The Homecoming of Samuel Lake. Jenny Wingfield

      “You married into an irreverent family,” Alvis’s wife, Eudora, told her. “You got to take the bad with the worse.”

      John had closed the bar just before sunup that morning and had gone straight to bed, figuring that would give him five or six hours of sleep, enough sleep for a well man, and he was certainly feeling like a well man. Calla’s store was operating on the honor system, the way it always did on reunion day. Folks who needed to buy something just went in and got what they wanted, and left the money or a note in a jar on the counter. There weren’t many customers until after church, when folks started drifting in, picking up last-minute items like brown ’n’ serve rolls and whipping cream for their Sunday dinners. It was the most natural thing in the world that quite a few of the customers would drift from the store into the yard, and would visit for a while, protesting that they really had to be getting on home until somebody put a plate into their hands and they were forced to stay and eat.

      Swan, Noble, and Bienville had a hard time figuring out who was kin and who wasn’t. The closest relatives they remembered from year to year, but there was this sea of nonrelatives, not to mention second cousins, and third cousins, and great-aunts twice removed. This cracked the kids up. “If that old bird’s been twice removed, how come she keeps coming back?” they would whisper to each other, and then they’d snicker until they got the hiccups or a swat on the pants from their grandmother, whichever happened first.

      John Moses woke up just before noon and wandered down to join the celebration. His sons and Willadee all came up out of the yard onto the side porch to greet him. The side porch had been added onto the house way back, shortly after John had walled in the back porch. John said a house wasn’t a home if it didn’t have a porch, a man had to have something to pee off of. Indoor plumbing was fine, as far as it went, but it never would offer a man the same sense of freedom that a porch would. The daughters all hugged John’s neck (Willadee rubbed his stubbled chin lovingly), and the sons all shook his hand. John smiled from ear to ear.

      “Somebody said there was a party,” he boomed.

      “They was right,” Toy Moses said.

      Toy looked nothing like his name implied. He stood six foot four, with muscles that rippled powerfully beneath his cotton shirt. He walked real straight and stiff-starched. Straighter than anyone Swan and her brothers had ever seen. There was a scar on his forehead and a tattoo of a belly dancer on his arm, and all told, he had the look of a man you wouldn’t want to mess with. He was soft-spoken, though, especially when he was talking to his daddy. He said, “You better come on out here and get some grub, before it’s all gone.”

      John said, “You won’t have to twist my arm,” just as cheerful as you please, and he led his brood back down the steps.

      When everybody had eaten until they were stuffed, the grown-ups flopped down into lawn chairs and onto the grass, and commenced talking about the good old days. The littlest kids all got put down for naps, and the teenagers meandered out to the cars to listen to the radio and talk about things they ought not to know about. Noble tried to join this worldly crowd, but he was coolly rejected, so he slunk off to the creek to think his own thoughts. Swan and Bienville crawled under the house (which was pier and beam, a good four feet off the ground) with a couple of cousins their own age and built toad houses. This was accomplished by mounding dirt over their bare feet and patting it down good, then carefully pulling their feet out, leaving perfect toad dwellings, suitable to accommodate the pickiest of toads.

      It was about three o’clock when John Moses started feeling a serious need for a drink. He’d been fighting the feeling ever since he woke up, and he’d thought he was winning the battle, but all of a sudden his fighting spirit waned, and he decided what could it hurt, he wasn’t going to drink himself into a stupor after all he was too happy for that. So he got to his feet and announced, ceremoniously, that he had to go to the bathroom.

      All his kids looked at all his other kids, and the looks they were giving each other were looks of dread. John Moses couldn’t help noticing.

      “Anybody find anything wrong with that?” he demanded. After all, he had just as much right to go to the bathroom as anyone else.

      Nobody made a sound.

      John said, “Well, if nobody has any objections …,” and he took off for the house.

      No one said anything for a minute or so. They just sat there looking as if they’d been waked up from a good dream. Then Alvis said, “Well, sonofabitch. I thought for a while there we had it made.”

      Willadee was chewing a hole in her lip, trying to decide whether or not to follow her daddy and head him off before he could get drunk and ruin the reunion. But then she remembered the beers she’d had the night before, and the pleasant grogginess that had followed, and she thought, Maybe he won’t ruin anything, maybe he’ll just relax a little, and go to sleep, and that will be the end of that. She stayed put in her lawn chair.

      Calla stood up and got herself a clean paper plate. “I don’t believe I’ve tasted Eudora’s friendship cake,” she said. “Anybody else want a piece of Eudora’s friendship cake while I’m up?”

      John went through the house and into the bar, and he sat down on the first barstool he came to. Giving in and having a drink wasn’t something he wanted to do today. He wanted to make them all proud of him. They had seemed proud of him all afternoon.

      By the time he poured the first two fingers of Johnnie Walker into a glass and drank it down, he had come to realize that every one of them (except for Willadee, who was above reproach) had been stringing him along, in order to manipulate him into staying sober. He poured three fingers the next time, instead of two. Willadee’s face seemed to be swimming before him, so he squenched his eyes closed, trying to shut her out.

      “Willadee, you just get on out of here,” he commanded, but she refused to leave.

      “I said get out of here, Willadee. You and I can have a beer and talk about this, after everybody else is gone.”

      When he opened his eyes, the image of Willadee had disappeared.

      “Where’s Walter?” John Moses asked. He had just come from the bar back through the house, and from the house out onto the side porch. The porch was full of people, and the yard was running over with people, and altogether, it was more people than John could deal with comfortably, since he was looking for just one face, and it was nowhere to be seen.

      It got so quiet even the wind quit blowing.

      “I said, where’s Walter?” John bellowed.

      Toy was sitting in the porch swing with his arm around his wife, Bernice, who was outlandishly pretty, even though she was thirty-five years old and ought to be starting to fade.

      Toy left Bernice and came over beside the old man. “Walter’s not here today, Daddy.”

      “The devil you say.” John’s words were slurring into one another. “Walter wouldn’t miss a Moses reunion.”

      Then John remembered why Walter wasn’t there. “You shouldn’t have let him go to work, Toy. You shouldn’t have ever let him go when he wasn’t feeling good, and you knew it.”

      Toy got a sick look on his face. “You’re right, Daddy. I know that.”

      John said, “Split open, like a slaughtered—”

      But he didn’t get to finish. Calla had come up the steps and stood facing him.

      “Why don’t you and me just go inside and take us a rest?” she asked. Which changed the world John Moses was living in. All of a sudden, he wasn’t thinking about Walter anymore. He was thinking about the fact that he’d been sleeping alone for more than a decade.

      “What?” he ripped out, raucous-sounding. “You’re saying you wanta go roll around in the old marriage bed?”

      Calla just stood there. Wordless. Her lips going white. Out in the yard, relatives and nonrelatives began skittering around,