The Heavenly Table Read Free Page B

else had said. After that, she began to come around, and although he knew she might never forgive him for being so reckless and stupid, at least he no longer had to worry about her going cuckoo or choking down a cupful of rat poison.
    He scraped the last of the oatmeal from the bowl and stood up. Eula hadn’t said a word while he was eating, just sat there staring out the window sipping her coffee. “Well,” Ellsworth told her, “when he gets home, you tell him to meet me at the field across from Mrs. Chester’s place. And to bring a hoe.”

    “And what if he don’t show up?”
    “By God, he better,” Ellsworth said. “The weeds have damn near taken over.”

3
    L IFE HADN’T ALWAYS been so hard for Pearl Jewett. At one time, he’d had a farm of his own back in North Carolina, just a few acres, but big enough for a man to get by on if he was willing to bust his ass. Life was as good as an illiterate farmer with no birthright could hope for in those days, and Pearl made sure to give the Almighty credit for that. He’d been quite a drinker and hell-raiser in his youth, but he turned over a new leaf when he met Lucille, and the only times he fell off the wagon after they married were whenever she went into labor. Hence, the rather odd names bestowed upon his sons didn’t signify anything of great importance, but were simply the result of what happens when a man who’s been off the sauce for a while consumes too much whiskey and then insists on having his way. With Cane, he had drawn his inspiration from a walking stick that someone had beaten him over the head with in a rowdy tavern; in the case of Cob, it turned out to be a half-eaten roasting ear he discovered in his back pocket after coming to under the porch of a boardinghouse called the Rebel Inn; while in regard to Chimney, it was a stovepipe that he was fairly certain he had helped a neighbor fashion from a sheet of tin in return for a cup of liquor that tasted like muddy kerosene and left him without any feeling in his fingers and toes for several days. And though Lucille would have preferred Christian names such as John and Luke and Adam, she figured the damage could have been worse, and she just counted her blessings that he was back home and walking a straight line again. He sacrificed much, even giving up tobacco, to pay for a pew in the First Baptist Church of Righteous Revelation in nearby Hazelwood, and every Sunday morning for the next few years, no matter what the weather, he and his young family walked the three miles there to worship. Pearl was especially proud that his wife was one of the few people in the congregation besides the minister who could read the lessons, and so, despite the fact that Lucille’s shyness sometimes made it hard for her to look even him in the eye, he had quickly volunteered her after the last lay reader, a silken-voiced, holier-than-thou man named Sorghum Simmons, backslid and ran off with a deacon’s wife and a business partner’s money. Every week he had to coax her into walking to the front of the church, telling himself it was for her own good. Thus, when she first started staying in bed on the Sabbath, complaining of feeling weak and light-headed, he couldn’t help but think she was faking it, and several months passed before he realized she really was sick.

    By that time, Lucille had lost a considerable amount of weight, and her sagging skin had turned the dreary gray color of a rain cloud. Taking out a lien against the land, Pearl sent for doctors. One of them bled her and another prescribed expensive tonics while a third put her on a diet of curds and raw onions, but nothing seemed to help. Then the money ran out and all he could do was watch her slowly wither away. What struck her down remained a mystery until the night of her wake. As he sat alone keeping company with her corpse in the dim, flickering light of a single candle, Pearl noticed that the tip of her tongue was sticking out from between her