The Heavenly Table (7 page)

That afternoon, Pearl’s stomach started acting up and he threw down his ax and hurried behind a bush, his hands fumbling with the knot he had tied in his rope belt. Ever since they’d started eating on that sick hog, he’d been prone to the squirts. He was squatted down with his pants around his knees when he suddenly emitted a high-pitched cry and toppled forward on his face. His sons, scattered across the clearing, all turned and looked at one another. Cob began to run in Pearl’s direction. “Keep an eye out,” Cane yelled. “He probably been bit.” The rotting carcasses of at least twenty rattlers and cottonmouths they had killed over the last several weeks hung from the lower branches of a huge oak standing alone in the middle of the hacked acres. Tardweller had ordered them not to touch the tree because it held, as he put it, “sentimental value,” and the brothers had whiled away hours speculating on what he might mean, Cane and Chimney finally agreeing that under that blue shade was probably where the man had gotten his first piece of ass. Such a spot, they figured, would be memorable to anyone, even that arrogant skinflint. Cob stopped and grabbed the rusty saber, then took off again. By that time, the others were only a few feet behind him.

After looking about for a snake, they turned Pearl over and searched for a bite mark, but found no sign of one. Although his eyes were open, they were fixed blankly on something that only he could see. A thin web of spittle hung from his chin whiskers to his Adam’s apple. Cob scratched his head and said, “I think he’s takin’ a nap.” He and Cane were on their knees on either side of the old man.

“No, he’s sick,” Chimney said. “I saw him puke up his biscuit this morning.” He stepped back a couple of feet, started trying to squeeze a splinter out of the palm of his hand.

Cane leaned over and put his ear against Pearl’s chest. He listened for a minute, then raised up. “Jesus,” he said. He grabbed hold of the old man’s bony shoulders and shook him.

“What ye doin’?” Chimney asked.

“Pap?” Cane said. “Hey, Pap.” He shook him again, but not so hard this time.

“Well?”

“I think his ol’ heart’s give out.”

“No way,” Chimney said. “Hell, I couldn’t keep up with him five minutes ago.”

“He sleeps pretty hard sometimes,” Cob said, gently smoothing his hand over Pearl’s forehead. “Poor ol’ Pap, he’s just tired, is all.”

“No,” Cane said, “that’s not it.” He turned and looked at Chimney. “I hate to say it, but I think he’s gone.”

Cob’s brow wrinkled and his hand moved down to pick a burr off Pearl’s shirt. For a moment, his brothers wondered if he understood, but then he said, as casually as if he were talking about the weather, “Well, that makes sense, I reckon. Remember what he said this morning?”

“No,” Cane said, “I don’t recall.”

“He said he could see someone a-settin’ a plate out for him. I just thought he was goin’ on about them ghosts again, but I bet he was talkin’ about the heavenly table, wasn’t he?”

“Shit, that don’t mean nothin’,” Chimney said. “That’s all he ever talked about.”

“Yeah, but still…”

Nothing else was said for several minutes, and Cane pushed Pearl’s muddy brown eyes closed with his thumbs, his living hands framing the wasted face for a moment like a picture hanging on a wall. Then he raised up and looked about the clearing. To his disgust, he found himself thinking that there was no way they would ever finish in time to get the chicken bonus now. The least he could have done was speak up this morning when Tardweller lied through his goddamn teeth about how many days they had left. That would have been something anyway, taking up for the old feller one last time. He fought down a sick feeling rising in his throat and said quietly to Cob, “Help me get his pants back up.”

As he stood watching, Chimney spat on his hands, then ran them through his hair. He wondered what Penelope was doing, hating her more than ever just then. From what he had seen those weeks he had worked in the barn, all she ever did was ride around in her college beau’s automobile and drink lemonade on the front porch. Well, whatever it was, she sure as hell wasn’t standing soaked with sweat in a field staring down at a dark, bloody lump behind her father’s feet, green bottle flies already buzzing around it. An anxious feeling swept over him just then, a wild desire to take off running and never look back, and he turned about in a circle several times before he could get settled down. Goddamn, he thought, just takin’ a shit. What a lousy way to go. Snake bit would have been a hundred times better.

Cob finished tying the belt and looked up at the sky. Somewhere out there beyond that blue expanse was the new country his father would soon be entering, one blessed with goodness and cool breezes and an everlasting repast. He smiled. There was nothing to be sad about. As he had heard Pearl say many times since his meeting with the hermit, a certain amount of suffering was called for to gain entry into paradise, and now that trial was over with for him. “Just think,” Cob said. “The heavenly table. He’s got it made now, don’t he?”

“He sure does,” said Chimney. “Shame we couldn’t have hitched a ride with him. Hell, they probably already fittin’ him for his feed bag.”

“This ain’t the time to be jokin’ around,” Cane told him.

“Maybe not,” Chimney said, “but I think Cob’s right. That poor old sonofabitch lying there just got the only thing he’s wanted for years. Christ, we should be happy for him.”

Although Cane couldn’t dispute the logic in his brother’s argument, such an attitude was still, to his way of thinking, a little too swift and coldhearted for the occasion. It was only right that a tear or two be shed, or, at the very least, some kind words spoken, before you started poking fun at someone’s passing. He stood up and walked over to the water bucket to retrieve his shirt. As he did so, he heard Cob say, “Well, I know I am. Heck, he’ll be eatin’ steaks big around as wagon wheels, and tender as…as…Oh, shoot, how tender was them steaks again, Chimney?”

“Tender as a young girl’s kitty-cat.”

“An’ the biscuits? What was it you said about them?”

“Oh, they’ll be hot and fluffy as—”

“Enough,” Cane said. He looked toward the shack on the other side of the cotton field. “You gather up the tools and me and Cob will carry him back to the house.”

“Where we gonna bury him?”

“Back there by the hog pen,” Cane said, as he finished buttoning his shirt. “At least that way he’ll have some company.”

10

B
EFORE
E
LLSWORTH WAS
halfway across town, he saw, coming toward him on Paint Street, a group of soldiers on horseback, their new leather saddles squeaking and the polished tack shining brightly in the morning sun. He pulled Buck off to the side and studied the procession closely, but he didn’t see any sign of Eddie. After they turned and headed down Main in the direction of the train depot, he continued on. He was amazed at how much Meade had grown since his last visit, and nearly overwhelmed by the racket coming from the automobiles and horse-drawn carriages and throngs of people on the sidewalks. “And this a weekday!” he exclaimed to himself. He looked about for something familiar, and as the mule plodded by Spetnagel’s Hardware with its ears bobbing, he recalled that he had bought Eula a nice dress there once, a blue and white print with pearly-looking buttons and a lacy collar. Even after all these years, he could still see the surprised look on her face when she opened the box. They had been married only a short time and were still getting to know each other. She had worn it to church the next week, and as they started to drive home afterward, he heard her start softly singing the hymn the preacher had chosen to close the services with. “What you so happy about?” he asked.

Eula stopped singing and glanced shyly at him, then looked away. “I know it’s silly,” she said, “but ain’t nobody ever bought me anything as nice as this dress before.”

Ellsworth had felt a lump start to form in his throat. Though Eula didn’t talk much about her past, and he didn’t ask, he’d heard a little about how she had been raised on the edge of Bourneville. Her father had been born deformed, without any fingers, and his arms hung helplessly at his sides like a pair of clubs, while her mother, when she was in the grips of what people called one of her “spells,” walked the roads at night wrapped in nothing but a bedsheet and talking nonsense about being of royal blood. Nine times out of ten, someone would usually find her the next morning lying violated in a ditch or under a tree somewhere, the older boys around Bourneville, and even some of the men, not caring one iota about who the crazy bitch married to Crip Sims claimed to know in Buckingham Palace. Throughout Eula’s childhood, every spoon of slop put out on the banana crate they used as a table was due to somebody’s charity. By the time she met Ellsworth in 1897, she was twenty-two, keeping house for an old man named Wheeler in Bainbridge in return for fifteen dollars a month and a bed in a windowless back room. Her parents were long dead, and her lone surviving relative, an older brother who had left home on his twelfth birthday, was a tramp who used to come through every two or three years to bum a buck or two. “Well, shoot, you’re my wife, ain’t ye?” Ellsworth finally managed to say.

“Until the day I die,” she had answered, then leaned over and kissed him quickly on the cheek. The dress, along with a pair of stockings and a petticoat, had set him back four dollars, but it was the best money he ever spent in his life.

When he finally arrived at the entrance to the army camp, Ellsworth swung down off the wagon and approached the three guards warily, explained that he was looking for his son. “Been gone three days now,” he said.

“Was he called up?” asked a man with a corporal stripe and a nose shaped like a sharp blade.

“What?”

“Did he get a draft notice?”

“No, not that I know of.”

“So he enlisted?”

“Maybe,” Ellsworth said.

“Well, if you don’t know, why do you think he’s here then? He could be anywhere.”

Just as Ellsworth had begun to suspect last night, they were going to make it hard for him. That’s just the way it was with the government; he had heard it said a hundred times over at Parker’s store. They were incapable of doing anything in a forthright, sensible way. But Christ Almighty, he couldn’t just turn around and head home without knowing for sure. What would he tell Eula? He looked the man straight in the eye and said, “I’d be much obliged if you’d check anyway. It took me most of a day to get here.”

The corporal stared off into the distance while pulling at his chin, looking as if he were about to make a momentous decision that could affect the entire outcome of the war. His name was Alfred Zimmerman, and he had paid a flunky draft-board doctor ten dollars to overlook his flat feet so that he might finally escape his father’s print shop in Akron and embark on what he truly believed was going to be a glorious career in the military. He wasn’t sure yet what special talent he possessed that would pave the way for his advancement, but in his view, compared to the two imbeciles he’d been stuck with on gate duty, he was virtually another Napoleon Bonaparte. “What’s his name?” he finally asked the farmer with a deep sigh.

“Eddie.”

“What about his last name?”

“Same as mine,” Ellsworth said.

Zimmerman’s face began to turn red, and the other two soldiers elbowed each other and chuckled. “So what the hell might that be?”

“Fiddler.”

Turning to one of the others, a stocky man with a head shaped like a bean can and thick, sun-bleached eyebrows that birds occasionally mistook for a pair of dead caterpillars, Zimmerman said, “Private Ballard, you’ll be responsible for the gate while I run this down. Just remember, like Lieutenant Bovard told us the other day, the enemy could be anywhere.” Then he wheeled around and marched off, his nose pointed skyward like a rudder and his back ramrod straight, toward a group of canvas huts off in the distance.

“Jesus, Ballard,” Ellsworth heard the third soldier say, a thin, bookish-looking man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a pale, triangular face who went by the name of Crank, “that Zimmerman needs to ease up a little. What’s his problem anyway?” An only child, he’d lived with his elderly parents in a neat, ivy-covered brick house in Martins Ferry, and had made a comfortable living keeping the books for several businesses before being called up. He had many quirks, among them an absolute rigidity when it came to the manner in which his food was laid out on his plate, and a maddening inability to sleep anywhere but in his own tiny bedroom. Because of the sloppy ineptness of the mess-hall workers, he hadn’t eaten anything but candy bars in over a week, and the insomnia he had suffered from since his first night in the barracks continued unabated. The fervent desire to make it home and never have to eat a chicken leg that had accidently brushed up against the mashed potatoes, or sleep in the same room with another human being ever again, was the only thing that kept him going.

“Don’t pay him no attention,” Ballard said. “The Jew got him a stripe, and now he thinks he’s Colonel Custard.” Unlike Crank, Ballard, a local boy who had been born and raised in a shotgun shack at the bottom of Porter Holler, considered his draft notice the luckiest thing that had ever happened to him, chiefly because it allowed him to escape the clutches of a pie-faced country woman whom he had managed to impregnate two years in a row behind the makeshift bandstand at the annual Lattaville Coon Hunters’ Dance. The way he saw it, even getting ground into mincemeat on a foreign field was better than playing daddy to a couple of hillbilly bastards and hubby to a floozy who didn’t think twice about spreading her legs for a glass of cider and a cake doughnut.

“You mean
General Custer,
don’t you?” Crank said.

“Shit, what difference does it make?” Ballard replied. “He’s a prick, that’s what I’m saying.”

Ellsworth stood waiting for a long time in the hot sun. The guards ignored him and he studied their brown uniforms and campaign hats out of the corner of his eye, trying to picture Eddie wearing one. He overheard Ballard tell a joke about a queer who set up house in a cucumber patch, but he couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. He wondered if either of them knew where Germany was located.