The Heavenly Table Page 9

  “No, I already told ye, I ain’t a-killin’ nobody,” Cob said loudly, trying to give the gun back.

  “Jesus Christ,” Chimney hissed, “keep it down.”

  “You don’t have to,” Cane said. “Just let us know if you see someone coming, that’s all.” Then he and Chimney set the machetes by the door and went feeling their way among the stalls, the horses now snuffling and stamping their feet nervously.

  Inside the house, Thaddeus Tardweller was slouched in the parlor in his favorite chair when he heard a noise through the open window that made him sit up. His wife and daughter were spending the night at a cousin’s house on the other side of the county, and he had enjoyed a comfortable evening alone drinking brandy in the dark and idly thinking of all the women he had molested over the years. Almost like a man’s voice, he thought as he reached under the chair for his revolver. Draped in a long white nightshirt, he stepped out onto the porch and stood listening with his head cocked toward the barn. Goddamn, he almost wished somebody was out there, just to liven things up a bit. Only once in his life had anyone dared to steal from him, and he had made that whole pack of mulattoes pay for the one’s mistake. He had killed all the men and boys in a flurry, but then his lust got the better of him; and while he was fucking the prettiest of the wenches, the other three he had locked in the shack got away. It wasn’t until he was finished with her that he realized he should have made them dig their own graves first. Not being accustomed to labor, it had taken him two days to cover up all those niggers, and he’d nearly lost his mind, what with all the flies and the stink. When he was done, he told everyone that the fever had wiped them out, and, since the ones who escaped never showed their faces again, nobody even questioned it. Thank God for the memories, he thought. Sometimes they were all that kept him going these days. Staggering off the porch, he pulled back the hammer on the pistol and began crossing the yard, the hem of his nightshirt dragging through the dewy grass.

  Cob, unfortunately, was much too tired for the task he’d been assigned. It had been, to his reckoning, the longest day of his life; and as soon as his brothers turned away, he had set the shotgun down, pressed one blurry eye against a crack in the siding, and promptly nodded off. As he dreamed of Pearl walking through clouds with a white napkin tied around his neck, Cane and Chimney finished choosing three horses from among the six in the stalls, two brown thoroughbreds and a gray Arabian. They had just started to bridle them when they heard Tardweller yell in a drunken voice, “Come on out now, you sonofabitch, and I’ll let you go.” A moment or two later he added with a snicker, “I give you my word as a God-fearin’ Christian.”

  Dropping the bridles, Cane and Chimney hurried past a still sleeping Cob to the door and peered out. The Major was no more than a few feet from them, weaving a little as he awaited a response. “Goddamn,” Chimney whispered, as they bent down and picked up the machetes. If by some miracle they got out of this alive, he thought, he would strangle Cob with his bare hands. Cane should have known better than to trust him with anything. The stupid sonofabitch— Just then, one of the horses kicked against the side of its stall, sounding like a cannon going off, and Tardweller jerked the door open. “Well,” he said, as he started to step inside, “I give you a chance, you thievin’ piece of shit, but you—”

  When Cane grabbed for the pistol, Chimney brought the corn cutter down on top of the man’s skull with as much force as he could muster. A splinter of bone flew sideways through the air and bounced off his cheek. As the Major dropped to his knees, a stream of blood sputtered out of the top of his head like a small geyser. Chimney stepped back and swung the machete again, burying the blade in the back of the man’s thick, meaty neck, but he remained upright, his eyes blinking rapidly and his mouth opening and closing like a landed fish sucking air. The boy tried to jerk the knife loose, but it was wedged tight between two vertebrae. “Jesus Christ, do something,” he yelled to Cane, as the big man let out a bellow and slowly, miraculously, started to get back up.

  Cane stood with a shocked expression on his face, the pistol in one hand, a machete in the other. In all the months of imagining their escape, nobody had gotten hurt. At least not on the first goddamn night. How could he have been so stupid? He heard Chimney yell, “Shoot the sonofabitch,” then watched him step back out of the way. Raising the revolver, Cane pointed it in the direction of Tardweller’s head. He drew a deep breath and tried to steady his aim. But just before he pressed the trigger, a blast exploded off to the side of him, lighting up the entire scene in reddish orange for a second, and something wet splattered against the wall. He whirled around, saw a grim-faced Cob standing in the shadows with the shotgun, a gray wisp of smoke rising from the barrel.

  For maybe a minute, they stood silently looking down at the Major in his bloody nightshirt, sprawled out on the floor with the top of his head gone. “Holy shit,” Chimney finally said in an awed voice. “I never saw that coming.”

  “Me, neither,” Cane managed to say.

  “Goddamn, Cob, you did good,” Chimney said. Then, placing one foot on the dead man’s lower back for leverage, he bent down and grabbed hold of the machete’s wooden handle.

  Cob was still standing there with the shotgun raised to his shoulder. Everything had happened so fast. Why, just this morning, he had seen the Major and Pearl talking together, as alive as any two people could be. He heard Cane call his name in a faraway voice. He was vaguely aware of the horses, upset over the commotion, nickering and bumping against the stalls. For a moment, he couldn’t move, and wondered if maybe he was still dreaming, but when he saw his brother yank the machete loose from Tardweller’s neck, he flung the shotgun down and turned away just as most of his funeral supper sprayed from his mouth onto the straw-strewn floor.

  Cane waited until he finished being sick, then started out the door with the pistol. “Get them horses ready,” he ordered in an urgent voice.

  “Where you going?” Chimney said.

  “Up to the house.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to take care of them?”

  “No,” Cane said. “I’ll handle it.” He looked over at Cob wiping the vomit off his chin. “You two did enough already.”

  —

  FINDING THE DOOR ajar, he entered the house trembling, still unhinged by what had just happened in the barn. He moved from room to room in the dark looking for Tardweller’s wife and daughter, so relieved when he didn’t find them that he almost got down on his knees and thanked God. He hoped they were off somewhere visiting, something Chimney had mentioned they did on occasion, and not already halfway over to the next farm after hearing the shotgun blast.

  The house smelled faintly of perfume and spices and tobacco, and he was suddenly aware of the stink roiling off his filthy body, a mix of shit and sweat and fear. Lighting a candle, he began searching hurriedly through closets and drawers. He found another 12-gauge and a box of shells. He took a black frock coat hanging from a door and three white shirts folded on top of a polished bureau and a gold pocket watch lying on a nightstand. He hunted all over for the purse he knew the squire carried, but it was not to be found. In the kitchen, he came across a bar of soap and a box of cartridges for the pistol and two bottles of brandy in a sideboard, along with a large smoked ham barely nibbled on and a pan of light rolls covered with a cloth. Wrapping everything up in the coat, he started out the front door, then stopped. He had never been in a house this fine before, and after what had just happened in the barn, it might be the only chance he’d ever get to experience one. Going into the parlor, he sat down carefully in a soft upholstered chair. He was disappointed not to see any books. A box on a side table was filled with cigars, and he stuck a handful of them and some matches in his shirt pocket. Just for a minute, he tried to enjoy the flowered wallpaper, the painting of the fox hunt above the mantel, the spinet piano in the corner, but he was suddenly overwhelmed with shame. He had lost his nerve back there in the barn, broke his promise to Cob to take care of everything.
As he went out, he quietly shut the door behind him.

  “Well, I didn’t hear no shots,” Chimney said when Cane returned to the barn. “What’d ye do, strangle ’em or slit their throats?” A lantern had been lit, and he was standing next to one of the thoroughbreds showing Cob how to cinch the girth straps on the saddle.

  “I went all over,” Cane said, “but they ain’t there.”

  Chimney stopped and studied his brother for a moment. Satisfied that he was telling the truth, he spat and said, “Ah, they probably out fucking somewhere, knowin’ them two whores.”

  Spreading the coat out on the floor, Cane began passing out the supplies for them to stick into their saddlebags. As he handed Cob the ham, he cleared his throat and said, “I owe you an apology, brother. I should have been the one killed him. It’s my fault you got your hands bloody.”

  “Aw, don’t worry about it,” Chimney said. “Hell, even ol’ Bloody Bill fucked up a time or two, right?” He threw a saddle on the Arabian and reached under its belly for one of the straps. “But I reckon it’s a good thing we had Cob backing us up. Jesus, I still can’t get over it. Him a-snorin’ one minute and then BAM! Talk about blowin’ somebody’s brains out. He’s a goddamn natural, that’s what he is.”

  “Well, anyway,” Cane said, “it won’t happen again. I guarantee both of ye that.”

  Cob didn’t say anything. In fact, it is doubtful that he heard a word that was being said, for he was now holding a ham the size of a newborn infant. It was like something he’d imagine you’d find on the heavenly table, in between the roast beef and the spare ribs, but instead it was right here, in his dirty hands. He had heard Pearl talk about sin and gluttony and false riches enough to know he should toss it to the ground and stomp it, but, shit, what would be the sense of doing that now? He had just killed a man. He was going to hell anyway. Raising it up to his mouth, he tore a big hunk off with his teeth and began to chew.

  “Jesus,” Chimney said, prying the ham loose from Cob and sticking it in a saddlebag, “what do ye think you’re doing? You just puked your guts out.”

  Cane looked over at them as he lifted himself onto the other thoroughbred. “Come on, boys, this ain’t no time to be fuckin’ around.”

  “How long you think ’fore they catch us?” Cob asked.

  “Pretty damn soon if we don’t get to moving.”

  When they came out to the main road, they stopped and looked behind them. It was only then that Cane, with just a corner of the barn’s pine-shingled roof visible in the moonlight, realized they should have brought Tardweller with them, hid his body where no one would ever find it. For a moment, he considered turning back, but quickly dismissed the idea. He told himself that at least this way the man’s wife could give him a proper burial, though the real reason wasn’t quite so compassionate. In truth, he wasn’t sure he could handle looking at it again. “Well, brothers,” he said, “ain’t nothing ever gonna be the same now.”

  “That’s for goddamn sure,” said Chimney, then he gouged his horse in the flanks and the others followed. Moving northward at a canter, the hooves of the animals pounding against the hard-packed earth, the enormity of their crime slowly began to pale in contrast to the feeling of freedom that grew inside them with each passing mile. From time to time they saw a midnight lamp glowing like a tiny star in a distant farmhouse or settlement, but met nobody on the dark strip of road. Finally, just before dawn a mile or so outside of Farleigh, their bodies aching and the insides of their thighs rubbed raw from riding and the horses slathered with foamy sweat, they cut off into a woods where they found a shallow, rocky creek. They took their first bath in over a year, then sat naked in the soft, green grass under a sycamore tree and ate most of the ham and bread while the horses gazed at them stupidly.

  “Heck, this is a regular picnic,” Chimney said, stretching out his skinny legs and wiggling his toes. “Just think, this time yesterday, we was gaggin’ down another one of them damn biscuits and gettin’ ready to go cut brush.”

  Cane got up and went to his horse. He came back with the three shirts he had stolen, handed each of his brothers one. “I don’t reckon they’ll fit, but at least they’re clean.”

  “You know,” Chimney said, “it was almost like he was a-waitin’ on us.”

  “Well, that’s the trouble with owning property,” Cane replied. “A man can’t sleep at night for worrying about it.” He finished buttoning his new shirt, then picked up the frock coat and shook the dust off it.

  Cob wiped his greasy fingers on his hairy belly, then tore another piece off the ham. “Wonder what Pap’s doin’ right about now?” he said.

  “Probably the same thing the Major’s doing,” Chimney said.

  “What’s that?”

  Chimney smiled as he reached for his grimy overalls. “Standin’ at the gate, getting ready to meet his Maker.”

  16

  LIEUTENANT VINCENT BOVARD of the newly formed 343rd Machine Gun Battalion stepped out onto the porch of the long, low building he shared with two dozen other junior officers at Camp Pritchard. He had just finished another pile of asinine paperwork, and was looking forward to his first smoke of the day. It was still morning, but already the August sun was beating down upon the flat, treeless army base with the same harsh relentlessness that Colonel Garland Pritchard, the obscure, half-crazed Union commander for whom the camp was named, had led his guerrilla forces across the South in the shadow of Sherman’s great march to the sea, supposedly doing cleanup, but mostly taking potshots at anything that had been lucky enough to survive. Settling into a rattan chair, Bovard looked about with satisfaction. Though the construction was still going on from sunrise to sunset, the sweltering air filled with the sounds of hammering and sawing, the cantonment already resembled a well-designed town. And to think that just a couple of months ago there had been nothing here but cornfields and cow patties. Being even a small part of such a vast operation was something to be proud of.

  For a brief moment, though, as he sat in his scratchy uniform listening to the racket going on around him, Bovard almost wished he was sipping a glass of ice tea at the Sandcastle Inn on the breezy Atlantic seashore, or lying in a shady hammock at his parents’ summer cottage in the Adirondacks. But then he heard Sergeant Malone’s hoarse voice in the distance screaming obscenities at a couple of unlucky privates. No, he reminded himself, this was exactly where he wanted to be, among men preparing to go to war. The old life of soft, mindless pleasures was over with. From here on out, he would take his comforts in the mess halls and barracks and trenches smelling of sweat and burned coffee and gun grease. It was his destiny, he could see that as clearly as he had seen anything in his twenty-two years of living.

  Even so, it had taken him several weeks to get used to Camp Pritchard. At six foot two, with wavy brown hair and sea-green eyes flecked with tiny blue deposits and a perfectly straight nose passed down from his great-grandfather, a minor French aristocrat who had been lucky enough to escape to America with his head during the Reign of Terror, Bovard stood out among the crude Midwestern farmers and store clerks and mill hands that made up the bulk of the camp’s troops like a polished stone sitting atop a pile of coal clinkers. A large part of his initial problem with handling the harsh realities of camp life was owing to his education. Trained in classics, he had entered the military with abnormally high expectations, but unfortunately, the men he had encountered so far were a far cry from the muscle-bound sackers of Troy or the disciplined defenders of Sparta that he had been infatuated with since the age of twelve. Still, even though the draftees had been a sore disappointment, both physically and mentally, he had quickly learned to deal with them. It was simply a matter of lowering one’s standards to fit the circumstances. After all, how could one expect any of these poor, awkward, illiterate brutes to have even heard of Cicero or Tacitus when at least half of them had difficulty comprehending a simple order? In just a matter of days, he went from trying to form a Latin reading club to thinking that
a lowly private who still had most of his teeth and could name the presidents was practically a paragon of good breeding and sophistication.

  Stretching out his legs, Bovard pulled a small leather case from his pocket and took out a cigar. His father had sent him a box of them last week, along with a carved walking stick and the last known copy of Colonel Pritchard’s memoir, a musty tome called A Great Man Looks Back, which he’d found completely unreadable and had passed on to the camp library. He cut off the end of the golden brown Cuban with a small pair of snips and reached for a match. He still found it hard to believe that just three months ago he was sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, drunk and filled with self-loathing, mulling over the best way to kill himself. As he puffed, he thought again about the initial cause of his despair, his former fiancée, Elizabeth Shadwell. Just as he was finishing his degree at Kenyon College, and turning his thoughts to their upcoming wedding, she had suddenly jilted him, explaining in her Dear John letter that she had fallen in love with somebody else, an attorney already moving up in a well-respected firm in New York that worked chiefly on behalf of several major industrialists with war contracts amounting to millions. Looking back on it now, Bovard knew that he shouldn’t have been so surprised at her desertion. Ever since he had left Harvard at the end of his second year to go study at Kenyon with Professor Hubert Lattimore, a world-renowned expert on ancient Greek and Roman board games, Elizabeth had hinted that she was having doubts about his choice of study, even referring to it on several occasions as nothing more than “a frivolous pastime.” To think that he had worked himself half to death to become one of the only five people on the planet who understood the convoluted and seemingly nonsensical rules of divide et impera, only to have her call it a hobby! “Again, I am sorry,” she had added in a postscript to that last missive, “but I have to think of the future. I wish you the very best of luck with whatever you finally decide to do with your life.” He had sensed her oil tycoon father’s influence behind the entire thing, it being no secret that Bernard Shadwell was revolted by his potential son-in-law’s apparent lack of interest in moneymaking. And so, in just a few lines of delicate script, Elizabeth had violently altered the course of his life, a life that seemed, in the immediate aftermath of her betrayal, to have been wasted on ancient ideals and traditions that couldn’t even begin to compete with the ego-driven, cannibalistic forces of twentieth-century capitalism.