The Heavenly Table(24)
“Well?” Chimney said impatiently.
“I ain’t smart enough to be no outlaw.”
“You won’t get no argument from—” Chimney started to say.
“Don’t worry,” Cane broke in. “I’ll watch out for ye.”
Cob scratched his head and tried to think. A sudden urge to sleep came over him, and he fought to suppress another yawn. Oh, how he wanted to just lie down and forget about everything, wake up in the morning and go chop some more brush. Why couldn’t things stay the same? He had always done whatever was required of him, never once questioning or complaining, but nobody had ever asked him to give up his soul before. Why, there probably wasn’t a second went by that the ol’ Devil didn’t make Bloody Bill regret what he’d done. Still, what choice did he have? He couldn’t imagine a life without his brothers any more than he could imagine being his own man. They had never been apart, not for a single night. And that wasn’t the only thing troubling him; now that they’d had their big feed, all that was left to eat was the rat that ran around in the shack at night, and he’d be a hard one to catch. Cob rubbed his hands roughly over his face. “Shoot, I got no idy what to do,” he finally said.
“Stick with us,” Cane said, and after a moment’s hesitation, Cob agreed with a nod of his head, though it was obvious his heart wasn’t in it.
“Okay, at least we got that shit out of the way,” Chimney said, taking another hit off the bottle.
“But why Farleigh?” Cob said. “They some bad people in that town. Don’t you remember what they did the last time we went through there?”
“Sure, I do,” Cane said. “I reckon I remember everything about that goddamn place.” The year before, when they were looking for work, a man gutting a turtle under a railroad trestle had told them about a farmer named Tardweller on the other side of Farleigh who might be hiring. It was a Sunday and they were on their way to talk to him. Just a hundred yards or so before the rutted clay road turned into a smooth graveled street, they passed a corpse hanging from an elm tree, a white man with a piece of cardboard pinned to his bloody long johns that said RAPEST. Some citizens loitering around a fountain in the square, admiring someone’s new automobile, told them to keep moving when Pearl asked if they might get a sup of water. He commenced to preaching to them about charity and the life in the world to come and the heavenly table, and somebody in the crowd bounced a rock off his forehead. By the time they made it out of there, even the women gathered in front of the brick church were hurling stones at them.
“That was a sight, wasn’t it?” Chimney said. “The way they’d clipped that ol’ boy’s pecker off?”
“I ain’t a-killin’ nobody, though,” said Cob.
“You won’t have to,” Cane assured him. “If there’s any trouble, me and Chimney will take care of it. I promise ye.”
14
WITH STILL SEVERAL miles to go before he made it home, Ellsworth came to a pasture that brought back a distant memory. Since he felt the need to take a leak anyway, he stopped the mule and stepped off the wagon onto the dirt road. As he unbuttoned his fly, he looked down into the field, and thought back on an evening when he was a young boy. It was in the early part of the winter and he was with his father. They had spent the day cutting firewood for a widow woman over on Storm Station Road; and they were on their way home, tired and hungry. The old lady had offered them part of her dinner, some moldy bread smeared with lard, and it had bothered his father the rest of the afternoon, trying to decide if he should take a dollar from someone who was obviously even poorer than they were. In the end, he had allowed to Ellsworth that fifty cents was plenty for chopping two ricks of wood, and that’s what he had charged her.
His father was puffing on his pipe and talking about something, probably the weather or what he planned to plant in the spring, Ellsworth couldn’t recall what now. A snow was beginning to fall. In the gray twilight, he had seen a rabbit poke its head out of a burrowed place in the dead brown leaves along the edge of a ditch that ran down the middle of the field. Though nearly forty years had passed since that day, the culvert was still there, still overgrown. Thinking now of that rabbit, all alone on that cold winter night with the snow starting to cover the ground, a sweet and sorrowful feeling overcame him. Of course, he knew that that creature had died long ago, just as his father did a few winters later. But with a swelling in his throat, he wondered, almost desperately it felt like, if he might find some sign of that rabbit were he to go down there and search among the weeds and brambles. His eyes began to water. So many had passed on in his lifetime, and so much had happened or not happened that had taken him further and further away from the boy he was back then. No, he thought, as he wiped his sleeve across his face, he wouldn’t find anything, not a sliver of bone or a shred of fur, not if he hunted for a week. The rabbit was gone forever, and that saddened him in much the same way the stars sometimes did at night, the way they kept shifting in the same abiding patterns, as regular as clockwork, year after year, century after century, regardless of what went on down here on this godforsaken ball of rock and clay, be it young men getting butchered in another war, or some crazy blind man living with a dead bird, or an innocent babe drowning in a rat-infested outhouse, or even some poor shivering rabbit sticking his head out of the weeds to watch a farm boy making his way home with his father.