The Heavenly Table (31 page)

“Well, you’re still young, but take my advice and don’t wait as long as I did to get hitched. I was thirty-four, and I wish to Christ I’d done it sooner.”

“Why’s that?”

“I guess I would have liked for her to’ve known me when I was at my best. Heck, when I was your age or thereabouts I screwed some gal seven times in one night, but by the time I met Eula, I couldn’t have done that for a thousand dollars.” Ellsworth thought about the time he was walking home from a church revival one rainy, windblown evening and saw Mrs. Sproat standing out in her yard under a pawpaw tree with an old slicker draped over her head, as if she were waiting just for him. He was nineteen at the time, living with his mother, trying to make a living for them on the fifteen acres his father had left them when he died. Mrs. Sproat asked him if he’d like to come in a spell to get out of the wet, and he, never having been in such a situation before, thought she just wanted to talk, her being a widow woman and probably feeling lonely on such a miserable evening. They hadn’t been inside the house more than two minutes when she started stripping off her long black dress. It scared the bejesus out of him, but he didn’t turn away from it. Though she was flabby and gray and a few years past her prime, it was all he could do to keep up with her. He’d shoot a load in her and roll over to get his breath; and she would lie there for a spell, and then start back up on him again with her hands and her lips and by the time the first cock crowed the next morning, he was so weak he couldn’t have split a bean pod open. He washed up good the next evening and went back to have another go at her, thinking that she considered him quite the stud, but when he presented himself at her door, she acted as if she didn’t even know him. He knew something wasn’t right, and so he went up the road a ways and circled around. It wasn’t fifteen minutes before he saw Gene Humbolt, a married man with five little ones at home, tie his coonhound to a fence post and sneak in the back. Ellsworth remembered that he’d hurt all the way home that night, but then woke up the next morning happy that he’d had his turn with her and glad that it was over with.

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” Cane said.

“Yes, sir,” Ellsworth said, watching Chimney start another row and still thinking about all the ways Mrs. Sproat had kept him going. “A few years makes a big difference in a man, I’ll tell ye that. Don’t matter who he is. So whatever you want to do, you best go ahead and do it before it’s too late.”

44

I
N
M
EADE, RIGHT
before lunchtime, a sputtering, red-faced Mayor Hasbro called the city engineer into his office and commenced to chewing his ass out about Jasper Cone. In the past week, four more women had accused him of trespassing on their property without good reason and spying on them. And as Hasbro pointed out, what if the idiot went off his rocker and actually laid his hands on someone? Now that their complaints were on record, if they were ignored, even a friendly pat on the ass might bankrupt the city in a lawsuit. “I don’t give a damn how much good you say he’s doing,” he told the engineer. “You tell him to back off.”

Although Rawlings had never seen the mayor get so upset or vocal about anything before, he had a hard time believing that the meek and hardworking Jasper could be guilty of such acts, at least not intentionally. He immediately suspected that Sandy Saunders, the sneaky little sonofabitch, was somehow behind the accusations, but he kept his mouth shut. Instead, he returned to his own office to mull the situation over. Not only had the city councilman been a pain in his ass ever since Rawlings had taken over as city engineer, it was common knowledge that he absolutely detested Jasper. Still, he needed proof. Realizing that the best way to get to the bottom of things was to interview the women himself, he was just getting ready to walk back over to the mayor’s office to ask for their names when there was a loud knock on his door and a plump older woman named Mrs. Lenora Trego barged in. Before he had a chance to ask what she wanted, she loudly informed him that while sitting in her outhouse perusing Miss Bernice Bottelby’s new novel,
Dreams of Milk and Honey,
Jasper Cone had flung the door open on her and attempted to enter. It was the first time the engineer had ever heard anyone actually use the word “perusing” in a sentence, and it threw him off for a second, long enough for her to plop down in the chair across from his desk. Being a retired English teacher, she continued, she might expect such nonsense coming from teenage boys, but from a grown man, and a city employee to boot, that was an entirely different matter. Also, as she stressed at least a dozen times during the hour that he had to put up with her, she was a published author in the
Scioto Gazette
—from what Rawlings was able to gather, she wrote poems about birds and trees and shit like that—and it was common knowledge that any sort of traumatic incident could potentially stop the flow of the creative juices. Why, she hadn’t written a decent line since he’d busted in on her.

“And when was that?” Rawlings said.

“Almost three hours ago,” Mrs. Trego said woefully, as if it might as well have been a lifetime.

Showing her to the door a few minutes later, he casually asked, “Do you happen to know Sandy Saunders?”

“Who?”

“Never mind,” Rawlings said. “I’ll see what I can do.” It was apparent from the puzzled expression on her face that she’d never heard of the bastard. So maybe it was true after all, maybe Jasper was stepping over the line. He sent out a message for him to report to the office as soon as possible. Something had to be done before his underling seriously fucked up and they both lost their jobs.

It was nearly quitting time when Jasper finally showed up. As usual, the day had been one shitty mess after another, and the stench coming off his clothes and rubber boots in the close confines of the office overwhelmed Rawlings to the extent that he nearly forgot why he had summoned him in the first place. It was only after he jerked a window open and sucked down several drafts of fresh air that he regained his bearings. He sheepishly thought of the mustard gas being used on men in Europe. Perhaps his ex-wife had been right after all, maybe he really was a candy-ass. With his head still hanging out over the sill, he told Jasper, “From now on, you only inspect an outhouse if my office gets a complaint, understand?”

“But you told me to crack down on—”

“Yeah, but hell, boy, you’re going overboard,” Rawlings said. He took one more deep breath of outside air, then cautiously left the window and moved over to his desk. Personally, as far as the engineer was concerned, the push for indoor plumbing in Meade was worth any number of old ladies, but he was beginning to sense that maybe he had picked the wrong man for the job. He fiddled with a pencil for a moment, then asked, “Do you know a Mrs. Trego over on Church Street?”

“Not really,” Jasper said a bit hesitantly. “More like I know of her. Why?”

“I think you know what I’m talkin’ about,” Rawlings said angrily, snapping the pencil in two and throwing it across the room. “My God, Cone, they put people in prison for less than that. It’s no more than a step or two away from rape. I’m warning you, if you can’t abide by the rules, I’ll have to let you go.”

“What do ye mean?”

“Just what I said.”

“Ye’d actually fire me?”

“I won’t have any choice if you don’t straighten up.”

“Did Sandy Saunders put you up to this?” Jasper said.

“What? Of course not. You think I’d take orders from someone that sells goddamn insurance?”

“So cleanin’ up the town was just talk.”

“No, of course not, but we’ve got to use common sense.”

“Why? Nobody else does.”

“I don’t give a damn what anybody else does,” Rawlings said. “From now on out, you don’t look in anybody’s shithouse unless there’s a legitimate complaint. And you make sure it’s not in use before you even think of opening the door. I was the one that pushed for you to get this job, but if you embarrass me one more time, I’ll hang your ass out to dry.”

—

D
ISAPPOINTED AND SADDENED
that his boss would bend so easily in the face of a little opposition, Jasper went out to the city landfill that evening with his buffalo gun, intending to blow off some steam. However, when he arrived, he saw the dump keeper’s shanty door open and decided to pay him a visit before he went hunting for any rats. Back when he was working as a scavenger, Jasper had talked to Bagshaw nearly every day, but since taking on the inspection job, he’d barely seen him at all. He set his rifle down outside the door and entered. Bagshaw, a squat, ruddy-faced man with a pitted lump of a nose, was relaxing on a settee that had the horsehair stuffing coming out of it, his feet propped up on a wooden crate. He was eating a black, mushy banana. A barrel stove sat against the back wall, a dented tin chimney running out the roof. A hodgepodge of women’s shoes, collected over the course of the last decade, were piled up in one corner, a towering stack of old newspapers and catalogs in another. Children’s toys, in various states of decrepitude, hung from the rafters on rusty wires. “Wanta ’nanner?” Bagshaw asked.

“No, thank ye,” Jasper said. “I ain’t hungry.”

“Found a whole sack of ’em a couple days ago. All the years I been doin’ this, and I still can’t get over the things people throw away. Ye’d think the whole town was made up of millionaires.”

“I wish I was one of ’em,” Jasper said.

“Why?” Bagshaw said. “What would you do different?”

“I’d quit my job and build the biggest bathroom this country’s ever seen.”

“What? I thought you loved that job,” the dump keeper said, pitching the banana peel out the door.

“Not anymore. Every time I turn around, somebody’s complaining.”

“I know what that’s like,” Bagshaw said. “Agnes is always on my ass about something.”

“Agnes?” Jasper said. “Who’s that?” All the time he’d been coming out here, he’d never heard the dump keeper mention anything about having a woman, but maybe he’d just met her.

“The one hangin’ right above your head there with the pretty blue eyes. I’ll tell ye, boy, she can be a handful when she’s in one of her moods.”

Jasper twisted his neck and looked up. The doll had a crack running down the middle of its porcelain face, and half its red hair had been singed off by fire. Probably a kid playing with matches, he figured. The blue eyes were staring back down at him with an air of haughty superiority. “Oh,” he said to the dump keeper. “I didn’t know who you meant there for a minute.” Then he glanced out the door at the pile of banana skins and heaved a sigh.

Bagshaw pulled at his chin and studied his young visitor, the pith helmet in his lap and the gloomy, dejected look on his face. He hadn’t seen the boy so down in the mouth since Itchy had croaked. This was one of those situations, he realized, where the wisdom of an older, more experienced man such as himself was called for. Even Agnes asked him for advice on occasion, and she was one of the sharpest people he’d ever met. “You know what you need, Jasper?”

“What’s that?”

“A friend,” the dump keeper said, nodding sagely, “a real friend. You find you one of them, you won’t need no suitcase full of money or fancy shithouse to make you happy. Believe me, it makes a big difference wakin’ up every day knowing you got somebody you can talk to, someone you can depend on.” Then, with rotten banana oozing thick as paste through the few teeth he had left in his head, he looked up at the doll and smiled.

45

I
T WAS GETTING
late in the day when Chimney looked up and saw two men sitting in a carriage watching them from the road. “Friends of yours?” he asked Ellsworth.

The farmer stopped in the middle of wrapping a piece of twine around a shock of corn and turned to look. It was Ovid and Augustus Singleton. “Not hardly,” he said, just as one of them took off his hat and waved.

“Wonder what they want then?” Chimney said.

“Nothing,” Ellsworth said. “They’re just being nosy.” He handed Cane the ball of twine, then started up through the field. “Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of them.” Right before the boys came in for breakfast this morning, Eula had mentioned that she thought there might be more to their situation than what they were letting on. “Don’t it seem a little strange to you,” she said, “them willin’ to pay all that money to sleep in a barn?” He had chosen not to tell her about the stubby pistols he saw in their pockets, or the way they glanced about uneasily whenever they heard the slightest noise. As hard as they worked, he could tell that they hadn’t been lying about all the farming they had done, but there also wasn’t any doubt in his mind that some sort of trouble had brought them here. “What do ye want me to do? Tell them to leave?” he’d asked her, resisting the urge to point out that she was the one who had made the deal with them. “No, no,” she said, “I just wondered what you thought.” Since it was the first time she had asked his opinion about anything since he had lost their savings, he considered carefully for a minute before answering. “Well, unless they start causin’ trouble,” he told her, “let’s just figure it’s none of our business.” And now, as far as he was concerned, that went double for the Singleton brothers.

“What the hell did he mean by that?” Chimney asked Cane as they watched the farmer approach the carriage.

“I don’t know,” Cane said.

“Think he’s got us figured out?”

“If he has, he don’t seem too worried about it.”

“Maybe Cob’s been runnin’ his mouth to the old woman,” Chimney said.

“Let’s just wait and see,” Cane said. “Maybe he didn’t mean nothing at all.”

At the edge of the field, Ellsworth stopped and nodded to the Singletons. Despite it being a rather warm day, they both wore heavy black coats and gloves. “You need something?” he asked them impatiently.

“We noticed you got yourself some help,” Augustus said. He was waving a little paper fan in front of his face that advertised Smith’s funeral home in Bainbridge.

“So?”

“Well, we were just trying to figure out who they were. From here, they sort of look like Sawyer Brown’s boys.”