Read The Homecoming of Samuel Lake for Free Online Page A

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