The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (13 page)

Ras Ballenger didn’t have a license to kill another man’s horse, the way he had believed he had a license to kill another country’s people in the war. He couldn’t just bayonet this horse. To do in somebody else’s horse, and get away with it, you had to have a reason. You had to be saving the animal from some unspeakable agony that couldn’t be fixed. Or you had to find a way to let the horse die on its own.

Everybody who knows anything much about horses knows that the surest way to get one to die on its own is also the simplest. You just leave the door to the feed room open, and you go off to town (if it happens to be daytime) or you go off to bed (if it happens to be night). A horse doesn’t know when to stop eating and doesn’t have the ability to throw up. That’s all right on the open range, or out in a pasture. Out there, the horse will just get a big grass belly, or it might get the squirts, but if it stands in one place and eats fifty pounds of grain, it will die a hard death.

When horses are afraid of a person, they won’t look that person in the eye. It’s as if they think that, if they don’t see the danger, it has disappeared. Or maybe they just can’t stand the stress. Snowman was standing with his eyes turned away from the wiry little man who was leaning against the fence and grinning at him.

Ras laughed out loud. “You best look away, you sonofabitch,” he cackled.

“Best look ’way, sum’bitch,” Blue parroted.

Ras laughed again, and informed Blue that he was a caution. Blue may or may not have known what a caution was, but he looked up at his daddy and told him that
he
was a caution. Ras laughed out loud again, and picked Blue up and set him on the top fence rail, and pointed to Snowman.

“Do you know what you’re lookin’ at there?” he asked.

“Horsee,” said Blue.

“That’s right. Horsee. Dead horsee.”

Blue’s eyes got wide with surprise, and Blade’s eyes got wide with horror.

“Dead horsee,” Blue chortled.

Ras sang out, “You hear that, Snowman? You’re a dead horsee.”

Blade didn’t say a word. He just stood there holding on to the fence with both hands. Blue might be the one perched on the top rail, but Blade was the one who felt like he might fall if he let go.

“Just as soon as those welts go down,” Ras said.

“Soon’s whells go down,” echoed Blue.

“Because Mr. Odell Pritchett is gonna wanta examine his horse,” Ras said. “And I don’t intend to deprive him of the privilege.”

Blue had gotten a little lost in all that, but he said it back the best he could.

“Mister Oh hell Pritchett wanta ’zamin he horse, and I don’t tenprive-prittilege!”

Chapter 16

Blade had no idea how long it would take for Snowman’s welts to go down, but he knew that, once it happened, that horse was done for. Sickness welled up inside him, followed by fury.

Nothing else his daddy had ever done had had quite this effect on Blade. Everything else he had accepted as just being the way things were. He didn’t know and didn’t ask himself why this was different. But it was.

All day long, he stewed over it. Ras buzzed around the place mending tack, mucking stalls, cutting the grass in the yard with a sling blade. Blue dogged his tracks, as usual, and (as usual) got patted on the head and told how smart he was. Blade crawled under the porch and sat there in the shadowy semidarkness, drawing pictures with his fingers while his mind tried to figure out what to do.

It wouldn’t do any good to plead with his daddy not to kill the horse. That would just get it killed sooner, and maybe ensure that it suffered more in the process. Blade would have liked to call Mr. Odell Pritchett, and tell him what was going on, and ask him to please come get Snowman. But to do that, he’d have to get the man’s phone number out of his daddy’s billfold, and figure out how to make a long-distance call, and somehow manage to make the call without getting caught. Three mountains he didn’t feel nearly big enough to climb.

He wished his daddy would disappear. He didn’t exactly wish, the way his mother did, that Ras would die. That kind of wish would have been hard for a boy Blade’s age to live with. He just wished that Ras would walk off into the woods, or take off in the truck, and never come back. Now you see him, now you don’t. He’s gone.

But Ras wasn’t gone. He wasn’t gone today, and he wouldn’t be gone tomorrow. He was here, and he was going to kill the horse, and there was nothing Blade could do to stop him. Unless …

(And here, Blade’s mind balked a little. Shied away like bare feet from broken glass.)

Unless
… he could make the
horse
disappear.

Blade Ballenger had never been more afraid of his daddy than he was in the moment when he unlatched the chain on the gate to the holding pen and stepped inside with Snowman. Up until that precise instant, if he’d gotten caught, he could have made up some story about why he was outside in the middle of the night, or he could have just clammed up, like anybody would expect from a kid who was too dumb to know it. Either way, there would have been consequences, but Blade was used to consequences. His life was pretty much one consequence after another.

If he got caught now, that would bring consequences of a kind that he’d never known but had had nightmares about. As a precaution, he had kept on his sleepers (his mama’s term for whatever shirt and underwear he’d had on that day), instead of putting on britches, because what if his daddy heard him rustling around getting dressed and came in there to see what he was up to?

There was no use thinking about it. Thinking about it wouldn’t do any good, and besides, nothing was going to change his mind. He was going to let Snowman out of that lot, and watch him run away to freedom, and then he was going to slip back into the house and get back in bed, and hope that that horse would get all the way to Odell Pritchett’s house before Ras Ballenger woke up and the devil came to breakfast.

Of course Blade couldn’t begin to guess how far it was to Camden, or how long it would take to get there, or whether a horse had enough gumption to find its way back to where it came from. He was just hoping.

When he had crawled out through his bedroom window, a few minutes ago, the curs had all lifted their heads and trained their eyes on him. He had worried they might set in howling, and wake everybody up, but they’d been seeing him crawl through that window two or three times a week for a while now, so it must have just seemed like business as usual. They didn’t even follow him across the yard.

Snowman was standing facing away from the gate, and he didn’t move a muscle when Blade came into the lot with him. Blade walked over beside him and stood looking up at him, wondering what to do next. He knew better than to try to drive Snowman out of the lot, because then the horse might take to rearing and whinnying and crashing around, which would get the dogs to barking, and then all hell would break loose. Blade thought about leading Snowman, but Ras had left the horse unhaltered, so there was nothing to reach up and grab hold of. While the boy was examining his options, Snowman wandered over and walked out of the lot on his own.

“Good boy,” Blade whispered, almost silently. “Go on. Go!”

But the horse stopped outside the gate and stood beside the fence, like it was waiting for something.

Blade couldn’t imagine what the horse could be waiting for. There for sure wasn’t one good thing going to happen to it if it stayed around here. But maybe animals don’t know those things. A dog, for instance, won’t generally run away from home, no matter how it’s treated. It might go off to a convention once in a while, but it’ll come back when the party’s over. If it’s able.

Anyway, Snowman should have been lighting a shuck out of there, but he kept standing beside that fence, still as a statue. On impulse, Blade climbed the fence, and swung one leg over, and maneuvered himself astride the horse, hoping against hope that his luck wouldn’t play out now. He tangled both hands in Snowman’s mane, and squeezed with his knees to keep from falling off, and dug his bare heels ever so gently into the big horse’s sides to get him moving.

“That way,” he was saying, silently, inside his mind. “Over there, Snowman. To the creek. All we have to do is follow the creek.”

A couple of hours before daylight, Toy Moses did something his daddy never would have done. He cut off a paying customer.

The customer was Bootsie Phillips, a logger, who was one of Never Closes’s most faithful regulars. You could always count on Bootsie to come in early, stay until everybody else had gone home, and spend every last dime he had. Never mind that he had a house full of hungry mouths at home, and the money could be better spent on groceries. He’d been there since the bar opened, and he was so drunk he had to hold on to the jukebox to feed it change, but he wasn’t showing any signs of being ready to call it a night.

After a while, Toy asked him if he was determined to stay there until his money was all gone, and Bootsie said he damn sure was.

Toy said, “Just a minute,” and walked out the back door of the bar, through the house, and into the grocery store. He gathered milk and eggs and bread and bacon and canned goods and flour, and a double handful of penny candy, and he sacked it all up. Then he marched back through the house and into the bar. Right over to where Bootsie was trying not to fall off his stool.

“Your money’s all gone,” Toy said.

Bootsie tried to look at Toy, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.

“Th’hell y’say,” he mumbled.

Toy held out his hands and waggled his fingers. Bootsie obediently dug in his pockets, and brought out all his money, and handed it over. Toy jerked his head toward the door.

“Come on. I’ll drive you home. You can get somebody to bring you back to get your truck tomorrow.”

Bootsie slid down off the stool and informed Toy darkly that he could drive his own damn self home. Either that or he said he was running for president. The way he was slurring his words, you couldn’t be sure.

Didn’t matter what he said, Toy was propelling him out the door. When they got outside, and Bootsie was stumbling ahead of Toy, making for the parking lot, Toy Moses slipped the money Bootsie had given him into the grocery sack. One logger’s wife was about to get a triple surprise. Her husband, home before daylight, with food for the family, and enough money to buy more.

Toy got back to Calla’s just at the beginning of what he thought of as the pearly grays—the soft perfection that envelops the world right before dawn. Toy’s favorite time of day. Or it used to be, when he was just getting out of bed at that hour, instead of just getting a chance to fall into it. The lights were on in Calla’s store, so he knew she was already in there starting coffee and getting ready to take care of her regulars as they began straggling in.

He swung down out of the truck and started toward the store, but then he saw something off to one side that made him do a double take. Out there beside the chicken pen, in Calla’s pretty garden—or what was left of Calla’s garden—was a horse. A big, white horse covered with filthy smudges. The animal had already gone through the corn, which had been coming on strong, thanks to the fish guts that Toy had been planting out there all spring, and now it was working on the purple hull peas.

Toy didn’t wave his arms or holler at the horse, because if it spooked and trampled the squash and tomatoes, that wasn’t going to fix the corn and peas. Instead, he just walked on out to the garden, moving easy, keeping his arms to his sides. There was nothing to do but catch the horse, and pen it up, and ask around until he found out who the owner was. That shouldn’t take long. You didn’t see many horses as pretty as that one would be if somebody gave it a bath and took a brush to it.

When he got closer, he felt like a fool for thinking the horse was just dirty. For not realizing straight off that those dark smudges were dried blood. At first he figured the animal had gotten tangled up in a barbed-wire fence, but that theory didn’t hold up. Barbed wire leaves jagged wounds, and the barbs can gouge out chunks of flesh. These marks were straight, crisscrossing each other. They’d been laid on with a whip. It had been a long time since Toy Moses had felt the kind of anger that boiled up in him now.

When he was about ten feet away from the horse, Toy stopped walking and stood still. The horse stopped eating and eyeballed him warily.

“It’s all right, boy. You can run away, if you want to. But you’d be better off here than wherever you come from.” His voice was soft as well water.

The horse backed away several steps. Toy backed away just as many.

“I sure wish you could talk,” Toy said. Then he backed off another couple of feet and broke eye contact with the beast. So, of course, the horse moved toward him. Just a little. Just a fraction. Toy still didn’t look at the horse, but he kept on talking, low and peaceful.

“If you could tell me who did this, I’d give him a taste of his own. See how he likes being on the receiving end.”

The horse must have had kind treatment at some time, Toy thought, because now he came closer. Toy stood still and waited. When the horse was near enough to touch, Toy resisted the urge to reach out to him. Just breathed in and out, deep and slow. And waited.

The horse offered his face. Toy told it hello the way horses say hello to each other, by breathing into his nose. The horse bobbed his head up and down as if to say that Toy Moses was all right, and he didn’t mind visiting with him. In slow, slow motion, Toy took off his belt, and looped it around the horse’s neck, and led the mighty Snowman out of Calla Moses’s garden.

The kids didn’t know what to think when they came down for breakfast and there wasn’t any. Well, there was a pan of cold biscuits on the back of the stove, and a bowl full of eggs on the cook table that Willadee must have been planning to scramble but hadn’t gotten around to. Swan’s first thought was that somebody else must have died, because she’d never in her life known her mother to forget to feed her children.

When she looked out the kitchen window and saw the sheriff’s car parked under a shade tree, she knew for sure that she’d been right. Not that the sight was all that unusual. That car was in that same spot for an hour or so most nights, while the sheriff and his deputy were in Never Closes, but the sheriff had never come around in the daytime except when Papa John shot himself. So this was bad.

The only person left in the family who was old enough to die was Grandma Calla, but it couldn’t be her, because there she was standing beside the sheriff, both of them watching something that Swan couldn’t see because Uncle Toy’s truck was in the way.

“Oh, no,” Swan breathed. Tragic. Her mind was going ninety to nothing, conjuring up images of all the terrible things that could have happened, and who they could have happened to.

“Oh, no, what?” Noble asked. He and Bienville had gotten themselves cold biscuits, and were poking holes in them with their fingers. Pouring Blackburn-Made syrup into the wells they’d made.

Swan didn’t answer. She was already out the door.