The Homecoming of Samuel Lake. Jenny Wingfield

so at a time. Then, when the peace was too much for him, and he couldn’t take it anymore, and his chest would feel like it was about to bust from the tears he’d been holding in, Toy Ephraim Moses would shatter the peace with a shot or two from his rifle. If he hit something, fine. Toy hoped Bernice would outlive him. If she should happen to die before he did, that was one funeral he’d have to go to, and he was afraid he’d turn out taking potshots at the mourners.

      Swan found out early the morning of the service that Uncle Toy wasn’t going.

      “Uncle Toy has no respect what-so-ever for the dead,” Lovey had said at breakfast. Lovey was Uncle Sid and Aunt Nicey’s youngest child. Ten years old, and spoiled rotten. She had insisted on sleeping over the night before, mostly so she could rub it in to Swan and her brothers how much better she’d known Papa John than they had, and also, so she could shame them for not crying as much as she thought they ought to. They had squeezed out a few tears, but nothing like the gallons Lovey produced. They hadn’t needed to grieve, because Papa John had lived and died a stranger.

      “You hush your mouth, young lady,” Grandma Calla had said to Lovey. “Your uncle Toy has his own ways, is all.”

      Swan had been hearing about Uncle Toy and his “ways” ever since she could remember. For one thing, he was a bootlegger—not that Swan had a clear idea of what that meant. She knew it was against the law, though, and that it could be dangerous. If Uncle Toy wanted to break the law, why not just work in Never Closes with Papa John? That sure seemed like a safe proposition. But it was like Grandma Calla said. Toy had his own ways.

      He’d been in the war, and was decorated for valor. Something about going through enemy fire to save a comrade. A colored man, no less. He got shot doing it, too. Got one leg blown clean off. That was why he walked so stiff-starched. His artificial leg didn’t have any give to it. But bootlegging when he could have been working in the bar and getting his leg blown off to save a Negro weren’t the only things that got Uncle Toy talked about. He’d killed a man once, right here in Columbia County. A neighbor named Yam Ferguson, whose family had “connections.” Yam hadn’t had to go off to war. He got to stay home and help run the Ferguson Sawmill, and chase after the wives and girlfriends of the boys whose families weren’t so well connected. Yam lived through the war, but not through the night Uncle Toy got home from the V.A. hospital.

      By the time the rest of the family was dressed for the funeral, Swan had made up her mind not to go. She got ready, along with everybody else, but she told her mama she was going to ride with Aunt Nicey, and she told Aunt Nicey she was going to ride with Aunt Eudora. Then, while everybody else was piling into the line of cars parked out in front of the store, Swan sneaked upstairs into Papa John’s bedroom. She would not look at the bed Papa John had sat down on to finish what he had started out in the pasture, under that tree. She would not look at the wall that the neighbor women had washed clean. She especially would not look at the Bible on the bedside table. It made her shudder to think that Papa John was in touching distance of the Holy Word when he did what he did, as if he just had to insult God one last time. There was no doubt in Swan’s mind that Papa John was already burning in Hell by now, unless by some chance, God took insanity into consideration. But, she figured, why have a hell if you’re going to let folks get off on technicalities?

      So she didn’t look at anything in the room. She had the feeling that, if she looked, she would see Papa John, still there, just the way his sons had found him, and she wasn’t about to chance a thing like that. Papa John was scary enough when he was alive.

      Swan walked over to the window and watched through the curtains while the caravan drove away. When the red dust had settled in the wake of the last car, Swan crept down the stairs. She could see the open door that led from the living room into the grocery store.

      Uncle Toy was standing in the store, leaning against the counter, using his pocketknife to peel the bark off a stick that he must have picked up on one of his treks into the woods. A lit Camel drooped from between his lips, and he smoked no hands. Swan stood in the doorway, watching him. She knew that he knew she was there, but he didn’t look up or say a word.

      Swan eased into the store, climbed up on top of the ice cream box, and started worrying the heel of one shoe with the toe of the other. Toy lifted his eyes, peering at her through a blue-white fog of smoke.

      “Guess you don’t like funerals, either.”

      “Never been to one.” Swan was lying, of course. Preachers’ kids attended more funerals than any other kids in the world. Toy had to know that.

      “Well—” Toy left the word hanging in the air for a while, like that said it all. He shaved down a little knob that jutted out on one side of the stick. Finally, he said, “You ain’t missed much.”

      Swan had been afraid he might say something adult like “Does your mama know you’re here?” Since he didn’t, she considered the two of them immediately bonded. Swan yearned to get close to somebody. Really close. Soul deep. She wanted the kind of friendship where two people know each other inside out and stick up for each other, no matter what. So far, she’d never had that, and she was convinced the reason was because her father was a minister.

      From Swan’s observations, there seemed to be a conspiracy among church members to keep the preacher and his family from knowing them too well. Playing cards were hidden when they came to visit. Liquor was stuck back in the pantry behind the mason jars of home-canned green beans and crowder peas. And you didn’t even talk about dancing. They just didn’t know Sam Lake’s background—but Swan did. She’d heard it said that her daddy had been a rounder back before God got hold of him. Samuel Lake had danced the soles off his shoes many’s the time, and he’d drunk his share of whiskey.

      “His share, and everybody else’s,” Willadee would say, grinning. Willadee was not a woman for protecting her husband’s image. She was a Moses, and the Moses family didn’t believe in lying. There were a lot of things the Moseses would do without a qualm, but they plain would not lie. This didn’t necessarily hold true for their children. Swan lied daily. Took pleasure in it. She fabricated the most wondrous, the most atrocious tales, and told them for the truth. The good thing about lies was that the possibilities were limitless. You could make up a world that was just like you wanted it, and if you pretended hard enough, it would start to feel real.

      The point is, church members might try to impress the preacher with how righteous they were—they might tell him what a blessing he was, and they might talk about brotherly love as if they’d invented it, but they never showed him their real faces, and they sometimes said ugly things behind his back. One thing Swan had overheard frequently was the meanest utterance since “Off with his head.”

      “Preachers’ kids are the worst kind.”

      Nobody ever said the worst kind of what, but the implication was that all preachers’ kids had illicit adventures, and Swan could never feel close to anyone who looked down on her for things she hadn’t had a chance to do yet.

      Swan didn’t have a ghost of an idea how to go about getting close with Uncle Toy. It stood to reason, though, that if you wanted to get in tight with somebody named Moses, honesty would be the best policy. Since they believed in it so strongly.

      “Lovey said you have no respect for the dead what-so-ever.” Swan hoped that was enough honesty to get his attention. She also hoped that he would take offense at Lovey for saying such a thing, and that the two of them could dislike the brat together.

      Uncle Toy just smiled a lazy smile. “Lovey said that?”

      “She damn sure did.”

      Swan figured that any man who wouldn’t go to his own brother’s or his own daddy’s funeral ought to be a safe bet to practice cussing around. She had him pegged right. He never even flinched.

      “Well …” Toy said that word like a sentence again. “I reckon I respect a person after they’re dead to about the same degree as I respected them while they was alive.”

      “Did you love your daddy a-tall?”

      “I did.”

      Which