The Heavenly Table(12)
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-f*ckin’ 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 * 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.