“What say?”
After taking a deep breath to steady himself, Chimney replied in a loud voice, “I said I’d gobble down frog shit and thistles if that’s what it takes to stay on His good side.”
“That’s right,” Pearl said, nodding his head. “As would I.” Then he pulled up his pants and tightened his belt another notch before walking away, whistling the first few notes of some half-forgotten hymn that Lucille used to sing to herself.
“Me, too,” Cob said after the old man was out of earshot. “Why, I’d eat me a pile of rocks if that’s what it took.” Ever since he had first heard Pearl describe heaven as some sort of celestial banquet hall where the food was piled high forever and you just helped yourself whenever you took a notion, Cob had become obsessed with gaining entry to it. The only other thing that had impressed him as much in all his nineteen years was Willy the Whale, a huge retarded oaf they had once seen in a stall at a county fair in Hancock County. Said to have been discovered living on pinecones and bat guano in a cave in the Smoky Mountains, Willy was so fat he used a woman’s petticoat for a napkin. His manager was taking bets that he could eat half a hogshead of raw crawdads in an hour. Though they were supposed to be alive, anyone could see that a good three or four inches of dead ones were floating around on top of the greasy brown water. It wasn’t until that day, when he saw the manager, with just a minute to go, cram the last of the bottom-feeders down Willy’s throat with a long wooden spatula as if he were priming a cannon, that Cob realized such a thing as a truly full belly was even possible anywhere else but in the Promised Land. And although something crucial had burst inside Willy and he died right in front of the crowd while the wagers were being collected, Cob was still a little upset that Cane hadn’t let him audition for the job when the carny came around later looking for someone with a healthy appetite to fill in for the evening show.
Chimney tossed another moldy spud across the yard, then turned to look at Cane. “What was it Bloody Bill said? ‘I’d rather rob and kill and be free for just one day than be stuck under some bastard’s thumb for a hundred years’?”
“That Bloody Bill,” Cob said, “he a bad one.”
Cane sat back in the dirt. “I believe he said ‘under some Yankee’s thumb,’ but you quoted him fairly right.” By then, he had read to his brothers from The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket so often that Chimney could recite practically every word of it by memory. Even Cob was able to remember certain lines if prompted, at least a few that dealt with food and drink. Perhaps because their lives had been so empty of anything but hardship and toil, it had made quite an impression on them. The author, Charles Foster Winthrop III, a failed poet from Brooklyn who had once dreamed of becoming the next Robert Browning, had centered the plot of the novel around one Colonel William Buchet’s insatiable need to avenge himself against the Northerners who had pillaged his plantation during the Civil War and left him without even a single cotton ball to wipe his ass on; and Winthrop had filled the book with every act of rape, robbery, and murder that his indignant, syphilitic brain could possibly conceive. For this, his twentieth such potboiler in less than three years, he was paid the niggardly sum of thirty dollars. By the time he settled with his creditors, and spent an hour passing diseases back and forth with the foul and wrinkled whore who lived across the hall in his building, Winthrop didn’t have enough money left over to buy a loaf of bread. “Well,” he said that night to the vermin living behind the cracked plaster in his dank room, “I gave it my best, and that’s all a man can do.” He waited until morning, and then, with the same cool steadiness he had conferred upon Bloody Bill, his final creation, the hack brushed the rat turds off his one good suit and chugged down enough turpentine to peel the paint off a two-story house. By the time the Jewetts discovered the book in a cast-off carpetbag near Oxford, Mississippi, poor Winthrop had been moldering in a soggy, unmarked grave on an island in the East River for nearly seventeen years, another forgotten casualty of the callous and fickle literary world he had once hoped to conquer.
“Come on,” Chimney said, “let’s quit fiddle-fuckin’ around here and make a break for it. Shit, this ain’t no way to live.”