The Heavenly Table

7

BY THE TIME they ended up working for Major Tardweller, Pearl’s sons figured their father had racked up enough hardships for them all to sit at the head of the goddamn heavenly table he had been blabbering about for the past three years. Just a couple of days after Cane advised that they cut back their biscuit ration, they discovered that the cache of potatoes they had buried in the ground to last them the rest of the summer was full of rot. They had woken up that morning to rain, and it being a Sunday anyway, Pearl had decided they would take the day off from clearing the swamp. It was the first break they’d had in several weeks. For a few minutes, the old man stood watching as the others sorted the bad from the good. “How does it look?” he finally asked.

“Like we’re gonna go hungry,” Cane replied.

“Well, they’s worse things. Remember that ol’ boy I met on the Foggy River? Shoot, he didn’t eat nothin’ but tadpoles and bugs and he seemed to be doin’ all right. If’n he can do it, I reckon we can, too.”

“It might come to that ’fore it’s over with,” said Cane.

“No need to worry,” Pearl said. “The Lord will give us our reward someday.”

“I ain’t eatin’ no goddamn tadpoles,” Chimney muttered.

“What say?”

After taking a deep breath to steady himself, Chimney replied in a loud voice, “I said I’d gobble down frog shit and thistles if that’s what it takes to stay on His good side.”

“That’s right,” Pearl said, nodding his head. “As would I.” Then he pulled up his pants and tightened his belt another notch before walking away, whistling the first few notes of some half-forgotten hymn that Lucille used to sing to herself.

“Me, too,” Cob said after the old man was out of earshot. “Why, I’d eat me a pile of rocks if that’s what it took.” Ever since he had first heard Pearl describe heaven as some sort of celestial banquet hall where the food was piled high forever and you just helped yourself whenever you took a notion, Cob had become obsessed with gaining entry to it. The only other thing that had impressed him as much in all his nineteen years was Willy the Whale, a huge retarded oaf they had once seen in a stall at a county fair in Hancock County. Said to have been discovered living on pinecones and bat guano in a cave in the Smoky Mountains, Willy was so fat he used a woman’s petticoat for a napkin. His manager was taking bets that he could eat half a hogshead of raw crawdads in an hour. Though they were supposed to be alive, anyone could see that a good three or four inches of dead ones were floating around on top of the greasy brown water. It wasn’t until that day, when he saw the manager, with just a minute to go, cram the last of the bottom-feeders down Willy’s throat with a long wooden spatula as if he were priming a cannon, that Cob realized such a thing as a truly full belly was even possible anywhere else but in the Promised Land. And although something crucial had burst inside Willy and he died right in front of the crowd while the wagers were being collected, Cob was still a little upset that Cane hadn’t let him audition for the job when the carny came around later looking for someone with a healthy appetite to fill in for the evening show.

Chimney tossed another moldy spud across the yard, then turned to look at Cane. “What was it Bloody Bill said? ‘I’d rather rob and kill and be free for just one day than be stuck under some bastard’s thumb for a hundred years’?”

“That Bloody Bill,” Cob said, “he a bad one.”

Cane sat back in the dirt. “I believe he said ‘under some Yankee’s thumb,’ but you quoted him fairly right.” By then, he had read to his brothers from The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket so often that Chimney could recite practically every word of it by memory. Even Cob was able to remember certain lines if prompted, at least a few that dealt with food and drink. Perhaps because their lives had been so empty of anything but hardship and toil, it had made quite an impression on them. The author, Charles Foster Winthrop III, a failed poet from Brooklyn who had once dreamed of becoming the next Robert Browning, had centered the plot of the novel around one Colonel William Buchet’s insatiable need to avenge himself against the Northerners who had pillaged his plantation during the Civil War and left him without even a single cotton ball to wipe his ass on; and Winthrop had filled the book with every act of rape, robbery, and murder that his indignant, syphilitic brain could possibly conceive. For this, his twentieth such potboiler in less than three years, he was paid the niggardly sum of thirty dollars. By the time he settled with his creditors, and spent an hour passing diseases back and forth with the foul and wrinkled whore who lived across the hall in his building, Winthrop didn’t have enough money left over to buy a loaf of bread. “Well,” he said that night to the vermin living behind the cracked plaster in his dank room, “I gave it my best, and that’s all a man can do.” He waited until morning, and then, with the same cool steadiness he had conferred upon Bloody Bill, his final creation, the hack brushed the rat turds off his one good suit and chugged down enough turpentine to peel the paint off a two-story house. By the time the Jewetts discovered the book in a cast-off carpetbag near Oxford, Mississippi, poor Winthrop had been moldering in a soggy, unmarked grave on an island in the East River for nearly seventeen years, another forgotten casualty of the callous and fickle literary world he had once hoped to conquer.

“Come on,” Chimney said, “let’s quit fiddle-fuckin’ around here and make a break for it. Shit, this ain’t no way to live.”

“Pap ain’t gonna put up with something like that,” Cob warned. He grew nervous whenever his younger brother started talking about leaving, and he’d been doing a lot of it lately. Why couldn’t he just be thankful that they were all still together and had a place to stay? Granted, the shack leaked a little and a wood floor would have been nice, but compared to some of the places they had slept in over the years, it was practically cozy. And why did he think things would be better somewhere else? They never had been. Not one time.

“Hell, he wouldn’t even know we were gone,” Chimney said. “He pays more attention to his nigger ghosts than he does us.”

“Well, then…well, then…” Cob stammered.

“Well, then what?” Chimney said.

Cob furrowed his brow, tried to think of a response. As he did so, he squeezed a large squishy potato into a hard glob the size of a walnut. Just as he was ready to give up, his eyes landed on the shovel the Major had loaned them the other day, and he suddenly remembered his little brother’s one weakness. “What about Penelope?” he said. “You just gonna take off and leave her behind, too?”

Cane snorted, trying to stifle a laugh, and Chimney’s face flushed with blood. He started to reach for a rock that was half-buried in the bottom of the hole, but then stopped himself. It wasn’t Cob’s fault that he had brought up the bitch’s name; it was his own for being so goddamn stupid in the first place. From time to time, Tardweller had borrowed Pearl’s youngest to groom his horses and clean out the stables. Because he was the only one ever sent for, Chimney had started to believe that the squire looked upon him with favor. He had even gotten it into his head that the man’s daughter, Penelope, a shapely but spoiled fifteen-year-old with strawberry blond hair and icy green eyes, was developing romantic feelings for him; and he had foolishly bragged to his brothers that he spent most of his time in the barn romancing her on a pile of feed sacks while they slaved away in the fields. For a few weeks, Penelope was all he thought about; and he ceased dreaming of gun battles and wild pussy and began fantasizing wedding bells and undying love.

But then one afternoon near the end of May, as he loaded manure from one of the stalls into a wheelbarrow, he overheard the girl complaining to her father that she’d rather see anybody, even a nigger, handling her horse than that ugly piece of white trash who was always hanging around spying on her. “Oh, don’t you worry about that little inbred bastard,” the Major had told her. “They’s not a one of them Jewetts got the grit to mess with one of mine. I could work ’em to death and that dumb ol’ daddy of theirs would still pucker up and kiss my ass like I done give him the keys to the kingdom. No, sweetheart, that boy even think of touchin’ you, he’ll be one sorry sonofabitch.” Just then, two of Penelope’s girlfriends arrived, and she retreated to the front porch to sip ice tea with them, and Tardweller lay down under a shade tree in the front yard to take his afternoon nap. However, he couldn’t shake off the thought of the Jewett boy ogling his daughter. It kept circling around in his mind until soon he was in a rage. He finally got to his feet and stomped across the yard. When he entered the barn, he found Chimney currying one of the horses. Tardweller was a big man, and he grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck and dragged him outside with ease, kicking his ass several times with the toe of his boot and making a big show of running him off in front of the ladies. “I ever catch you around my house again, I’ll cut the nuts right off ye,” he had yelled as Chimney broke loose and ran.

Straightening up from the potato pile, Chimney looked toward the thinning woods on the far side of the cotton patch. Even after almost three months, he could still hear those women laughing at him. He’d been too ashamed to tell his brothers what had happened, though he was sure Cane knew there had never been any fucking or anything else going on between him and Penelope. Only he and Cob were dumb enough to believe something like that could ever happen. And what the Major said was true. Tomorrow, they would be back over there in the swamp killing themselves for damn near nothing. The keys to the fuckin’ kingdom, all right. Hell, they still owed the mutton-chopped tyrant for the hog they were eating on. He ignored Cob’s question, and instead glanced over at Cane. “What about it, brother? You had enough yet?”

Wiping some sweat from his brow, Cane looked toward the cabin. They’d had this discussion a hundred times or more since they’d first come across the Bloody Bill book, and it was always the same, Cob afraid of changing anything and Chimney burning to change it all. Of course, Chimney was right, nothing was ever going to get any better as long as they stayed with Pearl. And though Cane knew the book was fictitious, sometimes it still seemed closer to the truth than anything he had read in his mother’s Bible. According to Charles Foster Winthrop III, the world was an unjust, despicable place lorded over by a select pack of the rich and ruthless, and the only way for a poor man to get ahead was to ignore the laws that they enforced on everybody but themselves. And from what Cane had seen in his twenty-three years of barely surviving, how could he disagree? Of course, he couldn’t go along with rape or murder, but, he had to admit, the idea of robbing a bank did possess a certain appeal. Just a few minutes of daring could possibly change their lives forever. Still, out of some old-fashioned loyalty or deep-seated superstition he was unable to shake, Cane was loath to desert their dotty old father. To do so might curse him and his brothers for the rest of their lives. No, it would be better just to wait it out. He watched Pearl stumble on the two steps leading up to the door of the shack. “Ain’t no reason to get in a hurry now,” he told Chimney. “You best stick with me and Cob. Our day’s comin’ soon enough.”

“You mean for the heavenly table?” Cob asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Cane said in a patient voice, “but don’t worry. You’ll get there one of these days.”

Chimney let out an exasperated groan. “Jesus Christ, you’re startin’ to sound like Pap.” Standing up, he wiped his hands on the front of his pants. “All right then,” he said, “I’ll give it a little longer.” He started off toward the water bucket sitting in the shade of the tulip tree, then stopped in his tracks. Cane and Cob watched him tilt his head and stare for a moment at the blanched and cloudless sky, his wet rag of a shirt clinging to his bony back. The only sound to be heard was Pearl’s faint whistling inside the cabin. Chimney spat in the dust and shook his head. “The heavenly table,” he said loudly over his shoulder as he began walking again. “Pork chops thick as a bull’s cock, beefsteaks the size of wagon wheels, buttered biscuits as hot and fluffy as the tits on…”

Cane smiled to himself and reached down. He picked up another potato and looked it over, then placed it on top of the good pile.