The Heavenly Table

27

ON A COOL, cloudy morning four weeks to the day after committing their first crime, the Jewett Gang made their way into a small, quiet village they had been observing for close to an hour from a dried-up creek bed. After spending three days ducking a group of assassins accompanied by a supply truck flying a flag that had the Montgomery family crest sewn on it, they were down to their last saltine and desperate to replenish their supplies before moving back into the brush. By that time various explanations were being tossed about across the nation — in newspapers, saloons, parlors, town hall meetings, churches, and courthouses — as to how they could have committed all of their crimes without getting caught or even sustaining a single scratch. Thanks in part to a tabloid story that claimed the gang was traveling with a Haitian voodoo priestess named Sylvia who had been chased out of Texas for casting a spell on her landlord, a good portion of the public had come to believe that their run of luck was the result of supernatural forces. Others, being somewhat more rational, considered it evidence that they were either the most brilliant criminals to ever come down the pike, or that the South was in bad need of retraining its police departments. The vast majority, however, held firm to the belief that the brothers would eventually make a mistake, in much the same way that even the most skilled of gamblers will eventually draw a bad hand if he keeps on playing; and that was exactly what was about to happen in Russell, Kentucky.

As they approached the general store, Cane tried to hand Chimney some money for the groceries.

Chimney looked over at the wad of dollar bills and sneered. “Shit, I don’t need that,” he said, patting the pistol hanging on his side.

“Look, goddamn it, we can’t be takin’ any chances over some lousy canned goods,” Cane said. “I thought we done went over this.”

Even though Chimney had been able to see the merits in Cane’s argument that it was time to lie low and focus on making it to Canada, he wasn’t quite as keen as his brothers were on completely giving up the outlaw life when, in his opinion, they were just starting to get good at it. Besides that, he was in a foul mood. He still hadn’t gotten a chance to fuck a woman yet, and lately it had been preying on his mind something awful that he was going to die before getting a chance to shoot his jizz into something other than his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, as he slid down off his horse, “this won’t take a minute. C’mon, Cob.”

“Do I have to?” Cob asked.

Cane spat and looked up and down the street. Except for a kid playing with a dog a few doors down, there wasn’t another soul to be seen. “Yeah, fuck, you better go on in with him,” he said, “just to be on the safe side.”

As Cane sat out front keeping watch, and Chimney pilfered the cash register and loaded up two gunnysacks with provisions from the shelves and a stack of old newspapers lying on the counter, the bony, spectacled storekeeper wrung his hands and cried like an old woman, his boo-hoos getting louder by the minute. “Knock that whiny bastard in the head!” Chimney yelled, but instead Cob tried conversing with him about the price of hams and the need for rain. It was no use, the clerk kept up his racket. Though the store was drearier and more poorly stocked than any they had come across, just as they were getting ready to leave, Chimney found a long unopened packing crate hidden under the counter. “What we got here?” he said.

The man quit bawling immediately. “You don’t want to mess with that,” he said, sucking in his snot and wiping at his eyes. “That’s a special order for Mr. Haskins.”

“What’s so special about it?” Chimney said, as he started to pry the box open.

“Mr. Haskins is not a man you want to—”

“I’ll be damned,” Chimney said. Inside the crate, wrapped in oiled paper, lay a new Lee-Enfield and two wooden boxes of cartridges. He tore the paper off and picked the rifle up, aimed it at the storekeeper’s head.

“You take that gun,” the man said, swallowing hard, “Mr. Haskins is going to make me pay for it. It came clear from England. Please, boys, I’m just barely makin’ ends meet now.”

“Well, that’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about,” Chimney said, as he turned and walked out the door, loaded down with groceries and the Enfield and one of the shell boxes, the heels of his new cowboy boots clicking loudly on the scarred wooden floor, the few dollars he’d taken from the register sticking out of his front pocket. “Come on, Cob, let’s go. And don’t forget that other sack. I got some peaches in there for you and Cane.”

Cob looked at the clerk and shrugged his shoulders and put his pistol back in his holster. Then he picked up the gunnysack and started out, the cans clanging against each other. The man stared after him grimly, his spectacles a little crooked on his long, narrow face, thinking there was more food in those two pokes than his wife and seven children sometimes got to eat in a month. Again this morning, breakfast had been a corn cake so thin you could have read the fine print on one of Mr. Haskins’s loan agreements through it. He realized suddenly that he had finally arrived at his own personal crossroads, just as his grandpa had said would happen someday if he lived long enough, and that what he did in the next few seconds mattered more than anything else he’d ever done in his life. For once, his fate was in his own hands and not somebody else’s, and though his hands were trembling with fear, he reached under the counter.

At the door, Cob stopped and said, “Well, been nice talkin’ to you about the rain and all.” Because the man seemed to be in such a bad mood over Chimney taking the gun, he didn’t really expect a response, but he turned and looked back at the clerk anyway, just in time to see him bringing a Winchester repeater to his shoulder. Dropping the sack, Cob ran for his horse. Bullets started flying through the open doorway and crashing through the windows, the sounds of rifle blasts and glass shattering echoing down the street. He was throwing his leg over the saddle when he got hit. As Cane emptied his pistol into the front of the store, Chimney grabbed the reins of Cob’s horse and led him out of town at a gallop. Within two hours, after poring over the blood drops in the dirt and the wanted poster the sheriff passed around, a group of citizens, including the store clerk, gathered together a few supplies and horses and headed out of town to make their fortunes.

Luckily, the slug that tore into Cob’s thigh hadn’t hit an artery or the bone, but because of the constant jostling from the horse, he kept losing blood, and eventually his boot was overflowing with it. He became so woozy he couldn’t keep his eyes open, but whenever they stopped to rest, the posse from Russell appeared in the distance; and they had to tie him to the saddle to keep him from falling off. By the time they came across an abandoned farm the following afternoon, his brothers were beginning to worry they might lose him. “Well,” Cane said, as he looked at the overgrown yard around the house, “this might be the end of it.”

“How you figure?” Chimney asked.

“We can’t ride no more till he gets better, so if they track us here, we’re fucked.”

Leaning over the horn of his saddle, Chimney spat and then said, “Well, I don’t know who those ol’ boys are back there, but I don’t figure they can shoot any better than we can.”

“Maybe, but there must be fifteen of them in that pack.”

“So?” Chimney said. “That many don’t even amount to one box of shells.”

Cane shook his head and started to climb off his horse. “You’re quite the optimist, ain’t ye?”

“What’s that? One of them words you got out of your dictionary?”

“Means someone who’s always lookin’ on the bright side of things.”

“Well, might as well, the way I figure it,” Chimney said. “A man gets to thinkin’ he’s beat, he just as well hang it up. Besides, they’ll be enough of that doom and gloom shit when we’re dead.”

They loosened Cob from the saddle and eased him down, then packed him to the house, through tall patches of milkweed and broomstraw and past a few blighted stalks of corn growing out of the top of an ancient rubbish pile. Thick vines infested with tiny brown spiders draped across the front of the rotting porch, and Chimney hacked a path to the door with one of the machetes. Kicking it open, he watched a long black snake slither across the rough pine floor in the summer shadows and disappear through a crack in one of the walls, leaving a winding imprint of itself in the soft dust. He spread a blanket near a fireplace made of clay bricks, and they carried Cob inside and laid him down. “I’ll take care of the horses,” he told Cane. He found a large black pot in the kitchen, covered with a lid and half full of a dried-up lump that had probably once been a soup or perhaps a stew. After banging out the mess on top of a rough pine counter, he carried it back outside. He tethered the animals in the shell of an old lean-to and unsaddled them and began hauling guns and supplies into the house. Then he walked about the property until he discovered a caved-in well, hidden in a thicket of wild roses. Even though it was dark by the time he finished cutting a way to it through the briars, he carried water to the horses in the pot, and by the time he came back inside the house, it was long after midnight. In the light from a candle stub, he watched Cane pour some whiskey into the bullet hole in Cob’s leg and then wrap it in a fresh bandage. “How’s he doing?” he asked.

“Hard to say,” Cane said. “At least the bleeding’s stopped for now. That’s the main thing.” He stood up and took a drink from the whiskey bottle, then passed it to Chimney.

“What about the bullet?”

“It’ll have to stay. We start diggin’ around for it, we might make things worse.”

“Well, I don’t reckon it matters much. Hell, Bloody Bill carried fifteen or twenty around inside him, and it didn’t hurt him any.”

Cane was quiet for a moment, then said, “You do know somebody just made him up, right?” It was a question he’d thought of asking several times over the last couple of weeks, whenever his brother spoke of Bloody Bill as if he were a real person, but he’d kept putting it off, partly because he feared what Chimney’s answer might be, and partly because he wasn’t sure it made any difference in the long run anyway.

“Course I do,” Chimney replied, handing the bottle back. “I’m not that fuckin’ stupid. Still don’t mean it can’t be true. The ol’ boy that wrote the book had to get his ideas somewhere.” He sat down and leaned his back against the wall, looked over at Cob passed out flat on his back on the floor, breathing loudly through his mouth. “You and me was lucky, wasn’t we?”

“What, that we didn’t get shot?”

“No,” Chimney said, “that we weren’t born like him. I mean, hell, even if he lives, he don’t have much to look forward to, does he?”

“I don’t know,” Cane said. “Before the old man died, he was probably the happiest one of us.”

“Only thing that proves is how dumb he is.”

Cane shook his head and took another drink, then capped the bottle. He debated if he should remind Chimney that the only reason they were in this predicament in the first place was because he’d insisted on stealing a few cans of beans instead of paying for them, but decided that keeping the peace was more important right now. And besides, if Cob lived through the night, tomorrow Chimney would probably be bragging on him for being such a tough bastard. “Well, what about you?” Cane asked. “What is it you look forward to if we get away with this?”

“Me?” Chimney said. “I’m gonna drink and fuck and carry on for ten or fifteen years, then meet me some nice girl and settle down. Maybe have a couple brats.”

“Ten or fifteen years?”

“Sure,” Chimney said. “Shit, I’m only seventeen.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“How about you?”

Cane hesitated. He was sure his brother wouldn’t understand what he looked upon as a life worth having, but what did it matter? Hell, they could all be dead tomorrow, and all of their dreams gone with them. Pulling a cigar from his pocket, he lit it, then said, “I remember one night we was walkin’ through this town with Pap. I think it was in Tennessee. I was maybe fifteen, I reckon. Cold, rainy ol’ night. We were hungry as hell, been on the move all day. We passed by this big house that was all lit up inside, and I saw a man leaned back in an easy chair with his feet propped up by a fire. And on the wall behind him was more books than I ever imagined there was in the world. Rows of ’em. Then some woman came into the room and—”

“What’d he do then?” Chimney asked. “I bet he fucked her, didn’t he?”

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

“So was she too old or ugly or what?”

“Like I said, it wasn’t like that,” repeated Cane, regretting now that he’d even mentioned it in the first place.

“What the fuck?” Chimney said. “A bunch of books and some puss walkin’ in on ye? That’s as crazy as Cob and his heavenly table horseshit. I don’t know about you sometimes, brother.” He moved over to the empty window frame and peered out at the dark tree line across from the house. “Better go ahead and get ye some sleep. Sounds like you need it. I’ll keep the first watch.”

Cob came to the next morning, a bit surprised that he wasn’t still on his horse. He tried to raise up, but he’d never felt this tired in his life. He saw Cane sitting on a warped and splintered wood floor covered with dust and grit and purplish balls of coon scat, his back leaned against the wall, reading one of the newspapers Chimney had taken from the store. A small pile of feathers from where a bird had been eaten by some animal lay over by the entrance to the other room. “Where are we?” he asked.

Cane looked up. “Some old house we found.” He set the paper aside and picked up a canteen.

“So them men quit chasin’ us?”

“Maybe,” Cane said. “We ain’t sure yet.” He held the canteen to Cob’s lips with one hand and lifted his head with the other.

“Where’s Chimney?” Cob asked after he had drunk his fill.

“I’m right here,” Chimney said. Swiveling his head to the left, Cob saw his other brother squatted down, looking out the front window. Beside him was the rifle they had stolen from the storekeeper. Other guns had been placed on either side of the door, and a wad of bloody rags was tossed in the corner.

“How long we been here?” Cob said.

“Since last night.”

“Boy, when I first woke up, I thought for sure we was back at the shack on the Major’s place.”

“Yeah,” Cane said, glancing around. “I guess it does have the same ambiance.”

“Ambiance? I’ve heard that word before, ain’t I?”

“Sure you have,” Cane said. “Remember that line in the book about Bloody Bill? Talkin’ about the sportin’ house? ‘The elegant, subdued ambiance of the gilded room was—’ ”

Then Chimney, still staring out the window, cut in and finished the sentence: “ ‘…suddenly shattered by the forced entry of a lustful, liquor-soaked Bloody Bill, his side-arms rattling in their tooled-leather holsters and his gold tooth gleaming in the light from the candelabras like the rarest of Satan’s jewels.’ ”

“What the heck does ‘gilded’ mean?” Cob asked.

“Well, I think it’s like ‘shiny,’ ” Cane said. Then he remembered the story he’d come across in the paper. “Hey, listen to this.” He commenced to reading aloud about a night watchman in Savannah who claimed that he fired six rounds point-blank into one of the Jewett Gang, the chubby one with the moon head, and watched as the criminal laughed them off as if the bullets weren’t any more lethal than mosquito bites or the good-night kisses of some sweet, innocent child.

“Damn, I wish it were so,” Cob said, craning his neck to look down at his throbbing leg.

“Jesus Christ, we never been within a hundred miles of there our whole lives,” Chimney complained. He walked from his post at the window over to the coffee pot sitting at the edge of the fireplace. Although Cane was usually against risking the smoke of a fire when they had men trailing them, Chimney had let him sleep all night, and he didn’t have the heart to tell him no when he said he’d like a cup of coffee. “And where do they get the rest of that bullshit? Skeeter bites. Fuck, look at him. He’s lucky that ol’ boy back there couldn’t shoot worth a damn or we’d probably be a-plantin’ him right about now.”

After that, they lapsed into silence, listened to the snake slither around inside the walls. Cob dozed off again and Chimney went out to check on the horses. Cane opened the newspaper, and on the third page he found an article about German soldiers roasting young children over a spit for their dinner in some place called Belgium. He shook his head when he finished reading it. At least he and his brothers weren’t the only ones being lied about.