“Because Mr. Odell Pritchett is gonna wanta examine his horse,” Ras said. “And I don’t intend to deprive him of the privilege.”
Blue had gotten a little lost in all that, but he said it back the best he could.
“Mister Oh hell Pritchett wanta ’zamin he horse, and I don’t tenprive-prittilege!”
Chapter 16
Blade had no idea how long it would take for Snowman’s welts to go down, but he knew that, once it happened, that horse was done for. Sickness welled up inside him, followed by fury.
Nothing else his daddy had ever done had had quite this effect on Blade. Everything else he had accepted as just being the way things were. He didn’t know and didn’t ask himself why this was different. But it was.
All day long, he stewed over it. Ras buzzed around the place mending tack, mucking stalls, cutting the grass in the yard with a sling blade. Blue dogged his tracks, as usual, and (as usual) got patted on the head and told how smart he was. Blade crawled under the porch and sat there in the shadowy semidarkness, drawing pictures with his fingers while his mind tried to figure out what to do.
It wouldn’t do any good to plead with his daddy not to kill the horse. That would just get it killed sooner, and maybe ensure that it suffered more in the process. Blade would have liked to call Mr. Odell Pritchett, and tell him what was going on, and ask him to please come get Snowman. But to do that, he’d have to get the man’s phone number out of his daddy’s billfold, and figure out how to make a long-distance call, and somehow manage to make the call without getting caught. Three mountains he didn’t feel nearly big enough to climb.
He wished his daddy would disappear. He didn’t exactly wish, the way his mother did, that Ras would die. That kind of wish would have been hard for a boy Blade’s age to live with. He just wished that Ras would walk off into the woods, or take off in the truck, and never come back. Now you see him, now you don’t. He’s gone.
But Ras wasn’t gone. He wasn’t gone today, and he wouldn’t be gone tomorrow. He was here, and he was going to kill the horse, and there was nothing Blade could do to stop him. Unless …
(And here, Blade’s mind balked a little. Shied away like bare feet from broken glass.)
Unless … he could make the horse disappear.
Blade Ballenger had never been more afraid of his daddy than he was in the moment when he unlatched the chain on the gate to the holding pen and stepped inside with Snowman. Up until that precise instant, if he’d gotten caught, he could have made up some story about why he was outside in the middle of the night, or he could have just clammed up, like anybody would expect from a kid who was too dumb to know it. Either way, there would have been consequences, but Blade was used to consequences. His life was pretty much one consequence after another.
If he got caught now, that would bring consequences of a kind that he’d never known but had had nightmares about. As a precaution, he had kept on his sleepers (his mama’s term for whatever shirt and underwear he’d had on that day), instead of putting on britches, because what if his daddy heard him rustling around getting dressed and came in there to see what he was up to?
There was no use thinking about it. Thinking about it wouldn’t do any good, and besides, nothing was going to change his mind. He was going to let Snowman out of that lot, and watch him run away to freedom, and then he was going to slip back into the house and get back in bed, and hope that that horse would get all the way to Odell Pritchett’s house before Ras Ballenger woke up and the devil came to breakfast.
Of course Blade couldn’t begin to guess how far it was to Camden, or how long it would take to get there, or whether a horse had enough gumption to find its way back to where it came from. He was just hoping.
When he had crawled out through his bedroom window, a few minutes ago, the curs had all lifted their heads and trained their eyes on him. He had worried they might set in howling, and wake everybody up, but they’d been seeing him crawl through that window two or three times a week for a while now, so it must have just seemed like business as usual. They didn’t even follow him across the yard.
Snowman was standing facing away from the gate, and he didn’t move a muscle when Blade came into the lot with him. Blade walked over beside him and stood looking up at him, wondering what to do next. He knew better than to try to drive Snowman out of the lot, because then the horse might take to rearing and whinnying and crashing around, which would get the dogs to barking, and then all hell would break loose. Blade thought about leading Snowman, but Ras had left the horse unhaltered, so there was nothing to reach up and grab hold of. While the boy was examining his options, Snowman wandered over and walked out of the lot on his own.
“Good boy,” Blade whispered, almost silently. “Go on. Go!”
But the horse stopped outside the gate and stood beside the fence, like it was waiting for something.
Blade couldn’t imagine what the horse could be waiting for. There for sure wasn’t one good thing going to happen to it if it stayed around here. But maybe animals don’t know those things. A dog, for instance, won’t generally run away from home, no matter how it’s treated. It might go off to a convention once in a while, but it’ll come back when the party’s over. If it’s able.
Anyway, Snowman should have been lighting a shuck out of there, but he kept standing beside that fence, still as a statue. On impulse, Blade climbed the fence, and swung one leg over, and maneuvered himself astride the horse, hoping against hope that his luck wouldn’t play out now. He tangled both hands in Snowman’s mane, and squeezed with his knees to keep from falling off, and dug his bare heels ever so gently into the big horse’s sides to get him moving.
“That way,” he was saying, silently, inside his mind. “Over there, Snowman. To the creek. All we have to do is follow the creek.”
A couple of hours before daylight, Toy Moses did something his daddy never would have done. He cut off a paying customer.
The customer was Bootsie Phillips, a logger, who was one of Never Closes’s most faithful regulars. You could always count on Bootsie to come in early, stay until everybody else had gone home, and spend every last dime he had. Never mind that he had a house full of hungry mouths at home, and the money could be better spent on groceries. He’d been there since the bar opened, and he was so drunk he had to hold on to the jukebox to feed it change, but he wasn’t showing any signs of being ready to call it a night.
After a while, Toy asked him if he was determined to stay there until his money was all gone, and Bootsie said he damn sure was.
Toy said, “Just a minute,” and walked out the back door of the bar, through the house, and into the grocery store. He gathered milk and eggs and bread and bacon and canned goods and flour, and a double handful of penny candy, and he sacked it all up. Then he marched back through the house and into the bar. Right over to where Bootsie was trying not to fall off his stool.
“Your money’s all gone,” Toy said.
Bootsie tried to look at Toy, but his eyes wouldn’t focus.
“Th’hell y’say,” he mumbled.
Toy held out his hands and waggled his fingers. Bootsie obediently dug in his pockets, and brought out all his money, and handed it over. Toy jerked his head toward the door.
“Come on. I’ll drive you home. You can get somebody to bring you back to get your truck tomorrow.”
Bootsie slid down off the stool and informed Toy darkly that he could drive his own damn self home. Either that or he said he was running for president. The way he was slurring his words, you couldn’t be sure.
Didn’t matter what he said, Toy was propelling him out the door. When they got outside, and Bootsie was stumbling ahead of Toy, making for the parking lot, Toy Moses slipped the money Bootsie had given him into the grocery sack. One logger’s wife was about to get a triple surprise. Her husband, home before daylight, with food for the family, and enough money to buy more.
Toy got back to Calla’s just at the beginning of what he thou
ght of as the pearly grays—the soft perfection that envelops the world right before dawn. Toy’s favorite time of day. Or it used to be, when he was just getting out of bed at that hour, instead of just getting a chance to fall into it. The lights were on in Calla’s store, so he knew she was already in there starting coffee and getting ready to take care of her regulars as they began straggling in.
He swung down out of the truck and started toward the store, but then he saw something off to one side that made him do a double take. Out there beside the chicken pen, in Calla’s pretty garden—or what was left of Calla’s garden—was a horse. A big, white horse covered with filthy smudges. The animal had already gone through the corn, which had been coming on strong, thanks to the fish guts that Toy had been planting out there all spring, and now it was working on the purple hull peas.
Toy didn’t wave his arms or holler at the horse, because if it spooked and trampled the squash and tomatoes, that wasn’t going to fix the corn and peas. Instead, he just walked on out to the garden, moving easy, keeping his arms to his sides. There was nothing to do but catch the horse, and pen it up, and ask around until he found out who the owner was. That shouldn’t take long. You didn’t see many horses as pretty as that one would be if somebody gave it a bath and took a brush to it.
When he got closer, he felt like a fool for thinking the horse was just dirty. For not realizing straight off that those dark smudges were dried blood. At first he figured the animal had gotten tangled up in a barbed-wire fence, but that theory didn’t hold up. Barbed wire leaves jagged wounds, and the barbs can gouge out chunks of flesh. These marks were straight, crisscrossing each other. They’d been laid on with a whip. It had been a long time since Toy Moses had felt the kind of anger that boiled up in him now.
When he was about ten feet away from the horse, Toy stopped walking and stood still. The horse stopped eating and eyeballed him warily.
“It’s all right, boy. You can run away, if you want to. But you’d be better off here than wherever you come from.” His voice was soft as well water.
The horse backed away several steps. Toy backed away just as many.
“I sure wish you could talk,” Toy said. Then he backed off another couple of feet and broke eye contact with the beast. So, of course, the horse moved toward him. Just a little. Just a fraction. Toy still didn’t look at the horse, but he kept on talking, low and peaceful.
“If you could tell me who did this, I’d give him a taste of his own. See how he likes being on the receiving end.”
The horse must have had kind treatment at some time, Toy thought, because now he came closer. Toy stood still and waited. When the horse was near enough to touch, Toy resisted the urge to reach out to him. Just breathed in and out, deep and slow. And waited.
The horse offered his face. Toy told it hello the way horses say hello to each other, by breathing into his nose. The horse bobbed his head up and down as if to say that Toy Moses was all right, and he didn’t mind visiting with him. In slow, slow motion, Toy took off his belt, and looped it around the horse’s neck, and led the mighty Snowman out of Calla Moses’s garden.
The kids didn’t know what to think when they came down for breakfast and there wasn’t any. Well, there was a pan of cold biscuits on the back of the stove, and a bowl full of eggs on the cook table that Willadee must have been planning to scramble but hadn’t gotten around to. Swan’s first thought was that somebody else must have died, because she’d never in her life known her mother to forget to feed her children.
When she looked out the kitchen window and saw the sheriff’s car parked under a shade tree, she knew for sure that she’d been right. Not that the sight was all that unusual. That car was in that same spot for an hour or so most nights, while the sheriff and his deputy were in Never Closes, but the sheriff had never come around in the daytime except when Papa John shot himself. So this was bad.
The only person left in the family who was old enough to die was Grandma Calla, but it couldn’t be her, because there she was standing beside the sheriff, both of them watching something that Swan couldn’t see because Uncle Toy’s truck was in the way.
“Oh, no,” Swan breathed. Tragic. Her mind was going ninety to nothing, conjuring up images of all the terrible things that could have happened, and who they could have happened to.
“Oh, no, what?” Noble asked. He and Bienville had gotten themselves cold biscuits, and were poking holes in them with their fingers. Pouring Blackburn-Made syrup into the wells they’d made.
Swan didn’t answer. She was already out the door.
Chapter 17
Sheriff Early Meeks was born prematurely, back at the turn of the century, and he’d been Early ever since. Early was the name his daddy gave him, thinking it was cute, and everybody agreed that it was, even Early, once he got big enough to have an opinion. Early was more than a name. It was who he was. Sunday School started at 10:00 A.M., so he was there at 9:45. He was supposed to show up for work at 8:30, so he came in at 8:00. He never seemed to be in a hurry, but he was always, always early.
Sheriff Meeks was an extreme sort of man. Extremely tall, extremely lean, and (for the most part) extremely just. Once in a while, his idea of justice varied somewhat from the letter of the law, and when that happened, he bent the law like a coat hanger.
Years ago, when Yam Ferguson had turned up in his own front yard with his head on pretty much backward, Early had been the first lawman on the scene. The body was behind the wheel of Yam’s convertible, and the engine of the car was still warm, but Yam wasn’t. Even if Early hadn’t already been handed all the pieces of this puzzle, it wouldn’t have taken much imagination to figure out that Yam didn’t drive himself home that night.
Everybody knew that Yam had been messing around with the wives of at least half a dozen soldiers who were off fighting for their country. Knew it, and despised him for it. They also knew that Toy Moses was the only one of those soldiers who had come home that evening.
This they knew because, when Toy got off the bus in Magnolia, he caught a ride with Joe Bill Rader, who lived a few miles past the cutoff to Toy’s place. As soon as Joe Bill got home, he told his wife, Omega, how Toy, who never had been much for conversation, talked the whole solid way about how glad he was to be home, and how he hadn’t told Bernice he was coming because he didn’t want her going to a lot of fuss and trouble getting things ready for him. When they got in sight of Toy’s house, and saw the tail of Yam’s car sticking out on the other side, Toy’s whole face went slack for a second, and then he asked Joe Bill not to stop. Said he’d forgot he needed cigarettes, and thought he’d just go on down to his mama’s store and get some. The last time Joe Bill saw Toy, he was standing in front of that store looking like a man who wished he’d been sent home in a pine box.
Omega wasted no time calling her sister, Almarie, who couldn’t be blamed for passing the news on to a few trusted friends. One of those friends was Early’s wife, Patsy, so Early already had a little background information when he got that phone call sometime after midnight. The one from a man whose voice he recognized.
“I thought you ought to know that Yam Ferguson is dead,” the voice said. “I expect you’ll be wanting to talk to me, but I’d appreciate it if you could give me a few hours first.”
Early had given the man more than a few hours. He’d given him all these years, and still had not asked him a question. He knew all he needed to know, without even thinking about it. Toy had left the store and gone back to his house and walked in on something he couldn’t handle. Yam had turned out dead, and Toy hadn’t wanted the body to be found at his place. If that had happened, Bernice would have been the talk of the town. Of course, she turned out to be anyway, but since Toy moved the body, she could at least pretend to be as much in the dark as anybody else regarding what had become of Yam Ferguson.
There wasn’t a mark on Yam’s car when Early got there, but the front end was bashed in like a sonofabitch by the time he called in to the o
ffice and told the night man that he’d been passing by Yam Ferguson’s house a little while ago and saw his car in the yard. He said he stopped to find out if Yam was sick or drunk or what, and when he got up to the car, he could tell it had been wrecked. Looked like maybe Yam had run into a tree, and the poor bastard must have broken his neck from the impact. How he managed to drive himself home was a mystery.
The Ferguson family didn’t buy that story for a minute, and they raised a big stink, but it didn’t do a bit of good. Judge Graves had lost a son in the war, and he’d been dying a little himself since that day. The way he saw it, Yam had gotten just what was coming to him.
The first thing Swan asked when she got out to Grandma Calla and Sheriff Meeks was “Who died?”
Grandma Calla said, “Nobody yet.” Which Swan took to mean “You’d better watch your step today, Swan Lake.”
Grandma Calla hadn’t taken her eyes off of whatever she was looking at, so Swan turned her eyes in the same direction, and she practically did die, at what she saw. Over in the calf lot, Willadee was stroking and soothing a huge white horse while Uncle Toy swabbed turpentine onto the animal’s oozing wounds. The horse quivered—maybe scared, maybe just hurting—but it stood the treatment without a sound.
Swan went queasy, and wanted to turn away, but she couldn’t.
Sheriff Meeks made a contemptuous racket in his throat and spat off to one side.
“What’s the matter with that horse?” Swan wanted to know. “How’d we get it?” What she really wanted to know was whether it could be hers, just hers. She could already see herself taking care of it and spoiling it and being the best friend it could ever have. If that horse belonged to her, it would never want for anything, not one solitary thing. She would brush it and pet it and feed it sugar cubes. Swan had read in books about kids feeding sugar cubes to horses, and it sounded like a sure way to make one come when you called it. Grandma Calla didn’t keep sugar cubes in her kitchen, but she had some in the store, and Swan would talk her out of a box, she’d even work for it if she had to. Doing things for that horse—her horse—would not be work, it would be a labor of love, and she wouldn’t mind, she’d put her whole heart into it. Shoot, her whole heart was already there.
The Homecoming of Samuel Lake Page 13
