The Heavenly Table Page 16

  “I just don’t understand people like that.”

  The sergeant shrugged, set the paper on his knee. “I expect somewhere along the line they got tired of being shit on. That’s what usually happens. It don’t take much to turn a man into an animal.” He leaned over and spat in the helmet. “You’ll see what I’m talking about when you get to the Front.”

  The lieutenant blanched a little, took his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face. Last night, all of them drugged and naked and slick as pigs, Lucas had donned Bovard’s service cap and suggested that they play a game. After a little coaxing, Caldwell agreed to play a captured German officer, and they tied him to a chair with strips of cloth torn from a sweat-stained pillowcase. They had done all sorts of things to extract information from the dirty Hun. It had been great fun for a while, a bit reminiscent for Bovard of his boarding school days, until Lucas stuffed a sock in the pharmacist’s mouth and pulled the leather whip out from under the bed. Caldwell’s eyes grew big as saucers then, and he fought like the dickens trying to break loose from his bonds, but all he succeeded in doing was toppling the chair and knocking himself unconscious when his head hit the hard oak floor. “Christ,” Lucas said, “I don’t know what got into him. He usually likes this sort of thing.”

  “Shouldn’t we do something?” Bovard had asked as he watched a trickle of blood run from Caldwell’s nose into his open mouth.

  “Absolutely,” Lucas said, nonchalantly tossing the whip into the corner on top of the druggist’s straw hat and climbing over him onto the bed. “There’s all sorts of things we should do.” He settled back against the headboard and smiled. “I can’t wait to show you a couple of them.”

  “No, I mean about Caldwell.”

  “Oh, hell, don’t worry about him,” Lucas had said. “Clarence is tougher than he looks. Just stick that candle up his ass and get over here.”

  Lighting his cigar, Bovard realized, as he inhaled the smoke, that he could still taste the theater manager in his mouth. He turned away and pretended to study a column of soldiers from the 157th marching past, listened to the sergeant carefully tear out the article about the outlaws and stick it in his pocket. Last night had been the strangest and most exhilarating experience of his life, and though he still felt essentially the same disgust and shame with himself as he had on that bleary afternoon in the hotel room when the Irish trollop revealed to him his true nature, at least he no longer had to fret about whether or not he was going to die a virgin.

  26

  ELLSWORTH CAME UP out of one of his fields and started down the road toward home. He’d been checking the corn again, trying to judge how much yield to expect. The summer had been hotter than usual, and there hadn’t been a decent rain in weeks; and so, from the looks of things, they’d be lucky to make enough money to get through the winter and spring. They had a hog they could butcher, and Eula had her chickens, but once you figured in taxes and coal and other essentials, they still needed, at the very least, a hundred dollars cash. He was damning the cattle swindler to hell again when he looked up and saw the Taylor boy coming toward him carrying a little bundle over his shoulder. “Howdy, Tuck,” Ellsworth said when he got closer. “What you up to?”

  “I went to Meade to join the army,” the boy said, wiping a bead of sweat from his upper lip, “but they wouldn’t have me.”

  “Why not?” Ellsworth said. “You got something wrong with ye?”

  “They said I was too young,” Tuck said. “Said you got to be at least eighteen to volunteer.”

  “Why, that don’t make no sense,” Ellsworth said, “them taking Eddie and not you. He ain’t no older than you are, is he?”

  “Eddie?” the boy said.

  “Sure, he’s been a-soldierin’ almost a month now. Hadn’t you heard?” Ellsworth watched as a puzzled look came over Tuck’s face. “You know something I don’t know?” he asked the boy.

  Tuck swallowed, then said, “Mr. Fiddler, Eddie ain’t in the army.”

  “What? Why do you say that?”

  “I seen him down in Waverly just last week.”

  “No, you must be mistaken. I had a man at the camp tell me he was there.”

  “Well, I don’t know why the man would’ve told ye that, but it was Eddie I saw in Waverly. Maybe he got kicked out or something.”

  Ellsworth suddenly felt a little light-headed. “Was he with anybody?” he asked.

  “Yeah, one of them Newsome girls. The one they call Spit Job. She was hangin’ all over him. And some old feller playin’ music.”

  “Music?”

  “Yeah, he was blowin’ on a harmonica.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “You mean Eddie? Probably. I doubt if he’d let himself be seen dancing a jig out in public with Spit Job unless he was loaded.”

  “You don’t know Eddie then,” Ellsworth said, a bitter taste rising in his throat. “He’s went clear off the rails here lately.”

  “I’m sorry,” the boy said.

  “No, no, I’m glad you told me. Leastways now I won’t have to worry about him getting his fool head shot off in Germany.”

  “I wish they would’ve let me in,” Tuck said. “I’d give anything to go.”

  “Well, you’ll get your chance, I expect.”

  “I don’t know. Pap heard someone at Parker’s say this might be the last war that ever gets fit.”

  “Aw, you liable to hear anything over there. Crazy as people are, they’ll probably be plenty more of ’em.”

  Tuck nodded his head, then said, “Well, I better get on home and let them know.”

  After the boy left, Ellsworth sat down under an old hickory that stood beside the road, a tree that had been there when his father was a boy, and leaned back against it. He again went over the conversation he had had with the man at the gate, wondered why he had lied. All the pride he’d been feeling for his son was gone, wiped away in less time than it takes to tie a shoelace. He felt deflated, as if someone had squeezed all the air, all the life, out of him. He should have known better than to get his hopes up, thinking Eddie would return from the army someday a man, ready to take over the farm. Thank God, except for Slater, he hadn’t told anyone about it. For a minute, he considered walking back to the house and hitching up the wagon, going to Waverly to hunt the little bastard down, but then realized that wouldn’t do any good. What was the sense of dragging him back? He thought about Uncle Peanut, of how he’d disappear for weeks at a time and then return shaky and near death to let his mother heal him up again, just so he could take off again and break her heart into more pieces. No, he wasn’t going to allow Eddie to do that to Eula. He’d give him one more chance if he came home, but that was all. As Jimmy Beulah once told his grandmother after he found Peanut seized up in a ditch over on Hartley Road and reluctantly dragged him home to her, sometimes you just have to let go.

  When Ellsworth finally returned to the house that evening, he walked into the kitchen with his hands behind his back. “Look what I found,” he said to Eula.

  “What is it?” she asked. She was bent down pulling a pan of cornbread out of the oven.

  “Just take a look.”

  “Can’t ye see I’m busy?”

  “C’mon.”

  “Oh, my,” she said, when she turned around and saw the furry ball in his hands.

  “It’s a female. Looks a lot like Pickles, don’t it?”

  Setting the hot pan on top of the stove, she took the kitten from him and held it up to look into its green eyes. “Where did you find her?”

  “The ol’ momma’s got ’em hid in a dead tree over on the widow’s place. I been watchin’ her awhile now.”

  “Who?” Eula said with a grin. “The cat or the widow?”

  “Ha!”

  “Can I keep her?”

  “Course you can.”

  Later that night, as they were getting ready for bed, Eula said, “I’m going to name her Josephine, after my mother.”

  “That’s go
od,” Ellsworth said. He hung his bibs on a peg and turned out the lamp.

  They had been lying in the dark for several minutes when Eula said, “I still wonder why we haven’t got a letter yet.”

  “Letter?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “From Eddie. At least one to let us know how he’s doing.”

  “They probably got him busy,” he told her. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Besides, we couldn’t read it anyway.”

  “Maybe so, but Mr. Slater could.”

  Ellsworth decided the best thing to do was try to steer the conversation in another direction. He thought for a moment, then said, “Oh, I see what’s goin’ on now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That damn schoolmarm. You’re stuck on him, ain’t ye?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Eula said, then giggled and swatted at his shoulder.

  “Must have been that flute he was a-playing. Or maybe that dandelion stuck in his ear.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “Yep,” he said, as he rolled over to face the wall, “I knew I should have never took you over there to see him.”

  “Go to sleep,” she said, “before you get into trouble.”

  Ellsworth closed his eyes, but images of Eddie twirling some little strumpet around in a circle kept him awake long into the night, and it was nearly sunrise before they finally spun off into the shadows.

  27

  ON A COOL, cloudy morning four weeks to the day after committing their first crime, the Jewett Gang made their way into a small, quiet village they had been observing for close to an hour from a dried-up creek bed. After spending three days ducking a group of assassins accompanied by a supply truck flying a flag that had the Montgomery family crest sewn on it, they were down to their last saltine and desperate to replenish their supplies before moving back into the brush. By that time various explanations were being tossed about across the nation—in newspapers, saloons, parlors, town hall meetings, churches, and courthouses—as to how they could have committed all of their crimes without getting caught or even sustaining a single scratch. Thanks in part to a tabloid story that claimed the gang was traveling with a Haitian voodoo priestess named Sylvia who had been chased out of Texas for casting a spell on her landlord, a good portion of the public had come to believe that their run of luck was the result of supernatural forces. Others, being somewhat more rational, considered it evidence that they were either the most brilliant criminals to ever come down the pike, or that the South was in bad need of retraining its police departments. The vast majority, however, held firm to the belief that the brothers would eventually make a mistake, in much the same way that even the most skilled of gamblers will eventually draw a bad hand if he keeps on playing; and that was exactly what was about to happen in Russell, Kentucky.

  As they approached the general store, Cane tried to hand Chimney some money for the groceries.

  Chimney looked over at the wad of dollar bills and sneered. “Shit, I don’t need that,” he said, patting the pistol hanging on his side.

  “Look, goddamn it, we can’t be takin’ any chances over some lousy canned goods,” Cane said. “I thought we done went over this.”

  Even though Chimney had been able to see the merits in Cane’s argument that it was time to lie low and focus on making it to Canada, he wasn’t quite as keen as his brothers were on completely giving up the outlaw life when, in his opinion, they were just starting to get good at it. Besides that, he was in a foul mood. He still hadn’t gotten a chance to fuck a woman yet, and lately it had been preying on his mind something awful that he was going to die before getting a chance to shoot his jizz into something other than his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, as he slid down off his horse, “this won’t take a minute. C’mon, Cob.”

  “Do I have to?” Cob asked.

  Cane spat and looked up and down the street. Except for a kid playing with a dog a few doors down, there wasn’t another soul to be seen. “Yeah, fuck, you better go on in with him,” he said, “just to be on the safe side.”

  As Cane sat out front keeping watch, and Chimney pilfered the cash register and loaded up two gunnysacks with provisions from the shelves and a stack of old newspapers lying on the counter, the bony, spectacled storekeeper wrung his hands and cried like an old woman, his boo-hoos getting louder by the minute. “Knock that whiny bastard in the head!” Chimney yelled, but instead Cob tried conversing with him about the price of hams and the need for rain. It was no use, the clerk kept up his racket. Though the store was drearier and more poorly stocked than any they had come across, just as they were getting ready to leave, Chimney found a long unopened packing crate hidden under the counter. “What we got here?” he said.

  The man quit bawling immediately. “You don’t want to mess with that,” he said, sucking in his snot and wiping at his eyes. “That’s a special order for Mr. Haskins.”

  “What’s so special about it?” Chimney said, as he started to pry the box open.

  “Mr. Haskins is not a man you want to—”

  “I’ll be damned,” Chimney said. Inside the crate, wrapped in oiled paper, lay a new Lee-Enfield and two wooden boxes of cartridges. He tore the paper off and picked the rifle up, aimed it at the storekeeper’s head.

  “You take that gun,” the man said, swallowing hard, “Mr. Haskins is going to make me pay for it. It came clear from England. Please, boys, I’m just barely makin’ ends meet now.”

  “Well, that’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about,” Chimney said, as he turned and walked out the door, loaded down with groceries and the Enfield and one of the shell boxes, the heels of his new cowboy boots clicking loudly on the scarred wooden floor, the few dollars he’d taken from the register sticking out of his front pocket. “Come on, Cob, let’s go. And don’t forget that other sack. I got some peaches in there for you and Cane.”

  Cob looked at the clerk and shrugged his shoulders and put his pistol back in his holster. Then he picked up the gunnysack and started out, the cans clanging against each other. The man stared after him grimly, his spectacles a little crooked on his long, narrow face, thinking there was more food in those two pokes than his wife and seven children sometimes got to eat in a month. Again this morning, breakfast had been a corn cake so thin you could have read the fine print on one of Mr. Haskins’s loan agreements through it. He realized suddenly that he had finally arrived at his own personal crossroads, just as his grandpa had said would happen someday if he lived long enough, and that what he did in the next few seconds mattered more than anything else he’d ever done in his life. For once, his fate was in his own hands and not somebody else’s, and though his hands were trembling with fear, he reached under the counter.

  At the door, Cob stopped and said, “Well, been nice talkin’ to you about the rain and all.” Because the man seemed to be in such a bad mood over Chimney taking the gun, he didn’t really expect a response, but he turned and looked back at the clerk anyway, just in time to see him bringing a Winchester repeater to his shoulder. Dropping the sack, Cob ran for his horse. Bullets started flying through the open doorway and crashing through the windows, the sounds of rifle blasts and glass shattering echoing down the street. He was throwing his leg over the saddle when he got hit. As Cane emptied his pistol into the front of the store, Chimney grabbed the reins of Cob’s horse and led him out of town at a gallop. Within two hours, after poring over the blood drops in the dirt and the wanted poster the sheriff passed around, a group of citizens, including the store clerk, gathered together a few supplies and horses and headed out of town to make their fortunes.

  Luckily, the slug that tore into Cob’s thigh hadn’t hit an artery or the bone, but because of the constant jostling from the horse, he kept losing blood, and eventually his boot was overflowing with it. He became so woozy he couldn’t keep his eyes open, but whenever they stopped to rest, the posse from Russell appeared in the distance; and they had to tie him to the saddle to keep him
from falling off. By the time they came across an abandoned farm the following afternoon, his brothers were beginning to worry they might lose him. “Well,” Cane said, as he looked at the overgrown yard around the house, “this might be the end of it.”

  “How you figure?” Chimney asked.

  “We can’t ride no more till he gets better, so if they track us here, we’re fucked.”

  Leaning over the horn of his saddle, Chimney spat and then said, “Well, I don’t know who those ol’ boys are back there, but I don’t figure they can shoot any better than we can.”

  “Maybe, but there must be fifteen of them in that pack.”

  “So?” Chimney said. “That many don’t even amount to one box of shells.”

  Cane shook his head and started to climb off his horse. “You’re quite the optimist, ain’t ye?”

  “What’s that? One of them words you got out of your dictionary?”

  “Means someone who’s always lookin’ on the bright side of things.”

  “Well, might as well, the way I figure it,” Chimney said. “A man gets to thinkin’ he’s beat, he just as well hang it up. Besides, they’ll be enough of that doom and gloom shit when we’re dead.”

  They loosened Cob from the saddle and eased him down, then packed him to the house, through tall patches of milkweed and broomstraw and past a few blighted stalks of corn growing out of the top of an ancient rubbish pile. Thick vines infested with tiny brown spiders draped across the front of the rotting porch, and Chimney hacked a path to the door with one of the machetes. Kicking it open, he watched a long black snake slither across the rough pine floor in the summer shadows and disappear through a crack in one of the walls, leaving a winding imprint of itself in the soft dust. He spread a blanket near a fireplace made of clay bricks, and they carried Cob inside and laid him down. “I’ll take care of the horses,” he told Cane. He found a large black pot in the kitchen, covered with a lid and half full of a dried-up lump that had probably once been a soup or perhaps a stew. After banging out the mess on top of a rough pine counter, he carried it back outside. He tethered the animals in the shell of an old lean-to and unsaddled them and began hauling guns and supplies into the house. Then he walked about the property until he discovered a caved-in well, hidden in a thicket of wild roses. Even though it was dark by the time he finished cutting a way to it through the briars, he carried water to the horses in the pot, and by the time he came back inside the house, it was long after midnight. In the light from a candle stub, he watched Cane pour some whiskey into the bullet hole in Cob’s leg and then wrap it in a fresh bandage. “How’s he doing?” he asked.