The Homecoming of Samuel Lake (24 page)

Chapter 29

Ras Ballenger didn’t think much of people in general, and he loathed the Moses family in particular. Over the months since that thing with Odell Pritchett, business had fallen off considerably, not to mention Ras had noticed folks talking behind their hands when he’d go into town to buy feed for his livestock. The hatred he felt for his neighbors had grown into a poisonous, festering abscess that plagued him day and night. Lately, he’d been powerfully drawn to the Moses place, and he had taken to driving past there at odd times, just to see what was going on.

Across the road from Calla’s was sixty acres of land that belonged to a family named Ledbetter, who had raised cotton there until a few years back, when Carl Ledbetter died and his wife, Irma, moved into town. Nothing was there now except empty fields that had been taken over by scrub brush, a weighing shed that had been taken over by poison ivy, and a For Sale, Reasonable sign that some drunk had run over and nobody had ever bothered to set back upright. Sometimes, late at night, Ras would turn his truck in to the field, and pull over behind the weighing shed, and watch the Moses place for hours.

Toward the end of October, it rained unexpectedly and turned cold. Toy woke late that afternoon to find the rain gone and the air crisp as apples. It took all he had to force himself to open the bar. No man should be shut up all night in a place like that.

Bootsie Phillips, who wouldn’t have minded being shut up in a place like that for the rest of his life, got so drunk that night that he fell off his barstool and rolled under a table. Toy and the regulars just left him there. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Sometime around 4:00
A.M.,
when the crowd had cleared out, and Bootsie was the only one left, it dawned on Toy that tradition was one thing and being a damned fool was another. It was just plain ridiculous for him to stay there with nothing to do but watch Bootsie Phillips sleep, when that wasn’t making any money and he wasn’t getting to do what he loved most, which was welcome the pearly grays. Keeping Never Closes open all night every night meant that by the time he made it into the woods these days, dawn had usually cracked and broken, spilling sunlight through the trees and painting splotches on the ground.

He didn’t want to wake Bootsie up and make him drive home drunk, so he grabbed an old overcoat of his daddy’s that had been hanging on the coatrack by the door since whenever John had put it there, and he covered Bootsie up. Then he cut the lights and left the bar, locking the door behind him.

For a second, he stood out in the yard, sucking in air that smelled of damp earth and autumn, and he wondered why people even had houses. He, for one, could do without the walls, and not having any around him at the moment made him so glad he trembled inside.

Ras Ballenger sat in his truck, imagining what it was going to feel like when he finally settled his debts with that bunch. They had ruined his business and stolen his son and made him look like a half-wit. For all of that, they would pay, and pay dearly. The pieces of his plan were in place. Now it was just a matter of picking the right time.

He couldn’t see the bar, since it was on the back side of the house, but he could see the glow from the lights—the muted way they lit the yard. He watched the customers coming and going until they were going, going, gone. When the lights went out, in the wee hours, he came to attention, wondering what that meant. He’d never seen the Moses yard dark before. Not once.

With daylight not due to come calling for at least another hour, he considered going over there and prowling around. Maybe snatching his son and making off with him. See how safe those bastids felt when they woke up in the morning to find that the child who didn’t belong to them was gone.

While he was thinking those thoughts, a light winked on in the side yard. The dome light in Toy’s truck. The truck and Toy Moses, materializing in the darkness. Ras saw the big man reach inside and take his rifle from the gun rack. Saw Toy Moses reaching behind the seat, and bringing out a vest, and pulling it on. A hunting vest, Ras knew. The truck door closed, and the yard went dark again for a moment. Then the bobbing beam of a flashlight came to life, moving away from the house, and Ras’s mind filled in the blanks of all he couldn’t see. Toy Moses, leaving the yard and heading for the woods, his gun across his shoulder.
Hisgunhisgunhisgun.
Those words went buzzing through Ras Ballenger’s brain, buzzing and humming and buzzing, it was the damnedest thing, the damnedest damn thing, the way he knew all at once that he could take his revenge right now, and still carry out his original plan later on, easy as pie and twice as sweet.

The slender little creek curved and twisted through the Moses pasture, slithering on and off the Ballenger place on the east side and the Hempstead farm, to the north.

Toy moved along, not following the creek exactly but keeping it in sight. Before sunup like this, a man could get turned around in deep woods, even woods he knew, if he didn’t notice things like which side of a creek he was on, and which way the water was flowing. He’d have found his way out, of course, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that this was stolen time, time treasured, and Toy didn’t want it marred by the rough edge of frustration. He wanted to feel as free as the water in that creek. And when the dawn washed across the sky, as it would before long, he wanted to drink it in, drink it up, drink it down. He wasn’t here to hunt for game (he wasn’t sure why he’d even brought the gun), he was here for a baptism—the only kind he knew and believed in. Immersion in silence and anointing by the pearly grays.

About the time Toy got to the first big curve in the creek, Ras Ballenger got back home. He took his own rifle from his own gun rack, then crossed his yard and faded into the woods. He had no way to know where Toy Moses was headed, but hunting was hunting. You looked for tracks and traces, and you tried to reason like the creature you were hunting, and you didn’t make a sound.

Sometimes you don’t think. You don’t dream. You don’t ask for anything or wish for anything or need anything, you just let yourself
be.
That’s what Toy was doing when the pearly grays arrived.
Just being.
He was squatting on the bank of the creek, looking down into the water—watching as it turned from dark to light, matching the sky tone for tone. There was an orange leaf skimming along on the surface. One bright orange, gently curling leaf, stark against the singing, silver water, and he couldn’t take his eyes off it. It was that perfect.

When Toy fell forward, he had the giddy impression that the leaf was flying toward him, flying hard, and bringing the water with it. He was thinking that it was crazy as the devil for a leaf to behave like that when he heard the sharp
crack
that told him he’d been shot.

Chapter 30

Millard Hempstead and his buddy, Scotty Dumas (who lived in town and liked to come out to Millard’s a couple of times a year to hunt), had hit the woods early that morning. They were out there after squirrels, but then Scotty saw a wild hog and just had to take a shot at it—shooting wild, because he was too excited to think straight. Town types didn’t see many razorbacks, much less get trophies to put over their mantels, so he didn’t want to miss his chance.

He didn’t miss his chance, but he missed the hog, although he didn’t have sense enough to know that. The hog whirled and crashed back into the brush, and Scotty crashed along after it.

“Got ’im!” he hollered over his shoulder to Millard.

“Boy, you ain’t got nothin’ but shit for brains!” Millard hollered back. “If you’d hit that hawg, you’d have just made him mad. You can’t kill a razorback with a squirrel rifle!”

Scotty wasn’t listening. He was going after the hog. Millard hollered at him again, telling him to get his ass back out of that brush if he didn’t want to go home in more pieces than he came in, but Scotty was determined to get that trophy head. What he thought was, if the hog had been hit, it would start to weaken sometime. All he’d have to do would be to shoot it again when he found it and finish it off.

Scotty went lumbering along in the general direction the hog had gone, and it was hardly any time until he came upon the creek bank where Toy Moses had been just a moment ago. There was no sign of the hog. Scotty went on up to the edge of the bank, and looked down into the water, and then his knees went clean out from under him.

“Millard?” he yelled. “Millard, you better get on over here. I just shot Toy Moses!”

Ras Ballenger had picked up Toy’s tracks and was having no trouble following them. Yesterday’s rain had left the dirt soft and the leaves on the ground slicked over. Toy might as well have been carrying a sack of corn with a hole in it, the trail was that easy to see. When Ras heard the shot, he knew he was getting close and figured Toy must have just gotten himself a squirrel. His last, unless he managed to get another one before Ras got to him. That big bastid had gotten his last of everything.

Of course, what he heard next was all that racket that Scotty Dumas made going after that hog, and then the man’s voice, blubbering about how he’d shot Toy Moses. Ras’s first impulse was to scram out of there, so nobody would ever know he’d been in these woods today. But what difference did it make? He hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger.

He scuttled toward the voices (there were two voices now), and when he got to the creek, he could see two men going over the side of the bank. One of them was Millard Hempstead, and he was white as a sheet.

“God a’mighty, Scotty,” he was saying. “I think you killed him!”

Then Scotty said he didn’t believe Toy was dead, and Millard said as much blood as there was in the water, he ought to be, and Ras Ballenger came forward and did what any good neighbor would do in a case like that. He offered to help them get that poor man to a doctor.

Toy didn’t exactly hear angels singing, but there was once that he thought he heard one calling his name. The way he was hurting, if she had told him to come on home, he wouldn’t have argued.

Mostly, the trip into town was a bloody haze. Blood all over his soaking wet clothes, and blood in his mouth, with every breath he tried to draw and couldn’t. That bullet got a lung. He knew. And he was losing blood fast. He knew that, too.

He was dimly aware of the men who hauled him out of the creek and carried him, running, jostling, shouting to each other—“my truck’s up there on the ridge”—“lay him in the back, and somebody sit back there to hold him”—“if we can get him into town before he bleeds to death, it’s gonna be a wonder”—“dammit won’t this truck go any faster”—

Those men. The men who saved him. Millard and Scotty and, of all people, Ras Ballenger. Toy kept thinking that maybe Ras had been the one who shot him, but Scotty was the one who kept apologizing over and over, at least he thought it was Scotty. Every sound seemed to be coming from far away, voices mingling three into one, and some soft, gurgling sound he didn’t recognize until it struck him that he was the one making it. After that, it seemed to him that he was way up above the men, looking down, thinking that he ought to tell them to let off the gas and take it easy. Life was too precious to live in a hurry.

All the adults in the Moses family spent the day in Magnolia at the hospital, all except Aunt Nicey, who volunteered to keep the children at her house. Swan and Noble and Bienville and Blade were beside themselves with grief and begged to go to the hospital, so they could be there when Uncle Toy came out of surgery, but Samuel wouldn’t hear of it.

“You can go later in the week,” he promised, “after Toy’s condition has stabilized.” He didn’t say
if,
he said
after.

“But he needs to know we’re there!” Swan wailed. “We’re the best love he has!”

Calla couldn’t imagine where the child got that kind of wisdom, but the words made her cry. She gathered Swan and the three boys all into her arms at once.

“You’re mighty right you are,” she said. Bernice was standing right beside her, looking all beautiful and insulted. Calla didn’t care. She wasn’t even done yet.

“Everybody on earth needs to know they’re loved, and I guess you four kids have given your uncle Toy something he’s had way too little of.” So there. “Now y’all go on to Aunt Nicey’s, and be good children, and I’ll tell Toy you’re doing him proud.”

So they went.

When Bootsie Phillips came to, around noon, there wasn’t a sound to be heard anywhere, and he couldn’t figure what the hell had happened. There he was on the floor, covered up with a musty old overcoat, and nobody on hand to serve him a drink.

So he served himself one. And then another. And another. It was on the third drink that he got to wondering what was keeping Toy, who was well known for stepping out into the night air and staying a few minutes when the bar wasn’t too busy. But this had been more than a few minutes.

Bootsie wandered over to the window and pulled back the curtain. All that daylight, when he’d been expecting darkness, just about put his eyes out. He dropped the curtain, then lifted it again and looked back out. Nothing was stirring on the whole place.

This had to be investigated. He went over to the door and tried to fling it open, but it refused to be flung. He was locked in. Which could be one of the best or worst things that ever happened to him. He wasn’t sure which.

Suddenly, he had to take a leak, and the bathroom that belonged to the bar was on the outside of the building. Some men would have just marched over and peed in the sink behind the bar, and Bootsie might have done that himself if it had been anybody else’s sink, but it belonged to his friends. He couldn’t just go peeing in the Moseses’ sink when these folks had been so good to him over the years. Not to mention he was hungry. So he tried the other door, the one that led into the house, and discovered that he wasn’t locked in after all.

He proceeded into the house.

The bathroom was easy to find, and so was the food. There was a plate of ham and biscuits on the table, covered up with an extra tablecloth, and Bootsie couldn’t imagine that Calla would mind if he helped himself. While he was eating, several cars pulled up out front and then drove off, and that set him wondering again what was going on here. His mind hadn’t come out of the fog enough to be working with any real efficiency, but it was working well enough now for him to realize that something was wrong. Maybe bad wrong.

He went in search of answers and found the rest of the house as empty and lifeless as the bar and the kitchen. He also found that the door between the living room and the store was as unlocked as the one between the kitchen and the bar.

He proceeded into the store.

And wouldn’t you know. No sooner had he gotten in there than another car arrived. Mindful of how the Moses family was about never closing regardless of circumstances, Bootsie went over and unlocked the door, and opened up for business.

The new arrival was Joy Beekman, who was known for coming in and taking over when anyone in the community had a tragedy. She was bringing a casserole, saying she was just so glad there was somebody there, she didn’t want to leave chicken delight out on the front steps, it might spoil, but she had wanted to bring something over to show the family she was thinking about them.

“I want them to know they’re in our hearts and prayers,” she said. “It’s so hard on a family when something like this happens, and nobody feels like lighting a match to a stove burner.”

Bootsie could see that he’d been right about there being something wrong, but he still didn’t know what it was, and he hated to admit it. So he asked the obvious question.

“Have you heard anything?”

Joy shook her head sorrowfully. “Not anything that you wouldn’t already know. Just that Toy had that horrible hunting accident this morning, and they don’t know whether he’s going to make it or not.”

Bootsie went numb all over.

Joy said, “And, if he dies, I hope to goodness they try Scotty Dumas for manslaughter and take away his hunting license.”

After she left, other people kept coming, some of them to buy, some of them to express their concern, and almost everybody bringing food—cakes and pies and what have you, every woman having prepared her specialty. Bootsie didn’t know what to do with all of it, so he let it collect on the counter until the ladies started bypassing him and carrying it into the house.

Bootsie took care of customers, and thanked everybody for being such good neighbors, and told them all he’d let Miz Calla know they’d stopped by. After a while, Millard Hempstead’s wife, Phyllis, came over and offered to tend to the house, since folks would like as not be coming and going all night, and you know how dishes can stack up when you have that many people at the same time. She said nobody could get into the hospital waiting room to even ask how Toy was doing. There were so many people in there, you couldn’t stir them with a stick.

After a while, Bootsie decided that Moses tradition could probably be honored just as well by keeping one of the businesses open as the other, so he locked the store and went back through the house, nodding and speaking to people along the way. For a man who hadn’t had a bath in two days, and had slept on the floor of a bar the night before, he was a gracious host. Phyllis handed him a plate loaded with food and told him he was a good man to help the Moses family out like this. Bootsie told her it was the least he could do.

Nobody knew where to find a key to the outside door of Never Closes, so Bootsie opened that establishment by propping the kitchen door open with a straight chair and telling the folks they were welcome to drink on the honor system. Women who had never laid eyes on the inside of a bar took guarded peeks as they walked past, and quite a few of the men took Bootsie up on his offer.

Nobody played the jukebox, though. There was no dancing or loud laughter, either. Everybody kept their voices low and their footsteps light, as they waited for word about Toy Moses.