The Homecoming of Samuel Lake. Jenny Wingfield

Two little boys. But Swan was focused on just one. The one who’d gotten struck by the cottonmouth. That kid. The way he was sitting there, with his head cocked to one side—looking like he didn’t care, like it was nothing. That kid’s face was burning a hole in Swan’s mind.

      She watched until the truck made the bend in the road and was blotted out by a bank of sweet gums and pin oaks. Until the whine of the tires and the chug of the motor faded down to a whisper that hung in the air for the longest time, unwilling to die.

      Chapter 5

      Sometimes, when Geraldine Ballenger wasn’t trying to think, but was letting her thoughts just drift, some quick, shining idea or insight would start to churn faster than the rest and would rocket to the surface, glimmering. She could never quite catch hold of these. They were like shooting stars. Fast gone.

      She was letting her thoughts drift now, enjoying the pleasant flow. There was a small, bright stab of light that had surfaced, a little earlier, back at the store, and it was still bobbing along in her consciousness. She gazed at it, mentally, fascinated by it. She knew better than to attempt to examine it for brilliance or for flaws. If she tried too hard to capture it, it would dissolve, or sink, or shoot out of reach. And, anyway she was content, for now, just to look at it.

      Her husband was smiling to himself while he drove. This she saw out of the corner of her eye, and her stomach did an uneasy flip-flop. When most folks smiled, it meant something good. With Ras, it could mean anything. Still, she wouldn’t let him and his smile take her mind off the lovely, shimmering Idea. She wanted to keep it in view as long as possible.

      “How long you had your eye on that ugly bastid?” Ras asked. He prided himself on his craftiness, as well as on his ability to throw her thinking off. He sure knew how to throw her thinking off.

      She just looked at him, without saying anything. When Ras was getting wound up, it was bad to talk, because he could find something incriminating in any words that came out of your mouth—and it was bad not to talk, because silence indicated guilt. It meant you couldn’t think of anything to say that would hide whatever dirty secret he was in the process of discovering.

      “I seen you droolin’ back there,” he accused. “Don’t you think I didn’.”

      Geraldine was irritated. The Idea was starting to dim a little. If only Ras would shut up so she could concentrate. She said, “Oh, you think you see so much.” She had already forgotten about it not being good to talk.

      He laughed. An obscene, snorting sound. “You’d best believe I do.”

      Geraldine shifted the baby from her lap to her shoulder and patted its back, rhythmically. She was so disgusted. The stab of light was gone. There was nothing to do now but go ahead and fuss with Ras. If you didn’t give him back a little of his own, he just got worse. Nothing made Ras worse quite so fast as knowing he had the upper hand.

      “Well, there wasn’t nothin’ to see,” she snapped.

      Ras spat a rusty stream of tobacco juice out the window and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “I reckon I know when I see a woman askin’ for it.”

      “You better quit accusin’ me of things, Ras Ballenger.” She made her voice go high and haughty. “You sure are somebody to go accusin’ people of things. Why, I don’t even know that man.”

      “Not as well as you’d like, is that it?”

      In fact, Geraldine did not know Toy Moses, had never even seen him except for times like today when he had happened to be keeping the store and she had stopped by with her husband and kids. Always with her husband and kids. She was not allowed to go anywhere alone. She knew the stories, though. About how Toy had lost his leg to save a life, and had taken a life to save his wife’s honor. These things she had heard and taken note of. Toy Moses looked out for those who couldn’t protect themselves. It was this realization that had been dancing through her mind like a will-o’-the-wisp a few minutes ago.

      She’d met and married Ras when she was only fourteen. Fourteen! Just a little split-tailed girl, and there he’d come along, a soldier back from the war, and he wasn’t bad-looking, even if he wasn’t any bigger than a mess of minutes.

      He had come strutting into her life, all quick moves and jaunty airs, and he had fair turned her head. After all, not many girls her age got courted by men who’d been everywhere and seen everything and sent more of the enemy than they could count to meet their Maker. Back then, the killing Ras had done hadn’t bothered her. Wasn’t that what soldiers are supposed to do? The only reason it bothered her now was that now she knew how much he’d enjoyed it. For Ras Ballenger, war had been a once in a lifetime opportunity.

      Oh, she had learned things about him, all right.

      Their courtship had lasted barely long enough for him to ascertain her virginity. This he had done by testing it, rather roughly. As soon as he had convinced himself on that one point he had brushed away her tears and told her there wasn’t anything to cry about. It was her fault, really, for making him so crazy, plus, he had had to know. He could never have loved a woman who had been used by another man.

      That word used should have tipped her off. Should have. But then he started talking about getting married, and she more or less forgot about everything else. She hadn’t known what she was getting into. She’d been finding out ever since.

      This upset her more at some times than at others. The first time that it had upset her badly—which was the first time Ras took a strap to her—she had begged her folks to let her come home, but they said she’d made her bed, she could wallow in it. After that, leaving never seemed to be an option.

      Actually (and Geraldine didn’t understand this herself), she didn’t always want to leave. Sure, Ras was rough with her, but he made up for it, afterward. After a while, it got to where the roughness just made everything more intense. There was a part of her that had come to believe nothing else could match that intensity. Even when she did want to get away, it was hard to imagine life without—that.

      Ras reached over now, across the bigger baby, another boy, who was staring off, exploring his nose and mouth with his fingers. Ras ran his hand under his wife’s skirt, and up the inside of her thigh, and gave the tender flesh a vicious squeeze. Geraldine was still patting the baby (her only girl) on the back, and she stopped, just for a second, gritting her teeth.

      “You wimmen are all alike,” Ras said. “Always wantin’ whatever you ain’t had. We’ll be to the house in a minute, and I’ll give you something you ain’t never had.”

      That laugh again. Edging higher, threatening to go out of control. His laugh could ricochet, change tone and direction all at once, and then hit you like a bullet in the heart. Or the head.

      Geraldine shut him out. Sometimes you had to do that, with Ras. You just had to think about other things, that was the only way. She turned her mind back to the river of her thoughts, but they had gotten sluggish and dark. With all her might, she tried to find that lovely stab of light again, that shimmering Idea that had been Toy Moses, Protector of the Helpless. But the Idea had lost its shining fire. Even if she found it now, it wouldn’t amount to anything. Once a shooting star goes out, wishing on it doesn’t do a lick of good.

      “What did Uncle Toy use to kill Yam Ferguson?”

      “What?”

      “What did he use? A gun? A knife? What?”

      Swan was sitting in the bathtub, shoulder-deep in bubbles. Her mother had been bending over the sink, washing her hair, but her head had snapped almost straight up when Swan asked her first question, and now she was swabbing shampoo out of her eyes.

      “Who told you Uncle Toy killed anybody?”

      “Lovey.”

      “Lovey talks entirely too much.”

      “She’s not the only one who’s said it. I heard you and Grandma Calla talking about it once, a long time ago.”

      Willadee