The Heavenly Table

46

FOUR FEET OF water and a muddy bottom had broken Sugar’s fall from the bridge. After the initial shock, he took account of himself as best he could with his hands tied behind his back and determined that nothing was broken. He got to his feet and managed to get his razor from his pocket and cut the ropes that bound him, then struggled up the riverbank. The campfire glared above him by the tracks, and he could hear the men laughing, as if what they had done to him was no different than killing a dog or a possum. Though his legs were wobbly, he began walking, water dripping from his clothes, squishing from his shoes. He reached up to feel a knot on the back of his head. His nose throbbed, and he tasted blood in his mouth. The moon came out from behind some clouds and showed him a way through the cattails and brambles. He headed on south.

The next afternoon, he arrived in Shadesville. He walked through the little burg with its grocery and barbershop and post office, and went out the other side past the Baptist church. He continued another quarter mile until he came to the house he had been born in. It was empty. Sugar stood there for quite a while looking at it, weather-beaten and leaning a little eastward with two smallish rooms and a wood-shingled roof. It was hard to believe, he thought, that nine people had once lived there together. Shit, the apartment he had shared with Flora was twice as big. He went up the three rotten steps and through the unlocked door. Except for a rusty hairpin he found lying on one of the two windowsills, the house was completely bare inside; and judging from the dust on the floor, he figured nobody had been there in a long time. He was so tired that he didn’t feel anything, not even disappointment.

An hour later, he went back into town and saw an old man sitting on a bench in front of the post office. “You ’member me?” Sugar asked.

The man examined him for a minute with yellow eyeballs, then cleared his throat. “Can’t say I do.”

“Don’t matter,” Sugar said. “Them Milfords that lived down the road there, where’d they all go off to?”

“Oh, they ain’t lived around here for several years now,” the old man said. “Not since the mother passed. I think maybe they went to Detroit. They always claimed one of their brothers was up there makin’ good money buildin’ them automobiles, but only a fool would have ever believed that shit. I knew that boy well, and he never was nothing but a liar and a blowhard. George, I think his name was. He’d brag about gettin’ up in the morning, that boy. Like he’d done something big, just by cracking his eyes open. Most worthless nigger ever come out of Shadesville, if ye ask me. I warned them others not to go, but they wouldn’t listen. Shoot, I’d say they probably all dead or locked up by now.”

Sugar scowled and turned away. So his mother was dead. It didn’t surprise him really, now that he thought of it; she could barely get out of her chair the day he’d left. He looked up and saw the cemetery on the little knob behind the grocery. Crossing the road, he found her resting place a few minutes later, a rock with her name scratched on it marking the head of it. The only store-bought stone in the entire graveyard belonged to Mrs. Hitchens, whose son, Marcel, had gone to a Negro college in Alabama and made good. Fucking stuck-up bastard, always wearing that goddamn blue tie and carrying a book under his arm. Getting down on his knees, Sugar started clearing the plot of weeds and dead leaves. He was nearly done when a great tiredness overcame him. He stretched out on the ground in the warm sunlight and closed his eyes. When he awoke several hours later, he made his way back down the hill to the grocery and bought three slices of longhorn cheese and a handful of crackers and a bottle of milk from a young girl with a rag tied around her head and a colicky baby balanced on her hip. He ate his supper out front. Across the dirt road, a group of young black men had replaced the old man on the bench in front of the post office. They were talking loudly and passing a bottle around. Bedrolls and carpetbags lay on the ground about them. Sugar finished his meal and walked over. They were from all over the county, from Fish Creek to Sourdough, and they told him they were going to join Uncle Sam’s army. A man with a wagon was supposed to pick them up in the morning and take them to Lexington.

Sugar laughed. “They ain’t gonna take no niggers in the army,” he said.

“Oh, yes, they are, boy,” a tall, heavy man with a loud, confident voice said. Sugar glanced over at him coolly. His front teeth were missing and he had no shoes, but he was wearing a new pair of bibs, and it was evident from the way he rocked back and forth on his bare heels with his thumbs hooked under the brass buttons on the shoulder straps that he thought he was hot shit. If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought he was a well-to-do land baron standing on a balcony among a bunch of his lackeys, surveying his vast holdings.

For a moment, Sugar thought about how stupid and childish the man looked. He doubted if the poor sonofabitch had fifty cents in his pocket. But then he remembered the smug way he had felt right after purchasing the bowler, and his stomach clenched up a little. King of the world for just $2.95. Christ, he was no better than this fucking clown. “Where’d you hear that?” he asked, swallowing some watery bile.

“Show him, Brownie,” the big man said.

A boy with bubbly white blisters around his mouth pulled a flyer from inside his homespun shirt and handed it over. Sugar scanned the drawing of a black man with thick lips and a broad nose dressed in a sharply creased uniform and saluting. Though it looked official, he still doubted the veracity of it. He figured someone was passing them around as a joke, like the ones he had seen in Detroit last winter promising five hundred dollars and twenty acres to any colored person over the age of eighteen who showed up at the courthouse in Fairbanks, Alaska, during the month of February. A dozen had frozen to death trying to make that journey, and several hundred more stranded before someone figured out it was all a hoax. It was just naturally assumed that some white folks were responsible, so imagine everyone’s surprise when it was discovered that a colored boy who swept up nights at a printing press was the culprit. His reason? Nobody knew. He disappeared the same night someone ratted him out, and by the time his body was discovered hanging like a side of beef in the back of a meat locker eight weeks later, it was too late to ask.

“You might as well come with us,” a voice behind him said.

Sugar passed the paper back. Just as he was getting ready to reply that, providing the poster was even legitimate in the first place, only an ass-kissing Uncle Tom would volunteer to go off and fight a war started by a bunch of rich white motherfuckers clear on the other side of the ocean, he saw one of the men tip the bottle up. “I sure could use a drink,” he said instead.

“Give him a taste, Malcolm.”

Sugar took a long pull and handed it back. He wiped his mouth just as the whiskey exploded in his belly. A warm, tingling sensation spread over his entire body, from the bottoms of his sore feet to the top of his bruised head, and he immediately wanted more. “Any place around here to get a jug?” he asked.

A squat, husky man wearing a frayed straw boater pointed across the road to a narrow, windowless hut tacked on the side of the store. “Jenksie over there will fix you up if’n you got the money,” he said.

“You ain’t from around here, are ye?” another asked.

“No,” Sugar replied, “I’m comin’ from Detroit.”

“Detroit? What you doin’ in Shadesville then?”

“Oh, I just stopped by to see some people, but they all gone.”

“What people?”

“The Milfords.”

“The Milfords? Why, that was ol’ Susie’s name, wasn’t it?” Several of them chuckled.

“Lord, I damn near forgot about her,” another said.

“Not me,” a light-skinned boy with greenish eyes said. “That girl could suck a—”

“That’s my sister you’re talkin’ about,” Sugar said, raising his voice and placing his hand on the razor in his pocket.

“Oh,” the boy said.

“Well,” said another.

They all looked away or down at the ground for a minute, then someone said, “Here ye go,” and handed Sugar the bottle again. He forgot about his sister and stayed with them for a while longer, but they didn’t pass their liquor around fast enough to suit him. Walking over to the little shed, he tapped on the door and a sweaty, sickly-looking man wearing nothing but a soiled pair of yellow trousers let him in. The man sat down on a wooden crate before he asked Sugar what he wanted. It was dark inside the room. There was something alive inside the crate, moving around in a tight circle, but Sugar couldn’t make out what it was. He bought a couple of pints of Old Rose and that left him with a dollar. Avoiding the volunteers, he sneaked around the corner and down the road to his homeplace and sat under a dead apple tree in the backyard. From time to time, he uncapped one of the bottles and took a sip, then screwed the cap back on tightly. He felt guilty about breaking his promise to the Lord, who had obviously saved him once again, this time from drowning back there at the bridge, but he swore that he would never get drunk again, not after this one last time. Who could blame him really? Coming all the way back here just to find his mother dead, and his brothers and sisters gone. What the hell was he going to do now?

He emptied the pint of whiskey and began on the other, willing himself to slow down and make it last. Eventually, he began thinking about Flora. My God, what an ass. Though he had known quite a few women who would go along with getting fucked in the ol’ ham flower if they were high enough or forced to or paid extra, Flora was the only one who actually requested it from time to time. His hand drifted down to his crotch and he started rubbing himself, but it was useless; the more he thought about what he had lost, the more despondent and limp-dicked he became. Jesus, he would probably never meet another woman like her again. A picture of that skinny young buck ramming it into her from behind rose up in his mind. He tortured himself with it for a minute, to the point where he could hear Flora moaning and the bed squeaking. “I’ll go back and kill ’em both,” he said out loud. “Cut their goddamn heads off.” He would start back tonight, he told himself. There, it was settled. But then, just as he was draining the last few drops from the second pint, another idea occurred to him, something so simple he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it long before now. He would return to Detroit all right, but not to murder anybody. Why take a chance on getting hanged over that old slut and her baby-faced punk? Instead, he would do as he’d always done, find himself a new puss, and he knew exactly which one he was going after. Flora had a friend named Mary or Margaret or something like that who had just bought a little house a couple of doors down from the laundry that Flora managed. She wasn’t much to look at, a scrawny, meek little thing with wire-rimmed spectacles, from what he could remember, but he didn’t give a damn. He’d fuck a snake if that’s what it took to get back at Flora. He could already see himself sitting on the front porch of his new house with a cup of coffee when the bitch walked by on her way to work. And besides, in all honesty, he really didn’t know any other way to live except off some woman. Just look at all the shit that had happened to him in the few days he’d been out on his own.

Excited by his new plan, Sugar hurried back to Jenksie’s and spent the last of his money on another jug. With any luck, he figured he could be back in Detroit in three or four days, probably be married by the end of next week. He staggered north past the men still gathered in front of the post office. By that time the sun was beginning to set over the big horse farm to the west that the white family named Montclair had owned since before his granddaddy was born. A few of the men hooted and catcalled when they saw him trip over his feet at the edge of town, and he cursed them and waved his razor in the air. Two or three started after him, but when he took off running, they stopped and threw rocks at him until he disappeared between two hills. He had only gone a mile or so when he curled up under a maple tree and uncapped the bottle. The next morning, he awoke more guilt-ridden and miserable than ever, with an army of red ants crawling over him. The plan that had burned so brilliantly in his mind just a few hours ago was barely smoldering now, and Detroit seemed like a million miles away. By the time he arrived back at the bridge that evening, Captain and his posse were gone. All that was left to indicate they had been there at all was a greasy forgotten skillet and a few discarded jugs. Searching madly among them, he found one corked with a chaw of tobacco, two inches of whiskey left in the bottom of it. He pulled out the slimy plug and tipped up the bottle with trembling hands, and as soon as his frayed nerves settled down a little, he crossed the bridge back over into Ohio.