The Heavenly Table

39

WHEN ELLSWORTH FINALLY came in from the field, Eula didn’t say anything about seeing a colored boy lurking about, and so he decided not to mention his encounter with the one on the road. He was glad now that he hadn’t hired him. It would have been just another thing for her to worry about. Even so, harvesting corn by hand was hard work even for a young man, and Ellsworth, being convinced all day that the lazy bastard was watching him from the woods, was completely gutted from trying to show him how it was done. Not only that, his voice was shot to hell from all the singing he had done. Once he’d gotten started, he found that he couldn’t stop, and he must have sung “The Old Brown Nag” a hundred times. “What’s wrong?” Eula asked. “You catchin’ a cold?”

“No,” he squeaked softly. “Just wore out is all.”

“A summer cold,” she said. “They the hardest to get rid of.”

“I done told ye, I ain’t sick.”

“Well, you sure sound like it,” she said. “Good thing you don’t have to sing for your supper.”

After a meal of cornbread and beans and sliced tomatoes, they went out on the porch to sit a bit before bedtime. The day was quickly coming to an end, and the shadows cast across the yard became a little longer with each passing minute. As she had done every evening for the past few days, Eula wondered aloud why they hadn’t heard from Eddie yet. “You’d almost think he’s done forgot about us.”

“No,” Ellsworth said softly, “I don’t think that’s it. Like I told ye before, I imagine he’s been too busy.” He shifted uncomfortably in his rocking chair, and a feeling of disgust crept over him. He knew that the right thing to do was just go ahead and tell her the truth about Eddie, but whenever he got the chance, he balked. He couldn’t figure it out, unless maybe he’d covered for the boy so much he couldn’t break the habit now; and every day he kept it up, the harder it was not to do it.

“How about a hot cup of water with honey?” she asked. “That’ll soothe your throat some.”

“No,” Ellsworth said, “just let me rest here a minute.” He stretched out his legs and closed his eyes, felt a cool breeze ruffle his sparse hair. He heard Eula get up from her chair and enter the house. Right before he faded off, he heard the door open again, smelled the cup of coffee she’d brought back with her.

Unbeknown to the Fiddlers, the Jewetts had been watching the farmhouse from across the road for the last thirty minutes. This was just the sort of quiet, out-of-the-way place Cane had been looking for ever since they’d entered Ohio. They hadn’t had more than a couple of hours’ sleep at a time since they’d left the dead grocer in the rain four days ago, and though Cob’s leg didn’t seem to be getting any worse, it wasn’t getting any better, either. And by this point the horses didn’t have another canter left in them, so outrunning the law or anyone else was out of the question. Unless they got some rest soon, they’d never make it to Canada, he was sure of that. “Well, what do you think?” Chimney finally asked.

Holding up his hand for him to be quiet, Cane studied the old people sitting on the porch awhile longer before making a decision. “Well, we won’t know till we try,” he finally said. He turned and looked at Cob. “What’s your name?”

Cob thought for a second, then said, “Junior. Junior Bradford.”

“That’s right,” Cane said. He looked over at Chimney. “Hollis, you let me do all the talking.”

Ellsworth was slumped over in his rocking chair when Eula awakened him with a shake. When he first opened his eyes, he thought he must be dreaming. Before him were three men, red-eyed and sweaty and caked with dust, mounted on horses. Rearing up in the chair, the farmer rubbed violently at his face, then said, “What the hell?”

“Howdy,” Cane said. “Sorry if we scared ye.”

Ellsworth’s eyes shifted back and forth as he took a hard look at each of the three in the dusk. “That’s all right,” he replied. “Didn’t hear you ride up is all.”

“Pardon?” Cane said.

“He’s got a cold,” Eula said.

“Jesus,” Ellsworth muttered under his breath. He turned and hacked up a ball of grit, spit it over the railing. “What can I do for ye?” he said, raising his voice with effort.

“Well, my brother here, he’s got a hurt leg, and we’re needin’ a place to rest up a day or two.”

Ellsworth glanced over at the chubby one, a friendly-looking boy with a smile on his round face, a filthy piece of cloth wrapped around his thigh. “What did he do to it?” he asked.

Cane shook his head. “Just a dumb accident. Playing around with a gun and it went off.”

“That sounds like something Eddie would do,” Eula said.

“Where ye headed?” Ellsworth said. “Going to join the army in Meade, I bet.”

“Well, no,” Cane said. “We’re headed for—”

“Why not?” Eula said. “That’s what our boy done, and he ain’t but sixteen.”

“It’s not that we don’t want to,” Cane said carefully. From what he’d read in the newspapers, he knew that many people weren’t taking this war business lightly. In fact, they had become quite nuts about it, going around kicking dachshunds to death, making ninety-year-old Americans with German-sounding names get down on their knees in the streets and kiss the American flag, calling sauerkraut Liberty cabbage and hamburger Salisbury steak. Searching factories and mines for terrorists, and taverns for hidden hordes of pretzels. And if they happened to have a family member in uniform, they were often twice as zealous when it came to sniffing out slackers and potential traitors. Maybe, Cane thought, they figured it wouldn’t hurt so much if their son got his ass blown off as long as there was a good chance the neighbor’s boy would suffer the same fate. There were few things in the world that put all people, regardless of education or wealth or place in society, on equal footing, but heartache was one of them. “It’s just…it’s just that…” He turned and looked at Cob, then back at the farmer and his wife. “Mind if I get down?”

“Go ahead,” Ellsworth said.

Cane eased off his horse and stepped up to the porch. “Thing is,” he whispered, leaning toward the couple, “my brother there ain’t right in the head, so someone’s got to watch over him all the time. It’s not his fault, he was born that way, but there’s no way they’d take him in the army. As ye can see, he can’t even handle a gun.”

“Oh, my,” Eula said, looking over at Cob. Because of her poor dead mother, she had always harbored a soft spot in her heart for the mentally challenged. And she knew how difficult it was to keep one safe. No matter how closely Eula and her father watched over her, Josephine had always found some way to slip out of the house at night. “Well, it’s good of you to take care of him. Not a lot of young men would do that.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“And who’s the other one?” Ellsworth said.

Cane glanced back at Chimney, then said, barely able to suppress a smile, “That’s our cousin, Hollis. He’s not quite playin’ with a full deck, either, but he ain’t as bad off as Junior.” He straightened up and looked over at the barn. “So you farm?”

“I try to,” Ellsworth said.

“It can be a hard life sometimes.”

“You ever done it?”

“Sure,” Cane said. “It’s all we’ve ever done.”

“Where would that be?” Ellsworth asked.

“Georgia mostly. Then Pap died a while back, and we lost the land.”

“How’d you come to lose it?”

“Back taxes mostly,” Cane said. “That’s why we’re going to Canada. We got an uncle lives up there.”

“Canada? That’s quite a ways off, ain’t it?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure. I just know we got to keep heading north.”

Ellsworth settled back and nodded approvingly. At least the boy was honest. He figured that owning up that you didn’t know the location of Canada was just as embarrassing as admitting that you didn’t know the whereabouts of Germany. And having your farm taken away because of back taxes was as bad as losing your life savings to a checkered-suited con man. Maybe even worse. He reckoned they might have quite a bit in common.

“Them your horses?” Ellsworth asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s their names?”

“How’s that?”

“Their names. Even my old mule’s got a name.”

“Right,” Cane said slowly, a slight hesitation in his voice. Of all the questions someone might ask, the old man wanted to know the names of the horses? Shit, Cob was the only one who’d ever called his anything other than “horse,” and he gave his a different handle damn near every day. “Well, this one—”

“Thunder, Lightning, and Hurricane,” Chimney said quickly, pointing to each.

“Buck’s what I call my mule,” said Ellsworth.

Chimney nodded. “That’s a good name for one. We used to have—”

“We can pay,” Cane cut in, trying to get the conversation back on track before his brother said something stupid.

“What?” Eula asked, coming forward in her chair. “What’d you say?”

“I said we can pay.”

“Boys, I hate to turn you down,” Ellsworth started to say, “but we—”

“Hold on a minute,” Eula said, lightly touching his arm to shut him up. All the time Ellsworth had been dozing, she’d been worrying again about how they were going to make it. Everything was tied up in the corn, but, as he kept telling her, with the summer having been so dry, they’d be lucky to get forty bushels an acre. And that was if he could get it all put up by himself. Though she was proud of Eddie for enlisting in the military, he surely couldn’t have picked a worse time. They didn’t even have a calf to sell this year. Perhaps the strangers’ arrival was some sort of sign that the Good Lord hadn’t entirely forsaken them. After all, when was the last time anybody rode in and actually offered them money instead of taking it? Never. “How much?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Cane said. “Could you fix us something to eat?”

“Sure, I can cook,” Eula said.

“Well,” he said, scratching his head, “how about twenty a day? Would that be all right?”

Eula’s heart began beating a little faster. “How many days are we talking about?”

“Three, maybe four. Just till Junior’s leg gets better.”

“But, Eula, where are they going to sleep?” Ellsworth asked. “We don’t have—”

“Hold on and let me think for a minute,” she said. Good God, man, she thought to herself, who cares where they sleep? We’re talking about sixty dollars here, maybe more. They could sleep in her bed for that much money. Of course, feeding them would use up a lot of the food she had stored back for winter, but they’d still come out way ahead, even if she had to kill half the chickens. Wait a minute, though. How could she be sure they weren’t just trying to pull one over on a couple of old people? Just looking at them, you wouldn’t think they’d have two nickels to rub together. “Can you pay something in advance?” she finally asked.

Cane pulled a small wad of bills out of his pocket and counted out forty dollars and placed it in her hand. “There’s two days’ worth,” he said.

She glanced down at the money. “It’s not that I don’t trust ye,” she said apologetically, “but we been took before.”

“I understand,” Cane said.

“Well, one of you can stay in our boy’s room, but I’m afraid the other two will have to sleep out in the barn. That’s the best we can do.”

“The barn will be fine for all of us,” said Cane.

“All right then,” Eula said. She stood up then and started into the house, gripping the money tightly. “There’s a well out back if’n you want to wash up. Ells will get you some soap and a lantern. But the first thing I want you to do is bring your brother in the house and let me change that dirty bandage. It’s a wonder he don’t have blood poisoning.”

—

“TWENTY DOLLARS A day!” Chimney said. “What the hell was you thinking?” They had just had their first decent meal in several weeks — beans and cornbread and fried pork and stewed apples and coffee — and were now lying on their blankets in the barn loft. There was a large hinged door at one end, and they had propped it open to let in a light breeze that was making the leaves whisper on the two oak trees in the front yard. Cob was already snoring down below them in the back of the farmer’s wagon. The horses were in a fenced-in lot behind the barn with the mule and a milk cow, and their guns were stashed under some boards behind a rusty plow that looked like it hadn’t been moved since the start of the century. At the other end of the loft, the saddlebag with the money was buried deep in some straw. The jugs of wine that Ellsworth had hid up there lay undetected just a few feet from their heads.

“I would have paid twice that,” Cane said. He could barely keep his eyes open. The last time he had felt this peaceful, their mother was still alive.

A nightingale let loose several soft, melodious notes, then stopped suddenly. Chimney sat up and looked over toward the house, a worried expression on his face. He was chewing the inside of his mouth, something he always did when he was on edge. After a few seconds, the bird started up again. “Do you really trust them?”

“Jesus, what do you think they’re gonna do? Climb up here and cut our throats? Tie us up and go runnin’ for the sheriff?”

“Well, what about Cob? He has a hard enough time remembering where he shit last. How you figure he’s going to keep that story straight?”

“Don’t worry about him,” Cane said. “What about you?”

Chimney spat out the door, then lay back down. “Hollis Stubbs, your dashing cousin.” He lazily scanned the constellations in the dark sky, but, unlike most men, he had never found much meaning in the stars. They were too remote, too silent. “Headed for Canada in search of my fortune.”