The Heavenly Table Read online

  “I can’t do that, mister. That’s their supper.”

  “Mark my word,” the man said, “you let them eat that cat, before long them boys will be wantin’ everything the easy way.” Then he stepped down into the river and started to make his way across. At its deepest point, the water rose above his chest, and his beard suddenly popped up to float along in front of his face like a buoy. A mass of insects scurried to the top of the nest of whiskers to keep from drowning, and Pearl watched as the white bird swooped down from the tree and began plucking them off one by one and placing them on the hermit’s outstretched tongue.

  No sooner had the man disappeared into the tree line than the sizzle in Pearl’s head sputtered to a stop, never to start up again. He entered briefly into a complete and profound silence, and in that glorious moment, he began to see God in a new light. If life was going to be hard, at least the hermit had provided a good reason for it, even a great one. From then on, Pearl seemed to intentionally follow the road that promised the most misery, and the only thing that brought him satisfaction was the worst that could happen. Hoping to replicate that perfect moment again, he plugged his ears with sawdust and clay and chewing tobacco and pebbles and chunks of wood, but the outside world always managed to seep through. He even considered piercing the thin tympanums with a thorn, but he worried that God might look upon such a selfish act as the desecration of a holy temple. Slowly, after countless failed experiments, he came to realize that he wouldn’t know the great silence again until he went down into his grave. That moment by the Foggy River had been just a preview of the eternal peace to come if he stayed the course and didn’t weaken. “I will be redeemed,” he kept repeating to himself. He wished for it more than anything, more than food or land or love, or even life itself.

  6

  EDDIE STILL WASN’T back the next morning when Eula came into the kitchen and found Ellsworth standing by the counter drinking his fourth dipper of water. Her eyes were puffy and she was still in her nightdress, a shapeless gray sack she had slept in as long as he could remember. She handed him five dollars for the store. “Whatever you do, don’t lose it,” she said. “It’s all we got left.”

  He nodded his throbbing head ever so slightly, then took another gulp. His pipes hadn’t felt this dried-out in years. After carrying the five gallons of wine over to the barn, he had stayed up trying to finish off what was left in the barrels. By the time he’d lurched and groped his way back up the stairs, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Looking down at the money in his hand, the old guilty ache started up again, and he thought back on all the years it had taken Eula to save the thousand dollars he had lost. Jesus, the patience it had taken, one quarter at a time, one dime, one penny even. And now here he was hiding wine behind her back. Shit, he was no better than his Uncle Peanut. Might as well go out and hunt up a dog turd to nibble on.

  “Remember,” she went on, as she turned away to light the stove, “twenty pounds of salt and the rest in sugar. No, wait. Get five pounds of Folgers, too. You might as well shoot me if we run out of coffee. And try not to stay away all day, either.”

  Without another word, or any breakfast for that matter, Ellsworth went to the barn and hitched the mule to the wagon and made his way out to the road. He wanted to get away before she started in about Eddie and the drinking again. She was probably right, he had to admit. He thought about the way his uncle used to flop around on the floor whenever he ran dry, his eyes damn near popped out of his head and the sweat pouring off of him like rain. He debated the problem all the way to Nipgen, pointing out the pros and the cons to Buck the mule, and trying to be as rational as he could be under the circumstances. Finally, just as the little burg came into view, he made his decision. Though he couldn’t do much about the way he’d spoiled his son or the book learning Eula had insisted upon, he could get rid of those barrels, and, yes, by God, even the jugs if he had to, before Eddie came back home. It was an awful sacrifice to make, but if he did it now, before the boy got any worse, maybe he’d never have to clamp a stick in his mouth to keep him from chewing off his tongue, like his grandmother used to do with Uncle Peanut.

  Pulling into the dusty lot of Parker’s store, he set the brake on the wagon and climbed down. He recalled that the last time he had been here the ground was still frozen. Ever since the cattle ruse, he had avoided people as much as possible, hoping none of his neighbors found out about it. As he pushed the screen door open, he saw the two bachelor brothers named Ovid and Augustus Singleton leaned over a checkerboard set atop a stack of wooden crates. It was rumored that they ate from the same plate and still slept together in the same bed they had been born in some fifty-odd years ago. They spent the majority of their days riding around the neighboring townships in a squeaky black carriage pulled by a pair of bony, dilapidated nags, searching through trash piles and abandoned houses for junk to sell, and as far as Ellsworth was concerned, they were as worthless as teats on a tater. He nodded to them stiffly, then turned and waited for Parker to finish tallying some numbers on a piece of cardboard. He hadn’t even placed his order yet when the storekeeper mentioned the army training camp the government was building on the edge of Meade, the county seat fifteen miles to the east. “Why they doing that?” Ellsworth asked.

  “ ’Cause of the war,” Parker said. In all the years Ellsworth had known the storekeeper, he had never seen him without something stuck in his mouth, and today he was sucking on what appeared to be a pink rubber eraser, but could just as easily have been the tongue of some small animal. He took off the green eyeshade he wore and scratched at his head. A few flakes of dandruff floated down onto the counter.

  “What war?” Ellsworth said.

  Behind him, Ovid spoke up. “Hell, Fiddler, the country declared war on Germany back in April. You didn’t know that?”

  “Well, I knew they was fightin’ going on somewhere, but I didn’t know we was in on it.”

  “Sure we are,” Augustus said. “A couple of them Baker boys have already signed up.”

  Then Parker put his pencil down and said, looking at the farmer and shaking his head, “Ells, you need to quit gettin’ all your news off that jackass out there and start talkin’ to us regular folks once in a while. Shit, he probably don’t even know where Germany is.”

  The Singletons got a kick out of that, and Ellsworth’s sunburned face turned an even deeper shade of red as he stood by the counter and listened to them hoot and cackle. He had always been at least vaguely aware of his limitations, but the thought of being bested in anything, even worldly affairs he had never heard of, by a pair of yahoos who had never, as far as anybody knew, done an honest day’s work in their lives, was almost more than he could stand. He had wanted to inquire about Eddie, ask if anyone had spotted him around, but figured that would just open up the door to another insult and so he let it go. However, on the way back home, nodding to himself and occasionally spitting great wads of phlegm that stuck like glue to Buck’s wide, sweaty rump, Ellsworth put two and two together in his own slow way. Somehow, Eddie had heard about that army camp.

  “Why do you think that?” Eula asked when he told her that afternoon what he figured Eddie might be up to. She was bent over the kitchen table rolling a cylinder of dumpling dough back and forth while a pot of water heated on the stove.

  “I don’t know,” Ellsworth said. “I just got a feeling.”

  Eula dabbed at the sweat on her face with her apron, then looked over at the sacks of salt and sugar he had set on the counter. Being a bit more realistic than her husband ever was when it came to their son, she had a hard time seeing Eddie as the type to voluntarily join something as strict and harsh as she imagined the military was, but then again, stranger things had happened, like the time Uncle Peanut got saved over in Jimmy Beulah’s shanty and didn’t touch a drop for nearly six months. “So where in the world is Germany anyway?” she said, as she picked up a knife and started cutting the round tube of yellow dough into half-inch pieces.


  Ellsworth’s face reddened again. He had no idea, but, still smarting from the abuse hurled at him earlier at the store, there was no way he was going to admit it. Going to the water bucket, he drew himself a drink, then sipped slowly while considering various responses. Finally, trying to sound both as nonchalant and convincing as possible, he said, “Hell’s fire, Eula, even ol’ Buck probably knows where Germany is.”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  Holy Christ on a cross, Ellsworth thought, the woman could be a sister to that damn bunch over at the store. “Well, fetch me a map,” he said, “and I’ll show ye.”

  “Map? Ells, you know we don’t have no—” Then Eula stopped and turned to look at him. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You don’t know, either, do ye?”

  Ellsworth took a deep breath. Though he had never, not once, struck Eula in all the time they had been married, he now fought the urge to throw the dipper at her head. He had listened to more than a few of his neighbors, usually after they’d had a drink or two in the back room of Parker’s store, brag about beating their wives for some infraction or other, and he had always looked upon such men as cowards and bullies. But standing there in the hot kitchen with the past days and weeks and months of frustrations and setbacks simmering inside him, he could almost understand why some of them yielded to it. He took another drink of water and thought longingly of the jugs of wine hidden in the hayloft. No, he and Eula had been through too much together to allow a little thing like geography drive him to do something he would regret for the rest of his life. And so, without another word, he hung the dipper back on the bucket and headed out to the barn.

  7

  BY THE TIME they ended up working for Major Tardweller, Pearl’s sons figured their father had racked up enough hardships for them all to sit at the head of the goddamn heavenly table he had been blabbering about for the past three years. Just a couple of days after Cane advised that they cut back their biscuit ration, they discovered that the cache of potatoes they had buried in the ground to last them the rest of the summer was full of rot. They had woken up that morning to rain, and it being a Sunday anyway, Pearl had decided they would take the day off from clearing the swamp. It was the first break they’d had in several weeks. For a few minutes, the old man stood watching as the others sorted the bad from the good. “How does it look?” he finally asked.

  “Like we’re gonna go hungry,” Cane replied.

  “Well, they’s worse things. Remember that ol’ boy I met on the Foggy River? Shoot, he didn’t eat nothin’ but tadpoles and bugs and he seemed to be doin’ all right. If’n he can do it, I reckon we can, too.”

  “It might come to that ’fore it’s over with,” said Cane.

  “No need to worry,” Pearl said. “The Lord will give us our reward someday.”

  “I ain’t eatin’ no goddamn tadpoles,” Chimney muttered.

  “What say?”

  After taking a deep breath to steady himself, Chimney replied in a loud voice, “I said I’d gobble down frog shit and thistles if that’s what it takes to stay on His good side.”

  “That’s right,” Pearl said, nodding his head. “As would I.” Then he pulled up his pants and tightened his belt another notch before walking away, whistling the first few notes of some half-forgotten hymn that Lucille used to sing to herself.

  “Me, too,” Cob said after the old man was out of earshot. “Why, I’d eat me a pile of rocks if that’s what it took.” Ever since he had first heard Pearl describe heaven as some sort of celestial banquet hall where the food was piled high forever and you just helped yourself whenever you took a notion, Cob had become obsessed with gaining entry to it. The only other thing that had impressed him as much in all his nineteen years was Willy the Whale, a huge retarded oaf they had once seen in a stall at a county fair in Hancock County. Said to have been discovered living on pinecones and bat guano in a cave in the Smoky Mountains, Willy was so fat he used a woman’s petticoat for a napkin. His manager was taking bets that he could eat half a hogshead of raw crawdads in an hour. Though they were supposed to be alive, anyone could see that a good three or four inches of dead ones were floating around on top of the greasy brown water. It wasn’t until that day, when he saw the manager, with just a minute to go, cram the last of the bottom-feeders down Willy’s throat with a long wooden spatula as if he were priming a cannon, that Cob realized such a thing as a truly full belly was even possible anywhere else but in the Promised Land. And although something crucial had burst inside Willy and he died right in front of the crowd while the wagers were being collected, Cob was still a little upset that Cane hadn’t let him audition for the job when the carny came around later looking for someone with a healthy appetite to fill in for the evening show.

  Chimney tossed another moldy spud across the yard, then turned to look at Cane. “What was it Bloody Bill said? ‘I’d rather rob and kill and be free for just one day than be stuck under some bastard’s thumb for a hundred years’?”

  “That Bloody Bill,” Cob said, “he a bad one.”

  Cane sat back in the dirt. “I believe he said ‘under some Yankee’s thumb,’ but you quoted him fairly right.” By then, he had read to his brothers from The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket so often that Chimney could recite practically every word of it by memory. Even Cob was able to remember certain lines if prompted, at least a few that dealt with food and drink. Perhaps because their lives had been so empty of anything but hardship and toil, it had made quite an impression on them. The author, Charles Foster Winthrop III, a failed poet from Brooklyn who had once dreamed of becoming the next Robert Browning, had centered the plot of the novel around one Colonel William Buchet’s insatiable need to avenge himself against the Northerners who had pillaged his plantation during the Civil War and left him without even a single cotton ball to wipe his ass on; and Winthrop had filled the book with every act of rape, robbery, and murder that his indignant, syphilitic brain could possibly conceive. For this, his twentieth such potboiler in less than three years, he was paid the niggardly sum of thirty dollars. By the time he settled with his creditors, and spent an hour passing diseases back and forth with the foul and wrinkled whore who lived across the hall in his building, Winthrop didn’t have enough money left over to buy a loaf of bread. “Well,” he said that night to the vermin living behind the cracked plaster in his dank room, “I gave it my best, and that’s all a man can do.” He waited until morning, and then, with the same cool steadiness he had conferred upon Bloody Bill, his final creation, the hack brushed the rat turds off his one good suit and chugged down enough turpentine to peel the paint off a two-story house. By the time the Jewetts discovered the book in a cast-off carpetbag near Oxford, Mississippi, poor Winthrop had been moldering in a soggy, unmarked grave on an island in the East River for nearly seventeen years, another forgotten casualty of the callous and fickle literary world he had once hoped to conquer.

  “Come on,” Chimney said, “let’s quit fiddle-fuckin’ around here and make a break for it. Shit, this ain’t no way to live.”

  “Pap ain’t gonna put up with something like that,” Cob warned. He grew nervous whenever his younger brother started talking about leaving, and he’d been doing a lot of it lately. Why couldn’t he just be thankful that they were all still together and had a place to stay? Granted, the shack leaked a little and a wood floor would have been nice, but compared to some of the places they had slept in over the years, it was practically cozy. And why did he think things would be better somewhere else? They never had been. Not one time.

  “Hell, he wouldn’t even know we were gone,” Chimney said. “He pays more attention to his nigger ghosts than he does us.”

  “Well, then…well, then…” Cob stammered.

  “Well, then what?” Chimney said.

  Cob furrowed his brow, tried to think of a response. As he did so, he squeezed a large squishy potato into a hard glob the size of a walnut. Just as he was ready to give up, his eyes landed on the sho
vel the Major had loaned them the other day, and he suddenly remembered his little brother’s one weakness. “What about Penelope?” he said. “You just gonna take off and leave her behind, too?”

  Cane snorted, trying to stifle a laugh, and Chimney’s face flushed with blood. He started to reach for a rock that was half-buried in the bottom of the hole, but then stopped himself. It wasn’t Cob’s fault that he had brought up the bitch’s name; it was his own for being so goddamn stupid in the first place. From time to time, Tardweller had borrowed Pearl’s youngest to groom his horses and clean out the stables. Because he was the only one ever sent for, Chimney had started to believe that the squire looked upon him with favor. He had even gotten it into his head that the man’s daughter, Penelope, a shapely but spoiled fifteen-year-old with strawberry blond hair and icy green eyes, was developing romantic feelings for him; and he had foolishly bragged to his brothers that he spent most of his time in the barn romancing her on a pile of feed sacks while they slaved away in the fields. For a few weeks, Penelope was all he thought about; and he ceased dreaming of gun battles and wild pussy and began fantasizing wedding bells and undying love.

  But then one afternoon near the end of May, as he loaded manure from one of the stalls into a wheelbarrow, he overheard the girl complaining to her father that she’d rather see anybody, even a nigger, handling her horse than that ugly piece of white trash who was always hanging around spying on her. “Oh, don’t you worry about that little inbred bastard,” the Major had told her. “They’s not a one of them Jewetts got the grit to mess with one of mine. I could work ’em to death and that dumb ol’ daddy of theirs would still pucker up and kiss my ass like I done give him the keys to the kingdom. No, sweetheart, that boy even think of touchin’ you, he’ll be one sorry sonofabitch.” Just then, two of Penelope’s girlfriends arrived, and she retreated to the front porch to sip ice tea with them, and Tardweller lay down under a shade tree in the front yard to take his afternoon nap. However, he couldn’t shake off the thought of the Jewett boy ogling his daughter. It kept circling around in his mind until soon he was in a rage. He finally got to his feet and stomped across the yard. When he entered the barn, he found Chimney currying one of the horses. Tardweller was a big man, and he grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck and dragged him outside with ease, kicking his ass several times with the toe of his boot and making a big show of running him off in front of the ladies. “I ever catch you around my house again, I’ll cut the nuts right off ye,” he had yelled as Chimney broke loose and ran.