The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

by Jenny Wingfield

  He let out a low moan that wasn’t quite as low as he’d meant it to be and said, “Love of God, Willadee,” and then, “Willadee, I need you so.”

  Her mouth moved against his skin. Taking. Talking.

  “Good thing, preacher boy. ’Cause if you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to live through all I’m about to do to you.”

  Downstairs in the swing, Bernice Moses was having a glass of iced tea with lots of lemon. Her ear was trained to the upstairs bedroom that happened to be right above the spot where she was sitting. She was listening intently. Listening, and not smiling. For the most part, Bernice had gotten everything she’d ever wanted out of life, and none of it had made her happy. There was only one thing she’d really wanted that she hadn’t gotten, and she was positive that if she could get it (no, when she got it), she would be deliriously happy. At last.

  What she wanted was Samuel. And what was in her way was Willadee. What had been in her way, until tonight, had been miles. But the miles weren’t going to be a factor anymore, so that left only Willadee. And how much competition could she be, when you thought about it?

  Bernice had been one of those Columbia County girls who had taken to their beds for a week after Sam got married. She was the only one who had the distinction of having been engaged to him—and having jilted him—and she was convinced that he had married Willadee on the rebound. Why else would he have married her, she wasn’t even pretty. Not according to Bernice’s definition of prettiness. She had all those freckles that she didn’t even try to bleach out or cover up, and she was plain as a board fence except for her eyes, and everybody had eyes.

  Anyway, it wasn’t supposed to have turned out like it did. Bernice had meant only to jilt him for a little while, to teach him a lesson about not being too friendly with other girls. Samuel was friendly with everybody, male and female, young and old, he made no distinctions. It was enough to gnaw a hole in a woman’s insides. So she had simply done what any woman with any technique at all would have done. She had Given Him Something to Think About. You couldn’t blame her for that. Besides, she was planning to give in and marry him, as soon as he came around to her way of thinking.

  Only Samuel never came around. While he was thinking about the lesson Bernice was teaching him, he met Willadee, and you never saw a man get so carried away over a woman. You’d have thought he’d struck gold. Of course, Bernice knew, always knew, that Samuel didn’t really love Willadee as much as he made out, but she never could get him to talk about it. Never could get him to talk to her again at all, except in the politest, most conversational sort of way, and that was worse than being totally ignored.

  Bernice had gotten herself engaged to Toy, trying to teach Samuel another lesson, which he also refused to learn. He’d just gone ahead and married Willadee, and Bernice had had no choice but to go through with marrying Toy; it had just been awful.

  Poor Toy. He was the kindest thing, and he was so crazy about her he couldn’t see straight. But when a person loves you so much that he asks for nothing in return, it’s only to be expected that that’s about what he gets. It’s like a Law of Nature.

  So here Bernice was, sitting in the swing, thinking about how things had gotten to the sorry state they were in, when all of a sudden—springs started creaking upstairs. Not actually all of a sudden. It came on kind of gradually, and just increased in tempo.

  That first little sound sliced Bernice’s heart almost in half, and the rest of them—coming louder and faster like they did—finished the job. It was absolutely enough to make a woman do Things She Wouldn’t Ordinarily Do.

  What Bernice did was, she leapt out of the swing so fast that the contents of her glass flew upward like steam out of a geyser, and she had to cram her fist in her mouth to keep from screaming. There was tea and ice showering down around her, not to mention soggy lemon wedges, some of which lodged in her hair. Bernice groped for the lemon wedges, and flung them at the ceiling, and commenced to stamping her feet like a child having a hissy fit.

  What’s important here, though, is that, all in all, Bernice Moses was too caught up in the moment to even notice when Swan crept up the steps and into the house, followed by a wide-eyed eight-year-old boy, who was dressed in just his underwear.

  That kid was marching along behind Swan like she was the path to salvation.

  Chapter 8

  The bed Swan slept in was so high she always used a stool to climb up onto it. The little boy was sitting on the bed, backed up against the headboard. His legs stuck straight out in front of him like sticks. Swan had stretched out on the other end of the bed and was lying there propped up on one elbow, wondering how this deal was going to come out.

  She said, “Okay. I’ve got you here, now what am I going to do with you?”

  The black eyes gazed steadily back at her.

  She said, “Well, what’s your name?”

  “Blade.”

  “That’s not a name.”

  He nodded. It was so.

  Swan turned the name over and over on her tongue, getting the feel of it. “Blade Ballenger. Blade Bal-len-ger. Your name is bad as mine.”

  With a perfect lead-in like that, most folks would have asked her name, but Blade didn’t, so she volunteered it.

  “Swan Lake. You laugh, I’ll cream you.”

  He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even change expressions. Swan sat up, and bounced on the bed a little, and tried to think of something else to talk about. Finally, she said, “This is where I live. This week. That lady you saw a while ago—out on the porch? Don’t worry, she’s not crazy or anything. I think she’s mad ’cause her husband works nights.”

  Still nothing.

  “How come you followed me home?”

  He lifted his shoulders, and let them fall.

  “You know you’re going to have to go back.”

  He slid under the covers and pulled the sheet up to his chin, as if he were putting on armor.

  She said, “I didn’t mean right now. I meant sometime.”

  He settled back into the pillow and closed his eyes. He must have been awfully tired. His little hands loosened their grip on the covers, and his body seemed to relax one section at a time. Blade Ballenger, at eight years of age, was too cautious to let go of consciousness all at once.

  A lump formed in Swan’s throat. No way could she have explained just why. Slowly, carefully, she stood up on the bed, never taking her eyes off the kid’s face. There was a knotted string dangling from a bare lightbulb overhead. Swan tugged at the string, and the room went dark. For a minute, she just stood there. Later on, years down the road, she would look back on this moment as a time when the world had changed. All the moves she would make from now on would be in a different direction than she’d ever been headed before. But she wasn’t thinking about that now. She wasn’t even thinking that Blade Ballenger had changed anything, although he had. And he would. She was thinking about the fact that her daddy didn’t have a church, so she wasn’t technically a preacher’s kid anymore, and now she could be normal.

  Through her open window, she could hear the music from Never Closes. Some country song. “Gonna live fast, love hard, die young—and leave a beautiful memory.” Why in the world would anybody write a song about a thing like that when nobody, but nobody wanted to die young?

  Swan eased herself down onto the bed, and felt her way along, and crawled under the covers. Blade stirred slightly, then got still again. Sometime later on, when Swan was drifting into sleep, she heard him murmur drowsily, “Swan Lake. That’s a goofy name.”

  In the wee hours before daylight, Willadee and Samuel did come up with a plan, which Samuel announced the next morning at breakfast.

  “We’d like to stay here for a while. Until we can make other arrangements. If it’s all right.”

  Noble and Bienville sure thought it was all right. They both let out war whoops. Swan thought it was all right, too, although she didn’t holler. You don’t holler when you’re sneaking food off
the table to take upstairs to a Fugitive, and hoping nobody will notice.

  Calla said it was all right with her, she wouldn’t have it any other way. She just hoped Samuel could cope with living in a house that had a bar attached. Samuel assured her that the bar wouldn’t bother him, he didn’t see how a bar could bother him if he didn’t go in it, and anyway, he was going to find a job of some sort, somewhere. It wasn’t as if he’d be lolling around the house making judgments about things.

  What about preaching, Calla inquired. She knew Samuel well enough to know that, if he wasn’t preaching, he wouldn’t be happy. And she knew Life well enough to know that if one person in a house gets really miserable for any length of time, the misery spreads like smallpox.

  “We’ve got that figured out,” Samuel informed her. “On weekends, I intend to do some relief preaching.”

  “What on earth is relief preaching?” Bernice purred. It was a good southern purr, designed to tweak heartstrings. She was sitting there at the breakfast table, in this sleek white satin robe that must’ve been designed for the same purpose. Her hair was all brushed out over her shoulders—gleaming—quite possibly from the lemon juice. She looked for all the world like a picture out of the Sears and Roebuck.

  Willadee gave Bernice a patient look and explained that sometimes a pastor needs some time off, like for a family vacation, or an emergency, or whatever. She went on to say that someone like Samuel, who was licensed to preach but didn’t have a congregation, could hold services in another pastor’s absence, and it could be very helpful and beneficial to all concerned.

  “Lots of churches need relief preachers,” Willadee finished brightly.

  Calla thought about that, and sipped at her coffee, and shook her head mournfully. “They won’t get any relief if they get Samuel,” she said.

  Swan was in a terrible hurry to get back upstairs after breakfast. She was worried that Blade Ballenger might wake up alone in a strange place and be afraid. Or that he might come tumbling down the stairs any minute, and then everyone would discover that she had been hiding him. But her anxiety was nothing compared to something else she was feeling. Blade Ballenger had chosen her as a refuge. Hadn’t she been wishing fervently for someone to bond with? All of a sudden, her wishes were coming true right and left.

  Just as she was about to bolt out of the kitchen, Samuel nabbed her. He and Willadee led her and her brothers into the living room, and closed the door, and gathered them into a circle, just like a scene from Ideals magazine.

  “Our lives are about to change in a lot of ways,” he told them. “We’ll have to work at keeping our equilibrium. But I don’t want you to worry or feel afraid. Whatever is about to happen to us, it’s going to be good, because all God’s purposes are good.”

  “Will one of the changes be that I can wear blue jeans?” Swan wanted to know. “Because I think that would be good. Us being here on a farm and all.” (She had gone back to wearing dresses the day before. Naturally. When Samuel came back from conference, the kids always immediately stopped breaking all the rules they’d been breaking while he was gone.)

  “You know better than that, Swan,” Willadee said. Swan blinked indignantly at her. Willadee gave her back a placid look. She could look mighty innocent when she wanted to.

  “Well, it’s not like there’ll be a whole church full of people watching every move we make anymore.”

  “We don’t decide how we’ll live according to what other people think,” Samuel said. “We just try to live by the Bible.”

  Swan argued, reasonably, that the Bible never said one solitary word about how a kid should dress to play in a cow pasture, but Samuel was already moving on to other things. They wouldn’t have much money—not that they had ever had much money—but their income would be uncertain now, so they’d all have to make sacrifices. And he hoped they would understand, and pitch in, and do their part without complaining.

  Swan wasn’t sure what the word sacrifice signified, in present-day terms. In Bible times, it had meant offering something precious on the altar in order to gain God’s favor. In Abraham’s case, that something had been Isaac, but God had sent a scapegoat, so Abraham didn’t actually have to slay his son. Swan had always secretly thought that sounded just a little too convenient. She didn’t say this out loud, of course. You don’t go around questioning the Bible, not if you want to go to Heaven one of these days. Besides, once you start picking holes in things, it’s hard to figure out which parts to throw away and which parts to keep.

  Still, if Samuel was asking them not to complain, that meant there might be something to complain about. This not being a preacher’s kid was sounding less and less appealing. What worried her most was the niggling thought that maybe her father had fallen out of God’s favor. She couldn’t imagine how that could have happened. Nobody tried harder to do the right thing than Sam Lake. Surely God was aware of that.

  Naturally, Blade didn’t hang around waiting until Swan got back to her room. By then, he’d already slipped out of the house and trotted home. He told his mama he’d been playing down by the creek, and she said he must’ve followed it north to Alaska, he sure didn’t answer when she called him half an hour ago, and since when did he go out to play before the rest of the family got their eyes open.

  Geraldine had the ironing board set up in the living room (she took in ironing for pay), and she was smoking a Pall Mall. Her face was about five different colors, mostly shades of blue, with cuts and scrapes crisscrossing each other along her jaw. What had happened the night before was, Blade’s daddy had been teaching his mama how to behave right, and Blade had just wanted to get away. It was scary when his daddy taught anybody about anything. Sometimes, when it happened, Blade pretended to be asleep, but last night, there’d been no pretending. Ras had been pulling Geraldine around the kitchen by the hair of her head and whacking her with a metal spatula. Geraldine had gone from crying and begging him to stop to trying to fight back, which was never a good idea. Blade had tried not to hear, and tried not to hear, and finally, he had just climbed out the window.

  At first, he had sat huddled against the well shed, drawing pictures in the dirt with his fingers, which was something he did a lot at times like this. He didn’t have to see what his hands were doing when he was drawing, and he didn’t have to be looking at something to draw it. He’d always drawn in the dark, usually without even thinking about it. Anyway, he could still hear everything, so he had walked out farther in the yard, and then down the lane, until he was far enough away that it all got pretty quiet. And then that girl had come along.

  Blade didn’t know why he had decided to follow her. Maybe it was because he had the feeling that, wherever she was headed, nothing scary was going to happen. She sure didn’t seem afraid of anything—except for when she first fell down. She was awful scared then, for a minute, like she thought the devil was about to get her. But once she got over that, she was solid as a rock.

  Anyway, he was glad that he had trailed along behind her. In his own mind, he had already laid claim on Swan Lake. She was a safe place—and something more that he was too young to understand or put into words. All he knew was that he wanted to hold on to the feeling he’d had the night before, and to let it wrap around him like a warm blanket on a cold night.

  Chapter 9

  Bernice could hardly stand the way she felt the next few days. For one thing, she kept imagining the whole family knew about her throwing that fit the other night. Everybody except Toy. Generally, Toy was careful not to know things he’d be happier and more comfortable not knowing. He’d been that way ever since that ugly business with Yam Ferguson, back after the war. But as for the rest of them—with everybody living in a heap like this, nobody would be able to poot without somebody smelling it.

  Not that Bernice ever pooted.

  The other thing that was making Bernice miserable was that, lately, she’d been having this time’s-a-wasting-and-so-am-I sort of feeling. You don’t go along for years being
the prettiest thing around, and then realize that you’re in full flower, without getting a little anxious, since the next stage after full flower is when the petals start to droop and fall. So here she was, ripe and lush, with all her petals still pointing in the right direction, and Sam Lake didn’t even notice.

  Well, she’d have to do something about that.

  Bernice tried to think of ways to make Sam notice. She thought about it in the daytime, after she and Toy got back to their own house. He always hit the sack as soon as they got home from Calla’s, and usually didn’t wake up until midafternoon. While he was asleep, Bernice would roam from room to room, as silent and graceful as a butterfly. Briefly lighting here and there. On a chair. On the couch. Sometimes, outside, on the porch rail. There were gardenias blooming beside the steps, and the smell was so sweet, it would catch in her throat and make her want to cry.

  She thought about it at night, when she sat alone in Calla’s swing, with the music from Never Closes rollicking in the background. She thought about it when Samuel and Willadee and the kids headed back to Louisiana to have their farewell service at the little church they were leaving. She thought about it all the time. Somehow there had to be a way to make Samuel see the truth—that he was miserable without her.

  With every hour that passed, Bernice felt an increasing sense of urgency. She wasn’t getting enough sleep, she wasn’t getting what she wanted, and she wasn’t getting any younger.

  It was late Friday night when Samuel’s car chugged into the yard, pulling a trailer that was piled so high with furniture and boxes it was a wonder it had made it under the railroad trestles along the way. Grandma Calla was waiting up for them. She came down off the porch, picked her way through the muddle of customers’ vehicles, and leaned in the car window, talking loud above the juke joint racket.