The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

by Jenny Wingfield

  “I know I’m not,” she said. “And I won’t stay long. Thank you for letting me pass.”

  What else could he do but step aside?

  She caught sight of Blade before she got into the house. Saw him through the screen door. His mother was sitting in a chair, holding a baby and a box of Kleenex in her lap. Blade was standing beside the chair, the way a man would do. Two younger boys were on the floor, the bigger one of the two sucking his thumb and snuffling.

  When Calla came into the room and Blade saw her, she could almost see his heart lurch. Geraldine glared at Calla with red-rimmed eyes. Apparently she was finding her husband’s memory a lot sweeter to live with than the man himself had been. Or maybe it was what had happened to him after he died that undid her. What the dogs had done. Calla knew about that. Early had mentioned it when they talked on the phone a while ago. Geraldine yanked a wad of Kleenex out of the box and blew her nose loudly.

  “Don’t come over here asking if there’s anything you can do,” she said. “You can’t bring him back.”

  No, and if somebody else did, I’d sent him off again. That was what Calla wanted to say. She didn’t, though. She said, “If you and your kids ever need anything, we’re still your neighbors.”

  Illogically, Geraldine reached out and wrapped an arm protectively around Blade. As if he needed protection from Calla Moses. “You’re not taking my boy again.”

  “No,” Calla said. “I expect Blade feels like he needs to be here with you.” Then she looked at him. “You’re welcome at our place, though, Blade. Welcome and loved.”

  He looked away. Calla turned and left. When she was almost out of the yard, she heard him coming up behind her. Running. She stopped and waited until he came around in front of her, and was facing her.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. So he was back to whispering now. “For what happened to Swan.”

  Calla said, “Blade, you had nothing to do with what happened to Swan. You can’t let anything that anyone else has done change the way you think about yourself.”

  He didn’t respond to that, so she asked him if he was all right inside. If he was sad about his daddy dying. He shook his head.

  “No,” he said. Barely audible. “But I’m supposed to be.”

  Then he turned and ran back toward the house.

  Swan slept off and on, sometimes waking up crying. When she opened her eyes, there was always someone there. Her mother, her father, her brothers, her grandmother. Whoever it was, she looked away, because she thought they must be seeing what had happened when they looked at her, and what had happened was even harder for her to handle now that she was safe.

  “All that’s over,” her mother would tell her.

  “No one can hurt you again,” Samuel would say.

  But it wasn’t the idea of being hurt again that was bothering her. She knew that Ballenger was dead, and that her father had been the one who killed him, because she’d seen the crumpled body when Samuel brought her out of the Dark Place and loaded her as gently as possible into the car. What was haunting her now was what had already happened that couldn’t be undone.

  Her brothers didn’t know what to say, except to ask her if she was all right. She always said the same thing.

  “No.”

  Before Grandma Calla left to see Toy, she stopped in Swan’s room and sat down on the bed beside her. There was misery in the girl’s eyes.

  “Remember you were saved by a miracle,” Grandma Calla told her, trying to help her regain that feeling of wonderment.

  Swan dissolved in tears. “It didn’t come in time,” she said. “I was only partly saved.”

  “Now, that’s not true,” Grandma Calla said. “And I don’t want to hear it. Your daddy brought you home all in one piece. We got our whole little girl back.”

  Swan said, “I don’t feel whole.”

  “Well, you will. You will. You will.”

  After she was gone, Swan asked her mother to ring the cowbell. Willadee grabbed the bell up off the table beside the bed and rang it loud and long. Swan lay back on her pillows and closed her eyes. That clanging sound made her feel easier, somehow.

  “Why do you think God waited so long to help me?” she asked her mother.

  Willadee had been wondering the same thing. All she could think of to say was “You’re here. You’re with us. That’s what matters.”

  Swan blew out a shuddery breath and tried to keep her thoughts away from that spot by the willows and the Dark Place at Ballenger’s. There were two cowbells and two duck calls still back there in the woods, and she hoped against hope that didn’t mean that anybody else was going to need a miracle. Really needing a miracle was the worst thing imaginable.

  Samuel took Calla into town to visit Toy, and while she was back there in the jail, he went searching for Early Meeks. When he found him, he repeated his confession. Early listened, but not as patiently as before.

  “Tell me what the inside of that room looked like,” he said finally. “The room where Ballenger was keeping Swan.”

  “It was dark,” Samuel said. “I couldn’t see a thing. There was a dirt floor. I remember that.”

  “Toy remembers a helluva lot more than a dirt floor. He remembers every last detail.”

  When Samuel opened his mouth to argue, Early just shook his head and told him that everybody in Columbia County knew who did the killing in the Moses family.

  “Back years ago,” he said, “Toy got away with murder because he was a war hero and Yam Ferguson was a spoiled, rich punk who stayed home and chased other men’s wives instead of doing his part in the war effort. But as much as Yam Ferguson and Ras Ballenger both needed killing, your brother-in-law can’t just go around breaking somebody’s neck every few years. It sets a bad example for everybody else.”

  “But he didn’t do it,” Samuel said. “Ask my daughter who came in there and got her.”

  “Your daughter,” Early said, “has been through something that could break a person’s mind. She told the doctor that mice set her free. Hundreds of mice. And you know what, Samuel? We found shredded ropes and a gunnysack, and all, just like she said. But we didn’t find any droppings in that room. A mouse can’t run here to yonder without crapping little pellets all over the place. Your daughter set herself free. I don’t know how she did it, but she did. Now, you go home and be glad you’ve still got a daughter to raise, and stop trying to take the credit for something you didn’t do.”

  The credit. Early was letting Samuel know that he thought somebody killing Ras Ballenger was a good thing, but he had his mind made up about who did it. Or who he was going to allow to take the blame. Suddenly Samuel wasn’t sure which. Either way, he knew Early Meeks wouldn’t budge.

  So he went to see the D.A., a stout old bulldog named Lavern Little. This time, when Samuel told his story, he left out the part about flying. Lavern didn’t even let him finish.

  “Folks aren’t a bit happy about this,” he told Samuel. “Not that anybody misses Ras Ballenger. They don’t. But they don’t want Toy Moses deciding who gets to live and die around here. What you need to do is quit trying to throw cogs in amongst the wheels of justice before I decide to try Toy for two killings, instead of just one. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  Samuel got the message. Anything else he said or did was just going to make it worse for Toy.

  Still, over the next couple of weeks, everybody in the family tried to talk some sense into Toy. He told them he’d never done a thing in his life that made more sense.

  “If they try me,” Samuel argued, “they might call it justifiable homicide. But they’ve got you charged with murder.” They could speak more freely than usual that day. Early had long since decided there was no need to post a guard to prevent Toy Moses from escaping, seeing as how he was so determined to be locked up.

  “That’s right, they have,” Toy told him. “And if I was out there with folks, there might be another one they’d have to charge me with.” He
didn’t have to mention that he was talking about Bernice. When Samuel was a little slow in answering back, Toy gave him something else to think about.

  “Do you know why I killed Yam Ferguson, Samuel?”

  Samuel was shocked. Until now, the Ferguson murder had always seemed like a myth. One of those stories that might be true but nobody expected to ever know for sure about.

  “I did it,” Toy said bitterly, “to defend Bernice’s honor.”

  He laughed then. The laugh was flat, too. And sad as the ages. “I killed a man to defend something that didn’t exist. So maybe that’s what I’m paying for this time, and you get what I got a long time ago. A reprieve.” Then he gave Samuel a level look and said the most important thing of all. “I couldn’t do any good out there the way I am now, Samuel, but you still can. And you’d better. You think life would be kind to your kids, if you was in here? I can tell you the answer, in case you don’t know it.”

  But Samuel knew it. Inside, he knew it.

  Calla tried to talk some sense into Toy, but he’d already thought things through, and all the talking in the world wasn’t going to sway him.

  “I understand why you’re doing this,” Calla told him. “But I can’t stand to see it happening. You don’t deserve half the bad that’s happened to you in your life, and there’s been plenty of it. Plenty of it, and now this.”

  “I’ve done my share of wrong,” Toy said peacefully.

  “Well, it’s wrong to take the blame for what you didn’t do,” she persisted. “You’re trying to do right by everybody else, but you’re not doing right by yourself.”

  Toy said oh, yes, he was. Calla reached through the bars and he took her hand in his. For just a heartbeat, a lonesome shadow seemed to pass across his face.

  “I can’t say I’m looking forward to where I’m going,” he told her. “But leaving is just something that happens in life. We all do it someday, one way or another. There’s worse things than going away with the taste of love still fresh in our mouths.”

  After Calla left, Willadee went back to see her brother. Her heart felt heavy as a lead weight in her chest.

  “I know you’re not going to listen to me,” she said. “You’ve never listened to anything you didn’t want to hear. But this time, you need to, because we all love you and we don’t want to lose you.”

  Toy gave her one of his easy smiles.

  “Y’all won’t be losing me, Willadee. I’ll just be someplace else.”

  She shook her head hard, sending a spray of angry tears flying.

  “Stop it, Toy! Stop smiling and acting like this is nothing. All these years, no matter what’s happened, you’ve pretended it didn’t hurt. When you came back from the war with a leg missing—and through all the hell Bernice has dished out to you—but this is different. Surely, if we just tell the sheriff the truth—if we’re Just Plain Honest—no jury in the world would go hard on Samuel.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Toy told her. “People turn. They’ve already been asking each other what Samuel did to get put out of the pulpit. Then you add Bernice’s escapades, and the fact that she’s telling it all over the county that Samuel chased her until she gave in, and that he was always sneaking her into your bedroom while you was working in the bar—”

  Willadee gaped.

  “They won’t say it in front of you,” Toy said. “They never said it in front of me, either, but they said it off to the side. Just because I don’t talk much, people forget I can hear.”

  The children came. Swan, and Noble, and Bienville. They were too heartbroken to talk much, so he just hugged them the best he could through the bars, and let them all hang on as long as they wanted.

  “We’ll all be grown by the time you come home again,” Swan said sadly.

  “You will,” Toy answered. “And I’ll be getting on up in years. But that won’t change the way I feel about you.” Then, to Bienville, he said, “You being a good boy?”

  “I’m always good,” Bienville told him, with an old man’s sigh. “I’ve been good so long it’s getting tedious.”

  Toy grinned, although the kids couldn’t see that. They had their heads pressed as close as they could to their uncle’s chest, all of them hating the bars that were in the way.

  “You all right these days, Swan?” Toy asked next.

  “Grandma Calla says I will be,” she said.

  “Your grandma’s right,” Toy told her. “You hold on to that.”

  And then he spoke to Noble.

  “How ’bout you, bud? You makin’ it okay?”

  Noble pulled back a little and looked his uncle in the eye.

  “I’m keeping my feet under me,” he said. “You taught me to do that.”

  Toy nodded, pleased.

  “Well, then,” he said, “I reckon I can rest easy.”

  Chapter 41

  Nobody believed Swan about the mice. They didn’t believe that any more than they believed Sam Lake could fly. They couldn’t explain what was in the dead space at the Ballenger farm, though. All those frayed bits of rope and those minced-up strips of cloth, or the gunnysack that had been reduced to confetti.

  One evening, toward the end of April, Samuel sat in the porch swing holding Swan in his lap. She was too big for that, but she was still his little girl.

  “I believe you about the mice,” he told her. “I don’t know whether I’ve told you that.”

  “You didn’t have to tell me,” she said. “I just knew, same as I knew it was true about you flying.” Then she told him that she was wondering whether they needed to stop telling people about those things. They’d already been Just Plain Honest, and maybe that was enough.

  “How else are folks going to find out that miracles still happen?” Samuel asked her.

  Swan said, “I think maybe miracles are something everybody has to find out about for themselves. Telling them about it doesn’t make them believe. It just makes them think you’re crazy as a bessie bug.”

  At his own insistence, Toy Moses got the speediest trial since hanging days. And one of the shortest. The courtroom was full of spectators for the whole hour and eleven minutes. He insisted on representing himself, waived his right to a jury, and his plea was “Guilty as hell, Your Honor.” When asked to address the court, Toy did more lying in ten minutes than he’d done in the rest of his life put together. The things he’d heard Samuel telling Willadee that night, back at the house, he wove together into a terse but thorough account, and he embellished his story with every single detail that he’d gleaned from his inspection of Ras Ballenger’s hidden room. When he got to the part about wringing the little bastard’s neck, that was just how he put it. He also threw in that some men just needed to be dead, and he was glad he’d helped that particular man to get that way.

  Samuel Lake asked to testify for the defense. The defense (Toy Moses) declined.

  The judge gave Toy twenty years. Probably ten for Yam Ferguson and ten for Ras Ballenger, although he didn’t say anything along those lines.

  Toy thanked him sincerely.

  Bernice hadn’t made it to the trial. She had, however, made it down to Shreveport, where she was living with a man named D. E. Shuler. She’d met D.E. in a bar, over at El Dorado, when he’d been passing through town on his way to Nashville to take care of some important business. At least that’s what he said, and Bernice took everything D.E. said as gospel.

  What had her hooked on D.E. was that he was a record producer, or would be, once he got his label established, and he was looking for a dynamite female vocalist. Bernice auditioned for him that first night, without singing a note, and they’d been together ever since.

  Early Meeks drove Toy out to the house after the sentencing, so he could spend some time telling his family goodbye in a way that wouldn’t be so hurtful to them when they remembered it. What he was doing wasn’t strictly legal, and Bobby Spikes pointed that out to him as they were walking Toy out to Early’s car. Early told Bobby that it probably wasn’t l
egal to make a deputy’s life a living hell, either, but he’d been known to do it, and might do it again, if riled.

  Out at Calla’s, the grown-ups sat around talking, pretty much as if this were any other visit. Sid had bought a pig from a farmer down the road and had roasted it in a pit in the backyard. What with Calla’s potato salad and Nicey’s baked beans and Willadee’s biscuits and corn casserole, it was a meal to remember. Toy told Nicey that her five-day cake was the best thing he’d ever laid glommers on, and she just lit up like a Sunbeam.

  Swan and her brothers started out the visit feeling ill at ease and sad enough to die, but before it was over, they’d gotten some peace about things. Toy wasn’t going away forever, he told them. Twenty years didn’t necessarily mean twenty years. It all depended on how things played out.

  “In the meantime,” Toy said to Noble, “you get your daddy to help you pull that motor we never got around to. Then you keep that truck running right, so you’ll have something to drive when you’re old enough to get a license.”

  Noble told him he’d do it, and that the first time he was allowed to drive it on his own, he’d have somebody take his picture and he’d send it to him.

  Toy spent time with each one of them, the way a man does with his kids when he’s going away for a while. Maybe they weren’t his kids in all ways, but they were his in the ways that mattered.

  He asked Bienville to send him books to read, and Bienville asked him what he liked. Toy said he liked anything about woods and water, but that Bienville was welcome to broaden his horizons. Bienville got a glint in his eye thinking about that.

  After a while, Toy picked Swan up and set her on his shoulders, and walked off with her, leaving everybody else behind. Swan held on and smiled, remembering how she’d once daydreamed about this very thing. Not the circumstances. She never would have imagined those, or wanted them. But this was the closeness she had yearned for.