A door slammed. Blade was sure he heard a door slam. He hoped and feared that he was right. And he was. His daddy’s voice came singing out across the yard, talking to the dogs, telling them to shut up and settle down.
Blade braced himself.
Chapter 23
What Swan intended to do was rescue Blade Ballenger. It had been three days now, and she was through fooling around.
The whole family had been under a cloud since they woke up to find their gifts still on the back of the stove. There’d been a lot of talk among the grown-ups (mostly in hushed tones, when they thought the kids weren’t listening) about what might have become of the boy, and how they all wished they could help him, and how the law and Ras Ballenger would come down on them like a pestilence if they tried, but not a word about just marching in there and getting him.
Swan had mentioned the Battle of Jericho to her daddy and had pointed out that, if God had really given Joshua an edge like that, then surely He would bless their efforts at saving Blade. After all, Joshua and his crew had to bring down the walls to a fortified city. All they had to do was scare one slimy little snake of a man into having a heart attack. Or at least distract him long enough to snatch his kid. She said since they didn’t have trumpets, she thought they ought to use cowbells. There were a bunch of old, rusty ones out in the barn, and they made a terrible racket when you shook them real hard.
Samuel explained to her that you can’t go around trying to reproduce the miracles that happened in biblical times, and she told him you sure could if you had faith as a grain of mustard seed. That was something she’d heard him preach about a lot—how a tiny seed of faith could yield a mighty harvest.
“It’s like you’re always saying in your sermons,” she told him, “if we show God our faith, He’ll show us His favor.”
“I’m just not sure that surrounding the Ballenger place with a bunch of cowbells is the best way to go about it,” Samuel said.
But he didn’t offer any better ideas, and neither did anybody else, so Swan decided to take matters into her own hands. The problem was that she had only two, and she needed more. Well, she knew where there were four.
Noble and Bienville nearly swallowed their teeth when she unfolded her plan to them.
“That man will kill us, Swan,” Noble said.
“Not if he doesn’t catch us,” Swan said back. “What we’ve got to do is make sure we have the Lord on our side before we start this operation. And the way we do that is with prayer and fasting.”
“How long do we have to fast?” Bienville wanted to know. He wasn’t sure what else they were having for supper that evening, but he’d seen their mama making banana pudding the last time he passed through the kitchen.
Swan had been thinking that twenty-four hours might be about right. That wasn’t as long as people generally prayed and fasted in the Bible, but this was an emergency. When she heard about the banana pudding, she cut the time down even more. It seemed to her that, if they skipped lunch (which was probably going to be peanut butter sandwiches) and spent the time on their knees before the Throne of Grace, that ought to do it. The way she saw it, they could rescue Blade and be back home in time for supper.
Swan knew how to get to the Ballenger place by taking the road and the lane, but she figured the best way to sneak up on somebody was to stay out of sight while you’re doing it. There had to be a back way, since there can’t very well be a front without a back, and it just made sense to her that, if she followed the creek, she would find what she was looking for. After all, Blade and his daddy had both shown up back there that day when she was looking for a place to baptize Lovey, and they had to have gotten there somehow.
There’s a certain amount of preparation that goes into doing a rescue, and one of the most crucial parts is making sure that grown-ups don’t come looking for you right when you’re about to make your Big Move. (Not showing up for a meal is the surest way on earth to get big people out looking for little people.) Swan and her brothers took care of that problem by telling their mother part of the truth—that they were planning to spend some time in prayer and fasting on Blade’s behalf. Willadee offered to join them, but they told her that wouldn’t be necessary, they had the prayer and fasting pretty much under control.
Willadee told her mother what the kids were up to (at least what she thought they were up to), and Calla Moses got tears in her eyes. “Maybe we ought to pray and fast right along with them,” she said. She’d never prayed and fasted a day in her life, and had always thought the fasting part was going overboard, but she was touched by what the kids were doing and wanted to show her support.
“I already offered,” Willadee answered. “They seem to want this to be just between them and God.”
Well, Calla could appreciate that. She’d always been a great believer in keeping your relationship with God to yourself when at all possible.
The kids had their prayer meeting out in the barn, kneeling on the blankets that they hadn’t let their parents take back to the house yet.
“When Blade ever does show up,” Swan had explained, “it would be so nice for him to find a soft spot waiting for him.”
She couldn’t bear the thought that he might never show up, and neither could the rest of the family. The blankets had stayed.
Noble, being the oldest, led the prayer meeting, and he did an impressive job of it. He’d been going to prayer meetings since before he could remember. The boy knew how to pray.
“Lord,” he started out, “Swan and Bienville and I come before You asking for strength.”
“Amen!” said Bienville.
“Yes, Lord!” said Swan.
“We need Your help in arresting Blade Ballenger out of the hands of evil,” Noble continued.
“Wresting,” corrected Bienville.
“Keep praying, Brother Noble,” said Swan.
Noble kept praying. As a matter of fact, he kept on for so long that Swan finally decided God had heard enough. There’s a time for praying and there’s a time for putting prayers into action.
The hard part was going to be keeping the cowbells quiet while they approached the Field of Battle. Bienville wisely counseled that they could accomplish that by wrapping the clappers with rags and then unwrapping them, quickly and carefully, when they were ready to cut loose.
So they had to find some rags. Which was no trouble. Grandma Calla had a big box full of cleaning rags under the counter in the store. Getting them out of there without her noticing would be the challenge. Not that Grandma Calla was overly attached to those cleaning rags. She had plenty of old pillowcases she could tear up to make more. But the kids didn’t want her to start asking questions.
It was Swan’s job to get Grandma Calla’s attention while the boys borrowed the rags. The word steal was not in their vocabulary today. You do not steal when you are on a Holy Mission.
Swan wasn’t born yesterday. And she hadn’t been living at Grandma Calla’s since the first week of June without learning how to get her attention good and proper. She went up to the door of the store and stuck her head inside, and looked as guilty as her grandmother used to always expect her to be. Calla had stopped expecting that so much lately, or had at least stopped talking so much about it.
“I may have torn up some of your flowers by mistake,” Swan said when Grandma Calla looked over and saw her there. Now lying is just as bad as stealing, and just as likely to result in God not blessing a rescue, but Swan wasn’t lying. Exactly. She said “may have.”
“I thought you kids were praying and fasting.”
“We are. But I had to come back to the house for something—and I may not have watched where I was going.”
“I’ve got plenty of flowers,” Grandma Calla told her kindly. “I’ve got so many flowers, you can’t hardly walk around the house without stepping on some of them. Which flowers do you think you may have torn up by mistake while you may not have been watching where you were going?”
Swan h
esitated for an appropriate length of time before answering. This had to seem like she really hated to admit what she was about to own up to.
“Your poppies,” she whispered remorsefully.
Calla Moses was around that counter and out the door before Swan could even blink. You’ve never seen a woman her age move so fast. She’d been trying to get poppies to grow on her place for a decade, and she’d never had any luck with them. Until this year. This year, they’d shown up and showed out, and the first thing Calla did every morning was go outside to look at them. She’d even had Toy pull the glider over there close to them so she could sit and have her coffee while she admired their colors. She didn’t say anything to Swan as she went past. It’s hard to talk when you’re chewing your tongue.
Swan waited until Calla had disappeared around the corner of the house, and then she let out a discreet whistle. Her brothers whizzed out of hiding and into the store. Swan took off after her grandmother.
When she got around to the other side of the house, she found Grandma Calla sitting in the glider looking as if she’d thought she was having a stroke and realized it was only a hot flash.
“Why, there’s nothing wrong with those poppies,” Grandma Calla said.
“Maybe it was the tiger lilies I may have torn up,” Swan hedged.
“You can’t hardly tear up a tiger lily,” Grandma Calla informed her. “They’re tough as nails. That’s why you see them still growing around old house places fifty years after the folks who lived there have moved off or died out.”
And then she said, “You can’t hardly confuse a tiger lily with a poppy, either.”
There was a squint on her face when she said it. Kind of a suspicious squint.
“Where’s that box of cleaning rags you always keep under here?” Willadee asked Calla later. They were leaning against the counter, munching peanut butter sandwiches, and Willadee was of the belief that, when you’re eating standing up, you might as well be doing something useful.
Calla looked under the counter and saw that the box was gone.
“So that’s what that was all about,” she said. “I knew Swan Lake could tell the difference between a tiger lily and a poppy.”
Willadee asked her what on earth she was talking about, and Calla said she wasn’t sure, but at least they didn’t have to worry about whether the kids were all right. Between praying and fasting and lying and stealing, they were probably too busy to get into any real trouble.
While Noble and Bienville wrapped the clappers with the cleaning rags, Swan took the additional precaution of borrowing three duck calls that she had come upon once when she was pilfering in the toolshed. Cowbells were great for just making racket, but they weren’t in any way kin to trumpets, and Swan thought this whole event would be more authentic if they had instruments they could blow through. They wedged the duck calls into the cowbells, in among the wadded rags.
The trip across the pasture was pretty much like any other trip across the pasture, except that the kids were considerably quieter than usual. The seriousness of what they were doing was starting to weigh on them. There was no turning back now, though. Blade Ballenger needed saving, and there was nobody else willing to do it.
When they got to the creek, they hunkered down and drank out of cupped hands, the way they imagined the Hebrew Children would have done. They were extra watchful while they drank, well aware that nothing they’d ever done before had entailed any true danger—and that this time was different.
Bienville wanted to do a little more praying before they set off again, but Swan told him he could pray while they walked.
“That’s what the Bible means when it says to pray without ceasing,” she said. “It means you gotta keep moving while you’re doing it.”
They didn’t slow down again until they got to the high bank above the swimming hole, and then they came to a dead halt, all of them going dry-mouthed at the same time.
“Oh noooooo,” Swan moaned.
Noble and Bienville just stared.
What had drawn them up short was the sight of clothes strewn about on the ground. Bienville’s clothes. The ones that Blade had been wearing the last time they saw him. There were the clothes, but where was the boy? He wasn’t in the swimming hole, and there was no good reason they could think of why he’d be out running around the woods in the altogether.
“You think something ate him?” Bienville gasped.
Noble gave a disgusted snort. “If something ate him, it undressed him first. The clothes would be all ragged and bloody if something ate him.”
Well, the clothes weren’t ragged, and there wasn’t any blood. So that was good.
Swan went around gathering up the clothes and holding them close to her heart. Her brothers examined the area for signs of a struggle. There were no signs.
“If anybody grabbed him, he didn’t put up much of a fight,” Noble reasoned.
Which didn’t do much to set Swan’s mind at ease. She remembered how hard Blade had fought the other day to get away from Uncle Toy, and he hadn’t left any signs of struggle in the calf lot. When a kid is being held up in the air by someone several times his size, the ground can’t bear witness to what happened.
Now they had an even greater sense of urgency, but they moved more cautiously—watching their step, and not talking at all anymore. They had to be getting close to Ballenger land, which meant they were getting closer to finding out just how well this miracle business really worked.
There are moments in our lives that we more or less stumble upon—moments that we could not have predicted, and were not prepared for, and would have done almost anything to avoid—and the Lake children were coming up on one of those.
According to the plan that Swan had laid out earlier, as soon as they discovered the Enemy, they were to march around the area seven times, just like the priests had done at the Battle of Jericho. They were not to speak or make any sound whatsoever until they’d made the seven rounds. Then they would silently unwrap the clappers and—on a signal from Swan—would shake the cowbells and blow on the duck calls. If seven trumpets had been all it took to make the walls of Jericho fall flat, three cowbells and three duck calls ought to be enough to knock the legs out from under Ras Ballenger. It would be up to Almighty God to keep him down long enough for them to locate Blade and carry him to safety.
Only, they never got a chance to implement the plan. They had just crawled under a barbed-wire fence that they reckoned (rightly) marked the boundary between Grandma Calla’s land and the Ballenger place when they heard a voice. The boys didn’t recognize it, although they could figure out who it belonged to. Swan didn’t have to figure. She knew for sure.
“Whoops!” Ras Ballenger was saying. Taunting. “Where you think you’re goin’? Nope. Not that way.” And then, “Not that way, either.”
Swan and her brothers got still as statues, afraid to even breathe. After a moment, they crept along toward the sound, which was coming from the other side of a bank of weeping willows.
They had to scrunch down low and pick their way through the drooping branches. Careful not to rustle the leaves on the trees, or the ones underfoot. When they were almost to the other side, they spied a clearing up ahead—a big open space where a couple of large pines had been uprooted, probably in the storm. The pines had fallen crossways, snapping off several of each other’s limbs in the process. Broken branches littered the ground.
There in the middle of the mess was Blade. Not a hundred yards away. He was wearing clothes that were grime-encrusted, and he was just as dirty, his fine black hair matted to his scalp. He was gathering wood. Scurrying about, this way and that, faster and faster, as his father popped his hateful bullwhip and barked instructions.
“Missed a piece there!” Ballenger yelped, herding the boy back and forth. “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you do anything right?”
Swan was so stricken at the sight that she reached out and grabbed hold of Noble’s arm to steady herself.
Bienville was on the other side of Noble, and he grabbed hold of his big brother’s shirttail. Noble let the others hold on to him, but he himself was having trouble standing up.
Then it happened. Blade couldn’t move fast enough to escape the whip, and it caught him about the face. He let out a piteous bleating sound and stopped darting around. Stopped moving at all.
Swan and her brothers stared in horror at their friend’s startled look. At the blood that was leaking from where his right eye had been.
Swan fainted.
Noble felt his sister letting go of his arm, and he managed to catch her before she hit the ground. Managed to let her down easy, so she wouldn’t get hurt in the fall, or hit with a thud that would alert Ballenger to their presence. Bienville had turned loose from Noble’s shirttail and was standing rigid, with his eyes squenched shut and his lips clamped together, so Noble was the only one who saw what happened next.
Ras Ballenger got a look at what he had done and he shook his head more like he was inconvenienced than like he was sorry. Still carrying the whip in his right hand, he went over and scooped Blade up and carried him under his left arm like a farmer might carry a squealing pig. Out of the clearing. Out of sight.
Gone.
Chapter 24
Willadee saw them coming when they topped a rise far out in the pasture and headed into the homestretch. They were following an old, worn cow path, the one they always took. She’d seen them make that trek dozens of times and never felt her heart seize up inside her chest, but that’s the way it felt this time.
She was out in the backyard shelling purple hull peas, her thumbs and fingers stained all to glory and the dishpan in her lap half full. She set the dishpan aside and stood up to get a better look. Something was wrong. She knew it. For one thing, Swan wasn’t in the lead, and that hardly ever happened. For another thing, she was holding Noble’s hand.
The Homecoming of Samuel Lake Page 18
