The Heavenly Table (4 page)

“Uh, well,” Eddie stammered, “it’s about a guy who—”

“I don’t give a hoot what it’s about. Where’d ye get it?”

“Corky loaned it to me.”

“Well, you go on over to his house right now and give it back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean it,” Ellsworth said. “Won’t be no more readin’ around here till you straighten up.” Eula had insisted that Eddie finish the sixth grade before he was allowed to quit school, and the farmer was convinced that a big part of the boy’s problem had to do with his education. In other words, he had gotten just enough of it to fuck him up for the real world. Ellsworth had seen it happen before, mostly to flighty types like horny spinsters and weak-eyed store clerks with a lot of time to kill. They would stick their noses in a book and then all of a sudden Ross County, Ohio, wasn’t good enough for them. The next thing you knew, they either got caught up in some perversion, like the old Wilkins woman who somehow managed to split herself open on a bedpost, or they lit out for some big city like Dayton or Toledo, in search of their “destiny.” Sometimes the line that divided those two impulses blurred until they amounted to pretty much the same thing, as in the case of the Fletcher boy the police found butchered in a hotel room in Cincinnati with a woman’s wig glued to his head and his pecker tossed under the bed like a cast-off shoe.

Ellsworth could sense his wife staring at him from across the table, waiting on an answer about the wine. He set his glass down and cleared his throat. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with Eddie takin’ off,” he finally said.

“Your side of the family’s always been too partial to drink, you know that,” Eula pointed out.

“That ain’t true. Uncle Peanut was fine until his woman ran off with that tinker.”

“Fine? My God, Ells, you’re talkin’ about a man who once ate a dog turd at Jack Eliot’s fish fry for a pint of moonshine, and that happened long before he ever hooked up with Jolene Carter. No, I mean it. Eddie might turn out to be a drunkard, but it’s not going to be with our help. Get rid of that wine and that will be the end of it.”

The buttermilk rose back up into his throat like hot lava, and Ellsworth had to swallow several times to keep it down. All the work he had put into it, his finest batch, and her making it sound as if dumping those barrels was no bigger deal than emptying grandma’s piss pot. He knew she had a right to be upset, but, Jesus Lord, there had to be another way. The two cups he drank in the evening were the only thing he had left to look forward to most days. He looked over at the cellar door cut into the floor in the corner of the kitchen. “What if I was to put a lock on it?” he asked, after he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to upchuck buttermilk all over the table.

“A lock? On what?”

“On the cellar door,” he explained quickly. “That would keep him out of it. Parker’s got some over at the store. Padlocks.”

Eula noted the slight tremor of desperation in his voice, and, for a moment, she started to weaken. Maybe something like that would work, she thought, rubbing her forehead. She was right on the verge of giving in when she glanced out the window and her eyes landed on Pickles’s grave in the backyard. The boy was drunk when he shot her; she didn’t doubt that for a minute. She knew it was partly her fault, too; perhaps if she had spoken up sooner, Pickles would still be alive. But still, if Ellsworth had wanted to save his wine, he should have considered something like a lock long before now. “No,” she said, “I’m not changing my mind.”

“Why not?”

She sighed and said, “Because it’s our boy we’re talking about. Just do it and get it over with.” Taking a sip of coffee, she looked over at the mostly bare shelves where she kept her staples. “But now that you mentioned the store—”

“Yeah?”

“Well, you did remind me of something.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re nearly out of sugar and salt,” she said, “and I got to get ready for the canning. The way things is looking, that garden might be the only thing that keeps us alive this winter.” She stood and started out of the kitchen. “You might as well go over to Parker’s tomorrow and take care of it.”

“But what about Eddie?” Ellsworth asked. “Don’t ye figure I should go out lookin’ for him?”

Eula stopped and put her hand against the doorway. She leaned there for a moment with her back turned, feeling dizzy. A wave of intense emotion ran through her body, and she began to tremble. Her son had disappeared and her cat was dead, and on top of that, it suddenly occurred to her that the sugar and salt would take what little money they had left. To think that this time last year they had a thousand dollars put aside. She bit her lip and fought the urge to cry out.

From where he sat, Ellsworth watched her narrow shoulders start to shake. An awkward silence filled the room, and he wondered if he should get up and hold her. But just as he was scooting his chair back, she wiped at her eyes and said, “I reckon Eddie will come home when he’s ready. He’s probably just out playin’ around.” Then she continued on into the bedroom. For a long time, Ellsworth sat staring at the stew congealing on his plate, and when he finally figured she was asleep, he slipped down into the cellar with the lantern. He looked about and found five empty jugs, then removed the wooden tops from the two wine barrels. After he filled them, he carried the jugs out to the barn and hid them in the loft. Then he went back to the cellar again. There were at least three or four gallons left. He dipped out a cup and drank it fast, then sat down at the bottom of the stairs with another.

5

A
FTER HE LOST
his wife and the bank took the farm, Pearl and his sons wandered aimlessly like nomads across a harsh, impoverished South still broken by a war that even he was too young to remember. They encountered corruption and decay at every turn, and their luck shifted from bad to worse. He prayed to God to smooth the way a bit, but no matter how hard they worked, their pockets remained empty and the best the four of them could do was stay one step ahead of starvation. He couldn’t understand it. Sitting by the fire in whatever meager camp they had made for the night, Pearl supped on parched corn and moldy bread and went back over his life, trying to recall something he might have done to deserve such a fate. He knew that he had sinned on occasion, yet no more than most, and certainly not as much as some. Pride had always been his biggest defect, and he knew that forcing Lucille to read those church lessons had been a vain and selfish act, but still, wasn’t God supposed to forgive? If not for him, then at least for his sons? And so, doubts began to creep into his mind, and that worried him even more than where their next meal was coming from.

By the time Pearl met the hermit along the Foggy River, Lucille had been gone ten years and the worm that killed her had turned to powder in his pillow. He was sitting on the bank in a daze that afternoon while the boys fished the water with their hands. They hadn’t eaten anything in several days, but he didn’t have the strength to help them. An occasional sparking sound that had started up in his head a few months ago had recently turned into an unrelenting sizzle, as if his brains were being sautéed in a frying pan, and he hadn’t slept more than a minute or two at a time in weeks.

The man came out of the woods and sat down beside Pearl without a word, as if they had known each other for years. Suddenly aware of a presence, he roused himself and looked over, saw a bent and misshapen stranger carrying a rod made of ash and wearing nothing but a grimy, torn sackcloth. On his forehead, a red canker the size of a silver dollar seethed like a hot coal. Pearl was reminded of a picture card he had once seen of a heathen who had lived his entire life chained to a tree sitting in a pile of his own slops, his eyes turned to black bubbles from staring into the sun. A pockmarked missionary just returned from some foreign land had passed it around the First Baptist Church of Righteous Revelation while grubbing for donations. Pearl wondered if he was dreaming. “Looks like you been on the road a long time,” he finally said to the man.

The stranger nodded. “See that little white bird over yonder in that cypress?” he said, pointing with his rod.

Shading his eyes with his hand, Pearl squinted across the river. “Yeah, I see him.”

“I been following him for fifty years now. He takes me wherever I need to go.”

“I had no idy a bird lived that long,” Pearl said.

“Oh, that one will never die.”

“How do ye figure?” said Pearl.

“Well,” the hermit said, “I’ve seen him blown to pieces with a four-gauge scattergun, and split in two by a panther’s claws, and even set on fire by a gang of no-goods over around Turlington a couple year ago, and yet there he is, a-sittin’ in that tree just as pretty as you please. He always comes back.”

Pearl thought for a minute, then asked, “You some kind of preacher?”

The man shrugged his bony shoulders. “God speaks to me from time to time, and His bird shows me the way. Not much else to it.”

Before he realized it, Pearl was telling the man about Lucille and the worm and all the ill fortune that had come after. He confessed that he was even beginning to wonder if God existed, for why would He treat some so badly and let others off the hook completely? It didn’t add up. There was no way his paltry sins were equal to the tribulations that had befallen him and his family. After Pearl finished, the man sat quietly for a long time stroking his long, matted beard. Then he glanced down at his callused feet. He leaned over and began tugging on one of his big toenails with his knotty fingers. Without so much as a wince, he tore it off and held it up for Pearl to see.

“You got it all wrong, my friend,” the man said. “The truth is you been chosen. God’s giving you the chance for a better resurrection, just like he did your old woman. Without taking hold of some of the misery in the world, there can’t be no redemption. Nor will there be any grace. That shouldn’t come as no surprise if you study on it. Look what He let them Jews do to His own son. Most of us got it damned easy compared to the suffering that went on that day. But what they call ‘preachers’ nowadays, they don’t want to tell people the truth. Ol’ Satan’s tricked them into believing the way to salvation can be had for a little bit of nothing. Why, some of them even go around in their fancy clothes claiming that the Lord wants us all to be rich. How does such a man sleep at night, telling lies like that? Using God to fatten his own pockets? Pure sacrilege, that’s what it is. You wait and see, those kind will burn the hottest come the Judgment Day. It’s just a shame their flocks will end up roastin’ with ’em. No, you got to welcome all the suffering that comes your way if you want to be redeemed.”

“You really believe that?” Pearl said, staring down at the man’s bloody toe while recalling the beaver hat and calfskin gloves the Reverend Hornsby back at the church in Hazelwood used to wear a bit too proudly.

“Friend, you and those boys of yours could drown me in that river right now and it would be the most blessed thing ever happened to me.”

“I don’t know,” Pearl said. “I can see where sleepin’ out in the cold and goin’ hungry from time to time might do a man some good, but, mister, we’re about starved clear out.”

The hermit smiled. “I ain’t et nothing in over a week except a few tadpoles and the creatures I’ve found in this beard of mine. I wouldn’t want no more than that.”

“If that’s so,” Pearl said, “what is it I get for all this redeeming you talkin’ about?”

“Why, one day you’ll get to eat at the heavenly table,” the man said. “Won’t be no scrounging for scraps after that, I guarantee ye.”

“The heavenly table?” Pearl repeated. He hadn’t heard of such a thing before, and wondered if maybe he had been dozing on whatever Sunday morning Reverend Hornsby preached on it.

“That’s right,” the hermit said, dropping the toenail to the ground. “But keep in mind, only them that shun the temptations of this world will ever sit there.”

“So what you’re a-sayin’ is that them that has it good down here don’t ever get to see the Promised Land?”

“Their chances are slim to none, I reckon. Too many spots on their garments, too many wants in their hearts.”

Gathering up some sandy dirt in his hand, Pearl let it trickle through his fingers. It was obvious the old man was a thinker. “Well, let me ask you this then,” he said. “What about this here noise I got in my head? I’d give the rest of my life for just one night without it.”

“Lean over here,” the man said. He put his ear against Pearl’s and held his breath. From a distance, they looked like two spent lovers watching the water pass by. A blue-winged dragonfly hovered above their gray heads, then darted off into a bunch of brown cattails. “Mercy,” the hermit said, after listening to the buzzing inside Pearl’s head for several minutes, “sounds like you gettin’ ready to hatch you a star in there.”

“You think it will ever go away?”

“Oh, I expect so,” the man said. “That’s the one good thing about this here life. Nothin’ in it lasts for long.” Then he glanced over at the bird in the cypress tree and reached for his staff. “Well, it’s been nice talkin’ to ye, brother, but I see my little friend is ready to go. Who knows? Maybe one of these days we’ll have us some wings, too.” Just as he stood, a loud commotion erupted down at the water and Cane whooped and slung a large catfish up onto the bank. The man shook his head as he watched it flop around in the mud. “Best you tell them to throw that thing back in,” he said to Pearl.

“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.