Jenny Wingfield
The Homecoming of Samuel Lake

For Taylor, Amy, and Lori—who never once said they wished I was normal.

For Jim, Ruth, Clif, and Hal—who probably said it, but not where I could hear.

And for Charlie and Leon—because.

Contents

Chapter 1

John Moses couldn’t have chosen a worse day, or a…

Chapter 2

This is the way it happened.

Chapter 3

Kinfolk started pouring in early the next morning. Pulling up…

Chapter 4

The first hour was the worst. Willadee’s brothers kept the…

Chapter 5

Sometimes, when Geraldine Ballenger wasn’t trying to think, but was…

Chapter 6

Uncle Toy had not spoken to Swan once since the…

Chapter 7

The little lane wound and twisted and tapered down to…

Chapter 8

The bed Swan slept in was so high she always…

Chapter 9

Bernice could hardly stand the way she felt the next…

Chapter 10

The way you trained a horse was, you taught it…

Chapter 11

Swan and her brothers had given up playing War Spies…

Chapter 12

Ras Ballenger had better things to do with his day…

Chapter 13

Bernice was wise enough not go on too much about…

Chapter 14

Samuel was out on the Macedonia highway, heading for the…

Chapter 15

On the first Friday in July, Odell Pritchett called from…

Chapter 16

Blade had no idea how long it would take for…

Chapter 17

Sheriff Early Meeks was born prematurely, back at the turn…

Chapter 18

In Blade’s dreams, he was running along the edge of…

Chapter 19

Ras knew that pretty soon, unless he could figure some…

Chapter 20

At breakfast, Samuel asked the rest of the family whether…

Chapter 21

As soon as Blade realized what was up, he lit…

Chapter 22

Willadee knew that Samuel was going to get a cool…

Chapter 23

What Swan intended to do was rescue Blade Ballenger. It…

Chapter 24

Willadee saw them coming when they topped a rise far…

Chapter 25

Swan was dead asleep. The little scuffling sounds of someone…

Chapter 26

Toy woke up around four o’clock that afternoon, not because…

Chapter 27

Time rocked on.

Chapter 28

The first thing Toy did after he got to his…

Chapter 29

Ras Ballenger didn’t think much of people in general, and…

Chapter 30

Millard Hempstead and his buddy, Scotty Dumas (who lived in…

Chapter 31

The surgery was tricky and took hours. According to Doc…

Chapter 32

It wasn’t so much decided that Willadee would take over…

Chapter 33

They’d never had a fight before. They’d never even had…

Chapter 34

“How long are you intending for this revival to run?”…

Chapter 35

At dawn, when Willadee dragged herself up the stairs and…

Chapter 36

February rolled around, and God still hadn’t shown Samuel what…

Chapter 37

Willadee had started supper before she left to get Blade,…

Chapter 38

Swan was in a dark place. A deeply dark place,…

Chapter 39

Out in the yard, Samuel was still waving his arms…

Chapter 40

Calla grieved.

Chapter 41

Nobody believed Swan about the mice. They didn’t believe that…

Behind the Scenes

‘They’re My Family After All’

‘Love or Loathe’

What to Read Next

Acknowledgments

About the Type

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Columbia County, Arkansas, 1956

John Moses couldn’t have chosen a worse day, or a worse way to die, if he’d planned it for a lifetime. Which was possible. He was contrary as a mule. It was the weekend of the Moses family reunion, and everything was perfect—or at least perfectly normal—until John went and ruined it.

The reunion was always held the first Sunday in June. It had been that way forever. It was tradition. And John Moses had a thing about tradition. Every year or so, his daughter, Willadee (who lived way off down in Louisiana), would ask him to change the reunion date to the second Sunday in June, or the first Sunday in July, but John had a stock answer.

“I’d rather burn in Hell.”

Willadee would remind her father that he didn’t believe in Hell, and John would remind her that it was God he didn’t believe in, the vote was still out about Hell. Then he would throw in that the worst thing about it was, if there did happen to be a hell, Willadee’s husband, Samuel Lake, would land there right beside him, since he was a preacher, and everybody knew that preachers (especially Methodists, like Samuel) were the vilest bunch of bandits alive.

Willadee never argued with her daddy, but the thing was, annual conference started the first Sunday in June. That was when all the Methodist ministers in Louisiana found out from their district superintendents how satisfied or dissatisfied their congregations had been that past year, and whether they were going to get to stay in one place or have to move.

Usually, Samuel would have to move. He was the kind who ruffled a lot of feathers. Not on purpose, mind you. He just went along doing what he thought was right—which included driving out into the boonies on Sunday mornings, and loading up his old rattletrap car with poor people (sometimes ragged, barefoot poor people), and hauling them into town for services. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d had separate services, one for the folks from the boonies and one for fine, upright citizens whose clothes and shoes were presentable enough to get them into Heaven, no questions asked. But Samuel Lake was of the bothersome conviction that God loved everybody the same. Add this to the fact that he preached with what some considered undue fervor, frequently thumping the pulpit for emphasis and saying things like “If you believe that, say ‘AMEN’!” when he knew full well that Methodists were trying to give up that sort of thing, and you can see what his churches were up against.

John Moses didn’t give a hoot about Samuel’s obligations. He wasn’t about to mess with Moses tradition just because Willadee had been fool enough to marry a preacher.

Of course, Samuel wasn’t a preacher when Willadee married him. He was a big, strapping country boy, strong as an ox, and dangerously good-looking. Black-haired and blue-eyed—Welsh and Irish or some such mix. Several girls in Columbia County had taken to their beds for a week when Samuel married that plain, quiet Willadee Moses.

Samuel Lake was magic. He was wonderful and terrible, with an awful temper and fearsome tenderness, and when he loved, he loved with his whole heart. He had a clear tenor voice, and he could play the guitar or the fiddle or the mandolin or just about any other instrument you could think of. Folks all over the county used to talk about Samuel and his music.

“Sam Lake can play anything he can pick up.”

“He can make strings talk.”

“He can make them speak in tongues.”

Every year, the day after school let out for the summer, Samuel and Willadee would load up their kids and take off for south Arkansas. Willadee already had freckles everywhere the sun had ever touched, but she would always roll the window down and hang her arm out, and God would give her more. Her boisterous, sand-colored hair would fly in the breeze, tossing and tangling, and eventually she would laugh out loud, just because going home made her feel so free.

Willadee loved this ritual. This once-a-year road trip, when she was snugged into the car with her good, healthy family—all of them fairly vibrating with anticipation. This was her time for thinking about where they’d been and where they might be going and how well the kids were growing in to their names—the names she’d given them as blessings when they were born. The first boy, she’d called Noble. Her clear call to the universe to infuse him with courage and honor. The younger son was Bienville. A good city, or as Willadee thought of it, a peaceful place. The girl, she had named Swan. Not because a swan is beautiful but because it is powerful. A girl needs power that she doesn’t have to borrow from anyone else, Willadee had thought. So far, her blessings seemed to be working. Noble was honest to a fault, Bienville was unfailingly amicable, and Swan radiated so much strength that she wore everybody else to a frazzle.

Columbia County was located down on the tail end of Arkansas, which looked just the same as north Louisiana. When God made that part of the country, He made it all in one big piece, and He must have had a good time doing it. There were rolling hills and tall trees and clear creeks with sandy bottoms and wildflowers and blue skies and great puffy clouds that hung down so low you’d almost believe you could reach up and grab a handful. That was the upside. The downside was brambles and cockleburs and a variety of other things nobody paid much attention to, since the upside outweighed the downside by a mile.

Because of the annual conference, Samuel never got to stay for the reunion. Just long enough to unload Willadee and the kids, and talk awhile with Willadee’s parents. At least, he talked with her mother, Calla. John would invariably gag and go outside the minute his son-in-law set foot in the house, but Calla thought Samuel hung the moon. Within an hour or so, Samuel would be kissing Willadee goodbye and patting her on the backside, right there in front of God and everybody. Then he’d hug the kids and tell them to mind their mama, and he’d head back to Louisiana. He always said goodbye to John as he left, but the old man never answered back. He couldn’t forgive Samuel for moving Willadee so far away, and he couldn’t forgive Willadee for going. Especially since she could have married Calvin Furlough, who now had a successful paint and body shop, and lived right down the road, and had the best coon dogs you ever laid eyes on. If Willadee had cooperated with her father by falling in love with Calvin, everything would have been different. She could have lived nearby, and been a comfort to John in his old age. And he (John) would not be stuck with a granddaughter named Swan Lake.

The Moses family lived all over Columbia County. All over. John and Calla had loved each other lustily, and had produced five children. Four sons and a daughter. All of these except Willadee and their youngest (Walter, who had died in a sawmill accident the year he turned twenty) still lived around Magnolia, all within forty miles of the old homeplace.

The “old homeplace” had been a sprawling hundred-acre farm, which provided milk and eggs and meat and vegetables and fruit and berries and nuts and honey. It took some coaxing. The land gave little up for free. The farm was dotted with outbuildings that John and his sons had erected over the years. Barns and sheds and smoke-houses and outhouses, most of which were leaning wearily by 1956. When you don’t use a building anymore, it knows it’s lost its purpose.

The Moses house was a big two-story affair. Solidly built, but it leaned a little, too, these days, as if there weren’t enough souls inside anymore to hold it up. John and Calla had stopped farming several years back. Calla still had a garden and a few chickens, but they let the fields grow up, and walled in the front porch of the house, and turned it into a grocery store/service station. Calla had John paint her a sign, but she couldn’t decide whether she wanted the thing to say “Moses’ Grocery and Service Station” or “Moses’ Gas and Groceries.” While she was making up her mind, John ran out of patience and nailed the sign above the front door. It said, simply, MOSES.

Calla would get out of bed every morning, go down to the store, and start a pot of coffee perking, and farmers would drop by on their way to the cattle auction or the feed store, and warm their behinds at the woodstove, and drink Calla’s coffee.

Calla had a way with the customers. She was an ample, comfortable woman, with capable hands, and people liked dealing with her. She didn’t really need John, not in the store. As a matter of fact, he got underfoot.

Now, John liked to drink. For thirty years, he’d laced his coffee with whiskey every morning before he headed out to the milk barn. That was to keep off the chill, in the winter. In the summertime, it was to brace him for the day. He no longer went to milk at dawn, but he still laced his coffee. He’d sit there in Calla’s store and visit with the regulars, and by the time they were on their way to take care of the day’s business, John was usually on his way to being ripped. None of this sat well with Calla. She was used to her husband staying busy, and she told him, finally, that he needed an interest.

“I’ve got an interest, woman,” he told her. Calla was bent over, stoking the fire in the woodstove at the moment, so she presented a mighty tempting target. John aimed himself in her direction, and wobbled over behind her, and slipped his arms around her middle. Calla was caught so off guard that she burned her hand on the poker. She shrugged her husband off and sucked on her hand.

“I mean, one that’ll keep you out of my hair,” she snapped.

“You never wanted me out of your hair before.”

He was wounded. She hadn’t intended to wound him, but after all, wounds heal over. Most of them.

“I never had time to notice before if you was in my hair or not. Isn’t there anything you like to do anymore, besides roll around in bed?” Not that she minded rolling around in bed with her husband. She liked it now, maybe even more than she had in all the years they’d been together. But you couldn’t do that all day long just because a man had nothing else to occupy his time. Not when you had customers dropping by every few minutes.

John went to the counter where he’d been drinking his coffee. He poured himself another cup, and laced it good.

“There is,” he announced stiffly. “There most damn certainly is something else I like to do. And I’m about to do it.”

The thing he was talking about was getting drunk. Not just ripped. Blind drunk. Beyond thinking and reasoning drunk. He took his coffee and his bottle, and a couple more bottles he had stashed behind the counter, plus a package of doughnuts and two tins of Prince Albert. Then he went out to the barn, and he stayed for three days. When he’d been drunk enough long enough, and there was no further purpose to be served by staying drunk any longer, he came back to the house and took a hot bath and had a shave. That was the day he walled in the back porch of the house and started painting another sign.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Calla demanded, hands on hips, the way a woman stands when She Expects an Answer.

“I’m cultivating an interest,” John Moses said. “From now on, you’ve got a business, and I’ve got a business, and we don’t either one stick our noses in the other one’s business. You open at dawn and close at dusk, I’ll open at dusk and close at dawn. You won’t have to roll around with me anymore, because we won’t be keeping the same hours.”

“I never said I didn’t want to roll around with you.”

“The hell you never,” said John.

He took his sign, with the paint still wet, and he climbed up on his stepladder and nailed that sign above the back door. The paint was smudged, but the message was readable enough. It said, NEVER CLOSES.

Never Closes sold beer and wine and hard liquor seven nights a week, all night long. Since Columbia County was dry, it was illegal to sell alcohol to the public, so John didn’t call it selling. He was just serving drinks to his friends, that’s all. Sort of like gifts he gave them. Then, when they were ready to call it a night, his “friends” would each give John a gift of some sort. Five dollars, or ten dollars, or whatever his little ragged notebook indicated the gift should be.

The county sheriff and several deputies got into the habit of dropping by after their shifts, and John really didn’t sell to them, just poured them anything they wanted, on the house. Those fellows never saw so much free liquor, so it just stood to reason that there would be a lot of other things they didn’t see. But they were used to not seeing, under certain circumstances, so it all felt pretty right.

Before long, John got his own share of regulars who would drop by to play dominoes or shoot pool. They’d talk religion and politics, and tell filthy stories, and spit tobacco juice in the coffee cans John had set around, and they’d smoke until the air was thick enough to cut into cubes.

John took bitter pride in his new venture. He’d have dropped the whole thing in a heartbeat, would have torn down his walls and burned his sign and told his regulars to go to hell, if Calla would have apologized, but she had her own pride. There was a wedge between them, and she couldn’t see that she’d been the one to drive it.

After a while, Calla took to staying open seven days a week, too. Sometimes her last customers of the day would walk right out the front door and go around the house to the back door and drink up whatever money they had left over from buying groceries. Sometimes, it was the other way around. John’s customers would stagger out the back door at dawn and come around to the front (there was a well-worn path). They’d sober up on Calla’s coffee, then spend the rest of their money on food for their families.

You could go to the Moses place, any time of the day or night, and buy what you needed, provided your needs were simple. And you never had to leave until you were ready, because neither Calla nor John had the heart to run anybody off, even when they ran out of money. Nate Ramsey had stayed once for almost a week when his wife, Shirley, took to throwing things at home.

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 damnedest 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.

Willadee was groggy, but it was a pleasant sort of grogginess. Like she was floating. Nothing to tie her down and hold her to earth. She could just float higher and higher, and look down at life while it turned all fuzzy and indistinct around the edges. She promised herself that, one of these days, she was going to have another couple of beers. One of these days. She was a Moses, after all.

Her father’s favorite child.

Chapter 3

Kinfolk started pouring in early the next morning. Pulling up in the front yard, and piling out of their cars, and opening the trunks of those cars with a flourish. Huge bowls of potato salad and dishpans full of fried chicken were produced like rabbits out of hats. And corn on the cob, and squash casseroles, and dilled green beans, and fifty kinds of pickles, and gallon jugs of iced tea, and enough pies and cakes to founder a multitude. Which was what was on hand.

John and Calla’s sons, Toy and Sid and Alvis, had been the first to arrive, along with their wives and offspring. Toy didn’t have any children, but Sid had two and Alvis had six, so what with Willadee’s three, nobody was worried that the family line might fade out any time soon.

“It’s unbelievable how many grandkids I’ve got,” Grandma Calla said, not to anybody in particular.

Willadee sang out, “But not inconceivable!”

All her brothers howled with laughter.

Calla said, “I can see I’ve raised a whole passel of heathens.” She was trying to look as if she disapproved, but it wasn’t any use. She approved of a good time, and everybody was having one.

The womenfolk laid the food out on the tables, and the kids started helping themselves before they were supposed to, so somebody had to say the blessing quick. Nicey (who was married to Sid, Willadee’s oldest brother) was selected, since it would have hurt her feelings if she hadn’t been. She was a serious churchgoer and had been teaching the Sunbeams practically ever since she’d gotten too old to be one. She prayed a fancy prayer, full of Thines and Thous, ending up with “Ah-men.” Sid and Alvis followed that with “Dive in!” which just about gave Nicey the vapors, it sounding so irreverent and all.

“You married into an irreverent family,” Alvis’s wife, Eudora, told her. “You got to take the bad with the worse.”

John had closed the bar just before sunup that morning and had gone straight to bed, figuring that would give him five or six hours of sleep, enough sleep for a well man, and he was certainly feeling like a well man. Calla’s store was operating on the honor system, the way it always did on reunion day. Folks who needed to buy something just went in and got what they wanted, and left the money or a note in a jar on the counter. There weren’t many customers until after church, when folks started drifting in, picking up last-minute items like brown ’n’ serve rolls and whipping cream for their Sunday dinners. It was the most natural thing in the world that quite a few of the customers would drift from the store into the yard, and would visit for a while, protesting that they really had to be getting on home until somebody put a plate into their hands and they were forced to stay and eat.

Swan, Noble, and Bienville had a hard time figuring out who was kin and who wasn’t. The closest relatives they remembered from year to year, but there was this sea of nonrelatives, not to mention second cousins, and third cousins, and great-aunts twice removed. This cracked the kids up. “If that old bird’s been twice removed, how come she keeps coming back?” they would whisper to each other, and then they’d snicker until they got the hiccups or a swat on the pants from their grandmother, whichever happened first.

John Moses woke up just before noon and wandered down to join the celebration. His sons and Willadee all came up out of the yard onto the side porch to greet him. The side porch had been added onto the house way back, shortly after John had walled in the back porch. John said a house wasn’t a home if it didn’t have a porch, a man had to have something to pee off of. Indoor plumbing was fine, as far as it went, but it never would offer a man the same sense of freedom that a porch would. The daughters all hugged John’s neck (Willadee rubbed his stubbled chin lovingly), and the sons all shook his hand. John smiled from ear to ear.

“Somebody said there was a party,” he boomed.

“They was right,” Toy Moses said.

Toy looked nothing like his name implied. He stood six foot four, with muscles that rippled powerfully beneath his cotton shirt. He walked real straight and stiff-starched. Straighter than anyone Swan and her brothers had ever seen. There was a scar on his forehead and a tattoo of a belly dancer on his arm, and all told, he had the look of a man you wouldn’t want to mess with. He was soft-spoken, though, especially when he was talking to his daddy. He said, “You better come on out here and get some grub, before it’s all gone.”

John said, “You won’t have to twist my arm,” just as cheerful as you please, and he led his brood back down the steps.

When everybody had eaten until they were stuffed, the grown-ups flopped down into lawn chairs and onto the grass, and commenced talking about the good old days. The littlest kids all got put down for naps, and the teenagers meandered out to the cars to listen to the radio and talk about things they ought not to know about. Noble tried to join this worldly crowd, but he was coolly rejected, so he slunk off to the creek to think his own thoughts. Swan and Bienville crawled under the house (which was pier and beam, a good four feet off the ground) with a couple of cousins their own age and built toad houses. This was accomplished by mounding dirt over their bare feet and patting it down good, then carefully pulling their feet out, leaving perfect toad dwellings, suitable to accommodate the pickiest of toads.

It was about three o’clock when John Moses started feeling a serious need for a drink. He’d been fighting the feeling ever since he woke up, and he’d thought he was winning the battle, but all of a sudden his fighting spirit waned, and he decided what could it hurt, he wasn’t going to drink himself into a stupor after all he was too happy for that. So he got to his feet and announced, ceremoniously, that he had to go to the bathroom.

All his kids looked at all his other kids, and the looks they were giving each other were looks of dread. John Moses couldn’t help noticing.

“Anybody find anything wrong with that?” he demanded. After all, he had just as much right to go to the bathroom as anyone else.

Nobody made a sound.

John said, “Well, if nobody has any objections …,” and he took off for the house.

No one said anything for a minute or so. They just sat there looking as if they’d been waked up from a good dream. Then Alvis said, “Well, sonofabitch. I thought for a while there we had it made.”

Willadee was chewing a hole in her lip, trying to decide whether or not to follow her daddy and head him off before he could get drunk and ruin the reunion. But then she remembered the beers she’d had the night before, and the pleasant grogginess that had followed, and she thought, Maybe he won’t ruin anything, maybe he’ll just relax a little, and go to sleep, and that will be the end of that. She stayed put in her lawn chair.

Calla stood up and got herself a clean paper plate. “I don’t believe I’ve tasted Eudora’s friendship cake,” she said. “Anybody else want a piece of Eudora’s friendship cake while I’m up?”

John went through the house and into the bar, and he sat down on the first barstool he came to. Giving in and having a drink wasn’t something he wanted to do today. He wanted to make them all proud of him. They had seemed proud of him all afternoon.

By the time he poured the first two fingers of Johnnie Walker into a glass and drank it down, he had come to realize that every one of them (except for Willadee, who was above reproach) had been stringing him along, in order to manipulate him into staying sober. He poured three fingers the next time, instead of two. Willadee’s face seemed to be swimming before him, so he squenched his eyes closed, trying to shut her out.

“Willadee, you just get on out of here,” he commanded, but she refused to leave.

“I said get out of here, Willadee. You and I can have a beer and talk about this, after everybody else is gone.”

When he opened his eyes, the image of Willadee had disappeared.

“Where’s Walter?” John Moses asked. He had just come from the bar back through the house, and from the house out onto the side porch. The porch was full of people, and the yard was running over with people, and altogether, it was more people than John could deal with comfortably, since he was looking for just one face, and it was nowhere to be seen.

It got so quiet even the wind quit blowing.

“I said, where’s Walter?” John bellowed.

Toy was sitting in the porch swing with his arm around his wife, Bernice, who was outlandishly pretty, even though she was thirty-five years old and ought to be starting to fade.

Toy left Bernice and came over beside the old man. “Walter’s not here today, Daddy.”

“The devil you say.” John’s words were slurring into one another. “Walter wouldn’t miss a Moses reunion.”

Then John remembered why Walter wasn’t there. “You shouldn’t have let him go to work, Toy. You shouldn’t have ever let him go when he wasn’t feeling good, and you knew it.”

Toy got a sick look on his face. “You’re right, Daddy. I know that.”

John said, “Split open, like a slaughtered—”

But he didn’t get to finish. Calla had come up the steps and stood facing him.

“Why don’t you and me just go inside and take us a rest?” she asked. Which changed the world John Moses was living in. All of a sudden, he wasn’t thinking about Walter anymore. He was thinking about the fact that he’d been sleeping alone for more than a decade.

“What?” he ripped out, raucous-sounding. “You’re saying you wanta go roll around in the old marriage bed?”

Calla just stood there. Wordless. Her lips going white. Out in the yard, relatives and nonrelatives began skittering around, loading up kids and leftover food. There was a storm brewing, and they wanted to be gone before it hit.

John hollered, “Where the hell you folks going? Don’t you know it’s not nice to eat and run?” But they kept leaving, like salt dribbling out of an overturned shaker. It was getting sparse out there.

Calla said, “John, quit making a fool of yourself.”

“I’ll make of myself what I damn well please,” John informed her. “I am a self-made man.” He did a lurching sort of dance step and nearly fell off the porch.

“You are a self-made jackass,” she muttered under her breath.

That’s when John Moses slapped her. The sound rang out, and Willadee came running across the yard. Pushing people aside. She stepped in between her mother and father and looked John Moses dead in the eye.

“I—am so—ashamed of you,” she said to him. Her voice was shaking.

That sobered John up. He looked back at Willadee for what seemed like eternity extended. Then he turned on his heel and walked inside the house.

Nobody felt much like visiting anymore. They all just hung there for a little bit, wishing none of this was happening. Willadee was patting her mother’s arm, but she was staring at the door John Moses had walked through. All at once, she knew what was about to happen, just as surely as if a voice had come out of the sky and told her. She took a quick step toward the door.

“Daddy!” she cried out, sharp and clear, but not one soul heard her say it, because the gunshot was as loud as a big clap of thunder.

Chapter 4

The first hour was the worst. Willadee’s brothers kept the women out of the house, but Willadee saw it all just as vividly in her mind as if she’d been the one to find the body. For the rest of her life, she would be pushing that picture back, fighting it, hating it. Trying to reduce the dimensions. Dull down the colors. She would never succeed.

She allowed herself to be led over to a chair in the yard, but she could not sit still. She leapt to her feet and crammed her fingers in her mouth to keep from wailing. Then someone took her arm and walked her in circles, from the porch to the well to the garden to the porch. Circles. Talking. Gentle words, pouring, one on top of another, running together. More circles. Later on, Willadee would be unable to remember who this person was who saved her from hysteria.

“My fault,” Willadee said to whoever it was.

“Hush, shhh, hush that talk, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

But Willadee knew better. She knew.

She managed to get Samuel on the phone, and he said what she knew he’d say. That he was going to get in the car and come back. He should be there, with her and the kids and Calla. Willadee wouldn’t hear of it. He needed to be right where he was. There were enough menfolk around to handle things, and if he came up, he’d just have to turn around and go back, and it was all too much driving, too dangerous, and she couldn’t stand it if anything happened to him, too.

“How could he do this to all of you, Willadee?” Samuel asked angrily, but she pretended not to hear.

After she hung up the phone, Willadee didn’t know what to do. The body had been taken into Magnolia, to the funeral home. Friends and neighbors had pitched in to clean up the mess John had made. People were milling around in the yard. There wasn’t a private place anywhere to sit down and think. Willadee wondered briefly whether she should find her children and comfort them, but there weren’t any kids in sight. Someone must have gotten them out of there, taken them home with them, and would bring them back later, tomorrow morning probably.

Alvis came over, and put his arms around her, and said, bitterly, “That old man.”

Willadee rubbed her forehead against his shoulder, then turned away. It bothered her for everybody to be so upset with her daddy for what he’d done. His life was broken, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so he’d just killed the man who was responsible. She picked her way through the crowd. Every way she turned, there was another sympathetic face. Someone telling her to just let go and cry it out—when she was dry and crumbling inside. Someone inquiring about the arrangements. What a word. Arrangements. What was left of John Moses to arrange? He was dead. He would rot. He had been beautiful once, and now he would rot, but not before arrangements were made, and a profit taken. Arrangements were expensive, even in 1956.

Finally, she found her way into the bar and locked the door behind her. It was dark in there. Murky and stifling hot. But she didn’t want any lights. Didn’t want to open doors and windows to let in air, because then that sea of people outside would begin to seep in, and she would drown for sure. She felt her way along the bar, thinking about her father and the night before, and the talk they’d had, and how she’d gone to bed thinking it was all right now, everything would be all right. She stood there, holding on to the bar with both hands, not even aware that she had started crying. Great, gusty sobs. After a while, she stopped, and just laid her head against the scarred wood. That was when she realized that she was not alone.

“I never once set foot in here, until today.” It was Calla talking. She was sitting way back in a corner, at one of the tables, all by herself. “I was so mad at him, all these years. I keep trying to remember what I was so mad about.”

Calla Moses spent the night at the funeral home. Ernest Simmons, the funeral director, said the body wouldn’t be ready for viewing until the next day, and that she should go on home and get some rest, but she informed him that she didn’t come to view the body, she came to be close to it, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

Willadee and her brothers all offered to stay with Calla, to keep her company. She said she didn’t want any company.

“You don’t need to be alone right now,” Willadee insisted.

“I’d feel more alone at home,” Calla answered stoutly. “And don’t any of you get the idea that you can start telling me what to do now that your daddy’s gone. You never had the nerve to try it before, so you’d best not start now.”

Everybody backed off except Toy, who refused to leave. He was just as stubborn as his mother.

“Bernice can sleep at your house, so she won’t be by herself,” he told her. “You won’t hardly know I’m here.”

And she didn’t. Toy saw all the others off, then spent most of the night standing outside smoking one cigarette after the other and staring at the sky. Calla took a seat in an empty viewing room and closed the door, and thought about the life she’d had with John Moses.

“It was a good life, John,” she whispered into the stillness. “We had our rough spots to go through, but it was a good life, mainly.”

Then she demanded, fiercely, “Why the hell did you give up on it?”

They didn’t close the store for the funeral. Calla said “Moses Never Closes” had been such a tradition for so long, and you know how Papa John was about tradition. Swan couldn’t help thinking that Papa John had pretty well played the wild with tradition by shooting himself, right in the middle of a family reunion, but you didn’t go around saying things like that. Besides, they didn’t make any money that day, didn’t charge for anything, so it wasn’t as if they were staying open out of greed. What if somebody in the community needed a jug of milk, they said. Or a jug of whiskey. Anybody had a touch of flu, there was nothing like lemon juice and sugar and whiskey to put them out of their misery while it ran its course. It wasn’t exactly flu season, but you never knew.

Toy kept the store. He didn’t like funerals anyway. Said they were just more examples of people trying to fit other people’s expectations. When Walter had died, Toy had slunk off into the woods with his .22 and taken potshots at squirrels while the rest of the family was doing what was expected of them. He figured his brother’s spirit was still close—maybe with a few things heavy on his mind that he’d been meaning to say but never got around to. So Toy went to the woods, and he listened. He and Walter had hunted those woods together since they were towheaded kids. They were close, the two of them. More than blood close.

Toy knew all the stumps and fallen logs where Walter liked to sit down and have a smoke, and just enjoy the peace. So that’s what Toy had done. For an hour or so at a time. Then, when the peace was too much for him, and he couldn’t take it anymore, and his chest would feel like it was about to bust from the tears he’d been holding in, Toy Ephraim Moses would shatter the peace with a shot or two from his rifle. If he hit something, fine. Toy hoped Bernice would outlive him. If she should happen to die before he did, that was one funeral he’d have to go to, and he was afraid he’d turn out taking potshots at the mourners.

Swan found out early the morning of the service that Uncle Toy wasn’t going.

“Uncle Toy has no respect what-so-ever for the dead,” Lovey had said at breakfast. Lovey was Uncle Sid and Aunt Nicey’s youngest child. Ten years old, and spoiled rotten. She had insisted on sleeping over the night before, mostly so she could rub it in to Swan and her brothers how much better she’d known Papa John than they had, and also, so she could shame them for not crying as much as she thought they ought to. They had squeezed out a few tears, but nothing like the gallons Lovey produced. They hadn’t needed to grieve, because Papa John had lived and died a stranger.

“You hush your mouth, young lady,” Grandma Calla had said to Lovey. “Your uncle Toy has his own ways, is all.”

Swan had been hearing about Uncle Toy and his “ways” ever since she could remember. For one thing, he was a bootlegger—not that Swan had a clear idea of what that meant. She knew it was against the law, though, and that it could be dangerous. If Uncle Toy wanted to break the law, why not just work in Never Closes with Papa John? That sure seemed like a safe proposition. But it was like Grandma Calla said. Toy had his own ways.

He’d been in the war, and was decorated for valor. Something about going through enemy fire to save a comrade. A colored man, no less. He got shot doing it, too. Got one leg blown clean off. That was why he walked so stiff-starched. His artificial leg didn’t have any give to it. But bootlegging when he could have been working in the bar and getting his leg blown off to save a Negro weren’t the only things that got Uncle Toy talked about. He’d killed a man once, right here in Columbia County. A neighbor named Yam Ferguson, whose family had “connections.” Yam hadn’t had to go off to war. He got to stay home and help run the Ferguson Sawmill, and chase after the wives and girlfriends of the boys whose families weren’t so well connected. Yam lived through the war, but not through the night Uncle Toy got home from the V.A. hospital.

By the time the rest of the family was dressed for the funeral, Swan had made up her mind not to go. She got ready, along with everybody else, but she told her mama she was going to ride with Aunt Nicey, and she told Aunt Nicey she was going to ride with Aunt Eudora. Then, while everybody else was piling into the line of cars parked out in front of the store, Swan sneaked upstairs into Papa John’s bedroom. She would not look at the bed Papa John had sat down on to finish what he had started out in the pasture, under that tree. She would not look at the wall that the neighbor women had washed clean. She especially would not look at the Bible on the bedside table. It made her shudder to think that Papa John was in touching distance of the Holy Word when he did what he did, as if he just had to insult God one last time. There was no doubt in Swan’s mind that Papa John was already burning in Hell by now, unless by some chance, God took insanity into consideration. But, she figured, why have a hell if you’re going to let folks get off on technicalities?

So she didn’t look at anything in the room. She had the feeling that, if she looked, she would see Papa John, still there, just the way his sons had found him, and she wasn’t about to chance a thing like that. Papa John was scary enough when he was alive.

Swan walked over to the window and watched through the curtains while the caravan drove away. When the red dust had settled in the wake of the last car, Swan crept down the stairs. She could see the open door that led from the living room into the grocery store.

Uncle Toy was standing in the store, leaning against the counter, using his pocketknife to peel the bark off a stick that he must have picked up on one of his treks into the woods. A lit Camel drooped from between his lips, and he smoked no hands. Swan stood in the doorway, watching him. She knew that he knew she was there, but he didn’t look up or say a word.

Swan eased into the store, climbed up on top of the ice cream box, and started worrying the heel of one shoe with the toe of the other. Toy lifted his eyes, peering at her through a blue-white fog of smoke.

“Guess you don’t like funerals, either.”

“Never been to one.” Swan was lying, of course. Preachers’ kids attended more funerals than any other kids in the world. Toy had to know that.

“Well—” Toy left the word hanging in the air for a while, like that said it all. He shaved down a little knob that jutted out on one side of the stick. Finally, he said, “You ain’t missed much.”

Swan had been afraid he might say something adult like “Does your mama know you’re here?” Since he didn’t, she considered the two of them immediately bonded. Swan yearned to get close to somebody. Really close. Soul deep. She wanted the kind of friendship where two people know each other inside out and stick up for each other, no matter what. So far, she’d never had that, and she was convinced the reason was because her father was a minister.

From Swan’s observations, there seemed to be a conspiracy among church members to keep the preacher and his family from knowing them too well. Playing cards were hidden when they came to visit. Liquor was stuck back in the pantry behind the mason jars of home-canned green beans and crowder peas. And you didn’t even talk about dancing. They just didn’t know Sam Lake’s background—but Swan did. She’d heard it said that her daddy had been a rounder back before God got hold of him. Samuel Lake had danced the soles off his shoes many’s the time, and he’d drunk his share of whiskey.

“His share, and everybody else’s,” Willadee would say, grinning. Willadee was not a woman for protecting her husband’s image. She was a Moses, and the Moses family didn’t believe in lying. There were a lot of things the Moseses would do without a qualm, but they plain would not lie. This didn’t necessarily hold true for their children. Swan lied daily. Took pleasure in it. She fabricated the most wondrous, the most atrocious tales, and told them for the truth. The good thing about lies was that the possibilities were limitless. You could make up a world that was just like you wanted it, and if you pretended hard enough, it would start to feel real.

The point is, church members might try to impress the preacher with how righteous they were—they might tell him what a blessing he was, and they might talk about brotherly love as if they’d invented it, but they never showed him their real faces, and they sometimes said ugly things behind his back. One thing Swan had overheard frequently was the meanest utterance since “Off with his head.”

“Preachers’ kids are the worst kind.”

Nobody ever said the worst kind of what, but the implication was that all preachers’ kids had illicit adventures, and Swan could never feel close to anyone who looked down on her for things she hadn’t had a chance to do yet.

Swan didn’t have a ghost of an idea how to go about getting close with Uncle Toy. It stood to reason, though, that if you wanted to get in tight with somebody named Moses, honesty would be the best policy. Since they believed in it so strongly.

“Lovey said you have no respect for the dead what-so-ever.” Swan hoped that was enough honesty to get his attention. She also hoped that he would take offense at Lovey for saying such a thing, and that the two of them could dislike the brat together.

Uncle Toy just smiled a lazy smile. “Lovey said that?”

“She damn sure did.”

Swan figured that any man who wouldn’t go to his own brother’s or his own daddy’s funeral ought to be a safe bet to practice cussing around. She had him pegged right. He never even flinched.

“Well …” Toy said that word like a sentence again. “I reckon I respect a person after they’re dead to about the same degree as I respected them while they was alive.”

“Did you love your daddy a-tall?”

“I did.”

Which seemed to pretty well take care of the funeral issue.

“Are you really a bootlegger?”

“Who said I’m a bootlegger?”

“Near ’bout everybody.”

Toy turned the stick in his hand, examining it for flaws. It wasn’t shaped like anything, but he had gotten it perfectly smooth.

Swan made her voice real low and ominous and warned him, “I just might be a revenuer. You better be careful I don’t find your still and run you in.”

“You got me mixed up with a moonshiner. Moonshiners, they’re the ones have stills and fight revenuers. A bootlegger is just a middleman. Meets the deacons in the thickets, or out behind the barn, and sells them what they wouldn’ be seen buyin’ in public. How come so many questions?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

“I’m not a cat.”

He squinted at her. “You sure? I think I see whiskers.”

She laughed. Out loud. Loving this. They were friends. They were going to get to know each other. She was going to find out everything about him, and tell him everything about herself, and she bet sometimes he’d ride her on his shoulders, and no telling what they would do together.

“You really kill a man once?” she asked suddenly. This time, he flinched. Swan was practically sure she saw him flinch.

“I killed a lot of men,” Toy said. Flat. “I was in the war.”

“I don’t mean in the war. I mean did you kill Yam Ferguson deader’n a doornail, for messing with Aunt Bernice.”

Toy had started whittling again, and now he raised his eyes to hers. Swan thought suddenly that she had never seen eyes so piercingly green. Toy’s shaggy, rust-colored brows were rearing up a little. She had touched a raw nerve, and wished she had not. But she knew the answer to her question all right.

“You watch how you talk about your aunt Bernice,” Toy said. His voice sounded tight, like his throat was parched. “Now, get your fuzzy butt out of here.”

“I didn’t mean anything,” Swan said.

Toy didn’t answer. He got a dingy old rag from behind the cash register and started polishing the countertop. The countertop did not need polishing.

“I was just making conversation.”

Toy didn’t even look up. Just kept rubbing at some imaginary stain. Swan didn’t exist for him anymore.

Swan turned her attention to the window. She was not about to leave the store just because Uncle Toy had ordered her to. Leaving in disgrace was not her style. Outside, a shiny red Chevrolet Apache pickup truck was stopping beside the gas pump. The driver—a sharp-featured, raven-haired man—was bearing down on the horn. There was a woman in the front seat beside him. A plump, blondish woman, holding a baby. Another, bigger baby stood in the seat between the woman and her husband. And in the back of the truck, there were two little boys, about four and eight years old. The sharp-featured man laid on the horn again. Louder.

Swan cast an uneasy glance at Uncle Toy, who was putting the cleaning rag back behind the cash register. Taking his time about it.

“Well, damn!” the man outside hollered, and he swung out of the truck. He was little bitty. Maybe five-two or five-three. He looked strong, though. Wiry and tough-muscled. He was walking toward the store. Walking fast, hunched forward, like he intended to drag everybody inside outside and stomp them good. He reached the door and started in at the precise same moment that Toy was starting out, so they ran smack into each other, the little man’s head slamming into Toy’s diaphragm. It should have knocked him down, but all it did was stop him in his tracks. He backed up a step, and tipped his head back, and glared up at Toy.

Swan had slid down off the ice cream box by now and sidled over near the door. For a second, she thought the little man was going to spit in Uncle Toy’s face. He must not have heard the story about Yam Ferguson.

“Anything I can do for you, Mr. Ballenger?” Toy asked, easy-sounding.

“You can pump me some damn gas, if it’s not too damn much trouble,” Mr. Ballenger snapped. His eyes—which were so black you couldn’t tell where the pupils left off and the irises started—those were snapping, too.

“No trouble,” Toy said easily. He stepped past Ballenger, out into the sunlight. Swan followed, hanging back a little, staying out of her uncle’s line of vision. While Toy was pumping the gas, the two little boys in the back of the truck watched him silently. Their hair and eyes were as black as their father’s. Their features had the softness of childhood, but the man’s stamp was on them, no doubt about that.

“How you fellers doin’?” Toy asked them. They sat as stiff as tin soldiers, staring back at him. The woman holding the baby turned a little in the seat, and smiled, just slightly. Toy must not have noticed, which was a good thing, because her husband did. Swan could tell by the way the keen black eyes flicked back and forth, from his wife’s face to Toy’s. The woman turned back around in the seat. Toy finished pumping the gas and hung up the hose.

“How much I owe you?” Ballenger asked. He had his chest pooched out and was fooling with his belt. Running his fingers over the buckle. Sort of half smiling, as if he might be anticipating something nobody else knew about.

“No charge today,” Toy said.

Ballenger eyeballed Toy narrowly, then glanced into the truck, at his wife. She was busy wiping the baby’s nose on the hem of her dress. Wiping it raw, she was being so diligent. Swan could see now that this “woman” was barely more than a girl. Must have started having babies about the same time she found out where they came from.

“You got a reason for doing me favors, Mr. Moses?”

Toy’s jaw tightened.

“They’re burying my daddy today, Mr. Ballenger. Mama wanted the store kept open, just in case anybody needed anything, but she drawed the line at charging money.”

Ballenger’s expression became carefully, properly sorrowful.

“You give my condolences to Miz Calla,” he said, and swung up into the cab. In the back of the truck, the older boy had gotten more trusting and was inching toward the side. Toward Toy. Ballenger caught the movement in the rearview mirror. Reached one hand out and back, and slapped at the boy, carelessly. He could have been swatting a fly. His palm caught the kid across the face, hard.

“How many times do I have to tell you not to move around back there?” Ballenger yelled over his shoulder. And to Toy, he said, “Sometimes you gotta help ’em remember.”

Toy glared at Ballenger the way you look at something you’d just like to step on. The kid’s lips were quivering, and he had a dazed look on his face, but he refused to cry. That little, and already he knew that, if you don’t cry, you’re not licked.

Swan had gasped loudly and was standing there now with her hand over her mouth, wishing she could take back the sound. She had a feeling that drawing Ballenger’s attention to your existence was like prodding a cottonmouth moccasin with your bare foot. A cottonmouth is deadly poisonous, and it will come after you. It will strike from behind.

Ballenger cut his glance in her direction. His black eyes widened, and he grinned. Swan wanted to shrink up inside herself and disappear, but it was too late.

“Where’d you come from, little pretty?” he asked.

Toy looked at her. Hard. “I thought I told you to git.”

She got. Turned and hustled into the store. There was another car pulling up, but she didn’t look to see who it was. She wouldn’t know them anyway. She leaned against the ice cream box and peeked through the bug-specked window. The new customer was a middle-aged woman in a flowery cotton dress. Some farmer’s wife. She was chattering to Toy as she started toward the store, and Toy was answering her. His voice was a deep, low rumble. Swan wasn’t paying any attention to them, though.

She was watching the red pickup truck as it peeled out onto the road. The two little boys were sitting like soldiers again. Straight as arrows. Two little boys. But Swan was focused on just one. The one who’d gotten struck by the cottonmouth. That kid. The way he was sitting there, with his head cocked to one side—looking like he didn’t care, like it was nothing. That kid’s face was burning a hole in Swan’s mind.

She watched until the truck made the bend in the road and was blotted out by a bank of sweet gums and pin oaks. Until the whine of the tires and the chug of the motor faded down to a whisper that hung in the air for the longest time, unwilling to die.

Chapter 5

Sometimes, when Geraldine Ballenger wasn’t trying to think, but was letting her thoughts just drift, some quick, shining idea or insight would start to churn faster than the rest and would rocket to the surface, glimmering. She could never quite catch hold of these. They were like shooting stars. Fast gone.

She was letting her thoughts drift now, enjoying the pleasant flow. There was a small, bright stab of light that had surfaced, a little earlier, back at the store, and it was still bobbing along in her consciousness. She gazed at it, mentally, fascinated by it. She knew better than to attempt to examine it for brilliance or for flaws. If she tried too hard to capture it, it would dissolve, or sink, or shoot out of reach. And, anyway she was content, for now, just to look at it.

Her husband was smiling to himself while he drove. This she saw out of the corner of her eye, and her stomach did an uneasy flip-flop. When most folks smiled, it meant something good. With Ras, it could mean anything. Still, she wouldn’t let him and his smile take her mind off the lovely, shimmering Idea. She wanted to keep it in view as long as possible.

“How long you had your eye on that ugly bastid?” Ras asked. He prided himself on his craftiness, as well as on his ability to throw her thinking off. He sure knew how to throw her thinking off.

She just looked at him, without saying anything. When Ras was getting wound up, it was bad to talk, because he could find something incriminating in any words that came out of your mouth—and it was bad not to talk, because silence indicated guilt. It meant you couldn’t think of anything to say that would hide whatever dirty secret he was in the process of discovering.

“I seen you droolin’ back there,” he accused. “Don’t you think I didn’.”

Geraldine was irritated. The Idea was starting to dim a little. If only Ras would shut up so she could concentrate. She said, “Oh, you think you see so much.” She had already forgotten about it not being good to talk.

He laughed. An obscene, snorting sound. “You’d best believe I do.”

Geraldine shifted the baby from her lap to her shoulder and patted its back, rhythmically. She was so disgusted. The stab of light was gone. There was nothing to do now but go ahead and fuss with Ras. If you didn’t give him back a little of his own, he just got worse. Nothing made Ras worse quite so fast as knowing he had the upper hand.

“Well, there wasn’t nothin’ to see,” she snapped.

Ras spat a rusty stream of tobacco juice out the window and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “I reckon I know when I see a woman askin’ for it.”

“You better quit accusin’ me of things, Ras Ballenger.” She made her voice go high and haughty. “You sure are somebody to go accusin’ people of things. Why, I don’t even know that man.”

“Not as well as you’d like, is that it?”

In fact, Geraldine did not know Toy Moses, had never even seen him except for times like today when he had happened to be keeping the store and she had stopped by with her husband and kids. Always with her husband and kids. She was not allowed to go anywhere alone. She knew the stories, though. About how Toy had lost his leg to save a life, and had taken a life to save his wife’s honor. These things she had heard and taken note of. Toy Moses looked out for those who couldn’t protect themselves. It was this realization that had been dancing through her mind like a will-o’-the-wisp a few minutes ago.

She’d met and married Ras when she was only fourteen. Fourteen! Just a little split-tailed girl, and there he’d come along, a soldier back from the war, and he wasn’t bad-looking, even if he wasn’t any bigger than a mess of minutes.

He had come strutting into her life, all quick moves and jaunty airs, and he had fair turned her head. After all, not many girls her age got courted by men who’d been everywhere and seen everything and sent more of the enemy than they could count to meet their Maker. Back then, the killing Ras had done hadn’t bothered her. Wasn’t that what soldiers are supposed to do? The only reason it bothered her now was that now she knew how much he’d enjoyed it. For Ras Ballenger, war had been a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Oh, she had learned things about him, all right.

Their courtship had lasted barely long enough for him to ascertain her virginity. This he had done by testing it, rather roughly. As soon as he had convinced himself on that one point he had brushed away her tears and told her there wasn’t anything to cry about. It was her fault, really, for making him so crazy, plus, he had had to know. He could never have loved a woman who had been used by another man.

That word used should have tipped her off. Should have. But then he started talking about getting married, and she more or less forgot about everything else. She hadn’t known what she was getting into. She’d been finding out ever since.

This upset her more at some times than at others. The first time that it had upset her badly—which was the first time Ras took a strap to her—she had begged her folks to let her come home, but they said she’d made her bed, she could wallow in it. After that, leaving never seemed to be an option.

Actually (and Geraldine didn’t understand this herself), she didn’t always want to leave. Sure, Ras was rough with her, but he made up for it, afterward. After a while, it got to where the roughness just made everything more intense. There was a part of her that had come to believe nothing else could match that intensity. Even when she did want to get away, it was hard to imagine life without—that.

Ras reached over now, across the bigger baby, another boy, who was staring off, exploring his nose and mouth with his fingers. Ras ran his hand under his wife’s skirt, and up the inside of her thigh, and gave the tender flesh a vicious squeeze. Geraldine was still patting the baby (her only girl) on the back, and she stopped, just for a second, gritting her teeth.

“You wimmen are all alike,” Ras said. “Always wantin’ whatever you ain’t had. We’ll be to the house in a minute, and I’ll give you something you ain’t never had.”

That laugh again. Edging higher, threatening to go out of control. His laugh could ricochet, change tone and direction all at once, and then hit you like a bullet in the heart. Or the head.

Geraldine shut him out. Sometimes you had to do that, with Ras. You just had to think about other things, that was the only way. She turned her mind back to the river of her thoughts, but they had gotten sluggish and dark. With all her might, she tried to find that lovely stab of light again, that shimmering Idea that had been Toy Moses, Protector of the Helpless. But the Idea had lost its shining fire. Even if she found it now, it wouldn’t amount to anything. Once a shooting star goes out, wishing on it doesn’t do a lick of good.

“What did Uncle Toy use to kill Yam Ferguson?”

“What?”

“What did he use? A gun? A knife? What?”

Swan was sitting in the bathtub, shoulder-deep in bubbles. Her mother had been bending over the sink, washing her hair, but her head had snapped almost straight up when Swan asked her first question, and now she was swabbing shampoo out of her eyes.

“Who told you Uncle Toy killed anybody?”

“Lovey.”

“Lovey talks entirely too much.”

“She’s not the only one who’s said it. I heard you and Grandma Calla talking about it once, a long time ago.”

Willadee bent back over the sink and twisted around until her head was under the flowing tap. Shampoo foamed and cascaded and ran in rivulets.

“What did you hear your grandma and me saying?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Good.”

“Well, I just think when a relative of mine has committed a murder, I deserve to know the details,” Swan complained.

“You deserve a licking about nine tenths of the time.”

Willadee pulled a strand of hair between her thumb and forefinger to see whether it squeaked. It did. She flipped her head back, wrapped a towel around it, and started out of the bathroom.

“Well, did he kill him or not?” Swan hollered after her.

“Yes!” her mother yelled back. It might take Willadee a while to get around to telling the truth, but if you pinned her down, she wouldn’t lie. She was Moses, through and through.

“So what did he use?”

“His hands!”

His hands. Uncle Toy had killed a man with his bare hands. Swan sat there for a minute, thinking about that, Uncle Toy growing bigger and more powerful in her mind by the second. He had captured her imagination, and she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Strangely enough, Aunt Bernice didn’t appear to be all that impressed with him. Often as not, she acted as if her husband wasn’t there, even when she was sitting right beside him. And they were so perfect together—him being so strong, and sure of himself, and her with that heartbreaking body, and skin like silk. If Aunt Bernice were just a little entranced with Uncle Toy, it would be the most incredible love story, the kind that lives on after the people are gone.

Swan stood up in the tub. Bubbles glistened everywhere. She reached down, scooped up a double handful of suds, and plastered them on either side of her chest, teasing them into pointy breast shapes, just like Aunt Bernice had. Willadee came back into the room in search of a comb and caught her in the act.

“Will you stop doing that.”

It was not a question. Swan slithered back down into the water. Her fabulous foamy breasts lost all their pointiness.

“Did he beat him to death? Did he strangle him?”

Willadee had found her comb and was leaving the room again.

“He broke his neck.”

Chapter 6

Uncle Toy had not spoken to Swan once since the funeral. He’d been around enough. His brothers had “real jobs,” so it was up to him to run Never Closes. His own customers would just have to buy their liquor in public or do without for now.

Every afternoon, an hour or so before Grandma Calla closed the store, Toy would come rolling into the yard in either his blue outrun-the-law Oldsmobile or his black hit-the-woods Ford pickup. Bernice always came with him, never failing to explain that she was afraid to stay home alone. While Willadee was making supper, Toy would busy himself around the place, finding things that needed a man’s hand—a door hanging out of plumb (all the doors were out of plumb), a hole to be patched in the chicken yard fence, a dead tree that needed to come down before some storm blew it over on the house.

The first day, Swan had followed Toy around, hoping he’d notice her, and forgive her, and they could become close, the way it had looked like they might. But Toy never looked her way. He just worked until it was time for supper, then ate like a horse and disappeared into the bar. Swan sat at the kitchen table after he left that first night, listening to her mother and Aunt Bernice talk while they cleaned the kitchen.

“I still can’t hardly stand to think about your daddy doing what he did,” Bernice said. She shuddered, indicating that she was thinking about it all right. In color. She was the only one in the family who seemed bent on bringing that subject up. Everybody else pretty much left it alone. It hung in the air, though. Always there.

Willadee said, “Let’s just let Daddy rest.”

Bernice looked over at her like maybe she felt a little insulted that her conversation starter hadn’t gone anywhere.

“I don’t know how all of you are holding up so well. If I were in your shoes, I don’t think I’d be able to even get out of bed in the morning.”

“If you had kids, you would.”

Having kids was something Bernice didn’t like to talk about, so the kitchen got quiet for a minute. Nothing but the clink and clatter of dishes. Then, as if it just occurred to her, she asked, “When’s Sam coming back?”

“Friday evening,” Willadee answered. “Like always.”

“Wonder where you’ll be next year.”

“God knows.”

“Well, maybe you won’t have to move.”

“Moving’s not that bad.”

“I couldn’t handle it myself, I don’t think.”

“Good thing you didn’t marry Sam.”

End of conversation. There was empty silence, until Willadee started humming “In the Gloaming,” and then Bernice just up and left the room. Like that. No warning. Willadee wiped her hands on her apron and watched her go. Then she noticed Swan, sitting there all eyes and ears.

“Swan Lake, what are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, do it somewhere else.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Naturally, Swan didn’t move. If you didn’t actually refuse to mind Willadee, you could frequently get by with not minding, at least for a little while.

“What’s Aunt Bernice’s problem?” Swan asked when her mother had started back washing dishes.

“Somewhere else, Swan.”

That had been Wednesday night, and now it was Friday, and time was running out. Swan’s father would be back this evening, and he would tell them where they were going to live next year, and in the morning, Willadee would have all their clothes packed up before they even got out of bed. As soon as breakfast was over, they’d be off. Going home to Louisiana. Either getting back into the swing of things in Eros, the tiny town they’d been living in for all of a year now, or else getting ready to move.

Swan hoped they moved. People felt sorry for her and her brothers because they moved so much, but she could never resist the excitement of it. When you went to a new place, everybody welcomed you, and church members had you over for dinner and made over you, and things were peachy. For a little while.

As far as Swan was concerned, once the new wore off, it was time to move again. After that, life got to be a dance, careful, careful how you step, mustn’t get on anybody’s toes, but her father did, all the time. He specialized in it. Just couldn’t resist telling sinners that God loved ’em, and he loved ’em, and why didn’t they put in an appearance at the Lord’s house, come Sunday. And we’re talking the rankest sinners, here. Men who were too lazy to work, and couples who were living in sin, and even one frowsy old woman who used to be a stripper, down on Bourbon Street, until her looks played out. Samuel didn’t stop at trying to get ordinary sinners saved. He wanted everybody on God’s green earth saved, and acted like the whole thing was up to just him. Like the Lord didn’t have any other helpers.

Sometimes Swan wished her father did almost anything else besides preaching. Probably, if he were the postmaster, or owned a hardware store, or something, and everybody in town wasn’t always watching her, hoping she’d mess up so they could gossip about it, probably, she could just be a regular kid. It must be lovely to be like everybody else.

But there were bigger things to think about right now. She had less than a day to get in solid with Uncle Toy. Once she and her family drove away in the morning, she wouldn’t see him again for a year, and the whole world could come to an end by then.

Swan started scouting around for Uncle Toy as soon as she woke up. Noble and Bienville were nowhere in sight, thank heaven. They had gotten disgusted with her the past couple of days, what with her trailing around after Uncle Toy all the time, and they’d started playing by themselves. Which suited Swan just fine. Everything that had seemed exciting less than a week ago had paled in comparison to Uncle Toy, who was bigger than life, bigger than anything she had ever seen in life, or could imagine ever seeing.

She found him out beside the house. He was on the ground, under Papa John’s old truck, just his feet sticking out, and he was tinkering with something. Swan squatted down and looked under the truck, and cleared her throat loudly. Uncle Toy didn’t have to glance over to know who it was.

“Can I help?” Swan asked.

“Nope.”

“Well, I wouldn’t mind.”

“Well, I would.”

His voice was blunt as a sledgehammer. Swan narrowed her eyes into slits and got this faraway, thoughtful look on her face.

“Do you know what?” she asked, after a while.

“What.”

“I have purely been wasting my time on you.”

“Is that so.”

“It damn sure is.”

She stood up and tapped her foot a couple of times. Disdainfully. She had her arms crossed in front of her chest, and she was staring down at his feet. If she’d known for sure which foot was the real one, she’d have given it a good hard kick. But she didn’t know, so she just used words to try to hurt him.

“Here I’ve been, dogging your tracks like you were some kind of hero, when all you really are is an old, one-legged bootlegger. I bet you never saved anybody’s life. You prob’ly lost your leg running away from a fight. And as for Yam Ferguson, he must have been one puny sombuck if he let himself get done in by the likes of you. I wouldn’t be scared of you in a graveyard on a dark night.”

It was awfully quiet. Uncle Toy wasn’t tinkering anymore. He could come sliding out from under that truck any minute. But Swan didn’t care. She really wasn’t scared of him. She had decided not to care one way or the other about him. He had become completely insignificant to her, the way she had to him.

She said, “And I don’t want to be your friend anymore, either.” That part was hard, because she didn’t mean it, even more than she hadn’t meant all the other things she’d been saying. She had a heavy feeling in her stomach, the way you do when you close a door that you don’t want closed, not ever. But she had had it with him. Begging wasn’t in her. So she turned, and stalked off, too proud to look back.

Toy slid out from under the truck and sat up. He could see her, heading into the house. Shoulders straight, head erect. “Well, I’m so glad,” he said softly.

Not that it was entirely true.

By the time Samuel’s old car pulled into the yard, it was almost dark. Swan was sitting on the porch steps waiting for him. The instant his feet hit the ground, she hurled herself across the yard and tackled him, hugging him and dancing up and down.

“Hey, hey, wait a minute,” Samuel protested, but he liked the reception.

“Are we moving?”

“We are.”

“Good. Where to?”

“We’ll talk about that later. Where’s your mama?”

Just as he asked, Willadee appeared on the porch and waved, and the two of them started walking toward each other. Bernice was sitting in the swing, sort of off to one side, almost hidden by the morning glories that meandered across the porch rail. She watched while Samuel and Willadee moved into each other’s arms. Noble and Bienville, who had been off in the pasture, were charging into the yard, bearing down on their parents—hugging them both at once, because those two were still standing welded together. One thing about Samuel and Willadee. They sure said hello like they meant it.

Eventually, Samuel turned loose of his wife and picked Bienville up and shook him like a rag, and made noises like an animal roaring, and set him down again. He greeted Noble by boxing him on the shoulder. Noble boxed back. Samuel grabbed his shoulder, as if that had hurt more than he expected, and while Noble was wondering whether he’d hit his old man too hard, Samuel cuffed him another good one.

All this, Bernice observed from her perch in the swing. Samuel and Willadee and the kids were starting up the steps, all jabbering at once. When they got even with Bernice, she stood up, sleek and graceful as a cat. She was wearing a soft little cream-colored dress that clung to her curves when she moved. And when she didn’t. Everybody stopped stock-still. Bernice had that effect on people.

“How you doing, Bernice?” Samuel asked.

Bernice said, “Fine as wine.” Smooth and warm, like butter melting.

Willadee rolled her eyes up in her head and drawled, real slow, “I’ve got something on the stove, Sam. You just come on in whenever you’re ready.” And she went inside the house. Talk about trust.

“Where’s that husband of yours?” Samuel asked Bernice. She motioned toward the backyard. A vague gesture. Samuel glanced in the direction she had pointed and nodded, as though indicating approval of Toy’s presence out there, somewhere. “I hear he’s been keeping things going around here the last few days.”

“Some things, yes.”

Samuel’s eyes played over Bernice’s face. No fondness, no malice. Just a look that said he knew where she was heading, and he wasn’t going along with her. He looked at her like that until she looked away. Then he opened the screen door and waved his children inside.

“C’mon, c’mon, your mama’s waitin’.”

“Sure am, preacher boy,” Willadee called out. Drawling again.

All during supper, Swan and Noble and Bienville kept after Samuel to tell them where they were moving, but he kept putting them off. This wasn’t like their father. Usually, he couldn’t wait to give them the news, and to embellish it with every single positive comment he’d been able to drag out of anybody who’d ever seen the place. As a rule, the new town was so small that it wasn’t easy finding people who’d been there, even just passing through—except for the pastor who was leaving, and he was apt to be more full of warnings than full of compliments. But Samuel always managed to find something good to tell about it. The people were the salt of the earth, or the countryside was a sight for sore eyes, or the church building was a relic and there were rumors that it had secret passageways, or the parsonage yard had a good spot for a playhouse, or something.

Tonight, though, was different, and everybody noticed. Even Calla and Toy and Bernice had questioning looks on their faces.

“Anything wrong, Sam?” Willadee asked.

“I was planning to tell you about it first, and then break it to everybody else.”

Willadee passed the speckled limas across to Toy. “They must be sending us to bayou country. We’ve been everywhere else.”

Samuel said, “They’re not sending us to bayou country.” He set down his tea glass and rested both arms on the table. Everybody’s eyes were on him. Waiting.

“They’re not sending us anywhere.”

Swan broke all records getting out of the house after supper. She had to find a place to think this thing through. She would have settled into the swing, but Aunt Bernice would be out there again before you could even spit. She always hogged the swing as soon as she’d finished helping to clean the kitchen. Swan herself never had to assist with such chores, although she knew unfortunate kids her age who did. Willadee was of the opinion that you’re only a kid once. Grandma Calla thought that once was a dandy time to learn some responsibility, but Swan could wear you to a frazzle, so she never pushed her point. If Aunt Bernice had an opinion, she kept it to herself. She just did her share of the work as quickly as possible and disappeared into the porch shadows until bedtime. You wouldn’t have known she was there, except for the gentle squeaks the swing made.

Swan wondered sometimes what Aunt Bernice found to think about, sitting out there all alone. She had asked her once. Aunt Bernice had lifted her hair up off the back of her neck and murmured, “Hmm? Oh. Things.”

Anyway, the swing was out, so Swan passed it by and went on through the yard, past the haphazard jumble of vehicles parked between the house and the road. The regulars had been gathering in to Never Closes for over an hour now.

Any other time, Swan would have crept around to the back of Never Closes and hid out, trying to get a peek inside. She and her brothers were strictly forbidden to do that, but they did it anyway, every chance they got. So far, they hadn’t seen anything worth looking at, and they’d have given the project up if it hadn’t been forbidden. But the fact that it was had to mean something, so they’d kept after it.

Tonight, though, Swan didn’t feel much like spying. All she wanted was privacy. She reached the road and walked along the grassy shoulder. She could see perfectly well, even once she’d gotten away from the lights of the house and bar. The moon was almost, almost full. She’d never realized before that the moon could shed enough light to give the world any real brightness. She’d also never strayed far from her family in the dark. But it wasn’t dark. The night was luminous.

Out there, walking along beside that easy-curving road, Swan decided she didn’t need to find a place to think. Who needed a place, when you could just keep moving, putting one foot in front of the other, enjoying going nowhere.

By now, her father’s situation had pretty well sorted itself out inside her head. At first, when it had struck her that she and her folks didn’t have an income, or a house to live in, she’d felt guilty for wishing that her life was different. Maybe this was what happened when you wished for something you didn’t know enough about.

The real gravity of the situation had escaped her, though. The Lake family changed homes every year or two anyway, so it wasn’t as though they were being jerked up by the roots. They didn’t have any roots. Besides, grown-ups worked out problems every day. That’s what grown-ups did. Plus, she figured, this had to be the Lord’s will. Hadn’t her daddy preached, time and again, about how God had a Plan, and how everything works together for those who love God? Her parents certainly loved God. Swan did, too, she was sure, even though she bent His rules with some degree of regularity, and prayed only When It Was Important. She’d never been one to wear God out with small talk.

Anyway, if you looked at it right, there was a Bible guarantee of a favorable outcome to all this, so her conscience was off the hook.

She sucked in a deep, glad gulp of honeysuckled air. The tall grass bent beneath her feet and straightened as she passed. She wasn’t ready to turn back just yet. This moment was too delicious. Ahead, and to the left, a narrow lane forked off the main road. She knew she shouldn’t take the lane, shouldn’t even be out here, but it couldn’t do any harm. Bad things happened on Dark and Stormy Nights, not on nights like tonight, when all of creation wore a soft satin sheen.

Chapter 7

The little lane wound and twisted and tapered down to almost nothing, and kept on going. Every bend promised some new discovery. And delivered. A slim young tree, silvered by moonlight. Dancing stars, mirrored in the rocky stream that tumbled alongside the rutted lane. Nothing was ordinary tonight. Even cow pastures and falling-down fences had an otherworldly look.

And the silence! It was like the immense quiet of snowfall, right here in summer. This had to mean something. Something good. Only good could come from so much light where there would ordinarily be darkness.

These were her thoughts as she rounded a final bend, and saw the house. It was smallish, built of faded wood and topped off by a tin roof. There were lights on inside, so the windows glowed golden against the silver of the night. An extremely neat yard wrapped around the house, and in that yard, there was a gleaming something. A vehicle. A pickup truck. As clear and brilliant as the night was, the light was no good for telling color. But Swan knew in her bones. It was red.

She heard a dull, grunting noise, like a person makes when they’ve been socked in the stomach. It took a second for her to realize that she’d made the sound herself. She couldn’t seem to move. Surely, her heart had stopped.

Only her mind was not immobilized. It was racing wildly, imagining the unimaginable. What if that little viper of a man was out here, somewhere, slithering around in the dark? What if he was watching her right now?

She whirled and fled. Running, scrambling, away and away, back along the rutted lane. She could feel Ballenger, back there, behind her—and could sense him, up there, ahead of her. No direction was safe. The June breeze was his hot breath. The rustle of leaves was a sinister whisper. The snakeman, hissing her name.

Swan thought of herself as a person who was prepared for anything. But she wasn’t prepared for this. And she wasn’t prepared for what happened next.

The moon slid behind a thick bank of clouds, and the world went dark. Suddenly, Swan couldn’t see where she was going—so she stumbled. There was nothing to catch hold of, to break her fall. She threw her arms out, flailing every which way like twin windmills, but that didn’t stop her from falling, either.

It seemed as though she fell for the longest time. Head over heels, and heels over head. When she stopped falling, she lay still, afraid to move. The reason she was afraid to move was that her hand was touching something soft and warm. Another hand.

Her eyes were closed, and she kept them that way, afraid of what she might see if she opened them.

“Well, are you dead?” a voice asked.

It wasn’t Ballenger’s voice. Swan could have died then, from relief. She opened her eyes, just enough so that she could peer through the darkness. Then she sat bolt upright.

The person talking to her … was the kid. Ballenger’s little boy. The one who had gotten slapped that day outside the store. He was sitting in the ditch, dressed in a ragged T-shirt and underdrawers. A skinny little fellow, his hair standing on end, his eyes studying her soberly. Swan made herself stop trembling and studied him back.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked him, finally.

“Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“Till it’s okay to go back.”

“Back where?”

The kid pointed toward the house.

Swan said, “Why isn’t it okay to go back right now?”

“Because.”

“You’re too little to be outside by yourself at night,” Swan said. “Why can’t you go back?”

The kid just shrugged.

Swan sighed. She figured she could guess the answer. Still, this kid really didn’t need to be out here alone, and she couldn’t stay here with him.

She said, “Well, maybe you ought to go back now, because I’ve got to get on home.”

He shook his head again, vigorously.

Swan said, “Well, I can’t babysit you.”

“Nobody ast you to.”

She stood up. “Well, don’t let a bobcat see you. A bobcat could eat you in two bites.”

He said, “I can kill bobcats.”

“Yeah? With what?”

He just stared at her. Swan was beginning to feel cross, because she knew she’d get into trouble if she didn’t turn up at Grandma Calla’s pretty soon. They’d have people out looking for her, and nothing makes grown-ups quite so mad as finding a child safe when they’d been scared silly that they might find that child dead.

She said, “Well, look. I know you’re probably afraid of your daddy. I’m afraid of him, myself, and I only saw him once. So why don’t I have my daddy talk to your daddy? My daddy’s a preacher. He talks people into changing their ways all the time.”

He said, “My daddy would kill your daddy.”

Swan dropped back down on her knees, facing him. The moon had come out of hiding, and she could see the kid’s face real plain. It was a beautiful face, with fine, high cheekbones and lush black lashes and a mouth that was fuller than it looked right now—because right now it was pulled tight, into a hard, brave line. Those black eyes of his were cutting right to her soul. Those fierce black eyes. He was, she thought, the damnedest thing she’d ever seen.

“You,” she said, “talk an awful lot about killing, for somebody who’s not hardly big enough to pee standing up.”

But you couldn’t even insult him. He just cocked his head to one side to show that nothing bothered him.

She got up again. “Go home,” she said.

He didn’t budge.

“Go home,” she pleaded. And this was Swan Lake, who never begged.

He still didn’t budge.

“Well, I’m going,” she warned. And she did. One step at a time. Hating every minute of it. Worrying all the way about that kid, and what was going to happen to him, whether he’d get snake-bit, or spider-bit, or be some animal’s supper. And where was he going to sleep? Would he dig a hole and curl up in it? Were his instincts that good? Or would his hateful daddy come raging out in search of him, and if he found him, what would happen then? What?

Maybe she should go back and get the kid, and take him up to his house, and give him over to his mother—but she had a feeling that mother wasn’t much protection. So maybe she should go back and get him, and take him home with her. But you can’t do that sort of thing. It’s kidnapping, even if it’s a kid who does the ’napping. Swan didn’t really think she’d go to jail for it, not as long as the law was still drinking for free at Never Closes, but she knew the story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

She made up her mind that, as soon as she got back to Grandma Calla’s, she was going to get her daddy to go find that kid and take him home and talk to his parents. Nobody would really dream of killing Samuel Lake, and even if they did think about it, they couldn’t succeed. Samuel Lake enjoyed the Protection of the Lord.

The hard part about this plan was going to be coming up with a good enough lie to explain why she’d been where she’d been, but Swan had tremendous confidence in her lying ability. And if worst came to worst, she could always tell the truth.

As it happened, she didn’t have to tell anybody the truth, or a lie, or anything else. She was almost back to Grandma Calla’s when she sensed something or someone behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, and there he was. That tough little guy. Walking ten or twelve paces behind her, as silent as an Indian.

“Do we have a plan?” Willadee was asking Samuel. They were lying in bed, curled together, the same way they had been for the past hour. They’d gone to bed before anyone else, which was something they almost never did. As wild about each other as they were after all these years, they still didn’t like to be too obvious about things like hustling off to their bedroom before it was really bedtime. This once, though, it had seemed to be the only way to get some privacy.

Willadee had told Samuel about John Moses, and the things that happened the day he died. (She didn’t mention the things that had happened the night before. She reasoned that Samuel had enough of a load to bear right now, she could tell him about the beer some other time. Maybe.) She’d also told him about how Calla had taken to going down to the living room in the middle of the night, wearing one of John’s old shirts over her nightgown, and just sitting there by herself, for hours at a time. Willadee had found her there one night, and asked her if she needed to talk about anything.

“It’s too late for talking,” Calla had told her sadly. “I had a million chances to tell John how I missed having him in bed beside me. How I wanted to smell his hair, and feel his skin, and touch him in the night. I should have swallowed my pride, but I wouldn’t, and now I’m choking on it.”

Samuel had listened while Willadee poured out her story, and when she asked him please not to ever let walls grow up between them, he’d promised that he wouldn’t. Then he’d told her about the annual conference, and how the superintendent had explained to him that, nowadays, churches had different needs than they’d had in the past, but that it wasn’t over for him, he still was licensed and all, there just didn’t seem to be a suitable place for him this year, so maybe he should contemplate, really contemplate, positive changes he could make, improvements he could make, in his ministry.

“They don’t want preachers anymore,” Samuel had told Willadee, his voice heavy. “They want social directors.”

“Well, you have to stand for what you think is right.”

“I think feeding my family is right, but I don’t know how I’m going to manage.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Will we?”

“Why, yes, you know we will.”

Several times, they had almost started making love, but the bed was so old and the springs so creaky that they’d decided to wait either until everyone else in the house was bedded down, asleep, or until inspiration struck and they figured out a way to have each other without risking getting funny looks at breakfast the next morning.

“Do we?” she asked again now. “Do we have a plan?”

“I could go looking for some oil,” Samuel said. “I could oil the springs.”

“I didn’t mean that kind of plan.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“We have to figure someplace to live.”

“I know we do.”

He was quiet for a moment. Just his breathing, the only sound. Strong and deep and steady. Then he said, “Willadee? What about the floor? Would you be really insulted, if we just did it on the floor?”

“Not insulted. But they’d still hear us.”

“We could be quiet.”

“Maybe you could.”

He laughed. Couldn’t help it. She hushed him with a kiss. After a little bit, he said, “I think I’m supposed to be scared or something, Willadee. I mean here I am with a wife and kids, and no job, and no house, and you know what, Willadee?”

“What, Samuel?”

“I’m scared, all right.”

She didn’t like this. Him being afraid. Him hurting. It was the worst part of this thing, that he should be hurt. Samuel, of all people.

She said, “Damn these springs.”

“What was that?”

“I said, ‘Damn these springs,’ Samuel.”

Willadee kicked off the covers and sat up in bed. She drew her knees up underneath her and knelt beside her husband, leaning over him, kissing his neck, his chest, his stomach. Her hands touching, giving. He shifted his weight, pushing up against her hands. The bedsprings creaked rudely.

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.

“Just unload the kids, and go park the trailer in the barn,” she told Samuel. “It’s too late to move your stuff inside, and you wouldn’t want anybody pilfering through it.”

Samuel did as she said.

On Saturday, Calla’s toilet backed up, so Samuel had to spend the day digging up the septic tank field line. He had no trouble finding it, since the grass on top of those things always grows so much greener and brighter than the grass around it, but he had plenty of trouble chopping out the sweet gum roots that had grown through it and tangled around it. The job took all day. The car and the trailer stayed shut up in the barn, and nothing got unloaded, so there was none of the usual commotion that occurs when a family moves into a house. Which is why folks around the community were pretty much in the dark about the fact that Sam Lake and his family had moved back home to Arkansas.

Bernice didn’t go down to breakfast on Sunday morning. She just stayed in bed thinking about how wrong this situation was. And that’s how it happened that she first got the Inspiration.

Actually, it was Samuel who inspired her, although he didn’t know it. He and Willadee were in their room getting dressed for church, and their voices drifted through to her, clearer than clear. Bernice didn’t even have to press her ear to the wall to hear. It was as though This Moment Was Meant to Be.

Willadee was asking Samuel if he was all right about this—about going to church this morning, knowing that people were going to be asking him why he wasn’t back home in Louisiana, preaching to his own congregation. (For sure it was going to be humiliating for him to admit that he didn’t have a congregation.) And Samuel was saying that he wasn’t about to let the Lord down by not showing up at His House on His Day.

“I have to believe that there’s a reason for all this,” he said. “Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to do right here that I couldn’t do if I were anywhere else. Maybe there’s someone that I’m supposed to reach out to, or some problem I’m supposed to help with.”

Bernice sat straight up in bed.

In the next room, Willadee was agreeing with Samuel. It must be that God had something for him to do here, and the only way to bring it about was to uproot him from Louisiana loam and replant him in Arkansas clay, and probably the fields were right now ripe unto harvest.

Bernice flung back her covers and leapt out of bed. The fields were ripe, all right. She being the fields. And she was so ready for harvest she couldn’t see straight.

Before Bernice could hardly turn around, Samuel and Willadee were loading the kids into the car. Calla had long since opened the store, and Toy had headed down to the pond to do a little fishing as soon as he’d closed the bar—so neither one of them was around to gum up the works. Even so, Bernice barely had time to wash her face, and brush out her hair, and slip on the dress she’d worn to Papa John’s funeral. It was a pale gray number, with a slightly scooped neckline, just perfect for this occasion. Proper and tantalizing, all at the same time. She didn’t bother with makeup, because her skin didn’t need makeup, and besides, when you cry, makeup runs, which makes a woman look absolutely scary, and she intended to cry this morning.

She came running out of the house at the very last moment, letting the screen door slam behind her. Samuel jerked his head around and looked back in her direction, and then he did a double take. It wasn’t every day you saw Bernice Moses run.

“Something wrong, Bernice?”

She waited until she was right up close to him before she answered, so that he’d be able to smell her perfume while he listened.

“I was wondering if I could ride to church with y’all,” she said softly.

If Sam was surprised, he didn’t show it. He smiled that big, wide, handsome smile of his and said, “Well, come on, then. There’s always room for one more in God’s house.”

As if God had one little thing to do with this.

Samuel took her arm, led her around the car to the passenger side, opened the door, leaned in ahead of her, and said, “Willadee, Bernice wants to ride to church with us.”

Willadee gave her husband a knowing smile and slid over to make room. Bernice got into the car the way she’d seen movie stars do, gracefully lowering herself onto the seat, and managing to show just enough flesh to be tempting as she swung her legs in. She glanced demurely up at Samuel, to see whether he’d been tempted, but he was busy making sure none of the kids had their fingers in the way as he shut the car door.

Bernice hadn’t counted on what the ride to church would actually be like. She’d imagined herself and Samuel in the front seat, with Willadee in between them feeling ugly and awkward. Samuel would sneak longing glances at her over Willadee’s head, and she would favor him with an occasional enigmatic smile. If Willadee caught on, she’d probably pout, which fit right into Bernice’s plan, since nothing makes a man want another woman as much as being reminded that the one he has is determined to hang on to him.

As for the kids, they were more or less background color, part of the scenery that surrounded Samuel. She’d never thought much one way or the other about Samuel’s kids. She’d also never been shut up in a car with all three of them at once.

Before long, she realized that there would be no longing looks from Samuel. He and Willadee were holding hands in Willadee’s lap, and Samuel pretty much had the air of a man whose longings had been recently satisfied.

The kids were unobtrusive enough for about the first half mile, but then Noble took to leaning forward and sucking in deep breaths through his nose.

“What are you doing back there, Noble?” Samuel finally asked.

“Sitting here.” Which was true.

“He’s drinking in her perfume,” Bienville said. You read enough books, you learn to spot these things.

Noble turned as red as a beet and gave his brother a look that said he’d tend to him later. Bienville wasn’t worried. He’d been tended to before, and always lived over it.

“Why do women wear perfume, Aunt Bernice?” Bienville asked.

“To attract males,” Willadee drawled.

“We just like to smell nice,” Bernice corrected.

“Well, you sure do smell nice, Aunt Bernice.”

“Thank you, Bienville.”

“Do you attract many males?”

Willadee felt the laughter coming and tried to stifle it, but it wouldn’t be stifled. Pretty soon it started gurgling in her throat. Bernice was sitting there with her mouth open and her brain working overtime, trying to come up with a good, workable answer. She couldn’t say “More than my share,” because there are times when the truth just gets in the way of a woman’s purposes. And she couldn’t say “Only my husband,” because that would make her sound dull, which was totally unacceptable. And she for sure couldn’t say “I’m trying to attract one right now.”

Finally, she said, “Oh, I never pay any attention to things like that.”

Samuel managed to keep a straight face, but only because preachers learn early on not to laugh when they shouldn’t. Another thing preachers learn early on is that the best way to pull a congregation together is to get everybody singing. So he asked Swan if she knew any new songs.

“Does it have to be a hymn?”

“No, just something everybody can sing along to.”

Swan told him that Lovey had taught her “My Gal’s a Corker,” and that sure was a good sing-along song. Ordinarily, Samuel would have nixed that one, but not today. Today he said, “Well, let’s hear it.”

Nobody ever had to ask Swan twice to sing. She had a great big voice for such a small girl, and she wasn’t afraid to turn it loose. She set in to singing, verse after verse, and the other kids joined in. Noble made sound effects. They were clapping their hands, and stomping their feet, and getting louder and louder, and Willadee and Samuel never even told them to pipe down. They didn’t let up until they pulled into the yard of the Bethel Baptist Church. (The Moses family had always been Baptists, those who went to church. When Willadee had married Samuel, she became the first Methodist Moses ever.) As the car rolled to a stop, Noble bellowed the last note of the song in the most rutting-buck tone he could muster.

Bernice made up her mind then and there, whenever the sweet day came that she finally got Samuel, Willadee would get the kids.

She flung open the car door and stumbled out, and wouldn’t you know, the first thing she did was step into a hole. The dainty little heel of her dainty little shoe broke clean off with a snap you could have heard all the way to El Dorado.

“Are you all right?” Willadee asked, when she could see clear as day that Bernice was in pain. Breaking a heel on a pair of shoes that make your feet look simply precious is a painful experience for any woman.

Bernice pulled herself up straight and hobbled toward the front door of the church. With every step, she kept reminding herself that, when you’re on a mission, you don’t let little things distract you. She had come here this morning to get saved, and she’d be damned if she was going to let anything or anybody ruin it for her.

When they got inside the church, the congregation was singing the first hymn. Lifting their hearts in song, Samuel thought—and that thought was followed by a rush of emotion. A yearning for a congregation of his own. Most men in Samuel’s shoes might have asked themselves whether they had done something to displease the Lord, but Samuel didn’t think like that. The God he knew was giving and kind, so he was convinced that this experience was going to turn out to be a blessing, maybe the greatest blessing of his life. That didn’t keep him from hurting, though.

Bernice hobbled down the aisle, slipped into the first vacant pew, and stepped on over to make room for the rest of them. The kids filed in after her, then Willadee, then Samuel. Swan started singing lustily before she came to a full stop. People turned their heads to look at her, the way they always did when she opened her mouth and that big voice came out. Swan didn’t notice. Anytime she was singing, she was in a world of her own. She would pour herself into the music, and it would pour out of her, tumbling like a waterfall, and there was nothing else she’d ever known that compared to the feelings that took her over.

Samuel and Willadee nudged each other and smiled. The boys were wincing at their sister’s volume. Bernice stood erect, gazing straight ahead. Involuntarily, Samuel cut his eyes to see what she was looking at. It couldn’t be the scrawny, red-faced song director, because he was a constant blur of motion—strutting around, waving his arms in time to the music. Whatever Bernice was looking at was stationary. But knowing Bernice, she might not consciously be focusing on anything at all. She had a curious way of living inside her own head. You never knew what was going on in there.

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