The Heavenly Table(75)

“I expect so,” Cane said, recalling the way Pearl had gone off the rails after Lucille died. “What do ye think you’d have done if you hadn’t married?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess if I hadn’t met her, I’d have probably drunk myself to death. Had an uncle do that. But she keeps me in line. What about you? You got a woman?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Cane said. “Not yet anyway.” Christ, he hadn’t even kissed a girl, let alone done anything else with one. He thought about the newspaper article he had read about the ones who had been coming forth in little towns all over the South, extolling his romantic charms, the gentlemanly way he treated them, each claiming to be his one and only sweetheart. “A twentieth-century Lothario,” the reporter had called him.

“Well, you’re still young, but take my advice and don’t wait as long as I did to get hitched. I was thirty-four, and I wish to Christ I’d done it sooner.”

“Why’s that?”

“I guess I would have liked for her to’ve known me when I was at my best. Heck, when I was your age or thereabouts I screwed some gal seven times in one night, but by the time I met Eula, I couldn’t have done that for a thousand dollars.” Ellsworth thought about the time he was walking home from a church revival one rainy, windblown evening and saw Mrs. Sproat standing out in her yard under a pawpaw tree with an old slicker draped over her head, as if she were waiting just for him. He was nineteen at the time, living with his mother, trying to make a living for them on the fifteen acres his father had left them when he died. Mrs. Sproat asked him if he’d like to come in a spell to get out of the wet, and he, never having been in such a situation before, thought she just wanted to talk, her being a widow woman and probably feeling lonely on such a miserable evening. They hadn’t been inside the house more than two minutes when she started stripping off her long black dress. It scared the bejesus out of him, but he didn’t turn away from it. Though she was flabby and gray and a few years past her prime, it was all he could do to keep up with her. He’d shoot a load in her and roll over to get his breath; and she would lie there for a spell, and then start back up on him again with her hands and her lips and by the time the first cock crowed the next morning, he was so weak he couldn’t have split a bean pod open. He washed up good the next evening and went back to have another go at her, thinking that she considered him quite the stud, but when he presented himself at her door, she acted as if she didn’t even know him. He knew something wasn’t right, and so he went up the road a ways and circled around. It wasn’t fifteen minutes before he saw Gene Humbolt, a married man with five little ones at home, tie his coonhound to a fence post and sneak in the back. Ellsworth remembered that he’d hurt all the way home that night, but then woke up the next morning happy that he’d had his turn with her and glad that it was over with.

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” Cane said.

“Yes, sir,” Ellsworth said, watching Chimney start another row and still thinking about all the ways Mrs. Sproat had kept him going. “A few years makes a big difference in a man, I’ll tell ye that. Don’t matter who he is. So whatever you want to do, you best go ahead and do it before it’s too late.”





44


IN MEADE, RIGHT before lunchtime, a sputtering, red-faced Mayor Hasbro called the city engineer into his office and commenced to chewing his ass out about Jasper Cone. In the past week, four more women had accused him of trespassing on their property without good reason and spying on them. And as Hasbro pointed out, what if the idiot went off his rocker and actually laid his hands on someone? Now that their complaints were on record, if they were ignored, even a friendly pat on the ass might bankrupt the city in a lawsuit. “I don’t give a damn how much good you say he’s doing,” he told the engineer. “You tell him to back off.”

Although Rawlings had never seen the mayor get so upset or vocal about anything before, he had a hard time believing that the meek and hardworking Jasper could be guilty of such acts, at least not intentionally. He immediately suspected that Sandy Saunders, the sneaky little sonofabitch, was somehow behind the accusations, but he kept his mouth shut. Instead, he returned to his own office to mull the situation over. Not only had the city councilman been a pain in his ass ever since Rawlings had taken over as city engineer, it was common knowledge that he absolutely detested Jasper. Still, he needed proof. Realizing that the best way to get to the bottom of things was to interview the women himself, he was just getting ready to walk back over to the mayor’s office to ask for their names when there was a loud knock on his door and a plump older woman named Mrs. Lenora Trego barged in. Before he had a chance to ask what she wanted, she loudly informed him that while sitting in her outhouse perusing Miss Bernice Bottelby’s new novel, Dreams of Milk and Honey, Jasper Cone had flung the door open on her and attempted to enter. It was the first time the engineer had ever heard anyone actually use the word “perusing” in a sentence, and it threw him off for a second, long enough for her to plop down in the chair across from his desk. Being a retired English teacher, she continued, she might expect such nonsense coming from teenage boys, but from a grown man, and a city employee to boot, that was an entirely different matter. Also, as she stressed at least a dozen times during the hour that he had to put up with her, she was a published author in the Scioto Gazette—from what Rawlings was able to gather, she wrote poems about birds and trees and shit like that—and it was common knowledge that any sort of traumatic incident could potentially stop the flow of the creative juices. Why, she hadn’t written a decent line since he’d busted in on her.