The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (10 page)

“Uplifting,” Samuel said.

And Toy said, “That’s good.”

He kept on cleaning fish, and Samuel kept tossing the knife back and forth. After a while, Samuel said, “Bernice surrendered her life to the Lord this morning.”

There was a slight break in Toy’s rhythm. Ever so slight. He finished the fish he was working on, chunked it into a dishpan with the rest of the already cleaned ones, and scooped another one out of the washtub where the last few live ones were thrashing around.

He said, “I guess that means she’ll be going to church a good bit from now on.”

“Maybe you’ll want to start going with her,” Samuel suggested. He was really hoping, although he didn’t believe it for a minute, that Toy might do just that. Besides the obvious consideration of Toy’s eternal soul, there was the fact that, if Toy started going to church, his wife would be riding with him, instead of with Samuel and his family. Willadee was an awfully good-natured woman, but she had her limits, and Samuel knew in his bones that those limits were about to be tested.

Toy shook his head. “Wouldn’t want the roof to cave in.”

Samuel grinned. Tossed the knife up higher into the air, and caught it with the same hand this time.

“I don’t imagine the roof would cave in,” he said.

“Be a shame for folks to find out the hard way,” Toy answered.

By the time the women got lunch ready, Toy had packed the fish into empty milk cartons, and filled the cartons with water, and asked Samuel to put them in the deep freeze. Then he had wrapped all the innards and scraps in newspaper and buried the mess in a bare patch in Calla’s garden. Come spring, whatever got planted there would flourish, and somebody would say, “Looks like Toy had a good catch sometime last summer.”

He drove a stake in the spot and hammered it down good, so it wouldn’t get knocked over by accident. Calla always wanted to know where he’d planted fish scraps, so she could be sure not to plant peas or beans anywhere near it. Peas and beans make lush, showy vines when they get a big dose of fertilizer, but that’s all they make. Calla was mighty particular about her garden. She had a system that worked, and she didn’t take kindly to anybody upsetting the balance.

Toy hosed down the table where he’d been cleaning the fish, and stripped off his shirt, and hosed himself down, too. He still smelled to high heaven, so he went into Never Closes and washed up with soap and water at the sink behind the bar.

He didn’t know why he’d been so surprised at what Samuel had told him. Trust Bernice to come up with the one thing nobody could fault her for. The one way she could be thrown together the most frequently, and under the most favorable circumstances, with the man she considered to be the love of her life.

Toy had nothing but respect for his good-looking preacher-boy brother-in-law, and he couldn’t imagine Sam Lake ever letting himself get sucked into a situation where his honor might be compromised.

Even so, Toy Moses couldn’t help feeling mighty sick inside.

Chapter 11

Swan and her brothers had given up playing War Spies because now, every time they found themselves running across the Minefield, dodging enemy bullets and trying not to get blown to Kingdom Come from blundering onto a land mine, they couldn’t help thinking about what it must really be like to get shot, or to have some body part suddenly explode. They kept picturing in their minds what Papa John must have looked like two seconds after he pulled the trigger.

All of a sudden, they had found that they couldn’t think about dying the same way as before. Used to be, they could shoot each other and watch each other fall and roll around moaning and twitching, and they never thought about death as something you couldn’t get up and walk away from. Now all that had changed.

They had switched from being War Spies to being Cowboys and Indians, and that had worked out all right. Cowboys and Indians killed each other all the time, but it didn’t seem so real. Besides, Swan and Noble and Bienville never shot each other anymore. Sometimes, just to keep things interesting, they’d let themselves get bushwhacked by a gunslinger, but they mainly suffered flesh wounds from those encounters. None of them ever wound up on Boot Hill.

Swan wanted to be the sheriff, but Noble wasn’t having that. Whoever heard of a lady sheriff? And besides, she’d probably get them all killed, the way she was always going off half-cocked. He was going to be the sheriff. She could be his deputy if she wanted to be a law woman.

Swan wasn’t about to settle for being anybody’s deputy, so she became a United States marshal. Bienville was a deaf and dumb Indian scout, and he worked up a variety of hand signals to communicate with them. At first, it was confusing, since he couldn’t speak a word or hear one either (he had to explain the hand signals with more hand signals), but after a while they got the hang of it.

The kids had a big shoot-out planned for the afternoon. They’d been chasing a band of Outlaws and had finally hemmed up the sorry, lily-livered snakes in the Box Canyon (their new name for the old calf lot). There were about fifty or so Outlaws, judging from the number of hoofprints where they’d all crossed the Big River (their new name for the creek), so the Good Guys were hopelessly outnumbered. As usual.

The way they had it figured, the deaf and dumb Indian scout would circle around behind the Box Canyon and throw in a lit torch, and the sagebrush would all catch fire, and the Bad Guys would have to hightail it to keep from being barbecued. The mouth to the canyon (the gate to the calf lot) was a tight fit, just room enough for one man to ride through at a time, so the sheriff and the United States marshal would have no trouble picking off the low-down, no-account sidewinders as they tried to escape.

Bienville wasn’t the one to come up with the plan, and he didn’t like it much. The way he saw it, even an Outlaw ought to be given a fair chance. Swan just hooted over that one. Fifty or so Outlaws against one local sheriff and one United States marshal didn’t sound exactly fair to
her.
Anyway, if the crooks wanted a fair chance, they shouldn’t have robbed the bank, shot up the town, and peed in the watering trough out in front of the saloon.

Of course, by the time lunch was over and the posse was ready to ride out, plans had changed. Swan was so inspired by what had happened at church that morning that she decided they should swipe a tarp from the shed, put up a tent back by the creek, and hold a Revival Meeting. That way, if they had any converts, they could baptize them before they had a chance to backslide.

She aimed to have converts. One in particular. Grandma Calla had mentioned at lunch that she thought Sid and Nicey and Lovey would be dropping by later, and wouldn’t Swan enjoy getting to play with a girl for a change.

Grandma Calla just didn’t know.

Swan reckoned that, by the time the company got there, she (the evangelist) and her deacons could have the tent all set up, and they’d be ready to lead their first sinner to salvation. They’d drag her if they had to. Swan told Grandma Calla that she would love to have a girl to play with, and wouldn’t she please tell Lovey, as soon as she got there, to just come on back to the creek.

Grandma Calla gave Swan one of those I-can-see-right-through-you looks and said, “You’d better not be up to anything, Swan Lake.”

“All I’m
up
to is trying to be nice to Lovey,” Swan explained archly.

And Grandma Calla said, “Um-hmm.”

The Revival Meeting was harder to coordinate than Swan had anticipated. Noble had been in charge of doing all the necessary stealing, and the only thing he could find to support the corners of the tent were some old cane fishing poles, which kept bending under the weight of the tarp. Finally, Bienville came up with the idea of draping the tarp over a low-hanging tree limb. Then they could tie the corners to some young saplings.

Only—they didn’t have any rope.

So Noble had to go back and burgle the shed again. While he was gone, Bienville scouted around for trees with low-hanging limbs, and Swan meandered down to the creek to pick out a good spot for the upcoming baptism.

For the most part, the little stream was less than a foot deep, which would be okay for a Methodist baptism, since Methodists let people choose between sprinkling and pouring. But Swan had no plans for performing a Methodist baptism. She also did not plan to give her baptismal candidate a choice. This was going to be a Baptist baptism. A baptism by immersion. All she had to do was find a spot that was deep enough.

She knew there was at least one spot in the creek that was deep enough, because she and her brothers had been warned never to go there without an adult. The Old Swimming Hole. That’s what her mother and her uncles always called it when they talked about how much fun they’d had, back when they were kids, swinging on grapevines and cannonballing the water.

It didn’t dawn on Swan that, if the water was deep enough to cannonball into, it was too deep for wading into with a new convert who was probably the biggest sissy in Arkansas. Especially since Swan herself didn’t know how to swim. How
could
she, when her daddy was always too busy to teach her? She had begged him to, and he had promised to, and he had surely intended to, but there had always been something more pressing. For instance, somebody out in the boonies had a kid with a fever of 103. And the kid had to get to the doctor, but they didn’t have a car. So somebody would call the preacher, and he would drop everything and go do what had to be done.

Swan wasn’t thinking about any of this, though. All she was thinking about was that Lovey was stuck on herself and needed to be taken down a few notches.

The swimming hole hadn’t been used in years, and there were no paths leading down to it anymore, so finding it wasn’t easy. Swan followed the creek bank, looking and hoping, and looking and hoping, but the swimming hole just did not seem to exist. The bank sloped and slanted, sometimes level with the water, sometimes rising high above it.

When she finally found what she was looking for, it came as a huge surprise, because she almost charged off the bank and landed in the middle of it. She had just reached one of the high points and was picking her way through some underbrush that seemed to go on forever when, all at once—it didn’t. There was a clear space right ahead, and she was heading for it, and it turned out that the clear space was where the bank dropped off, straight down and down and down. If it hadn’t been for the fabled grapevines, and for the fact that Swan happened to get an arm tangled up in one as she was pushing toward the light, she’d have been doing a cannonball off the side whether she wanted to or not.

But then, the grapevines
were
there, and she
did
get her arm (not to mention her skirt tail) tangled up in one, and so she turned out not falling in but dangling above the water with her panties showing. She was screaming bloody murder.

Noble had gotten back with the rope, and Bienville had found a tree with an appropriately low-hanging limb. The two of them were busy setting up the Revival Tent when they heard all the commotion. The thing was, their sister had gotten far enough off from the Revival Grounds that her terrified voice didn’t exactly come through loud and clear. It was muted. Distant. And not altogether believable, since Swan had a history of making make-believe seem like the real thing.

The two boys kept working on the tent.

Blade Ballenger had been trailing Swan ever since she had left Bienville behind and struck out on her own. He’d stayed out of sight, and had made no sound at all.

When Swan went crashing through the underbrush, Blade started to holler out, to warn her that there was a drop-off. He’d been here before. He knew this place. He knew a lot of the places in these parts, because he’d explored most of them, at one time or another, when he was trying to stay away from whatever was going on at home. But she was moving faster than his thoughts. One second she was on land, and the next second, she was in the air, and the only thing between her and the water was a gnarled old grapevine.

Blade went racing to the side of the bank, terrified that Swan Lake was about to go plunging out of his life once and for all. He had to do something.

He was afraid to say anything to her. Afraid that anything he did would be wrong. But he had to do something.

So he cannonballed. Just took a flying leap off the side, passed her on the way down, and ploinked into the water. Little as he was, he didn’t even make much of a splash. He went under and kept heading down for a bit, then bobbed to the surface.

Swan had seen him whizzing past and was gaping down at him. Hanging on to the vine that was hanging on to her, and just gaping.

“Well, let go!” he yelled.

She shook her head and held on harder.

“I can’t swim!”

He said, “You go down, you come up!”

“And then I’d go down again.”

“No, you won’t. The way I learned to swim was somebody threw me in.”

Which was true. His daddy had thrown him out of a boat into a pond when he was three years old. He couldn’t remember exactly how it all happened, but he had swum like a fish.

Swan wasn’t buying his story.

“Well, I’m not letting go! You go down three times, you’re done for.”

“I’ll save you!”

“Who’s gonna save
you
?”

“
I
don’t need saving.”

He was dog-paddling in circles, and it certainly did not look as though he needed saving, but Swan wasn’t taking any chances.

“I’m going to swing back to the bank,” she said.

She gathered her feet up beneath her, and pushed the air with them, and went nowhere in particular. She tried again. Same result.

“Go get somebody!” she hollered. She was hanging on with both hands now and didn’t dare let go, so she jerked her head in the general direction of the Revival Grounds. “Go get my brothers! They’re right back over yonder.”

Not that her brothers could swim, either.

But Blade wasn’t about to leave her. It would take too long. What if she lost her grip while he was gone? That was a chance he couldn’t take. He didn’t know for sure what he would do if she let go now, but if she fell, he was going to be there.

Swan had gone with her daddy plenty of times over the years to visit elderly parishioners who reveled in reciting the details of their latest brushes with death, heart attacks being the most frequently mentioned and dramatically described. She knew the symptoms of a heart attack and was pretty sure she was having one. Her chest felt tight, her pulse was pounding in her ears, and her left arm was going numb.

Swan was an optimistic sort, but she couldn’t help thinking that one of two things was about to happen. Either she was going to die in the air or she was going to die in the water. When the snakeman appeared out of nowhere on the creek bank a few seconds later saying not to worry, that he’d have her back on solid footing in a jiffy, Swan just had one more thing to worry about.

Maybe she was going to die on dry land.