Ras wasn’t convinced that Blade could have “taken” Snowman anywhere, but whatever he had done with Snowman, he was going to regret it. More important right now, though, was finding Odell Pritchett’s horse.
Ras took off in his truck, and he didn’t have to go far. The first place he stopped was Calvin Furlough’s, because Calvin had a reputation for knowing everybody’s business and telling everything he knew to anybody who would listen. Ras found Calvin inside his shop, popping the dents out of the hood of a Nash Rambler with a rubber mallet, and sure enough—Calvin said he’d gone down to Miz Calla’s store earlier for some Bull of the Woods and couldn’t even get waited on, because the whole family was congregated out beside the barn, all circled around a big white horse. Finally, he’d just helped himself to the chewing tobacco and left his money on the counter.
“Sheriff Meeks was there, too,” Calvin said. “Don’t ask me why.”
Early Meeks was tearing paper matches out of a matchbook and flipping them at a cottonmouth moccasin that sat coiled on the corner of his desk with its mouth wide open and its fangs exposed. Early had killed the snake in a bog behind his house a couple of years back, and had had the taxidermist fix it so that an ashtray would fit inside the coil. In case it was true what Early had heard about the fangs of poisonous snakes being just as dangerous after the snakes were dead as when they were alive, those had been painted over with a clear sealant that was turning yellow now.
The ashtray was half-full of paper matches when Ras Ballenger stormed into the office, braying indignantly that he’d had a horse stolen the night before. He said his dogs had waked him up barking, and he’d come running out of the house with his shotgun, but by that time, the thief was lighting out of there, riding the best horse he had on the place. He didn’t shoot, because he didn’t want to hit the horse.
Early leaned back in his chair and listened, the way a lawman is supposed to. He didn’t interrupt Ras once, just let the little turd hustler tell him everything without meaning to.
“That animal was in top shape when it left my place.” Ras banged his fist on Early’s desk. “And it better be in the same condition when I git it back.”
Early scratched his ear and frowned. “You don’t think I took the horse,” he said.
Ras coughed and spluttered explosively. “I wasn’t accusin’ you. I was reportin’ a crime!”
“I couldn’t tell. Sounded like you was saying you’re holding me responsible for anything that might’ve happened to the animal.”
“I wasn’t sayin’ anything of the kind.”
Early looked blank. Like this was all deeper than he could fathom.
“So you’re thinking—that the thief rode the horse off your place, and maybe decided he didn’t like it enough to keep it—so he hurt it some way, just for spite—and left it where I’d be able to find it?” He scratched his ear again. “Usually, a man’s gonna steal a horse, he’ll back a trailer up to the pasture and cut the fence and load the critter on, and hightail it to the next county. I never heard of anybody going afoot onto somebody else’s property, right up close to their house, walking in amongst their dogs and all—and taking a horse and riding it out, just so he could mistreat it—and then taking off on foot again. I wonder how the sonofabitch got home.”
Ras tightened up like a spring. He knew he was being messed with, but now he had no choice except to gut this out.
“All I know is, it got stole. And it’s your job to git it back for me.”
Early smiled. It was a tolerant smile that he reserved for folks he wouldn’t piss on if they were to catch fire. Then he stood up, like a ladder unfolding. Ras reacted by pulling himself up as tall as he could, which wasn’t very. Early halfway expected him to jump on top of the desk so he could be the one looking down on somebody.
“I’ll ask around,” Early said.
He didn’t let on that he knew where the horse was, and Ras didn’t let on that he knew that Early knew. They both had their little secrets.
After Ras left, Early sat back down and tore another paper match out of the matchbook, and flipped it into the ashtray that was nestled into the coil of the cottonmouth. Through the window, he could see Ras strutting across to the curb, where the red Apache waited. The summer sun played over the little man’s bronzy skin and midnight hair, making him gleam like a shiny water moccasin.
Watching Ras climb up into his truck and gun it out of there, Early couldn’t help thinking that there was a man who was overdue for killing. When the time came, he’d be more than glad to do the honors, but there was no telling who or what was going to suffer in the meantime. He kind of wished he could do it early.
Chapter 19
Ras knew that pretty soon, unless he could figure some way around it, he was going to have to call Odell Pritchett and tell him that his horse was missing. It galled him to have to say it was missing when it wasn’t missing at all, it just wasn’t where it was supposed to be. There ought to be a way to get it back.
But there wasn’t. He’d already overplayed his hand by blowing off his mouth to Early Meeks about how the horse had been stolen. Now Meeks knew whose place the animal had come off of, and that was the first place he would look if it was to go missing again.
When Ras got home, he did chores around the place, and ate what Geraldine put in front of him, and drew back his hand every time she opened her mouth to speak. He didn’t even talk to Blue.
He didn’t call Odell yet, because he hadn’t finished thinking out how to handle the situation, and he still did not go looking for Blade, even though Geraldine blubbered and begged. He wasn’t in a hurry. Let the little bastid see how he liked going hungry and sleeping on the ground. Then, in a day or so, he could see how he liked what else was in store for him.
All afternoon, Blade Ballenger hung out near the creek, watching the Lake children pretend to track outlaws. Actually, they didn’t do all that much tracking, they were too busy making over the horse. They were leading it down to the creek for a drink, and scratching its ears and its belly, and when it lay down in the tall meadow grass, they lay down all around it and used it for a pillow.
Blade wanted to go play with them, but he didn’t dare show himself. He didn’t think the girl would run tell her folks about him (she had let him sleep in her bed that once, after all), but he wasn’t so sure about the boys. Besides, those children were fully dressed and reasonably clean, whereas he was still wearing what he’d had on the night before—the same tattered shirt and underwear, filthy with his own blood and his brother’s pee and dirt from hiding under the house after he jumped out the window this morning. He’d stayed under there, afraid to breathe, until his daddy tore out of the yard in the truck, and then he’d made a beeline for the woods.
So now, here he was. He couldn’t go home, and there was nowhere else to go. All he could do was stay still and watch those kids playing with the horse he had saved, and wait for something to happen.
But staying still made it hard for him to keep his eyes open. He was dead for sleep, plus he hadn’t eaten a bite all day, and he was running on empty. His eyes were dry and grainy, so he blinked them, hard, and that was all it took. Once his eyelids came together, they wouldn’t pull apart for the longest time. When he finally got them open again, it was dark, and the children were gone.
Blade had been to the Moses place enough times that he knew the ebb and flow of life here. He knew how to blend into the shadows as he crept across the yard. He also knew where to step in the kitchen so as not to hit a board that creaked, and he knew where everything was kept. Leftover corn bread would be on the back of the stove, covered with a dish towel. Lately, there’d even been pieces of cake, or sometimes a slice of pie. Other leftovers would be in the icebox, sometimes stored in covered bowls, but often as not, in lidded mason jars. These he preferred, because he could grab the jars and go, instead of digging in the covered bowls and hoping no one heard. Blade suspected that women liked their bowls, and would get upset if one
disappeared, but nobody worried about a missing mason jar.
He knew a lot for a boy his age, but he didn’t know everything. He didn’t know, for instance, that Sam Lake sometimes sat in the dining room, in the dark, after everyone else had gone to bed, thinking about his situation and wondering how to make it better. Samuel had spotted Blade a couple of times sneaking jars of string beans and chunks of corn bread, and he had started keeping up with whether the boy had been around by leaving his dessert on the stove after supper (“for later,” he told Willadee, in case he got hungry during the night).
On this particular night, Samuel was in the dining room again, and when Blade stole out of the house, Samuel trailed him. Far enough behind that the kid had no idea he was being followed.
Blade holed up in the barn and ate his supper with gusto. When he was done, he hid the jars under a pile of spoiled hay with the growing accumulation of empties. Then he burrowed into the hay himself, curling up like a fox in its den.
He slept.
Sometime during the night, a crisp sheet settled over him like a cloud, and a set of clean clothes was laid out on top of the sheet. The sheet smelled fresh as sunshine, and when daybreak came sifting through the cracks in the old barn walls, it took Blade a few seconds to wake up and realize what had happened, and what it meant.
It meant he was home.
Chapter 20
At breakfast, Samuel asked the rest of the family whether they’d ever noticed a little black-headed boy hanging around looking like he didn’t have anyplace to live, and everybody looked confused as the devil, especially Swan. She said she sure hadn’t noticed any little black-headed boy hanging around, she hadn’t ever noticed one solitary soul hanging around, if she had, she’d have told a grown-up so fast it would’ve made their heads spin.
Willadee took note of her daughter’s emphatic denial and put the note in a mental file to be examined later.
“Well, I’ve seen the little shaver several times,” Samuel said. “As a matter of fact, I saw him just last night, taking food from the kitchen again.”
Grandma Calla squinted at Samuel and cocked her eyebrows way up nearly to her hairline.
She said, “Again,” kind of like she was asking a question, and kind of like she was providing an echo.
“I reckon I should have said something sooner,” Samuel admitted. “He’s been coming and going for weeks. At first I thought surely he had a family, and maybe they were just short on groceries, but last night made me wonder.”
Then he told them about trailing the kid out to the barn, and how the kid had burrowed down into the hay to go to sleep, and how he’d looked so pitiful, like a little lost dog that had been dumped beside the road.
“I took one of your good sheets out there and covered him up,” Samuel said to Calla. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Calla said that she didn’t mind, sheets were made for covering people up, there wasn’t any other reason to own one.
When Bienville found out that Samuel had also taken some of his clothes out there because the little boy was wearing filthy rags, he sat up so straight and proud you’d have thought he just found out he was kin to Abe Lincoln.
“Well, I sure don’t grudge him the use of my clothes,” he said grandly. “What’s the use of having more clothes than you can wear at one time, if you’re not willing to share?”
Down at the end of the table, Bernice was holding hands with Uncle Toy like the good wife she was determined to appear, and she was about to choke on all this milk of human kindness.
“Well,” she observed in just the silkiest tone. “We have to find out who his parents are, and take him home. They must be beside themselves with worry.”
Swan said, “Maybe his parents aren’t good people. Maybe his daddy is a mean old sonofa——”
Samuel looked at her, hard, and she realized what she’d almost said, just in time to alter the outcome.
“—biscuit eater, and the kid is scared to go home.”
Willadee made another mental note.
Toy Moses pushed back his plate and lit a cigarette.
After breakfast, the family gathered at the window and watched the barn for signs of life.
“I bet he’s already come out and gone.” Noble was disappointed. He’d been looking forward to meeting a little kid who slept in people’s barns and stole food out of people’s kitchens late at night. Now that kid must be formidable.
“If he’s eating here and sleeping here, where would he go?” asked Willadee.
And Calla said, “I feel just like I’m waiting for a cow to calve.”
Blade Ballenger had tried on Bienville’s clothes and found that the shirt came down to his knees, which was good, because the pants were so big on him that they kept slipping down there, too.
He hated to put on such nice clean clothes, because he was so dirty, and he hated to go out into the open, because he knew he looked foolish. For a little while, he stayed in the barn, both hopeful and afraid that someone would come out of the house. For sure, they must be nice people; only nice people would come down and cover a kid up in the middle of the night with a sheet that smelled like sunshine. So that was the hopeful side. But he was still afraid.
After a while, he ventured out of the barn and sat down cross-legged, staring at the house. And waited.
They all saw him at once, and they all started oohing and aahing as if they really were watching a calf get born. All but Toy, who had figured out who Samuel was talking about even before the kid came out of the barn, and Bernice, who simply couldn’t get excited about the same things everybody else did.
“There he is! There he is!” Noble was yammering, and Bienville said, “Well, I’ll be dawg,” and Calla said, “Now, ain’t he something in Bienville’s clothes?”
Willadee glanced at Samuel, proud of him for what he’d done, but he wouldn’t look back. He was feeling far too much to look anybody in the eye, even Willadee.
Swan started for the door. “I think y’all better let me be the one to go talk to him,” she said. “I’m good with little kids.”
Willadee’s mental notebook was filling up fast.
Blade didn’t move a muscle when he saw Swan barreling out of the house and coming his way. She was across the yard in nothing flat, and was standing right in front of him before he hardly knew it.
“Don’t let on like you know me!” she hissed. “My folks might get mad if they find out I let you stay in my room that time.”
Blade’s eyes got big and round, and he started to get up and run off. He didn’t like to be around when folks got mad.
Swan laid a hand on his arm and held him back. “Don’t worry,” she reassured him. “When my folks get mad, nothing much happens.”
Blade relaxed a little.
“How come you to sleep in our barn last night?” Swan asked.
Blade shrugged elaborately.
Swan said, “I mean, it’s all right. It’s all right as everything. I was just wondering.”
Blade shrugged again and tugged Bienville’s britches up under his armpits to keep them from falling off.
Swan slung an arm around his shoulders and gave him a conspiratorial look. “Well, anyhow,” she said, “I’ll bet you’re hungry. So you just come on up to the house, and my mama will fix you something to eat, and I’ll tell you on the way what to say and what to keep quiet about.”
You never saw a small child eat as much as Blade Ballenger ate that morning, and you never saw so many folks gang around watching with such fascination. Swan was sitting right beside him, so she could poke him if he got mixed up on what not to say. Nobody asked him any uncomfortable questions, though. Mainly things like “You want some more butter on those pancakes?” and “You got room for another couple strips of bacon?” Things he naturally said yes to. He didn’t volunteer any other information. Swan did, though.
“His name is Blade,” she announced, as if that was something she’d just found out two minutes ago. “His folks go
t carried off by the tornado, and he doesn’t have anybody to take care of him, so like as not, we’re gonna have to adopt him.”
Toy was on the other side of the room, leaning against the door-jamb, and he nearly fell over at the sheer magnitude of that whopper. He understood why Swan had told it, though. She’d seen the way Ras Ballenger treated the boy that day in front of the store, and he knew she wouldn’t want him to have to go back to more of the same.
Toy wasn’t the only one who saw the holes in Swan’s story. Samuel knew for a fact that the kid had been coming around since before the storm. As for Willadee and Calla, they simply knew when Swan was lying. Noble and Bienville couldn’t tell for sure, but Bernice (not having kids or maternal instincts or any experience with liars—herself excluded) bought the tale hook, line, and sinker.
“You can’t adopt a child just because it’s an orphan,” she told Swan.
“He’s not an it,” Swan bristled.
“Well, of course, he’s not. He’s a little boy who’s lost his family, and little boys who’ve lost their families have to be turned over to the Welfare, for their own good.”
Blade gave her a look that said he didn’t know what she was talking about, but he didn’t like the sound of it.
“Nobody’s turning him over to anybody yet,” Grandma Calla put in. “Why, my goodness, we haven’t even heard the whole story.”
She nodded for Swan to continue, just as if she thought the truth might suddenly start pouring out of the girl’s mouth.
Swan hadn’t actually planned to continue. She had more or less expected that Blade would be invited to move in, and that would be that. In the back of her mind, she knew that Blade’s folks would try to get him back, but some things you can’t think about until you absolutely have to.
The Homecoming of Samuel Lake Page 15