An hour later, an orderly pushed Bovard out of the operating theater on a gurney and down the hall to a room. Eisner, the clap doctor, came out a minute or two later, and Malone asked him about the lieutenant’s condition. “Well, he’s suffered a serious shock, and there wasn’t anything to be done about the hand or the ear, but from what I’ve heard, it could have been a lot worse. My biggest concern is the risk of infection. A tavern is one of the worst places in the world for germs. Which reminds me, have you and your men washed up since you left that filthy hole?”
“Uh, well, we haven’t had—”
“I don’t understand you people,” Eisner said angrily. “Good hygiene is one of the most important keys to a long and happy life, and yet you refuse to embrace it.” Then he turned and stomped out of the building.
Malone walked down to the room where they’d taken Bovard. He stood in the doorway and looked in. A soft light burned in the far corner. Wesley Franks was sitting in a metal chair beside the lieutenant’s bed. He was talking softly to him and dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth. “Has he said anything?” Malone asked.
“No, sir,” Wesley said. “They got him knocked out.”
Malone stepped into the room, moved up closer to the bed. The stub of Bovard’s left hand was wrapped with gauze, and another bandage covered his ear hole. A bit of bloody cotton was sticking out of the corner of his mouth. “Well, at least it wasn’t his right.”
“Sir?” Wesley said, squinting at the sergeant with his good eye.
“His hand. He’s right-handed, from what I remember.”
“Oh,” Wesley said. He dipped the cloth in a pan of water, then squeezed the excess out of it. “Do you think he’ll still be able to stay in the army, sir?”
Malone shook his head. “It’s doubtful.”
“That’s a shame,” Wesley said.
“Maybe,” Malone said, “maybe not. What if he went over there and got himself killed? At least this way he’s still walkin’ around on top of the ground.”
“Well…”
“Just like you, Franks. That Dear John letter you got may have saved your life in the long run.”
Wesley shook his head. He had been thinking a lot about what his shameful return home was going to be like; and he’d spent all day wishing he could just stay here in the infirmary forever. “I don’t know, sir,” he said to the sergeant. “I guess that all depends on what you think it’s worth.”
72
CHESTER HIGGENBOTHAM HEARD the noise and sat up. It sounded as if someone was trying to jimmy the front door. The news that the stable would soon be converted into a garage still had him down, and this afternoon, as soon as Hog handed him his week’s pay, he had headed for the Mecca Bar to drown his sorrows. He had passed out in the straw before sundown, and though it was now past midnight, he still felt a little drunk. He heard the noise again. “Shit,” he said under his breath. In return for his six dollars a week and somewhere to sleep, he took care of the animals and cleaned out the stalls and kept an eye on the place at night. He picked up his squirrel rifle. As he stepped out the back door, he heard clamoring coming from uptown, men shouting and car engines roaring and a gunshot or two. Lord, some fools must be having a high ol’ time tonight, he thought. Maybe everybody in the goddamn county’s losing their job.
Slipping quietly around the side of the building, Chester saw a dark shape at the door, obviously prying on the lock. He called out, and when the man turned and started to run, he lifted his rifle and fired once without really aiming, regretting it as soon as he pulled the trigger. You dumb bastard, he berated himself. He’d been on a toot when he committed the stupid crimes that got him sent to Mansfield, and now here he was again, half drunk and shooting at somebody. Although prison was where he had learned to take care of horses, he’d vowed the day of his release that he’d kill himself before he ever went back. That’s what worried him most about the stable shutting down. It was all he’d done for the past thirty years, but the job had kept him out of trouble. True, it hadn’t been much of a life, but he’d seen the last time he was locked up what the young ones did to men his age, forcing them to kneel down like a supplicant beside some hoodlum’s bunk and gently knead his wang and blow little kisses on the head of it while the sonofabitch dreamed of some woman on the outside. No, he had it damn good compared to that. And, hell, you never knew, maybe Hog would change his mind about working on automobiles. So when he saw the man keep going, Chester breathed a sigh of relief and wished him luck, then went back inside the barn to finish sleeping off his debacle.
The bullet, however, didn’t just fly into the air aimlessly, as the stable bum thought. Getting hold of his horse had been the only plan Cane could think of when he left Jasper’s house. With the gangs of men roaming the streets, fired up on liquor and rumors and false sightings and the chance at reward money, it had taken him over an hour to sneak and dodge and crawl to the stables where he and Cob had left their rides three days ago. He was still trying to pry the hasp off the door with the barrel of Cob’s pistol when he heard Chester yell; and he didn’t get more than a few feet before the bullet knocked him sideways, tearing the hell out of his right kidney before lodging in his stomach wall. Stifling a cry, he kept going.
He ran on until he came to the iron railway trestle extending over the Scioto. He stumbled across it in the dark, then jogged north a mile or so along the tracks with his hand pressed against the rip in his side. By then, his new shirt and coat were soaked with blood. He stopped and pulled some paper currency out of the saddlebag and tried to staunch the wound with it. Then he walked on, panting raggedly. Three miles out of town, a freight train barreled past him; and he would have gladly given all the money he had ever stolen for one third-class ticket away from here. He managed to go a few more yards before he collapsed in a heap.
Lying in the sharp gravel, he stared wearily at some bobbing lights off in the distance for several minutes before he realized that he’d seen such a sight before, one night in Tennessee when a posse on horseback had followed them with torches. The moon came out from behind some clouds then, and he forced himself up and made his way into a grove of trees. He limped and lurched past a deserted camp of burned-out fires and tin cans and chicken bones where he figured some hobos occasionally stopped to take a respite. The wind picked up and the autumn leaves rattled in the trees. Deciding he couldn’t go on anymore tonight, he got down on his knees and crawled back under a thick mass of honeysuckle bushes. By then it was two o’clock in the morning. Resting his head on the saddlebag, he cocked his pistol and set it on his chest. He thought about how Chimney always volunteered to stand watch, no matter how tired he was, as if he didn’t trust him or Cob to stay awake. He wondered again what had happened exactly, how his brother had ended up in the custody of those soldiers. If he could make it to a town, maybe he could find…
When Cane woke up, the morning sky was overcast with gray clouds, and he was damp with drizzle and shivering with the cold. For the first time in his life, he was truly alone. He raised up on his elbows to take a look around, and as he did so, he felt more blood gush out of the bullet hole. Easing himself back down, he felt in his pockets and found his last cigar and some matches. He drew on it several times, hoping it might warm him, but then he started coughing, and stabbed it out on a wet leaf. For several minutes, he watched a cardinal hop from branch to branch, just a foot or so away from him, and then fly away.
As the drizzle became a rain, Cane drifted off again. He found himself in a house that seemed familiar, as if he had lived there for a long, long time. He was sitting in a chair by a fireplace reading a book, and from what he could tell, he was near the end of it. The smell of freshly baked bread and flowers wafted in the warm air, and through the curtained windows he could see that it was dark outside. Suddenly, a beautiful, dark-haired woman appeared in the room and started to walk by him, her dress rustling against her pale skin. Her hand reached out and lightly touched his shoulder; and he felt more at
peace right then than he’d ever felt in his life. Then she paused at a stairway and looked back; and the last thing he heard as he turned another page was her wishing him good night.
Epilogue
AFTER JASPER SHOWED up at their house with Cob one night in a rented carriage, the Fiddlers hid him in Eddie’s old room and then spent the entire winter trying to invent a convincing explanation as to who he was and why he was staying with them. They must have told each other a hundred different lies before they finally settled on one they thought might work. Then they went over that lie a hundred more times before Eula felt that Ellsworth was ready to tell it to someone, and in the end, they decided that that someone would be Parker. They figured with the way the storekeeper liked to spread gossip, all they had to do was get him to believe it, and within a week or two everyone in the township would.
And so one bright morning in the early spring of 1918, Ellsworth took Cob, along with a few sips of wine in a jar to give him courage, over to Nipgen to plant the seed. As they pulled the wagon into the lot, he patted the boy on the knee and reminded him again, “Just let me do the talking.” When they entered the store, he saw to his relief that no one else was there. So far, so good, Ellsworth thought to himself, but when Parker suddenly raised up from behind the counter, he panicked, forgetting all about Eula’s warning to just act normal, and before the storekeeper could even get a good look at who he was talking about, he’d finished the story about Junior without taking a single breath and ordered a pound of coffee, and then they were out the door.
Fortunately, though Parker did wonder a little why Ellsworth had seemed so nervous, he didn’t suspect anything was amiss, at least not at first. He’d seen the farmer shook up before over stuff that most men wouldn’t think twice about. Why, the Singletons could get him going with a mere smirk. And things such as what he’d described, well, they happened all the time. He sucked on a piece of hard candy while he thought it over, reworking the details a bit to give it a little more color, and by evening the storekeeper had told the story in various renditions to twenty or more customers. He was still revising it in his head when Dean Hartley came in right at closing time stinking of home brew and mumbled that he wanted a pound of salt fish.
Parker reached under the counter for a sheet of the old newspapers he saved back to wrap parcels in, and spread it on the counter. Then he took the lid off the barrel of cod and pulled four or five out. As he laid them on the scale tray, he glanced down at the paper and saw the faded drawings of the three outlaws that had caused so much commotion last fall. “Well, shit, that looks just like—” he started to say, but then stopped.
“Huh?” Hartley grunted.
“Nothing,” Parker said. “Just talkin’ to myself.” He pushed the sheet aside and wrapped the fish in another. As soon as Hartley staggered out, the storekeeper licked the brine off his fingers and locked the door. He picked up the paper and held it under the lamplight, wishing that he’d paid more attention to the boy while Ellsworth was talking. From what he could recall, though, there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between him and the chubby one in the picture other than a beard. Hell, maybe that was the reason Ells had been so jittery; maybe he was hiding something.
Pulling his visor down tight on his head, Parker tried to think it through. He might have been a meddler, but this, he realized, was a lot more serious than telling people that Lucille Adkins had gotten religion and was making her husband, Forrest, sleep in the shed because he was a sinner, or that someone saw Old Man Cottrill walking down the road without any clothes on the other day. Cutting a chunk of meat off a smoked ham hanging in the window, he chewed on it slowly. The money didn’t interest him; he had enough of that saved back to last him out if he shut down the store tomorrow. So the big question was, even if the boy was one of the outlaws, what good would it do to tell the authorities? For sure, Ells and Eula would get in trouble for harboring a criminal—Lord, they’d probably even go to prison—and then everybody would look upon him as a squealer, a rat, a no-account Judas. And as far as that went, how many times last year had he heard poor men stand right in this store and talk about the gang as if they were heroes, say that they wished they had the guts to go rob a bank? Quite a few. Not only that, how many had shaken their heads sadly when they’d heard that the one had been caught in Meade? Again, quite a few. Too, what if he was wrong? Why, he’d look like the biggest fool around. The more he thought about it, the more preposterous it seemed. It was easier picturing the Singletons as sex-crazed womanizers than believing someone as tame as Ellsworth Fiddler was buddies with cold-blooded desperadoes. When he finally turned out the lamp and went to bed, it was past midnight; and in the morning, he crumpled up the newspaper without looking at it again and burned it in the stove, having decided it best to stick with the story he’d been told. And just as the Fiddlers had hoped, within a few days everyone in the township believed Junior was the son of one of Eula’s cousins from up around Springfield, and that they had taken him in after both of his parents succumbed to the grippe within a few hours of each other. “Ye can tell the poor feller’s slow,” Parker said whenever he came to the end of the tale. “He just stood there like a statue with a grin on his face while Ells went on about his people a-dying. Reminds me of Tom Stout’s boy, the one that got hit in the head by that tree.”
Talk of the young man living with the Fiddlers began to die down after a couple of weeks, but then, after someone saw him and Ellsworth one Saturday at an auction in Bainbridge buying six Holsteins and a bull, it started up again for a while. Since it was common knowledge that Ells didn’t have two nickels to rub together, it was speculated that maybe Junior had been left a little inheritance. But that was as far as it went. By that time, Parker had repeated the story so much that he’d convinced himself it was true, and nobody else ever really wondered about the boy’s past or begrudged the farmer a few cattle for taking him in. There were, after all, new rumors every other day about the devastation being brought on by the Spanish influenza. And, too, as many pointed out whenever the subject did come up, maybe old Ells deserved some luck after losing his savings to that thief down in Pike County, and his son running off and never coming back, although everyone did agree that it was terrible the way he fell into it.
As for Cob, except when he was around Ellsworth and Eula, he kept his mouth shut. Every morning when the first cow bawled in the feedlot, he hopped out of bed and put on his clothes, headed for the barn. He liked taking care of the milking by himself. It gave him time to think about what he was going to do. It bothered him something awful, trying to decide. Every time he imagined Cane coming for him, he felt half sick, and then he’d feel guilty. But the fact of the matter was he loved it here, and he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving, even with his brother. For close to two years, he agonized over it, and then one morning, as he rinsed out a bucket at the well, he realized that Cane had already made the decision for him, and was all right with letting him stay.
He’d always be finished with the milking by the time Ellsworth showed up, scratching and yawning. The old man would help him pour it through the strainer and into the metal containers they used to haul it over to Parker’s, and by the time they finished, Eula would be calling them to the house for breakfast. Then they would work in the fields some; and in the afternoon, they’d take the milk over to the store in the wagon, singing “The Old Brown Nag” seven or eight times before they got there.
After he carried the containers inside, Junior would hand Parker a dime for a soda pop and a cake and go out to the porch. Owning some cattle and a little business had given Ellsworth a boost of confidence he’d never had in the past, and he would often spend an hour or more talking inside. Of course, Junior didn’t mind waiting. He didn’t mind anything. It didn’t matter to him that the pop was warm, or the cake stale. He’d eaten a lot worse than that in his life. And who could ever find fault with sitting on his ass listening through the screen to some old men tell jokes and argue over the pri
ce of crops, or why anyone would ever want a telephone? Not him. Because he knew, with a certainty he’d never known before in his life, that no matter what was being discussed, eventually Ellsworth would come out the door and say, “Hey Junior, let’s head home.” And that’s exactly where they would go. Home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the following: First and foremost, local Ross County historian Rami Yoakum, for all the talks we had about Camp Sherman and Chillicothe during 1917 (sorry I didn’t stick with the facts, brother!); the Guggenheim Foundation, for helping keep food on the table; my agents and first readers, Richard Pine and Nathanial Jacks, for knowing just what to say; and my editors, Gerry Howard of Doubleday and Francis Geffard of Albin Michel, for all their advice, patience, and wisdom. Oh, and Dr. Ron Salomone, for riding my ass to finish the damn thing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Donald Ray Pollock is the author of the acclaimed novel The Devil All the Time and the story collection Knockemstiff, and the recipient of the 2009 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship. He worked as a laborer at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, from 1973 to 2005. He holds an MFA from Ohio State University.
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Donald Ray Pollock, The Heavenly Table
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