The Heavenly Table

31

TWO DAYS AFTER killing the store clerk from Russell, the brothers came to a high granite bluff overlooking a wide river. A mile or so to the west, they could just make out, in the early morning fog, a train crossing over the water on a covered bridge; and to the east, they watched a coal-fired barge come around a curve, pulling a load of raw lumber. They had been riding hard all night. To Chimney’s dismay, most of the arsenal they had collected had to be dumped in a pond after the packhorse split a hoof and couldn’t keep up. A group of men, a dozen or more in number, had been gaining on them steadily. Yesterday evening Cane had caught a whiff of their cook fire as they came up out of a steep, rocky ravine they had hidden in all day. While he pushed forward with a weak and feverish Cob, Chimney had slipped up close to their camp and listened to them as they ate and drunkenly bragged about what they would do with the criminals after they killed them. From what he could gather, a bearded man that the others called Captain was the leader. Sitting on a campstool, he wore an old blue coat with tarnished braids on the shoulders, and a tall hat decorated with shiny bits of foil and a plume of peacock feathers. “As long as we got their heads as proof for the bounty, I don’t give a good goddamn what you do,” he heard him say. “Fuck ’em in the ass for all I care.”

“By God, Cap, that’s a grand idea,” another man said. “Many women as they’ve raped, them sonsofbitches deserve a good cornholing.”

“But do we cut their heads off before we fuck ’em, or after we fuck ’em?” someone else asked.

“Well,” Captain said, as he rooted loose a piece of meat stuck between his teeth with a finger, “the way I see it, if’n you want them to squirm around a bit and not just lay there like some ol’ cold housewife, then ye’d best keep ’em alive until after you’ve had your fill.”

As Chimney listened to several others voice their opinions about the pros and cons of live fucks versus dead ones, he settled a bead on Captain’s head with the Enfield. He wondered how much cornholing they’d be up for if he blew the old boy’s gummy brains all over their hot vittles. His heart started beating faster, and he felt his finger slowly begin to squeeze the trigger, but then he recalled Cane saying, “Whatever you do, don’t start nothing. The shape Cob’s in, we’d never be able to outrun ’em.” Letting out a sigh, he turned away and sneaked back to his horse. It had taken him half the night to find them in the dark.

“So that’s the Ohio?” Chimney asked.

“Far as I can figure, it is,” Cane said.

“Jesus, I never thought it’d be that big.”

“Looks like the bridge is the only way across.”

“Well, let’s get to it then,” Chimney said. “If they didn’t get too drunk last night, those bastards probably ain’t more than an hour or so behind us.”

Cane shook his head. “No, we’ll have to wait till the sun goes down. We get caught in the middle of that thing in the daylight it’d be a goddamn turkey shoot.” He looked around at the thin trees and patchy grass growing out of the rocky soil. “At least here we got the high ground.”

“But there’s nowhere to run if they find us,” Chimney argued. “Unless we do what Bloody Bill did, and I’ll say right now I’d just as soon shoot it out.”

Looking over the edge of the steep bluff, at least two hundred feet above the river, Cane thought about how Bill Bucket, with a small army closing in on him from three sides, had chosen to leap to his death with his horse off a high cliff in some windblown New Mexico desert. “A modern-day Icarus” was the way Charles Winthrop III described him in that last flowery paragraph, “harried and hemmed in on all sides by a cruel and unjust world, making a final glorious attempt to break free of all his earthly bonds.” Though they didn’t have any notion as to who this Icarus feller was, they had speculated he was probably some robber who had come to a bad end in some bygone time. Cane rubbed the back of his neck, glanced over at Cob. “What do ye think, brother? Can ye go a little farther?”

Cob was slumped over in his saddle, a thin string of drool hanging from his bottom lip. His skin was pale and greasy with sweat. When he heard Cane speaking to him, he straightened up a little and opened his dull eyes. “Remember them peaches the old man had hid?” he said.

“What about them?”

“I got one a-growin’ inside me. I can feel it.”

“No, buddy, you just got a fever,” Cane said.

“I wish I’d never ate them damn things. They was rotten and now I’m a-rotten, too.”

“Maybe you got one of them worms in ye like mama had,” Chimney joked.

“Jesus Christ, shut up,” Cane said. “He don’t need to hear that shit.”

“And why does he keep followin’ me?” Cob said. He turned his head as if he were looking at something behind them.

“Who?”

“Tardweller. No matter what I give him, he won’t go away.”

“Well, that settles it,” Cane said. “We stay here for now.”

They laid Cob on his blanket under a gnarled crabapple tree, hobbled the horses in the grassiest spots they could find. Then Chimney climbed with the Enfield twenty feet or so into a tall spruce at the southern edge of the promontory and propped himself between two thick branches. He reached in his back pocket for a strand of licorice and leaned back against the sticky trunk to keep an eye out for the band of sodomites that were on their heels.

Cane was searching through the saddlebags, trying to figure out if they had any food left, when he realized with a start that The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket was missing. He thought for a minute, recalled that the last place he had seen it was back at the farmhouse where they had hid out from the Russell posse. Evidently, in the rush to get away after Chimney killed the clerk, he must have forgotten it. “Bloody Bill,” he said to himself. How many times, he wondered, had he read that book to his brothers? He had lost track, but it had to be fifteen, maybe twenty. Though he had always known it was just an outlandish tale written by someone (and maybe Charles Foster Winthrop III wasn’t even his real name) who probably didn’t know any more about killing people and robbing banks than an old maid who’d spent all her life hidden away in a bedroom of her father’s house, it had still given them hope when there was none, something to aim for that was bigger than the life they’d been handed, even if it was crazy to think they’d ever get away with it. And where would they be right now if they’d never found it that day in that moldy-ass carpetbag? Or, for that matter, if he hadn’t been able to read. Still be poor as dirt, doing Tardweller’s bidding and trying to stretch another meal or two out of a sick hog.

Up until now, he reckoned that the only period in his life when he had truly felt like he was worth something was when his mother was teaching him his letters. She used to brag on the easy way that he picked up words, said that someday he would be a schoolteacher. After she died, he used to put himself to sleep at night thinking about those hours they spent together at the kitchen table, but after four or five years of wandering around half-starved with Pearl, they started to fade away, just like her face did. He glanced into the saddlebag they carried the money in, then cinched it closed. After the way that they had lived, he couldn’t hold it against Chimney for simply wanting good times and women, but he desired something more for Cob and himself. Nothing fancy, just a decent life. A sturdy house with polished floors and a good woman and clean clothes and books on a shelf. Like he’d seen that rainy night in Tennessee.

He raised his head and saw two young boys fishing on the other side of the river, the leaves on the trees behind them already turning, vivid splashes of orange and red and yellow. A flock of starlings swooped down along the water, then rose up and scattered in different directions across the blue sky. He leaned against his horse and closed his eyes, and though he knew it was way too much to expect after all the awful things they had done, he asked God in a whisper to help them get to Canada. And in return, he vowed, he would try to live right the rest of his time on earth. Then he went over and sat beside Cob. In the shade, the air had a slight chill to it. He yawned and cocked his pistol, laid it on the ground beside him.

The sun was setting when Chimney shook him awake. “Come on, we better get to it.”

Though the fever had subsided, Cob was still weak as a cat. What they needed, Cane thought, was to find somewhere to put up for a few days and rest once they got across the river. As Chimney gathered up the guns and got the horses ready, he poured more whiskey on Cob’s wound, then tied a clean rag around it. “So is that Canada over yonder?” Cob asked.

“No, that’s Ohio,” Cane replied, handing him the canteen. “But we’re gettin’ close.”

Before they left, they split the last of some jerky and a chocolate bar. As they mounted their horses, Cane remembered looking through the saddlebags earlier. “I think I lost Bloody Bill’s book,” he said.

“What?” Cob asked.

“I can’t find it, and the last time I recall seeing it was back there at that farmhouse. I must’ve forgot to pack it.”

For a moment, Chimney looked disappointed, even a little sad, as if he’d just found out he’d lost a good friend, but then he spat and said, “Aw, we can probably find us another one. I imagine they sell ’em all over the place. Besides, we can damn near recite every word in it anyway.”

“It don’t matter to me,” Cob said. “The way I look at it, that thing’s been nothin’ but trouble.”

They made their way down off the bluff in the dark and traveled west along a gravelly path to the covered bridge. The sky was the color of a crow, and they could hear the water lapping against the girders. There was just a narrow, planked walkway between the two sets of rails, barely wide enough for a man. They stood at the mouth of the tunnel and peered in, but a thick mist made it impossible to see anything. “Let’s just hope we don’t meet anything in there,” Chimney said.

“Like what?” Cob asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Chimney answered. “Could be any number of things. Maybe a train, or a pack of wild dogs, or those ass-fuckin’ bounty hunters, or a—”

“Come on,” Cane said, “let’s just get it over with.” Then he nudged his horse lightly and disappeared into the tunnel, his brothers following close behind, the hooves of their animals ringing hollowly on the wooden floor high above the water.

And so, on September 28, 1917, the notorious Jewett Gang entered the state of Ohio at approximately one o’clock in the morning. Just a few hundred yards on the other side of the bridge was a small hamlet known as Sciotoville. They entered it warily, with guns drawn, though not even a single dog was awake to greet them. The only sound to be heard was the creaking of a metal sign hanging in front of the general store, slightly swinging in the dank, fishy-smelling breeze coming off the river. It didn’t take them more than five minutes to cross the entire town. As they headed out, they stopped and watched a northbound freight pour out of the tunnel at forty miles an hour, the headlights of the engine looking like yellow smudges in the fog. They were only a couple of yards down the gravel bank from the rails, and, as the train rolled past, the earth began trembling under the horses’ hooves. The animals skirted and thrashed their tails nervously, their heads thrown back and their startled eyes bulging in their sockets. Cane saw his brothers mouth some words, but the loud, thumping clatter of the steel wheels drowned them out. They waited until the last of the swaying boxcars blew past them, and then they proceeded on.