The Homecoming of Samuel Lake, Page 2

  And that’s the way things went along, right up until the day John Moses died. Moses Never Closes was something folks counted on. It was a certain place in an uncertain world. Folks wanted it to stay the way it was, because once you change one part of a thing, all the other parts begin to shift, and pretty soon, you just don’t know what’s what anymore.

  Chapter 2

  This is the way it happened.

  Samuel dropped Willadee and the kids off on Saturday, and Willadee spent the rest of the day helping her mother with the cooking and cleaning. The kids weren’t going to be any help, so they were banished from the house and had to endure such punishments as romping in the hayloft, fishing for crawdads in the creek, and playing War Spies all over the hundred acres.

  Noble was twelve years old, all arms and legs and freckles. He had his daddy’s eyes, but you didn’t really notice them because of his glasses, which were so thick and heavy they continually slid down his nose. He wanted, more than anything, to be formidable, so he walked with a swagger and talked in low, menacing tones. Problem was, his voice was changing and would take the high road when he least expected it. Just when he might say something sinister like “You make a move, and I’ll cut your heart out,” his voice would jump to falsetto and spoil the effect completely.

  Swan was eleven. A gray-eyed, compact bit of a girl who could pass for a boy, dressed in her younger brother, Bienville’s, clothes, as she was now. Samuel would have had a fit if he’d known that Willadee allowed such things. The Bible clearly said that women were not to dress as men, and Samuel Lake always tried to follow the Bible to the letter. But then, Willadee had a habit of letting the kids do whatever they wanted to when Samuel wasn’t around, as long as they didn’t violate the Moses Family Rules—which meant no lying, no stealing, no tormenting animals or smaller children.

  The most delicious thing in Swan’s life was this one week every summer of wearing boy clothes and forgetting about modesty. She could scoot under barbed-wire fences and race across pastures without those confounded skirts getting in her way. She was little. She was quick. And she was just what Noble dreamed of being. Formidable. You couldn’t get the best of her, no matter how you tried.

  “That child is a terror,” Grandma Calla would say to Willadee when she thought Swan wasn’t listening. (Swan was always listening.)

  “She’s her father’s daughter,” Willadee would answer, usually with a small sigh, which indicated that there was nothing to be done about the situation, Swan was Swan. Both Willadee and Calla rather admired Swan, although they never would have said so. They just indicated it with a slight lift of their eyebrows, and the least hint of a smile, whenever her name came up. Which was often. Swan got into more trouble than any other child in the Moses tribe.

  Bienville was nine years old, and he was another story altogether. He had a peaceable nature, a passion for books, and a total fascination with the universe in general. You just couldn’t count on him for things like surveillance, or assassinations. You could be playing the best game of Spies, and have the Enemy cornered, and be just about to move in for the kill, and there Bienville would be, studying the pattern of rocks in the creek bed or examining the veins in a sassafras leaf. He couldn’t be depended on to do his part in a war effort.

  Noble and Swan had learned how to deal with Bienville, though. Since he never seemed to commit to either side, they made him a double agent. Bienville didn’t care, even though being a double agent generally meant he was the first one to get killed.

  Bienville had just gotten killed for the fourth time that Saturday afternoon when Things Started Happening. He was lying on his back in the pasture, dead as a stone, staring up at the sky.

  He said, “Swan, did you ever wonder why you can see stars at night but not in the daytime? Stars don’t evaporate when the sun comes up.”

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” Swan reminded him.

  She had just shot him with an invisible submachine gun, and she was busy digging an invisible trench with an invisible shovel. Bienville didn’t know it, but he was about to be rolled over into the trench, dead or not. Noble was still lurking somewhere out there in Enemy Territory, so Swan had to keep a watchful eye.

  Bienville said, “I’m tired of being dead,” and he sat up.

  Swan pushed him back down with her foot. “You are a corpse,” she told him. “You can’t be tired, you can’t sit up, and you cannot talk.”

  She had forgotten to be watchful. Sudden footsteps behind her told her so. She whirled, brandishing the invisible shovel. Noble was running directly toward her, arms pumping. The area he was crossing had been designated as a Minefield, but Noble wasn’t looking for mines. Swan let out a ferocious roar and brought her “shovel” down across Noble’s head. That should have done him in, but he didn’t fling himself on the ground and commence his death agonies, like he was supposed to. He grabbed Swan and clamped one hand over her mouth, and hissed at her to get quiet. Swan struggled indignantly but couldn’t get free. Even if Noble wasn’t formidable, he was strong.

  “I just—killed you—with a shovel!” she hollered. Noble’s hand muffled the sound into mushy, garbled noises. About every other word, Swan tried to bite his fingers. “No way—could you—have survived. That—was a fatal blow—and you know it!”

  Bienville was looking on like a wise old sage, and he made out enough of what Swan was saying to have to agree with her.

  “It was a fatal blow, all right,” he confirmed.

  Noble rolled his eyes and clamped his hand tighter across Swan’s mouth. She was kicking up a storm and growling, deep in her throat.

  “I said shhh!” Noble dragged his sister toward a line of brush and brambles that ran between the pasture and a patch of woods. Bienville flipped over on his belly and crawled across the Minefield after them. When they got close to the brush line, Noble realized he had a problem. He needed to let Swan go, which promised to be something like releasing a wildcat.

  He said, very calmly, “Swan, I’m going to turn you loose.”

  “Irpulmbfrmlmb, ustnknbzzrd!” she answered, and she bit his hand so hard that he jerked it away from her mouth to inspect it for blood. That split second was all Swan needed. She drove an elbow into Noble’s gut, and he doubled over, gasping for breath.

  “Dammit, Swan,” he groaned. She was all over him. Noble drew himself into a wad, enduring the onslaught. He knew a few Indian tricks, such as Becoming a Tree. A person could hit and kick a tree all day long without hurting it, because it was Unmovable. He’d learned this from Bienville, who had either read about it or made it up. Noble didn’t care whether Bienville’s stories were true, just so the methods worked.

  Swan hated it when Noble Became a Tree. It was something she had never mastered (she was not about to stand still for anybody to hit her), and it wore her out fighting someone who wouldn’t fight back. It made her feel like a loser, no matter how much damage she inflicted. Still, she had to save face, so she landed one last blow to Noble’s wooden shoulder and licked her sore knuckles.

  “I win,” she announced.

  “Fine.” Noble let his muscles relax. “You win. Now, shut up and follow me.”

  John Moses was sitting under a tree, cleaning his shotgun and talking to God.

  “And another thing,” he was saying. “I don’t believe the part about the Red Sea opening up and people walking through on dry land.”

  For a man who didn’t believe in God, John talked to Him a lot. Whether God ever listened was anybody’s guess. John was generally drunk during these monologues, and the things he said were not very complimentary. He’d been mad at God for a long time, starting when Walter had fallen across that saw blade, over at the Ferguson mill.

  John was pulling a string out of the end of his shotgun barrel. There was an oily strip of cotton cloth tied onto the end of the string, and the cloth came out gray-black. He sighted down the barrel, squinting and angry-looking.

  “You expect us to believe the damne
dest things.” He was talking in a normal tone of voice, just as if God were sitting two feet away from him.

  “For instance, all this stuff about You being love,” he went on, and here his voice grew thick. “If You was love, You wouldn’t have let my Walter get split wide open like a slaughtered hog—”

  John began polishing the butt of his gun with a separate rag that he’d had tucked away in the bib of his overalls. Tears welled in his eyes, then spilled over and trailed down his weathered face. He didn’t bother to wipe them away.

  “If You are love,” he roared, “then love ain’t much to crow about.”

  The kids were all crouched behind a thick wall of razor wire (blackberry vines), peering at the Enemy through the tiniest of openings between the thorny canes. They had a good, clear view of the old man, but he couldn’t see them.

  Swan had a feeling that they shouldn’t be here. It was one thing for her and her brothers to spy on each other, since they only said things they meant each other to hear. But this was Papa John. They had never seen him cry, or believed it was possible for him to cry. Usually during their visits, he just slept the days away and ran his bar at night. If they saw him at all, it was only as he walked through a room without speaking or sat at the supper table, picking at his food. Their mother said he hadn’t always been this way, that he had really been something beautiful when she was growing up, but he had let life get the best of him. From the looks of him now, she was right about that last part.

  Swan tugged on Noble’s sleeve, intending to tell him she wanted to leave, but he drew one finger across his gullet, indicating that he would slit her throat for sure if she said a word.

  Just then, Papa John gave up on talking to God and set in singing.

  “Coming home,” he quavered. He had to be tone-deaf. “Cominnng—hommmme—”

  Swan shot a look at Bienville, and he shot one back. This was getting harder to swallow by the minute.

  “Never more to roammmm—” Papa John caterwauled, but he couldn’t remember any more of the words, so he switched over to a Hank Williams song, which he also couldn’t remember.

  He hummed the first few bars tunelessly, while he dug a shell out of his pocket and loaded his shotgun.

  “I’m so lonesome, I could—” he sang, suddenly loud and clear. Then his voice broke and quavered. “I’m so lonesome, I could—”

  Swan thought he sounded like a stuck record.

  “I could—” he sang again, but he couldn’t make himself say that last word. He shook his head and blew out a long, discouraged breath. Then he stuck the shotgun barrel in his mouth.

  Swan screamed. Noble and Bienville sprang up in the air like flushed quail.

  Papa John hadn’t had time to get his finger situated on the trigger, so instead of blowing his brains out in full view of his grandchildren, he jerked to attention and banged the back of his head on the tree. The shotgun barrel slipped out of his mouth, bringing his upper plate with it. The false teeth went sailing and disappeared in the blackberry vines, directly in front of where the three kids were now standing, shaking like maple leaves. Papa John jumped to his feet, shocked and humiliated. His mouth was working, open and shut. Slack-looking without that upper plate.

  The kids hung their heads and stared at the ground for the longest time. When they looked up again, Papa John was cutting through the woods, going back toward the house. Shade and sun rays fell across him, dappling and camouflaging, making him indistinguishable from his surroundings. He never really disappeared from view. He just blended in with the trees and the underbrush, like he was part of the woods and they were part of him.

  Papa John didn’t show up for supper, just went into Never Closes and opened for business. Calla and Willadee and the kids could hear the hubbub through the wall that separated the kitchen from the bar. John had bought himself a used jukebox during the past year, and his customers were giving it a workout. Swan and Noble and Bienville kept sneaking anxious glances at each other while they ate.

  Finally, Calla couldn’t take it anymore. “All right,” she said. “I want to know what’s up, and I want to know now.”

  Bienville gulped. Noble pushed his glasses up his nose. Swan reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out Papa John’s false teeth.

  “Papa John lost these this afternoon, and we found them.”

  “That’s all you’re looking guilty about?” Calla asked sharply.

  Which made Swan mad. Grown-ups had a way of interpreting every single, solitary expression that ever lit on a kid’s face as guilt. “We’re not guilty,” she said, a little louder than was necessary. “We’re worried. Papa John came within an inch of killing himself this afternoon, and if it hadn’t been for us, he would’ve made it.”

  Willadee sucked in a sharp breath.

  Calla just shook her head. “He wouldn’t have made it. He never does.”

  Willadee looked at her mother accusingly.

  Calla poured some tomato gravy onto her biscuit. “Sorry, Willadee. I can’t panic anymore. I’ve been through it too many times. You kids eat your okra.”

  Willadee didn’t say anything, but you could tell she was thinking. As soon as supper was over, she offered to clean the kitchen and asked her mother to put the hellions to bed. Grandma Calla said, “Oh, sure, give me the dirty work,” and both women laughed. The kids all turned up their noses while they allowed themselves to be herded upstairs. They knew better than to complain, but they had their own ways of getting back at people who insulted them. Next time they played War Spies, they would probably take a couple of female prisoners and get information out of them the hard way.

  Willadee washed all the dishes, left them to dry in the drain rack, and went out the back door into Never Closes. This was the only bar she’d ever been inside in her life, and the first time during business hours. At least once every summer, she’d insisted on cleaning and airing out the place for her daddy, marveling every time that his customers could stand the bitter, stale burned-tobacco odor that no amount of scrubbing could drive away. She was surprised tonight to find that the smell was entirely different when the place was full of life. The smoke was overpowering but fresh, and it was mingled with men’s aftershave and the heady perfume worn by the few women customers. A lone couple danced in one corner, the woman toying with the man’s hair while his hands traveled all up and down her back. There was a card game going on, and a couple of games of dominoes, and you couldn’t even see the pool table for all the rear ends and elbows. The way people were laughing and joking with each other, they must’ve checked their troubles at the door. John Moses was standing behind the bar, uncapping a couple of beers. He passed them over to a middle-aged bleached blonde and smiled, lips closed, self-conscious about the missing upper plate. He pretended not to see Willadee until she came over and leaned against the bar.

  Willadee passed his teeth across to him. Discreetly. John’s eyes narrowed, but he took the teeth, turned away for a second, and put them inside his mouth. Then he turned back to face his daughter.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Just thought I’d see how the other half lives,” Willadee said. “How’re you doing, Daddy? I never get to see you much anymore when I come home.”

  John Moses coughed disdainfully. “You didn’t live so far away, you’d see me plenty.”

  Willadee gave her daddy the gentlest look imaginable, and she said, “Daddy, are you all right?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I care.”

  “My eye.”

  “You’re just set on being miserable. Come on. Give me a grin.”

  But it looked as if he didn’t have a grin left in him.

  She said, “It’s not healthy to manufacture trouble and wallow around in it.”

  “Willadee,” he grumbled, “you don’t know trouble.”

  “Yes, I do, you old fart. I know you.”

  That sounded a lot more like the kind of thing a Moses would say than the kind
of thing a preacher’s wife would say. So, as it turned out, John did have a grin or two left in him, and he gave her one, as proof.

  “You want a beer, Willadee?” He sounded hopeful.

  “You know I don’t drink.”

  “Yeah, but it would tickle the pure-dee hell outta me to see you do something that’d make Sam Lake have a stroke if he knew about it.”

  Willadee laughed, and reached across the bar, and goosed her daddy in the ribs, and said, “Well, give me that beer. Because I surely would like to see you get tickled.”

  It was after 2:00 A.M. by the time Willadee left Never Closes and sneaked back through the house. Her mother was just coming out of the bathroom, and the two bumped into each other in the hall.

  “Willadee, have you got beer on your breath?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I have.”

  “Well, forevermore,” Calla said as she headed up the stairs. She was going to have to mark this day on the calendar.

  Later on, when Willadee was in her old room, she lay in bed thinking about how the first beer had tasted like rotten tomatoes, but the second one had simply tasted wet and welcome, and how the noise and laughter in the bar had been as intoxicating as the beer. She and her daddy had left the customers to wait on themselves and had found an empty table and talked about everything on earth, the way they used to, before Willadee got married. She had been the old man’s shadow, back then. Now, he had become the shadow. Almost invisible these days. But not tonight. Tonight, he’d had a shine about him.

  He didn’t want to die anymore. He certainly did not seem to want to die anymore. He’d just been feeling unnecessary for so long, and she’d shown him how necessary he was, by sitting with him those hours. Joking with him, and listening with her heart, while he poured out his.

  “You’ve always been my favorite,” he had told her, just before she left Never Closes. “I love the others. All of them. I’m their daddy, and I love them. But you. You and Walter—” He shook his head. All his feelings stuck in his throat. Then he kissed her cheek, there at the back door of the bar. John Moses, ushering his beloved daughter back into the solid safety of the house he had built when he was a stalwart, younger man. John Moses, feeling necessary.