One night, at the supper table, about a week after her conversion, he caught her looking at him with this kind of glow, the way a woman does when she’s falling in love, or falling back into love. Toy wasn’t the only one who noticed. Samuel and Willadee both blinked, and Calla nearly choked on her collards.
Toy didn’t care. Let them all think that Bernice was building him up for another fall. Let them think any damn thing they wanted. Toy wanted more than anything to trust Bernice, and he was the kind of man who would risk everything for something he believed in.
“Shameless” was what Calla had to say about it. It was Thursday morning, and she and Willadee were hanging laundry on the line out in the backyard. Bernice had gone to prayer meeting the night before with Samuel and Willadee and the kids, and she had looked simply luscious, wearing this virginal smile and a modest little princess-style dress that showed off how much tinier her waist was than the parts above and below it. It had been all Calla could do not to drag her out of the car and tell her she could do her praying at home.
“We can’t say she’s not sincere,” Willadee said. Although she knew better.
“She’s sincere, all right,” Calla muttered. “And we know what she’s sincere about.”
Willadee hung a sheet, making sure to smooth it out and keep the corners straight. You hang a sheet right, it comes off the line looking like it’s been ironed.
“Mama,” she said, “it doesn’t matter what Bernice does. It’s what Samuel does that counts. And he’s too good a man to let go of his principles.”
Calla grunted under her breath. She believed in Samuel’s goodness, too. The trouble was, she believed just as strongly in Bernice’s ability to take anything good and flat-out ruin it.
Willadee felt guilty for talking about giving Bernice the benefit of the doubt when she wasn’t doing that herself. To tell the truth, though, she didn’t think her sister-in-law’s case of religion would last very long. Bernice would keep up her act for a little while, but when she saw it wasn’t going to get her what she wanted, she’d give it up.
The worst thing about it was that Toy was bound to get hurt again, and he’d been hurt enough. Willadee said as much to Samuel early one morning, right after Toy and Bernice had left for the day. Bernice had been especially attentive to Toy at breakfast, calling him honey, and buttering his toast, and laying her hand on his arm when she probably hadn’t touched him on purpose in years. Butter wasn’t the only thing she could spread on thick.
“I wouldn’t be too worried about him,” Samuel told Willadee. The two of them were in the bathroom with the door closed. She was perched on the side of the bathtub shaving her legs while he stood at the sink shaving his face. It had been three weeks since he’d come back from the Methodist conference, and he was about to go job hunting. He kept one side of his face taut while he drew the razor down across it. “He’s been looking pretty happy lately.”
“That’s what worries me. She’s got him fooled again.”
“Now, we don’t know that.”
Samuel’s voice was patient and kind—and just the slightest bit reproving. Willadee jerked around so fast she nicked her ankle.
“Don’t tell me she’s got you fooled, too,” she said. Her leg was stinging like crazy, but that sting wasn’t the one that was smarting the most.
“I’m not taking up for her,” he protested. “I’m just saying that we can’t possibly know what’s in somebody else’s heart.”
“I know what’s in hers.” Willadee hated herself for saying that. As a rule, she and Samuel were on the same wavelength about things. She waited for Samuel to say something else, but he was shaving again, paying close attention to what he was doing. Willadee turned back around and started shaving again, too. For the first time since she was fifteen years old, she cut herself in three different places.
Outside, the sky was dull gray, and the air felt heavy, like the elements were about to turn loose and do something terrible. Willadee tried to talk Samuel into staying home, but he wasn’t about to let his kids see him sitting around idle. He figured the weather was like a lot of people. Most of their threats never got carried out. Besides, the Bible said that a man who didn’t provide for his family was worse than an infidel. And even if the Bible hadn’t said a word about it, Samuel couldn’t stand the idea of living off of Calla.
Already, he had been making phone calls, and sending out letters, offering his services to other pastors he had known for years.
If they were wanting to go on vacation and needed a relief preacher …
If they felt the Lord leading them to hold a revival anytime soon and hadn’t yet selected an evangelist …
Try as he would, Samuel could not think of himself as an evangelist. To his way of thinking, an evangelist was kind of a lone wolf who roamed from flock to flock, driving strays into the fold. Maybe wolf wasn’t the right term, precisely, since the sheep were in no danger of being eaten alive. And they were being driven into the fold for their own good. But a shepherd didn’t drive his flock, he led it. And Samuel was a shepherd, pure and simple. All he wanted was to have a flock of his own, and lead it beside the still waters, and protect it from harm, and seek out the lost, and gently bring them home to peace and safety. Traveling from town to town, spending a week here and two weeks there, and leaving folks behind without really getting to know them—none of that appealed to him at all.
He needn’t have worried. All the ministers he contacted already had their vacations and revivals planned, and their pulpits filled. They seemed to feel bad about turning him down, though, and they all promised to keep him in mind, in case anything came up.
Sam Lake knew how to do a lot of things. He could sing, and make music, and help people to see the best in themselves and each other. He could get a couple who were on the verge of divorce to start talking, and he could guide the conversation along until they remembered why they had fallen in love in the first place, and forgot about whatever had convinced them that the love was gone. He could persuade a thief to give back what he had taken, and to be a man and come clean about it. He could talk a judge or a constable into going easy on someone who deserved a second chance. He could visit a teenage girl who had just given birth out of wedlock, and by the time he left, she would be feeling proud of her child instead of ashamed of herself.
But none of the things Sam Lake knew how to do were mentioned in the Magnolia Banner-News help wanted ads.
The first place he stopped was at the Eternal Rock Monument Company, in Magnolia, where they needed a salesman in the worst way. The man who ran the office, Mr. Lindale Stroud, took one look at Samuel and decided what everybody always decided when they looked at Samuel: that he was the kind of man nobody could say no to. He hired him on the spot.
The way Samuel’s new job worked was, he drove around calling on people who had recently lost a loved one, and he told them how he sympathized with them in this their time of grief—which was no exaggeration. He really did have compassion for people who were suffering. He would visit with them, just getting a feel for their circumstances, and then he’d ask them whether they had thought about picking out a monument to commemorate their beloved. If they hadn’t, he’d talk with them a bit more, helping them to see the importance of doing it now instead of putting it off, since time slips away when we’re not looking. Finally, he would open the three-ring binder that Mr. Lindale Stroud had provided and show the folks the glossy photos of all the various styles of monuments available.
To make it all easier for the families who couldn’t afford to pay in full (and most couldn’t), the monument company had an E-Z payment plan. The plan had a not so E-Z interest rate, which bothered Samuel. He would work it all out for the folks, showing them how they’d be paying the full price several times over if they took the E-Z plan, but nobody wanted to hear those explanations. It was just too tempting to sign on the dotted line and pay the small down payment. All those future weekly payments seemed worlds away.
&n
bsp; By the time the storm hit, at 3:08 P.M., Samuel had already made his first sale.
Willadee had kept the kids inside most of the day, because she had a bad feeling about the weather and didn’t want to have to track them down if it turned ugly. Swan and her brothers had never lived in tornado country, and had never witnessed a twister during their visits to Arkansas, so they didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The ominous cloud banks hanging above the horizon didn’t seem nearly as threatening as the thunderheads they were used to back home in Louisiana. The long, lead-colored banks looked as if they had been sheared off, flat across the bottom, and regular sky showed underneath. Rain drizzled, and lightning feathered through the clouds, and thunder rumbled, and the treetops churned in the wind. None of this seemed especially scary to the kids, even when little tails dipped down out of the flat bottoms of the clouds and felt around, like they were looking for something to lock on to.
All day long, Willadee had kept going to the window and looking out, or stepping onto the porch and frowning at the sky, and saying she wished Samuel would hurry up and get back. About midafternoon, Calla came through the house from the store, and stood on the porch with Willadee, and frowned at the sky, too.
“I never saw a man had a lick of sense,” Calla said. Which wasn’t true at all. Her sons had plenty of sense, and so did Samuel. Even John had had a good head on his own shoulders, back before the liquor scorched his brain. But griping about men not having any sense was easier for Calla than admitting that she was worried about Samuel.
“Well, I know he’s all right,” Willadee said, trying to convince herself.
The kids had been hanging half in and half out the front door, and now they ventured out on the porch, to help with the weather watch.
“Why is the sky turning green?” Bienville wanted to know.
“Why is your bee-hind about to turn red?” Grandma Calla asked. Then she saved him the trouble of answering. “Because I’m about to swat it, that’s why.”
Swan said, “Well, the weather’s not doing anything. The wind’s not even blowing anymore.”
She was right. Willadee had been so busy watching the sky that she hadn’t noticed the sudden, eerie stillness. Now she looked at her mother, who was looking at her, and they both went grim around the mouth.
“Get inside, and get your pillows off your beds,” Willadee told them. “And go climb in the bathtub with the pillows over your heads, until I tell you.”
“But nothing’s happening!” Swan persisted.
Grandma Calla hollered, “Swan Lake, if this storm rips your head off your shoulders and slings it out there in the cow pasture, I guess you’ll learn to listen.”
Swan thought that was hilarious. A head, in a cow pasture, listening. She didn’t dare laugh, though, because Grandma Calla was stomping her foot and waving her apron, like she was shooing her hens into the chicken yard. Swan, Noble, and Bienville stampeded through the door, and up the stairs, then grabbed their pillows and clattered back down. They charged into the bathroom and dove into the tub. So far, Swan thought, this was kind of fun.
Grandma Calla and their mother had run back inside and were throwing windows open, because they had heard somewhere that that could help keep a house from exploding if a twister hit it. Then they rushed into the bathroom and sat down on the floor beside the tub. Willadee told the kids that she bet their daddy was praying right then for God to keep them safe, so there wasn’t one thing to be afraid of.
Swan pulled the pillow down off her head and said that if there wasn’t anything to be afraid of, she personally didn’t see the point of hiding in the bathtub. Before Willadee could open her mouth to ask Swan to please shut hers, they heard what sounded like a freight train, screaming out of nowhere. All the kids could think about at the time was that that was odd, since there wasn’t a railroad track around for miles.
Chapter 14
Samuel was out on the Macedonia highway, heading for the home of Birdie Birdwell, daughter of T. H. Birdwell, recently deceased. According to Mr. Lindale Stroud, who had gotten it from Avery Over-beck, whose third cousin was Birdie’s next-door neighbor’s uncle Frank, T.H. had been out in the privy looking at the lingerie section of the Montgomery Ward catalog when he suffered a massive heart attack.
Samuel didn’t dwell on the details. His job was to provide comfort—which he felt good about—and to try to sell Birdie a monument—which he did not feel completely good about. Already, he was beginning to view himself as a vulture, swooping down after death had struck, hoping to feed off the unfortunate. The biggest difference he saw between himself and the buzzards was that they fed off the dead, and—as long as he was in this line of work—he would be feeding off the living.
Still, there was no moral reason not to sell monuments. He’d just make sure to give the people on his prospect list his best by being careful never to take advantage of them.
Now, if he could make this sale, that would give him two checks to hand over to the Eternal Rock Monument Company. And it would give him two commissions. Samuel could go home with money in his pocket. Not only that, but next week, he could drop back around and collect the installment payments from the sales he had made this week. Theoretically, the whole thing should keep on growing to the point where, eventually, he would have substantial income whether he made any new sales or not.
Samuel wasn’t a gullible sort, so he already knew that things wouldn’t actually turn out quite that rosy. Once the people got their headstones set up, the payments were likely to be perceived first as an inconvenience, then as a burden, and finally as something the customers didn’t actually owe anyway, considering the interest rate was so ungodly. But Samuel would cross those bridges when he came to them. Right now, he was looking for the Birdwell mailbox. The weather had been getting nastier by the minute.
He was trying to decide whether to turn in to the drive or turn around and head home when the bottom fell out of the sky. The rain was sudden and savage and impossible to see through. The wind came back to life with a vengeance, slamming into Samuel’s car, rocking it back and forth. Unless that car picked up and flew, which seemed a possibility at the moment, Sam Lake wasn’t going anywhere. Whatever was going on at home, it was too late for him to show up and help out. So he did something even better.
He cut the engine, and took his Bible from the passenger seat, and held it to his heart, and calmly began to pray. From the tone of his voice, he could have been asking his best friend for a glass of water.
“Lord,” he said, “I’m asking you for one thing, and one thing only. If the storm is headed toward Calla’s house, please make it go around.”
Two hours later, when the weather had finished having its say, and the western sky was just turning mauve and gold, Samuel’s car rolled over the crest of a hill about a half a mile away from Calla’s front door. From the top of that rise, Samuel could see the Moses place, all spread out below. He hadn’t been worried about whether his family was safe. It never occurred to him to doubt that his prayer had been answered. But he wasn’t prepared for the sight that lay before him. His first impression was that parts of the place must now be scattered all over south Arkansas. Samuel had to stop the car and get out and stand there for a few minutes, just staring. It looked like a bulldozer had headed through the woods, mowing down trees like so much tall grass, and then had continued straight toward the house. An old feed silo was in its way. It shredded the silo. An abandoned outhouse was in its way. It flattened the outhouse. Calla’s chicken coop was in the way, but it was spared, because the twister had veered off abruptly, cutting a semicircle around the yard and the closest outbuildings and the Moses home before straightening back out and resuming its path of destruction.
Samuel got down on his knees, right there in the middle of the mud-puddled road, and looked up at the heavens. He could feel his eyes filling with tears.
“Anything You ask of me, Lord,” he said, simply. “Anything You want.”
Sa
muel spent the rest of the afternoon helping Toy pick up broken limbs and shattered boards and mangled pieces of tin.
“I reckon it’ll take a while to rebuild everything,” Samuel said, when the two stopped for a breather.
“I reckon it won’t,” Toy returned. He waved one arm, indicating the casualties. “We don’t need an outhouse, since we have indoor plumbing. Don’t need a silo, since we got no cattle to feed. I was gonna take down that fence over yonder, because it was falling apart anyway. And all those sheds were just places for rats and snakes to breed. Nothing we had any use for was even touched. Damnedest thing I ever saw.”
Later on, in bed, Samuel told Willadee that he had a feeling God was about to teach him a thing or two about trust.
“But you always trust,” she said.
“I know. But it’s always been easy, Willadee. Everything has always come easy for me.”
“Because you trust,” she insisted.
“I used to think that, too,” Samuel said. “I thought things came easy for me because I had such strong faith. But anybody can trust as long as everything’s going their way. You think about it. I’ve never lost anybody except my parents, and they had lived long lives, and everybody expects to lose their parents someday. I’ve never had a broken heart, except when Bernice jilted me, and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. Other than being without a church right now, I’ve never asked for anything I didn’t get, my whole life.”
“Samuel,” Willadee said. “You’re the best person I’ve ever known. God blesses you because you’re good.”
“God blesses me because He is good,” Samuel corrected her.