The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

by Jenny Wingfield

  “We’ve got a very special visitor this morning, folks,” Brother Homer proclaimed. “One of the best and most devout men I’ve ever been privileged to know. Samuel Lake. Stand up, Samuel. Let us get a look at you.”

  Samuel stood up. He hated to, but he did it. He looked around at all the people, and smiled at them, and nodded to them, and they all smiled and nodded back. Brother Homer beamed and cleared his throat, to indicate that he had more to say. The congregation dutifully turned their eyes back to him.

  “Ordinarily, we don’t get the honor of having Samuel with us for services. But tragic circumstances have brought him our way this morning. Samuel, I know you’re here to be with your wife’s family in their time of grief. I just want to say that you all have our deepest sympathies, and our heartfelt prayers.”

  “Thank you, Brother Homer,” Samuel said. “We appreciate that.” And then he added, “I just hope you folks don’t get tired of looking at me, because Willadee and the kids and I are moving home.”

  Brother Homer said, “Well, praise the Lord! Where will you be preaching?”

  Samuel looked around at the people, these people he had grown up with, who respected him and looked up to him, and he said, in that calm, resonant voice of his, “I don’t have a church this year. I’ll be preaching wherever God provides me with a pulpit.”

  You could have knocked those folks over with a feather. If Sam Lake didn’t have a church, that meant that the Methodist conference hadn’t seen fit to appoint him to one. And if that were the case, there had to be a reason. Methodists might be dead wrong about not believing in closed communion and once-saved-always, but they seemed to do right by their preachers. Surely they didn’t lay them off for nothing, like mill hands during a slow season. Something bad must have happened, and Samuel must have been unfairly blamed for it.

  At this point, nobody was even thinking, at least not seriously, that maybe Samuel himself had done anything wrong. Those thoughts would come later. For the moment, the people were all for Samuel.

  Brother Homer’s sermon was all full of hellfire and brimstone, which wasn’t really the side of religion that Samuel liked to emphasize, but concentrating on the message kept his mind off of what would come next, which was visiting with people after the service and having to explain over and over that he and the Methodist church weren’t seeing eye to eye these days. Willadee had been right. It was humiliating, and the more people he had to talk to about it, the more humiliating it would become.

  What he didn’t know was that, by the time the service was over, everybody there would be thinking about something else entirely.

  When Calla heard about Bernice getting religion, it just made her so mad she could spit. Not that she had anything against salvation. She’d taken the plunge herself, back when she was just a slip of a girl, and she still prayed and tried to do the right thing, even though she had decided by now that God was all over the place, and you didn’t have to go to church to find Him. The thing was, she’d had a bellyful of Bernice a long time ago, and she was way past the point of giving that woman the benefit of the doubt. She never said as much to anybody, but Calla had always been of the opinion that when Toy came home from the war, and killed Yam Ferguson, the biggest mistake he made was that he wrung the wrong neck.

  It was the kids who just had to tell Calla the big news. They were piling out of the car before their father even cut off the engine, and they went racing and scrambling straight into the store.

  “Aunt Bernice got saved!” Noble was yelling, not paying the slightest attention to the fact that Calla had a couple of customers who really didn’t need to know Everything About Everything.

  Calla very nearly dropped the dozen eggs and the can of Calumet baking powder she was ringing up. The customers—a sweet-faced old lady and a weather-beaten old man—looked pleased as could be, the way you ought to look when you find out that somebody has come to the Lord.

  “You don’t say,” the old lady chirruped.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” Swan warbled back. The three kids had all skidded to a stop right across the counter from Calla, and Swan was trying to shove Noble out of the way so that she could be the spokesperson for the delegation. “She went down the aisle as soon as they started singing ‘Just As I Am,’ and she flung herself down on her knees—”

  Swan flung her own self down next to a stack of fifty-pound sacks of chopped corn, the kind of corn Grandma Calla fed her chickens. The sacks were made of printed cotton fabric, most of them colorful florals, so they made a nice backdrop for the reenactment.

  “And she was holding her head up?” Swan said. “Like this? Like she was looking up to the Lord? And she was just crying her heart out, only her face didn’t crumple up like most people’s faces do when they cry, you know how ugly most people look when they cry? But she didn’t look ugly at all, she looked just like an angel.”

  “And just about everybody there went down and knelt around her and helped her pray through,” Noble added.

  Bienville nodded soberly. “She got saved as all get-out.”

  Calla got this kind of squinty-eyed stare, and handed the old couple their purchase, and told them to have a good day. The old couple cast confused glances at each other, knowing they’d just been dismissed and wondering what in the world had gotten into Calla Moses, who was usually so nice and pleasant, and always had a kind word for everybody.

  Calla’s garden was a beauteous jumble of flowers and vegetables that seemed to spring up of their own accord wherever they pleased. Sunflowers towered ten feet in the air, with runner beans and cucumbers climbing their stalks and blooming all along the way. Tomatoes were surrounded by peppers, which were set off by marigolds of orange and bronze and gold. Graceful okra cast a fan-leafed canopy over a frilly patchwork of lettuces. Scarlet zinnias and pastel cosmos danced among hip-high summer squash, and purple hull peas hugged the sturdy legs of strappy sweet corn. It was a sight to behold.

  Toy was scaling crappie at a rickety old table between the garden and the toolshed. He glanced up at the sound of all the car doors slamming, and then he focused his attention back on what he was doing. He knew Bernice had gone to church with the others—not because he had seen her leave, and not because he had gone to their room and discovered that she wasn’t there. He just knew because he knew, the same way he often just knew things, especially where his wife was concerned.

  Toy wished with his whole heart that he didn’t care so much about what Bernice did, or whether she cared about him. He wished he could numb it all out and not hurt over her or yearn after her, or give a damn one way or the other. He wished that she were not still in love with Sam Lake, or that at least he didn’t have to be so acutely aware of it. The hardest thing he did every day was to pretend not to be aware, and the only way he managed it was to just keep on doing whatever work was at hand to do, from the time he got up until the time he lay down, day after day, after day.

  Right now, the work at hand was cleaning fish. So he gutted and scaled, and gutted and scaled. He had a kind of rhythm to his movements that would have caused anybody watching him to think, Now, there’s a man who’s at peace with his world.

  He could hear the cooking sounds starting up in the kitchen. The clatter of pots and pans. The low murmur of female voices. That would be Bernice and Willadee. He didn’t strain to hear what they were saying, partly because that was not his way and partly because they wouldn’t be saying much worth listening to anyway.

  Pretty soon, Samuel came out and joined him. He had changed into khakis and an everyday shirt, and he was holding a paring knife.

  “How about some help?” Samuel asked.

  “No sense in both of us smelling like fish,” Toy said. “Anyway, I’m almost done.”

  Samuel hadn’t figured Toy would want or accept help. He had just brought the knife along to show that he was willing to do his part. Since he felt useless, and didn’t know what else to do with himself, he leaned against a tree and tossed the knife from
one hand to the other.

  “How was church?” Toy asked. Just making conversation.

  “Uplifting,” Samuel said.

  And Toy said, “That’s good.”

  He kept on cleaning fish, and Samuel kept tossing the knife back and forth. After a while, Samuel said, “Bernice surrendered her life to the Lord this morning.”

  There was a slight break in Toy’s rhythm. Ever so slight. He finished the fish he was working on, chunked it into a dishpan with the rest of the already cleaned ones, and scooped another one out of the washtub where the last few live ones were thrashing around.

  He said, “I guess that means she’ll be going to church a good bit from now on.”

  “Maybe you’ll want to start going with her,” Samuel suggested. He was really hoping, although he didn’t believe it for a minute, that Toy might do just that. Besides the obvious consideration of Toy’s eternal soul, there was the fact that, if Toy started going to church, his wife would be riding with him, instead of with Samuel and his family. Willadee was an awfully good-natured woman, but she had her limits, and Samuel knew in his bones that those limits were about to be tested.

  Toy shook his head. “Wouldn’t want the roof to cave in.”

  Samuel grinned. Tossed the knife up higher into the air, and caught it with the same hand this time.

  “I don’t imagine the roof would cave in,” he said.

  “Be a shame for folks to find out the hard way,” Toy answered.

  By the time the women got lunch ready, Toy had packed the fish into empty milk cartons, and filled the cartons with water, and asked Samuel to put them in the deep freeze. Then he had wrapped all the innards and scraps in newspaper and buried the mess in a bare patch in Calla’s garden. Come spring, whatever got planted there would flourish, and somebody would say, “Looks like Toy had a good catch sometime last summer.”

  He drove a stake in the spot and hammered it down good, so it wouldn’t get knocked over by accident. Calla always wanted to know where he’d planted fish scraps, so she could be sure not to plant peas or beans anywhere near it. Peas and beans make lush, showy vines when they get a big dose of fertilizer, but that’s all they make. Calla was mighty particular about her garden. She had a system that worked, and she didn’t take kindly to anybody upsetting the balance.

  Toy hosed down the table where he’d been cleaning the fish, and stripped off his shirt, and hosed himself down, too. He still smelled to high heaven, so he went into Never Closes and washed up with soap and water at the sink behind the bar.

  He didn’t know why he’d been so surprised at what Samuel had told him. Trust Bernice to come up with the one thing nobody could fault her for. The one way she could be thrown together the most frequently, and under the most favorable circumstances, with the man she considered to be the love of her life.

  Toy had nothing but respect for his good-looking preacher-boy brother-in-law, and he couldn’t imagine Sam Lake ever letting himself get sucked into a situation where his honor might be compromised.

  Even so, Toy Moses couldn’t help feeling mighty sick inside.

  Chapter 11

  Swan and her brothers had given up playing War Spies because now, every time they found themselves running across the Minefield, dodging enemy bullets and trying not to get blown to Kingdom Come from blundering onto a land mine, they couldn’t help thinking about what it must really be like to get shot, or to have some body part suddenly explode. They kept picturing in their minds what Papa John must have looked like two seconds after he pulled the trigger.

  All of a sudden, they had found that they couldn’t think about dying the same way as before. Used to be, they could shoot each other and watch each other fall and roll around moaning and twitching, and they never thought about death as something you couldn’t get up and walk away from. Now all that had changed.

  They had switched from being War Spies to being Cowboys and Indians, and that had worked out all right. Cowboys and Indians killed each other all the time, but it didn’t seem so real. Besides, Swan and Noble and Bienville never shot each other anymore. Sometimes, just to keep things interesting, they’d let themselves get bushwhacked by a gunslinger, but they mainly suffered flesh wounds from those encounters. None of them ever wound up on Boot Hill.

  Swan wanted to be the sheriff, but Noble wasn’t having that. Whoever heard of a lady sheriff? And besides, she’d probably get them all killed, the way she was always going off half-cocked. He was going to be the sheriff. She could be his deputy if she wanted to be a law woman.

  Swan wasn’t about to settle for being anybody’s deputy, so she became a United States marshal. Bienville was a deaf and dumb Indian scout, and he worked up a variety of hand signals to communicate with them. At first, it was confusing, since he couldn’t speak a word or hear one either (he had to explain the hand signals with more hand signals), but after a while they got the hang of it.

  The kids had a big shoot-out planned for the afternoon. They’d been chasing a band of Outlaws and had finally hemmed up the sorry, lily-livered snakes in the Box Canyon (their new name for the old calf lot). There were about fifty or so Outlaws, judging from the number of hoofprints where they’d all crossed the Big River (their new name for the creek), so the Good Guys were hopelessly outnumbered. As usual.

  The way they had it figured, the deaf and dumb Indian scout would circle around behind the Box Canyon and throw in a lit torch, and the sagebrush would all catch fire, and the Bad Guys would have to hightail it to keep from being barbecued. The mouth to the canyon (the gate to the calf lot) was a tight fit, just room enough for one man to ride through at a time, so the sheriff and the United States marshal would have no trouble picking off the low-down, no-account sidewinders as they tried to escape.

  Bienville wasn’t the one to come up with the plan, and he didn’t like it much. The way he saw it, even an Outlaw ought to be given a fair chance. Swan just hooted over that one. Fifty or so Outlaws against one local sheriff and one United States marshal didn’t sound exactly fair to her. Anyway, if the crooks wanted a fair chance, they shouldn’t have robbed the bank, shot up the town, and peed in the watering trough out in front of the saloon.

  Of course, by the time lunch was over and the posse was ready to ride out, plans had changed. Swan was so inspired by what had happened at church that morning that she decided they should swipe a tarp from the shed, put up a tent back by the creek, and hold a Revival Meeting. That way, if they had any converts, they could baptize them before they had a chance to backslide.

  She aimed to have converts. One in particular. Grandma Calla had mentioned at lunch that she thought Sid and Nicey and Lovey would be dropping by later, and wouldn’t Swan enjoy getting to play with a girl for a change.

  Grandma Calla just didn’t know.

  Swan reckoned that, by the time the company got there, she (the evangelist) and her deacons could have the tent all set up, and they’d be ready to lead their first sinner to salvation. They’d drag her if they had to. Swan told Grandma Calla that she would love to have a girl to play with, and wouldn’t she please tell Lovey, as soon as she got there, to just come on back to the creek.

  Grandma Calla gave Swan one of those I-can-see-right-through-you looks and said, “You’d better not be up to anything, Swan Lake.”

  “All I’m up to is trying to be nice to Lovey,” Swan explained archly.

  And Grandma Calla said, “Um-hmm.”

  The Revival Meeting was harder to coordinate than Swan had anticipated. Noble had been in charge of doing all the necessary stealing, and the only thing he could find to support the corners of the tent were some old cane fishing poles, which kept bending under the weight of the tarp. Finally, Bienville came up with the idea of draping the tarp over a low-hanging tree limb. Then they could tie the corners to some young saplings.

  Only—they didn’t have any rope.

  So Noble had to go back and burgle the shed again. While he was gone, Bienville scouted around for trees
with low-hanging limbs, and Swan meandered down to the creek to pick out a good spot for the upcoming baptism.

  For the most part, the little stream was less than a foot deep, which would be okay for a Methodist baptism, since Methodists let people choose between sprinkling and pouring. But Swan had no plans for performing a Methodist baptism. She also did not plan to give her baptismal candidate a choice. This was going to be a Baptist baptism. A baptism by immersion. All she had to do was find a spot that was deep enough.

  She knew there was at least one spot in the creek that was deep enough, because she and her brothers had been warned never to go there without an adult. The Old Swimming Hole. That’s what her mother and her uncles always called it when they talked about how much fun they’d had, back when they were kids, swinging on grapevines and cannonballing the water.

  It didn’t dawn on Swan that, if the water was deep enough to cannonball into, it was too deep for wading into with a new convert who was probably the biggest sissy in Arkansas. Especially since Swan herself didn’t know how to swim. How could she, when her daddy was always too busy to teach her? She had begged him to, and he had promised to, and he had surely intended to, but there had always been something more pressing. For instance, somebody out in the boonies had a kid with a fever of 103. And the kid had to get to the doctor, but they didn’t have a car. So somebody would call the preacher, and he would drop everything and go do what had to be done.

  Swan wasn’t thinking about any of this, though. All she was thinking about was that Lovey was stuck on herself and needed to be taken down a few notches.

  The swimming hole hadn’t been used in years, and there were no paths leading down to it anymore, so finding it wasn’t easy. Swan followed the creek bank, looking and hoping, and looking and hoping, but the swimming hole just did not seem to exist. The bank sloped and slanted, sometimes level with the water, sometimes rising high above it.