The Heavenly Table Read Free

end of September last year, and casually asked if he might know someone who’d be interested in buying fifty Guernsey cows at twenty dollars a head. “Why so cheap?” Ellsworth had asked suspiciously. He knew for a fact that Henry Robbins had paid over twice that just a couple of weeks ago for some Holstein calves.
    “Well, to tell ye the truth,” the man said, “I’m up against it. My wife’s took sick and the doctor says she won’t last another six months if’n I don’t get her to warmer weather.”
    “Oh,” Ellsworth said, “I hate to hear that.”
    “Consumption,” the man went on. “Nolie never was in any good shape, not even back when I married her damn near twenty years ago, but I didn’t care. And I still don’t. Wasn’t her fault she was born sickly. I’d gladly make a deal with ol’ Beelzebub just so she might draw one more breath. The way I see it, a man that don’t do everything he can to uphold his marriage vows ain’t much of a man.” He pulled a soiled handkerchief from his coat and patted his eyes with it. “Anyway, that’s why I’m in a hurry to sell.”
    Ellsworth was impressed with the man’s speech; he felt much the same way about Eula, though he wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to trade around with the Devil, no matter how bad things got. “How much would them cows figure up to altogether?” he had asked, unable to calculate such a high number on his own.

    “A thousand dollars,” Eddie spoke up.
    “That’s right,” the man said. “Boy’s got a good head on his shoulders, don’t he?”
    “I reckon,” Ellsworth murmured, looking past the man at a yellow finch that had just landed a few yards away in a crabapple tree. He and Eula had a thousand dollars put back, but it was all the money they had in the world, and it had taken them years to save it. Still, if he could convince her to go along with this, he’d own more cattle than anybody else in the township. And if he didn’t buy them, somebody else surely would before the day was out. It was just too good a deal to pass up. He took a deep breath. “I’d have to talk this over with my wife first,” he said.
    “I know exactly what you mean,” the man said. “I don’t spend a dime without talkin’ it over with Nolie.”
    The man had followed them home, waited in the front yard while Ellsworth went inside the house. He found Eula sitting at the kitchen table having her afternoon cup of coffee. Pacing back and forth, he explained the situation twenty different ways in increasingly glowing terms, occasionally stopping to remind her that he knew as much about cattle as Henry Robbins, and then some. “We could have one of the best dairy farms around,” he told her. “Or, we could just take ’em to auction and double our money. Either way, it’s the chance of a lifetime.” Of course, she had been resistant, as he had known she would be, but after an hour of his going on about it with no sign of a letup, she reluctantly gave in. She went into the bedroom and returned with the money jar she kept hidden under a loose board behind the dresser. “You look those cows over good before you go to handin’ him this,” she said.
    Three hours later, he and Eddie and the man passed through a wide, sturdy gate to a large farm set between some wooded hills in Pike County. Ellsworth looked about admiringly at the rolling green pastures and acres of corn and hay and the freshly painted barn and scattered outbuildings and the brick two-story house set back among some tall oaks. “Quite a place ye got here,” he said.

    “Yes, it is,” the man said. “The Lord’s been good to me.”
    Ellsworth had wondered what was going to happen to the land, but he hated to ask. After all, the old boy was already taking a beating on his livestock. He remembered later that he’d been a little surprised at how soft the man’s hand seemed when he shook it to finalize the transaction. And then there was the checkered suit coat and