Kings of the Earth: A Novel (15 page)

Donna

T
HAT SON OF HERS
. It was getting so she hated to bring him. She hated even to raise the idea.

They owned two cars now, DeAlton’s great big bloodred Ninety-Eight and her little green Chevelle coupe, so on weekends the whole family didn’t need to do everything together. DeAlton could throw the clubs into the trunk and go play golf, and she could bake up a rhubarb pie and go visit her brothers. But getting Tom to come to the farm was harder every time, even though DeAlton was less and less agreeable to letting him come along to the country club and ride in the cart. She knew that his reluctance meant he was playing with a certain group of fast-living friends who spent more time in the clubhouse than they did hitting balls, but she tried not to let that bother her. What bothered her was Tom’s stubbornness.

His uncles loved him. She took no end of pleasure in witnessing it. To visit the Carversville farm without Tom was to let that go, and nobody was better for its loss other than perhaps Tom himself and then only in his own selfish imagination. He brought to the farm a kind of light and uplift, and she hated to deprive her brothers of its benefit. In turn his uncles could teach him a world of things. Things she didn’t even know and things that DeAlton had long ago rejected. Useful things.

Today, though, she had him along. DeAlton was busy all week at the State Fair, where he and Roy Dobson were in the Science and Industry Building demonstrating the very latest in milking technology. They had a thirty-foot booth decked out like an operating room, all gleaming steel and shining glass and soft red rubber tubing. Every hour on the hour they’d lift an exterior door and admit one prizewinning heifer or another and show the world exactly how it was done. DeAlton hated the whole thing. He hated it like poison. He hated wearing the coveralls and he hated showing his wares to the ignorant and he hated the public degradation of these poor innocent cows. Dobson Milkers got less and less profit from the fair with every year that went by—DeAlton would come home fuming about the little kids and maiden aunts and pencil-necked bookkeeper types who’d gawk at them as if they had no previous idea as to where milk came from—but for Roy Dobson it was an inviolate tradition. He’d sold his first machine at the State Fair, and that was that.

Tom had asked to go along but DeAlton had said no. No place on earth was more deathly boring than the Science and Industry Building, and no place on earth was less suited to an unsupervised boy than the rest of the fair. Any kid worth his Wheaties would say nuts to the blue-ribbon livestock and the horse jumping and the Porter Wagoner concert, and head straight down to the girlie tent on the midway. God help him he might even figure a way to sneak in. DeAlton figured he still had a right to have that conversation with his own son, and he’d do it on his own damned schedule.

Out of both generosity and self-defense, Donna put together some sandwiches before they left home. Baloney and cheese on white bread. She baked a rule of peanut butter cookies and put them in tinfoil. They stopped to pick up a couple of sacks of chips and she thought about maybe getting some of that smelly cheese that Audie liked but at the last minute she couldn’t bring herself to. Tom would be miserable enough without having to witness that. She had sponges and buckets and a mop in the trunk, along with a pair of rubber gloves and a million kinds of cleaning products. Tom had only himself.

Vernon

W
E HAD THAT DOG
forever or one just like it. They was just always around. One of them might hunt and the next one might not. They come as pups usually. Pups nobody’d have. I guess if you pay good money for a dog you expect something out of it but we never paid a nickel. So this one would hunt and the next one wouldn’t and you never could tell until they got their growth. This last one won’t hunt for shit. He’s about wore me out on dogs.

DeAlton

N
OBODY CAN MAKE YOU
go for a horseback ride. I don’t know what’s the big deal about a horseback ride anyway but nobody can make you take one, so quit it.

I know you’re growing up. I know. I already said you didn’t have to.

Hey. Now that’s not a bad idea. Just one problem. You’d need to be Dan Blocker to be too big to ride that horse. She’s what they call a Percheron. At least part of her is, somewhere. So just say you don’t want to if you don’t want to.

That’s right. He’s Hoss on television. Dan Blocker.

Anyhow you’ve got to go with your mother today, and tomorrow she’ll bring you on over to the fair. I promise. I’ll be there today like I said but I won’t enjoy it. We’ve all got to do things we don’t like. Even your old man. Sometimes especially.

Donna

H
ER BROTHERS MOVED
like the ghosts of drowned men traversing the ocean floor. Their pale hair and their pale beards wavered in the light wind as on deep currents. They went slowly and methodically, as if they and their aims were older than time and long past any need for urgency. The longer she lived in town, the more she took note of this antique strangeness of theirs. And seeing them now as she came up the dirt lane—Audie bent over the tractor, Vernon feeding the chickens, Creed dragging a spade toward the barn—she pictured her three brothers preserved in grainy black and white or some aged murky sepia. Perhaps not even that. Perhaps a woodcut.

Yet the two oldest had walked the earth for not even a century between them. The youngest was not yet forty and looked half again that. Work and woe had done to these men not their worst but just their usual, which was enough.

They heard her car coming and they looked up in unison like cows. Audie’s hand shook and he dropped his screwdriver into high weeds and he vanished after it. In a moment he came up grinning, put the screwdriver in his breast pocket, and went toward the car. If he had known how his eyesight would dim in the years to come, he would have filed away this moment of happy recognition so as to call it up in darker days. Instead he just went. His lips and tongue were stained red and the white of his beard at the corners of his mouth was stained red too, and inside the car Tom recoiled as if his uncle were one of the living dead he’d seen advertised on the theater marquee in Cassius. Audie was as speechless as they were and as implacable too. He came toward his nephew with his right hand outstretched and there was red not just on his mouth and in his beard but on his grasping fingertips.

Not blood, though. Just the juice of raspberries.

“I hope you didn’t eat them all,” Donna called out Tom’s window. The vagueness of it did little to ease her ignorant son’s alarm.

Audie planted his red hand on the sill and made it clear that no, there were all kinds of berries left. He could show Tom where they were. Donna opened the trunk and took out a bucket meant for other duties. She handed it to Tom and told him to hose it out before he put berries in it, as though any kind of sanitation were possible within five miles of this place.

Preston

T
HEY WENT UP
toward the edge of the woods. There’s no end of raspberry bushes up around there. I don’t know whether they’re on my property or theirs but it doesn’t make a difference. If a person’s got a stand of wild raspberry bushes that he never even planted in the first place and he can’t manage to share them with his neighbor, then it’s a pretty sad world. The dog went along, as I recall. The dog always liked that boy but the feeling was never mutual. Not that I knew of.

I sat on the screen porch watching them go. Tom kind of picked his way around the edge of the bushes but Audie dove right into the middle like it was a swimming pool. That’s what happens when you live on a farm your whole life. A few prickers don’t bother you anymore. He came back and reached out and grabbed the boy by the arm and took him in. The bushes were taller than Tom in places but Audie’s head stuck up. I hope he was putting as many raspberries in the bucket as he was eating because he was eating plenty. He always did. Not that he made any show of hiding it.

I watched them for a while and then I went back to my book. I was probably working on a Zane Grey. How that man could write. After maybe a half hour I heard a truck come up the road. The tanker from the co-op had already come and gone so it wasn’t that. I didn’t think anything of it. I looked up and saw Tom and Audie sitting by the bushes eating raspberries. Some dust blew across the pasture. I heard the truck engine start up again and the gearshift grind and somebody hollering. There was a sound of chains and slipping metal, that hard sound you hear. A shriek, and then something lowering down. I put my book on the little side table and went out the screen door into the backyard, where I could see what was what. I hate to be nosy, but a person can’t concentrate with that kind of noise going on. Not even on a Zane Grey.

The truck was a plain stake-bed with no markings on it. It was so rusted through and beat up that the Proctor boys could have owned it themselves if they’d ever wanted to own a truck. I couldn’t decide what color it was and I was looking right at it. It had a ramp in the back, and a couple of men I’d never seen before had pulled it out and lowered it down. One young and one old. The young one had on a ball cap and the old one didn’t. He was bareheaded and his head was sunburnt. They looked like father and son. The older one shook hands with Creed and they got to talking while the younger one went into the barn where Vernon was.

They looked like they were up to no good, and even though the Proctor boys aren’t stupid they’re as innocent as they come. Naïve.
Credulous
might be the word Margaret would use for it. So I went down. The older man was named Tubbs, and sure enough it said
TUBBS
around the other side of the truck where the paint wasn’t all worn off. I never found out if the younger one was his son but I think so. They had a similar way. There was another word on the side of the truck along with
TUBBS
and I should have guessed it from the look of things. I shook the old man’s hand and he said he’d come for the horse. That old part-Percheron mare. A bigger animal that was any less use would be hard to find unless you went to Africa or someplace. The Proctor boys were sold a bill of goods when they bought her and I didn’t think they were going to get out the other end of it any better with this Tubbs.

I asked him what he was paying and he told me it was none of my goddamned business. Creed told me instead. I thought about it a minute and then I looked him in the eye and I said by golly I didn’t know the horse was dead already.

Tubbs laughed right out loud. He shook his head and said that’s how much I knew about his business. Creed laughed right along with him. That old mare is just as alive as you or me, Tubbs said. He said if a man had a dead horse he’d need to pay somebody to haul it off and here he was giving good money for it.

I said I knew that. I said I just thought his price was a little bit low. The money he was putting up was just about what the bones and the hide were worth. Plus maybe the tail too if he had a customer for it.

He didn’t like that much.

I asked him if he’d weighed that mare yet, and how much he was getting for a pound of horsemeat on the open market. Seeing as how a live horse would yield up horsemeat and a horse part Percheron would yield up plenty.

He said a deal was a deal and I asked him to show me the papers. He said there weren’t any papers and he didn’t have to take that useless old nag off anybody’s hands unless the terms suited him. He pulled out his keys and made like he was going to get back into the cab of the truck but he didn’t. He shook his finger at Creed and said he was doing him and his brothers a favor. Asked him why he’d let me go sticking my nose into their goddamned business anyhow.

Creed put his hand on my shoulder and said something I never in all the world expected to hear. I think he must have gotten it from one of those lawyer shows. I don’t know how he’d saved it up but he did. You never know what’s in a person’s mind. He looked Tubbs straight in the eye and said he’d better get used to paying attention to me because I was his trusted business adviser. Just like that.
His trusted business adviser
.

I’ve never been so flattered in all my life.

Tubbs said all right maybe we could renegotiate the numbers a little, and I said OK let’s get down to it.

Audie

W
E STARTED DOWN
from the bushes. We were all over with raspberry juice and coming down with the mop bucket almost empty. I hoped Donna wouldn’t care. I was thinking she might want to bake a pie but she never baked a pie here. Only at home and brought them. I was thinking Tom might want a pie but he had his fill of raspberries already. So we were just coming on down. That old Tubbs was there with his truck, and he had the ramp down, and he was talking to my brother Creed and then Preston. He looked mad. His head was red and his face was getting red too. One from the sun and the other from Preston. Preston looked like he was giving old Tubbs what for.

Vernon came out of the barn with the mare. Tubbs’s boy was with him. Tom took one look and said he wasn’t interested in going for a horseback ride today and I told him that was all right. I said that mare wasn’t taking anybody for a ride. Not anymore she wasn’t.