Kings of the Earth: A Novel (20 page)
Read Kings of the Earth: A Novel Online
Authors: Jon Clinch
Tags: #Fiction - General, #Brothers, #Family Life, #General, #Literary, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Fiction, #Rural families
Ruth
H
E COMES PAST
the graveyard where she lies alongside Lester and he walks across the ridge to follow the slope of the pasture down. Aware of the dew settling in the grass and the dampness on his pant legs. Threading among the cows, entirely careless of where he steps but glad that he changed into his work boots out of the dress shoes he’s had on all day. Thinking how quickly things can go to ruin from one innocent mistake.
He smells the night everywhere and the cows on either side of him and the silage from down in the barn as its scent rises on a light southerly breeze. He hears the creaking of iron spindles and wooden dowels against iron fittings and wooden frames in the yard around front. He pictures Audie on the porch listening or down among them listening. The work Audie loves best, come to life. The clouds clear and he switches off the flashlight and keeps going. The creaking grows louder the nearer he gets. A half a hundred voices raised in the night and crying out. The earth turns and the sun shines somewhere and the temperatures shift and the wind comes up and these things—these creatures, for what else are they but created—these creatures cry out in their half a hundred voices. He pounds his damp boots on the dirt of the yard and scrapes a clod from one heel and enters the barn and finds the light switch. Just a couple of chickens and a duck and some cats. The cats look startled by the sudden illumination but the others are as insensible as bugs. He switches off the light and goes around front.
He sees the crown of Audie’s white head as he rounds the corner. He is on the porch, upright in the overstuffed chair that Vernon always claimed for his own. He sits like a man entranced, not plucking tatters from the chair and rolling them into pellets the way his brother did but absolutely still and moveless in the dark. Faint blooms of light creep over his face as cars pass on the main road below, but he is blind to them. Preston jingles the change in his pocket by way of announcing himself and Audie twitches. Preston speaks his name out loud and Audie recoils. Preston steps onto the porch and Audie drops from whatever trance he had lulled himself into and turns his head in his direction and begins to shake with such unearthly intensity that the little wooden feet of the overstuffed chair chatter on the board floor as if the chair means to bear itself and its poor palsied burden off to some more hospitable place.
“Where’d your brother get to.”
Audie makes no answer.
“That’s all right,” he says. “You take it easy and I’ll go find him myself.” Beginning to reach for the screen door, unsure of what to expect, thinking that Creed could not still be with the trooper after all this time. Wondering where he is.
Audie struggles to indicate that his brother is not in the house.
“I didn’t think so,” Preston says. “I guess that trooper didn’t bring him back yet, did he.”
Audie says no. The word as it emerges draws itself out into a howl less suited to a man than to a wolf. Forlorn and yearning and isolate. It quavers at the end when his breath fails and it rattles like some last exhalation and then he gasps himself back to life. Reduced to tears, collapsing on the big overstuffed chair into a position perhaps even less than fetal. In the yard the whirligigs scrape against themselves.
Preston comes to his side and kneels down. His knees hurt. He wants to go see about Creed but he can’t. He places a hand on Audie’s shivering side and at the touch of it Audie withdraws as if he’s been branded.
That rooster. Vernon give it to me. We was boys
.
Creed
F
OR ALL
I
WORRIED
about him my brother’d already ate his supper. Margaret fed him a pork chop I think and some sauerkraut and some mashed potatoes. I brung the microwave pizza Del Graham bought at the gas station but he didn’t want any part of it. He said he was too full already thanks to Margaret. He set there at her kitchen table patting his belly and saying it. He said why didn’t Margaret keep the microwave pizza. She had it coming.
Preston said he wanted to see Del Graham so he went out but I don’t think he got to him in time. Del Graham was pretty satisfied with his paperwork I guess and he pulled out quick. He had a lot on his mind. Not just Vernon I don’t think. When I was getting out of the car with the microwave pizza he asked me about a marijuana cigarette they found and I didn’t let on Tom had any connection to it. I told him Vernon used that stuff for the cancer and it just grew. It just grew around. Things grow on a farm whether a city boy knows it or not and that marijuana just grew like the rest. Del Graham laughed and he said he thought I was right about that. He was a city boy so what did he know. I didn’t say a word about Tom so he never found out.
Preston
E
VERYBODY IN THE FAMILY
just doted on that little girl right from the start. She was the last to come and she was the first one that wasn’t a boy. Her mother was always a mystery to me, but judging by the way she favored Donna I always thought maybe when she married Lester she married down. I don’t know why I say that because I don’t know a single fact about her life before. It was just a feeling I had. Like she hoped her daughter could be what she was supposed to be herself. You expect that with boys usually but not with girls. I don’t know why that would be. Maybe things are changing. Anyhow there’s no question those boys rose up above their no-account father and Donna surpassed her mother with nursing school and all that, so I guess everybody got their wish.
Donna and Audie had similarities even though you might not think it. Each one of them was the younger of a pair: Vernon and Audie, Creed and Donna. They were what, ten years apart? That’s a big gap. Until Creed came along Audie’d been the youngest for a good long while and I think he got used to it. It suited him. Folks either expect the world from the youngest child or else they baby him along. Sometimes a little of both. So they had that in common. Anyhow Donna was just a little thing in elementary school around the time I’m talking about. Her mother dressed her like a doll, at least as far as she was able. Being the one girl, she didn’t get hand-me-downs, or at least not directly. The ones she got probably came from the Salvation Army or the church. She certainly didn’t get them the way Creed did, him being third in line. I guess if she’d been a tomboy she’d have fit right in and been able to carry on the family tradition, but she wasn’t a tomboy so she didn’t have to. I don’t guess her mother would have let her be one. So she wore a dress to school every day. Not that I guess she smelled any better than the rest of them.
One day Vernon came along and asked me if I’d run him down to see that fellow Driscoll over by the creek. That’s Cassius Creek, not Fish Creek. Fish Creek runs into the lake. Cassius Creek runs I don’t know where, it just runs. Driscoll has a sawmill down by the creek. Back when he was younger he did a little bit of every kind of woodworking there might be any call for. Not just sawmill work. He’d take down a tree if you needed one taken down or he’d haul it away if it came down all by itself. Then he’d cut it up and dry it out in a couple of barns he had and sell it back to you or somebody else. He had a couple of big planers and some joinery equipment and he did some carpentry and even a little bit of cabinetmaking. In those days Driscoll used to be a kind of a one-man band when it came to wood.
He’d come the summer before and taken down a cherry tree from up along the top of the pasture that’d been hit by lightning, and now he’d called back and said he had some wood from it for Audie. For his whirligigs. I don’t know how they had the details of that transaction worked out. The cherry tree was worth something to him and hauling it away was worth something to the boys and the lumber he got out of it was definitely worth something to pretty much anybody. Those little bitty pieces Audie put into his whirligigs weren’t worth anything. They were just scrap.
When Vernon came near he had Audie with him but he didn’t mention anything about Audie going. Just him. I said why didn’t Driscoll just drop off that little bit of wood when he was out driving around, but he gave me a look and leaned in toward me so Audie couldn’t hear and said there was more to it than that. I asked him what and he laughed and said it was a secret, and I said not from me it isn’t. Not if I was doing the driving. He said a secret was a secret and then he just shut up, grinning. I said all right I’d take him if he was going to be that way.
I tell you what, it turned out to be a fool’s errand.
The first thing was, Driscoll didn’t have enough scrap lumber to fill up a milk crate. It wasn’t worth the gas to drive over, and this was when gas was twenty-five cents. The second thing was, it turned out we didn’t go for the lumber anyhow. That was a ruse on Vernon’s part. The real reason was Driscoll had an old wood lathe he was getting rid of, and Vernon wanted it for Audie.
I said to Vernon now how in the world am I supposed to get that home in my car. He said he thought we’d have better luck with the car than with the tractor, and I had to admit he had a point. Driscoll threw a switch and shut down the saw he was running and came hustling over under a full head of steam and said what was wrong with him. Couldn’t he wait a week, for Christ’s sake. He said he’d told him on the telephone that he’d bring that lathe out to the farm next week. No charge. Just to get rid of it. Provided he could wait that long.
Well, didn’t Vernon look sheepish. Disappointed and sheepish both. I told him it was all right. His brother had waited this long and he could wait another week. I said remember he didn’t even know he was waiting for anything in the first place. Vernon asked was I sure we couldn’t take it to pieces and get it in the car some way and I said I wasn’t about to take it to pieces and Driscoll said he didn’t have any time to fool with it now. He’d bring it out in a week.
Donna
W
HEN IT ARRIVED
on Driscoll’s truck, it looked bigger. Driscoll had a crane mounted on the back for wrangling tree trunks and sawn wood and with the help of it he’d gotten the lathe on board all by himself. He backed the truck all the way up from the main road and got out and stood all alone in the dirt swatting at flies with a straw hat, looking like he’d made a terrible mistake. Like unless someone appeared directly to give him a hand he might just tip the whole thing into the barnyard like the trash it was and leave it there to rust. The Proctor boys were slow in materializing, but one by one they detected his presence and emerged from their various secret occupations. Young Creed lowering himself from the hayloft. Vernon stepping from behind the house, buttoning up the fly of his coveralls and squirting a jet of tobacco juice at the dog. Audie piloting the tractor down from a high cornfield, mounted on it like some pale rider. They converged, already a gathering of spirits, wordless.
“I ain’t got all day,” said Driscoll.
Ruth and Donna poked their heads around the corner of the porch and came down into the dooryard as yet only lightly populated by Audie’s makings. A live rooster pecking, and another rooster of wind-driven wood making as if to peck. A man sawing timber. Something with wings.
Vernon got Audie’s attention and climbed up on the truck bed and put his arm around the lathe as proudly as if he had fathered it himself. He said it would belong to Audie from now on but Audie had trouble getting the drift. Vernon looked disappointed but he kept on. He paced off the dimensions of the lathe and went into the barn and paced them off again and came back out and said he’d miscalculated. It wouldn’t fit where he’d thought. Driscoll’s shoulders fell and he uttered a curse, not the day’s last. He said he reckoned he could take it to the dump then just as easily as not. Vernon’s shoulders fell but he uttered no curse to match Driscoll’s, his mother and his innocent little sister being present after all.
Creed suggested the hayloft. Driscoll tilted his head back to study the old barn and concluded that he didn’t believe it would support a good snowfall much less woodworking equipment. Creed said he might be surprised. Driscoll shook his head and swatted flies and whistled through his teeth. Creed said if Driscoll hadn’t lifted a hay bale lately he would be surprised for certain, for they were far heavier than a man might think and the loft held mountains of them just fine. Driscoll put on his hat and said all right, maybe it wasn’t such a stupid idea after all, and he went in to size up the timbers and came out not entirely satisfied but not about to hold back progress either. It was their barn.
Vernon
D
RISCOLL THOUGHT IT WOULDN’T WORK
but he was wrong. We used the block and tackle. We hoisted it right up and in through the door just as easy as pie. I sent Audie up to clear a place for it first while Driscoll backed the truck around and we untied the straps he had on it to hold it down. He had it tied down good so it didn’t fall off. I went up and showed Audie how big a space to clear and he cleared it. We hung the block and tackle from the beam and lifted it up. When we got it in I said Driscoll ought to show us how to work it and he said plug it in first he didn’t have all day. We didn’t have juice up there it turned out but that was all right because it didn’t take a regular plug anyhow. Driscoll said we had to have a two-twenty line if we wanted to run it or else we could just keep it for a decoration. He laughed about that. How we’d have it for a decoration in the hayloft. He climbed down laughing and he was laughing when he drove off. Preston put in the juice for it later. He was always handy. He was always a good friend. Then he showed me how to run it and I showed Audie.