The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

  11

  IT TOOK THE Jewett brothers the rest of the afternoon to dig a grave in the dry, hard earth on the other side of the hog pen, just a few feet away from the sunken area that contained the mulattoes. When they were done, they washed Pearl’s face and hands, then went through his pockets. Besides his pocketknife, which Chimney had already called dibs on, all they found was seventeen American cents and a Canadian nickel along with half a plug of linty tobacco and a sales receipt for a handful of nails purchased over two years ago. After wrapping him tightly in his blanket and lowering him into the hole, Cob climbed down and slipped the worm pillow under his head. They took turns filling in the grave, then Chimney walked over to the porch and returned with the rusty saber. “Remember when we found this fuckin’ thing?” he said.

  Cane nodded and smiled. They had discovered the sword one windy autumn day in a woods a few miles outside of Atlanta, unaware that over fifty years before, some Northern soldiers working point for Sherman’s army had used it to mark the spot where they had buried one of their comrades, a fat and jolly shoemaker from Boston who was singing an aria from The Barber of Seville when the top of his head was sheared off by a sniper’s minié ball. The blade was standing up in the dirt, and Pearl had jerked it from the ground without thinking, then he and the boys had moved on. Two days later, though, while searching through a garden patch hoping to find something edible the owner might have overlooked, it suddenly occurred to him that the sword might be more than just another cast-off remnant of the Civil War. Hadn’t he heard once of a man in Tennessee who had found an ordnance box filled with silver bullion while digging a footer for a house? The more he scratched about in the empty garden with the saber, the more he began to imagine that it had indicated the spot where a cache of war booty was hidden. “Gather up yer brothers,” he finally said to Cane. “We’re headin’ back into them woods.”

  “What for?” the boy had asked warily. Although he was only thirteen years old at the time, Cane was already beginning to doubt much of what came out of Pearl’s mouth, not because he was a liar, but because it was evident that he was slowly losing his mind, and had been ever since Lucille died and he started sleeping with the worm under his head.

  “Goin’ back to where we found this sword.”

  “What about Mississippi? You said we’d—”

  “Back when the war was a-goin’ on, people hid stuff from the Yankees all the time. Their gold and jewels and what have ye.”

  “Okay,” Cane said, “but that don’t—”

  “And I’d bet anything somebody used this sword to mark the spot where he buried his valuables,” Pearl went on. “Probably got killed before he could get back to it, the poor bastard. It just makes sense. Why else would it been stuck in the ground like that?”

  Though Cane figured there were at least a dozen other explanations for why the saber had ended up in the woods, any of them more logical than the one his old man was proposing, for the life of him he couldn’t think of one just then. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe…maybe…”

  “Maybe quit yer stutterin’ and get them boys rounded up,” Pearl had ordered.

  They had been homeless and barely making it for almost three years at that point, but on their way back to the woods, Pearl began talking of the grand meals they would soon be eating and the land they would buy and the new duds they would sport. He even made up a marching song to keep Cob and Chimney moving along at a steady pace. To pacify Cane, he mentioned sending him to one of those universities where smart people loafed about talking bullshit; that is, if he still thought book learning was something he wanted to waste his time on once he got his share of the treasure. His enthusiasm was infectious, and even Cane slowly allowed himself to start dreaming that just maybe their luck was about to change.

  It took four days to figure out the approximate location where they had come across the sword, and they then spent another week digging a series of deep pits, searching for what Pearl kept referring to as the “sweet spot.” Finally, on their twenty-third attempt, Chimney hit something with the shovel blade that didn’t sound like the usual root or rock. Pearl jerked the boy out of the hole and jumped in. He began slinging dirt into the air with his hands, working like a madman for several minutes before he suddenly stopped and uttered a sickly, frustrated moan. When the dust cleared, the boys walked up to the edge of the hole and looked down upon the remains of the shoemaker, no longer fat and certainly no longer jolly, wrapped in a rotten horse blanket.

  “Pap,” Cob said, after his father climbed out, “how we gonna trade them old bones for a new farm?” Before he could stop himself, Pearl whirled around and backhanded the boy, knocking him over a pile of dirt. Then he stalked off, disappearing into the trees. When he returned several hours later, looking nearly as lifeless as the skeleton, he was carrying two dead rabbits and had his coat pockets filled with windfall apples—his way, Cane figured, of asking forgiveness. Pearl decided to hang on to the sword. “Ye never know,” he had said, “it might come in handy someday.” And so it did, eleven years later, as Chimney shoved it down into the loose soil at the head of his grave.

  Standing around the red clay mound, Cane flipped through the pages of the Bible, finally coming to a passage in the Hebrews that their mother had marked with a pencil. “I reckon you should bow your heads,” he said. Then he cleared his throat and began to read:

  “And what shall I more say? For the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins: being destitute, afflicted, tormented; of whom the world was not worthy: they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.”

  “Amen.”

  “By God, that hit the nail on the head,” Chimney said. He squatted down and picked up a pebble, tossed it on top of the mound. “He probably would’ve give anything for one of them sawings.”

  “The man had a need for pain, that’s for sure,” Cane said.

  Cob stared at the sword stuck in the ground, his brow lined with worry. “Cane?” he finally said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Now that Pap’s gone, who’s gonna fix the biscuits?”

  With a loud hoot, Chimney sprang up. Behind him, the evening sun seemed to be halted on the blue and orange horizon, as if it, too, were paying the old man some last respects. “What now, boss?” he said.

  Cane glanced over at his youngest brother. Standing there dressed in rags with his thin arms hanging at his sides and his ribs showing through his shirt, Chimney seemed more wretched than he could ever recall seeing him. Even Cob, who could usually go two or three days without eating and not lose an ounce, was beginning to look a little poorly. It was time to leave this place before they all ended up planted around the hog pen. “People most always have a big feed after a funeral, don’t they?” Cane said.

  Chimney shrugged his shoulders and spat. “I reckon most do, yeah.”

  “Well, then, what say we eat the rest of that pig.”

  “All of it?” Cob asked excitedly.

  “Hell, yes,” Cane said. “Who’s gonna stop us?”

  12

  ON HIS WAY back across Meade from the army camp, Ellsworth remembered that Eula’s birthday was coming up soon. Perhaps a little present would help ease the news about Eddie, maybe even get her to forget about the wine. Now that he knew the boy was safely ensconced in the milita
ry, he was having second thoughts about dumping it. The gift would have to be cheap, though. Maybe a broom, he thought. He had noticed the other day that the straws on her old one were worn clear down to the handle. Not as nice as a new dress, but it would still surprise her. He stopped Buck on a street lined with elm trees and pulled his purse out. He was counting the coins that he kept back for pipe tobacco when he heard some whistling and looked up. A short, wiry man wearing a pith helmet and knee-high gumboots stepped out from between two houses. He carried a long wooden pole over his shoulder and a dead rat by the tail. A blackjack smeared with blood hung from a cord on his wide leather belt. With his small head and bowlegged walk, he bore a strong resemblance to a Floyd Odell who used to witch water for people out in Twin Township.

  As the man started to pass by, he smiled and nodded at Ellsworth. His was the first friendly face the farmer had seen since he had left home the morning before. “Mister,” Ellsworth said quickly, “you wouldn’t have any idy where I could buy a good broom, would ye?” He noted that the pole the man carried was marked at regular intervals with dabs of black paint like a measuring stick and looked to be about eight feet long. The bottom third of it was coated with wet, dark matter, and a ball of flies buzzed around the tip of it like bees around a fragrant flower.

  The man stopped. “A broom? I sure do. I got an uncle that makes ’em. Old boy’s blind as a bat, but I guarantee you his sweepers are ten times better than anything you’ll find in the stores.” He pointed the rat down the street. “Just make ye a left at that house up yonder with the white fence and go down a block or so. You’ll see his sign right across from Antoine’s barbershop. You can’t miss it. His name is Cone.”

  “Cone,” Ellsworth repeated. “That your name, too?”

  “Yes, sir, it is. Jasper Cone.”

  “Reason I ask is you look an awful lot like an Odell I used to know.”

  The man shook his head. “No, I been a Cone all my life.”

  Though a little leery of making himself look like a fool yet again, Ellsworth’s curiosity got the better of him. He hesitated a moment, then asked, “What ye doin’ with that rat?”

  “Oh, I haul them out to the dump,” Jasper explained. “Nothing worse than a rodent when it comes to spreadin’ diseases.”

  “That your job? Go around killin’ rats?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Jasper said. “Mostly I check the levels on the outhouses, but if’n I run into, say, a black snake while I’m in there, or a spider’s nest, or a possum, or what have ye, I go ahead and take care of it.” He set the end of the pole down on the sidewalk and leaned against it. “Yes, sir, they’s a lot more to being the sanitation inspector than most folks realize.”

  Though Ellsworth couldn’t begin to imagine why anyone would pay a man to go around poking a stick in people’s privies, or why a man would want such a job in the first place, he nodded and said, “I bet ye seen some sights, ain’t ye?”

  “I surely have,” Jasper said. “Ye’d be surprised at what goes on in a shithouse.” He looked about, then moved toward the wagon and lowered his voice. “Husbands a-cheatin’ on their wives, wives a-cheatin’ on their husbands. And that’s not nearly the worst of it. I’ve come across people doin’ things that would make your hair stand on end. It’s the privacy, see? That’s what attracts them. Ye step in and latch the door and everybody thinks you’re just takin’ a dump. Why, I bet ye half the girls in this town have lost their cherry in somebody’s johnny.” He took another step closer. “Then there’s other stuff, too. A couple months back I rescued a newborn out of one over on Hickory Street. The mother thought she was just havin’ pains from some cabbage she’d et for supper, but as soon as she started to strain, out plopped a baby right down in the slop. Didn’t even know she was expecting, or so she claimed anyway.”

  “Good Lord,” Ellsworth said.

  “Oh, it turned out fine,” Jasper said. “I ran him straight over to Doc Hamm’s once I pulled him out. They put my name in the newspaper and everything. Heck, the mother even said she was goin’ to name him after me, but then her old man, he got jealous, started claiming that I’d been spying on her, and, well, that put the stops to that. But you can ask Mr. Rawlings, the city engineer, I don’t need nobody’s permission. I got a legal right to check any outhouse in this town.” Then Jasper’s face turned dark and he lowered his voice even more, to the point where Ellsworth could barely hear him. “Found me another one, too, over on the south side, but it was already dead. Nothin’ but his little feet stickin’ up like a couple of peckerhead mushrooms. They never did find out who put him there.” He shook his head sadly and glanced down at the rat in his hand. A drop of blood dripped from its crushed skull and landed on the toe of his boot.

  “Sounds like a helluva job,” Ellsworth said.

  “It’s an awful of a thing to say, but hogs is cleaner than a lot of the people around here. And since they started building Camp Pritchard, the town’s nearly doubled in size. That’s a fair amount of fecal matter when you think about it.” Anytime he found himself in a conversation with someone, especially a stranger, Jasper liked to throw in a technical phrase if given the opportunity, so that the person would know he truly was a professional. “Fecal matter” was one of his favorites.

  “I imagine so,” Ellsworth said.

  “Right now the drinking water’s the main worry,” Jasper went on. “I find effluent running into a well, I got no choice but to shut it down.”

  Ellsworth wasn’t sure how to respond, but he was damn glad he lived out in the country where a man had room to shit all he wanted. Clearly he was in the presence of an official who wielded a lot of power. After all, he thought, only someone with substantial pull could shut down a man’s water supply, no matter what sort of filth was floating in it. Taking a chance that the man might be in agreement, he said, “Well, these are modern times, I guess.”

  Jasper’s face lit up and he gave the rat a good shake. “Yes, sir, they are,” he said, his voice rising with excitement, “but you still got a lot of people set in their ways. As Mr. Rawlings says, they want to hang on to their slop jars and corncobs and privies and jakes no matter what. Hell, I think half of them would do their business right out in the street if they could get by with it. You mark my word, though, if’n we don’t kill ourselves off first, someday everybody in the country will have indoor facilities, and I don’t just mean some hole sawed in the floor, either, like Chester Dotson’s got in his parlor.” He took a deep breath and wiped his nose with the same hand that held the rat. “Well, it’s been nice talkin’ to ye, mister, but I better get back to it. Last time I counted, there were still over eighteen hundred outhouses in this town, and I’d bet my buffalo gun at least one of them is causin’ trouble today.” Then he turned on his rubber heels and headed across the redbrick street, swinging the rat by the tail like a whirligig.

  —

  A FEW MINUTES later, Ellsworth halted the mule in front of a small white house. From a porch post hung a wooden sign that had a broom painted on it with a careful hand. Across the street, several men were squeezed together on a bench in front of the barbershop smoking, while another stood reading them a story from a newspaper in a theatrical manner, with much hand-waving and fist-clenching and verbal emphasis on certain words. The farmer set the brake on the wagon, then walked up to the porch. He knocked on the door and a voice inside called out, “It’s open.” He stepped inside a dark and musty room that smelled of stale sweat and straw and bacon grease. Hanging in one corner from a hook in the ceiling was a birdcage that contained what appeared to be a mummified parakeet. An old man with long white hair sat in a rocking chair in the opposite corner. Even though the air was stifling inside the closed-up room, he wore a thick woolen sweater underneath a butcher’s apron stained with spills from a hundred dinners. His eyes were covered with a translucent film that reminded Ellsworth of egg whites. The man leaned forward and sniffed the air. “You got a mule?” he asked.

  “Yeah.�
��

  “Thought so,” the man said, tapping a crooked finger to his nose. “Mules got a smell all their own. I used to have a team of ’em back when I could see.”

  “That right?” Ellsworth said. He found that he couldn’t stop staring at the dried-up bird in the cage. He wondered if the man had forgotten it, or just couldn’t bear to part with it. This room, he thought, must get awful lonely at times.

  “Well,” the man said, “what you need?”

  “The sanitation inspector mentioned you got brooms for sale.”

  “You mean Jasper?”

  “He told me you was his uncle,” Ellsworth said.

  “Is he still wearing that goddamn helmet?”

  “He had one on, yeah.”

  The old man laughed. “Don’t get me wrong, Jasper’s all right, but sometimes I think that job might have gone to his head.” He paused and spat into a tin cup he held in his lap. Then a sly grin spread over his face. “I don’t reckon he mentioned his dick, did he?”

  “What?” Ellsworth asked, a little startled.

  “Didn’t think so,” the broom maker said. “If ye ask me, that’s what he should be proud of. Hell, anybody can count turds, but there’s few men alive hung like ol’ Jasper. He’d give one of them bull elephants a run for their money.”

  “Well, I only talked to him for a minute or two.”

  “Yeah,” the man said, “he’s right ashamed of it, and I blame his mother for that, her and that goddamn religion of hers. She did everything in her power to ruin that boy. Why, I had me a cock like that, I’d have the women a-crawlin’ around here on the floor begging for it.”

  Ellsworth coughed and cleared his throat. “So, about the brooms,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” the old man continued, ignoring him, “they’d think they’d had a log chain drug through ’em by the time I got done, by God. I’d put…”

  The broom maker was still talking when Ellsworth slipped out the door. Thankfully, the men sitting on the bench across the street now seemed to be in a deep discussion, and he managed to get away without being noticed. He was almost out of town when he saw the saloon across from the paper mill, a shabby hole in the wall called the Blind Owl. Ellsworth pulled the mule over and thought for a minute. Though he wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone else today, a drink surely would do him good after all the aggravation he had been through. Of course, there were bound to be people in there telling tales and spreading lies, but what if he just kept his mouth shut and minded his own business? That would work, he told himself, and he set the brake on the wagon and went inside.