The Heavenly Table (48 page)

Lying in the sharp gravel, he stared wearily at some bobbing lights off in the distance for several minutes before he realized that he’d seen such a sight before, one night in Tennessee when a posse on horseback had followed them with torches. The moon came out from behind some clouds then, and he forced himself up and made his way into a grove of trees. He limped and lurched past a deserted camp of burned-out fires and tin cans and chicken bones where he figured some hobos occasionally stopped to take a respite. The wind picked up and the autumn leaves rattled in the trees. Deciding he couldn’t go on anymore tonight, he got down on his knees and crawled back under a thick mass of honeysuckle bushes. By then it was two o’clock in the morning. Resting his head on the saddlebag, he cocked his pistol and set it on his chest. He thought about how Chimney always volunteered to stand watch, no matter how tired he was, as if he didn’t trust him or Cob to stay awake. He wondered again what had happened exactly, how his brother had ended up in the custody of those soldiers. If he could make it to a town, maybe he could find…

When Cane woke up, the morning sky was overcast with gray clouds, and he was damp with drizzle and shivering with the cold. For the first time in his life, he was truly alone. He raised up on his elbows to take a look around, and as he did so, he felt more blood gush out of the bullet hole. Easing himself back down, he felt in his pockets and found his last cigar and some matches. He drew on it several times, hoping it might warm him, but then he started coughing, and stabbed it out on a wet leaf. For several minutes, he watched a cardinal hop from branch to branch, just a foot or so away from him, and then fly away.

As the drizzle became a rain, Cane drifted off again. He found himself in a house that seemed familiar, as if he had lived there for a long, long time. He was sitting in a chair by a fireplace reading a book, and from what he could tell, he was near the end of it. The smell of freshly baked bread and flowers wafted in the warm air, and through the curtained windows he could see that it was dark outside. Suddenly, a beautiful, dark-haired woman appeared in the room and started to walk by him, her dress rustling against her pale skin. Her hand reached out and lightly touched his shoulder; and he felt more at peace right then than he’d ever felt in his life. Then she paused at a stairway and looked back; and the last thing he heard as he turned another page was her wishing him good night.

Epilogue

A
FTER
J
ASPER SHOWED
up at their house with Cob one night in a rented carriage, the Fiddlers hid him in Eddie’s old room and then spent the entire winter trying to invent a convincing explanation as to who he was and why he was staying with them. They must have told each other a hundred different lies before they finally settled on one they thought might work. Then they went over that lie a hundred more times before Eula felt that Ellsworth was ready to tell it to someone, and in the end, they decided that that someone would be Parker. They figured with the way the storekeeper liked to spread gossip, all they had to do was get him to believe it, and within a week or two everyone in the township would.

And so one bright morning in the early spring of 1918, Ellsworth took Cob, along with a few sips of wine in a jar to give him courage, over to Nipgen to plant the seed. As they pulled the wagon into the lot, he patted the boy on the knee and reminded him again, “Just let me do the talking.” When they entered the store, he saw to his relief that no one else was there. So far, so good, Ellsworth thought to himself, but when Parker suddenly raised up from behind the counter, he panicked, forgetting all about Eula’s warning to just act normal, and before the storekeeper could even get a good look at who he was talking about, he’d finished the story about Junior without taking a single breath and ordered a pound of coffee, and then they were out the door.

Fortunately, though Parker did wonder a little why Ellsworth had seemed so nervous, he didn’t suspect anything was amiss, at least not at first. He’d seen the farmer shook up before over stuff that most men wouldn’t think twice about. Why, the Singletons could get him going with a mere smirk. And things such as what he’d described, well, they happened all the time. He sucked on a piece of hard candy while he thought it over, reworking the details a bit to give it a little more color, and by evening the storekeeper had told the story in various renditions to twenty or more customers. He was still revising it in his head when Dean Hartley came in right at closing time stinking of home brew and mumbled that he wanted a pound of salt fish.

Parker reached under the counter for a sheet of the old newspapers he saved back to wrap parcels in, and spread it on the counter. Then he took the lid off the barrel of cod and pulled four or five out. As he laid them on the scale tray, he glanced down at the paper and saw the faded drawings of the three outlaws that had caused so much commotion last fall. “Well, shit, that looks just like—” he started to say, but then stopped.

“Huh?” Hartley grunted.

“Nothing,” Parker said. “Just talkin’ to myself.” He pushed the sheet aside and wrapped the fish in another. As soon as Hartley staggered out, the storekeeper licked the brine off his fingers and locked the door. He picked up the paper and held it under the lamplight, wishing that he’d paid more attention to the boy while Ellsworth was talking. From what he could recall, though, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between him and the chubby one in the picture other than a beard. Hell, maybe that was the reason Ells had been so jittery; maybe he was hiding something.

Pulling his visor down tight on his head, Parker tried to think it through. He might have been a meddler, but this, he realized, was a lot more serious than telling people that Lucille Adkins had gotten religion and was making her husband, Forrest, sleep in the shed because he was a sinner, or that someone saw Old Man Cottrill walking down the road without any clothes on the other day. Cutting a chunk of meat off a smoked ham hanging in the window, he chewed on it slowly. The money didn’t interest him; he had enough of that saved back to last him out if he shut down the store tomorrow. So the big question was, even if the boy was one of the outlaws, what good would it do to tell the authorities? For sure, Ells and Eula would get in trouble for harboring a criminal—Lord, they’d probably even go to prison—and then everybody would look upon him as a squealer, a rat, a no-account Judas. And as far as that went, how many times last year had he heard poor men stand right in this store and talk about the gang as if they were heroes, say that they wished they had the guts to go rob a bank? Quite a few. Not only that, how many had shaken their heads sadly when they’d heard that the one had been caught in Meade? Again, quite a few. Too, what if he was wrong? Why, he’d look like the biggest fool around. The more he thought about it, the more preposterous it seemed. It was easier picturing the Singletons as sex-crazed womanizers than believing someone as tame as Ellsworth Fiddler was buddies with cold-blooded desperadoes. When he finally turned out the lamp and went to bed, it was past midnight; and in the morning, he crumpled up the newspaper without looking at it again and burned it in the stove, having decided it best to stick with the story he’d been told. And just as the Fiddlers had hoped, within a few days everyone in the township believed Junior was the son of one of Eula’s cousins from up around Springfield, and that they had taken him in after both of his parents succumbed to the grippe within a few hours of each other. “Ye can tell the poor feller’s slow,” Parker said whenever he came to the end of the tale. “He just stood there like a statue with a grin on his face while Ells went on about his people a-dying. Reminds me of Tom Stout’s boy, the one that got hit in the head by that tree.”

Talk of the young man living with the Fiddlers began to die down after a couple of weeks, but then, after someone saw him and Ellsworth one Saturday at an auction in Bainbridge buying six Holsteins and a bull, it started up again for a while. Since it was common knowledge that Ells didn’t have two nickels to rub together, it was speculated that maybe Junior had been left a little inheritance. But that was as far as it went. By that time, Parker had repeated the story so much that he’d convinced himself it was true, and nobody else ever really wondered about the boy’s past or begrudged the farmer a few cattle for taking him in. There were, after all, new rumors every other day about the devastation being brought on by the Spanish influenza. And, too, as many pointed out whenever the subject did come up, maybe old Ells deserved some luck after losing his savings to that thief down in Pike County, and his son running off and never coming back, although everyone did agree that it was terrible the way he fell into it.

As for Cob, except when he was around Ellsworth and Eula, he kept his mouth shut. Every morning when the first cow bawled in the feedlot, he hopped out of bed and put on his clothes, headed for the barn. He liked taking care of the milking by himself. It gave him time to think about what he was going to do. It bothered him something awful, trying to decide. Every time he imagined Cane coming for him, he felt half sick, and then he’d feel guilty. But the fact of the matter was he loved it here, and he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving, even with his brother. For close to two years, he agonized over it, and then one morning, as he rinsed out a bucket at the well, he realized that Cane had already made the decision for him, and was all right with letting him stay.

He’d always be finished with the milking by the time Ellsworth showed up, scratching and yawning. The old man would help him pour it through the strainer and into the metal containers they used to haul it over to Parker’s, and by the time they finished, Eula would be calling them to the house for breakfast. Then they would work in the fields some; and in the afternoon, they’d take the milk over to the store in the wagon, singing “The Old Brown Nag” seven or eight times before they got there.

After he carried the containers inside, Junior would hand Parker a dime for a soda pop and a cake and go out to the porch. Owning some cattle and a little business had given Ellsworth a boost of confidence he’d never had in the past, and he would often spend an hour or more talking inside. Of course, Junior didn’t mind waiting. He didn’t mind anything. It didn’t matter to him that the pop was warm, or the cake stale. He’d eaten a lot worse than that in his life. And who could ever find fault with sitting on his ass listening through the screen to some old men tell jokes and argue over the price of crops, or why anyone would ever want a telephone? Not him. Because he knew, with a certainty he’d never known before in his life, that no matter what was being discussed, eventually Ellsworth would come out the door and say, “Hey Junior, let’s head home.” And that’s exactly where they would go. Home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the following: First and foremost, local Ross County historian Rami Yoakum, for all the talks we had about Camp Sherman and Chillicothe during 1917 (sorry I didn’t stick with the facts, brother!); the Guggenheim Foundation, for helping keep food on the table; my agents and first readers, Richard Pine and Nathanial Jacks, for knowing just what to say; and my editors, Gerry Howard of Doubleday and Francis Geffard of Albin Michel, for all their advice, patience, and wisdom. Oh, and Dr. Ron Salomone, for riding my ass to finish the damn thing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Donald Ray Pollock is the author of the acclaimed novel
The Devil All the Time
and the story collection
Knockemstiff,
and the recipient of the 2009 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship. He worked as a laborer at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, from 1973 to 2005. He holds an MFA from Ohio State University.

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