The Heavenly Table(6)
4
WHEN EDDIE DIDN’T return home by suppertime that evening, Ellsworth knew something was amiss. The boy never stayed away this long, no matter how shit-faced he got. The farmer stood on the porch puffing on his cob pipe and listening to Eula bang around in the kitchen. He prayed to God the fool hadn’t gotten drunk and drowned in a pond, or made his way over the hill and caught a dose of the syph off one of those Slab Holler girls that the men who loitered over at Parker’s store were always warning the young bucks about. What a mess. Though he had always tried his best to hide the extent of Eddie’s screwups from Eula, it was getting harder and harder to come up with excuses. He didn’t even know why he kept doing it, other than to save her from the worries. For just a second, he wondered which would be worse, finding him floating facedown in somebody’s mud hole or watching him go blind and crazy from a sick peter.
“I can’t figure it out,” he said when he finally mustered up the courage to go in the house. “Think maybe he went fishin’ with those Hess boys?” Without bothering to reply, Eula wiped her red hands on the front of her apron and went back to the stove. Ellsworth sat down and nervously drummed his fingers on the table. Looking about the room, he noticed that she had rearranged the two faded pictures on the far wall, tropical island scenes cut from a magazine that Eddie had brought home one Friday from school when he was ten, explaining that Mr. Slater, the teacher, had tossed it in the trash. The first time he ever caught him in a lie, Ellsworth recalled. He had met Slater on the road the next afternoon, on his way to question Eddie about the National Geographic that had turned up missing from his desk drawer. Another student claimed he had seen him with it. “I don’t know if he’s the one who took it, Mr. Fiddler,” Slater said, “but—”
“It was him,” Ellsworth said, his face turning crimson from embarrassment.
“Oh,” the teacher said, “so you knew he stole it?”
“No, but I do now,” Ellsworth answered. And what had he done? Nothing. Handed Slater a quarter for the goddamn magazine and kept it a secret from Eula, thinking she would be better off not knowing. Just like he’d been doing with the wine.
A few minutes later Eula put out his supper, a meatless stew that she had been serving every Tuesday and Friday since last fall, and sat down across from him. Except for a rather prominent overbite, she had been almost pretty when they married, with her bright blue eyes and smooth, milky complexion, and her looks had held up well over the years, but it was clear that the last year had been hard on her. Although she had rallied in most ways after the loss of the money, she no longer seemed to care about her appearance. Her thin cotton dress was stained with various splatters, and her hair was just a greasy brown ball pinned atop her head. Even from the other end of the table, it was hard for him to ignore the strong odor of her sweat. “Ain’t you gonna eat?” he said, as he began buttering a slice of bread.
“You need to dump that wine,” Eula said, her voice calm but definite. “What’s left of it anyway.” Her mind was made up. Something had to be done about Eddie before it was too late. Just two weeks ago, after spending the morning in his bedroom supposedly nursing another one of his bellyaches, he had slipped out of the house with the shotgun and blown a hole through Pickles, the cat that had been her closest companion for the past ten years. Of course, he swore right off it was an accident, and though she was fairly sure that was true, she’d still felt he needed to be taught a lesson. But all Ellsworth had done was get more inventive with the allowances he made for the boy. Looking back on it, she didn’t know why she had expected anything else. He had always been too softhearted and trusting for his own good, and Eddie had learned over the years to take advantage of that good nature any chance he got.
Laying the bread down, Ellsworth looked away as he took a drink of buttermilk. At age fifty-two, he had a friendly, somewhat meek face, and thinning gray hair that Eula kept trimmed with a pair of sewing scissors. He could still outwork most men in the township, though sometimes now he woke up in the morning wondering how long he could keep it up. Since the embarrassment suffered last fall, he had grown heavier in the belly and jowls, even with Eula’s rationing, and had recently developed a slight stoop that often made him look as if he were searching the ground for a nail that had dropped out of his pocket, or the clue to a mystery he was forever trying to solve. In many ways, the con man had stolen more than just money from them.
On the afternoon that he came in from the fields and Eula told him Pickles had been shot, he went straight to Eddie’s room. When he flung the door open, the boy jumped up from his bed, and a book lying beside him fell to the floor. He had just finished digging the cat’s grave a few minutes before, and was still shiny with sweat. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Ellsworth had yelled.
“It was an accident, I swear,” Eddie said.
“An accident? How could such a thing be an accident?”
“I tripped and the gun went off. I didn’t mean to do it.” To an extent, anyway, Eddie was telling the truth. After spending the morning secretly sipping on some of his father’s wine and searching fruitlessly through a tattered book called Tom Jones for the juicy parts that Corky Routt had promised were in it, he had grown bored and decided to sneak the shotgun out of the closet and go blast a couple of birds. He was staggering across the backyard with Pickles sashaying along a few feet in front of him when he stumbled and fell. The gun, which had a loose trigger, went off when it hit the ground, and he lay there cursing for a minute before he raised up and saw that the blast had split the cat nearly in half.