The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

  Toy knew all the stumps and fallen logs where Walter liked to sit down and have a smoke, and just enjoy the peace. So that’s what Toy had done. For an hour or so at a time. Then, when the peace was too much for him, and he couldn’t take it anymore, and his chest would feel like it was about to bust from the tears he’d been holding in, Toy Ephraim Moses would shatter the peace with a shot or two from his rifle. If he hit something, fine. Toy hoped Bernice would outlive him. If she should happen to die before he did, that was one funeral he’d have to go to, and he was afraid he’d turn out taking potshots at the mourners.

  Swan found out early the morning of the service that Uncle Toy wasn’t going.

  “Uncle Toy has no respect what-so-ever for the dead,” Lovey had said at breakfast. Lovey was Uncle Sid and Aunt Nicey’s youngest child. Ten years old, and spoiled rotten. She had insisted on sleeping over the night before, mostly so she could rub it in to Swan and her brothers how much better she’d known Papa John than they had, and also, so she could shame them for not crying as much as she thought they ought to. They had squeezed out a few tears, but nothing like the gallons Lovey produced. They hadn’t needed to grieve, because Papa John had lived and died a stranger.

  “You hush your mouth, young lady,” Grandma Calla had said to Lovey. “Your uncle Toy has his own ways, is all.”

  Swan had been hearing about Uncle Toy and his “ways” ever since she could remember. For one thing, he was a bootlegger—not that Swan had a clear idea of what that meant. She knew it was against the law, though, and that it could be dangerous. If Uncle Toy wanted to break the law, why not just work in Never Closes with Papa John? That sure seemed like a safe proposition. But it was like Grandma Calla said. Toy had his own ways.

  He’d been in the war, and was decorated for valor. Something about going through enemy fire to save a comrade. A colored man, no less. He got shot doing it, too. Got one leg blown clean off. That was why he walked so stiff-starched. His artificial leg didn’t have any give to it. But bootlegging when he could have been working in the bar and getting his leg blown off to save a Negro weren’t the only things that got Uncle Toy talked about. He’d killed a man once, right here in Columbia County. A neighbor named Yam Ferguson, whose family had “connections.” Yam hadn’t had to go off to war. He got to stay home and help run the Ferguson Sawmill, and chase after the wives and girlfriends of the boys whose families weren’t so well connected. Yam lived through the war, but not through the night Uncle Toy got home from the V.A. hospital.

  By the time the rest of the family was dressed for the funeral, Swan had made up her mind not to go. She got ready, along with everybody else, but she told her mama she was going to ride with Aunt Nicey, and she told Aunt Nicey she was going to ride with Aunt Eudora. Then, while everybody else was piling into the line of cars parked out in front of the store, Swan sneaked upstairs into Papa John’s bedroom. She would not look at the bed Papa John had sat down on to finish what he had started out in the pasture, under that tree. She would not look at the wall that the neighbor women had washed clean. She especially would not look at the Bible on the bedside table. It made her shudder to think that Papa John was in touching distance of the Holy Word when he did what he did, as if he just had to insult God one last time. There was no doubt in Swan’s mind that Papa John was already burning in Hell by now, unless by some chance, God took insanity into consideration. But, she figured, why have a hell if you’re going to let folks get off on technicalities?

  So she didn’t look at anything in the room. She had the feeling that, if she looked, she would see Papa John, still there, just the way his sons had found him, and she wasn’t about to chance a thing like that. Papa John was scary enough when he was alive.

  Swan walked over to the window and watched through the curtains while the caravan drove away. When the red dust had settled in the wake of the last car, Swan crept down the stairs. She could see the open door that led from the living room into the grocery store.

  Uncle Toy was standing in the store, leaning against the counter, using his pocketknife to peel the bark off a stick that he must have picked up on one of his treks into the woods. A lit Camel drooped from between his lips, and he smoked no hands. Swan stood in the doorway, watching him. She knew that he knew she was there, but he didn’t look up or say a word.

  Swan eased into the store, climbed up on top of the ice cream box, and started worrying the heel of one shoe with the toe of the other. Toy lifted his eyes, peering at her through a blue-white fog of smoke.

  “Guess you don’t like funerals, either.”

  “Never been to one.” Swan was lying, of course. Preachers’ kids attended more funerals than any other kids in the world. Toy had to know that.

  “Well—” Toy left the word hanging in the air for a while, like that said it all. He shaved down a little knob that jutted out on one side of the stick. Finally, he said, “You ain’t missed much.”

  Swan had been afraid he might say something adult like “Does your mama know you’re here?” Since he didn’t, she considered the two of them immediately bonded. Swan yearned to get close to somebody. Really close. Soul deep. She wanted the kind of friendship where two people know each other inside out and stick up for each other, no matter what. So far, she’d never had that, and she was convinced the reason was because her father was a minister.

  From Swan’s observations, there seemed to be a conspiracy among church members to keep the preacher and his family from knowing them too well. Playing cards were hidden when they came to visit. Liquor was stuck back in the pantry behind the mason jars of home-canned green beans and crowder peas. And you didn’t even talk about dancing. They just didn’t know Sam Lake’s background—but Swan did. She’d heard it said that her daddy had been a rounder back before God got hold of him. Samuel Lake had danced the soles off his shoes many’s the time, and he’d drunk his share of whiskey.

  “His share, and everybody else’s,” Willadee would say, grinning. Willadee was not a woman for protecting her husband’s image. She was a Moses, and the Moses family didn’t believe in lying. There were a lot of things the Moseses would do without a qualm, but they plain would not lie. This didn’t necessarily hold true for their children. Swan lied daily. Took pleasure in it. She fabricated the most wondrous, the most atrocious tales, and told them for the truth. The good thing about lies was that the possibilities were limitless. You could make up a world that was just like you wanted it, and if you pretended hard enough, it would start to feel real.

  The point is, church members might try to impress the preacher with how righteous they were—they might tell him what a blessing he was, and they might talk about brotherly love as if they’d invented it, but they never showed him their real faces, and they sometimes said ugly things behind his back. One thing Swan had overheard frequently was the meanest utterance since “Off with his head.”

  “Preachers’ kids are the worst kind.”

  Nobody ever said the worst kind of what, but the implication was that all preachers’ kids had illicit adventures, and Swan could never feel close to anyone who looked down on her for things she hadn’t had a chance to do yet.

  Swan didn’t have a ghost of an idea how to go about getting close with Uncle Toy. It stood to reason, though, that if you wanted to get in tight with somebody named Moses, honesty would be the best policy. Since they believed in it so strongly.

  “Lovey said you have no respect for the dead what-so-ever.” Swan hoped that was enough honesty to get his attention. She also hoped that he would take offense at Lovey for saying such a thing, and that the two of them could dislike the brat together.

  Uncle Toy just smiled a lazy smile. “Lovey said that?”

  “She damn sure did.”

  Swan figured that any man who wouldn’t go to his own brother’s or his own daddy’s funeral ought to be a safe bet to practice cussing around. She had him pegged right. He never even flinched.

  “Well …” Toy said that word like
a sentence again. “I reckon I respect a person after they’re dead to about the same degree as I respected them while they was alive.”

  “Did you love your daddy a-tall?”

  “I did.”

  Which seemed to pretty well take care of the funeral issue.

  “Are you really a bootlegger?”

  “Who said I’m a bootlegger?”

  “Near ’bout everybody.”

  Toy turned the stick in his hand, examining it for flaws. It wasn’t shaped like anything, but he had gotten it perfectly smooth.

  Swan made her voice real low and ominous and warned him, “I just might be a revenuer. You better be careful I don’t find your still and run you in.”

  “You got me mixed up with a moonshiner. Moonshiners, they’re the ones have stills and fight revenuers. A bootlegger is just a middleman. Meets the deacons in the thickets, or out behind the barn, and sells them what they wouldn’ be seen buyin’ in public. How come so many questions?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “I’m not a cat.”

  He squinted at her. “You sure? I think I see whiskers.”

  She laughed. Out loud. Loving this. They were friends. They were going to get to know each other. She was going to find out everything about him, and tell him everything about herself, and she bet sometimes he’d ride her on his shoulders, and no telling what they would do together.

  “You really kill a man once?” she asked suddenly. This time, he flinched. Swan was practically sure she saw him flinch.

  “I killed a lot of men,” Toy said. Flat. “I was in the war.”

  “I don’t mean in the war. I mean did you kill Yam Ferguson deader’n a doornail, for messing with Aunt Bernice.”

  Toy had started whittling again, and now he raised his eyes to hers. Swan thought suddenly that she had never seen eyes so piercingly green. Toy’s shaggy, rust-colored brows were rearing up a little. She had touched a raw nerve, and wished she had not. But she knew the answer to her question all right.

  “You watch how you talk about your aunt Bernice,” Toy said. His voice sounded tight, like his throat was parched. “Now, get your fuzzy butt out of here.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” Swan said.

  Toy didn’t answer. He got a dingy old rag from behind the cash register and started polishing the countertop. The countertop did not need polishing.

  “I was just making conversation.”

  Toy didn’t even look up. Just kept rubbing at some imaginary stain. Swan didn’t exist for him anymore.

  Swan turned her attention to the window. She was not about to leave the store just because Uncle Toy had ordered her to. Leaving in disgrace was not her style. Outside, a shiny red Chevrolet Apache pickup truck was stopping beside the gas pump. The driver—a sharp-featured, raven-haired man—was bearing down on the horn. There was a woman in the front seat beside him. A plump, blondish woman, holding a baby. Another, bigger baby stood in the seat between the woman and her husband. And in the back of the truck, there were two little boys, about four and eight years old. The sharp-featured man laid on the horn again. Louder.

  Swan cast an uneasy glance at Uncle Toy, who was putting the cleaning rag back behind the cash register. Taking his time about it.

  “Well, damn!” the man outside hollered, and he swung out of the truck. He was little bitty. Maybe five-two or five-three. He looked strong, though. Wiry and tough-muscled. He was walking toward the store. Walking fast, hunched forward, like he intended to drag everybody inside outside and stomp them good. He reached the door and started in at the precise same moment that Toy was starting out, so they ran smack into each other, the little man’s head slamming into Toy’s diaphragm. It should have knocked him down, but all it did was stop him in his tracks. He backed up a step, and tipped his head back, and glared up at Toy.

  Swan had slid down off the ice cream box by now and sidled over near the door. For a second, she thought the little man was going to spit in Uncle Toy’s face. He must not have heard the story about Yam Ferguson.

  “Anything I can do for you, Mr. Ballenger?” Toy asked, easy-sounding.

  “You can pump me some damn gas, if it’s not too damn much trouble,” Mr. Ballenger snapped. His eyes—which were so black you couldn’t tell where the pupils left off and the irises started—those were snapping, too.

  “No trouble,” Toy said easily. He stepped past Ballenger, out into the sunlight. Swan followed, hanging back a little, staying out of her uncle’s line of vision. While Toy was pumping the gas, the two little boys in the back of the truck watched him silently. Their hair and eyes were as black as their father’s. Their features had the softness of childhood, but the man’s stamp was on them, no doubt about that.

  “How you fellers doin’?” Toy asked them. They sat as stiff as tin soldiers, staring back at him. The woman holding the baby turned a little in the seat, and smiled, just slightly. Toy must not have noticed, which was a good thing, because her husband did. Swan could tell by the way the keen black eyes flicked back and forth, from his wife’s face to Toy’s. The woman turned back around in the seat. Toy finished pumping the gas and hung up the hose.

  “How much I owe you?” Ballenger asked. He had his chest pooched out and was fooling with his belt. Running his fingers over the buckle. Sort of half smiling, as if he might be anticipating something nobody else knew about.

  “No charge today,” Toy said.

  Ballenger eyeballed Toy narrowly, then glanced into the truck, at his wife. She was busy wiping the baby’s nose on the hem of her dress. Wiping it raw, she was being so diligent. Swan could see now that this “woman” was barely more than a girl. Must have started having babies about the same time she found out where they came from.

  “You got a reason for doing me favors, Mr. Moses?”

  Toy’s jaw tightened.

  “They’re burying my daddy today, Mr. Ballenger. Mama wanted the store kept open, just in case anybody needed anything, but she drawed the line at charging money.”

  Ballenger’s expression became carefully, properly sorrowful.

  “You give my condolences to Miz Calla,” he said, and swung up into the cab. In the back of the truck, the older boy had gotten more trusting and was inching toward the side. Toward Toy. Ballenger caught the movement in the rearview mirror. Reached one hand out and back, and slapped at the boy, carelessly. He could have been swatting a fly. His palm caught the kid across the face, hard.

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to move around back there?” Ballenger yelled over his shoulder. And to Toy, he said, “Sometimes you gotta help ’em remember.”

  Toy glared at Ballenger the way you look at something you’d just like to step on. The kid’s lips were quivering, and he had a dazed look on his face, but he refused to cry. That little, and already he knew that, if you don’t cry, you’re not licked.

  Swan had gasped loudly and was standing there now with her hand over her mouth, wishing she could take back the sound. She had a feeling that drawing Ballenger’s attention to your existence was like prodding a cottonmouth moccasin with your bare foot. A cottonmouth is deadly poisonous, and it will come after you. It will strike from behind.

  Ballenger cut his glance in her direction. His black eyes widened, and he grinned. Swan wanted to shrink up inside herself and disappear, but it was too late.

  “Where’d you come from, little pretty?” he asked.

  Toy looked at her. Hard. “I thought I told you to git.”

  She got. Turned and hustled into the store. There was another car pulling up, but she didn’t look to see who it was. She wouldn’t know them anyway. She leaned against the ice cream box and peeked through the bug-specked window. The new customer was a middle-aged woman in a flowery cotton dress. Some farmer’s wife. She was chattering to Toy as she started toward the store, and Toy was answering her. His voice was a deep, low rumble. Swan wasn’t paying any attention to them, though. br />
  She was watching the red pickup truck as it peeled out onto the road. The two little boys were sitting like soldiers again. Straight as arrows. Two little boys. But Swan was focused on just one. The one who’d gotten struck by the cottonmouth. That kid. The way he was sitting there, with his head cocked to one side—looking like he didn’t care, like it was nothing. That kid’s face was burning a hole in Swan’s mind.

  She watched until the truck made the bend in the road and was blotted out by a bank of sweet gums and pin oaks. Until the whine of the tires and the chug of the motor faded down to a whisper that hung in the air for the longest time, unwilling to die.

  Chapter 5

  Sometimes, when Geraldine Ballenger wasn’t trying to think, but was letting her thoughts just drift, some quick, shining idea or insight would start to churn faster than the rest and would rocket to the surface, glimmering. She could never quite catch hold of these. They were like shooting stars. Fast gone.

  She was letting her thoughts drift now, enjoying the pleasant flow. There was a small, bright stab of light that had surfaced, a little earlier, back at the store, and it was still bobbing along in her consciousness. She gazed at it, mentally, fascinated by it. She knew better than to attempt to examine it for brilliance or for flaws. If she tried too hard to capture it, it would dissolve, or sink, or shoot out of reach. And, anyway she was content, for now, just to look at it.

  Her husband was smiling to himself while he drove. This she saw out of the corner of her eye, and her stomach did an uneasy flip-flop. When most folks smiled, it meant something good. With Ras, it could mean anything. Still, she wouldn’t let him and his smile take her mind off the lovely, shimmering Idea. She wanted to keep it in view as long as possible.