The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

  After Doc Bismark left, the family went over and converged around the men who had brought Toy in. Everybody thanking them. Everybody blessing them.

  “Doc says you boys got him here just in time,” Sid Moses told them. “Another few minutes, he’d have been too far gone to save.”

  Scotty set in to apologizing again for shooting Toy, but the Moses crew didn’t want to hear it. They told Scotty to stop blaming himself and advised all three of them to go home and get some rest, and topped it off by inviting them to drop by sometime for supper. They didn’t even draw the line at Ras Ballenger. If anybody thought about how awkward it might be for that man to come sit at their table right across from his estranged son, or of the possibility that he might refuse to leave without the boy, they dismissed those thoughts as unworthy. Maybe losing his son had made him take a hard look at himself and his ways. Maybe he had changed.

  Aunt Nicey was a dimpled little dumpling of a woman, but her house was the worst place in the world for a child. There were starched doilies everywhere, and crafty things that she had made, and pressed glass lamps, and the sweetest little porcelain candy dishes sitting around with no candy in them.

  Swan, Noble, Bienville, and Blade huddled on the couch, afraid to stop thinking about Toy, because then he might die, and afraid to move, because they might break something. Lovey, who still was not their favorite person, instructed them what not to touch.

  They didn’t want to touch anything anyway. Every few minutes, they asked Aunt Nicey if she would please call the hospital again to see how Uncle Toy was doing, but she said if she drove those folks crazy, that wouldn’t do Toy one speck of good, plus Sid would call as soon as he knew anything.

  Then she made them sit around the dining room table while she set up this contraption that looked like a big blackboard covered in felt. (She had another such board at church, but she kept this one at home, for when her Sunbeams came over.) Maybe hearing a nice Felt Board Story would help take their minds off things, she cooed. Swan and her brothers had seen so many felt boards during their Sunday School careers that they didn’t care whether they ever saw another one, but Blade had had no such experiences, so he was game.

  Aunt Nicey brought out a host of paper cutouts of biblical characters and biblical props (a palm tree, a tent, a stretch of desert sand, some sheep and camels) that all had felt glued to the back of them. These, she let Lovey place on the felt board at strategic times (they stuck, like magic) as she (Aunt Nicey) launched into the story of David and Goliath. When she got to the part where the giant was stepping on little people and squashing them to mush, Blade narrowed his eyes and clenched his fists.

  “That mean old sonofabitch,” he sputtered indignantly.

  Aunt Nicey said, yes, well, there was a price to pay for sin, and Goliath had turned out paying it.

  By midafternoon, Aunt Nicey (worn out from being so nice) suggested that a nap might be simply delicious. That plan met with considerable resistance, so she set a stack of storybooks on the coffee table and disappeared into her bedroom with Lovey in tow.

  When Sid called, a little later, to announce that Toy would live, Swan answered the phone and delivered the news to the boys. They opened their mouths wide and squealed silently, careful not to wake anybody who was less bother when they were asleep. After that, it got harder and harder to be good, so they gave it up. Bienville and Noble got into a wrestling match, right on Aunt Nicey’s nice hardwood floor, and Blade kept poking Swan in the ribs and running off. After the fourth or fifth time, Swan took out after him and cornered him over beside a table loaded with carnival glass.

  “What has gotten into you?” she demanded.

  “Nothing,” he shrieked, through peals of laughter.

  Then he kissed her smack on the mouth.

  Toy was allowed to have one visitor. Being the wife, Bernice got the honor. Toy was hooked up to several machines, and he didn’t really have the strength for talking, but he tried.

  “Looks like you’ll still have me to put up with,” he rasped, painfully.

  Bernice stroked his arm, and kissed his forehead, and gave him the tenderest smile in the world. “Thank God you’re alive,” she lied.

  Chapter 32

  It wasn’t so much decided that Willadee would take over running Never Closes as it was assumed. There was no one else to do it, and the family had to have the money. When Samuel realized what was about to happen, he began to feel that God was grinding him to dust.

  “You don’t have to do this, Willadee,” he told her the morning after Toy got shot. “God has always provided for all our needs.”

  Willadee was rushing around straightening the house and doing laundry, hoping to get everything done in time to get some rest before the kids got home from school. There’d been precious little sleep the night before, and tonight would be even worse.

  “Well, let me know when He starts back,” she said. She was feeling ground under, too.

  Samuel didn’t argue. When he and Willadee had gotten married, and the preacher had asked her whether she would love, honor, and obey, she had answered like a Moses. “Yes, yes, and that all depends,” she had said with a grin.

  The Moses family had laughed, and the Lake family had winced, and Sam Lake had taken his bride with the conditions laid out. Up until now, those conditions had never caused any real problems.

  On the way to work that day, Samuel asked God to give him a sign, to show him what to do.

  He was on the outskirts of Magnolia when he uttered that prayer, and he hadn’t driven a city block before he saw a line of vehicles passing through town. Big, mud-crusted, grease-streaked trucks of all sizes, with rough-looking drivers, and gears that creaked, and fantastic pictures painted on the sides. Pictures of lion tamers and trapeze artists and big tops. The circus, on its way somewhere.

  Well, Samuel had his sign. He didn’t think for one minute that God was telling him to go off and join the circus, but “Come one, come all!” was suddenly ringing in his ears. When he got to the Eternal Rock Monument Company, he turned in his three-ring binder to Mr. Lindale Stroud and made the man a deal.

  “If you’ll let me make some long-distance calls on the office phone, you can take the charges out of whatever commissions I’ve got coming.”

  In less than fifteen minutes, Samuel had located a company down in Shreveport that would rent him a tent and some folding chairs and a loudspeaker system, and let him pay for it when he started taking in offerings.

  There were plenty of places Samuel could have set up his tent, but the Ledbetter place seemed to have the most advantages. For one thing, the use of it was free. Irma Ledbetter might live in town now, but she knew the strain her old neighbors were under. She’d have died before she let Samuel pay money to use that land. Especially since he was going to clean it up for her, and once he got it looking good, somebody might buy it.

  Another advantage to this location was that, being there (right, precisely there) made a statement. There was a steady stream of lost souls flowing in and out of Never Closes every night, and they could neither come nor go without seeing Samuel’s banner, which would read, CHOOSE YE THIS DAY WHOM YE WILL SERVE.

  “A revival,” Willadee said, when Samuel told her the news.

  “A tent revival,” said Samuel.

  “Right across the road.”

  “Right square across the road.”

  “Well, I think that’s real good,” she told him. And she meant it, too. Samuel hadn’t looked this happy in a long time.

  She’d been surprised when he had come home from work early, and surprised wasn’t the word for how she’d felt when he told her that he’d quit his job. This revival thing made three surprises in less than five minutes, and she was glad for every one of them. At least now Samuel would be doing something he believed in, so maybe his spirits could heal.

  “How big a revival?” Willadee asked. She was sitting at the kitchen table folding laundry, and Samuel was getting himself a glass of iced
tea.

  “Big as I can make it.”

  “Maybe I can put the regulars on the honor system long enough to come over and hear you preach.”

  “Maybe you can bring the regulars with you.”

  She got up and went over behind him, and laid her head against his back, and kissed him through the fabric of his shirt.

  She said, “I hope you know I believe in you.”

  “That goes both ways,” he said.

  “Even though I’m working for the devil these days?”

  He set his tea glass down, and turned around, and gave her a pained smile. “Willadee, you’re just drawing the devil’s troops in close enough so I can get a crack at ’em.”

  After supper, Calla put the kids to bed and Willadee went to work for the first time in Never Closes. Samuel drove over to the hospital to take his turn sitting up with Toy, so Bernice could come back to Calla’s and catch up on her sleep.

  When Willadee closed the bar the next morning and trudged into the kitchen, Bernice was just getting home, looking no worse for wear. She and Samuel had sat up all night talking, and she was just amazed that she barely felt tired at all.

  Willadee, who wanted nothing so much as to go wash off the stale smell of the bar and get into bed but couldn’t yet, was more than slightly rankled. “I thought the idea behind Samuel going to stay at the hospital all night was so you could come home and get some sleep.”

  “It was,” Bernice explained happily. “But then he told me about the revival, and we started making plans, and we just couldn’t find a stopping place.”

  “Plans?”

  “I’m going to help him with the music. You know we used to sing together a lot, back when we were—back a long time ago.”

  Willadee nodded, dully. She knew, all right.

  In one of the lower cabinets, there was a fifty-pound sack of flour, and in that sack, on top of the flour, was an old blue speckled enamel pan. Willadee got the pan out, and filled it with flour, and set it on the cook table. Then she took milk from the refrigerator, and baking powder and salt and lard from an upper cabinet, and she set those things out, too. All that time, she was thinking that this situation had the potential for disaster.

  “Don’t you ruin this for Samuel,” she said.

  Bernice had been about to leave the room, but she stopped now and stood there in the doorway, staring back at Willadee like she couldn’t believe her ears. “Willadee Moses, whatever are you talking about?”

  Willadee poked her fist into the flour and dumped the other ingredients into the crater she’d made, not bothering to measure. She’d been making biscuits every day for fifteen years, which came to more than five thousand batches of biscuits. With one hand, she squished and mixed. With the other, she turned the pan, little bit by little bit, working in more flour from the wall of the crater as she went along.

  “I’m a Lake,” she corrected. “You’re a Moses. And you know very well what I’m talking about.” She had never let loose on her sister-in-law before, but her instincts were screaming that there was danger ahead, danger for Samuel, who needed, desperately needed, for something to finally go right. “This is the first chance at happiness Samuel has had for a while, and he’s got his work cut out for him. People are going to be watching him, and you can bet your boots, they’ll be watching you.”

  Which was true as a blue sky, but Bernice wasn’t about to admit it.

  “Well, I cannot begin to imagine—” she started.

  “Oh, yes, you can,” Willadee said. And all of a sudden, she was loaded for bear. “You’re real good at imagining. I figure you began to imagine that you were somehow going to get Samuel back the day you found out we were moving back here. You even got religion because you imagined that would throw the two of you together more. And you probably imagine that this revival is the answer to your prayers—what with me working nights now and you with nothing to do but look pretty and act holy. But don’t go after Samuel, because you won’t win.”

  Bernice glared at Willadee. She wasn’t pretending to be innocent anymore. For a fraction of a second, her eyes fairly glittered.

  “You won’t win,” Willadee went on, “not because I’m a better woman than you, but because Sam is too good a man to be corrupted. You can’t get him away from me, but you could mess this up for him, and if you do—I swear to God, I’ll pull you bald-headed.”

  Bernice said, “My, my, my, Willadee. One night in the bar, and you’re already talking like the regulars.”

  Then she took off her shoes, and started languorously unbuttoning her blouse, and informed Willadee that she was going up to bed.

  “You might want to get some sleep yourself,” she said helpfully, as she was leaving. “You’re looking downright haggard.”

  When Bernice drove back to the hospital that afternoon, Willadee went along with her. She was thinking it might be nice to visit for a while with Toy. She also figured Bernice would tattle to Samuel about the dressing-down she had given her, and she wanted to be on hand to defend herself. It was almost time for the kids to get home from school, so Willadee left a pan of baked sweet potatoes on the stove for a snack, along with a note telling them to do their homework and not leave the yard. Calla would be busy in the store but had promised to check on them from time to time.

  The two women didn’t talk along the way, Willadee having said what was on her mind that morning, and Bernice having her own thoughts that she didn’t care to share. The silence was like the still before a storm.

  Samuel was standing around talking to a cluster of elderly women who were soaking him up like sunshine. When he saw the car pull into the parking lot, he shook hands with each of the ladies and walked over to open the door for Willadee. Bernice slid out from behind the wheel and waited patiently while Samuel kissed his wife. Then she told them both, in a strained little voice, that she’d like to talk to them, if they could spare a few minutes. Willadee was not surprised. Yet.

  “Well, of course we can,” Samuel assured. “Toy won’t even miss us. The nurses are giving him a sponge bath.”

  As if Bernice wanted to even think about Toy getting a sponge bath.

  The three walked over onto a patch of grass where they’d have some privacy. When they got to a spot that looked private enough, Bernice turned and faced them with her heart in her eyes.

  “You don’t need to feel obligated to let me work in the revival,” she said to Samuel. “The last thing I want is to be a stumbling block to some poor sinner who needs to find the Lord.”

  Willadee blinked at her incredulously.

  Samuel said, “Well, of course you’re going to work in the revival. Where’d you get the idea that you shouldn’t?”

  Bernice looked from one to the other, as though afraid she might have spoken out of turn.

  “Well, from what Willadee said this morning—”

  Willadee blinked at her again. Samuel frowned.

  “That’s not what I said,” Willadee protested. “That’s not even kin to what I said.”

  “You said people would be watching us,” Bernice faltered. Her lips were trembling. “You said everybody knew I didn’t really get religion, and if I sang with Samuel at the revival, folks would think I was out to get him, and I mustn’t ruin this for him, because it’s his only chance to make something of himself after the way he failed as a pastor.”

  Willadee didn’t blink this time. Her eyes and her mouth were locked wide open.

  “Dear God in Heaven,” she finally managed.

  Willadee turned her gaze toward Samuel, hoping to see in his eyes that he knew how preposterous this all was, but his eyes were leaden.

  “I didn’t say those things,” she argued. And then, because she was Moses Honest, she amended. “Well, not exactly.”

  Samuel stood there for a minute like a punch-drunk boxer taking body blows. Then he said, “Bernice, I imagine Toy is finished with that sponge bath by now.”

  Bernice looked sick with regret. “Don’t be upse
t with Willadee,” she told Samuel. And to Willadee, she said, “I know you didn’t really mean it when you said you were going to drag me off the stage and pull me bald-headed.”

  “You go see to your husband,” Samuel told her. “And call the house if you need anything.”

  Bernice nodded obediently and started walking toward the hospital entrance. Samuel went over to the car and opened the door for Willadee.

  “I didn’t say those things,” she told him again, as she slid into the seat.

  Samuel said, “Willadee—don’t.”

  On the drive back to Calla’s, Willadee tried to make her husband understand what had happened. Yes, she had had a talk with Bernice. Yes, she had warned her to leave Samuel alone. Yes, she had said that people would be looking at them. She had mentioned the music, she had pointed out that this revival was important to Samuel’s happiness. But most of what Bernice had said was all a bunch of hooey.

  “What ‘most’?” Samuel asked. “You just admitted to everything she said.”

  “No, I didn’t!” She ticked the items off on her fingers. “I didn’t say you failed as a pastor. I didn’t accuse her of being a stumbling block to sinners. I didn’t say that anybody besides me doubted her religion! She’s taking one or two words out of every sentence I said, and weaving lies around them, and coming out with something totally different.”

  “It doesn’t sound all that different to me, Willadee. And as for Bernice’s conversion—”

  “She hasn’t had a conversion.”

  “You have no right to say that.”

  Willadee rolled her eyes and blew out a mad breath. “That’s right, I forgot. Nobody knows her heart but you and God.”

  Samuel gave her a reproving look and shook his head. “This isn’t like you, Willadee. I’m starting to feel as if I don’t even know you anymore.”