The Heavenly Table

2

THAT SAME MORNING, several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler went to wake his son and discovered he was already up and gone. He stood for a moment looking at Eddie’s empty bed, then walked to the barn on the slim chance that he might be there, but there was no sign of him. Going back to the house, he checked to make sure Eula, his wife, was still asleep, then slipped down into the cellar beneath the kitchen. Just as he feared, there were at least two more jars of his blackberry wine missing. “I never should have let him have that first taste,” he mumbled to himself, thinking back to last Christmas. The holiday had been a gloomy one, mostly because Ellsworth had lost his and Eula’s life savings to a con man in a checkered suit the previous September, and he thought that sharing a drink with Eddie might brighten things up a bit for the boy. Ellsworth’s own father had allowed him a glass every night from the time he was twelve, and he’d turned out all right, hadn’t he? Looking back on it, though, he should have known better. Eddie was already prone to daydreaming and telling fibs and shirking his chores, and even a little hard cider sometimes did strange things to people like that. And sure enough, ever since that first sip, down in the cellar listening to Eula moving around in the kitchen above them while she stuffed the Christmas bird, a tough, stringy Tom that he’d traded Roy Cox some old harness for, the boy had become, on top of everything else, a regular boozehound.

He was just emerging from the cellar when Eula came into the kitchen. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Lookin’ for Eddie,” Ellsworth said nervously. “He ain’t in his bed.”

“You mean he’s gone?”

“Well, I can’t find him.”

“But even if ye can’t, why would you think he’d be down there at six o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” Ellsworth said. “I just—”

Shaking her head, Eula walked to the boy’s room to look for herself. Ellsworth waited on her to say something when she came back, but instead she lit the kindling in the cookstove, then dipped some water from a bucket into a pan for coffee. He went back out to the barn and fed the mule; and a few minutes later, she called him to the table and he sat down to a couple of eggs and a bowl of gummy, tasteless oatmeal. Jesus, he thought, this time last year there would have been sausage and gravy, maybe even pork chops. Though sick and tired of thinking about the swindle, the tiniest things reminded him of it all over again, even his breakfast. It was an ache inside him that never let up, something he figured would probably gnaw at him the rest of his days. A man riding a red sorrel mare had stopped him and Eddie along the road one bright afternoon toward the end of September last year, and casually asked if he might know someone who’d be interested in buying fifty Guernsey cows at twenty dollars a head. “Why so cheap?” Ellsworth had asked suspiciously. He knew for a fact that Henry Robbins had paid over twice that just a couple of weeks ago for some Holstein calves.

“Well, to tell ye the truth,” the man said, “I’m up against it. My wife’s took sick and the doctor says she won’t last another six months if’n I don’t get her to warmer weather.”

“Oh,” Ellsworth said, “I hate to hear that.”

“Consumption,” the man went on. “Nolie never was in any good shape, not even back when I married her damn near twenty years ago, but I didn’t care. And I still don’t. Wasn’t her fault she was born sickly. I’d gladly make a deal with ol’ Beelzebub just so she might draw one more breath. The way I see it, a man that don’t do everything he can to uphold his marriage vows ain’t much of a man.” He pulled a soiled handkerchief from his coat and patted his eyes with it. “Anyway, that’s why I’m in a hurry to sell.”

Ellsworth was impressed with the man’s speech; he felt much the same way about Eula, though he wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to trade around with the Devil, no matter how bad things got. “How much would them cows figure up to altogether?” he had asked, unable to calculate such a high number on his own.

“A thousand dollars,” Eddie spoke up.

“That’s right,” the man said. “Boy’s got a good head on his shoulders, don’t he?”

“I reckon,” Ellsworth murmured, looking past the man at a yellow finch that had just landed a few yards away in a crabapple tree. He and Eula had a thousand dollars put back, but it was all the money they had in the world, and it had taken them years to save it. Still, if he could convince her to go along with this, he’d own more cattle than anybody else in the township. And if he didn’t buy them, somebody else surely would before the day was out. It was just too good a deal to pass up. He took a deep breath. “I’d have to talk this over with my wife first,” he said.

“I know exactly what you mean,” the man said. “I don’t spend a dime without talkin’ it over with Nolie.”

The man had followed them home, waited in the front yard while Ellsworth went inside the house. He found Eula sitting at the kitchen table having her afternoon cup of coffee. Pacing back and forth, he explained the situation twenty different ways in increasingly glowing terms, occasionally stopping to remind her that he knew as much about cattle as Henry Robbins, and then some. “We could have one of the best dairy farms around,” he told her. “Or, we could just take ’em to auction and double our money. Either way, it’s the chance of a lifetime.” Of course, she had been resistant, as he had known she would be, but after an hour of his going on about it with no sign of a letup, she reluctantly gave in. She went into the bedroom and returned with the money jar she kept hidden under a loose board behind the dresser. “You look those cows over good before you go to handin’ him this,” she said.

Three hours later, he and Eddie and the man passed through a wide, sturdy gate to a large farm set between some wooded hills in Pike County. Ellsworth looked about admiringly at the rolling green pastures and acres of corn and hay and the freshly painted barn and scattered outbuildings and the brick two-story house set back among some tall oaks. “Quite a place ye got here,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” the man said. “The Lord’s been good to me.”

Ellsworth had wondered what was going to happen to the land, but he hated to ask. After all, the old boy was already taking a beating on his livestock. He remembered later that he’d been a little surprised at how soft the man’s hand seemed when he shook it to finalize the transaction. And then there was the checkered suit coat and pants that he wore, another warning sign that Ellsworth, in what he later shamefully realized was his hurry to take advantage of someone else’s misfortune, chose to ignore. “Well, I hope your wife gets to feelin’ better,” he’d said, as he watched the man stuff the money in his pocket without even bothering to count it, then scribble out a receipt on the back of an old envelope with a pencil stub.

“So do I,” the man answered. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.” His voice had actually quavered when he said that, and whenever Ellsworth replayed the incident in his head, that was the thing that enraged him most of all. Sometimes he imagined the slimy scoundrel in a smoky dive, flush with the thousand dollars, bragging to his lowlife buddies in between hee-haws and buying rounds for the house exactly how he had weaved the tight web around the country hick, one slick and deceitful strand at a time. Because, as it turned out, the man never had any claim to the cattle in the first place.

But that was to come later, learning that he’d been rooked. Over the next two days, he and Eddie drove nearly half the herd the seven miles back to their place, four or five head at a time. Then, on the third morning, just as they started through the gate with another bunch, the real owner of the farm showed up, after being away at a family gathering in Yellow Springs for the past week. Fortunately, Abe McAdams was a reasonable man. Though the law was sent for and a shotgun calmly directed at Ellsworth’s head while they waited, it could have been worse. Nobody would have blamed McAdams if he had killed them both. The constable finally arrived in a Model T with a white star painted on the door. By that time, McAdams really didn’t believe the pair intentionally meant to steal from him, but Constable Sykes, a man who’d heard enough false cries of innocence to blow the roof off a concert hall, insisted that they be taken into custody just the same, at least until he had made some inquiries. Neither of them had ridden in an automobile before, and Ellsworth, already sick over being duped, splattered the running boards with vomit several times before they got to the Pike County jailhouse. Everyone, from the toothless wife-beater in the next cell to the crowd of curious citizens who gathered outside their barred window, wondered how the farmer could have been so dumb. More than a few offered to sell him things: a mansion on a hill for fifty cents, a genuine lock of Jesus’s hair for two stogies, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for a dozen brown eggs. Listening to their jokes was bad enough, but even worse had been watching Eddie, who hadn’t said a word since they’d been arrested, curl up on a bunk and turn away to face the wall, as if he couldn’t bear to look at him. Finally, an hour or so before sundown, they were released. “What about the man who stole my money?” Ellsworth asked on his way out.

The constable shrugged. “I wouldn’t hardly get my hopes up. I’ll keep my eye out, but I figure that ol’ boy’s long gone by now. You just make sure you get those cattle back to their rightful owner.”

Going back to face Eula that night was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. If only she had beat him with her fists, screamed curses at him, spit in his face. But no; except for a barely audible gasp when she realized what he was telling her, she said nothing. For weeks afterward, she walked about in a stupor, not eating or sleeping or barely, it seemed at times, even breathing. He began to fear she might do herself in. Every afternoon, he came into the house from the fields or the barn filled with dread at what he might find. But then one November morning, two months after the swindle, he overheard her say to herself, “Just have to start over, that’s all.” She was standing at the stove fixing breakfast, and she pursed her lips and nodded her head, as if she were agreeing with something someone else had said. After that, she began to come around, and although he knew she might never forgive him for being so reckless and stupid, at least he no longer had to worry about her going cuckoo or choking down a cupful of rat poison.

He scraped the last of the oatmeal from the bowl and stood up. Eula hadn’t said a word while he was eating, just sat there staring out the window sipping her coffee. “Well,” Ellsworth told her, “when he gets home, you tell him to meet me at the field across from Mrs. Chester’s place. And to bring a hoe.”

“And what if he don’t show up?”

“By God, he better,” Ellsworth said. “The weeds have damn near taken over.”