When they got over to Calla’s garden, Toy set her down and knelt facing her, looking her full in the eye.
“You’ve got my heart,” he told her. “You know that, don’t you?”
Swan nodded, love in her eyes.
“Now you can’t throw it away while I’m gone,” he warned her.
“I wouldn’t ever,” she promised.
“No,” he said. “I reckon you wouldn’t. I sure reckon you wouldn’t ever throw away a heart that loves you.”
They had bonded now, Swan thought to herself. Bonded soul deep, just the way she’d dreamed of that day in the store. Only, back then she really hadn’t known what soul deep meant. She knew it now, though. She knew it now, for true.
There was one kid missing. Blade. Toy asked the others to tell Blade, the next time they saw him, that he loved him like a son. And he’d like it if Blade would draw him a letter or two from time to time.
After a while, Toy hugged everyone who had come, even the men. Samuel’s shoulders quaked—fairly quaked, from all the feelings he was trying not to let go of in front of everybody—when it came his turn. Toy gave him a grin and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “You take care of yourself, Preacher.”
And Samuel said, “You’ll be in my prayers.”
Early didn’t have to tell his prisoner when it was time to go. Toy Moses was not a man who needed to be hustled along. He finished passing out hugs, and kissed the kids one more time, and then hugged his mama again, hard and long.
“You come back,” Calla told him.
Toy nodded and said, “You be here.”
“I’ll do my best,” Calla answered, knowing her best might not be enough. Not necessarily twenty years might still be more than she had left. She touched his lips with her fingers and drew her hand away, letting him go.
Toy stood there for one more moment, soaking in everybody and everything he was leaving. Then he turned to Early Meeks and asked him which one of them was driving.
About the middle of May, Samuel got a letter from Bruce Hendricks, his district superintendent—or the man who had been his district superintendent. Bruce had written to tell Samuel that he thought he might have a church for him, and that Samuel should come on down to the annual conference to see what could be worked out.
Instead of a letter of acceptance, Samuel sent Bruce a batch of newspaper clippings that fully detailed the facts of the trial—including a mention that one Samuel Lake, the brother-in-law of the convicted man, tried for a while to claim responsibility for the murder of Ras Ballenger.
A letter arrived by return mail. The offer of a church had been withdrawn. Samuel read the letter, and handed it to Willadee, and went out and planted some melons.
“Are you hurting over this?” she asked him later on. It must have been sometime around sunset. They were walking in one of Samuel’s fields, where the crops were up in profusion.
“Not hurting.”
“What, then?”
Samuel pointed out some corn that was taller than it had a right to be, and then he showed her some squash that was making like crazy, and after that, he pointed back toward the barn, where their three kids were all grooming Lady. The last of the day’s sun rays were washing over the kids, painting them in all manner of beautiful colors.
“Happy,” Samuel said. “Just happy.”
After a time, Blade started coming back around. There was a quietness about him, and a serious air. His daddy had left marks on people while he was alive, but when he died, he left a stain—and that kind of thing takes a lot longer to wear off.
At least Blade was there. And frequently. Partly to play, partly to see if there might be a letter from Toy (there often was)—or to bring one that he had gotten five minutes before, out of his own mailbox.
At first, Blade found it hard to be around Swan—as though he had been the one to hurt her and couldn’t forgive himself. Finally, one day, she took him aside and faced him with the facts.
“Look,” she said. “You can’t let what happened make you afraid to be my friend. You didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did I.”
“I know.” His voice was low and tragic. “But my daddy’s who I’m from.”
She thought about that for a minute. He was right. Up to a point.
“He may be who you’re from,” she said, “but he’s not who you are. I love who you are, Blade.”
That was a lot for the boy to take in and hold. Being told that he was loved. He’d heard it plenty here with this family, but never from Swan. Love wasn’t a word she threw around a lot.
“I love you, too,” he said, shyly. Then he cut a cockeyed grin and added, “I’m still gonna marry you someday.”
Swan said, “Oh, hell, no, you’re not. You’re gonna be my brother.”
Sometimes, when it was hot as blazes, Samuel would take the four kids down to the Old Swimming Hole. He’d been meaning to teach his children to swim for years, but he was always too busy with the Lord’s business. Watching them laugh and grow, he began to suspect that what he was doing now was the Lord’s business. The way he saw it, God had worked out the outcome just fine.
Farming for a living didn’t keep Sam Lake from driving sick folks to the doctor or spreading the Good Word, just like he’d been called to do. He didn’t always use words to tell folks that God is love. Sometimes his sermon was a mess of greens and a bushel of peas that he left on some hungry family’s doorstep—usually along with a handful of flowers. Sometimes it was just looking some unfortunate person in the eye without flinching when most people would look away.
In the meantime, Willadee had opened Never Closes back up and had started serving home cooking to the regulars. Pretty soon, she stopped selling liquor and took to closing the place before bedtime. That was when the men started bringing their wives and kids, and Willadee told Samuel that she needed a new sign.
Samuel took down the NEVER CLOSES sign and was ready to paint another one, but Willadee couldn’t decide what she wanted the thing to say. Samuel knew exactly what he wanted it to say, so he just painted out the N in Never and painted out Closes altogether, and painted in another word where that one had been. Then he nailed the new sign above the back door. It said, EVER AFTER.
Willadee asked him if he thought maybe it should say HAPPY EVER AFTER, but Samuel said no, he thought happiness was like any other miracle. The more you talked about it, the less people believed it was real. It was like Swan said, some things, everybody just had to find out about for themselves.
Not that they needed a sign. Folks could smell Willadee’s home cooking for a mile, and they heard about it farther away than that. Ever After was open every night except Sunday (Samuel strictly drew the line at making profit on the Lord’s Day). As time went by, the supper crowd grew until it filled up Ever After and spilled out into the yard. Samuel built picnic tables and benches, and set them out under the spreading oak trees, and those tables filled up, too.
Come dusk, the Moses yard would be full of cars, and people milling around visiting with each other, and kids playing tag and catching fireflies. Sometimes, if you looked close enough, you could actually see laughter bubbling in the air. Folks would sit there at the tables and load up on barbecue and potato salad and baked beans and corn on the cob and Grandma Calla’s spiced pickled peaches. They’d wash the food down with iced tea that was always served in mason jars, and if they still had room, they’d top the meal off with Willadee’s banana pudding or double fudge layer cake, and if they didn’t have room, they made some.
Most nights, after Samuel came in from the fields and got cleaned up, he’d pull up a chair and play his mandolin or his guitar or his fiddle, and anybody who took a notion could join in and sing.
Swan would stand there behind her daddy’s chair with one arm draped across his shoulders, and she’d let ’er rip all the way from her toes. The way the music poured out of her, so clear and fresh and liquid, people would hang on the notes and ride the swells. Hearing that little gi
rl sing was like floating the rapids of the Cossatot River.
Pretty soon it got to where pickers would come from all over the county and sit in, and the old pickers would teach new, young pickers (Noble and Bienville and Blade among them) how to play hot licks. It was enough to make your heart fill up and burst, just being there.
“Sam Lake can play anything he can pick up,” folks would invariably say.
“He can make strings talk.”
“He can make them speak in tongues.”
Nobody ever made a move to leave until Calla would get up out of her chair and say something like “If I was someplace else right now, I believe I’d go on home.”
Then folks would start gathering their young’uns and heading for their cars. All those regulars and soon to be regulars and folks who’d just been passing through, and had heard about the place, and would still be talking about it when they got back to wherever they had come from.
And that’s the way things have gone along from that day until this. Not staying the same, but always changing. And that’s okay, because once one part of a thing changes, all the other pieces begin to shift, and pretty soon it’s a whole new story.
BEHIND THE SCENES
‘THEY’RE MY FAMILY AFTER ALL’
A Word from the Author
‘LOVE OR LOATHE’
Things to Think About
WHAT TO READ NEXT
‘THEY’RE MY FAMILY AFTER ALL’
The nature of the writer’s craft is a mysterious one. What is it that inspires authors to put pen to paper: curiosity, sympathy, passion, obsession? In her own words, Jenny Wingfield reveals what inspired her to write The Homecoming of Samuel Lake …
Back in the nineties, I had a hankering to write a play. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because someone told me that, in theatre, the writer is king. I’ve never really wanted to be any sort of royalty. I’d much rather be what I am: a gardener/goat-keeper who is also a storyteller. But I’d been writing screenplays for a while and had discovered that, in film, an awful lot of people get to have opinions about how a story unfolds. Having grown up in a string of parsonages, I’d had enough of other people’s opinions by the time I was twelve, so naturally the idea of writing something nobody could fiddle with appealed to me.
With no particular story inside me begging to get out, I put second things first by creating the set – actually, three in one, where a set change would only entail shifting the lights. What I came up with was a house, sandwiched between a grocery store and a bar. A place that never closes.
But who would live there? Well, my maternal grandmother had run a store similar to the one in the book. I gave her ‘Moses’. My grandfather had a long-standing love affair with liquor, so he got ‘Never Closes’ – and darned if he didn’t kill himself before I’d hardly started writing.
Not only that, but the story didn’t want to be a play, it wanted to be a book. By now, my brothers and I had wormed our way into the mix (bringing our parents and a whole slew of friends and relatives along), and we didn’t want to be stuck inside any old building. We wanted to smell the honeysuckle and race through pastures and splash in the creek and have adventures.
Now, stories are hard things to argue with. They have minds of their own. The only way to win with them is to give in, so I did. For a couple of weeks, I wrote like crazy. Then I had to put the book aside to work on other deadlines, and of course, one deadline led into the next. It was years before I revisited the Moses clan, but when I finally did, it was just like going home.
They’re my family, after all.
‘LOVE OR LOATHE’
From Socrates to the salons of pre-Revolutionary France, the great minds of every age have debated the merits of literary offerings alongside questions of politics, social order and morality. Whether you love a book or loathe it, one of the pleasures of reading is the discussion books regularly inspire. Below are a few suggestions for topics of discussion about The Homecoming of Samuel Lake …
‘She was little. She was quick. And she was just what Noble dreamed of being. Formidable. You couldn’t get the best of her, no matter how you tried.’ After finishing this novel, to what extent do you agree with this early description of Swan Lake? In what other ways, if any, would you describe her?
What do you think is the significance of the shop, Moses, and the bar, Never Closes? What, in your view, do they represent?
The novel is set in 1950s Arkansas. In what ways do you think the author captures a sense of place? How successfully, in your opinion, does she do this?
Samuel Lake, Ras Ballenger and John Moses are the fathers in this novel. In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different? Are there any other characters who you think represent strong father figures and why?
Family and faith are just two of the themes in The Homecoming of Samuel Lake. What other themes do you think are interwoven in the novel?
What are your views on the character of Bernice? How important do you think she is to the book?
Towards the end of the novel, Swan is raped by Ras. What impact did this have on you as a reader? How successfully do you think the author portrayed this shocking incident?
How would you describe the relationship between Samuel and Willadee? How, if at all, do you think it develops as the novel progresses?
The novel concludes with Toy being sentenced to prison for twenty years. How satisfied were you with the book’s ending?
The title, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, refers to Samuel’s failure to secure a congregation and having to stay with the Moses family. Do you think this is a powerful title? Are there any other title possibilities that you think could work?
What genre do you think this novel falls under and why?
WHAT TO READ NEXT
If you enjoyed The Homecoming of Samuel Lake you might be
interested in these other titles from Harper Press …
Plague Child by PETER RANSLEY
September 1625: Plague cart driver, Matthew Kneave, is sent to pick up the corpse of a baby. Yet, on the way to the plague pit, he hears a cry – the baby is alive. A plague child himself, and now immune from the disease, Matthew decides to raise it as his own. Fifteen years on, Matthew’s son Tom is apprenticed to a printer in the City. Somebody is interested in him and is keen to turn him into a gentleman. He is even given an education. But Tom is unaware that he has a benefactor and soon he discovers that someone else is determined to kill him.
The civil war divides families, yet Tom is divided in himself. Devil or saint? Royalist or radicalist? He is at the bottom of the social ladder, yet soon finds himself within reach of a great estate – one which he must give up to be with the girl he loves.
April 2011
The Confession of Katherine Howard by SUZANNAH DUNN
When twelve-year-old Katherine Howard comes to live in the Duchess of Norfolk’s household, poor relation Cat Tilney is deeply suspicious. The two girls couldn’t be more different: Cat, watchful and ambitious; Katherine, interested only in clothes and boys. Their companions are in thrall to Katherine, but it’s Cat in whom Katherine confides and, despite herself, Cat is drawn to her. Summoned to court at seventeen, Katherine leaves Cat in the company of her ex-lover, Francis, and the two begin their own, much more serious, love affair.
Within months, the king has set aside his Dutch wife Anne for Katherine. The future seems assured for the new queen and her maid-in-waiting, Cat. For a blissful year and a half, it seems that Katherine can have everything she wants. But then allegations are made about her girlhood love affairs. Desperately frightened, Katherine recounts a version of events which implicates Francis but which Cat knows to be a lie. With Francis in the Tower, Cat alone knows the whole truth of Queen Katherine Howard – but if she tells, Katherine will die.
May 2011
The Girl in the Mirror by SARAH GRISTWOOD
Jeanne, a young French exile orphaned by the wars of religion on the continent, is brought to London disgui
sed as a boy. As she grows up, the disguise remains and she finds a living as a clerk, ending up in the household of Robert Cecil, Elizabeth I’s great statesman. Soon, she witnesses the plots swirling round the court in the last days of Gloriana’s reign and finds herself being sucked into the orbit of the dashing and ambitious young favourite; the Earl of Essex. The queen draws near to the end of her life, with no heir to follow, and the stakes are high.
As Essex hurtles towards self-destruction, Jeanne finds her loyalties, her disguise and her emotions under threat – in a political climate where the least mistake can attract dire penalties.
June 2011
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Acknowledgments
My unending thanks go to:
Kevin McCormick, for those long-ago trips to bookstores, when he’d put a copy of someone else’s novel in my hands, and tell me that I should write my own.
Shari Rhodes and Elsie Julian, who loved books and loved me, and were the start of so many good things. No one ever had truer friends. Fly with the angels, Shari.
Charlie Anderson and Leon Joosen, for reading my pages every night and for keeping me encouraged. Because of you two, I wrote the book instead of talking about it.
Helen Bartlett, for being such a warm, gracious, and insightful mentor.
Lynn Hendee, whose generous spirit and love of truth make her opinions all the more valuable.
Barri Evins, for faith, friendship, and story sense, for letting me read her my stuff over the phone at all hours, and for introducing this Texan to Trader Joe’s.
Beth Grossbard, for fiercely championing writers, and for bringing me together with the irrepressible—
Dorothea Benton Frank, for her deep well of laughter, for taking the time to show me the ropes, and for turning me over to the wonderful—