Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“Well, if Germany’s where they’re a-sendin’ Eddie, I’d like to have an idy of where it is, and I figure if there’s anyone around here who could show us, it will be him.”

Ellsworth frowned. Ever since the embarrassment with the stolen magazine six years ago, he had done his best to avoid Slater, but he couldn’t think of a good excuse not to take her; the man didn’t live but a couple of miles away. It was only after he’d agreed that Ellsworth began to see it as an opportunity. He could let him know that the boy had turned out all right after all, that he wasn’t locked up in a hoosegow somewhere for larceny or something even worse. It was the first time in ages that he actually had something to be proud of when it came to Eddie, and by the time they left for the teacher’s house the next afternoon, he was actually looking forward to doing a little bragging.

They found Slater, a pale, skinny man with wiry red hair, lounging in a hammock tied between two chestnut trees in his front yard. He was playing a wooden flute, one much the same as a shepherd stuck with his flock on a lonely hillside might have passed the time with in olden days. A wide-brimmed straw hat covered his rather small head.

When he saw them approaching, he rolled out of the hammock and set the flute atop a rusty overturned washtub. “Mr. and Mrs. Fiddler,” he said, taking off his hat as he walked up to their wagon. “What a surprise.” Ellsworth noted a little disdainfully that he was barefoot and had a yellow dandelion stuck behind his ear. Not only that, he didn’t appear to have on any underclothes beneath the baggy nightshirt he was wearing.

“I hope we’re not botherin’ ye,” Eula said.

“No, no, not at all. What can I do for you?”

“Well, we was wonderin’ if you might have a map of Germany.”

Slater thought for a moment as he fanned himself with the hat and scratched at a deerfly welt on his neck. “Not Germany specifically,” he said, “but I do have a map of the world, if that would do you any good.”

“Does it have a picture of Germany on it?”

“Well, it’s more like an outline, Mrs. Fiddler. Showing the boundaries.”

“Do you think we could see it?”

“Yes, of course, but if you don’t mind my asking, why the interest?”

“That’s where Eddie’s a-goin’ to fight,” Ellsworth said, puffing out his chest a little.

“Eddie? My God, is he in the military? I wouldn’t have thought he’d be old enough.”

“Neither did I, but they took him just the same.”

“Have you tried to get him back?”

“He’d already signed his name by the time I found out.”

“Yes, but Eddie can’t be more than…what is he, fifteen?”

“Sixteen this past spring.”

Slater was surprised. He certainly would have never thought Eddie Fiddler the type to run off and join the army. Immature for his age, that’s how he would have described him. Except for the time he’d stolen a magazine from his desk drawer, he had never really been any trouble, but then he had never been anything else, either. When he didn’t return after his sixth year, Slater hardly gave it a second thought. Most of the boys around here just bided their time until they could quit. Only Tommy Fletcher had had the makings of a scholar, and he had thrown everything away to become some homosexual’s plaything for a year or so in Cincinnati before he was discovered mutilated and murdered in a fleabag down along the river. Thank God the boy’s parents had never found out that he was the one who had given Tommy the money for the train ticket. But Slater had learned his lesson, and it was the last time he ever got personally involved with one of his students, no matter how sorry he felt for them. Well, bravo for Eddie. Maybe the war would be good for him.

He led them into the house and through a small, messy parlor toward the kitchen. Dog-eared books and journals were strewn about the floor, stacked high on the two battered easy chairs that sat in front of the fireplace. A layer of dust that Eula later described as an inch thick covered the oak mantel. A white hen sat clucking softly on a soiled red pillow in one corner of the room, and a mound of dirt and feathers had been swept carelessly into another. The house used to be part of the Culver farm, but it had been in Slater’s name for some time now. Though most of the teachers who had taught at the Nipgen schoolhouse in the past barely knew more than the students, he had shown up for the job interview with a bona fide bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Ohio University; and Mrs. Culver, who pretty much had her hand in everything that went on in the township, was determined to keep him, whatever the cost. Stay and get my son, Albert, into college, she had told Slater, and I’ll give you a house and five acres. He had refused at first, said he only needed the job for a year or two. He had dreams of becoming a famous playwright, of winning acclaim in the theater and traveling the world accompanied by an ever-changing entourage of beautiful lovers and bootlicking parasites. But after several summers of filling notebook after notebook with what he eventually came to realize was tepid, empty fluff that quite frankly would have made a dog sick, the idea of living out his life in quiet obscurity slowly took hold, began to seem more and more attractive. By then, Albert was ten years old. “Wonder whatever happened to ol’ Shakespeare Slater?” he could imagine some of his former classmates saying when they ran into each other. “Remember him?” There was nothing tragic or noble or self-sacrificing about it. It had felt right, that’s all. If asked, he would have said that he had finally come to the realization that he didn’t have what it takes. Better to find out early than torture yourself for a lifetime. But, of course, nobody asked. And Albert Culver? Without Slater coaching him, the poor numskull hadn’t lasted one year at the University of Toledo.

“There it is,” he said to the Fiddlers, pointing to a cracked, sun-bleached map hanging in a lacquered frame on the wall above the kitchen table where tiny black gnats swarmed about some dirty dishes. The map had been donated to the school by Mrs. Culver’s grandfather probably around the same time that John Wilkes Booth was making his final curtain call, but it was so obsolete by the year Slater started working there that he bought a new one with money out of his own pocket and took the old one home.

Eula and Ellsworth stepped forward, peered at all the different colored shapes. They were staring at the South Pole region when Slater realized that neither of them could read. He moved between them, stuck his finger on the map. “This is Germany, but when they send Eddie overseas, he’ll probably go to France first. From what I’ve read in the newspapers, that’s pretty much where all of our soldiers will end up.”

“That’s somewhere over there, too, ain’t it?” Eula asked.

“Yes,” Slater said, as he slid his finger an inch or two southward. “This is France.”

“So then…where would we be?”

“Right about here,” the teacher said, tapping the approximate location of Ohio.

“Well, heck, Eula, that don’t seem very far away,” Ellsworth said.

Slater cast a puzzled look at the farmer, but then, after a brief hesitation, started to explain, in the same patient voice he tried to maintain when he was talking to his slower students, “Oh, it’s quite a distance really. The world is a big place. You have to understand that the map just makes it look smaller. Everything is scaled down so that it can fit.”

“And what’s this?” Eula said, pointing at the broad expanse of blue that separated America from Europe while waving gnats away from her face.

“That’s the Atlantic Ocean.”