Donald Pollock: The Heavenly Table

“What happened to it?” Pearl had asked.

“Sold it to some banana man down in South America who collects such things,” the auctioneer replied. Back then, Pearl had dismissed the notion as part of some sales pitch to run the bidding up on a pair of young bulls, but now he realized there might be some truth in it. Though he hated to admit it, from the looks of things, his seed had already lost some of its vigor when he and Lucille made Cob, and by the time he shot Chimney into the oven, it had gone from slightly tepid to downright sour.

Even so, perhaps because he was the youngest or had yet to grow the scraggly beard his brothers wore, Chimney was still the one that reminded Pearl of his dead wife the most. He leaned closer and stared into the boy’s eyes even more intently, as if he were peering into a smoky portal to the past. Chimney looked over at his brothers again, took the last bite of his biscuit. The old man’s breath reeked of stomach gas and rancid drippings. A solitary bird began to twitter from somewhere close by, and suddenly Pearl was recalling a long-ago night when he had walked Lucille home from a barn dance just a few weeks before they married. The autumn sky was glittering with stars, and a faint smell of honeysuckle still hung in the cool air. He could hear the gravel crunching beneath their feet. Her face appeared before him, as young and pretty as the first time he ever saw her, but just as he was getting ready to reach out and touch her cheek, Chimney shattered the spell. “Hell, yes,” he said, “maybe we should ask them niggers if they’d be a-willin’ to—”

Without any warning, Pearl’s hand whipped out and caught the boy by the throat. “Spit it out,” he growled. “Spit it out.” Chimney tried to break away, but the old man’s grip, seasoned by years of plowing and chopping and picking, was tight as a vise. With his windpipe squeezed shut, he soon ceased struggling and managed to spew a few wet crumbs from his mouth that stuck to the hairs on Pearl’s wrist.

“Pap, he didn’t mean nothing,” Cane said, moving toward the two. “Let him go.” Though he figured his brother probably deserved getting the shit choked out of him, if for no other reason than being a constant aggravation, Cane also knew that getting their father too upset this early in the morning meant that he would push them twice as hard in the field today, and it was tough enough working a slow pace when you had but one biscuit to run on.

“I’m sick of his mouth,” Pearl said through clenched teeth. Then he snorted some air and tightened his hold even more, seemingly resolved on shutting the boy up forever.

“I said let him go, goddamn it,” Cane repeated, just before he grabbed the old man’s other arm and wrenched it behind his back with a violent twist that filled the room with a loud pop. Pearl let out a piercing howl as he jerked free of Cane and shoved Chimney away. The boy coughed and spat out the rest of his biscuit onto the floor, and they all watched in the gloomy half-light as the old man ground it into the dirt with his shoe while working the hurt out of his shoulder. Nothing else was said. Even Chimney was temporarily out of words.

When Pearl was done, they all followed him out of the shack single-file. Cob stopped at the well and drew a pail of water, and they carried it, together with their tools — three double-headed axes and a couple of machetes and a rusty saber with a broken tip — along the edge of a long green cotton field. As the sun crested the hills to the east, looking like the bloodshot eye of a hungover barfly, they came to a swampy piece of acreage they were clearing for Major Tardweller. He had promised them a bonus of ten laying hens if they finished the job in six weeks, and Cane figured they might just make it at the rate they were going. He peeled off his ragged shirt and draped it over the top of the canvas bucket to keep the gnats and mosquitoes out, and another day of work began. By afternoon, with nothing but warm water sloshing around in their guts, all they could think about was that sick hog hanging in the smokehouse.

THAT SAME MORNING, several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler went to wake his son and discovered he was already up and gone. He stood for a moment looking at Eddie’s empty bed, then walked to the barn on the slim chance that he might be there, but there was no sign of him. Going back to the house, he checked to make sure Eula, his wife, was still asleep, then slipped down into the cellar beneath the kitchen. Just as he feared, there were at least two more jars of his blackberry wine missing. “I never should have let him have that first taste,” he mumbled to himself, thinking back to last Christmas. The holiday had been a gloomy one, mostly because Ellsworth had lost his and Eula’s life savings to a con man in a checkered suit the previous September, and he thought that sharing a drink with Eddie might brighten things up a bit for the boy. Ellsworth’s own father had allowed him a glass every night from the time he was twelve, and he’d turned out all right, hadn’t he? Looking back on it, though, he should have known better. Eddie was already prone to daydreaming and telling fibs and shirking his chores, and even a little hard cider sometimes did strange things to people like that. And sure enough, ever since that first sip, down in the cellar listening to Eula moving around in the kitchen above them while she stuffed the Christmas bird, a tough, stringy Tom that he’d traded Roy Cox some old harness for, the boy had become, on top of everything else, a regular boozehound.

He was just emerging from the cellar when Eula came into the kitchen. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Lookin’ for Eddie,” Ellsworth said nervously. “He ain’t in his bed.”

“You mean he’s gone?”

“Well, I can’t find him.”

“But even if ye can’t, why would you think he’d be down there at six o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” Ellsworth said. “I just—”

Shaking her head, Eula walked to the boy’s room to look for herself. Ellsworth waited on her to say something when she came back, but instead she lit the kindling in the cookstove, then dipped some water from a bucket into a pan for coffee. He went back out to the barn and fed the mule; and a few minutes later, she called him to the table and he sat down to a couple of eggs and a bowl of gummy, tasteless oatmeal. Jesus, he thought, this time last year there would have been sausage and gravy, maybe even pork chops. Though sick and tired of thinking about the swindle, the tiniest things reminded him of it all over again, even his breakfast. It was an ache inside him that never let up, something he figured would probably gnaw at him the rest of his days. A man riding a red sorrel mare had stopped him and Eddie along the road one bright afternoon toward the end of September last year, and casually asked if he might know someone who’d be interested in buying fifty Guernsey cows at twenty dollars a head. “Why so cheap?” Ellsworth had asked suspiciously. He knew for a fact that Henry Robbins had paid over twice that just a couple of weeks ago for some Holstein calves.