The Heavenly Table
ALSO BY DONALD RAY POLLOCK
Knockemstiff
The Devil All the Time
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Donald Ray Pollock
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover design by Michael J. Windsor
Cover composite images: Shutterstock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pollock, Donald Ray.
Title: The heavenly table / by Donald Ray Pollock.
Description: New York : Doubleday, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036275 | ISBN 9780385541299 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385541305 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.O5694 H43 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036275
ebook ISBN 9780385541305
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
Also by Donald Ray Pollock
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Patsy always
and
For Barney, the best dog ever, who passed away October 1, 2015
1
IN 1917, JUST as another hellish August was starting to come to an end along the border that divides Georgia and Alabama, Pearl Jewett awakened his sons before dawn one morning with a guttural bark that sounded more animal than man. The three young men arose silently from their particular corners of the one-room shack and pulled on their filthy clothes, still damp with the sweat of yesterday’s labors. A mangy rat covered with scabs scuttled up the rock chimney, knocking bits of mortar into the cold grate. Moonlight funneled through gaps in the chinked log walls and lay in thin milky ribbons across the red dirt floor. With their heads nearly touching the low ceiling, they gathered around the center of the room for breakfast, and Pearl handed them each a bland wad of flour and water fried last night in a dollop of leftover fat. There would be no more to eat until evening, when they would all get a share of the sick hog they had butchered in the spring, along with a mash of boiled spuds and wild greens scooped onto dented tin plates with a hand that was never clean from a pot that was never washed. Except for the occasional rain, every day was the same.
“I seen me two of them niggers again last night,” Pearl said, staring out the rough-cut opening that served as the only window. “Out there a-sittin’ in the tulip tree, singin’ their songs. They was really goin’ at it.” According to the owner of the land, Major Thaddeus Tardweller, the last tenants of the shack, an extended family of mulattoes from Louisiana, had all died of the fever several years ago, and were buried out back in the weeds along the perimeter of the now-empty hog pen. Due to fears of the sickness lingering on in a place where black and white had mixed, he hadn’t been able to convince anyone to live there until the old man and his boys came along last fall, half starved and looking for work. Lately, Pearl had been seeing their ghosts everywhere. The morning before, he’d counted five of them. Gaunt and grizzled, with his mouth hanging open and the front of his trousers stained yellow from a leaky bladder, he felt as if he might join them on the other side any minute. He bit into his biscuit, then asked, “Did ye hear ’em?”
“No, Pap,” Cane, the oldest, said, “I don’t think so.” At twenty-three, Cane was as close to being handsome as any sharecropper’s son could hope to get, having inherited the best of both parents: his father’s tall, sinewy frame and his mother’s well-defined features and thick, dark hair; but the harsh, hopeless way they lived was already starting to crinkle his face with fine lines and pepper his beard with gray. He was the only one in the family who could read, having been old enough before his mother passed for her to teach him from her Bible and an old McGuffey borrowed from a neighbor; and strangers usually viewed him as the only one of the bunch who had any promise, or, for that matter, any sense. He looked down at the greasy glob in his hand, saw a curly white hair pressed into the dough with a dirty thumbprint. This morning’s ration was smaller than usual, but then he remembered telling Pearl yesterday that they had to cut back if they wanted the sack of flour to last until fall. Pinching the hair loose from his breakfast, he watched it float to the floor before he took his first bite.
“Only thing I heard was that ol’ rat runnin’ around,” Cob said. He was the middle one, short and heavyset, with a head round as a chickpea and watery green eyes that always appeared a little out of focus, as if he had just been clobbered with a two-by-four. Though as stout as any two men put together, Cob had always been a bit on the slow side, and he got along mainly by following Cane’s lead and not complaining too much, no matter how deep the shit, how small the biscuit. Even telling time was beyond his comprehension. He was, to put it bluntly, what people usually referred to in those days as a dummy. You might come across such a man almost anywhere, sitting on his haunches around some town pump, hoping for a friendly howdy or handout from some good citizen passing by, someone with enough compassion to realize that but for the grace of God, it could just as easily be himself sitting there in that sad, ragged loneliness. Truth be told, if it hadn’t been for Cane looking out for him, that’s pr
obably how Cob would have ended up, living out his days on a street corner, begging for scraps and the occasional coin with a rusty bean can.
The old man waited a moment for the youngest to respond, then said, “What about you, Chimney? Did ye hear ’em?”
Chimney stood with a dazed look on his pimply, dirt-streaked face. He was still thinking about the splay-toothed floozy with the fat tits that the old man’s raspy squawk had chased away a few minutes ago. Last night, as with most evenings whenever Pearl passed out on his blanket before it got too dark to see, Cane had read aloud to his brothers from The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, a crumbling, water-stained dime novel that glorified the criminal exploits of an ex-Confederate soldier turned bank robber cutting a swath of terror throughout the Old West. Consequently, Chimney had spent the last few hours dreaming of gun fights on scorched desert plains and poontang that tasted like honey. He glanced over at his brothers, yawning and scratching like a couple of dogs, eating what might as well have been lumps of clay and listening to that nutty bastard prattle on about his black buddies in the spirit world. Of course, he could understand Cob buying Pearl’s bullshit; there weren’t enough brains in his head to fill a teaspoon. But why did Cane continue to play along? It didn’t make any sense. Hell, he was smarter than any of them. Being loyal to any old mother or father was fine up to a point, Chimney reckoned, no matter how crazy or senile they had become, but what about their own selves? When did they get to start living?
“I’m talkin’ to you, boy,” Pearl said.
Chimney looked down at the shelf of greenish-gray mold growing along the bottom of the cabin walls. A simple yes or no wasn’t going to cut it, not this morning. Perhaps because he was the runt of the family, rebelliousness had always been the bigger part of his nature, and whenever he was in one of his defiant or pissed-off moods, the seventeen-year-old was liable to say or do anything, regardless of the consequences. He thought again about the juicy wench in his dream, her dimpled ass and sultry voice already fading away, soon to be extinguished completely by the backbreaking misery of swinging an ax in another hundred-degree day. “Don’t sound like no bad deal to me,” he finally said to Pearl. “Layin’ around pickin’ your teeth and playin’ music. Christ, why is it they get to have all the fun?”
“What’s that?”
“I said the way things is goin’ around this goddamn place, I’d trade even up with a dead darkie any day.”
The room went quiet as the old man pulled his slumped shoulders back and tightened his mouth into a grim leer. Clenching his fists, Pearl’s first thought was to knock the boy to the floor, but by the time he turned away from the window, he’d already changed his mind. It was too early in the morning to be drawing blood, even if it was justified. Instead, he stepped closer to Chimney and studied his thin, triangular face and cold, insolent eyes. Sometimes the old man almost found it hard to believe the boy was one of his own. Of course, Cob had always been a disappointment, but at least he had a good heart and did what he was told, and Cane, well, only a fool would find fault with him. Chimney, on the other hand, was impossible to figure out. He might work like a dog one day and then refuse to hit a lick the next, no matter how much Pearl threatened him. Or he might give Cob his share of the evening meal, then turn around and shit in his shoes while he was eating it. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind between being good or evil, and so he tried his best to be both. Not only that, he was woman-crazy, too, had been ever since he first found out his pecker would get hard. And he didn’t give a damn who knew it, either; you could hear him jerking it over there in his blanket two or three times every night, especially if Cane had read to him again from that goddamn book they treasured like a holy relic. Pearl thought about something he had once heard an auctioneer say at a livestock sale, about how when the stud gets older, the litters get weaker, not only in the body, but in the head, too. “Don’t just go for your animals, either,” the man said. “Had an old boy back home caught him a young wife and decided at fifty-nine he wanted to bring one more of his own into the world before he dried up for good. Poor thing was born one of them maniacs like they got locked up in the nuthouse over in Memphis.”
“What happened to it?” Pearl had asked.
“Sold it to some banana man down in South America who collects such things,” the auctioneer replied. Back then, Pearl had dismissed the notion as part of some sales pitch to run the bidding up on a pair of young bulls, but now he realized there might be some truth in it. Though he hated to admit it, from the looks of things, his seed had already lost some of its vigor when he and Lucille made Cob, and by the time he shot Chimney into the oven, it had gone from slightly tepid to downright sour.
Even so, perhaps because he was the youngest or had yet to grow the scraggly beard his brothers wore, Chimney was still the one that reminded Pearl of his dead wife the most. He leaned closer and stared into the boy’s eyes even more intently, as if he were peering into a smoky portal to the past. Chimney looked over at his brothers again, took the last bite of his biscuit. The old man’s breath reeked of stomach gas and rancid drippings. A solitary bird began to twitter from somewhere close by, and suddenly Pearl was recalling a long-ago night when he had walked Lucille home from a barn dance just a few weeks before they married. The autumn sky was glittering with stars, and a faint smell of honeysuckle still hung in the cool air. He could hear the gravel crunching beneath their feet. Her face appeared before him, as young and pretty as the first time he ever saw her, but just as he was getting ready to reach out and touch her cheek, Chimney shattered the spell. “Hell, yes,” he said, “maybe we should ask them niggers if they’d be a-willin’ to—”
Without any warning, Pearl’s hand whipped out and caught the boy by the throat. “Spit it out,” he growled. “Spit it out.” Chimney tried to break away, but the old man’s grip, seasoned by years of plowing and chopping and picking, was tight as a vise. With his windpipe squeezed shut, he soon ceased struggling and managed to spew a few wet crumbs from his mouth that stuck to the hairs on Pearl’s wrist.
“Pap, he didn’t mean nothing,” Cane said, moving toward the two. “Let him go.” Though he figured his brother probably deserved getting the shit choked out of him, if for no other reason than being a constant aggravation, Cane also knew that getting their father too upset this early in the morning meant that he would push them twice as hard in the field today, and it was tough enough working a slow pace when you had but one biscuit to run on.
“I’m sick of his mouth,” Pearl said through clenched teeth. Then he snorted some air and tightened his hold even more, seemingly resolved on shutting the boy up forever.
“I said let him go, goddamn it,” Cane repeated, just before he grabbed the old man’s other arm and wrenched it behind his back with a violent twist that filled the room with a loud pop. Pearl let out a piercing howl as he jerked free of Cane and shoved Chimney away. The boy coughed and spat out the rest of his biscuit onto the floor, and they all watched in the gloomy half-light as the old man ground it into the dirt with his shoe while working the hurt out of his shoulder. Nothing else was said. Even Chimney was temporarily out of words.
When Pearl was done, they all followed him out of the shack single-file. Cob stopped at the well and drew a pail of water, and they carried it, together with their tools—three double-headed axes and a couple of machetes and a rusty saber with a broken tip—along the edge of a long green cotton field. As the sun crested the hills to the east, looking like the bloodshot eye of a hungover barfly, they came to a swampy piece of acreage they were clearing for Major Tardweller. He had promised them a bonus of ten laying hens if they finished the job in six weeks, and Cane figured they might just make it at the rate they were going. He peeled off his ragged shirt and draped it over the top of the canvas bucket to keep the gnats and mosquitoes out, and another day of work began. By afternoon, with nothing but warm water sloshing around in their guts, all they could think about was that sick hog hanging in the
smokehouse.
2
THAT SAME MORNING, several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler went to wake his son and discovered he was already up and gone. He stood for a moment looking at Eddie’s empty bed, then walked to the barn on the slim chance that he might be there, but there was no sign of him. Going back to the house, he checked to make sure Eula, his wife, was still asleep, then slipped down into the cellar beneath the kitchen. Just as he feared, there were at least two more jars of his blackberry wine missing. “I never should have let him have that first taste,” he mumbled to himself, thinking back to last Christmas. The holiday had been a gloomy one, mostly because Ellsworth had lost his and Eula’s life savings to a con man in a checkered suit the previous September, and he thought that sharing a drink with Eddie might brighten things up a bit for the boy. Ellsworth’s own father had allowed him a glass every night from the time he was twelve, and he’d turned out all right, hadn’t he? Looking back on it, though, he should have known better. Eddie was already prone to daydreaming and telling fibs and shirking his chores, and even a little hard cider sometimes did strange things to people like that. And sure enough, ever since that first sip, down in the cellar listening to Eula moving around in the kitchen above them while she stuffed the Christmas bird, a tough, stringy Tom that he’d traded Roy Cox some old harness for, the boy had become, on top of everything else, a regular boozehound.