The Heavenly Table(13)
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 f*cking 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 f*ckin’ 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.
8
THE DAY AFTER returning from Parker’s store, Ellsworth hitched up the wagon around noon and started down the road toward Meade. He had made up his mind during the night. It had occurred to him, as he lay in bed digesting his supper and wondering how many miles away Germany might be, that he also had no idea what the war was even about. He rolled over in bed and stared out the window into the darkness on the other side of the rippled pane. He had once shucked corn with an old man named Garnet Quick who had lost an ear in the War Between the States, the one they fought over freeing the slaves, and Ellsworth had harbored a sneaking suspicion ever since he’d talked to the man that a war could get started over the least little thing. And if the fight wasn’t worth fighting, he had reasoned, as he lay there listening to Eula call out to Pickles in her sleep, then how could he sit by without raising a finger and allow his only son to take a chance on getting maimed or even killed?
By that evening, Ellsworth was standing on a hill overlooking the army camp splayed out north of the town on the other side of the Scioto River. It was much larger than he’d expected, as big as most cities, he reckoned, and for the first time all day, he began to have doubts that he could get Eddie back even if he did find him. Ellsworth had been to Meade a few times in his life, and though he had been confident when he left home, he had forgotten about the lonely, insecure feeling that always came over him when he was among a crowd of complete strangers. Now, staring across at the huge camp, still under construction but already filled with hundreds of soldiers and trucks and horses—even a flying machine, only the second one the farmer had ever seen in his life, circling like a buzzard above it all—he grew nervous. There were forces at work down there along the river that would intimidate almost anybody. And not just there, either. Why, just a couple of hours ago, he had seen a woman dressed in men’s trousers driving a Ford Coupe out along the Huntington Pike all by herself. As he watched the airplane make one more pass over the camp and then land on a flat strip of ground outlined in whitewash, Ellsworth rubbed his chin and recalled standing around the stove in Parker’s store one night last winter and someone, maybe Tick Osborne, saying that these were what people called “modern times.” Most of those gathered there were in agreement that the world now seemed head over heels in love with what the tycoons and politicians kept referring to as “progress,” but before they could begin arguing the pros and cons of exactly what that was going to mean in the long run, Jimmy Beulah spoke up and said, “?‘End times’ is more like it.” Then he spat on the stove, and Kermit Saunders passed him a bottle and said, “Amen,” and the only sound you could hear in the store after that was the crackle of Jimmy’s spit on the black metal lid.