The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

by Jenny Wingfield

  Willadee was groggy, but it was a pleasant sort of grogginess. Like she was floating. Nothing to tie her down and hold her to earth. She could just float higher and higher, and look down at life while it turned all fuzzy and indistinct around the edges. She promised herself that, one of these days, she was going to have another couple of beers. One of these days. She was a Moses, after all.

  Her father’s favorite child.

  Chapter 3

  Kinfolk started pouring in early the next morning. Pulling up in the front yard, and piling out of their cars, and opening the trunks of those cars with a flourish. Huge bowls of potato salad and dishpans full of fried chicken were produced like rabbits out of hats. And corn on the cob, and squash casseroles, and dilled green beans, and fifty kinds of pickles, and gallon jugs of iced tea, and enough pies and cakes to founder a multitude. Which was what was on hand.

  John and Calla’s sons, Toy and Sid and Alvis, had been the first to arrive, along with their wives and offspring. Toy didn’t have any children, but Sid had two and Alvis had six, so what with Willadee’s three, nobody was worried that the family line might fade out any time soon.

  “It’s unbelievable how many grandkids I’ve got,” Grandma Calla said, not to anybody in particular.

  Willadee sang out, “But not inconceivable!”

  All her brothers howled with laughter.

  Calla said, “I can see I’ve raised a whole passel of heathens.” She was trying to look as if she disapproved, but it wasn’t any use. She approved of a good time, and everybody was having one.

  The womenfolk laid the food out on the tables, and the kids started helping themselves before they were supposed to, so somebody had to say the blessing quick. Nicey (who was married to Sid, Willadee’s oldest brother) was selected, since it would have hurt her feelings if she hadn’t been. She was a serious churchgoer and had been teaching the Sunbeams practically ever since she’d gotten too old to be one. She prayed a fancy prayer, full of Thines and Thous, ending up with “Ah-men.” Sid and Alvis followed that with “Dive in!” which just about gave Nicey the vapors, it sounding so irreverent and all.

  “You married into an irreverent family,” Alvis’s wife, Eudora, told her. “You got to take the bad with the worse.”

  John had closed the bar just before sunup that morning and had gone straight to bed, figuring that would give him five or six hours of sleep, enough sleep for a well man, and he was certainly feeling like a well man. Calla’s store was operating on the honor system, the way it always did on reunion day. Folks who needed to buy something just went in and got what they wanted, and left the money or a note in a jar on the counter. There weren’t many customers until after church, when folks started drifting in, picking up last-minute items like brown ’n’ serve rolls and whipping cream for their Sunday dinners. It was the most natural thing in the world that quite a few of the customers would drift from the store into the yard, and would visit for a while, protesting that they really had to be getting on home until somebody put a plate into their hands and they were forced to stay and eat.

  Swan, Noble, and Bienville had a hard time figuring out who was kin and who wasn’t. The closest relatives they remembered from year to year, but there was this sea of nonrelatives, not to mention second cousins, and third cousins, and great-aunts twice removed. This cracked the kids up. “If that old bird’s been twice removed, how come she keeps coming back?” they would whisper to each other, and then they’d snicker until they got the hiccups or a swat on the pants from their grandmother, whichever happened first.

  John Moses woke up just before noon and wandered down to join the celebration. His sons and Willadee all came up out of the yard onto the side porch to greet him. The side porch had been added onto the house way back, shortly after John had walled in the back porch. John said a house wasn’t a home if it didn’t have a porch, a man had to have something to pee off of. Indoor plumbing was fine, as far as it went, but it never would offer a man the same sense of freedom that a porch would. The daughters all hugged John’s neck (Willadee rubbed his stubbled chin lovingly), and the sons all shook his hand. John smiled from ear to ear.

  “Somebody said there was a party,” he boomed.

  “They was right,” Toy Moses said.

  Toy looked nothing like his name implied. He stood six foot four, with muscles that rippled powerfully beneath his cotton shirt. He walked real straight and stiff-starched. Straighter than anyone Swan and her brothers had ever seen. There was a scar on his forehead and a tattoo of a belly dancer on his arm, and all told, he had the look of a man you wouldn’t want to mess with. He was soft-spoken, though, especially when he was talking to his daddy. He said, “You better come on out here and get some grub, before it’s all gone.”

  John said, “You won’t have to twist my arm,” just as cheerful as you please, and he led his brood back down the steps.

  When everybody had eaten until they were stuffed, the grown-ups flopped down into lawn chairs and onto the grass, and commenced talking about the good old days. The littlest kids all got put down for naps, and the teenagers meandered out to the cars to listen to the radio and talk about things they ought not to know about. Noble tried to join this worldly crowd, but he was coolly rejected, so he slunk off to the creek to think his own thoughts. Swan and Bienville crawled under the house (which was pier and beam, a good four feet off the ground) with a couple of cousins their own age and built toad houses. This was accomplished by mounding dirt over their bare feet and patting it down good, then carefully pulling their feet out, leaving perfect toad dwellings, suitable to accommodate the pickiest of toads.

  It was about three o’clock when John Moses started feeling a serious need for a drink. He’d been fighting the feeling ever since he woke up, and he’d thought he was winning the battle, but all of a sudden his fighting spirit waned, and he decided what could it hurt, he wasn’t going to drink himself into a stupor after all he was too happy for that. So he got to his feet and announced, ceremoniously, that he had to go to the bathroom.

  All his kids looked at all his other kids, and the looks they were giving each other were looks of dread. John Moses couldn’t help noticing.

  “Anybody find anything wrong with that?” he demanded. After all, he had just as much right to go to the bathroom as anyone else.

  Nobody made a sound.

  John said, “Well, if nobody has any objections …,” and he took off for the house.

  No one said anything for a minute or so. They just sat there looking as if they’d been waked up from a good dream. Then Alvis said, “Well, sonofabitch. I thought for a while there we had it made.”

  Willadee was chewing a hole in her lip, trying to decide whether or not to follow her daddy and head him off before he could get drunk and ruin the reunion. But then she remembered the beers she’d had the night before, and the pleasant grogginess that had followed, and she thought, Maybe he won’t ruin anything, maybe he’ll just relax a little, and go to sleep, and that will be the end of that. She stayed put in her lawn chair.

  Calla stood up and got herself a clean paper plate. “I don’t believe I’ve tasted Eudora’s friendship cake,” she said. “Anybody else want a piece of Eudora’s friendship cake while I’m up?”

  John went through the house and into the bar, and he sat down on the first barstool he came to. Giving in and having a drink wasn’t something he wanted to do today. He wanted to make them all proud of him. They had seemed proud of him all afternoon.

  By the time he poured the first two fingers of Johnnie Walker into a glass and drank it down, he had come to realize that every one of them (except for Willadee, who was above reproach) had been stringing him along, in order to manipulate him into staying sober. He poured three fingers the next time, instead of two. Willadee’s face seemed to be swimming before him, so he squenched his eyes closed, trying to shut her out.

  “Willadee, you just get on out of here,” he commanded, but she refused to leave.


  “I said get out of here, Willadee. You and I can have a beer and talk about this, after everybody else is gone.”

  When he opened his eyes, the image of Willadee had disappeared.

  “Where’s Walter?” John Moses asked. He had just come from the bar back through the house, and from the house out onto the side porch. The porch was full of people, and the yard was running over with people, and altogether, it was more people than John could deal with comfortably, since he was looking for just one face, and it was nowhere to be seen.

  It got so quiet even the wind quit blowing.

  “I said, where’s Walter?” John bellowed.

  Toy was sitting in the porch swing with his arm around his wife, Bernice, who was outlandishly pretty, even though she was thirty-five years old and ought to be starting to fade.

  Toy left Bernice and came over beside the old man. “Walter’s not here today, Daddy.”

  “The devil you say.” John’s words were slurring into one another. “Walter wouldn’t miss a Moses reunion.”

  Then John remembered why Walter wasn’t there. “You shouldn’t have let him go to work, Toy. You shouldn’t have ever let him go when he wasn’t feeling good, and you knew it.”

  Toy got a sick look on his face. “You’re right, Daddy. I know that.”

  John said, “Split open, like a slaughtered—”

  But he didn’t get to finish. Calla had come up the steps and stood facing him.

  “Why don’t you and me just go inside and take us a rest?” she asked. Which changed the world John Moses was living in. All of a sudden, he wasn’t thinking about Walter anymore. He was thinking about the fact that he’d been sleeping alone for more than a decade.

  “What?” he ripped out, raucous-sounding. “You’re saying you wanta go roll around in the old marriage bed?”

  Calla just stood there. Wordless. Her lips going white. Out in the yard, relatives and nonrelatives began skittering around, loading up kids and leftover food. There was a storm brewing, and they wanted to be gone before it hit.

  John hollered, “Where the hell you folks going? Don’t you know it’s not nice to eat and run?” But they kept leaving, like salt dribbling out of an overturned shaker. It was getting sparse out there.

  Calla said, “John, quit making a fool of yourself.”

  “I’ll make of myself what I damn well please,” John informed her. “I am a self-made man.” He did a lurching sort of dance step and nearly fell off the porch.

  “You are a self-made jackass,” she muttered under her breath.

  That’s when John Moses slapped her. The sound rang out, and Willadee came running across the yard. Pushing people aside. She stepped in between her mother and father and looked John Moses dead in the eye.

  “I—am so—ashamed of you,” she said to him. Her voice was shaking.

  That sobered John up. He looked back at Willadee for what seemed like eternity extended. Then he turned on his heel and walked inside the house.

  Nobody felt much like visiting anymore. They all just hung there for a little bit, wishing none of this was happening. Willadee was patting her mother’s arm, but she was staring at the door John Moses had walked through. All at once, she knew what was about to happen, just as surely as if a voice had come out of the sky and told her. She took a quick step toward the door.

  “Daddy!” she cried out, sharp and clear, but not one soul heard her say it, because the gunshot was as loud as a big clap of thunder.

  Chapter 4

  The first hour was the worst. Willadee’s brothers kept the women out of the house, but Willadee saw it all just as vividly in her mind as if she’d been the one to find the body. For the rest of her life, she would be pushing that picture back, fighting it, hating it. Trying to reduce the dimensions. Dull down the colors. She would never succeed.

  She allowed herself to be led over to a chair in the yard, but she could not sit still. She leapt to her feet and crammed her fingers in her mouth to keep from wailing. Then someone took her arm and walked her in circles, from the porch to the well to the garden to the porch. Circles. Talking. Gentle words, pouring, one on top of another, running together. More circles. Later on, Willadee would be unable to remember who this person was who saved her from hysteria.

  “My fault,” Willadee said to whoever it was.

  “Hush, shhh, hush that talk, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  But Willadee knew better. She knew.

  She managed to get Samuel on the phone, and he said what she knew he’d say. That he was going to get in the car and come back. He should be there, with her and the kids and Calla. Willadee wouldn’t hear of it. He needed to be right where he was. There were enough menfolk around to handle things, and if he came up, he’d just have to turn around and go back, and it was all too much driving, too dangerous, and she couldn’t stand it if anything happened to him, too.

  “How could he do this to all of you, Willadee?” Samuel asked angrily, but she pretended not to hear.

  After she hung up the phone, Willadee didn’t know what to do. The body had been taken into Magnolia, to the funeral home. Friends and neighbors had pitched in to clean up the mess John had made. People were milling around in the yard. There wasn’t a private place anywhere to sit down and think. Willadee wondered briefly whether she should find her children and comfort them, but there weren’t any kids in sight. Someone must have gotten them out of there, taken them home with them, and would bring them back later, tomorrow morning probably.

  Alvis came over, and put his arms around her, and said, bitterly, “That old man.”

  Willadee rubbed her forehead against his shoulder, then turned away. It bothered her for everybody to be so upset with her daddy for what he’d done. His life was broken, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so he’d just killed the man who was responsible. She picked her way through the crowd. Every way she turned, there was another sympathetic face. Someone telling her to just let go and cry it out—when she was dry and crumbling inside. Someone inquiring about the arrangements. What a word. Arrangements. What was left of John Moses to arrange? He was dead. He would rot. He had been beautiful once, and now he would rot, but not before arrangements were made, and a profit taken. Arrangements were expensive, even in 1956.

  Finally, she found her way into the bar and locked the door behind her. It was dark in there. Murky and stifling hot. But she didn’t want any lights. Didn’t want to open doors and windows to let in air, because then that sea of people outside would begin to seep in, and she would drown for sure. She felt her way along the bar, thinking about her father and the night before, and the talk they’d had, and how she’d gone to bed thinking it was all right now, everything would be all right. She stood there, holding on to the bar with both hands, not even aware that she had started crying. Great, gusty sobs. After a while, she stopped, and just laid her head against the scarred wood. That was when she realized that she was not alone.

  “I never once set foot in here, until today.” It was Calla talking. She was sitting way back in a corner, at one of the tables, all by herself. “I was so mad at him, all these years. I keep trying to remember what I was so mad about.”

  Calla Moses spent the night at the funeral home. Ernest Simmons, the funeral director, said the body wouldn’t be ready for viewing until the next day, and that she should go on home and get some rest, but she informed him that she didn’t come to view the body, she came to be close to it, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Willadee and her brothers all offered to stay with Calla, to keep her company. She said she didn’t want any company.

  “You don’t need to be alone right now,” Willadee insisted.

  “I’d feel more alone at home,” Calla answered stoutly. “And don’t any of you get the idea that you can start telling me what to do now that your daddy’s gone. You never had the nerve to try it before, so you’d best not start now.”

  Everybody backed off except Toy, who refused to leave. He was
just as stubborn as his mother.

  “Bernice can sleep at your house, so she won’t be by herself,” he told her. “You won’t hardly know I’m here.”

  And she didn’t. Toy saw all the others off, then spent most of the night standing outside smoking one cigarette after the other and staring at the sky. Calla took a seat in an empty viewing room and closed the door, and thought about the life she’d had with John Moses.

  “It was a good life, John,” she whispered into the stillness. “We had our rough spots to go through, but it was a good life, mainly.”

  Then she demanded, fiercely, “Why the hell did you give up on it?”

  They didn’t close the store for the funeral. Calla said “Moses Never Closes” had been such a tradition for so long, and you know how Papa John was about tradition. Swan couldn’t help thinking that Papa John had pretty well played the wild with tradition by shooting himself, right in the middle of a family reunion, but you didn’t go around saying things like that. Besides, they didn’t make any money that day, didn’t charge for anything, so it wasn’t as if they were staying open out of greed. What if somebody in the community needed a jug of milk, they said. Or a jug of whiskey. Anybody had a touch of flu, there was nothing like lemon juice and sugar and whiskey to put them out of their misery while it ran its course. It wasn’t exactly flu season, but you never knew.

  Toy kept the store. He didn’t like funerals anyway. Said they were just more examples of people trying to fit other people’s expectations. When Walter had died, Toy had slunk off into the woods with his .22 and taken potshots at squirrels while the rest of the family was doing what was expected of them. He figured his brother’s spirit was still close—maybe with a few things heavy on his mind that he’d been meaning to say but never got around to. So Toy went to the woods, and he listened. He and Walter had hunted those woods together since they were towheaded kids. They were close, the two of them. More than blood close.