The Heavenly Table(7)

“You been drinking again, ain’t ye?” Ellsworth said, looking at the boy’s bloodshot eyes.

“No,” Eddie answered nervously, “but with the way Mom carried on, I almost wish I had been.”

Ellsworth shook his head. Though he tried his best to love his son and accept him for who he was, he found himself wishing yet again that he was more like Tom Taylor’s boy, Tuck, big and rawboned and shoeing mules by the time he was ten years old. He felt guilty whenever he had such thoughts, but he had been waiting years for the boy to straighten up and be of some use. Not once had he ever given Eddie a proper thrashing, and though he had no stomach for any kind of cruelty—be it kicking dogs or whipping horses or drowning kittens or beating children—he regretted his soft touch now. Farming fifty acres by himself was hard work, and he wasn’t getting any younger. Now he was beginning to wonder if Eddie, with his lazy ways and thin wrists and that shaggy mop of blondish hair always hanging in his eyes, might have been better off a girl. At least then there might have been a chance of landing a stout son-in-law who could help out. But everything was a trade-off, and so whatever a man did, he usually ended up wishing he had done the other. “What’s that book you got there?” he asked.

“Uh, well,” Eddie stammered, “it’s about a guy who—”

“I don’t give a hoot what it’s about. Where’d ye get it?”

“Corky loaned it to me.”

“Well, you go on over to his house right now and give it back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean it,” Ellsworth said. “Won’t be no more readin’ around here till you straighten up.” Eula had insisted that Eddie finish the sixth grade before he was allowed to quit school, and the farmer was convinced that a big part of the boy’s problem had to do with his education. In other words, he had gotten just enough of it to f*ck him up for the real world. Ellsworth had seen it happen before, mostly to flighty types like horny spinsters and weak-eyed store clerks with a lot of time to kill. They would stick their noses in a book and then all of a sudden Ross County, Ohio, wasn’t good enough for them. The next thing you knew, they either got caught up in some perversion, like the old Wilkins woman who somehow managed to split herself open on a bedpost, or they lit out for some big city like Dayton or Toledo, in search of their “destiny.” Sometimes the line that divided those two impulses blurred until they amounted to pretty much the same thing, as in the case of the Fletcher boy the police found butchered in a hotel room in Cincinnati with a woman’s wig glued to his head and his pecker tossed under the bed like a cast-off shoe.

Ellsworth could sense his wife staring at him from across the table, waiting on an answer about the wine. He set his glass down and cleared his throat. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with Eddie takin’ off,” he finally said.

“Your side of the family’s always been too partial to drink, you know that,” Eula pointed out.

“That ain’t true. Uncle Peanut was fine until his woman ran off with that tinker.”

“Fine? My God, Ells, you’re talkin’ about a man who once ate a dog turd at Jack Eliot’s fish fry for a pint of moonshine, and that happened long before he ever hooked up with Jolene Carter. No, I mean it. Eddie might turn out to be a drunkard, but it’s not going to be with our help. Get rid of that wine and that will be the end of it.”

The buttermilk rose back up into his throat like hot lava, and Ellsworth had to swallow several times to keep it down. All the work he had put into it, his finest batch, and her making it sound as if dumping those barrels was no bigger deal than emptying grandma’s piss pot. He knew she had a right to be upset, but, Jesus Lord, there had to be another way. The two cups he drank in the evening were the only thing he had left to look forward to most days. He looked over at the cellar door cut into the floor in the corner of the kitchen. “What if I was to put a lock on it?” he asked, after he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to upchuck buttermilk all over the table.

“A lock? On what?”

“On the cellar door,” he explained quickly. “That would keep him out of it. Parker’s got some over at the store. Padlocks.”

Eula noted the slight tremor of desperation in his voice, and, for a moment, she started to weaken. Maybe something like that would work, she thought, rubbing her forehead. She was right on the verge of giving in when she glanced out the window and her eyes landed on Pickles’s grave in the backyard. The boy was drunk when he shot her; she didn’t doubt that for a minute. She knew it was partly her fault, too; perhaps if she had spoken up sooner, Pickles would still be alive. But still, if Ellsworth had wanted to save his wine, he should have considered something like a lock long before now. “No,” she said, “I’m not changing my mind.”

“Why not?”

She sighed and said, “Because it’s our boy we’re talking about. Just do it and get it over with.” Taking a sip of coffee, she looked over at the mostly bare shelves where she kept her staples. “But now that you mentioned the store—”

“Yeah?”

“Well, you did remind me of something.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re nearly out of sugar and salt,” she said, “and I got to get ready for the canning. The way things is looking, that garden might be the only thing that keeps us alive this winter.” She stood and started out of the kitchen. “You might as well go over to Parker’s tomorrow and take care of it.”