The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (5 page)

“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.”