Free The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock

daddy to a couple of hillbilly bastards and hubby to a floozy who didn’t think twice about spreading her legs for a glass of cider and a cake doughnut.
    “You mean General Custer, don’t you?” Crank said.
    “Shit, what difference does it make?” Ballard replied. “He’s a prick, that’s what I’m saying.”
    Ellsworth stood waiting for a long time in the hot sun. The guards ignored him and he studied their brown uniforms and campaign hats out of the corner of his eye, trying to picture Eddie wearing one. He overheard Ballard tell a joke about a queer who set up house in a cucumber patch, but he couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. He wondered if either of them knew where Germany was located.
    When Zimmerman finally returned, his spine was even straighter than before. Unfortunately, in the time it took him to reach the office where the records were kept, he had allowed his mind to drift for a minute or two, first daydreaming about his next promotion and then worrying about what Ballard and Crank were saying behind his back, and he had forgotten the name the farmer had given him. “Who are you looking for?” the private behind the desk asked. Zimmerman had shut his eyes for a moment and strained his memory. The last name started with an “F,” of that he was sure. “Franklin,” he guessed. The private scrolled through several pages, then said, “Don’t see any Franklin, but we got a Wesley Franks signed in two days ago.” “That’s him,” Zimmerman said, and out the door he went.

    “Well, you were right,” he told Ellsworth. “They got a new one on the list goes by that name.”
    “Good,” the farmer said. “How do I get him back?”
    “You can’t,” Zimmerman said, shaking his head. “He’s already been inducted.”
    “But he’s only sixteen years old. That’s too young to be fightin’ the Germans, ain’t it?”
    “Too young!” Ballard spoke up. “Ain’t you heard? Them Huns got newborn babies chained to machine guns. They either fight or get dumped in the stew pot with the horse apples. Don’t worry, your boy’s plenty old enough.”
    “Good God, Ballard,” Zimmerman said, “you’ve been talkin’ to Sergeant Malone again.” The sergeant he referred to was a great spinner of horrific war stories, and much admired among some of the new recruits at Camp Pritchard. As a youth, he had fought in Cuba in 1898, and then, ever nostalgic for what he considered the “best three weeks of his life,” had quit his job in a glove factory in upstate New York and joined up with the Red Cross in the summer of 1915, it being the only way an American could get to the war at that time. Although he soon found out that the conflict in Europe was no horsey lark in the tropical boonies, to his credit he endured eighteen months of hell with an ambulance crew around Verdun before he began to go haywire and ended up in a loony bin down near Marseille. Despite his protestations, he was judged unfit for further service and sent home just a few weeks before the United States entered the fray. By then he was twitchy and gray and thirty-eight years old, a mere shell of the boy who once rode with Roosevelt, and though he didn’t think they would take him, he showed up at the recruiting station in Albany anyway. To his surprise, because of his experience at the Front, the whiskey on his breath had been ignored and he’d quickly been offered a sergeant’s rank. Now he was training doughboys how to take a shit in the mud without getting their heads blown off, and practicing a self-prescribed form of controlled drinking that kept him from diving to the ground every time a bird flew over.

    “So? I guarantee you Malone knows more about what’s goin’ on over there than your Lieutenant Bovard ever will.”
    “He’s a bad one to drink, my boy is,” Ellsworth interrupted. It was embarrassing to admit, but what did it matter? He would never see these men again anyway. “And dumb, too,” he added,