Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

ELLSWORTH WAS CUTTING corn in a field he rented off Clyde Ferguson’s widow when he saw a colored man sporting a light gray bowler hat sauntering down the dirt road. He stopped working and watched the man pause and remove his hat, then proceed to pull a broad-toothed comb through his black, wiry hair. He wore a pair of threadbare pinstripe trousers and a faded yellow shirt. Recalling the black man he had seen working in the field that day outside Meade, Ellsworth decided to look upon the stranger’s appearance as a good omen, though he was a bit concerned about the primping. One that liked bright colors and carried a comb was likely to be damn near useless when it came to getting blisters on his hands; and it was a known fact that you could hypnotize some of them with a mirror, although he reckoned you could do that with any fool who thought himself pretty, no matter what the color of his skin might be. He looked around at all the corn that still needed cutting. The way things were going, there would be snow on the ground before he finished. “Yo!” he yelled to the passerby. “Yo!”

The man dove to the ground as if dodging a bullet, the comb still stuck in his hair. He lay there for a minute, a fearful look on his face, then slowly raised his head. He spotted the farmer in baggy bibs and a sweat-soaked linen shirt walking up through the field toward him, gripping a corn knife in one hand.

“Hidy,” Ellsworth said, once he had cleared the ditch that ran alongside the road. “Didn’t mean to scare ye.”

“I ain’t scared,” the man said defensively, as he stood and dusted off his pants. “Just careful is all.” His Christian name was George Milford, but a woman he had once shacked up with in Detroit had dubbed him Sugar because she thought his sperm tasted like taffy, and that’s what he had gone by ever since. He was running from a crime he had committed in Mansfield, Ohio, three days ago, and was on his way to Kentucky to see his family. He hadn’t seen any of them in over ten years. Pulling the comb from his hair, he slid it into his back pocket, then put his bowler back on. “What you want?”

Ellsworth hesitated. It had just occurred to him that he should probably talk to Eula first before offering the man a job, but it was a good twenty-five-minute walk back to the house from here, and he couldn’t expect a stranger to wait around while he went seeking his wife’s permission. However, if he let this one get away there might not be another, at least not in time to do him any good with the harvest. Already it was the first day of October. He had to admit that he’d taken on more than he could handle. Hoping to make back some of the money he had lost last fall, he had rented two extra fields off the widow, but he hadn’t planned on Eddie not being around to help. “I was wonderin’ if you might be lookin’ for some work?” he said to the black man.

Sugar spit out the stem of a weed he’d been chewing on. Though he wasn’t interested in a job, never had been, for that matter, he had discovered that while most white people tolerated colored folks, to a degree anyway, especially if they found themselves alone with one, damn near all of them looked upon a black man who wouldn’t work with the utmost suspicion and contempt. Sugar shrugged and looked down into the field. “Might be,” he told Ellsworth, but no sooner had those words popped out of his mouth than he wondered why he’d said them. Fuck the white bastard. There wasn’t another soul around that he could see, and he had his razor in his pocket. Why worry about him? “But then again, I might not be.”

“Well, which is it?”

“Depends.”

Ellsworth blinked several times, then took a rag from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his face and neck. Hell, he thought, this boy is as smart-alecky as those damn gatekeepers back at Camp Pritchard. “Where ye headed for anyway?” he asked. “They ain’t nothing down this way.”

“They is if you keep walking,” Sugar said. “It will take you clear to the river.”

“What river?” Ellsworth asked. He turned and looked down the road. He hadn’t been any farther south than Waverly in all the years he had lived. Almost everything he knew about the world lay to the east, toward Meade, and that had always been more than enough for him.

“Why, the Ohio,” Sugar said. “You never been there? Shoot, it ain’t but forty miles from here.”

Ellsworth shook his head. Of course, he had heard of the Ohio, but he had never imagined it as being within walking distance. “Never had no need.”

“It’s a big river, let me tell ye,” Sugar said. “A man ought to see it before he dies.”

“What makes you think I’m a-dying?” Ellsworth asked. He had heard once, over at Parker’s store, that some coloreds, specifically those born at the stroke of midnight, could see into the future, and he wondered if this man might be one of them.

“I didn’t mean you in particular,” Sugar said. “Anybody is who I meant.” He reached into his pocket and laid his hand on his razor. For a second, he weighed the pros and cons of robbing the dumb hillbilly, but then took another look at the long, wooden-handled corn knife he held in his hand and decided against it. The farmer was a stout-looking fucker for his age; and even if he did have any cash, it would be buried in a tin can somewhere or stuck up a cow’s ass. All of these country fools were the same when it came to hoarding their pennies.

“Oh,” Ellsworth said. He coughed and cleared his throat, then wiped at his mouth with the rag. “Well, you want the job or not?”

“How much you pay?”

“A dollar for a good day’s work,” Ellsworth said. “Plus’n a good breakfast.” He thought about throwing in a jar of wine every evening, but realized that might backfire on him, especially if the man turned out to be anything like Eddie or his Uncle Peanut.

Four quarters and a bowl of mush, Sugar thought. A man who would trade even one day of his short time on earth for that might as well crawl into a cave and be done with it. Still, why not have a little fun with the cheap-ass motherfucker before he headed off? “Last man I worked for,” Sugar said, “he paid three dollars a day.”

“Three dollars!”

“Yes, sir, he did. And he fed us breakfast, lunch, and dinner, too. Me and another boy didn’t have no arms. Sausages and flapjacks and pork chops and mashed taters and corn on the cob. Then on Sundays we laid under a shade tree in his front yard and et on a big ol’ chicken his old lady fried up for us. And like I said, the other boy, he had both his arms cut off, so I did most of the work. Couldn’t even wipe his own ass. Had to have the farmer do it for him. Lord, though, that boy could sing. He could coax a woman into anything.”

“Holy Christ in a manger, I do that I might as well burn the damn field down.”

“Pretty women, too,” Sugar went on. “Not no dogs. And I mean anything. Why, he spent most of his time laying in the barn trying to think up new stuff for them to do. They flocked to him like hens to a rooster. Don’t seem right, does it?” Then he turned and started on down the road without another word, a toothy grin spreading across his face.

Ellsworth stood in the dust for a while and waited on the man to come back, thinking that no matter what he had said, it would be one rich colored boy who would turn down a dollar a day, but Sugar just kept walking until he disappeared over the next rise. He had a hard time believing there was a farmer somewhere who could afford to pay a single man anything close to three greenbacks a day, or feed pork chops and whole chickens to his help. Nor keep a crippled songbird around whose only job was to chase whores all day! He began to worry that this might be another symptom of these modern times, paying a man more than he’d ever be worth, and perhaps even paying him for nothing at all. Why, if he could find someone who would treat him that good, he might chop off his own arms and hire himself out for regular wages.