Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

Only then did the doctor realize what the woman meant by “an adjustment.” Lord, could she be serious? He glanced about the room, bare except for a small dresser and a plain wooden cross hanging on the wall above the neatly made bed and a long rifle leaning in the corner. “But why?” Hamm asked.

“To make me normal,” the boy replied. “Just like she told ye.” Then he began to tremble and a single tear flushed from one of his brown eyes and dripped off his chin onto the floor.

“Now don’t worry, son,” Hamm said. “I’m not going to touch it, let alone operate on it, I promise. How old are you?”

“Be twelve my next birthday.”

“So you’re still in school?”

The boy shook his head. “Mother won’t allow it. She says freaks shouldn’t be seen in public.”

“What about your father?”

“He got killed right after I was born,” Jasper said. “Over at the paper mill.” He turned then and pointed at the rifle. “He bought that buffalo gun just for me. You ever seen one before?”

“No, can’t say that I have.”

“Mother won’t let me shoot it, but one of these days I will.”

Hamm looked out the window into the backyard, saw a couple of chickens pecking in the dirt, a mangy cat stretched out on a low hanging limb in a mulberry tree. Once, as part of his surgical training, he and several classmates had dissected a cadaver. The man on the table had been found frozen to death on a bench in downtown Baltimore in the middle of the day. Just a tramp with no name, no next of kin. Other than that, the only thing Hamm remembered about the poor fellow was that he’d had the biggest cock any of them had ever seen. Pumped up, it would have been the length of a hatchet handle and as big around as a specimen cup. They had all gone out for a beer afterward, and, of course, there had been much joking about it, most of them finding it hard to believe that a man who possessed something so magnificent could have ever ended up alone in the gutter. And by the time Jasper’s quit growing, Hamm estimated, as he watched the cat suddenly drop from the tree and slink off through the grass, his would be even larger than the one they had removed from the bum, the one that had ended up pickled in a jar of alcohol in a dark closet alongside some mutated embryos and a three-headed mouse.

“Your mother,” the doctor told Jasper, “just doesn’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with you. Certainly not anything we can fix anyway. You’re just going to have to live with it. My God, son, probably ninety percent of the men the world over would give anything to have your problem.”

That had been sixteen years ago, and now Jasper was twenty-seven. But what most men would have looked upon as a great gift, he had always considered a curse. Of course, his mother was to blame, with her insane, unrelenting tirades about Devil’s spawn, perverted desires, and hellish retributions. Growing up in such a house, Jasper became half-mad himself. It was a lonely life, filled with shame and guilt. As far as the doctor knew, he had never been with a woman. If he had, she would have probably ended up in the hospital a medical emergency, needing stitches at the very least. Not long after Hamm examined him, Jasper started keeping his penis bound up in a homemade truss constructed from a swatch of coarse canvas and strips of leather cord and a pair of silk bloomers he found lying behind the Blind Owl Saloon on one of those few nights when his mother forgot to lock him in his bedroom. But then, when he was eighteen, Cassandra Cone died from a heart attack while walking home with one of her chickens from a Blessing of the Animals service. Suddenly, Jasper’s world opened up in ways he’d never dreamed of. Within days of her passing, his uncle, the broom maker, got him a job emptying outhouses with a scavenger named Itchy Ingham, and every evening after they shoveled the last load of shit off the honey wagon, they took turns shooting rats out at the city dump with the buffalo gun. For someone whose life had been as joyless and stunted as Jasper’s, every day with the easygoing Itchy was like a holiday. He and the old man worked and ate and murdered rodents together six days a week. Then one blazing hot afternoon in the summer of 1915, Itchy keeled over and died in the middle of scooping out a particularly odious crapper at a boardinghouse over on Chestnut Street that catered to men who worked at the Old Capitol Brewery. Besides Jasper, the only other person who attended the funeral was Ernie Bagshaw, the dump keeper. The next day, Jasper made a place in the shed behind his house for Gyp, the donkey that pulled the honey wagon, and went back to work by himself.

A year later, after a spring flood sent a hundred shithouses floating down Mulberry Street into the Scioto, and six people died of cholera after drinking water from a fountain in the city park, water suspected of being tainted by the nearby jakes, the city engineer, a man by the name of Rawlings, convinced the mayor to call an emergency meeting of the city council to discuss the raw sewage situation. The engineer, fresh out of Wabash College, was brimming with modern ideas, and though he didn’t come right out and say it, for fear of being pegged a crackpot or, even worse, a Socialist, his hope was that somehow they could start pressuring citizens to install indoor plumbing. The debate went on for several hours, but in the end the city leaders reluctantly voted 5 to 1, with one abstainer, that they should hire what Rawlings referred to as a “sanitation inspector.” He admitted it was a new concept, but one he felt was necessary if they wanted to avoid any more disasters like the one that had occurred in the spring. “Good,” he said after the votes were tallied. “I’ve got just the man in mind.”

“Who might that be?” Bus Davenport, the school superintendent, asked suspiciously. After being involved professionally with children for so many years, he found it difficult to trust anyone who might possibly have been one in the past.

“Jasper Cone.”

The howls of protest could be heard three blocks away. “At least hire someone who’s qualified!” Sandy Saunders, an insurance salesman and the one nay voter, yelled, banging the silver-headed cane he always carried on the varnished floor.

“There’s not a soul in this county who knows more about filth than that boy,” the engineer said.

“And could you remind us again exactly what he’d be doing?” queried Homer Hasbro, the mayor and sole abstainer, quietly, as he poured himself a drink of water from a pitcher on the table. Though Homer was inept in almost every way, he had still somehow learned that the single best thing a politician could do to survive was absolutely nothing, and he had won his last four elections by expertly riding the fence. Privately, he was in favor of any modern convenience, but he wasn’t about to sacrifice his cushy job by becoming actually involved in pushing for one. The majority of people hated change more than anything.

“Going around and checking privies.”

“That’s it?” Saunders said incredulously.

“Of course not. If he finds one that’s in danger of overflowing and polluting a well, either their own or their neighbors’,” Rawlings explained, “he’ll issue a warning ticket. Then they’ll have a few days to set things right before the city starts fining them three dollars a week. Gentlemen, I can’t stress enough the need for immediate action. Right now there are approximately nineteen hundred outhouses within the city limits.”

“Wait a minute,” Henry Tatman, the new owner of Lange’s Grocery, said. “Who’s going to be doing the emptying? Since Cone’s a scavenger, wouldn’t this be a…a…”

“Conflict of interest?” Biff Landers said. Twenty years ago, Landers had been a law student at the University of Michigan, but a hazing incident turned deadly had gotten him expelled and seemingly stuck forever in a low-level supervisory position in the boiler house at the paper mill. Now his lungs were full of coal dust and the closest he’d ever come to realizing his dream of arguing a case in a courtroom was when he was summoned as a material witness in a former friend’s divorce proceedings. There wasn’t a day went by when he didn’t regret tying the noose around that little freshman’s neck.