The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

  Sugar grabbed the money from her hand and stormed out the door past the men. He was three blocks away before he remembered his clothes. Fuck it, he thought. He’d go back after the bastards left, stick a shiv in the boy’s guts the first time he dared to step outside Flora’s door. But then it started to rain, and he ended up down by the railroad tracks in a dive called the Depot. He spent the next several days drinking and bemoaning his predicament to any barfly who would listen, going on and on about all the cooking and ironing and pussy licking he had done for the bitch; and then, although he couldn’t remember doing it or why, he’d hopped a train headed south.

  Standing in the road beside his ruined hat, looking down at the hoofprints of the horses in the thick dust, he went over everything that had occurred since he’d left Detroit. When he came to in that empty freight car with no idea of where he was or how long he had slept, the first thing he saw when he looked out the open door was a sign announcing Mansfield, Ohio. The train slowed down long enough as it passed through town for him to jump off, his only intention being to find a bottle or something to eat, whichever came first. He was walking along the tracks when he spied an old white woman sitting on her porch fanning herself with a piece of cardboard. He hid behind a stack of rail ties and bided his time. Finally, just before dark, she got up and shuffled inside. A light popped on and then went off a few minutes later. He waited awhile longer and then climbed through a window into her kitchen. He searched all around, but to his disappointment there was no liquor or meat to be found. He was buttering some stale bread and gulping his third glass of water from a bucket on the table when she awoke in the next room. Fifteen minutes later, and twenty-four dollars richer, he went back to the tracks and caught another freight.

  By the next morning, he figured he’d put enough distance between him and Mansfield to be safe, and he got off when the train made a stop in Meade. It only took a couple of breaths of the stinking, sulfurous air emitted by the paper mill for him to realize that he’d passed through here once before, on his way to Detroit years ago. Walking around, he finally found a colored diner on the south side of town. He was halfway through a big breakfast when the old woman’s bloody face appeared in his plate and he shoved the food away. “Something wrong?” the waitress asked. He looked up at her. She wasn’t as dark-skinned as he liked them, but she had a nice set of cocksucker lips and fine white teeth and a way of swiveling her hips when she walked that he figured probably got her some good tips, even in a dump like this. She smiled and refilled his coffee cup, and he was just beginning to imagine following her home and screwing her little brains out when he noticed the wedding band on her finger. Despite his many faults, Sugar had never lain with a woman whose husband was still living. It was the one rule he stuck by. Even the weakest and most cowardly of men could become outright dangerous if they were cuckolded, and there were too many unattached females out there to risk getting your head blown off in a fit of jealousy. “No,” he told the waitress, shaking his head, “just tired is all.” He was relieved in a way. In the past few days, he had lost Flora in Detroit and then lost himself in Mansfield, and he needed something more substantial than a quick piece of ass to make him feel better about himself, this time anyway. He finished off the coffee and stood up, laid a dollar on the table.

  As he recalled what had happened next, he cursed and stomped what was left of his hat into the dusty road. He had stepped out of the diner and noticed a small shop across the street. A cardboard placard advertising FINERY FOR ALL AGES had hung in the single, flyspecked window. He counted his money, then entered the store. A few minutes later, he purchased the bowler from a bald, hunchbacked man in a white linen suit. He had never owned such a nice hat before, and he immediately felt better, like a different man almost. “What about some new clothes to go with it, young buck?” the cripple had asked him. “Those ye got on are looking pretty rough.”

  “No,” Sugar said, as he looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted the hat’s angle, “this is all I need.” And it was, at least for the length of time it took him to walk up the street to a joint with no name and rent a room for the night.

  After sleeping fitfully through the hot, sticky afternoon, he had gone downstairs and bought two bottles of cheap whiskey and a fat black whore named Mabel. By the time she sucked him down to the nub, he had finished off one of the bottles and was down to his last four dollars; and he wondered, in his insane drunkenness, just how much was a white woman’s life worth anyway? Not much, he calculated sadly, as he watched the whore wipe his seed off her chin. A greasy breakfast and a sporty hat and two bottles of rotgut hooch and a fishy-smelling slut with a wart on her lip. That was what a white woman’s life amounted to in the end.

  He and the girl kept drinking, and around midnight she puked her guts up in the washbasin. The windowless room filled with her stench, and she dropped to her knees and started crying about leaving her sick baby at home by itself, and shit like that always brought Sugar down. He climbed out of bed and punched and kicked her until she rolled over on the filthy brown rug and farted once before passing out. Her impertinence enraged him even more, and he spread her ass cheeks apart and fucked her from behind, the salty sweat pouring off him and splattering like raindrops on her broad, bruised back. When he was finished, he wiped himself off in her nappy hair and got dressed. The sour smell in the room was suddenly overwhelming. He slipped down the back stairs with her comb and the money he had paid her in his pocket. Stumbling down an alley, he curled up on a pile of garbage with his bowler and awoke the next morning with his head pounding and his tongue dry as leather. Lying there in the trash, he looked up at a pigeon perched on a wire and swore to God Almighty that he was going to straighten up. And since he was so close anyway, he thought, why not go down to Kentucky and show his folks his new hat? It wasn’t a shiny car driven by a white chauffeur, but it was better than nothing. He could see them now, gathering around and slapping him on the back, asking a million questions, his mother hugging him until he couldn’t get his breath. He had picked himself up and begun walking. Two blocks away, he came across an old man on his knees pulling weeds out of a little vegetable patch and asked him for a drink of water. “Got the dry pipes, have ye?” the old man said, looking at Sugar’s bloodshot eyes. “I ’member what that was like. Why, I used to wake up so thirsty I’d pay ’bout anything for a nice cool drink.”

  “I ain’t got no money,” Sugar remembered telling the man.

  “Sho you ain’t,” the old man said, nodding his head and grinning, his toothless gums a wet pink that made Sugar queasy all over again. “Spent it all last night, I expect. I ’member when—”

  “Can I have a drink or not?”

  “Sho you can,” the old man said. “Got a well right there.”

  There was a rat swimming around on top of the water when Sugar lifted the wooden top, and the old man scooped it out with a shovel and started beating it to death; and watching him go after it like he did, yipping and bashing and pounding on it like he was getting back at every dirty bastard who had ever done him wrong, made Sugar think about the white woman again. It wasn’t his fault he had gone crazy on her; shit, she would still be alive if Flora hadn’t kicked him out. She was the one to blame, her and that goddamn baby-faced nigger she was fucking. He watched the old man pick up the bloody gob by the tail and fling it over into a neighbor’s yard, and then he got down on his knees and washed the whore’s smell off his face and drank until his belly felt like it was going to burst. A few minutes later, he was on his way out of town, heading for Kentucky.

  That had been just yesterday morning, and now here he was standing in the middle of a lonely road miles away from the old man’s well and staring down at his hat sieved with bullets and flat as a pancake. Insects buzzed madly in the weeds and a bird called out weakly in the heat. He almost wished he had taken the farmer up on his offer. A dollar a day wasn’t much, but at least he’d still have his bowler. He began moving again, feeling the most awfu
l pity for himself. As far back as he could remember, there hadn’t been a day when he wasn’t yearning for something he didn’t have. And that wore a man down after so many years, fighting that feeling day after day without any letup. Why couldn’t he ever be satisfied? Why did he keep fucking up? Suddenly he stopped and looked up into the sky. “Lawd,” he sobbed, “please, Lawd, I don’t want to live like this no more. I’m not a-lyin’ this time, I swear. I just want to see my folks now. You help ol’ Sugar through this one and I promise you…” He searched his mind for what he could pledge, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be. “I promise you…” he began again, but then he stopped. He had nothing of his own to offer. Even the little bit of money in his pocket was somebody else’s. A murdered woman’s, no less. He was nothing but a bum, a goddamn, worthless bum. Not once in his life had he ever done anything worthwhile. Wiping at his eyes, he took a deep breath to steady himself and continued on.

  Before he was around the next curve the cravings kicked in again, and he beat his head with his fists until his nose and lips were bleeding and his clothes soaked with sweat. Exhausted, he dropped his arms to his sides and cast a hopeless look down the empty road. He was completely and utterly alone. “Lawd, ol’ Sugar…” he started to implore again, but then he realized, with a start, what he needed to do to make a clean break from his old life. It was so clear to him now, what he had to pledge. He did have a proper name, had been baptized with it in Finfish Creek when he was but three months old. And from this day forward, he was going to use it again. George. George Milford. Sugar was just some fool nickname a dirty whore had cursed him with, but no more. His pace quickened as the idea took hold. “What’s your name?” he asked himself in a strained, high-pitched voice. “George,” he answered in his own deep baritone, “George Milford.” He repeated this a number of times, letting it wrap around him, the old name salvaged from the past and the saving grace it would surely bring him in the future. He should have been in jail awaiting the hangman’s noose, or, if not that, lying with a bullet in his head back there in that field. But no, the Lord had kept him safe, been keeping him safe all along. Then he stopped and watched openmouthed as the most beautiful sunset he could ever recall unfurled like a richly colored carpet across the sky. He had been staring at it for several minutes before he noticed, off in one corner, a swatch of the golden shore that his mother used to talk about all the time. Dropping to his knees, he was just getting ready to sing the Great Redeemer’s praises when a hornet as big around as his thumb smacked him in the face and drove a black stinger deep into the fleshy tip of his nose; and before he could catch himself, he was clawing at his stinking skin again and screaming curses at Flora and all the other dirty motherfuckers who had ever done him wrong and begging the Devil for just enough liquor—a drop, a spit, a spoonful—to make his pain, his endless, endless pain, go away, if only for the time it took to get around the next bend.

  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 thi
s 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?”