The Homecoming of Samuel Lake. Jenny Wingfield

folks going? Don’t you know it’s not nice to eat and run?” But they kept leaving, like salt dribbling out of an overturned shaker. It was getting sparse out there.

      Calla said, “John, quit making a fool of yourself.”

      “I’ll make of myself what I damn well please,” John informed her. “I am a self-made man.” He did a lurching sort of dance step and nearly fell off the porch.

      “You are a self-made jackass,” she muttered under her breath.

      That’s when John Moses slapped her. The sound rang out, and Willadee came running across the yard. Pushing people aside. She stepped in between her mother and father and looked John Moses dead in the eye.

      “I—am so—ashamed of you,” she said to him. Her voice was shaking.

      That sobered John up. He looked back at Willadee for what seemed like eternity extended. Then he turned on his heel and walked inside the house.

      Nobody felt much like visiting anymore. They all just hung there for a little bit, wishing none of this was happening. Willadee was patting her mother’s arm, but she was staring at the door John Moses had walked through. All at once, she knew what was about to happen, just as surely as if a voice had come out of the sky and told her. She took a quick step toward the door.

      “Daddy!” she cried out, sharp and clear, but not one soul heard her say it, because the gunshot was as loud as a big clap of thunder.

      Chapter 4

      The first hour was the worst. Willadee’s brothers kept the women out of the house, but Willadee saw it all just as vividly in her mind as if she’d been the one to find the body. For the rest of her life, she would be pushing that picture back, fighting it, hating it. Trying to reduce the dimensions. Dull down the colors. She would never succeed.

      She allowed herself to be led over to a chair in the yard, but she could not sit still. She leapt to her feet and crammed her fingers in her mouth to keep from wailing. Then someone took her arm and walked her in circles, from the porch to the well to the garden to the porch. Circles. Talking. Gentle words, pouring, one on top of another, running together. More circles. Later on, Willadee would be unable to remember who this person was who saved her from hysteria.

      “My fault,” Willadee said to whoever it was.

      “Hush, shhh, hush that talk, it wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

      But Willadee knew better. She knew.

      She managed to get Samuel on the phone, and he said what she knew he’d say. That he was going to get in the car and come back. He should be there, with her and the kids and Calla. Willadee wouldn’t hear of it. He needed to be right where he was. There were enough menfolk around to handle things, and if he came up, he’d just have to turn around and go back, and it was all too much driving, too dangerous, and she couldn’t stand it if anything happened to him, too.

      “How could he do this to all of you, Willadee?” Samuel asked angrily, but she pretended not to hear.

      After she hung up the phone, Willadee didn’t know what to do. The body had been taken into Magnolia, to the funeral home. Friends and neighbors had pitched in to clean up the mess John had made. People were milling around in the yard. There wasn’t a private place anywhere to sit down and think. Willadee wondered briefly whether she should find her children and comfort them, but there weren’t any kids in sight. Someone must have gotten them out of there, taken them home with them, and would bring them back later, tomorrow morning probably.

      Alvis came over, and put his arms around her, and said, bitterly, “That old man.”

      Willadee rubbed her forehead against his shoulder, then turned away. It bothered her for everybody to be so upset with her daddy for what he’d done. His life was broken, and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so he’d just killed the man who was responsible. She picked her way through the crowd. Every way she turned, there was another sympathetic face. Someone telling her to just let go and cry it out—when she was dry and crumbling inside. Someone inquiring about the arrangements. What a word. Arrangements. What was left of John Moses to arrange? He was dead. He would rot. He had been beautiful once, and now he would rot, but not before arrangements were made, and a profit taken. Arrangements were expensive, even in 1956.

      Finally, she found her way into the bar and locked the door behind her. It was dark in there. Murky and stifling hot. But she didn’t want any lights. Didn’t want to open doors and windows to let in air, because then that sea of people outside would begin to seep in, and she would drown for sure. She felt her way along the bar, thinking about her father and the night before, and the talk they’d had, and how she’d gone to bed thinking it was all right now, everything would be all right. She stood there, holding on to the bar with both hands, not even aware that she had started crying. Great, gusty sobs. After a while, she stopped, and just laid her head against the scarred wood. That was when she realized that she was not alone.

      “I never once set foot in here, until today.” It was Calla talking. She was sitting way back in a corner, at one of the tables, all by herself. “I was so mad at him, all these years. I keep trying to remember what I was so mad about.”

      Calla Moses spent the night at the funeral home. Ernest Simmons, the funeral director, said the body wouldn’t be ready for viewing until the next day, and that she should go on home and get some rest, but she informed him that she didn’t come to view the body, she came to be close to it, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

      Willadee and her brothers all offered to stay with Calla, to keep her company. She said she didn’t want any company.

      “You don’t need to be alone right now,” Willadee insisted.

      “I’d feel more alone at home,” Calla answered stoutly. “And don’t any of you get the idea that you can start telling me what to do now that your daddy’s gone. You never had the nerve to try it before, so you’d best not start now.”

      Everybody backed off except Toy, who refused to leave. He was just as stubborn as his mother.

      “Bernice can sleep at your house, so she won’t be by herself,” he told her. “You won’t hardly know I’m here.”

      And she didn’t. Toy saw all the others off, then spent most of the night standing outside smoking one cigarette after the other and staring at the sky. Calla took a seat in an empty viewing room and closed the door, and thought about the life she’d had with John Moses.

      “It was a good life, John,” she whispered into the stillness. “We had our rough spots to go through, but it was a good life, mainly.”

      Then she demanded, fiercely, “Why the hell did you give up on it?”

      They didn’t close the store for the funeral. Calla said “Moses Never Closes” had been such a tradition for so long, and you know how Papa John was about tradition. Swan couldn’t help thinking that Papa John had pretty well played the wild with tradition by shooting himself, right in the middle of a family reunion, but you didn’t go around saying things like that. Besides, they didn’t make any money that day, didn’t charge for anything, so it wasn’t as if they were staying open out of greed. What if somebody in the community needed a jug of milk, they said. Or a jug of whiskey. Anybody had a touch of flu, there was nothing like lemon juice and sugar and whiskey to put them out of their misery while it ran its course. It wasn’t exactly flu season, but you never knew.

      Toy kept the store. He didn’t like funerals anyway. Said they were just more examples of people trying to fit other people’s expectations. When Walter had died, Toy had slunk off into the woods with his .22 and taken potshots at squirrels while the rest of the family was doing what was expected of them. He figured his brother’s spirit was still close—maybe with a few things heavy on his mind that he’d been meaning to say but never got around to. So Toy went to the woods, and he listened. He and Walter had hunted those woods together since they were towheaded kids. They were close, the two of them. More than blood close.

      Toy