Everybody except Toy. Generally, Toy was careful not to know things he’d be happier and more comfortable not knowing. He’d been that way ever since that ugly business with Yam Ferguson, back after the war. But as for the rest of them—with everybody living in a heap like this, nobody would be able to poot without somebody smelling it.

Not that Bernice ever pooted.

The other thing that was making Bernice miserable was that, lately, she’d been having this time’s-a-wasting-and-so-am-I sort of feeling. You don’t go along for years being the prettiest thing around, and then realize that you’re in full flower, without getting a little anxious, since the next stage after full flower is when the petals start to droop and fall. So here she was, ripe and lush, with all her petals still pointing in the right direction, and Sam Lake didn’t even notice.

Well, she’d have to do something about
that.

Bernice tried to think of ways to make Sam notice. She thought about it in the daytime, after she and Toy got back to their own house. He always hit the sack as soon as they got home from Calla’s, and usually didn’t wake up until midafternoon. While he was asleep, Bernice would roam from room to room, as silent and graceful as a butterfly. Briefly lighting here and there. On a chair. On the couch. Sometimes, outside, on the porch rail. There were gardenias blooming beside the steps, and the smell was so sweet, it would catch in her throat and make her want to cry.

She thought about it at night, when she sat alone in Calla’s swing, with the music from Never Closes rollicking in the background. She thought about it when Samuel and Willadee and the kids headed back to Louisiana to have their farewell service at the little church they were leaving. She thought about it all the time. Somehow there had to be a way to make Samuel see the truth—that he was miserable without her.

With every hour that passed, Bernice felt an increasing sense of urgency. She wasn’t getting enough sleep, she wasn’t getting what she wanted, and she wasn’t getting any younger.

It was late Friday night when Samuel’s car chugged into the yard, pulling a trailer that was piled so high with furniture and boxes it was a wonder it had made it under the railroad trestles along the way. Grandma Calla was waiting up for them. She came down off the porch, picked her way through the muddle of customers’ vehicles, and leaned in the car window, talking loud above the juke joint racket.

“Just unload the kids, and go park the trailer in the barn,” she told Samuel. “It’s too late to move your stuff inside, and you wouldn’t want anybody pilfering through it.”

Samuel did as she said.

On Saturday, Calla’s toilet backed up, so Samuel had to spend the day digging up the septic tank field line. He had no trouble finding it, since the grass on top of those things always grows so much greener and brighter than the grass around it, but he had plenty of trouble chopping out the sweet gum roots that had grown through it and tangled around it. The job took all day. The car and the trailer stayed shut up in the barn, and nothing got unloaded, so there was none of the usual commotion that occurs when a family moves into a house. Which is why folks around the community were pretty much in the dark about the fact that Sam Lake and his family had moved back home to Arkansas.

Bernice didn’t go down to breakfast on Sunday morning. She just stayed in bed thinking about how wrong this situation was. And that’s how it happened that she first got the Inspiration.

Actually, it was Samuel who inspired her, although he didn’t know it. He and Willadee were in their room getting dressed for church, and their voices drifted through to her, clearer than clear. Bernice didn’t even have to press her ear to the wall to hear. It was as though This Moment Was Meant to Be.

Willadee was asking Samuel if he was all right about this—about going to church this morning, knowing that people were going to be asking him why he wasn’t back home in Louisiana, preaching to his own congregation. (For sure it was going to be humiliating for him to admit that he didn’t have a congregation.) And Samuel was saying that he wasn’t about to let the Lord down by not showing up at His House on His Day.

“I have to believe that there’s a reason for all this,” he said. “Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to do right here that I couldn’t do if I were anywhere else. Maybe there’s someone that I’m supposed to reach out to, or some problem I’m supposed to help with.”

Bernice sat straight up in bed.

In the next room, Willadee was agreeing with Samuel. It must be that God had something for him to do here, and the only way to bring it about was to uproot him from Louisiana loam and replant him in Arkansas clay, and probably the fields were right now ripe unto harvest.

Bernice flung back her covers and leapt out of bed. The fields were ripe, all right. She being the fields. And she was so ready for harvest she couldn’t see straight.

Before Bernice could hardly turn around, Samuel and Willadee were loading the kids into the car. Calla had long since opened the store, and Toy had headed down to the pond to do a little fishing as soon as he’d closed the bar—so neither one of them was around to gum up the works. Even so, Bernice barely had time to wash her face, and brush out her hair, and slip on the dress she’d worn to Papa John’s funeral. It was a pale gray number, with a slightly scooped neckline, just perfect for this occasion. Proper and tantalizing, all at the same time. She didn’t bother with makeup, because her skin didn’t need makeup, and besides, when you cry, makeup runs, which makes a woman look absolutely scary, and she intended to cry this morning.

She came running out of the house at the very last moment, letting the screen door slam behind her. Samuel jerked his head around and looked back in her direction, and then he did a double take. It wasn’t every day you saw Bernice Moses run.

“Something wrong, Bernice?”

She waited until she was right up close to him before she answered, so that he’d be able to smell her perfume while he listened.

“I was wondering if I could ride to church with y’all,” she said softly.

If Sam was surprised, he didn’t show it. He smiled that big, wide, handsome smile of his and said, “Well, come on, then. There’s always room for one more in God’s house.”

As if God had one little thing to do with this.

Samuel took her arm, led her around the car to the passenger side, opened the door, leaned in ahead of her, and said, “Willadee, Bernice wants to ride to church with us.”

Willadee gave her husband a knowing smile and slid over to make room. Bernice got into the car the way she’d seen movie stars do, gracefully lowering herself onto the seat, and managing to show just enough flesh to be tempting as she swung her legs in. She glanced demurely up at Samuel, to see whether he’d been tempted, but he was busy making sure none of the kids had their fingers in the way as he shut the car door.

Bernice hadn’t counted on what the ride to church would actually be like. She’d imagined herself and Samuel in the front seat, with Willadee in between them feeling ugly and awkward. Samuel would sneak longing glances at her over Willadee’s head, and she would favor him with an occasional enigmatic smile. If Willadee caught on, she’d probably pout, which fit right into Bernice’s plan, since nothing makes a man want another woman as much as being reminded that the one he has is determined to hang on to him.

As for the kids, they were more or less background color, part of the scenery that surrounded Samuel. She’d never thought much one way or the other about Samuel’s kids. She’d also never been shut up in a car with all three of them at once.

Before long, she realized that there would be no longing looks from Samuel. He and Willadee were holding hands in Willadee’s lap, and Samuel pretty much had the air of a man whose longings had been recently satisfied.

The kids were unobtrusive enough for about the first half mile, but then Noble took to leaning forward and sucking in deep breaths through his nose.

“What are you doing back there, Noble?” Samuel finally asked.

“Sitting here.” Which was true.

“He’s drinking in her perfume,” Bienville said. You read enough books, you learn to spot these things.

Noble turned as red as a beet and gave his brother a look that said he’d tend to him later. Bienville wasn’t worried. He’d been tended to before, and always lived over it.

“Why do women wear perfume, Aunt Bernice?” Bienville asked.

“To attract males,” Willadee drawled.

“We just like to smell nice,” Bernice corrected.

“Well, you sure do smell nice, Aunt Bernice.”

“Thank you, Bienville.”

“Do you attract many males?”

Willadee felt the laughter coming and tried to stifle it, but it wouldn’t be stifled. Pretty soon it started gurgling in her throat. Bernice was sitting there with her mouth open and her brain working overtime, trying to come up with a good, workable answer. She couldn’t say “More than my share,” because there are times when the truth just gets in the way of a woman’s purposes. And she couldn’t say “Only my husband,” because that would make her sound dull, which was totally unacceptable. And she for sure couldn’t say “I’m
trying
to attract one right now.”

Finally, she said, “Oh, I never pay any attention to things like that.”

Samuel managed to keep a straight face, but only because preachers learn early on not to laugh when they shouldn’t. Another thing preachers learn early on is that the best way to pull a congregation together is to get everybody singing. So he asked Swan if she knew any new songs.

“Does it have to be a hymn?”

“No, just something everybody can sing along to.”

Swan told him that Lovey had taught her “My Gal’s a Corker,” and
that
sure was a good sing-along song. Ordinarily, Samuel would have nixed that one, but not today. Today he said, “Well, let’s hear it.”

Nobody ever had to ask Swan twice to sing. She had a great big voice for such a small girl, and she wasn’t afraid to turn it loose. She set in to singing, verse after verse, and the other kids joined in. Noble made sound effects. They were clapping their hands, and stomping their feet, and getting louder and louder, and Willadee and Samuel never even told them to pipe down. They didn’t let up until they pulled into the yard of the Bethel Baptist Church. (The Moses family had always been Baptists, those who went to church. When Willadee had married Samuel, she became the first Methodist Moses ever.) As the car rolled to a stop, Noble bellowed the last note of the song in the most rutting-buck tone he could muster.

Bernice made up her mind then and there, whenever the sweet day came that she finally got Samuel, Willadee would get the kids.

She flung open the car door and stumbled out, and wouldn’t you know, the first thing she did was step into a hole. The dainty little heel of her dainty little shoe broke clean off with a snap you could have heard all the way to El Dorado.

“Are you all right?” Willadee asked, when she could see clear as day that Bernice was in pain. Breaking a heel on a pair of shoes that make your feet look simply precious is a painful experience for any woman.

Bernice pulled herself up straight and hobbled toward the front door of the church. With every step, she kept reminding herself that, when you’re on a mission, you don’t let little things distract you. She had come here this morning to get saved, and she’d be damned if she was going to let anything or anybody ruin it for her.

When they got inside the church, the congregation was singing the first hymn. Lifting their hearts in song, Samuel thought—and that thought was followed by a rush of emotion. A yearning for a congregation of his own. Most men in Samuel’s shoes might have asked themselves whether they had done something to displease the Lord, but Samuel didn’t think like that. The God he knew was giving and kind, so he was convinced that this experience was going to turn out to be a blessing, maybe the greatest blessing of his life. That didn’t keep him from hurting, though.

Bernice hobbled down the aisle, slipped into the first vacant pew, and stepped on over to make room for the rest of them. The kids filed in after her, then Willadee, then Samuel. Swan started singing lustily before she came to a full stop. People turned their heads to look at her, the way they always did when she opened her mouth and that big voice came out. Swan didn’t notice. Anytime she was singing, she was in a world of her own. She would pour herself into the music, and it would pour out of her, tumbling like a waterfall, and there was nothing else she’d ever known that compared to the feelings that took her over.

Samuel and Willadee nudged each other and smiled. The boys were wincing at their sister’s volume. Bernice stood erect, gazing straight ahead. Involuntarily, Samuel cut his eyes to see what she was looking at. It couldn’t be the scrawny, red-faced song director, because he was a constant blur of motion—strutting around, waving his arms in time to the music. Whatever Bernice was looking at was stationary. But knowing Bernice, she might not consciously be focusing on anything at all. She had a curious way of living inside her own head. You never knew what was going on in there.

One thing was for sure. She was up to something this morning—and Samuel figured it had to do with her trying to get him back. You’d think, after all these years, she’d have given up, but if she gave up, what would she have? A marriage she never wanted, to a good man who loved her so much that she despised him.

It wasn’t that Bernice ever actually chased after Samuel. She just managed every time he was around to drape herself someplace where he couldn’t help seeing her, and she talked to him in that silky, honey-drip voice, and she acted, well—amused. As if there was some powerful electric current between them and she found it comical to watch him trying to resist it.

Samuel responded by treating her the same way he treated everybody else. He was gracious and polite, and respectful as you please. He never avoided looking her in the eye. He never looked away first. He never let her get under his skin.