The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

  “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

  BEFORE ELLSWORTH 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 th
e 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.

  When Zimmerman finally returned, his spine was even straighter than before. Unfortunately, in the time it took him to reach the office where the records were kept, he had allowed his mind to drift for a minute or two, first daydreaming about his next promotion and then worrying about what Ballard and Crank were saying behind his back, and he had forgotten the name the farmer had given him. “Who are you looking for?” the private behind the desk asked. Zimmerman had shut his eyes for a moment and strained his memory. The last name started with an “F,” of that he was sure. “Franklin,” he guessed. The private scrolled through several pages, then said, “Don’t see any Franklin, but we got a Wesley Franks signed in two days ago.” “That’s him,” Zimmerman said, and out the door he went.

  “Well, you were right,” he told Ellsworth. “They got a new one on the list goes by that name.”

  “Good,” the farmer said. “How do I get him back?”

  “You can’t,” Zimmerman said, shaking his head. “He’s already been inducted.”

  “But he’s only sixteen years old. That’s too young to be fightin’ the Germans, ain’t it?”

  “Too young!” Ballard spoke up. “Ain’t you heard? Them Huns got newborn babies chained to machine guns. They either fight or get dumped in the stew pot with the horse apples. Don’t worry, your boy’s plenty old enough.”

  “Good God, Ballard,” Zimmerman said, “you’ve been talkin’ to Sergeant Malone again.” The sergeant he referred to was a great spinner of horrific war stories, and much admired among some of the new recruits at Camp Pritchard. As a youth, he had fought in Cuba in 1898, and then, ever nostalgic for what he considered the “best three weeks of his life,” had quit his job in a glove factory in upstate New York and joined up with the Red Cross in the summer of 1915, it being the only way an American could get to the war at that time. Although he soon found out that the conflict in Europe was no horsey lark in the tropical boonies, to his credit he endured eighteen months of hell with an ambulance crew around Verdun before he began to go haywire and ended up in a loony bin down near Marseille. Despite his protestations, he was judged unfit for further service and sent home just a few weeks before the United States entered the fray. By then he was twitchy and gray and thirty-eight years old, a mere shell of the boy who once rode with Roosevelt, and though he didn’t think they would take him, he showed up at the recruiting station in Albany anyway. To his surprise, because of his experience at the Front, the whiskey on his breath had been ignored and he’d quickly been offered a sergeant’s rank. Now he was training doughboys how to take a shit in the mud without getting their heads blown off, and practicing a self-prescribed form of controlled drinking that kept him from diving to the ground every time a bird flew over.

  “So? I guarantee you Malone knows more about what’s goin’ on over there than your Lieutenant Bovard ever will.”

  “He’s a bad one to drink, my boy is,” Ellsworth interrupted. It was embarrassing to admit, but what did it matter? He would never see these men again anyway. “And dumb, too,” he added, figuring he might as well lay it on as thick as possible. “You don’t want to be a-fightin’ along someone like that, do you? Hell, he’s as liable to shoot the wrong man as the right one. Believe me, fellers, he ain’t fit to be in your army.”

  “Mister,” Crank said, “if being stupid kept men out of the army, there wouldn’t be enough left in Camp Pritchard to wash the dishes in the chow hall.”

  “Don’t listen to the bookkeeper,” Ballard told the farmer. “He’s just pissed because—”

  Throwing up his hands in frustration, Ellsworth said, “What if I talked to the boss?”

  Both the privates laughed, but before either could make another smart remark, Corporal Zimmerman silenced them with an upraised hand. He had allowed this foolishness to go on too long and he needed to reinforce his authority. Turning to Ellsworth, he began speaking slowly, as if he were talking to someone who had just awoken from a long coma. Zimmerman had discovered, over the course of manning the gate eight hours a day for the past couple of weeks, that many people, soldiers and private citizens alike, have a hard time taking no for an answer. They’re like little children who have been spared the rod and trust that, by yowling long enough and loud enough, they will eventually get their way. He was convinced that any parent who didn’t beat their offspring within an inch of their lives at least once a week was doing the world a great disservice, and he was thankful now that his own father had followed that line of thinking. Sure, it might have hurt at the time, but if it hadn’t been for his old man’s leather strap, Zimmerman thought, he might have turned out like that sniveling whiner Crank, or, God forbid, that mouthy, fatheaded Ballard. “Now,” he told Ellsworth, as he finished explaining the situation in short declarative sentences that even a cretin might understand, “the best thing for you to do is go back home. Don’t worry, you’ll see your son in a year or two.” He held up one finger, then another, in front of the farmer’s face.

  Ellsworth’s eyes widened. “A year or two!” he sputtered. Why, he couldn’t imagine it taking more than a few weeks to kill every human being on the planet if you had someone overseeing things who knew what they were doing. But then again, with the government in charge, it might go on forever without anything to show for it. There was no way he was going to get Eddie back. He realized that now. “What’s this war about anyway?” he asked.

  The soldiers glanced at one another uneasily. In all their hours of manning the gate, and answering a thousand questions, nobody had ever asked them that one before. “It’s complicated,” Zimmerman said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Some bastard shot some other bastard,” Crank said. “Over around Russia somewhere.”

  “That’s pretty much the crack of it, from what I hear,” Ballard chimed in.

  “You mean the crux of it.”

  “Actually,” Zimmerman said, “it started in Austria. I ought to know. I’ve still got family living there.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” Ballard said snidely. “I’ll bet ol’ Australia’s full of your kind.”

  Crank rolled his eyes. “He said Austria, not Australia.”

  “Well, if that’s the reason they started this war, the politicians must be clear out of their minds,” Ellsworth said, raising his voice. “Either that, or they’re a-lyin’ to ye.”

  The soldiers all stared silently at the farmer for a moment. Regardless of how they felt about each other, they all believed, deep down, that there was nothing nobler than being a courageous patriot defending his country against the savage Germanic hordes. Even Crank, as much as he missed his parents and French toast on Sunday mornings and his peaceful bedchamber overlooking the sugar maple in the backyard, would have agreed with that if push came to shove. “Sir, you could be arrested for that kind of talk,” Zimmerman finally said.

  “Yeah, what the hell are you, buddy?” Ballard added. “One of them damn Wobblies?”

  Ellsworth didn’t know what a Wobbly was, but from the way the guard spat the word out of his mouth, he figured it couldn’t be a good thing. Lately, it seemed that wherever he turned, something beyond his comprehension was lying in wait to make him look like a fool. He decided not to say anything else. Even if the reason they gave for the war sounded like one of the dumbest things he had ever heard in his life, there was no way he was going to give these guards any more ammunition to use against him. As soon as he did, they’d have him playing house in a pickle patch with that other poor bastard they had joked about. He turned away and climbed back on his wagon.

  Reaching for the gourd under the seat, he took a drink of water, then looked over at the camp again. In a field far off to the left, a row of soldiers stood at attention near the edge of a freshly dug trench. A
thick-chested man with skinny legs paced back and forth in front of them, giving a speech. His voice was loud and gruff, but Ellsworth was still too far away to hear what he was saying. He gripped a rifle with a gleaming bayonet attached to the end of the barrel. Every so often, he stopped talking and gave a bloodcurdling cry, then stabbed the bayonet into what appeared to be a feed sack filled with sand. Ellsworth wondered if Eddie was standing in the line of soldiers, and if he had helped dig the ditch. As hard as it was getting him to do a few chores around the farm, it would serve him right if the army had stuck a pick and shovel in his hands first thing. He’d ask Eddie about that the next time he saw him. He would probably be wearing one of those brown uniforms, have a story or two to tell. Maybe he would even know the whereabouts of Germany. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps the army was a good thing, especially if it toughened the boy up. Hell, he might turn out to be a halfway decent farmer after all.

  He sat watching the man attack the feed bag until there wasn’t anything left but a few shreds of burlap, and then he turned the mule and headed back toward town. Glancing over at the gate, he saw a glowering Ballard drop to the ground and start doing pushups while Zimmerman stood over him counting, the hint of a smile creasing his otherwise stony face. At least now, Ellsworth thought, as he passed a huge cairn of stinking slops and discarded civilian rags, the wheels of the wagon squeaking and black flies swarming over man and mule alike, he could tell Eula for certain where their boy had run off to.