The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

  When she finally found what she was looking for, it came as a huge surprise, because she almost charged off the bank and landed in the middle of it. She had just reached one of the high points and was picking her way through some underbrush that seemed to go on forever when, all at once—it didn’t. There was a clear space right ahead, and she was heading for it, and it turned out that the clear space was where the bank dropped off, straight down and down and down. If it hadn’t been for the fabled grapevines, and for the fact that Swan happened to get an arm tangled up in one as she was pushing toward the light, she’d have been doing a cannonball off the side whether she wanted to or not.

  But then, the grapevines were there, and she did get her arm (not to mention her skirt tail) tangled up in one, and so she turned out not falling in but dangling above the water with her panties showing. She was screaming bloody murder.

  Noble had gotten back with the rope, and Bienville had found a tree with an appropriately low-hanging limb. The two of them were busy setting up the Revival Tent when they heard all the commotion. The thing was, their sister had gotten far enough off from the Revival Grounds that her terrified voice didn’t exactly come through loud and clear. It was muted. Distant. And not altogether believable, since Swan had a history of making make-believe seem like the real thing.

  The two boys kept working on the tent.

  Blade Ballenger had been trailing Swan ever since she had left Bienville behind and struck out on her own. He’d stayed out of sight, and had made no sound at all.

  When Swan went crashing through the underbrush, Blade started to holler out, to warn her that there was a drop-off. He’d been here before. He knew this place. He knew a lot of the places in these parts, because he’d explored most of them, at one time or another, when he was trying to stay away from whatever was going on at home. But she was moving faster than his thoughts. One second she was on land, and the next second, she was in the air, and the only thing between her and the water was a gnarled old grapevine.

  Blade went racing to the side of the bank, terrified that Swan Lake was about to go plunging out of his life once and for all. He had to do something.

  He was afraid to say anything to her. Afraid that anything he did would be wrong. But he had to do something.

  So he cannonballed. Just took a flying leap off the side, passed her on the way down, and ploinked into the water. Little as he was, he didn’t even make much of a splash. He went under and kept heading down for a bit, then bobbed to the surface.

  Swan had seen him whizzing past and was gaping down at him. Hanging on to the vine that was hanging on to her, and just gaping.

  “Well, let go!” he yelled.

  She shook her head and held on harder.

  “I can’t swim!”

  He said, “You go down, you come up!”

  “And then I’d go down again.”

  “No, you won’t. The way I learned to swim was somebody threw me in.”

  Which was true. His daddy had thrown him out of a boat into a pond when he was three years old. He couldn’t remember exactly how it all happened, but he had swum like a fish.

  Swan wasn’t buying his story.

  “Well, I’m not letting go! You go down three times, you’re done for.”

  “I’ll save you!”

  “Who’s gonna save you?”

  “I don’t need saving.”

  He was dog-paddling in circles, and it certainly did not look as though he needed saving, but Swan wasn’t taking any chances.

  “I’m going to swing back to the bank,” she said.

  She gathered her feet up beneath her, and pushed the air with them, and went nowhere in particular. She tried again. Same result.

  “Go get somebody!” she hollered. She was hanging on with both hands now and didn’t dare let go, so she jerked her head in the general direction of the Revival Grounds. “Go get my brothers! They’re right back over yonder.”

  Not that her brothers could swim, either.

  But Blade wasn’t about to leave her. It would take too long. What if she lost her grip while he was gone? That was a chance he couldn’t take. He didn’t know for sure what he would do if she let go now, but if she fell, he was going to be there.

  Swan had gone with her daddy plenty of times over the years to visit elderly parishioners who reveled in reciting the details of their latest brushes with death, heart attacks being the most frequently mentioned and dramatically described. She knew the symptoms of a heart attack and was pretty sure she was having one. Her chest felt tight, her pulse was pounding in her ears, and her left arm was going numb.

  Swan was an optimistic sort, but she couldn’t help thinking that one of two things was about to happen. Either she was going to die in the air or she was going to die in the water. When the snakeman appeared out of nowhere on the creek bank a few seconds later saying not to worry, that he’d have her back on solid footing in a jiffy, Swan just had one more thing to worry about.

  Maybe she was going to die on dry land.

  Chapter 12

  Ras Ballenger had better things to do with his day than chase around through the woods after a kid who kept wandering off. Lately, every time he’d needed Blade to go fetch him his Bull Durham, or to bring him a jug of ice water from the house, the boy was nowhere to be seen. Used to be, Blade disappeared only to put off getting a strapping when he’d done something he shouldn’t, or to keep from having to hear his mama blubbering when she’d gotten out of line. But nowadays, he was like swamp fire. Here, there, and gone. It looked like he’d have figured out by now that running off only made things worse, but that young’un had to learn everything the hard way.

  Ras had made up his mind that, when he caught up to him this time, he’d get his point across good and proper. A horse wasn’t the only thing that could be cross-tied.

  But here he was, standing high on the rise over the creek, and there Blade was down in the water, and there that little bit of a girl was hanging out over the swimming hole, with her skirts hiked up. All of a sudden, Ras wasn’t so mad anymore.

  He had his whip all rolled up in one hand. He didn’t have to tell the little girl to get still, because she did that as soon as she laid eyes on him.

  “Now, don’t be scared,” he said, real nice and soft. “I’m just gonna snag that vine with this whip and pull you over here and get you untangled.”

  Swan’s eyes were big as saucers. She was trying hard to swallow, but her throat didn’t want to cooperate. She sure did wish she could fly.

  Still, maybe Ballenger didn’t intend to hurt her. Maybe he was only mean to his own kids. A lot of people were like that—nicer to everybody else than they were to their own flesh and blood.

  And anyway, the snakeman was rearing back with his whip, about to let it fly. If she moved a muscle, he might take her arm off.

  The tail of the whip whistled through the air and popped as it wound around the grapevine, about two feet above Swan’s head. Ras jerked back on the whip and dragged Swan through empty space like she was on a trapeze. As soon as she swung into reach, he grabbed hold of the grapevine with his free hand and steadied it.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asked. Swan was trying to get free from the vine, but her hands were shaking, and her legs were like water. It was all she could do to stand up. She shook her head timidly.

  Ras laughed and started easing her arm free from the vine. Her stomach lurched when he touched her.

  “You ain’t got nothing to be afraid of, little pretty,” he said, just as cheerful as sunrise. He made sure not to put his hands anywhere except on her arm and shoulder while he worked. He made sure not to look as she tugged her skirt tail back down where it was supposed to be. He even patted her on the head.

  The tough old vine had scraped and bruised the top of Swan’s arm, and now that she was safe, she could feel the pain. She gritted her teeth, trying not to cry.

  Ras made a sympathetic clucking sound. “You need to git home and
let your mama put something on that.”

  She nodded and backed away from him.

  Ras Ballenger bowed grandly. “Any time you need savin’, you just holler.”

  She sure could holler. That’s what he was thinking later on, when he and Blade were headed back to the house. Ras was covering ground fast. The boy was trotting alongside, looking up at him and talking a mile a minute.

  “That was something, what you did with the whip,” he was saying. “You just let ’er fly, and popped that ole grapevine a hummer. That was sure something, what you did with the whip.”

  Ras reached down and patted his son on the head, just the way he had patted the girl on the head a few minutes earlier.

  “Bet you’re hopin’ I don’t pop you a hummer, too,” he said.

  The little boy gulped. He had been thinking maybe his father had forgotten that the reason he’d had to come off down to the creek and the reason he was carrying the whip had anything to do with each other.

  Ras looked down at him and smiled. It wasn’t a bad smile, like sometimes. He sifted through the boy’s hair with his hand.

  “Well, you’re wrong,” he said. “I ain’t goin’ to take the whip to you.”

  Blade gulped again, this time from blessed relief. “You’re not?”

  “Nawwwww,” Ras said.

  Then, snake-quick, he knotted his fingers in the boy’s hair, yanked him up off the ground, gave him a toss off to one side, and kept on walking.

  When Swan got back to the Revival Grounds, the deacons had the tent up and were constructing a pulpit out of rocks and deadwood. It wasn’t going to be a very high pulpit, Noble explained. If they tried to build it too high, it would fall down. But he had seen this one evangelist once who was so tall that he had to kind of hunker over the pulpit to see his sermon notes. Swan could, maybe, play like she was tall.

  Swan told him he was crazy as hell if he thought she was going to hunker over anything. Then she slunk off toward the house. Which meant that Noble got to be the evangelist, and Bienville had to be the whole congregation.

  Sid and Nicey and Lovey weren’t the only relatives who had shown up while Swan was off where she had no business being. Alvis was there, too, with Eudora. Their kids were all in town at the movies—something Swan and her brothers never got to do, going to the movies being a sin in Samuel’s eyes. The grown-ups were lolling around on the porch and in the yard, finger snapping and foot tapping while Samuel played “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” on his five-string banjo.

  When Samuel saw Swan scurrying past, he stopped playing and called out to her. “Hey, little girl. You want to sing a song with your daddy?”

  She shook her head and kept walking.

  He sweetened the offer. “We’ll do ‘Faded Love.’”

  But not even the thought of those sweet harmonies could tempt her to join the fun.

  Alvis, the worst cutup in the bunch, was leaning against the biggest old oak tree in the yard. He grabbed Swan, out of the blue, and started dancing her around. She jerked away from him like he was poison and kept on going.

  Alvis looked perplexed, and sniffed his armpits, and said, “I can’t smell that bad.”

  As a matter of fact, he smelled like Dial soap and Old Spice. Alvis Moses was an auto mechanic, who spent half his life covered with grease and sweat and the other half so clean he gleamed.

  “She’s just going through a stage,” Grandma Calla said.

  “Then y’all better look out,” Alvis offered. “Them stages can drain you.”

  Swan stomped up onto the porch and stepped around Lovey, who was playing with a couple of walking dolls near the screen door. Lovey was allowed to wear shorts and had on a navy blue pair, with the cutest little white sailor top. For a second, Swan thought about hauling her back down to the swimming hole and baptizing her good. But no way was she going back to that swimming hole. There were dangers down there that even her parents didn’t know about.

  Lovey didn’t ask her to come play dolls, which was just as well. Swan hated dolls. She slammed into the house and on to the bathroom, to doctor her scrapes with Mercurochrome—otherwise known as Monkey Blood.

  She wished she could tell the men of the family that she was scared to death of Ras Ballenger, and ask them to be on the lookout for him and protect her from him. But she couldn’t. If she asked for help, she’d have to explain about breaking the rules, and that would take more courage than she had in her. You have to figure the percentages in these things. If she stuck close to home from now on, there was probably at least a fifty-fifty chance that she could avoid Ras Ballenger. But if her folks ever found out what she had done, the odds were double to nothing that she’d have no place to hide.

  The Moses family was used to the ebb and flow of music from Never Closes. Used to car doors slamming and muffled voices, and voices that needed to be muffled. They never locked their doors at night, and never worried about anyone slipping into the house. After all, no one ever had. But several times that week, doors were eased open, and hallways explored, and stairs were climbed silently, and no one asleep in the bedrooms was any the wiser.

  Sometimes the visits took place in broad daylight—although, in the daytime, the prowler stayed away from the house, peering through a chink hole in the shed, or hiding in the hayloft, or crouching at the edge of the woods. Patient, and observant, and silent as a stone.

  On one sultry afternoon, Samuel was standing beside his and Willadee’s bedroom window, picking out a song on his guitar. It was a lonesome kind of song, and he knew he ought to switch over to something more upbeat, since it’s not good to stay in a melancholy mood too long, but the lonesome song kept winning out. He closed his eyes and rode the notes, and it was almost like a prayer, just feeling that sweet, sad music. When he opened his eyes, he looked out over the Moses farm. It was a comforting sight, even in its present state of neglect. Sam Lake had been a farm boy before he got to be a preacher. He loved good earth—the smell of it, and the feel of it in his hands. Loved what could be done with it when a person cared enough to sweat over it, and give to it.

  Somebody ought to do something with this place. Somebody ought to lay into it and love it and woo it back to what it used to be. That’s what he was thinking. Then his thoughts were interrupted, because something caught his eye. Down there, in what used to be the hay meadow, half-hidden by the fuzzy, gray-green sea of goatweed. A small, dark-haired boy, gazing at the house.

  Samuel went downstairs and out into the meadow, but there was no sign that anyone had been there. Nothing except a bare spot of ground where someone had been drawing in the dirt.

  Other than that, Blade Ballenger had left without a trace.

  Chapter 13

  Bernice was wise enough not go on too much about the difference the Lord was making in her life. She knew full well that the more you talk about a thing, the less likely folks are to believe it, so her plan was to let her actions speak louder than words.

  First off, she was determined to start being at church every time the doors opened. Willadee had never made a secret of the fact that she thought worshiping God and going to church were two different things altogether, and she had been known to miss a service now and then. Bernice was positive she could show Willadee up in that department.

  Second, she was going to start singing solos, as soon as somebody noticed how pretty she could sing and asked her to.

  Bernice hadn’t sung in a while, not so much as a note, because who wants to sing when they’re sad, and she had been sad so much for so long. But she used to sing, back before she lost Samuel to Willadee. That was one of the things that had gotten her and Samuel together to start with. Samuel used to come over and sit on the front porch with Bernice’s brother, Van, both of them picking on their old guitars. Bernice would sit out there with them and sing up a storm, and Samuel would just get lost in the music. And in her.

  Third, she supposed she was going to have to start living differently, although the only thing she really
wanted to change about her life was the man in it. Still, church people were forever talking about how God had made them over, so she guessed she could make herself over and let God take the credit.

  She could handle that. A woman can handle almost anything when she’s got a good enough reason. And Bernice looked across the supper table at that reason every night. Sometimes it was all she could do to keep from reaching over and touching him.

  But she was not that stupid. She could pass him the mashed potatoes, and let her fingertips brush his for an instant. Stand behind him, and lean across to set the corn bread on the table, and let her body press against his shoulder for one electric second. So easy. But not smart.

  Good works were smart.

  So she offered to help out more around Calla’s house, and wouldn’t you know, Calla put a mop in her hand. Far be it from Calla Moses to just let Bernice do the things that came to mind, such as—Well, nothing really came to mind, but she had offered to help, and it seemed to her that Calla could have thanked her for being so thoughtful and let it go at that.

  She contemplated other good works she could do, such as visiting the sick and the elderly, but that wouldn’t help her to be around Samuel, unless she asked him to drive her, which she couldn’t get by with, since she knew how to drive. Besides, being around the sick and the elderly made her skin crawl.

  Toy was surprised when Bernice started making over him again the way she had back when they were courting. Surprised—but so glad he could have cried. He knew that Bernice might be doing all this for show, just to impress Samuel with how virtuous she was becoming, and he told himself that no man should be as big a fool over a woman as he was over his wife. But his “self” didn’t listen. His “self” was just eating this up, like a kid sucking on candy.

  Toy Moses couldn’t believe the taste life had these days. Bernice would be smiling when he woke up late in the afternoon. She would bring him coffee and talk to him while he drank it. When they were driving to Calla’s, she would sit right beside him instead of way over on the other side of the car—and when he’d slip his arm around her, she’d snuggle like a bird into a nest.