Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“Yeah, what the hell are you, buddy?” Ballard added. “One of them damn Wobblies?”

Ellsworth didn’t know what a Wobbly was, but from the way the guard spat the word out of his mouth, he figured it couldn’t be a good thing. Lately, it seemed that wherever he turned, something beyond his comprehension was lying in wait to make him look like a fool. He decided not to say anything else. Even if the reason they gave for the war sounded like one of the dumbest things he had ever heard in his life, there was no way he was going to give these guards any more ammunition to use against him. As soon as he did, they’d have him playing house in a pickle patch with that other poor bastard they had joked about. He turned away and climbed back on his wagon.

Reaching for the gourd under the seat, he took a drink of water, then looked over at the camp again. In a field far off to the left, a row of soldiers stood at attention near the edge of a freshly dug trench. A thick-chested man with skinny legs paced back and forth in front of them, giving a speech. His voice was loud and gruff, but Ellsworth was still too far away to hear what he was saying. He gripped a rifle with a gleaming bayonet attached to the end of the barrel. Every so often, he stopped talking and gave a bloodcurdling cry, then stabbed the bayonet into what appeared to be a feed sack filled with sand. Ellsworth wondered if Eddie was standing in the line of soldiers, and if he had helped dig the ditch. As hard as it was getting him to do a few chores around the farm, it would serve him right if the army had stuck a pick and shovel in his hands first thing. He’d ask Eddie about that the next time he saw him. He would probably be wearing one of those brown uniforms, have a story or two to tell. Maybe he would even know the whereabouts of Germany. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps the army was a good thing, especially if it toughened the boy up. Hell, he might turn out to be a halfway decent farmer after all.

He sat watching the man attack the feed bag until there wasn’t anything left but a few shreds of burlap, and then he turned the mule and headed back toward town. Glancing over at the gate, he saw a glowering Ballard drop to the ground and start doing pushups while Zimmerman stood over him counting, the hint of a smile creasing his otherwise stony face. At least now, Ellsworth thought, as he passed a huge cairn of stinking slops and discarded civilian rags, the wheels of the wagon squeaking and black flies swarming over man and mule alike, he could tell Eula for certain where their boy had run off to.

IT TOOK THE Jewett brothers the rest of the afternoon to dig a grave in the dry, hard earth on the other side of the hog pen, just a few feet away from the sunken area that contained the mulattoes. When they were done, they washed Pearl’s face and hands, then went through his pockets. Besides his pocketknife, which Chimney had already called dibs on, all they found was seventeen American cents and a Canadian nickel along with half a plug of linty tobacco and a sales receipt for a handful of nails purchased over two years ago. After wrapping him tightly in his blanket and lowering him into the hole, Cob climbed down and slipped the worm pillow under his head. They took turns filling in the grave, then Chimney walked over to the porch and returned with the rusty saber. “Remember when we found this fuckin’ thing?” he said.

Cane nodded and smiled. They had discovered the sword one windy autumn day in a woods a few miles outside of Atlanta, unaware that over fifty years before, some Northern soldiers working point for Sherman’s army had used it to mark the spot where they had buried one of their comrades, a fat and jolly shoemaker from Boston who was singing an aria from The Barber of Seville when the top of his head was sheared off by a sniper’s minié ball. The blade was standing up in the dirt, and Pearl had jerked it from the ground without thinking, then he and the boys had moved on. Two days later, though, while searching through a garden patch hoping to find something edible the owner might have overlooked, it suddenly occurred to him that the sword might be more than just another cast-off remnant of the Civil War. Hadn’t he heard once of a man in Tennessee who had found an ordnance box filled with silver bullion while digging a footer for a house? The more he scratched about in the empty garden with the saber, the more he began to imagine that it had indicated the spot where a cache of war booty was hidden. “Gather up yer brothers,” he finally said to Cane. “We’re headin’ back into them woods.”

“What for?” the boy had asked warily. Although he was only thirteen years old at the time, Cane was already beginning to doubt much of what came out of Pearl’s mouth, not because he was a liar, but because it was evident that he was slowly losing his mind, and had been ever since Lucille died and he started sleeping with the worm under his head.

“Goin’ back to where we found this sword.”

“What about Mississippi? You said we’d—”

“Back when the war was a-goin’ on, people hid stuff from the Yankees all the time. Their gold and jewels and what have ye.”

“Okay,” Cane said, “but that don’t—”

“And I’d bet anything somebody used this sword to mark the spot where he buried his valuables,” Pearl went on. “Probably got killed before he could get back to it, the poor bastard. It just makes sense. Why else would it been stuck in the ground like that?”

Though Cane figured there were at least a dozen other explanations for why the saber had ended up in the woods, any of them more logical than the one his old man was proposing, for the life of him he couldn’t think of one just then. “I don’t know,” he said, “maybe…maybe…”

“Maybe quit yer stutterin’ and get them boys rounded up,” Pearl had ordered.

They had been homeless and barely making it for almost three years at that point, but on their way back to the woods, Pearl began talking of the grand meals they would soon be eating and the land they would buy and the new duds they would sport. He even made up a marching song to keep Cob and Chimney moving along at a steady pace. To pacify Cane, he mentioned sending him to one of those universities where smart people loafed about talking bullshit; that is, if he still thought book learning was something he wanted to waste his time on once he got his share of the treasure. His enthusiasm was infectious, and even Cane slowly allowed himself to start dreaming that just maybe their luck was about to change.

It took four days to figure out the approximate location where they had come across the sword, and they then spent another week digging a series of deep pits, searching for what Pearl kept referring to as the “sweet spot.” Finally, on their twenty-third attempt, Chimney hit something with the shovel blade that didn’t sound like the usual root or rock. Pearl jerked the boy out of the hole and jumped in. He began slinging dirt into the air with his hands, working like a madman for several minutes before he suddenly stopped and uttered a sickly, frustrated moan. When the dust cleared, the boys walked up to the edge of the hole and looked down upon the remains of the shoemaker, no longer fat and certainly no longer jolly, wrapped in a rotten horse blanket.

“Pap,” Cob said, after his father climbed out, “how we gonna trade them old bones for a new farm?” Before he could stop himself, Pearl whirled around and backhanded the boy, knocking him over a pile of dirt. Then he stalked off, disappearing into the trees. When he returned several hours later, looking nearly as lifeless as the skeleton, he was carrying two dead rabbits and had his coat pockets filled with windfall apples — his way, Cane figured, of asking forgiveness. Pearl decided to hang on to the sword. “Ye never know,” he had said, “it might come in handy someday.” And so it did, eleven years later, as Chimney shoved it down into the loose soil at the head of his grave.