The Heavenly Table Page 14

  “It’s my son,” the woman said, a sob catching in her throat as she looked toward the narrow stairs leading to the second floor. “He’s…he’s…” she stuttered.

  “Well?” Hamm said, hoping it was something easy, like constipation or a stomachache. With the ink on his medical degree barely dry, he didn’t think he was quite ready to tackle something life-threatening yet. He was sure his lack of confidence would soon go away, but a few more days to settle in before he confronted something complicated or ghastly would be a blessing.

  “It’s not something a lady can talk about,” she said, wiping delicately at a tear running down her powdered cheeks. “Just look him over and you’ll see. An adjustment, that’s what he needs.”

  “A what?”

  “An adjustment,” she repeated. “So he’s normal.”

  Shit, this must be bad, Hamm thought, as he looked down at the string of rosary beads she was squeezing in her hand. “What’s his name?” he asked.

  “Jasper,” she managed to whisper right before she gave a little swoon and carefully crumpled onto the horsehair sofa.

  Hamm climbed the stairway with a sense of dread. Though he really didn’t believe in a divine being anymore, he stopped near the top and crossed himself anyway, hoping for some guidance and preparing for the worst. It was inevitable, he had been told in medical school, that he would lose a patient now and then, but why did the first one have to be a child? “Just do your best,” he told himself, as he walked toward the open door at the end of the hall. However, when he entered the room he found a boy standing rigidly in front of a bed, looking quite healthy except for a frightened look on his rather plain, bony face.

  “Well, lad,” Hamm said, after introducing himself, “can you tell me what’s wrong? I can’t make heads or tails out of what your—”

  “I don’t want you cuttin’ on it,” Jasper interrupted.

  “On what?” Hamm asked, figuring the boy must be suffering from a cyst or tumor of some kind.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Jasper unbuckled his pants and let them drop to the floor. He wasn’t wearing any drawers. Hamm stood there speechless for a minute, staring at the long slab of meat hanging between the boy’s skinny legs. “So this is what your mother was talking about?” he finally said. “Your penis?”

  Jasper nodded grimly, then reached down and pulled his pants back up over it. “She wants you to whack some of it off, but I’d rather you maybe tried to shrink it like those Africans do with the heads and stuff.”

  Only then did the doctor realize what the woman meant by “an adjustment.” Lord, could she be serious? He glanced about the room, bare except for a small dresser and a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall above the neatly made bed and a long rifle leaning in the corner. “But why?” Hamm asked.

  “To make me normal,” the boy replied. “Just like she told ye.” Then he began to tremble and a single tear flushed from one of his brown eyes and dripped off his chin onto the floor.

  “Now don’t worry, son,” Hamm said. “I’m not going to touch it, let alone operate on it, I promise. How old are you?”

  “Be twelve my next birthday.”

  “So you’re still in school?”

  The boy shook his head. “Mother won’t allow it. She says freaks shouldn’t be seen in public.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He got killed right after I was born,” Jasper said. “Over at the paper mill.” He turned then and pointed at the rifle. “He bought that buffalo gun just for me. You ever seen one before?”

  “No, can’t say that I have.”

  “Mother won’t let me shoot it, but one of these days I will.”

  Hamm looked out the window into the backyard, saw a couple of chickens pecking in the dirt, a mangy cat stretched out on a low hanging limb in a mulberry tree. Once, as part of his surgical training, he and several classmates had dissected a cadaver. The man on the table had been found frozen to death on a bench in downtown Baltimore in the middle of the day. Just a tramp with no name, no next of kin. Other than that, the only thing Hamm remembered about the poor fellow was that he’d had the biggest cock any of them had ever seen. Pumped up, it would have been the length of a hatchet handle and as big around as a specimen cup. They had all gone out for a beer afterward, and, of course, there had been much joking about it, most of them finding it hard to believe that a man who possessed something so magnificent could have ever ended up alone in the gutter. And by the time Jasper’s quit growing, Hamm estimated, as he watched the cat suddenly drop from the tree and slink off through the grass, his would be even larger than the one they had removed from the bum, the one that had ended up pickled in a jar of alcohol in a dark closet alongside some mutated embryos and a three-headed mouse.

  “Your mother,” the doctor told Jasper, “just doesn’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with you. Certainly not anything we can fix anyway. You’re just going to have to live with it. My God, son, probably ninety percent of the men the world over would give anything to have your problem.”

  That had been sixteen years ago, and now Jasper was twenty-seven. But what most men would have looked upon as a great gift, he had always considered a curse. Of course, his mother was to blame, with her insane, unrelenting tirades about Devil’s spawn, perverted desires, and hellish retributions. Growing up in such a house, Jasper became half-mad himself. It was a lonely life, filled with shame and guilt. As far as the doctor knew, he had never been with a woman. If he had, she would have probably ended up in the hospital a medical emergency, needing stitches at the very least. Not long after Hamm examined him, Jasper started keeping his penis bound up in a homemade truss constructed from a swatch of coarse canvas and strips of leather cord and a pair of silk bloomers he found lying behind the Blind Owl Saloon on one of those few nights when his mother forgot to lock him in his bedroom. But then, when he was eighteen, Cassandra Cone died from a heart attack while walking home with one of her chickens from a Blessing of the Animals service. Suddenly, Jasper’s world opened up in ways he’d never dreamed of. Within days of her passing, his uncle, the broom maker, got him a job emptying outhouses with a scavenger named Itchy Ingham, and every evening after they shoveled the last load of shit off the honey wagon, they took turns shooting rats out at the city dump with the buffalo gun. For someone whose life had been as joyless and stunted as Jasper’s, every day with the easygoing Itchy was like a holiday. He and the old man worked and ate and murdered rodents together six days a week. Then one blazing hot afternoon in the summer of 1915, Itchy keeled over and died in the middle of scooping out a particularly odious crapper at a boardinghouse over on Chestnut Street that catered to men who worked at the Old Capitol Brewery. Besides Jasper, the only other person who attended the funeral was Ernie Bagshaw, the dump keeper. The next day, Jasper made a place in the shed behind his house for Gyp, the donkey that pulled the honey wagon, and went back to work by himself.

  A year later, after a spring flood sent a hundred shithouses floating down Mulberry Street into the Scioto, and six people died of cholera after drinking water from a fountain in the city park, water suspected of being tainted by the nearby jakes, the city engineer, a man by the name of Rawlings, convinced the mayor to call an emergency meeting of the city council to discuss the raw sewage situation. The engineer, fresh out of Wabash College, was brimming with modern ideas, and though he didn’t come right out and say it, for fear of being pegged a crackpot or, even worse, a Socialist, his hope was that somehow they could start pressuring citizens to install indoor plumbing. The debate went on for several hours, but in the end the city leaders reluctantly voted 5 to 1, with one abstainer, that they should hire what Rawlings referred to as a “sanitation inspector.” He admitted it was a new concept, but one he felt was necessary if they wanted to avoid any more disasters like the one that had occurred in the spring. “Good,” he said after the votes were tallied. “I’ve got just the man in mind.”

  “Who might that be?” Bus
Davenport, the school superintendent, asked suspiciously. After being involved professionally with children for so many years, he found it difficult to trust anyone who might possibly have been one in the past.

  “Jasper Cone.”

  The howls of protest could be heard three blocks away. “At least hire someone who’s qualified!” Sandy Saunders, an insurance salesman and the one nay voter, yelled, banging the silver-headed cane he always carried on the varnished floor.

  “There’s not a soul in this county who knows more about filth than that boy,” the engineer said.

  “And could you remind us again exactly what he’d be doing?” queried Homer Hasbro, the mayor and sole abstainer, quietly, as he poured himself a drink of water from a pitcher on the table. Though Homer was inept in almost every way, he had still somehow learned that the single best thing a politician could do to survive was absolutely nothing, and he had won his last four elections by expertly riding the fence. Privately, he was in favor of any modern convenience, but he wasn’t about to sacrifice his cushy job by becoming actually involved in pushing for one. The majority of people hated change more than anything.

  “Going around and checking privies.”

  “That’s it?” Saunders said incredulously.

  “Of course not. If he finds one that’s in danger of overflowing and polluting a well, either their own or their neighbors’,” Rawlings explained, “he’ll issue a warning ticket. Then they’ll have a few days to set things right before the city starts fining them three dollars a week. Gentlemen, I can’t stress enough the need for immediate action. Right now there are approximately nineteen hundred outhouses within the city limits.”

  “Wait a minute,” Henry Tatman, the new owner of Lange’s Grocery, said. “Who’s going to be doing the emptying? Since Cone’s a scavenger, wouldn’t this be a…a…”

  “Conflict of interest?” Biff Landers said. Twenty years ago, Landers had been a law student at the University of Michigan, but a hazing incident turned deadly had gotten him expelled and seemingly stuck forever in a low-level supervisory position in the boiler house at the paper mill. Now his lungs were full of coal dust and the closest he’d ever come to realizing his dream of arguing a case in a courtroom was when he was summoned as a material witness in a former friend’s divorce proceedings. There wasn’t a day went by when he didn’t regret tying the noose around that little freshman’s neck.

  “Yeah,” Herman Matthews, the real estate agent, chimed in, “he’ll be making money hand over fist. Maybe we should think this over some more.” Though he’d just voted for the measure, he was already beginning to have a change of heart. As the owner of at least a dozen rental properties, none of which had indoor plumbing, it had just occurred to him that he might be held responsible if his tenants didn’t abide by the new law.

  “No,” Rawlings said, “that won’t happen. I’ve already talked to him about it. He understands he’ll have to quit the honey-dipping if he takes the inspection job.”

  “But calling him an inspector?” said Saunders. “Jesus Christ, Rawlings, we’re talking about Jasper Cone. Does he even know how to read? People will think we’ve lost our goddamn minds.”

  “It’s just a job title,” the city engineer replied. “Call him what you want.”

  “Well, then, who’s going to take over his business?” Edgar Blaine asked. A Presbyterian minister by trade, he had recently retired, and it had taken him most of the evening to figure out exactly what was being discussed. Up until just a few minutes ago, he thought they were planning some sort of celebration. He had told his wife again this morning that his brain wasn’t working right, that it would be better if he let someone else have his seat on the council, but she wouldn’t hear of it. For some reason, no matter how many times he came down to breakfast wearing nothing but socks on his hands, or tried to butter his bread with a coffee cup, she still refused to believe that his best years were behind him. Why couldn’t she see that he just wanted to spend his time in the garden with a blanket covering his cold legs, reading through his old sermons and reflecting on the number of souls his words might have saved before he forgot what words were actually used for?

  “I don’t know yet. Anybody here interested in cleaning out privies?” Rawlings said. He looked over at Saunders. “What about you, Sandy? Pays two dollars a cubic yard.”

  23

  AFTER SHOOTING DOWN Reese Montgomery’s airplane, the Jewett brothers started traveling mostly at night. Since they had to stay off the roads most of the time, it was slow going in the dark. During the day they camped along brushy creeks and snaky swamps, hid in hollowed-out caves and deserted homesteads, with one always standing guard while the other two slept. They lived mostly on hardtack and candy and tins of stew and evaporated milk, but it was still the best fare they had eaten since before their mother died. Continuing their way northward, they robbed several general stores, collecting up various firearms and boxes of ammunition—along with a Webster’s International dictionary and a teakwood box of silver flatware—to the point where they finally had to steal an extra horse just to haul their arsenal. Inspired, at least in part, by The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, Chimney and Cob started dressing in cowboy garb, ten-gallon hats and dungarees and hand-tooled pointy-toed boots, while Cane, with the black frock coat and new white shirt, his hair greased back with pomade, took on the same look of shady refinement favored by riverboat gamblers and dissipated men of the cloth. Crossing into Tennessee, they held up three more banks, finally hitting the jackpot in a little town called Wayward. That night, after Cane finished counting the $29,000 in hundred-dollar bills the trembling bank clerk had pulled out of the vault and tossed onto the coat Chimney had spread on the floor, he looked at his brothers and said, “That’s it, we’re done.”

  “What do ye mean?” Chimney said.

  “No more robbing. There’s enough cash here we don’t need to take any more chances.”

  “You swear?” Cob said. By this point he was sick to death of running all night and hurting people and stealing their property. Sometimes the only thing that kept him from slipping off and giving himself up at the nearest post office or calaboose was Cane’s promise that they would buy a farm, a home, a place to call their own, as soon as they made it across the border into Canada.

  Cane nodded. “All we got to do now is disappear.”

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. The big haul in Wayward had come with a heavy price. While Cane was sitting on his horse acting as lookout during the holdup, a deputy in a motorcar had spun around the corner, ramming the steel bumper into the animal’s front legs and snapping them like twigs. Tumbling backward out of his saddle, Cane hit the ground hard, but managed to hold on to his Smith & Wesson. Just as the deputy raised his rifle, Cane fired two shots at him, the first one ripping his chin off and the second puncturing his right lung. Townspeople ran to their windows and watched as the tall man in the black coat put the screaming horse out of its misery before emptying another pistol into the still-sputtering engine of the automobile.

  Though they managed to escape and steal another horse that night, the very next day they encountered still more trouble. While looking for a place to relieve himself, Bill Wilson, the leader of a posse from Wayward, accidentally wandered upon them hiding in a thick, tangled stand of pine trees. He was unbuttoning his trousers when he looked up and saw Cane pointing a gun at him. To the outlaw’s surprise, Wilson smiled with an air of complete confidence. He was the constable in Henderson County, and had been, over the course of a twenty-year career, in a number of fixes just as bad as this one. Most criminals, he had often told people, were essentially gutless cowards, and if you didn’t show any fear, they’d usually lose their nerve and slither away like snakes. He’d shot a number of them hightailing it for some hidey hole after he’d stared them down. But even men as dedicated and tough as Bill needed a break now and then, and he had been fishing the riffles on the Beech River when all hel
l broke loose in Wayward, or he would have probably already had these bastards either locked up or in their graves. “You better think twice about that, buster,” Wilson said coolly. “I got a whole pack of men right over the hill waitin’ on me.” From the witnesses he’d talked to, he was fairly certain this dirty thug was the one who had blasted half of Deputy Lamar’s face off.

  “Keep quiet,” Cane said.

  “And what if I don’t?” asked Wilson loudly, shifting his eyes over to the fat one someone had described as a half-wit, sitting on a log in the gloomy shade in a cowboy outfit with what appeared to be a paper bag of Circus Peanuts in his lap. He wondered where the third one might be. Probably passed out in his bedroll, he figured. That was another thing about such scum; within a few hours of committing a crime, they usually got liquored up, either to celebrate their haul or to keep from dwelling on the fate that awaited them once they were apprehended. He was about to say as much when he heard a footstep behind him and the swish of something cutting through the air. There was no chance to call out to his comrades over the hill or draw his weapon or even utter a final prayer. As he landed with a soft thump on the pine needle floor, the last thing he saw was a skinny boy bend down in front of him and wipe blood off a machete; and the last thought that went through his partially detached head was that today was a Thursday, and tomorrow would be a Friday.

  Just a few hours after the posse brought Bill Wilson’s body back to Wayward, the attorney general of Tennessee, Ezra Powys, consulted with his most trusted political advisers and upped the reward for the brothers dead or alive from $750 to $5,000 American dollars. It was an outrageous amount to offer, even for cop killers, but he had run on a platform pledging to clean up corruption, and recent allegations that he was in the pocket of a consortium of Memphis moonshiners were steadily gaining traction throughout the state. But, as his consultants told him, if he played this right, and showed the people that he was willing to do whatever it took to bring the criminals to justice, the murder of Bill Wilson might just save his career. Within hours of making the announcement, he realized he had made a mistake ever listening to the dumb bastards. According to several editorials that ran in that evening’s papers, the majority of taxpayers of Tennessee didn’t think there were more than three or four people walking the globe worth five thousand dollars, and certainly not a self-deluded, two-bit constable from Henderson County who had a reputation for shooting misdemeanors and old drunks in the back. Too, many of these same taxpayers lived on collard greens and corn pone six or seven days a week; and a great percentage of them were beginning to view the robbing of a bank as a just blow against the system that helped keep them in poverty. One of the writers even speculated that the reason the attorney general was so eager to offer such an outlandish reward was because the money the Jewett boys had stolen in Wayward belonged to one of his Memphis cronies! Even worse than that, Powys found out that the funeral for Bill Wilson was to be held on Sunday at noon, and he had a tee time scheduled for one o’clock at the newly opened Happy Valley Golf Course. Though he had only recently taken up the game, it was already becoming an obsession. One of his underlings discreetly tried to get the service changed to an earlier time, or perhaps even moved to Monday, but Mrs. Wilson insisted that her husband be buried on the Sabbath at the same time of day that he had entered this world forty-two years ago. “Sorry, Chief, she won’t budge.”