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.
