The Heavenly Table (2 page)

“What’s that?”

“I said the way things is goin’ around this goddamn place, I’d trade even up with a dead darkie any day.”

The room went quiet as the old man pulled his slumped shoulders back and tightened his mouth into a grim leer. Clenching his fists, Pearl’s first thought was to knock the boy to the floor, but by the time he turned away from the window, he’d already changed his mind. It was too early in the morning to be drawing blood, even if it was justified. Instead, he stepped closer to Chimney and studied his thin, triangular face and cold, insolent eyes. Sometimes the old man almost found it hard to believe the boy was one of his own. Of course, Cob had always been a disappointment, but at least he had a good heart and did what he was told, and Cane, well, only a fool would find fault with him. Chimney, on the other hand, was impossible to figure out. He might work like a dog one day and then refuse to hit a lick the next, no matter how much Pearl threatened him. Or he might give Cob his share of the evening meal, then turn around and shit in his shoes while he was eating it. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind between being good or evil, and so he tried his best to be both. Not only that, he was woman-crazy, too, had been ever since he first found out his pecker would get hard. And he didn’t give a damn who knew it, either; you could hear him jerking it over there in his blanket two or three times every night, especially if Cane had read to him again from that goddamn book they treasured like a holy relic. Pearl thought about something he had once heard an auctioneer say at a livestock sale, about how when the stud gets older, the litters get weaker, not only in the body, but in the head, too. “Don’t just go for your animals, either,” the man said. “Had an old boy back home caught him a young wife and decided at fifty-nine he wanted to bring one more of his own into the world before he dried up for good. Poor thing was born one of them maniacs like they got locked up in the nuthouse over in Memphis.”

“What happened to it?” Pearl had asked.

“Sold it to some banana man down in South America who collects such things,” the auctioneer replied. Back then, Pearl had dismissed the notion as part of some sales pitch to run the bidding up on a pair of young bulls, but now he realized there might be some truth in it. Though he hated to admit it, from the looks of things, his seed had already lost some of its vigor when he and Lucille made Cob, and by the time he shot Chimney into the oven, it had gone from slightly tepid to downright sour.

Even so, perhaps because he was the youngest or had yet to grow the scraggly beard his brothers wore, Chimney was still the one that reminded Pearl of his dead wife the most. He leaned closer and stared into the boy’s eyes even more intently, as if he were peering into a smoky portal to the past. Chimney looked over at his brothers again, took the last bite of his biscuit. The old man’s breath reeked of stomach gas and rancid drippings. A solitary bird began to twitter from somewhere close by, and suddenly Pearl was recalling a long-ago night when he had walked Lucille home from a barn dance just a few weeks before they married. The autumn sky was glittering with stars, and a faint smell of honeysuckle still hung in the cool air. He could hear the gravel crunching beneath their feet. Her face appeared before him, as young and pretty as the first time he ever saw her, but just as he was getting ready to reach out and touch her cheek, Chimney shattered the spell. “Hell, yes,” he said, “maybe we should ask them niggers if they’d be a-willin’ to—”

Without any warning, Pearl’s hand whipped out and caught the boy by the throat. “Spit it out,” he growled. “Spit it out.” Chimney tried to break away, but the old man’s grip, seasoned by years of plowing and chopping and picking, was tight as a vise. With his windpipe squeezed shut, he soon ceased struggling and managed to spew a few wet crumbs from his mouth that stuck to the hairs on Pearl’s wrist.

“Pap, he didn’t mean nothing,” Cane said, moving toward the two. “Let him go.” Though he figured his brother probably deserved getting the shit choked out of him, if for no other reason than being a constant aggravation, Cane also knew that getting their father too upset this early in the morning meant that he would push them twice as hard in the field today, and it was tough enough working a slow pace when you had but one biscuit to run on.

“I’m sick of his mouth,” Pearl said through clenched teeth. Then he snorted some air and tightened his hold even more, seemingly resolved on shutting the boy up forever.

“I said let him go, goddamn it,” Cane repeated, just before he grabbed the old man’s other arm and wrenched it behind his back with a violent twist that filled the room with a loud pop. Pearl let out a piercing howl as he jerked free of Cane and shoved Chimney away. The boy coughed and spat out the rest of his biscuit onto the floor, and they all watched in the gloomy half-light as the old man ground it into the dirt with his shoe while working the hurt out of his shoulder. Nothing else was said. Even Chimney was temporarily out of words.

When Pearl was done, they all followed him out of the shack single-file. Cob stopped at the well and drew a pail of water, and they carried it, together with their tools—three double-headed axes and a couple of machetes and a rusty saber with a broken tip—along the edge of a long green cotton field. As the sun crested the hills to the east, looking like the bloodshot eye of a hungover barfly, they came to a swampy piece of acreage they were clearing for Major Tardweller. He had promised them a bonus of ten laying hens if they finished the job in six weeks, and Cane figured they might just make it at the rate they were going. He peeled off his ragged shirt and draped it over the top of the canvas bucket to keep the gnats and mosquitoes out, and another day of work began. By afternoon, with nothing but warm water sloshing around in their guts, all they could think about was that sick hog hanging in the smokehouse.

2

T
HAT SAME MORNING,
several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler went to wake his son and discovered he was already up and gone. He stood for a moment looking at Eddie’s empty bed, then walked to the barn on the slim chance that he might be there, but there was no sign of him. Going back to the house, he checked to make sure Eula, his wife, was still asleep, then slipped down into the cellar beneath the kitchen. Just as he feared, there were at least two more jars of his blackberry wine missing. “I never should have let him have that first taste,” he mumbled to himself, thinking back to last Christmas. The holiday had been a gloomy one, mostly because Ellsworth had lost his and Eula’s life savings to a con man in a checkered suit the previous September, and he thought that sharing a drink with Eddie might brighten things up a bit for the boy. Ellsworth’s own father had allowed him a glass every night from the time he was twelve, and he’d turned out all right, hadn’t he? Looking back on it, though, he should have known better. Eddie was already prone to daydreaming and telling fibs and shirking his chores, and even a little hard cider sometimes did strange things to people like that. And sure enough, ever since that first sip, down in the cellar listening to Eula moving around in the kitchen above them while she stuffed the Christmas bird, a tough, stringy Tom that he’d traded Roy Cox some old harness for, the boy had become, on top of everything else, a regular boozehound.

He was just emerging from the cellar when Eula came into the kitchen. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Lookin’ for Eddie,” Ellsworth said nervously. “He ain’t in his bed.”

“You mean he’s gone?”

“Well, I can’t find him.”

“But even if ye can’t, why would you think he’d be down there at six o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” Ellsworth said. “I just—”

Shaking her head, Eula walked to the boy’s room to look for herself. Ellsworth waited on her to say something when she came back, but instead she lit the kindling in the cookstove, then dipped some water from a bucket into a pan for coffee. He went back out to the barn and fed the mule; and a few minutes later, she called him to the table and he sat down to a couple of eggs and a bowl of gummy, tasteless oatmeal. Jesus, he thought, this time last year there would have been sausage and gravy, maybe even pork chops. Though sick and tired of thinking about the swindle, the tiniest things reminded him of it all over again, even his breakfast. It was an ache inside him that never let up, something he figured would probably gnaw at him the rest of his days. A man riding a red sorrel mare had stopped him and Eddie along the road one bright afternoon toward the end of September last year, and casually asked if he might know someone who’d be interested in buying fifty Guernsey cows at twenty dollars a head. “Why so cheap?” Ellsworth had asked suspiciously. He knew for a fact that Henry Robbins had paid over twice that just a couple of weeks ago for some Holstein calves.

“Well, to tell ye the truth,” the man said, “I’m up against it. My wife’s took sick and the doctor says she won’t last another six months if’n I don’t get her to warmer weather.”

“Oh,” Ellsworth said, “I hate to hear that.”

“Consumption,” the man went on. “Nolie never was in any good shape, not even back when I married her damn near twenty years ago, but I didn’t care. And I still don’t. Wasn’t her fault she was born sickly. I’d gladly make a deal with ol’ Beelzebub just so she might draw one more breath. The way I see it, a man that don’t do everything he can to uphold his marriage vows ain’t much of a man.” He pulled a soiled handkerchief from his coat and patted his eyes with it. “Anyway, that’s why I’m in a hurry to sell.”

Ellsworth was impressed with the man’s speech; he felt much the same way about Eula, though he wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to trade around with the Devil, no matter how bad things got. “How much would them cows figure up to altogether?” he had asked, unable to calculate such a high number on his own.

“A thousand dollars,” Eddie spoke up.

“That’s right,” the man said. “Boy’s got a good head on his shoulders, don’t he?”

“I reckon,” Ellsworth murmured, looking past the man at a yellow finch that had just landed a few yards away in a crabapple tree. He and Eula had a thousand dollars put back, but it was all the money they had in the world, and it had taken them years to save it. Still, if he could convince her to go along with this, he’d own more cattle than anybody else in the township. And if he didn’t buy them, somebody else surely would before the day was out. It was just too good a deal to pass up. He took a deep breath. “I’d have to talk this over with my wife first,” he said.

“I know exactly what you mean,” the man said. “I don’t spend a dime without talkin’ it over with Nolie.”

The man had followed them home, waited in the front yard while Ellsworth went inside the house. He found Eula sitting at the kitchen table having her afternoon cup of coffee. Pacing back and forth, he explained the situation twenty different ways in increasingly glowing terms, occasionally stopping to remind her that he knew as much about cattle as Henry Robbins, and then some. “We could have one of the best dairy farms around,” he told her. “Or, we could just take ’em to auction and double our money. Either way, it’s the chance of a lifetime.” Of course, she had been resistant, as he had known she would be, but after an hour of his going on about it with no sign of a letup, she reluctantly gave in. She went into the bedroom and returned with the money jar she kept hidden under a loose board behind the dresser. “You look those cows over good before you go to handin’ him this,” she said.

Three hours later, he and Eddie and the man passed through a wide, sturdy gate to a large farm set between some wooded hills in Pike County. Ellsworth looked about admiringly at the rolling green pastures and acres of corn and hay and the freshly painted barn and scattered outbuildings and the brick two-story house set back among some tall oaks. “Quite a place ye got here,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” the man said. “The Lord’s been good to me.”

Ellsworth had wondered what was going to happen to the land, but he hated to ask. After all, the old boy was already taking a beating on his livestock. He remembered later that he’d been a little surprised at how soft the man’s hand seemed when he shook it to finalize the transaction. And then there was the checkered suit coat and pants that he wore, another warning sign that Ellsworth, in what he later shamefully realized was his hurry to take advantage of someone else’s misfortune, chose to ignore. “Well, I hope your wife gets to feelin’ better,” he’d said, as he watched the man stuff the money in his pocket without even bothering to count it, then scribble out a receipt on the back of an old envelope with a pencil stub.

“So do I,” the man answered. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.” His voice had actually quavered when he said that, and whenever Ellsworth replayed the incident in his head, that was the thing that enraged him most of all. Sometimes he imagined the slimy scoundrel in a smoky dive, flush with the thousand dollars, bragging to his lowlife buddies in between hee-haws and buying rounds for the house exactly how he had weaved the tight web around the country hick, one slick and deceitful strand at a time. Because, as it turned out, the man never had any claim to the cattle in the first place.

But that was to come later, learning that he’d been rooked. Over the next two days, he and Eddie drove nearly half the herd the seven miles back to their place, four or five head at a time. Then, on the third morning, just as they started through the gate with another bunch, the real owner of the farm showed up, after being away at a family gathering in Yellow Springs for the past week. Fortunately, Abe McAdams was a reasonable man. Though the law was sent for and a shotgun calmly directed at Ellsworth’s head while they waited, it could have been worse. Nobody would have blamed McAdams if he had killed them both. The constable finally arrived in a Model T with a white star painted on the door. By that time, McAdams really didn’t believe the pair intentionally meant to steal from him, but Constable Sykes, a man who’d heard enough false cries of innocence to blow the roof off a concert hall, insisted that they be taken into custody just the same, at least until he had made some inquiries. Neither of them had ridden in an automobile before, and Ellsworth, already sick over being duped, splattered the running boards with vomit several times before they got to the Pike County jailhouse. Everyone, from the toothless wife-beater in the next cell to the crowd of curious citizens who gathered outside their barred window, wondered how the farmer could have been so dumb. More than a few offered to sell him things: a mansion on a hill for fifty cents, a genuine lock of Jesus’s hair for two stogies, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for a dozen brown eggs. Listening to their jokes was bad enough, but even worse had been watching Eddie, who hadn’t said a word since they’d been arrested, curl up on a bunk and turn away to face the wall, as if he couldn’t bear to look at him. Finally, an hour or so before sundown, they were released. “What about the man who stole my money?” Ellsworth asked on his way out.