there might be something to complain about. This not being a preacher’s kid was sounding less and less appealing. What worried her most was the niggling thought that maybe her father had fallen out of God’s favor. She couldn’t imagine how that could have happened. Nobody tried harder to do the right thing than Sam Lake. Surely God was aware of that.
Naturally, Blade didn’t hang around waiting until Swan got back to her room. By then, he’d already slipped out of the house and trotted home. He told his mama he’d been playing down by the creek, and she said he must’ve followed it north to Alaska, he sure didn’t answer when she called him half an hour ago, and since when did he go out to play before the rest of the family got their eyes open.
Geraldine had the ironing board set up in the living room (she took in ironing for pay), and she was smoking a Pall Mall. Her face was about five different colors, mostly shades of blue, with cuts and scrapes crisscrossing each other along her jaw. What had happened the night before was, Blade’s daddy had been teaching his mama how to behave right, and Blade had just wanted to get away. It was scary when his daddy taught anybody about anything. Sometimes, when it happened, Blade pretended to be asleep, but last night, there’d been no pretending. Ras had been pulling Geraldine around the kitchen by the hair of her head and whacking her with a metal spatula. Geraldine had gone from crying and begging him to stop to trying to fight back, which was never a good idea. Blade had tried not to hear, and tried not to hear, and finally, he had just climbed out the window.
At first, he had sat huddled against the well shed, drawing pictures in the dirt with his fingers, which was something he did a lot at times like this. He didn’t have to see what his hands were doing when he was drawing, and he didn’t have to be looking at something to draw it. He’d always drawn in the dark, usually without even thinking about it. Anyway, he could still hear everything, so he had walked out farther in the yard, and then down the lane, until he was far enough away that it all got pretty quiet. And then that girl had come along.
Blade didn’t know why he had decided to follow her. Maybe it was because he had the feeling that, wherever she was headed, nothing scary was going to happen. She sure didn’t seem afraid of anything—except for when she first fell down. She was awful scared then, for a minute, like she thought the devil was about to get her. But once she got over that, she was solid as a rock.
Anyway, he was glad that he had trailed along behind her. In his own mind, he had already laid claim on Swan Lake. She was a safe place—and something more that he was too young to understand or put into words. All he knew was that he wanted to hold on to the feeling he’d had the night before, and to let it wrap around him like a warm blanket on a cold night.
Chapter 9
Bernice could hardly stand the way she felt the next few days. For one thing, she kept imagining the whole family knew about her throwing that fit the other night. Everybody except Toy. Generally, Toy was careful not to know things he’d be happier and more comfortable not knowing. He’d been that way ever since that ugly business with Yam Ferguson, back after the war. But as for the rest of them—with everybody living in a heap like this, nobody would be able to poot without somebody smelling it.
Not that Bernice ever pooted.
The other thing that was making Bernice miserable was that, lately, she’d been having this time’s-a-wasting-and-so-am-I sort of feeling. You don’t go along for years being the prettiest thing around, and then realize that you’re in full flower, without getting a little anxious, since the next stage after full flower is when the petals start to droop and fall. So here she was, ripe and lush, with all her petals still pointing in the right direction, and Sam Lake didn’t even notice.
Well, she’d have to do something about that.
Bernice tried to think of ways to make Sam notice. She thought about it in the daytime, after she and Toy got back to their own house. He always hit the sack as soon as they got home from Calla’s, and usually didn’t wake up until midafternoon. While he was asleep, Bernice would roam from room to room, as silent and graceful as a butterfly. Briefly lighting here and there. On a chair. On the couch. Sometimes, outside, on the porch rail. There were gardenias blooming beside the steps, and the smell was so sweet, it would catch in her throat and make her want to cry.
She thought about it at night, when she sat alone in Calla’s swing, with the music from Never Closes rollicking in the background. She thought about it when Samuel and Willadee and the kids headed back to Louisiana to have their farewell service at the little church they were leaving. She thought about it all the time. Somehow there had to be a way to make Samuel see the truth—that he was miserable without her.
With every hour that passed, Bernice felt an increasing sense of urgency. She wasn’t getting enough sleep, she wasn’t getting what she wanted, and she wasn’t getting any younger.
It was late Friday night when Samuel’s car chugged into the yard, pulling a trailer that was piled so high with furniture and boxes it was a wonder it had made it under the railroad trestles along the way. Grandma Calla was waiting up for them. She came down off the porch, picked her way through the muddle of customers’ vehicles, and leaned in the car window, talking loud above the juke joint racket.
“Just unload the kids, and go park the trailer in the barn,” she told Samuel. “It’s too late to move your stuff inside, and you wouldn’t want anybody pilfering through it.”
Samuel did as she said.
On Saturday, Calla’s toilet backed up, so Samuel had to spend the day digging up the septic tank field line. He had no trouble finding it, since the grass on top of those things always grows so much greener and brighter than the grass around it, but he had plenty of trouble chopping out the sweet gum roots that had grown through it and tangled around it. The job took all day. The car and the trailer stayed shut up in the barn, and nothing got unloaded, so there was none of the usual commotion that occurs when a family moves into a house. Which is why folks around the community were pretty much in the dark about the fact that Sam Lake and his family had moved back home to Arkansas.
Bernice didn’t go down to breakfast on Sunday morning. She just stayed in bed thinking about how wrong this situation was. And that’s how it happened that she first got the Inspiration.
Actually, it was Samuel who inspired her, although he didn’t know it. He and Willadee were in their room getting dressed for church, and their voices drifted through to her, clearer than clear. Bernice didn’t even have to press her ear to the wall to hear. It was as though This Moment Was Meant to Be.
Willadee was asking Samuel if he was all right about this—about going to church this morning, knowing that people were going to be asking him why he wasn’t back home in Louisiana, preaching to his own congregation. (For sure it was going to be humiliating for him to admit that he didn’t have a congregation.) And Samuel was saying that he wasn’t about to let the Lord down by not showing up at His House on His Day.
“I have to believe that there’s a reason for all this,” he said. “Maybe there’s something I’m supposed to do right here that I couldn’t do if I were anywhere else. Maybe there’s someone that I’m supposed to reach out to, or some problem I’m supposed to help with.”
Bernice sat straight up in bed.
In the next room, Willadee was agreeing with Samuel. It must be that God had something for him to do here, and the only way to bring it about was to uproot him from Louisiana loam and replant him in Arkansas clay, and probably the fields were right now ripe unto harvest.
Bernice flung back her covers and leapt out of bed. The fields were
