The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (9 page)

Truth was, Samuel felt sorry for Bernice. She was the most alone person he had ever met—so intent on staying forever breathtaking that she could never let any of life’s glories take her own breath away. He hadn’t felt a tingle for her since the day he met Willadee. (Talk about one of life’s glories. Talk about something taking your breath away.) But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to be extra cautious around his sister-in-law. An electrical cord doesn’t have to carry a charge in order to be dangerous. It can still be used to tie people up. And strangle them.

Chapter 10

The way you trained a horse was, you taught it that life was uncertain and punishment was sure. At least, that was the way Ras Ballenger trained horses. If the people who entrusted their animals to him had known his methods, most of them would have found another trainer.

A few people would have used Ras anyway. Those who only cared about results. Ras definitely got results. He could get a horse to do damn near anything. You wanted it to be a high stepper? He could turn it into a high stepper, all right. You wanted it to prance around with its head at an elegant but unnatural angle? He could get it to where it would prance all day long and never bob its head once. You wanted it to be a good kid horse? He could turn it into a horse a three-year-old could ride.

The thing was, the reason the horses Ras trained were so obedient and eager to please was that they were terrified of humans, and broken in spirit. They came away from his place groomed and gleaming, but with a vacant stare and a tendency to shudder when they were petted. Sometimes owners questioned Ras about that, and he had all sorts of explanations. The weather was changing, and you know how squirrelly horses can get when the weather is changing. Or they weren’t used to the owners anymore, after all they hadn’t seen them in a couple of months, but they’d get back to normal soon enough. Or they knew they were about to be moved, and horses hate being hauled. That sort of thing.

Ras never let the conversation linger long on such trivia. The thing that kept people coming back to him was performance, so he never wasted any time getting down to showing them what their horses could do now that he had worked with them so diligently.

He’d get up on the horse and ride it around, and start it and stop it and back it and make it step sideways. He’d lope it and canter it and trot it and run it at a gallop. If it happened to be a cutting horse, he’d turn some calves into the lot, and he’d do a little cutting demonstration, which never failed to please the owners. Few things in the world are as pretty and flashy as the intricate dance a fine horse does when it’s separating a calf from a herd.

At some point, Ras would go no-hands. He’d loop the reins around the pommel, and rest his hands on his thighs, and let the horse do the work on its own. He always wound up the performance by putting a kid in the saddle. He’d use one of his own if the folks hadn’t brought one along. Then he’d tell the kid what to do, and they’d go through a little replay of Ras’s original demonstration, and by that time, nobody was worrying anymore about whether the horse had a vacant stare. They’d be clapping Ras on the shoulder, and asking him how he did it, and pressing money into his ready hand.

“A horse is smart,” Ras would tell them. Smiling. “All you have to do is show it what you want, and it’ll do it, or die trying.”

So far, none of the horses that had been brought to Ras had died trying, although a few had come close.

If you wanted Ras Ballenger to work with your horse, you had to take it to his place and leave it. After all, he could put in more time with it that way, and besides, he was already set up for it.

The owners didn’t know it, but Ras’s setup included a twitch, a whip, and a place in his barn where the beasts could be cross-tied so that they couldn’t move an inch in any direction. A horse could be left for hours or days without food and water, so that it would be grateful and docile when it was finally released and given a drink. It could be tormented in any number of ways, and Ras Ballenger knew them all.

At about the same time that Samuel Lake was sitting in church wondering what was going to become of his life, a big white gelding named Snowman was standing in Ras Ballenger’s holding pen, probably wondering the same thing. Ras was standing outside the pen, leaning against the wood rails, watching the horse watch him.

They’d been like that—the two of them, watching each other—for a couple of hours now. Ever since the owner, a fellow named Odell Pritchett, from over around Camden, had dropped the horse off. Odell had explained that Snowman was green broke, but he needed some finishing work. He was a little high-headed. A little unpredictable.

Ras had assured Odell that he would do what he could. Generally, all a horse like that needed was a little experience. (He didn’t say what kind.) A lot of special attention. (He didn’t explain that, either.) What he would do was, he’d work with Snowman every day. He’d be consistent, and show him what was expected of him, and before you could pour piss out of a boot, he’d have him whipped into shape. (He for sure didn’t elaborate on that one.)

Right now, Ras was doing what he always did first with a new horse, which was to let the animal’s anxiety take over. He could stand here all day, if it took all day, just giving the horse a chance to realize that whatever happened next would be something it would have no control over whatsoever. An uncertain horse was a horse that made mistakes. And a horse that made mistakes was a horse that could be corrected. And that was the point where Ras Ballenger would start to truly enjoy his work.

“You’re thinkin’ ’bout it now, ain’t you?” he asked. Talking soft. Laughing low.

Snowman moved to the far side of the pen and turned his head away.

“You’re thinkin’ ’bout how you’re bigger than me, and faster than me, and how you got four feet to my two,” Ras went on, and his voice sounded deceptively kind. “You’re wonderin’ whether this is all gonna be hard or easy, ain’t you, Snowman?”

He stepped inside the pen, and walked over to the horse, and took hold of its halter, and snapped on a lead rope, which was already attached to a sturdy post that was cemented into the ground.

“Well, I’m here to tell you, Snowman—it won’t be easy. ’Cause easy just ain’t no fun.”

When Brother Homer Nations got up to make the announcements, the first words out of his mouth were the ones Samuel dreaded.

“We’ve got a very special visitor this morning, folks,” Brother Homer proclaimed. “One of the best and most devout men I’ve ever been privileged to know. Samuel Lake. Stand up, Samuel. Let us get a look at you.”

Samuel stood up. He hated to, but he did it. He looked around at all the people, and smiled at them, and nodded to them, and they all smiled and nodded back. Brother Homer beamed and cleared his throat, to indicate that he had more to say. The congregation dutifully turned their eyes back to him.

“Ordinarily, we don’t get the honor of having Samuel with us for services. But tragic circumstances have brought him our way this morning. Samuel, I know you’re here to be with your wife’s family in their time of grief. I just want to say that you all have our deepest sympathies, and our heartfelt prayers.”

“Thank you, Brother Homer,” Samuel said. “We appreciate that.” And then he added, “I just hope you folks don’t get tired of looking at me, because Willadee and the kids and I are moving home.”

Brother Homer said, “Well, praise the Lord! Where will you be preaching?”

Samuel looked around at the people, these people he had grown up with, who respected him and looked up to him, and he said, in that calm, resonant voice of his, “I don’t have a church this year. I’ll be preaching wherever God provides me with a pulpit.”

You could have knocked those folks over with a feather. If Sam Lake didn’t have a church, that meant that the Methodist conference hadn’t seen fit to appoint him to one. And if that were the case, there had to be a reason. Methodists might be dead wrong about not believing in closed communion and once-saved-always, but they seemed to do right by their preachers. Surely they didn’t lay them off for nothing, like mill hands during a slow season. Something bad must have happened, and Samuel must have been unfairly blamed for it.

At this point, nobody was even thinking, at least not seriously, that maybe Samuel himself had done anything wrong. Those thoughts would come later. For the moment, the people were all for Samuel.

Brother Homer’s sermon was all full of hellfire and brimstone, which wasn’t really the side of religion that Samuel liked to emphasize, but concentrating on the message kept his mind off of what would come next, which was visiting with people after the service and having to explain over and over that he and the Methodist church weren’t seeing eye to eye these days. Willadee had been right. It was humiliating, and the more people he had to talk to about it, the more humiliating it would become.

What he didn’t know was that, by the time the service was over, everybody there would be thinking about something else entirely.

When Calla heard about Bernice getting religion, it just made her so mad she could spit. Not that she had anything against salvation. She’d taken the plunge herself, back when she was just a slip of a girl, and she still prayed and tried to do the right thing, even though she had decided by now that God was all over the place, and you didn’t have to go to church to find Him. The thing was, she’d had a bellyful of Bernice a long time ago, and she was way past the point of giving that woman the benefit of the doubt. She never said as much to anybody, but Calla had always been of the opinion that when Toy came home from the war, and killed Yam Ferguson, the biggest mistake he made was that he wrung the wrong neck.

It was the kids who just had to tell Calla the big news. They were piling out of the car before their father even cut off the engine, and they went racing and scrambling straight into the store.

“Aunt Bernice got saved!” Noble was yelling, not paying the slightest attention to the fact that Calla had a couple of customers who really didn’t need to know Everything About Everything.

Calla very nearly dropped the dozen eggs and the can of Calumet baking powder she was ringing up. The customers—a sweet-faced old lady and a weather-beaten old man—looked pleased as could be, the way you ought to look when you find out that somebody has come to the Lord.

“You don’t say,” the old lady chirruped.

“Oh, yes, ma’am,” Swan warbled back. The three kids had all skidded to a stop right across the counter from Calla, and Swan was trying to shove Noble out of the way so that she could be the spokesperson for the delegation. “She went down the aisle as soon as they started singing ‘Just As I Am,’ and she flung herself down on her knees—”

Swan flung her own self down next to a stack of fifty-pound sacks of chopped corn, the kind of corn Grandma Calla fed her chickens. The sacks were made of printed cotton fabric, most of them colorful florals, so they made a nice backdrop for the reenactment.

“And she was holding her head up?” Swan said. “Like this? Like she was looking up to the Lord? And she was just crying her heart out, only her face didn’t crumple up like most people’s faces do when they cry, you know how ugly most people look when they cry? But she didn’t look ugly
at all,
she looked just like an angel.”

“And just about everybody there went down and knelt around her and helped her pray through,” Noble added.

Bienville nodded soberly. “She got saved as all get-out.”

Calla got this kind of squinty-eyed stare, and handed the old couple their purchase, and told them to have a good day. The old couple cast confused glances at each other, knowing they’d just been dismissed and wondering what in the world had gotten into Calla Moses, who was usually so nice and pleasant, and always had a kind word for everybody.

Calla’s garden was a beauteous jumble of flowers and vegetables that seemed to spring up of their own accord wherever they pleased. Sunflowers towered ten feet in the air, with runner beans and cucumbers climbing their stalks and blooming all along the way. Tomatoes were surrounded by peppers, which were set off by marigolds of orange and bronze and gold. Graceful okra cast a fan-leafed canopy over a frilly patchwork of lettuces. Scarlet zinnias and pastel cosmos danced among hip-high summer squash, and purple hull peas hugged the sturdy legs of strappy sweet corn. It was a sight to behold.

Toy was scaling crappie at a rickety old table between the garden and the toolshed. He glanced up at the sound of all the car doors slamming, and then he focused his attention back on what he was doing. He knew Bernice had gone to church with the others—not because he had seen her leave, and not because he had gone to their room and discovered that she wasn’t there. He just knew because he knew, the same way he often just knew things, especially where his wife was concerned.

Toy wished with his whole heart that he didn’t care so much about what Bernice did, or whether
she
cared about
him.
He wished he could numb it all out and not hurt over her or yearn after her, or give a damn one way or the other. He wished that she were not still in love with Sam Lake, or that at least he didn’t have to be so acutely aware of it. The hardest thing he did every day was to pretend not to be aware, and the only way he managed it was to just keep on doing whatever work was at hand to do, from the time he got up until the time he lay down, day after day, after day.

Right now, the work at hand was cleaning fish. So he gutted and scaled, and gutted and scaled. He had a kind of rhythm to his movements that would have caused anybody watching him to think, Now, there’s a man who’s at peace with his world.

He could hear the cooking sounds starting up in the kitchen. The clatter of pots and pans. The low murmur of female voices. That would be Bernice and Willadee. He didn’t strain to hear what they were saying, partly because that was not his way and partly because they wouldn’t be saying much worth listening to anyway.

Pretty soon, Samuel came out and joined him. He had changed into khakis and an everyday shirt, and he was holding a paring knife.

“How about some help?” Samuel asked.

“No sense in both of us smelling like fish,” Toy said. “Anyway, I’m almost done.”

Samuel hadn’t figured Toy would want or accept help. He had just brought the knife along to show that he was willing to do his part. Since he felt useless, and didn’t know what else to do with himself, he leaned against a tree and tossed the knife from one hand to the other.

“How was church?” Toy asked. Just making conversation.