The Heavenly Table (3 page)

The constable shrugged. “I wouldn’t hardly get my hopes up. I’ll keep my eye out, but I figure that ol’ boy’s long gone by now. You just make sure you get those cattle back to their rightful owner.”

Going back to face Eula that night was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. If only she had beat him with her fists, screamed curses at him, spit in his face. But no; except for a barely audible gasp when she realized what he was telling her, she said nothing. For weeks afterward, she walked about in a stupor, not eating or sleeping or barely, it seemed at times, even breathing. He began to fear she might do herself in. Every afternoon, he came into the house from the fields or the barn filled with dread at what he might find. But then one November morning, two months after the swindle, he overheard her say to herself, “Just have to start over, that’s all.” She was standing at the stove fixing breakfast, and she pursed her lips and nodded her head, as if she were agreeing with something someone else had said. After that, she began to come around, and although he knew she might never forgive him for being so reckless and stupid, at least he no longer had to worry about her going cuckoo or choking down a cupful of rat poison.

He scraped the last of the oatmeal from the bowl and stood up. Eula hadn’t said a word while he was eating, just sat there staring out the window sipping her coffee. “Well,” Ellsworth told her, “when he gets home, you tell him to meet me at the field across from Mrs. Chester’s place. And to bring a hoe.”

“And what if he don’t show up?”

“By God, he better,” Ellsworth said. “The weeds have damn near taken over.”

3

L
IFE HADN’T ALWAYS
been so hard for Pearl Jewett. At one time, he’d had a farm of his own back in North Carolina, just a few acres, but big enough for a man to get by on if he was willing to bust his ass. Life was as good as an illiterate farmer with no birthright could hope for in those days, and Pearl made sure to give the Almighty credit for that. He’d been quite a drinker and hell-raiser in his youth, but he turned over a new leaf when he met Lucille, and the only times he fell off the wagon after they married were whenever she went into labor. Hence, the rather odd names bestowed upon his sons didn’t signify anything of great importance, but were simply the result of what happens when a man who’s been off the sauce for a while consumes too much whiskey and then insists on having his way. With Cane, he had drawn his inspiration from a walking stick that someone had beaten him over the head with in a rowdy tavern; in the case of Cob, it turned out to be a half-eaten roasting ear he discovered in his back pocket after coming to under the porch of a boardinghouse called the Rebel Inn; while in regard to Chimney, it was a stovepipe that he was fairly certain he had helped a neighbor fashion from a sheet of tin in return for a cup of liquor that tasted like muddy kerosene and left him without any feeling in his fingers and toes for several days. And though Lucille would have preferred Christian names such as John and Luke and Adam, she figured the damage could have been worse, and she just counted her blessings that he was back home and walking a straight line again. He sacrificed much, even giving up tobacco, to pay for a pew in the First Baptist Church of Righteous Revelation in nearby Hazelwood, and every Sunday morning for the next few years, no matter what the weather, he and his young family walked the three miles there to worship. Pearl was especially proud that his wife was one of the few people in the congregation besides the minister who could read the lessons, and so, despite the fact that Lucille’s shyness sometimes made it hard for her to look even him in the eye, he had quickly volunteered her after the last lay reader, a silken-voiced, holier-than-thou man named Sorghum Simmons, backslid and ran off with a deacon’s wife and a business partner’s money. Every week he had to coax her into walking to the front of the church, telling himself it was for her own good. Thus, when she first started staying in bed on the Sabbath, complaining of feeling weak and light-headed, he couldn’t help but think she was faking it, and several months passed before he realized she really was sick.

By that time, Lucille had lost a considerable amount of weight, and her sagging skin had turned the dreary gray color of a rain cloud. Taking out a lien against the land, Pearl sent for doctors. One of them bled her and another prescribed expensive tonics while a third put her on a diet of curds and raw onions, but nothing seemed to help. Then the money ran out and all he could do was watch her slowly wither away. What struck her down remained a mystery until the night of her wake. As he sat alone keeping company with her corpse in the dim, flickering light of a single candle, Pearl noticed that the tip of her tongue was sticking out from between her lips. Leaning over to set it right, he saw a slight movement. My God, he thought, his heart quickening, can it be that she’s still alive? “Lord Jesus,” he started to pray, just before a worm, no wider than a ring finger and no thicker than a few sheets of paper, pushed forward several inches out of her mouth. Pearl lurched back and knocked the chair over in his rush to get away from the bed, but managed to stop himself at the doorway. He stood listening to the soft breathing of his sons sleeping in the next room while trying to still the frantic pounding in his chest. With a shudder, he thought of some of the words he had heard Lucille read the last time she was well enough to do the lessons: “Where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” Though he couldn’t recall any more of the passage, he was certain that Reverend Hornsby had explained in his sermon that it was an apt description of hell. He debated what to do. To bury his wife with that thing still inside her was out of the question, but he had no idea how to go about removing it other than to cut her open, and he couldn’t bear the thought of doing something like that. Stepping forward, he saw another two inches of the worm emerge, and the blind head rise up and move back and forth as if trying to get a bearing on this new world it was about to enter. Pearl paced around the room, fighting the urge to crush it with his hands. For the first time in several years, he craved a drink. The only thing to do, he finally decided, was to wait it out, and so he sat back down and spent the next several hours watching the creature slowly work its way out of her.

Not long after sunrise, the last of the worm slid from Lucille’s mouth and dropped onto her chest with a soft, almost imperceptible
plop.
Pearl looked out the window and beyond the yard to his fields barren of crops and overgrown with weeds. Lucille’s dying had begun in the spring and taken up the entire summer. Soon the man from the bank would be coming for his money, and Pearl didn’t have it. He stood and repeated the lesson words aloud: “Where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” He studied on this for a while, then turned to the bed and gathered up the worm like a spool of wet rope and carried it outside. Unrolling it along the ground in front of the house, he pinned each pulsing end of it down with rocks he took from the border of one of Lucille’s flower beds. Two peahens, all that remained of his livestock, darted out from around the house and began pecking furiously at it. He grabbed them up, one in each hand, and bashed their heads bloody against a porch post. Then he went back inside and drank a cold cup of coffee before shaking his sons awake. Later that morning, he and Cane carried Lucille out of the house and buried her in the shady spot under a magnolia tree where she used to sit and shell beans and read her Bible. For the next several days, the boys gnawed on chicken bones and decorated the grave with whatever pretty things they could find while Pearl sat silently watching the scalding Carolina sun turn the worm into a silver, leathery strip. When he was finally satisfied with the cure, he stuffed the remains into an empty coffee-bean sack along with some of the peahen feathers and sewed it shut like a shroud. Ever since then, and that had been nearly fourteen years ago, he had used it to rest his head on at night, and to remind him, lest he ever forget, that nothing is certain in this earthly life except the end of it.

4

W
HEN
E
DDIE DIDN’T
return home by suppertime that evening, Ellsworth knew something was amiss. The boy never stayed away this long, no matter how shit-faced he got. The farmer stood on the porch puffing on his cob pipe and listening to Eula bang around in the kitchen. He prayed to God the fool hadn’t gotten drunk and drowned in a pond, or made his way over the hill and caught a dose of the syph off one of those Slab Holler girls that the men who loitered over at Parker’s store were always warning the young bucks about. What a mess. Though he had always tried his best to hide the extent of Eddie’s screwups from Eula, it was getting harder and harder to come up with excuses. He didn’t even know why he kept doing it, other than to save her from the worries. For just a second, he wondered which would be worse, finding him floating facedown in somebody’s mud hole or watching him go blind and crazy from a sick peter.

“I can’t figure it out,” he said when he finally mustered up the courage to go in the house. “Think maybe he went fishin’ with those Hess boys?” Without bothering to reply, Eula wiped her red hands on the front of her apron and went back to the stove. Ellsworth sat down and nervously drummed his fingers on the table. Looking about the room, he noticed that she had rearranged the two faded pictures on the far wall, tropical island scenes cut from a magazine that Eddie had brought home one Friday from school when he was ten, explaining that Mr. Slater, the teacher, had tossed it in the trash. The first time he ever caught him in a lie, Ellsworth recalled. He had met Slater on the road the next afternoon, on his way to question Eddie about the
National Geographic
that had turned up missing from his desk drawer. Another student claimed he had seen him with it. “I don’t know if he’s the one who took it, Mr. Fiddler,” Slater said, “but—”

“It was him,” Ellsworth said, his face turning crimson from embarrassment.

“Oh,” the teacher said, “so you knew he stole it?”

“No, but I do now,” Ellsworth answered. And what had he done? Nothing. Handed Slater a quarter for the goddamn magazine and kept it a secret from Eula, thinking she would be better off not knowing. Just like he’d been doing with the wine.

A few minutes later Eula put out his supper, a meatless stew that she had been serving every Tuesday and Friday since last fall, and sat down across from him. Except for a rather prominent overbite, she had been almost pretty when they married, with her bright blue eyes and smooth, milky complexion, and her looks had held up well over the years, but it was clear that the last year had been hard on her. Although she had rallied in most ways after the loss of the money, she no longer seemed to care about her appearance. Her thin cotton dress was stained with various splatters, and her hair was just a greasy brown ball pinned atop her head. Even from the other end of the table, it was hard for him to ignore the strong odor of her sweat. “Ain’t you gonna eat?” he said, as he began buttering a slice of bread.

“You need to dump that wine,” Eula said, her voice calm but definite. “What’s left of it anyway.” Her mind was made up. Something had to be done about Eddie before it was too late. Just two weeks ago, after spending the morning in his bedroom supposedly nursing another one of his bellyaches, he had slipped out of the house with the shotgun and blown a hole through Pickles, the cat that had been her closest companion for the past ten years. Of course, he swore right off it was an accident, and though she was fairly sure that was true, she’d still felt he needed to be taught a lesson. But all Ellsworth had done was get more inventive with the allowances he made for the boy. Looking back on it, she didn’t know why she had expected anything else. He had always been too softhearted and trusting for his own good, and Eddie had learned over the years to take advantage of that good nature any chance he got.

Laying the bread down, Ellsworth looked away as he took a drink of buttermilk. At age fifty-two, he had a friendly, somewhat meek face, and thinning gray hair that Eula kept trimmed with a pair of sewing scissors. He could still outwork most men in the township, though sometimes now he woke up in the morning wondering how long he could keep it up. Since the embarrassment suffered last fall, he had grown heavier in the belly and jowls, even with Eula’s rationing, and had recently developed a slight stoop that often made him look as if he were searching the ground for a nail that had dropped out of his pocket, or the clue to a mystery he was forever trying to solve. In many ways, the con man had stolen more than just money from them.

On the afternoon that he came in from the fields and Eula told him Pickles had been shot, he went straight to Eddie’s room. When he flung the door open, the boy jumped up from his bed, and a book lying beside him fell to the floor. He had just finished digging the cat’s grave a few minutes before, and was still shiny with sweat. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Ellsworth had yelled.

“It was an accident, I swear,” Eddie said.

“An accident? How could such a thing be an accident?”

“I tripped and the gun went off. I didn’t mean to do it.” To an extent, anyway, Eddie was telling the truth. After spending the morning secretly sipping on some of his father’s wine and searching fruitlessly through a tattered book called
Tom Jones
for the juicy parts that Corky Routt had promised were in it, he had grown bored and decided to sneak the shotgun out of the closet and go blast a couple of birds. He was staggering across the backyard with Pickles sashaying along a few feet in front of him when he stumbled and fell. The gun, which had a loose trigger, went off when it hit the ground, and he lay there cursing for a minute before he raised up and saw that the blast had split the cat nearly in half.

“You been drinking again, ain’t ye?” Ellsworth said, looking at the boy’s bloodshot eyes.

“No,” Eddie answered nervously, “but with the way Mom carried on, I almost wish I had been.”

Ellsworth shook his head. Though he tried his best to love his son and accept him for who he was, he found himself wishing yet again that he was more like Tom Taylor’s boy, Tuck, big and rawboned and shoeing mules by the time he was ten years old. He felt guilty whenever he had such thoughts, but he had been waiting years for the boy to straighten up and be of some use. Not once had he ever given Eddie a proper thrashing, and though he had no stomach for any kind of cruelty—be it kicking dogs or whipping horses or drowning kittens or beating children—he regretted his soft touch now. Farming fifty acres by himself was hard work, and he wasn’t getting any younger. Now he was beginning to wonder if Eddie, with his lazy ways and thin wrists and that shaggy mop of blondish hair always hanging in his eyes, might have been better off a girl. At least then there might have been a chance of landing a stout son-in-law who could help out. But everything was a trade-off, and so whatever a man did, he usually ended up wishing he had done the other. “What’s that book you got there?” he asked.