The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield Page B

could pour piss out of a boot, he’d have him whipped into shape. (He for sure didn’t elaborate on that one.)
    Right now, Ras was doing what he always did first with a new horse, which was to let the animal’s anxiety take over. He could stand here all day, if it took all day, just giving the horse a chance to realize that whatever happened next would be something it would have no control over whatsoever. An uncertain horse was a horse that made mistakes. And a horse that made mistakes was a horse that could be corrected. And that was the point where Ras Ballenger would start to truly enjoy his work.
    “You’re thinkin’ ’bout it now, ain’t you?” he asked. Talking soft. Laughing low.
    Snowman moved to the far side of the pen and turned his head away.
    “You’re thinkin’ ’bout how you’re bigger than me, and faster than me, and how you got four feet to my two,” Ras went on, and his voice sounded deceptively kind. “You’re wonderin’ whether this is all gonna be hard or easy, ain’t you, Snowman?”
    He stepped inside the pen, and walked over to the horse, and took hold of its halter, and snapped on a lead rope, which was already attached to a sturdy post that was cemented into the ground.
    “Well, I’m here to tell you, Snowman—it won’t be easy. ’Cause easy just ain’t no fun.”

    When Brother Homer Nations got up to make the announcements, the first words out of his mouth were the ones Samuel dreaded.
    “We’ve got a very special visitor this morning, folks,” Brother Homer proclaimed. “One of the best and most devout men I’ve ever been privileged to know. Samuel Lake. Stand up, Samuel. Let us get a look at you.”
    Samuel stood up. He hated to, but he did it. He looked around at all the people, and smiled at them, and nodded to them, and they all smiled and nodded back. Brother Homer beamed and cleared his throat, to indicate that he had more to say. The congregation dutifully turned their eyes back to him.
    “Ordinarily, we don’t get the honor of having Samuel with us for services. But tragic circumstances have brought him our way this morning. Samuel, I know you’re here to be with your wife’s family in their time of grief. I just want to say that you all have our deepest sympathies, and our heartfelt prayers.”
    “Thank you, Brother Homer,” Samuel said. “We appreciate that.” And then he added, “I just hope you folks don’t get tired of looking at me, because Willadee and the kids and I are moving home.”
    Brother Homer said, “Well, praise the Lord! Where will you be preaching?”
    Samuel looked around at the people, these people he had grown up with, who respected him and looked up to him, and he said, in that calm, resonant voice of his, “I don’t have a church this year. I’ll be preaching wherever God provides me with a pulpit.”
    You could have knocked those folks over with a feather. If Sam Lake didn’t have a church, that meant that the Methodist conference hadn’t seen fit to appoint him to one. And if that were the case, there had to be a reason. Methodists might be dead wrong about not believing in closed communion and once-saved-always, but they seemed to do right by their preachers. Surely they didn’t lay them off for nothing, like mill hands during a slow season. Something bad must have happened, and Samuel must have been unfairly blamed for it.
    At this point, nobody was even thinking, at least not seriously, that maybe Samuel himself had done anything wrong. Those thoughts would come later. For the moment, the people were all for Samuel.
    Brother Homer’s sermon was all full of hellfire and brimstone, which wasn’t really the side of religion that Samuel liked to emphasize, but concentrating on the message kept his mind off of what would come next, which was visiting with people after the service and having to explain over and over that he and the Methodist church weren’t seeing eye to eye these days. Willadee had been right. It was