The Heavenly Table (17 page)

“There it is,” he said to the Fiddlers, pointing to a cracked, sun-bleached map hanging in a lacquered frame on the wall above the kitchen table where tiny black gnats swarmed about some dirty dishes. The map had been donated to the school by Mrs. Culver’s grandfather probably around the same time that John Wilkes Booth was making his final curtain call, but it was so obsolete by the year Slater started working there that he bought a new one with money out of his own pocket and took the old one home.

Eula and Ellsworth stepped forward, peered at all the different colored shapes. They were staring at the South Pole region when Slater realized that neither of them could read. He moved between them, stuck his finger on the map. “This is Germany, but when they send Eddie overseas, he’ll probably go to France first. From what I’ve read in the newspapers, that’s pretty much where all of our soldiers will end up.”

“That’s somewhere over there, too, ain’t it?” Eula asked.

“Yes,” Slater said, as he slid his finger an inch or two southward. “This is France.”

“So then…where would we be?”

“Right about here,” the teacher said, tapping the approximate location of Ohio.

“Well, heck, Eula, that don’t seem very far away,” Ellsworth said.

Slater cast a puzzled look at the farmer, but then, after a brief hesitation, started to explain, in the same patient voice he tried to maintain when he was talking to his slower students, “Oh, it’s quite a distance really. The world is a big place. You have to understand that the map just makes it look smaller. Everything is scaled down so that it can fit.”

“And what’s this?” Eula said, pointing at the broad expanse of blue that separated America from Europe while waving gnats away from her face.

“That’s the Atlantic Ocean.”

Ellsworth leaned in for a closer look. “Why, that don’t look no bigger than Clancy’s pond,” he said.

Now Slater wasn’t sure how to respond. Although the ignorance of some of the locals didn’t surprise him at all anymore, he now wondered if perhaps Ellsworth was pulling his leg. To not know the location of a foreign country was one thing, but to confuse a great ocean with a Huntington Township fishing hole was something entirely different. Even that crazy-ass preacher, Jimmy Beulah, one of the most backward-thinking men that Slater had ever met, had a rudimentary knowledge of the vastness of the earth, though he did still believe it to be as flat as a griddle cake. Oh, well, either way, the sooner he took care of their questions, the sooner he could get back to his music. He was right on the verge of finishing his first original composition, a slow, mournful piece in eight movements meant to capture the educator’s dread of returning to the classroom after the bliss of the summer break. Tentatively titled “Might as Well Hang Myself,” he had been working on it off and on for the past several years. “Anything else I can help you with?” he asked the couple.

“No,” Eula said. “I just wanted to see where they’re sending my boy, that’s all. We appreciate ye takin’ the time.”

A few minutes later, as they were driving home in the wagon, Ellsworth asked her, “What are ye thinkin’ about?”

“Oh, nothing much,” she said. “Eddie, I guess. Wondering why Mr. Slater don’t get himself a wife or at least hire a housekeeper. What about you?”

Ellsworth was also curious as to why Slater didn’t have a woman. Even a man who put flowers in his hair should be able to find some kind of mate. Then again, maybe the teacher just didn’t want the worries and responsibilities that came with being hitched. He and Eula had a better marriage than most he knew about, even with all the troubles they had gone through the past few months, but there were still occasional moments when he caught himself recalling with fondness the years when he was a single man. He didn’t know how he had done it, staying out all night running with Uncle Peanut or coon hunting with the Holcomb twins or hanging out in Parker’s back room, then working all day and doing it again the next night. Heck, these days he could hardly stay awake long enough after supper to finish a pipe. Age had finally caught up with him, as it did with everyone eventually. Even his memories were beginning to feel tired. He gave a little sigh, then said, “Do you think he’s read all them books?”

“Probably,” Eula said. “Why else would he clutter up his house with ’em if’n he wasn’t going to?”

“Well, I’ll tell ye this, after seeing him a-layin’ under that tree half-naked like that, I’m damn glad Eddie decided to take up soldiering. I bet they don’t put up with any of that silly horseshit in there, by God.”

“I don’t care nothin’ about that,” Eula said. “I just want him to come back in one piece.” She started to sniffle, and from somewhere out of her dress she took out a hankie to wipe her nose.

“Ah, don’t you worry,” Ellsworth said, wrapping his arm around her and pulling her close. “He’ll be fine. Shoot, the next time we see him we’ll probably have to salute and call him General Eddie. Now wouldn’t that be something?”

22

O
N HIS WAY
to the Senate Grill for his usual afternoon pick-me-up, Benjamin Hamm, a longtime physician in Meade, turned the corner at Paint and Second Street and saw Jasper Cone a few yards ahead, bent over in the middle of the sidewalk, wiping the crud off his measuring stick with the ragged remains of an old shirt. The doctor stopped in mid-step, then backed away and crossed the street, hoping to avoid him. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the young man; he was just too busy today to get into another tedious discussion about Emerald Hollister’s intestinal worms or Jasper’s suspicions that Mrs. Castle over on Caldwell Street might be suffering from hemorrhoids. Because of his access to everyone’s privy, Jasper could at times be spot-on when it came to diagnosing certain health problems among the citizenry, but it was still, Hamm thought, an invasion of privacy if he discussed them, even with somebody in the medical field. So, for example, if the Appleby girl that lived on Piatt Avenue wanted to puke up every morsel of food she ate, or Mule Miller took up eating glass again, that was, ultimately, their own business.

The doctor had known Jasper ever since moving from Baltimore to start his medical practice. He’d no sooner hung up his shingle when the boy’s mother, a high-strung, intensely devout Catholic with a pinched face and brown, puffy eyes, sent for him. He’d had a couple of walk-ins that morning with minor ailments, but this was his first house call, and he was, to say the least, a little nervous. “What seems to be the problem, Mrs. Cone?” Hamm had asked, looking around the cramped parlor. Religious icons made of plaster sat in a neat row on the mantel; a few Bibles and prayer books lay open on a table in front of the horsehair sofa. A wooden shrine to the Virgin Mary, illuminated by several candles, was set up in the corner.

“It’s my son,” the woman said, a sob catching in her throat as she looked toward the narrow stairs leading to the second floor. “He’s…he’s…” she stuttered.

“Well?” Hamm said, hoping it was something easy, like constipation or a stomachache. With the ink on his medical degree barely dry, he didn’t think he was quite ready to tackle something life-threatening yet. He was sure his lack of confidence would soon go away, but a few more days to settle in before he confronted something complicated or ghastly would be a blessing.

“It’s not something a lady can talk about,” she said, wiping delicately at a tear running down her powdered cheeks. “Just look him over and you’ll see. An adjustment, that’s what he needs.”

“A what?”

“An adjustment,” she repeated. “So he’s normal.”

Shit, this must be bad, Hamm thought, as he looked down at the string of rosary beads she was squeezing in her hand. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“Jasper,” she managed to whisper right before she gave a little swoon and carefully crumpled onto the horsehair sofa.

Hamm climbed the stairway with a sense of dread. Though he really didn’t believe in a divine being anymore, he stopped near the top and crossed himself anyway, hoping for some guidance and preparing for the worst. It was inevitable, he had been told in medical school, that he would lose a patient now and then, but why did the first one have to be a child? “Just do your best,” he told himself, as he walked toward the open door at the end of the hall. However, when he entered the room he found a boy standing rigidly in front of a bed, looking quite healthy except for a frightened look on his rather plain, bony face.

“Well, lad,” Hamm said, after introducing himself, “can you tell me what’s wrong? I can’t make heads or tails out of what your—”

“I don’t want you cuttin’ on it,” Jasper interrupted.

“On what?” Hamm asked, figuring the boy must be suffering from a cyst or tumor of some kind.

After a moment’s hesitation, Jasper unbuckled his pants and let them drop to the floor. He wasn’t wearing any drawers. Hamm stood there speechless for a minute, staring at the long slab of meat hanging between the boy’s skinny legs. “So this is what your mother was talking about?” he finally said. “Your penis?”

Jasper nodded grimly, then reached down and pulled his pants back up over it. “She wants you to whack some of it off, but I’d rather you maybe tried to shrink it like those Africans do with the heads and stuff.”

Only then did the doctor realize what the woman meant by “an adjustment.” Lord, could she be serious? He glanced about the room, bare except for a small dresser and a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall above the neatly made bed and a long rifle leaning in the corner. “But why?” Hamm asked.

“To make me normal,” the boy replied. “Just like she told ye.” Then he began to tremble and a single tear flushed from one of his brown eyes and dripped off his chin onto the floor.

“Now don’t worry, son,” Hamm said. “I’m not going to touch it, let alone operate on it, I promise. How old are you?”

“Be twelve my next birthday.”

“So you’re still in school?”

The boy shook his head. “Mother won’t allow it. She says freaks shouldn’t be seen in public.”

“What about your father?”

“He got killed right after I was born,” Jasper said. “Over at the paper mill.” He turned then and pointed at the rifle. “He bought that buffalo gun just for me. You ever seen one before?”

“No, can’t say that I have.”

“Mother won’t let me shoot it, but one of these days I will.”

Hamm looked out the window into the backyard, saw a couple of chickens pecking in the dirt, a mangy cat stretched out on a low hanging limb in a mulberry tree. Once, as part of his surgical training, he and several classmates had dissected a cadaver. The man on the table had been found frozen to death on a bench in downtown Baltimore in the middle of the day. Just a tramp with no name, no next of kin. Other than that, the only thing Hamm remembered about the poor fellow was that he’d had the biggest cock any of them had ever seen. Pumped up, it would have been the length of a hatchet handle and as big around as a specimen cup. They had all gone out for a beer afterward, and, of course, there had been much joking about it, most of them finding it hard to believe that a man who possessed something so magnificent could have ever ended up alone in the gutter. And by the time Jasper’s quit growing, Hamm estimated, as he watched the cat suddenly drop from the tree and slink off through the grass, his would be even larger than the one they had removed from the bum, the one that had ended up pickled in a jar of alcohol in a dark closet alongside some mutated embryos and a three-headed mouse.

“Your mother,” the doctor told Jasper, “just doesn’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with you. Certainly not anything we can
fix
anyway. You’re just going to have to live with it. My God, son, probably ninety percent of the men the world over would give anything to have your problem.”

That had been sixteen years ago, and now Jasper was twenty-seven. But what most men would have looked upon as a great gift, he had always considered a curse. Of course, his mother was to blame, with her insane, unrelenting tirades about Devil’s spawn, perverted desires, and hellish retributions. Growing up in such a house, Jasper became half-mad himself. It was a lonely life, filled with shame and guilt. As far as the doctor knew, he had never been with a woman. If he had, she would have probably ended up in the hospital a medical emergency, needing stitches at the very least. Not long after Hamm examined him, Jasper started keeping his penis bound up in a homemade truss constructed from a swatch of coarse canvas and strips of leather cord and a pair of silk bloomers he found lying behind the Blind Owl Saloon on one of those few nights when his mother forgot to lock him in his bedroom. But then, when he was eighteen, Cassandra Cone died from a heart attack while walking home with one of her chickens from a Blessing of the Animals service. Suddenly, Jasper’s world opened up in ways he’d never dreamed of. Within days of her passing, his uncle, the broom maker, got him a job emptying outhouses with a scavenger named Itchy Ingham, and every evening after they shoveled the last load of shit off the honey wagon, they took turns shooting rats out at the city dump with the buffalo gun. For someone whose life had been as joyless and stunted as Jasper’s, every day with the easygoing Itchy was like a holiday. He and the old man worked and ate and murdered rodents together six days a week. Then one blazing hot afternoon in the summer of 1915, Itchy keeled over and died in the middle of scooping out a particularly odious crapper at a boardinghouse over on Chestnut Street that catered to men who worked at the Old Capitol Brewery. Besides Jasper, the only other person who attended the funeral was Ernie Bagshaw, the dump keeper. The next day, Jasper made a place in the shed behind his house for Gyp, the donkey that pulled the honey wagon, and went back to work by himself.

A year later, after a spring flood sent a hundred shithouses floating down Mulberry Street into the Scioto, and six people died of cholera after drinking water from a fountain in the city park, water suspected of being tainted by the nearby jakes, the city engineer, a man by the name of Rawlings, convinced the mayor to call an emergency meeting of the city council to discuss the raw sewage situation. The engineer, fresh out of Wabash College, was brimming with modern ideas, and though he didn’t come right out and say it, for fear of being pegged a crackpot or, even worse, a Socialist, his hope was that somehow they could start pressuring citizens to install indoor plumbing. The debate went on for several hours, but in the end the city leaders reluctantly voted 5 to 1, with one abstainer, that they should hire what Rawlings referred to as a “sanitation inspector.” He admitted it was a new concept, but one he felt was necessary if they wanted to avoid any more disasters like the one that had occurred in the spring. “Good,” he said after the votes were tallied. “I’ve got just the man in mind.”