The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

  “You don’t have to close down the revival just because of Bernice,” Willadee told him. “There are plenty of people around here who can help you with the music.”

  “Not every night,” he said. “And anyway, revivals aren’t supposed to go on forever. The way attendance has been falling off, pretty soon I could be in debt to the rental company, and then I’d be in worse shape than I was to start with.”

  They were quiet for a moment, and then he said, heavily, “I swear, I can’t figure out what God wants from me anymore.”

  Willadee didn’t know what to tell him, but she knew he needed comfort, so she wrapped herself around that man and rocked him like a baby.

  In the coming days, Samuel returned the tent and folding chairs and the sound equipment to the rental company, and threw himself into cleaning up Calla’s neglected land. Cutting brush and burning it. Sawing up fallen trees for firewood. There was a certain pleasure in the hard physical work, and it gave him plenty of time to talk to God, but honestly, it seemed to him that it was God’s turn to do the talking.

  Nobody in the family talked much about Bernice. Instead of leaving town, she went on a kind of rampage, throwing herself at males of all ages, and making sure the whole world knew about it.

  Toy was flattened. With the truth too obvious to be ignored, everything that had mattered most to him was over. Except for the kids. He loved those kids so much it hurt, but he couldn’t stand to be around them or anybody else right now. He still had to go into Never Closes every night and stay until daylight, but he didn’t talk to the customers much, and they understood. Every one of them realized that what Toy felt like doing was going on a rampage of his own—just lashing out every which way—and that he was afraid if he got to feeling crowded, he might do it.

  So Toy stayed to himself. Every minute he wasn’t either working or sleeping, he took to the woods and the water, but that made it all worse, somehow. Every beautiful thing that he saw reminded him of beauty lost and gone.

  He couldn’t even stand to be comfortable, so after a while, he stopped sleeping in his room upstairs and took to sacking out on an old Army cot in the back of the shed. There was hardly enough room in there to turn around, but the only turning around he ever did was to come back out every evening, the same way he’d gone in. He had all the space he needed.

  Willadee brought his meals, and she left his food outside the door of the shed. If they happened to see each other, they’d talk for a few minutes, not about much of anything. There wasn’t anything much Toy cared to talk about these days, and Willadee respected that.

  The kids were desolate. Sometimes Blade would “draw the uncle a letter,” using pictures instead of words to communicate. These he would leave outside the door of the shed. The next day the drawings would be gone, but Toy stayed as remote as before.

  Swan haunted the shed and tried a couple of times to talk to Toy through the walls, but Willadee told her to leave him alone. He worked all night and didn’t need his sleep interrupted.

  “It’ll take him some time,” she explained to the kids when they pestered her about the change in the man they adored.

  “But he doesn’t even like us anymore!” wailed Swan.

  Willadee said, “Oh, yes, he does. He loves you more than anything. One day he’s going to come out of that shed, and you better just be ready for all the love that man will show you.”

  Chapter 36

  February rolled around, and God still hadn’t shown Samuel what to do, so he asked Calla what she thought about him planting some potatoes.

  “Why, I think that any man who has land available is falling down on the job if he doesn’t get some potatoes in the ground by Valentine’s Day,” she told him. “How many potatoes are you thinking of planting?”

  “A couple of acres,” Samuel said.

  Calla pulled a surprised face. “That sounds like a kind of in-between amount of potatoes to plant. Too many for a family to eat but not enough to call a real crop.”

  Samuel said, “Actually, I wanted to use about five or ten acres to do it.”

  Well, Calla looked as confused as she was beginning to feel, so he explained that he’d noticed the way she gardened over the years, and it seemed to him she had a system that could be duplicated on a larger scale.

  “You don’t just plant one big stretch of any one thing,” he said. “You mix everything up, and throw in some flowers where they’re least expected, and you get more food from less space, without any insects or plant diseases. It’s like the bugs get so bumfuzzled they don’t know where to go to dinner.”

  Calla said, “Why, that’s just the reason I do it, but you’re the first person who ever noticed.”

  Samuel knew that real farming cost real money. Money for seeds—but Calla saved more seeds every year than she could plant in ten, so he figured he could get those from her for free. Money for fertilizer—but Calla’s chickens provided more droppings than she could ever use, plus the calf lot was rich with old, rotted manure and Lady was doing her part every day, so all that would be free, too. Money for equipment—but Samuel didn’t need the kind of fancy equipment that mauled the land into submission, not for what he had in mind. John’s old tractor and a few hand tools would do just fine. Samuel had seen enough of his own daddy living on farm loans to know he didn’t want to go that route. By the time a man got in his crops and sold them and paid everything off, he’d have to start living on the next year’s loan. What Samuel wanted to do—what he thought might work—was make the soil happy with dried manure and fish scraps and wood ashes, and see if it didn’t give something extra back in return.

  Calla said, “You don’t have to stop at fish scraps. I bury table scraps out there all winter long. By spring, the earthworms have got the ground worked up so good, all I have to do is punch holes in it with my finger and drop in the seeds. Why are you stopping at five or ten acres?”

  “Because I’m still expecting God to give me a church.”

  Calla just nodded. She hated to think about God giving Samuel a church, as much as she knew he still wanted one. Once he got a new church, he’d be gone. And Willadee and the kids would be gone along with him.

  “I’d hate to leave you with the whole place planted in all manner of crops that somebody would just have to plow under,” he went on. “And I don’t reckon there’s a farmer in the county who’d take over tending to a bunch of marigolds.”

  “You don’t have to tend to marigolds, Samuel. Marigolds take care of themselves.”

  “That makes it even better,” he said.

  So he planted potatoes. Half a row here, half a row there, with cabbages and pole beans in between. The more the weather warmed, the more different vegetables Samuel planted. Greens and squash and corn and tomatoes and onions and okra. And flowers, everywhere, flowers. He planted in blocks and patches that didn’t run in straight lines, like crops were supposed to. There were odd-shaped plots, blending and running together, connected by winding paths, with short stretches of fence here and there for climbing plants to latch on to. Some of the land, he didn’t even plow. He just covered it with old hay, or with oak leaves or pine needles. Other farmers would drive by and see Samuel out there covering up perfectly good field dirt with all manner of dead plant matter, and they’d just figure he’d finally lost it. His field didn’t look like anything those men had ever seen, but to Samuel, it looked promising.

  The second week of March, Calvin Furlough (who wasn’t a farmer but had opinions about everything) stopped by the store on Monday morning and told Calla he was worried about Samuel.

  Calla said, “You’re not worried about Samuel, you’re worried about Willadee. Why don’t you go home and worry about Donna?”

  Donna was Calvin’s wife. To tell the truth, he didn’t pay her anywhere near enough attention, and everybody knew it.

  “Donna’s all right,” he said. “I just bought her a new Chevy.” By “new” he meant one she hadn’t had before. He was good about buying wr
ecked cars and fixing them up. Donna got a new one every time she turned around, but they always had For Sale signs in the window.

  “Samuel’s all right, too,” Calla told him. She never had had much use for Calvin Furlough.

  “Well, he’s sure acting like a crazy man. What is it exactly that he’s doing out there?”

  “You’ll see when everybody else does,” Calla said.

  Calvin wasn’t the only one who stopped by the store asking questions. Ras Ballenger stopped by the same day and asked about Blade.

  “It’s been right hard on his mama and me,” he said, sounding anguished, “having him over here instead of at home with us. But if this is where he wants to stay, so be it. At least we know he’s taken care of.”

  Calla said that taking care of Blade was no trouble. They all enjoyed having the boy around. Ras went on about how that was a relief, and how he hated for any of his blood kin to be a burden to anybody, and how he knew what a handful Blade could be.

  “It was gittin’ to where we couldn’t hardly keep him at home anymore,” he said. “He hasn’t tried runnin’ off from here, has he?”

  “No,” Calla said. “He seems to be pretty happy.”

  Ras nodded humbly, as if to indicate that this all made him feel bad, but he guessed it was his lot in life. As he left, he said, “You don’t have to tell him I came by or nothin’.”

  Don’t worry, I won’t, thought Calla.

  For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what Ras Ballenger was doing in her store after all these months, acting like he was concerned about his son. The mother she would have expected to show up, bawling and begging the boy to go home with her. Or just grabbing him up and taking him. Back when Calla’s children were little, she for sure wouldn’t have let one of them be gone so much as overnight without permission. But then, she wouldn’t have stood by a man who harmed one of them, either. If John Moses had put out one of her kids’ eyes with a bullwhip, he’d have gone to sleep that night in one world and woke up the next morning in another.

  After Ras was gone, she pondered over what it could all mean. Maybe he was just trying to improve his image in the community. Probably that was what he’d been doing that day when he helped Millard and Scotty get Toy out of the woods and into town to the emergency room. She’d been cordial to him ever since. They all had. As grateful as they’d been to still have Toy alive and among them, they hadn’t questioned his motives.

  She was questioning them now, though.

  “I don’t know what it could mean,” Willadee said that evening, after Calla told her about it. “I don’t trust him, though. Seems like every time we start forgetting he’s around, he rears up his head to remind us.”

  They had just put the kids to bed and were sitting in the living room. Willadee was turning the collar on one of Samuel’s shirts, so the worn part wouldn’t show. She’d just gotten all the stitches out and was pulling off loose bits of thread.

  “Well, I think we need to start watching Blade closer again,” Calla told her. “We’ve gotten lax.”

  Here of late, the kids had been playing all over the place. Not as far back as the creek, but they stayed out of sight a lot, especially when they were riding Lady. Which was generally from the time they got off the school bus until it was too dark to see.

  Willadee eased the collar back between the yoke and the facing, with the good side up, and started pinning it in place.

  “I hate to wish harm to anybody, Mama, but I don’t know why people like that man get to live on this earth.”

  “If he bothers that boy again, he won’t, for long.”

  Willadee gave her a look. That was strong talk, coming from Calla Moses.

  Calla said, “And don’t think I don’t mean it.”

  Ras Ballenger sat on his front steps that night with a fresh chew of Bull Durham in his jaw and a peaceful smile on his face.

  He hadn’t been asking questions at Calla Moses’s store because he needed answers. No sirree. His appearances at the revival, and that little charade about taking Blade presents at Christmas, and now this visit to the store today, had all been done for the same reason he did half the things he did to Geraldine. He just liked to make people squirm.

  All the answers he needed, he’d picked up by observation—when no one had been observing him.

  The door creaked behind him now. Geraldine stepped out of the house and sat down beside him. She didn’t sit close enough to touch him, and he knew that the only reason she had come out at all was because she had no one else to talk to who was over five years old. Just to get her goat, he reached over and began feeling the little fat rolls around her middle. She went stiff as a board, immediately.

  “What’s the matter, you don’t like me feeling your fat?”

  She edged away from his hand. “Don’t do that.”

  “Well, all right, if you don’t want my lovin’. You really oughta take it where you can find it, though, a lump like you.” He goosed those fat rolls again. “You wasn’t hardly lumpy at all when I married you.”

  She pursed her mouth and sighed resignedly. Ras patted her on the back as if she were a good old dog and gave her a cheerful smile.

  “I went by and asked about your boy today.” That was what he called Blade these days, when he was talking to her. “Your boy.” Little one-eyed bastid.

  Geraldine looked away, like she always looked away when he talked about Blade. Ras couldn’t tell whether she missed the boy or whether she was simply glad the kid was over there instead of over here, and she didn’t want him to see it in her eyes. Maybe she thought a child would be safer at the Moses place. He almost laughed out loud, thinking about that.

  He reached up and took a clump of her limp hair in his hand. Not pulling on it, the way he sometimes did. Just holding on hard enough so she couldn’t jerk her head away.

  “Looks like you’d do something with this hair,” he told her. “You look like a plow horse with this hair.”

  On Tuesday afternoons after school, Blade took art lessons from Isadora Priest, who had a major in art and a minor in education, and knew artistic ability when she saw it. Isadora was sixty-three years old and did a little substitute teaching in Emerson when any of the salaried teachers were sick. The first time she’d laid eyes on Blade and his artwork, Isadora knew she’d found a diamond in a turnip patch. The way she discovered the artwork was that she was patrolling the room to make sure all the kids were writing their spelling words twenty times each, and she found that Blade was not. He was drawing. She confiscated his notebook and instantly decided that it was no wonder the boy’s spelling was faulty. As many sketches as there were in that book, he couldn’t possibly have had time to work on his spelling.

  Isadora didn’t work all the time, and she didn’t like talking on the phone, so she had shown up at Calla’s the next day and had told Willadee proudly that the boy had “an eye.” After she said it, she realized how it sounded and altered her statement to indicate that he had genuine talent, the kind you don’t see every day.

  “It’s like whatever he sees goes in through his eye and comes out through his hand,” she said. She also said she thought she should work with him. She thought Tuesday afternoons would be good. She thought that she could walk over to the school on those afternoons to get Blade and walk him back to her house. She thought the lessons should last about an hour. And she thought that Willadee could drive over and pick him up afterward.

  Willadee asked her whether she’d thought about how much she would charge, and she said that she had indeed. The lessons would be free. Willadee argued with her about that, and Isadora finally admitted that a pint of whiskey from Never Closes once a month would be nice. She never had the nerve to go out and buy it for herself, and there were just so many uses for it.

  So it was settled.

  From then on, Blade walked with Isadora to her house every Tuesday afternoon, and Willadee drove over later and picked him up, which meant that, not too long after the other
kids got off the school bus, Willadee left the house. She always visited for a bit with Isadora, but she was usually back home in less than forty-five minutes.

  The day after Ras stopped by the store, Willadee went to get Blade from Isadora’s, just like always. Swan watched her drive away and waved to her from the porch. Samuel waved from the field. Toy didn’t wave, because he was asleep in the shed. Calla had a customer, but she looked up and saw Willadee leaving, and she said to the woman she was waiting on, “There goes Willadee. Gone to pick up Blade.”

  Ras Ballenger saw Willadee leave—saw her from where he was crouched, hidden, at the edge of the woods. He was holding a gunnysack.

  He glanced over to Samuel’s Crazy Patch, which was what the locals were now calling the farming project, and there was Samuel, carting a wheelbarrow of manure from the calf lot over to where he had plowed up some new ground. Those two boys of his were trotting out to join him—none of them aware that they were being watched.

  Ras headed toward the back of the Moses yard, keeping out of sight. Going thicket to thicket. Thicket to fencerow. Fencerow to outbuildings. When he got over behind the chicken house, he opened the gunnysack and turned loose a kitten.

  Chapter 37

  Willadee had started supper before she left to get Blade, and she had put Swan in charge of keeping an eye on it to make sure nothing burned or boiled over. Swan turned all the fires down low and went outside to take care of her one regular chore. Tending the chickens.

  Swan didn’t like chickens, except for the baby ones, but there weren’t any chicks right now, there was just a bunch of grumpy old hens, and that danged speckled rooster with the spurs like tenpenny nails. Swan let herself into the pen and went into the chicken house. There, she opened a lidded metal drum that sat over in a corner and filled a coffee can with chopped corn, which she took back out into the chicken yard. She was about to start throwing handfuls of corn to the chickens when she heard the most pitiful sound in the world. A kitten crying.