Donald Pollock: The Heavenly Table

“Your side of the family’s always been too partial to drink, you know that,” Eula pointed out.

“That ain’t true. Uncle Peanut was fine until his woman ran off with that tinker.”

“Fine? My God, Ells, you’re talkin’ about a man who once ate a dog turd at Jack Eliot’s fish fry for a pint of moonshine, and that happened long before he ever hooked up with Jolene Carter. No, I mean it. Eddie might turn out to be a drunkard, but it’s not going to be with our help. Get rid of that wine and that will be the end of it.”

The buttermilk rose back up into his throat like hot lava, and Ellsworth had to swallow several times to keep it down. All the work he had put into it, his finest batch, and her making it sound as if dumping those barrels was no bigger deal than emptying grandma’s piss pot. He knew she had a right to be upset, but, Jesus Lord, there had to be another way. The two cups he drank in the evening were the only thing he had left to look forward to most days. He looked over at the cellar door cut into the floor in the corner of the kitchen. “What if I was to put a lock on it?” he asked, after he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to upchuck buttermilk all over the table.

“A lock? On what?”

“On the cellar door,” he explained quickly. “That would keep him out of it. Parker’s got some over at the store. Padlocks.”

Eula noted the slight tremor of desperation in his voice, and, for a moment, she started to weaken. Maybe something like that would work, she thought, rubbing her forehead. She was right on the verge of giving in when she glanced out the window and her eyes landed on Pickles’s grave in the backyard. The boy was drunk when he shot her; she didn’t doubt that for a minute. She knew it was partly her fault, too; perhaps if she had spoken up sooner, Pickles would still be alive. But still, if Ellsworth had wanted to save his wine, he should have considered something like a lock long before now. “No,” she said, “I’m not changing my mind.”

“Why not?”

She sighed and said, “Because it’s our boy we’re talking about. Just do it and get it over with.” Taking a sip of coffee, she looked over at the mostly bare shelves where she kept her staples. “But now that you mentioned the store—”

“Yeah?”

“Well, you did remind me of something.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re nearly out of sugar and salt,” she said, “and I got to get ready for the canning. The way things is looking, that garden might be the only thing that keeps us alive this winter.” She stood and started out of the kitchen. “You might as well go over to Parker’s tomorrow and take care of it.”

“But what about Eddie?” Ellsworth asked. “Don’t ye figure I should go out lookin’ for him?”

Eula stopped and put her hand against the doorway. She leaned there for a moment with her back turned, feeling dizzy. A wave of intense emotion ran through her body, and she began to tremble. Her son had disappeared and her cat was dead, and on top of that, it suddenly occurred to her that the sugar and salt would take what little money they had left. To think that this time last year they had a thousand dollars put aside. She bit her lip and fought the urge to cry out.

From where he sat, Ellsworth watched her narrow shoulders start to shake. An awkward silence filled the room, and he wondered if he should get up and hold her. But just as he was scooting his chair back, she wiped at her eyes and said, “I reckon Eddie will come home when he’s ready. He’s probably just out playin’ around.” Then she continued on into the bedroom. For a long time, Ellsworth sat staring at the stew congealing on his plate, and when he finally figured she was asleep, he slipped down into the cellar with the lantern. He looked about and found five empty jugs, then removed the wooden tops from the two wine barrels. After he filled them, he carried the jugs out to the barn and hid them in the loft. Then he went back to the cellar again. There were at least three or four gallons left. He dipped out a cup and drank it fast, then sat down at the bottom of the stairs with another.

AFTER HE LOST his wife and the bank took the farm, Pearl and his sons wandered aimlessly like nomads across a harsh, impoverished South still broken by a war that even he was too young to remember. They encountered corruption and decay at every turn, and their luck shifted from bad to worse. He prayed to God to smooth the way a bit, but no matter how hard they worked, their pockets remained empty and the best the four of them could do was stay one step ahead of starvation. He couldn’t understand it. Sitting by the fire in whatever meager camp they had made for the night, Pearl supped on parched corn and moldy bread and went back over his life, trying to recall something he might have done to deserve such a fate. He knew that he had sinned on occasion, yet no more than most, and certainly not as much as some. Pride had always been his biggest defect, and he knew that forcing Lucille to read those church lessons had been a vain and selfish act, but still, wasn’t God supposed to forgive? If not for him, then at least for his sons? And so, doubts began to creep into his mind, and that worried him even more than where their next meal was coming from.

By the time Pearl met the hermit along the Foggy River, Lucille had been gone ten years and the worm that killed her had turned to powder in his pillow. He was sitting on the bank in a daze that afternoon while the boys fished the water with their hands. They hadn’t eaten anything in several days, but he didn’t have the strength to help them. An occasional sparking sound that had started up in his head a few months ago had recently turned into an unrelenting sizzle, as if his brains were being sautéed in a frying pan, and he hadn’t slept more than a minute or two at a time in weeks.

The man came out of the woods and sat down beside Pearl without a word, as if they had known each other for years. Suddenly aware of a presence, he roused himself and looked over, saw a bent and misshapen stranger carrying a rod made of ash and wearing nothing but a grimy, torn sackcloth. On his forehead, a red canker the size of a silver dollar seethed like a hot coal. Pearl was reminded of a picture card he had once seen of a heathen who had lived his entire life chained to a tree sitting in a pile of his own slops, his eyes turned to black bubbles from staring into the sun. A pockmarked missionary just returned from some foreign land had passed it around the First Baptist Church of Righteous Revelation while grubbing for donations. Pearl wondered if he was dreaming. “Looks like you been on the road a long time,” he finally said to the man.

The stranger nodded. “See that little white bird over yonder in that cypress?” he said, pointing with his rod.

Shading his eyes with his hand, Pearl squinted across the river. “Yeah, I see him.”

“I been following him for fifty years now. He takes me wherever I need to go.”

“I had no idy a bird lived that long,” Pearl said.

“Oh, that one will never die.”

“How do ye figure?” said Pearl.

“Well,” the hermit said, “I’ve seen him blown to pieces with a four-gauge scattergun, and split in two by a panther’s claws, and even set on fire by a gang of no-goods over around Turlington a couple year ago, and yet there he is, a-sittin’ in that tree just as pretty as you please. He always comes back.”

Pearl thought for a minute, then asked, “You some kind of preacher?”

The man shrugged his bony shoulders. “God speaks to me from time to time, and His bird shows me the way. Not much else to it.”

Before he realized it, Pearl was telling the man about Lucille and the worm and all the ill fortune that had come after. He confessed that he was even beginning to wonder if God existed, for why would He treat some so badly and let others off the hook completely? It didn’t add up. There was no way his paltry sins were equal to the tribulations that had befallen him and his family. After Pearl finished, the man sat quietly for a long time stroking his long, matted beard. Then he glanced down at his callused feet. He leaned over and began tugging on one of his big toenails with his knotty fingers. Without so much as a wince, he tore it off and held it up for Pearl to see.