The Heavenly Table

6

EDDIE STILL WASN’T back the next morning when Eula came into the kitchen and found Ellsworth standing by the counter drinking his fourth dipper of water. Her eyes were puffy and she was still in her nightdress, a shapeless gray sack she had slept in as long as he could remember. She handed him five dollars for the store. “Whatever you do, don’t lose it,” she said. “It’s all we got left.”

He nodded his throbbing head ever so slightly, then took another gulp. His pipes hadn’t felt this dried-out in years. After carrying the five gallons of wine over to the barn, he had stayed up trying to finish off what was left in the barrels. By the time he’d lurched and groped his way back up the stairs, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Looking down at the money in his hand, the old guilty ache started up again, and he thought back on all the years it had taken Eula to save the thousand dollars he had lost. Jesus, the patience it had taken, one quarter at a time, one dime, one penny even. And now here he was hiding wine behind her back. Shit, he was no better than his Uncle Peanut. Might as well go out and hunt up a dog turd to nibble on.

“Remember,” she went on, as she turned away to light the stove, “twenty pounds of salt and the rest in sugar. No, wait. Get five pounds of Folgers, too. You might as well shoot me if we run out of coffee. And try not to stay away all day, either.”

Without another word, or any breakfast for that matter, Ellsworth went to the barn and hitched the mule to the wagon and made his way out to the road. He wanted to get away before she started in about Eddie and the drinking again. She was probably right, he had to admit. He thought about the way his uncle used to flop around on the floor whenever he ran dry, his eyes damn near popped out of his head and the sweat pouring off of him like rain. He debated the problem all the way to Nipgen, pointing out the pros and the cons to Buck the mule, and trying to be as rational as he could be under the circumstances. Finally, just as the little burg came into view, he made his decision. Though he couldn’t do much about the way he’d spoiled his son or the book learning Eula had insisted upon, he could get rid of those barrels, and, yes, by God, even the jugs if he had to, before Eddie came back home. It was an awful sacrifice to make, but if he did it now, before the boy got any worse, maybe he’d never have to clamp a stick in his mouth to keep him from chewing off his tongue, like his grandmother used to do with Uncle Peanut.

Pulling into the dusty lot of Parker’s store, he set the brake on the wagon and climbed down. He recalled that the last time he had been here the ground was still frozen. Ever since the cattle ruse, he had avoided people as much as possible, hoping none of his neighbors found out about it. As he pushed the screen door open, he saw the two bachelor brothers named Ovid and Augustus Singleton leaned over a checkerboard set atop a stack of wooden crates. It was rumored that they ate from the same plate and still slept together in the same bed they had been born in some fifty-odd years ago. They spent the majority of their days riding around the neighboring townships in a squeaky black carriage pulled by a pair of bony, dilapidated nags, searching through trash piles and abandoned houses for junk to sell, and as far as Ellsworth was concerned, they were as worthless as teats on a tater. He nodded to them stiffly, then turned and waited for Parker to finish tallying some numbers on a piece of cardboard. He hadn’t even placed his order yet when the storekeeper mentioned the army training camp the government was building on the edge of Meade, the county seat fifteen miles to the east. “Why they doing that?” Ellsworth asked.

“ ’Cause of the war,” Parker said. In all the years Ellsworth had known the storekeeper, he had never seen him without something stuck in his mouth, and today he was sucking on what appeared to be a pink rubber eraser, but could just as easily have been the tongue of some small animal. He took off the green eyeshade he wore and scratched at his head. A few flakes of dandruff floated down onto the counter.

“What war?” Ellsworth said.

Behind him, Ovid spoke up. “Hell, Fiddler, the country declared war on Germany back in April. You didn’t know that?”

“Well, I knew they was fightin’ going on somewhere, but I didn’t know we was in on it.”

“Sure we are,” Augustus said. “A couple of them Baker boys have already signed up.”

Then Parker put his pencil down and said, looking at the farmer and shaking his head, “Ells, you need to quit gettin’ all your news off that jackass out there and start talkin’ to us regular folks once in a while. Shit, he probably don’t even know where Germany is.”

The Singletons got a kick out of that, and Ellsworth’s sunburned face turned an even deeper shade of red as he stood by the counter and listened to them hoot and cackle. He had always been at least vaguely aware of his limitations, but the thought of being bested in anything, even worldly affairs he had never heard of, by a pair of yahoos who had never, as far as anybody knew, done an honest day’s work in their lives, was almost more than he could stand. He had wanted to inquire about Eddie, ask if anyone had spotted him around, but figured that would just open up the door to another insult and so he let it go. However, on the way back home, nodding to himself and occasionally spitting great wads of phlegm that stuck like glue to Buck’s wide, sweaty rump, Ellsworth put two and two together in his own slow way. Somehow, Eddie had heard about that army camp.

“Why do you think that?” Eula asked when he told her that afternoon what he figured Eddie might be up to. She was bent over the kitchen table rolling a cylinder of dumpling dough back and forth while a pot of water heated on the stove.

“I don’t know,” Ellsworth said. “I just got a feeling.”

Eula dabbed at the sweat on her face with her apron, then looked over at the sacks of salt and sugar he had set on the counter. Being a bit more realistic than her husband ever was when it came to their son, she had a hard time seeing Eddie as the type to voluntarily join something as strict and harsh as she imagined the military was, but then again, stranger things had happened, like the time Uncle Peanut got saved over in Jimmy Beulah’s shanty and didn’t touch a drop for nearly six months. “So where in the world is Germany anyway?” she said, as she picked up a knife and started cutting the round tube of yellow dough into half-inch pieces.

Ellsworth’s face reddened again. He had no idea, but, still smarting from the abuse hurled at him earlier at the store, there was no way he was going to admit it. Going to the water bucket, he drew himself a drink, then sipped slowly while considering various responses. Finally, trying to sound both as nonchalant and convincing as possible, he said, “Hell’s fire, Eula, even ol’ Buck probably knows where Germany is.”

“I don’t,” she said.

Holy Christ on a cross, Ellsworth thought, the woman could be a sister to that damn bunch over at the store. “Well, fetch me a map,” he said, “and I’ll show ye.”

“Map? Ells, you know we don’t have no—” Then Eula stopped and turned to look at him. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You don’t know, either, do ye?”

Ellsworth took a deep breath. Though he had never, not once, struck Eula in all the time they had been married, he now fought the urge to throw the dipper at her head. He had listened to more than a few of his neighbors, usually after they’d had a drink or two in the back room of Parker’s store, brag about beating their wives for some infraction or other, and he had always looked upon such men as cowards and bullies. But standing there in the hot kitchen with the past days and weeks and months of frustrations and setbacks simmering inside him, he could almost understand why some of them yielded to it. He took another drink of water and thought longingly of the jugs of wine hidden in the hayloft. No, he and Eula had been through too much together to allow a little thing like geography drive him to do something he would regret for the rest of his life. And so, without another word, he hung the dipper back on the bucket and headed out to the barn.