Laying the bread down, Ellsworth looked away as he took a drink of buttermilk. At age fifty-two, he had a friendly, somewhat meek face, and thinning gray hair that Eula kept trimmed with a pair of sewing scissors. He could still outwork most men in the township, though sometimes now he woke up in the morning wondering how long he could keep it up. Since the embarrassment suffered last fall, he had grown heavier in the belly and jowls, even with Eula’s rationing, and had recently developed a slight stoop that often made him look as if he were searching the ground for a nail that had dropped out of his pocket, or the clue to a mystery he was forever trying to solve. In many ways, the con man had stolen more than just money from them.
On the afternoon that he came in from the fields and Eula told him Pickles had been shot, he went straight to Eddie’s room. When he flung the door open, the boy jumped up from his bed, and a book lying beside him fell to the floor. He had just finished digging the cat’s grave a few minutes before, and was still shiny with sweat. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Ellsworth had yelled.
“It was an accident, I swear,” Eddie said.
“An accident? How could such a thing be an accident?”
“I tripped and the gun went off. I didn’t mean to do it.” To an extent, anyway, Eddie was telling the truth. After spending the morning secretly sipping on some of his father’s wine and searching fruitlessly through a tattered book called Tom Jones for the juicy parts that Corky Routt had promised were in it, he had grown bored and decided to sneak the shotgun out of the closet and go blast a couple of birds. He was staggering across the backyard with Pickles sashaying along a few feet in front of him when he stumbled and fell. The gun, which had a loose trigger, went off when it hit the ground, and he lay there cursing for a minute before he raised up and saw that the blast had split the cat nearly in half.
“You been drinking again, ain’t ye?” Ellsworth said, looking at the boy’s bloodshot eyes.
“No,” Eddie answered nervously, “but with the way Mom carried on, I almost wish I had been.”
Ellsworth shook his head. Though he tried his best to love his son and accept him for who he was, he found himself wishing yet again that he was more like Tom Taylor’s boy, Tuck, big and rawboned and shoeing mules by the time he was ten years old. He felt guilty whenever he had such thoughts, but he had been waiting years for the boy to straighten up and be of some use. Not once had he ever given Eddie a proper thrashing, and though he had no stomach for any kind of cruelty—be it kicking dogs or whipping horses or drowning kittens or beating children—he regretted his soft touch now. Farming fifty acres by himself was hard work, and he wasn’t getting any younger. Now he was beginning to wonder if Eddie, with his lazy ways and thin wrists and that shaggy mop of blondish hair always hanging in his eyes, might have been better off a girl. At least then there might have been a chance of landing a stout son-in-law who could help out. But everything was a trade-off, and so whatever a man did, he usually ended up wishing he had done the other. “What’s that book you got there?” he asked.
“Uh, well,” Eddie stammered, “it’s about a guy who—”
“I don’t give a hoot what it’s about. Where’d ye get it?”
“Corky loaned it to me.”
“Well, you go on over to his house right now and give it back.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I mean it,” Ellsworth said. “Won’t be no more readin’ around here till you straighten up.” Eula had insisted that Eddie finish the sixth grade before he was allowed to quit school, and the farmer was convinced that a big part of the boy’s problem had to do with his education. In other words, he had gotten just enough of it to fuck him up for the real world. Ellsworth had seen it happen before, mostly to flighty types like horny spinsters and weak-eyed store clerks with a lot of time to kill. They would stick their noses in a book and then all of a sudden Ross County, Ohio, wasn’t good enough for them. The next thing you knew, they either got caught up in some perversion, like the old Wilkins woman who somehow managed to split herself open on a bedpost, or they lit out for some big city like Dayton or Toledo, in search of their “destiny.” Sometimes the line that divided those two impulses blurred until they amounted to pretty much the same thing, as in the case of the Fletcher boy the police found butchered in a hotel room in Cincinnati with a woman’s wig glued to his head and his pecker tossed under the bed like a cast-off shoe.
Ellsworth could sense his wife staring at him from across the table, waiting on an answer about the wine. He set his glass down and cleared his throat. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with Eddie takin’ off,” he finally said.
“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.”