All this, Bernice observed from her perch in the swing. Samuel and Willadee and the kids were starting up the steps, all jabbering at once. When they got even with Bernice, she stood up, sleek and graceful as a cat. She was wearing a soft little cream-colored dress that clung to her curves when she moved. And when she didn’t. Everybody stopped stock-still. Bernice had that effect on people.
“How you doing, Bernice?” Samuel asked.
Bernice said, “Fine as wine.” Smooth and warm, like butter melting.
Willadee rolled her eyes up in her head and drawled, real slow, “I’ve got something on the stove, Sam. You just come on in whenever you’re ready.” And she went inside the house. Talk about trust.
“Where’s that husband of yours?” Samuel asked Bernice. She motioned toward the backyard. A vague gesture. Samuel glanced in the direction she had pointed and nodded, as though indicating approval of Toy’s presence out there, somewhere. “I hear he’s been keeping things going around here the last few days.”
“Some things, yes.”
Samuel’s eyes played over Bernice’s face. No fondness, no malice. Just a look that said he knew where she was heading, and he wasn’t going along with her. He looked at her like that until she looked away. Then he opened the screen door and waved his children inside.
“C’mon, c’mon, your mama’s waitin’.”
“Sure am, preacher boy,” Willadee called out. Drawling again.
All during supper, Swan and Noble and Bienville kept after Samuel to tell them where they were moving, but he kept putting them off. This wasn’t like their father. Usually, he couldn’t wait to give them the news, and to embellish it with every single positive comment he’d been able to drag out of anybody who’d ever seen the place. As a rule, the new town was so small that it wasn’t easy finding people who’d been there, even just passing through—except for the pastor who was leaving, and he was apt to be more full of warnings than full of compliments. But Samuel always managed to find something good to tell about it. The people were the salt of the earth, or the countryside was a sight for sore eyes, or the church building was a relic and there were rumors that it had secret passageways, or the parsonage yard had a good spot for a playhouse, or something.
Tonight, though, was different, and everybody noticed. Even Calla and Toy and Bernice had questioning looks on their faces.
“Anything wrong, Sam?” Willadee asked.
“I was planning to tell you about it first, and then break it to everybody else.”
Willadee passed the speckled limas across to Toy. “They must be sending us to bayou country. We’ve been everywhere else.”
Samuel said, “They’re not sending us to bayou country.” He set down his tea glass and rested both arms on the table. Everybody’s eyes were on him. Waiting.
“They’re not sending us anywhere.”
Swan broke all records getting out of the house after supper. She had to find a place to think this thing through. She would have settled into the swing, but Aunt Bernice would be out there again before you could even spit. She always hogged the swing as soon as she’d finished helping to clean the kitchen. Swan herself never had to assist with such chores, although she knew unfortunate kids her age who did. Willadee was of the opinion that you’re only a kid once. Grandma Calla thought that once was a dandy time to learn some responsibility, but Swan could wear you to a frazzle, so she never pushed her point. If Aunt Bernice had an opinion, she kept it to herself. She just did her share of the work as quickly as possible and disappeared into the porch shadows until bedtime. You wouldn’t have known she was there, except for the gentle squeaks the swing made.
Swan wondered sometimes what Aunt Bernice found to think about, sitting out there all alone. She had asked her once. Aunt Bernice had lifted her hair up off the back of her neck and murmured, “Hmm? Oh. Things.”
Anyway, the swing was out, so Swan passed it by and went on through the yard, past the haphazard jumble of vehicles parked between the house and the road. The regulars had been gathering in to Never Closes for over an hour now.
Any other time, Swan would have crept around to the back of Never Closes and hid out, trying to get a peek inside. She and her brothers were strictly forbidden to do that, but they did it anyway, every chance they got. So far, they hadn’t seen anything worth looking at, and they’d have given the project up if it hadn’t been forbidden. But the fact that it was had to mean something, so they’d kept after it.
Tonight, though, Swan didn’t feel much like spying. All she wanted was privacy. She reached the road and walked along the grassy shoulder. She could see perfectly well, even once she’d gotten away from the lights of the house and bar. The moon was almost, almost full. She’d never realized before that the moon could shed enough light to give the world any real brightness. She’d also never strayed far from her family in the dark. But it wasn’t dark. The night was luminous.
Out there, walking along beside that easy-curving road, Swan decided she didn’t need to find a place to think. Who needed a place, when you could just keep moving, putting one foot in front of the other, enjoying going nowhere.
By now, her father’s situation had pretty well sorted itself out inside her head. At first, when it had struck her that she and her folks didn’t have an income, or a house to live in, she’d felt guilty for wishing that her life was different. Maybe this was what happened when you wished for something you didn’t know enough about.
The real gravity of the situation had escaped her, though. The Lake family changed homes every year or two anyway, so it wasn’t as though they were being jerked up by the roots. They didn’t have any roots. Besides, grown-ups worked out problems every day. That’s what grown-ups did. Plus, she figured, this had to be the Lord’s will. Hadn’t her daddy preached, time and again, about how God had a Plan, and how everything works together for those who love God? Her parents certainly loved God. Swan did, too, she was sure, even though she bent His rules with some degree of regularity, and prayed only When It Was Important. She’d never been one to wear God out with small talk.
Anyway, if you looked at it right, there was a Bible guarantee of a favorable outcome to all this, so her conscience was off the hook.
She sucked in a deep, glad gulp of honeysuckled air. The tall grass bent beneath her feet and straightened as she passed. She wasn’t ready to turn back just yet. This moment was too delicious. Ahead, and to the left, a narrow lane forked off the main road. She knew she shouldn’t take the lane, shouldn’t even be out here, but it couldn’t do any harm. Bad things happened on Dark and Stormy Nights, not on nights like tonight, when all of creation wore a soft satin sheen.
Chapter 7
The little lane wound and twisted and tapered down to almost nothing, and kept on going. Every bend promised some new discovery. And delivered. A slim young tree, silvered by moonlight. Dancing stars, mirrored in the rocky stream that tumbled alongside the rutted lane. Nothing was ordinary tonight. Even cow pastures and falling-down fences had an otherworldly look.
And the silence! It was like the immense quiet of snowfall, right here in summer. This had to mean something. Something good. Only good could come from so much light where there would ordinarily be darkness.
These were her thoughts as she rounded a final bend, and saw the house. It was smallish, built of faded wood and topped off by a tin roof. There were lights on inside, so the windows glowed golden against the silver of the night. An extremely neat yard wrapped around the house, and in that yard, there was a gleaming something. A vehicle. A pickup truck. As clear and brilliant as the night was, the light was no good for telling color. But Swan knew in her bones. It was red.
She heard a dull, grunting noise, like a person makes when they’ve been socked in the stomach. It took a second for her to realize that she’d made the sound herself. She couldn’t seem to move. Surely, her heart had stopped.
Only her mind was not immobilized. It was racing wildly, imagining the unimaginabl
e. What if that little viper of a man was out here, somewhere, slithering around in the dark? What if he was watching her right now?
She whirled and fled. Running, scrambling, away and away, back along the rutted lane. She could feel Ballenger, back there, behind her—and could sense him, up there, ahead of her. No direction was safe. The June breeze was his hot breath. The rustle of leaves was a sinister whisper. The snakeman, hissing her name.
Swan thought of herself as a person who was prepared for anything. But she wasn’t prepared for this. And she wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
The moon slid behind a thick bank of clouds, and the world went dark. Suddenly, Swan couldn’t see where she was going—so she stumbled. There was nothing to catch hold of, to break her fall. She threw her arms out, flailing every which way like twin windmills, but that didn’t stop her from falling, either.
It seemed as though she fell for the longest time. Head over heels, and heels over head. When she stopped falling, she lay still, afraid to move. The reason she was afraid to move was that her hand was touching something soft and warm. Another hand.
Her eyes were closed, and she kept them that way, afraid of what she might see if she opened them.
“Well, are you dead?” a voice asked.
It wasn’t Ballenger’s voice. Swan could have died then, from relief. She opened her eyes, just enough so that she could peer through the darkness. Then she sat bolt upright.
The person talking to her … was the kid. Ballenger’s little boy. The one who had gotten slapped that day outside the store. He was sitting in the ditch, dressed in a ragged T-shirt and underdrawers. A skinny little fellow, his hair standing on end, his eyes studying her soberly. Swan made herself stop trembling and studied him back.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked him, finally.
“Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Till it’s okay to go back.”
“Back where?”
The kid pointed toward the house.
Swan said, “Why isn’t it okay to go back right now?”
“Because.”
“You’re too little to be outside by yourself at night,” Swan said. “Why can’t you go back?”
The kid just shrugged.
Swan sighed. She figured she could guess the answer. Still, this kid really didn’t need to be out here alone, and she couldn’t stay here with him.
She said, “Well, maybe you ought to go back now, because I’ve got to get on home.”
He shook his head again, vigorously.
Swan said, “Well, I can’t babysit you.”
“Nobody ast you to.”
She stood up. “Well, don’t let a bobcat see you. A bobcat could eat you in two bites.”
He said, “I can kill bobcats.”
“Yeah? With what?”
He just stared at her. Swan was beginning to feel cross, because she knew she’d get into trouble if she didn’t turn up at Grandma Calla’s pretty soon. They’d have people out looking for her, and nothing makes grown-ups quite so mad as finding a child safe when they’d been scared silly that they might find that child dead.
She said, “Well, look. I know you’re probably afraid of your daddy. I’m afraid of him, myself, and I only saw him once. So why don’t I have my daddy talk to your daddy? My daddy’s a preacher. He talks people into changing their ways all the time.”
He said, “My daddy would kill your daddy.”
Swan dropped back down on her knees, facing him. The moon had come out of hiding, and she could see the kid’s face real plain. It was a beautiful face, with fine, high cheekbones and lush black lashes and a mouth that was fuller than it looked right now—because right now it was pulled tight, into a hard, brave line. Those black eyes of his were cutting right to her soul. Those fierce black eyes. He was, she thought, the damnedest thing she’d ever seen.
“You,” she said, “talk an awful lot about killing, for somebody who’s not hardly big enough to pee standing up.”
But you couldn’t even insult him. He just cocked his head to one side to show that nothing bothered him.
She got up again. “Go home,” she said.
He didn’t budge.
“Go home,” she pleaded. And this was Swan Lake, who never begged.
He still didn’t budge.
“Well, I’m going,” she warned. And she did. One step at a time. Hating every minute of it. Worrying all the way about that kid, and what was going to happen to him, whether he’d get snake-bit, or spider-bit, or be some animal’s supper. And where was he going to sleep? Would he dig a hole and curl up in it? Were his instincts that good? Or would his hateful daddy come raging out in search of him, and if he found him, what would happen then? What?
Maybe she should go back and get the kid, and take him up to his house, and give him over to his mother—but she had a feeling that mother wasn’t much protection. So maybe she should go back and get him, and take him home with her. But you can’t do that sort of thing. It’s kidnapping, even if it’s a kid who does the ’napping. Swan didn’t really think she’d go to jail for it, not as long as the law was still drinking for free at Never Closes, but she knew the story wouldn’t have a happy ending.
She made up her mind that, as soon as she got back to Grandma Calla’s, she was going to get her daddy to go find that kid and take him home and talk to his parents. Nobody would really dream of killing Samuel Lake, and even if they did think about it, they couldn’t succeed. Samuel Lake enjoyed the Protection of the Lord.
The hard part about this plan was going to be coming up with a good enough lie to explain why she’d been where she’d been, but Swan had tremendous confidence in her lying ability. And if worst came to worst, she could always tell the truth.
As it happened, she didn’t have to tell anybody the truth, or a lie, or anything else. She was almost back to Grandma Calla’s when she sensed something or someone behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, and there he was. That tough little guy. Walking ten or twelve paces behind her, as silent as an Indian.
“Do we have a plan?” Willadee was asking Samuel. They were lying in bed, curled together, the same way they had been for the past hour. They’d gone to bed before anyone else, which was something they almost never did. As wild about each other as they were after all these years, they still didn’t like to be too obvious about things like hustling off to their bedroom before it was really bedtime. This once, though, it had seemed to be the only way to get some privacy.
Willadee had told Samuel about John Moses, and the things that happened the day he died. (She didn’t mention the things that had happened the night before. She reasoned that Samuel had enough of a load to bear right now, she could tell him about the beer some other time. Maybe.) She’d also told him about how Calla had taken to going down to the living room in the middle of the night, wearing one of John’s old shirts over her nightgown, and just sitting there by herself, for hours at a time. Willadee had found her there one night, and asked her if she needed to talk about anything.
“It’s too late for talking,” Calla had told her sadly. “I had a million chances to tell John how I missed having him in bed beside me. How I wanted to smell his hair, and feel his skin, and touch him in the night. I should have swallowed my pride, but I wouldn’t, and now I’m choking on it.”
Samuel had listened while Willadee poured out her story, and when she asked him please not to ever let walls grow up between them, he’d promised that he wouldn’t. Then he’d told her about the annual conference, and how the superintendent had explained to him that, nowadays, churches had different needs than they’d had in the past, but that it wasn’t over for him, he still was licensed and all, there just didn’t seem to be a suitable place for him this year, so maybe he should contemplate, really contemplate, positive changes he could make, improvements he could make, in his ministry.
“They don’t want preachers anymore,” Samuel had told Willadee, his voice he
avy. “They want social directors.”
“Well, you have to stand for what you think is right.”
“I think feeding my family is right, but I don’t know how I’m going to manage.”
“We’ll manage.”
“Will we?”
“Why, yes, you know we will.”
Several times, they had almost started making love, but the bed was so old and the springs so creaky that they’d decided to wait either until everyone else in the house was bedded down, asleep, or until inspiration struck and they figured out a way to have each other without risking getting funny looks at breakfast the next morning.
“Do we?” she asked again now. “Do we have a plan?”
“I could go looking for some oil,” Samuel said. “I could oil the springs.”
“I didn’t mean that kind of plan.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“We have to figure someplace to live.”
“I know we do.”
He was quiet for a moment. Just his breathing, the only sound. Strong and deep and steady. Then he said, “Willadee? What about the floor? Would you be really insulted, if we just did it on the floor?”
“Not insulted. But they’d still hear us.”
“We could be quiet.”
“Maybe you could.”
He laughed. Couldn’t help it. She hushed him with a kiss. After a little bit, he said, “I think I’m supposed to be scared or something, Willadee. I mean here I am with a wife and kids, and no job, and no house, and you know what, Willadee?”
“What, Samuel?”
“I’m scared, all right.”
She didn’t like this. Him being afraid. Him hurting. It was the worst part of this thing, that he should be hurt. Samuel, of all people.
She said, “Damn these springs.”
“What was that?”
“I said, ‘Damn these springs,’ Samuel.”
Willadee kicked off the covers and sat up in bed. She drew her knees up underneath her and knelt beside her husband, leaning over him, kissing his neck, his chest, his stomach. Her hands touching, giving. He shifted his weight, pushing up against her hands. The bedsprings creaked rudely.