The Heavenly Table(60)
He leafed through it, skimmed a few vaguely remembered paragraphs. It was obvious from the smudged fingerprints and dog-eared pages that it had been pored over a number of times. Looking about the room, he saw a couple of bloody dressings tossed in the corner, some empty bean cans in the fireplace, three different sets of boot tracks in the dust. Jesus, he thought, what the hell had went on here? And how did this book, this moldy, crumbling relic from his own familial past, ever end up in an abandoned hovel in the backwoods of Kentucky? For some reason, he suddenly recalled a conversation he’d had with his father last year when he was home for a visit. “Mark my word, Arthur,” the old man had told him, “before long there won’t be a spot on the globe that hasn’t been infected with this progress they keep on about.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” Arthur had said. It was a bright but chilly day right after Thanksgiving. They were sitting in the library and he was staring at his brother’s portrait hanging on the wall. By then, William had been dead ten years. Arthur took a sip of the warm wine the maid had brought in and reminded himself to visit the grave before he left the city.
“Because, son,” his father had said, lifting his beloved copy of Plato—the leather cover cracked from age and the spine broken from a thousand hours of examination—from the table by his chair, and waving it about like a call to arms, “in another hundred years, everything we deem worthwhile, over three thousand years of thought and tradition and learning, won’t be considered any more important than what some tribe of dark-skinned savages has to say about a spirit they believe lives in a damn seashell. Don’t you see? Everything will be looked upon as equal when really it’s not.”
Arthur had known well enough not to argue. The old man had practiced law for forty years and had never lost a case, as far as his son knew. Still, the future was coming, whether people liked it or not. Granted, the state of Kentucky certainly wasn’t some South Sea island filled with savages cut off from the rest of the world, but this house felt just as isolated and backward as he imagined a place could be, which was maybe why finding this particular book here was such a surprise. Taking one last look around, he wondered again about the cast-off bandages. Then he shoved the book in his pocket and stepped outside.
He was headed into the woods when he noticed sunlight glinting off something in a briar patch on the other side of the house. Dropping the mule’s lead, he held his arms aloft and made his way through the tall weeds toward it. As he got closer, he began to smell the rot, could hear the flies buzzing. He covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, then pushed forward a few more feet. To his horror, he saw two large crows pecking away in short bursts at a man’s upturned face. Arthur lurched back, then stopped himself. What had initially caught his attention was a pair of spectacles hanging from one of the man’s ears and shining in the bright light. His swollen limbs had turned a bluish-green color and were about to burst through the seams of his ragged clothes. A clot of maggots boiled forth from a hole in his chest and dripped like raindrops into a muddy well of water right below him. Pulling a .32-caliber Iver Johnson pistol from his pocket that he used to kill snakes with, Arthur cast another look around the perimeter of the property before firing a shot into the air to scare the birds away.
His heart pounding, he watched them flap through the air and land on the roof of the house. Then he turned and stumbled to the mule, waving the gun about wildly. Grabbing the rope, he began tugging and cursing the goddamn dumb beast to get moving, his only thought to flee from this haunted, godforsaken place as fast as possible. And though the crows were already sated, they waited patiently until the intruder disappeared into the trees, then flew back to the briar patch to tear away some more of the softer parts the clerk had left to offer.
35
ON HIS WAY to lunch in the officers’ mess, Bovard came around the corner of a building lost in thought and almost tripped over Wesley Franks seated on the ground reading a letter. The lieutenant had learned yesterday that Dr. Lattimore, his adviser at Kenyon, had dropped over dead from an aneurysm a couple of weeks ago, and he’d just realized this morning that the many times the man had brushed up against him when they were alone together in his office were not as “accidental” as he’d claimed. He couldn’t believe how naive he’d been. Clearly, the old classicist had wanted to f*ck him. Had it been so apparent that he was homosexual? Even before he knew himself? “Pardon me, Private,” Bovard said, as Wesley dropped the pages and scrambled to stand up and salute.
“My fault, sir,” the private said.
“A letter from home?”
The boy stared straight ahead. “Yes, sir.”
Bovard let his eyes wander for a moment over the slim body. Though it didn’t make a big difference in the way he imagined he and Wesley might die together, it was nice to know that at least he could read. He wondered if he should offer to loan him the copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse that his parents had sent him the other day. Accompanying the book was a note in which his father informed him that they had gone to Elizabeth’s wedding in New York, and that she sent her regards. It sounded almost like an apology, the way it was worded, as if the old man were afraid his son might look upon their attendance as a betrayal; and Bovard reminded himself to write and reassure them that he was more content than he’d ever been, that he had no ill feelings whatsoever toward the money-grubbing bitch. If they only knew how happy he was not to be stuck in that life anymore. He looked down at the letter on the ground near Wesley’s feet, two sheets of paper covered with a large, childish scrawl, and suddenly realized this was the perfect opportunity to ask a question that had been on his mind ever since he’d first laid eyes on the boy. “Fiancée?”