The Heavenly Table Read online

  Bovard’s face quickly flushed crimson with anger and embarrassment. Oh, you’ve got that right, you dumb hillbilly, he thought to himself. Not a one of you sorry bastards would make a good pimple on a legionnaire’s ass. He was on the verge of blurting out such an insult when he glanced at Malone, still standing at his side, a passive look on his face, ready to take over again whenever his superior had had enough of playing leader for the day. He steadied himself. “No, we’re not,” he said instead, “but we are Americans.” Then he turned and pointed at a tall oak that stood half a mile away at the eastern edge of the base. “Three times to the tree and back, gentlemen. Follow me.”

  After he’d run them into the ground—a quarter of the men lay practically helpless in various spots along the route—Bovard casually walked over to where a shaky Wesley Franks was sprawled out in the grass attempting to uncap his canteen. “Here,” he said, crouching down on his haunches, “let me help you with that.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the boy managed to say between gulps of air.

  Bovard twisted the top off and handed the canteen back; and Wesley sat up and proceeded to drain it. Resisting the urge to tell him to slow down, the lieutenant waited until he was finished, then asked, “Where are you from, Private?”

  “Place called Veto, sir.”

  “Is that in Ohio?” Bovard said, as he tried not to stare at the sweat dripping off the boy’s smooth handsome chin onto the crotch of his brown pants.

  “Yes, sir, over near Belpre. It’s just a little place.”

  Bovard was about to ask the boy about his family when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Malone start walking toward him. “Keep up the good work, Private,” he said instead. Then he stood and jogged effortlessly across the field to meet the sergeant as several of the men lying nearby watched him with hatred in their eyes.

  “I think that’s about all they can take this morning, sir,” Malone said. “Looks like you wiped ’em out.”

  “Whatever you think best, Sergeant. I guess maybe I did go a bit overboard.”

  “Not at all, sir. Not at all. There won’t be anybody holdin’ their hand when they get to the Front.”

  They waited silently for the men to recover, watched a crew push a borrowed French SPAD out of an airplane hangar and point it toward the gravel runway. Bovard thought again about what Malone had told him in the bar last night. Of course, he knew that most of it was nothing but lies and bullshit and myths perpetuated by soldiers who were bored or superstitious or terrified, but hadn’t Homer and Virgil once sought inspiration out of the same bloody timeworn cloth? Standing in the early morning sun, relaxed by the run, he felt his eyelids growing heavy, and then…and then…and then he and Wesley are pinned down in a funk hole in the middle of No Man’s Land near a section of the Hindenburg Line. Night finally falls and they sleep in each other’s arms, exhausted and smeared with other men’s blood and guts and skin. An ugly, jaundiced-looking moon casts a sinister glow over the smoking landscape. Just as dawn breaks, a whistle sounds a long, paralyzing note from a sector of the German trenches, and, in what seems like no more than a few seconds, he and Wesley are overrun by a company of enemy soldiers, screaming savages with pointed helmets and fat, piggish faces. Though they put up a valiant fight, and Bovard imagines it as the most glorious few minutes a man could ever hope for in this world, the two don’t stand a chance against such overwhelming odds. After the Huns shoot and hack and bludgeon their bodies beyond recognition, they quickly become food, first for the swarms of flies and rats, and then, a few hours later, for the tribe of deserters that Malone claimed live in the tunnels and caves beneath No Man’s Land and prowl the battlefields under cover of darkness, robbing and cannibalizing corpses. The sergeant swore—this was sometime around whiskey number eight—that he and another stretcher-bearer had come across such a group of ghouls one night while out searching for the wounded after a particularly bloody skirmish, English and French and Russian and Italian and even a Turk, all banded together, mad as hatters and feasting on a cadaver, gibbering in some new language they had formed underground. The lieutenant was just beginning to imagine Wesley and himself being eaten, bones and all, by some nefarious monster dressed in a slop-encrusted uniform of many colors, when he became aware that someone was talking to him. His eyes flew open. Malone was looking at him curiously. “Are you all right, sir?” he repeated.

  “What’s that?” Bovard said, looking a little dazed.

  “I asked if you were all right, sir. You seemed—”

  “No, no, I’m fine,” the lieutenant said, quickly regaining his composure. “In fact, Sergeant, I don’t believe I’ve ever felt better in my entire life.”

  21

  TEN DAYS OR so after Ellsworth returned from Meade, Eula told him that she wanted to go see Mr. Slater, the teacher at the schoolhouse in Nipgen. “Why would you wanta do something like that?” he asked.

  “Well, if Germany’s where they’re a-sendin’ Eddie, I’d like to have an idy of where it is, and I figure if there’s anyone around here who could show us, it will be him.”

  Ellsworth frowned. Ever since the embarrassment with the stolen magazine six years ago, he had done his best to avoid Slater, but he couldn’t think of a good excuse not to take her; the man didn’t live but a couple of miles away. It was only after he’d agreed that Ellsworth began to see it as an opportunity. He could let him know that the boy had turned out all right after all, that he wasn’t locked up in a hoosegow somewhere for larceny or something even worse. It was the first time in ages that he actually had something to be proud of when it came to Eddie, and by the time they left for the teacher’s house the next afternoon, he was actually looking forward to doing a little bragging.

  They found Slater, a pale, skinny man with wiry red hair, lounging in a hammock tied between two chestnut trees in his front yard. He was playing a wooden flute, one much the same as a shepherd stuck with his flock on a lonely hillside might have passed the time with in olden days. A wide-brimmed straw hat covered his rather small head.

  When he saw them approaching, he rolled out of the hammock and set the flute atop a rusty overturned washtub. “Mr. and Mrs. Fiddler,” he said, taking off his hat as he walked up to their wagon. “What a surprise.” Ellsworth noted a little disdainfully that he was barefoot and had a yellow dandelion stuck behind his ear. Not only that, he didn’t appear to have on any underclothes beneath the baggy nightshirt he was wearing.

  “I hope we’re not botherin’ ye,” Eula said.

  “No, no, not at all. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, we was wonderin’ if you might have a map of Germany.”

  Slater thought for a moment as he fanned himself with the hat and scratched at a deerfly welt on his neck. “Not Germany specifically,” he said, “but I do have a map of the world, if that would do you any good.”

  “Does it have a picture of Germany on it?”

  “Well, it’s more like an outline, Mrs. Fiddler. Showing the boundaries.”

  “Do you think we could see it?”

  “Yes, of course, but if you don’t mind my asking, why the interest?”

  “That’s where Eddie’s a-goin’ to fight,” Ellsworth said, puffing out his chest a little.

  “Eddie? My God, is he in the military? I wouldn’t have thought he’d be old enough.”

  “Neither did I, but they took him just the same.”

  “Have you tried to get him back?”

  “He’d already signed his name by the time I found out.”

  “Yes, but Eddie can’t be more than…what is he, fifteen?”

  “Sixteen this past spring.”

  Slater was surprised. He certainly would have never thought Eddie Fiddler the type to run off and join the army. Immature for his age, that’s how he would have described him. Except for the time he’d stolen a magazine from his desk drawer, he had never really been any trouble, but then he had never been anything else, either. When he didn’t return after his sixth y
ear, Slater hardly gave it a second thought. Most of the boys around here just bided their time until they could quit. Only Tommy Fletcher had had the makings of a scholar, and he had thrown everything away to become some homosexual’s plaything for a year or so in Cincinnati before he was discovered mutilated and murdered in a fleabag down along the river. Thank God the boy’s parents had never found out that he was the one who had given Tommy the money for the train ticket. But Slater had learned his lesson, and it was the last time he ever got personally involved with one of his students, no matter how sorry he felt for them. Well, bravo for Eddie. Maybe the war would be good for him.

  He led them into the house and through a small, messy parlor toward the kitchen. Dog-eared books and journals were strewn about the floor, stacked high on the two battered easy chairs that sat in front of the fireplace. A layer of dust that Eula later described as an inch thick covered the oak mantel. A white hen sat clucking softly on a soiled red pillow in one corner of the room, and a mound of dirt and feathers had been swept carelessly into another. The house used to be part of the Culver farm, but it had been in Slater’s name for some time now. Though most of the teachers who had taught at the Nipgen schoolhouse in the past barely knew more than the students, he had shown up for the job interview with a bona fide bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Ohio University; and Mrs. Culver, who pretty much had her hand in everything that went on in the township, was determined to keep him, whatever the cost. Stay and get my son, Albert, into college, she had told Slater, and I’ll give you a house and five acres. He had refused at first, said he only needed the job for a year or two. He had dreams of becoming a famous playwright, of winning acclaim in the theater and traveling the world accompanied by an ever-changing entourage of beautiful lovers and bootlicking parasites. But after several summers of filling notebook after notebook with what he eventually came to realize was tepid, empty fluff that quite frankly would have made a dog sick, the idea of living out his life in quiet obscurity slowly took hold, began to seem more and more attractive. By then, Albert was ten years old. “Wonder whatever happened to ol’ Shakespeare Slater?” he could imagine some of his former classmates saying when they ran into each other. “Remember him?” There was nothing tragic or noble or self-sacrificing about it. It had felt right, that’s all. If asked, he would have said that he had finally come to the realization that he didn’t have what it takes. Better to find out early than torture yourself for a lifetime. But, of course, nobody asked. And Albert Culver? Without Slater coaching him, the poor numskull hadn’t lasted one year at the University of Toledo.

  “There it is,” he said to the Fiddlers, pointing to a cracked, sun-bleached map hanging in a lacquered frame on the wall above the kitchen table where tiny black gnats swarmed about some dirty dishes. The map had been donated to the school by Mrs. Culver’s grandfather probably around the same time that John Wilkes Booth was making his final curtain call, but it was so obsolete by the year Slater started working there that he bought a new one with money out of his own pocket and took the old one home.

  Eula and Ellsworth stepped forward, peered at all the different colored shapes. They were staring at the South Pole region when Slater realized that neither of them could read. He moved between them, stuck his finger on the map. “This is Germany, but when they send Eddie overseas, he’ll probably go to France first. From what I’ve read in the newspapers, that’s pretty much where all of our soldiers will end up.”

  “That’s somewhere over there, too, ain’t it?” Eula asked.

  “Yes,” Slater said, as he slid his finger an inch or two southward. “This is France.”

  “So then…where would we be?”

  “Right about here,” the teacher said, tapping the approximate location of Ohio.

  “Well, heck, Eula, that don’t seem very far away,” Ellsworth said.

  Slater cast a puzzled look at the farmer, but then, after a brief hesitation, started to explain, in the same patient voice he tried to maintain when he was talking to his slower students, “Oh, it’s quite a distance really. The world is a big place. You have to understand that the map just makes it look smaller. Everything is scaled down so that it can fit.”

  “And what’s this?” Eula said, pointing at the broad expanse of blue that separated America from Europe while waving gnats away from her face.

  “That’s the Atlantic Ocean.”

  Ellsworth leaned in for a closer look. “Why, that don’t look no bigger than Clancy’s pond,” he said.

  Now Slater wasn’t sure how to respond. Although the ignorance of some of the locals didn’t surprise him at all anymore, he now wondered if perhaps Ellsworth was pulling his leg. To not know the location of a foreign country was one thing, but to confuse a great ocean with a Huntington Township fishing hole was something entirely different. Even that crazy-ass preacher, Jimmy Beulah, one of the most backward-thinking men that Slater had ever met, had a rudimentary knowledge of the vastness of the earth, though he did still believe it to be as flat as a griddle cake. Oh, well, either way, the sooner he took care of their questions, the sooner he could get back to his music. He was right on the verge of finishing his first original composition, a slow, mournful piece in eight movements meant to capture the educator’s dread of returning to the classroom after the bliss of the summer break. Tentatively titled “Might as Well Hang Myself,” he had been working on it off and on for the past several years. “Anything else I can help you with?” he asked the couple.

  “No,” Eula said. “I just wanted to see where they’re sending my boy, that’s all. We appreciate ye takin’ the time.”

  A few minutes later, as they were driving home in the wagon, Ellsworth asked her, “What are ye thinkin’ about?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” she said. “Eddie, I guess. Wondering why Mr. Slater don’t get himself a wife or at least hire a housekeeper. What about you?”

  Ellsworth was also curious as to why Slater didn’t have a woman. Even a man who put flowers in his hair should be able to find some kind of mate. Then again, maybe the teacher just didn’t want the worries and responsibilities that came with being hitched. He and Eula had a better marriage than most he knew about, even with all the troubles they had gone through the past few months, but there were still occasional moments when he caught himself recalling with fondness the years when he was a single man. He didn’t know how he had done it, staying out all night running with Uncle Peanut or coon hunting with the Holcomb twins or hanging out in Parker’s back room, then working all day and doing it again the next night. Heck, these days he could hardly stay awake long enough after supper to finish a pipe. Age had finally caught up with him, as it did with everyone eventually. Even his memories were beginning to feel tired. He gave a little sigh, then said, “Do you think he’s read all them books?”

  “Probably,” Eula said. “Why else would he clutter up his house with ’em if’n he wasn’t going to?”

  “Well, I’ll tell ye this, after seeing him a-layin’ under that tree half-naked like that, I’m damn glad Eddie decided to take up soldiering. I bet they don’t put up with any of that silly horseshit in there, by God.”

  “I don’t care nothin’ about that,” Eula said. “I just want him to come back in one piece.” She started to sniffle, and from somewhere out of her dress she took out a hankie to wipe her nose.

  “Ah, don’t you worry,” Ellsworth said, wrapping his arm around her and pulling her close. “He’ll be fine. Shoot, the next time we see him we’ll probably have to salute and call him General Eddie. Now wouldn’t that be something?”

  22

  ON HIS WAY to the Senate Grill for his usual afternoon pick-me-up, Benjamin Hamm, a longtime physician in Meade, turned the corner at Paint and Second Street and saw Jasper Cone a few yards ahead, bent over in the middle of the sidewalk, wiping the crud off his measuring stick with the ragged remains of an old shirt. The doctor stopped in mid-step, then backed away and crossed the street, hoping to avoid him
. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the young man; he was just too busy today to get into another tedious discussion about Emerald Hollister’s intestinal worms or Jasper’s suspicions that Mrs. Castle over on Caldwell Street might be suffering from hemorrhoids. Because of his access to everyone’s privy, Jasper could at times be spot-on when it came to diagnosing certain health problems among the citizenry, but it was still, Hamm thought, an invasion of privacy if he discussed them, even with somebody in the medical field. So, for example, if the Appleby girl that lived on Piatt Avenue wanted to puke up every morsel of food she ate, or Mule Miller took up eating glass again, that was, ultimately, their own business.

  The doctor had known Jasper ever since moving from Baltimore to start his medical practice. He’d no sooner hung up his shingle when the boy’s mother, a high-strung, intensely devout Catholic with a pinched face and brown, puffy eyes, sent for him. He’d had a couple of walk-ins that morning with minor ailments, but this was his first house call, and he was, to say the least, a little nervous. “What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Cone?” Hamm had asked, looking around the cramped parlor. Religious icons made of plaster sat in a neat row on the mantel; a few Bibles and prayer books lay open on a table in front of the horsehair sofa. A wooden shrine to the Virgin Mary, illuminated by several candles, was set up in the corner.