Kings of the Earth: A Novel (3 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
Audie
T
HEY ALL CAME OUT TOGETHER
. They came out together alive and dead both. The humming of their talk and the grinding of their feet on the boards. The knocking of that plank against the doorframe like Vernon wanted something. I thought I would go feed the turkeys but the cows were calling from the barn all mournful. I heard them through the barn wall so instead of going out to the school bus where we keep the turkeys I pried open the track door and slid on in among them. I got a pail and the milking stool and I squatted down and took hold of the first teat that come to hand and I worked it. I was shaking some and a little of the milk caught me in the knee when it spurted out and it ran down my leg and reminded me how the bed was dry when I woke up. The bed was dry and Vernon was dead in it and I was the oldest, the oldest and left to follow him. But not all the way. Not yet.
Donna
G
RAHAM STEPPED OFF
the porch last. “Put out those smokes and give these fellows a hand why don’t you?” He was talking to the other troopers. It was his way of giving orders. “Make yourselves useful.”
Donna stood in the dirt watching the technicians set the brakes on the stretcher and check it and open the rear door of the ambulance. She looked woeful and aghast, collapsed in on herself.
“I’m sorry about your brother.”
“I know. Thank you.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a white card and gave it to her along with his name.
“They all sleep in that same bed, you know. Slept.”
Graham fitted his hat on his head and looked out over the yard. At the bare dirt and the sprays of tobacco juice soaking into it. At the whirligigs turning in the breeze. At the collapsed fence and the fields beyond it and the dirt lane running through. He tilted the hat back on his head by a few degrees and he scratched at his forehead with two fingers and he tilted it back down. “This’s a hard way to live,” he said.
“I told myself I’d never come back.”
“When was that.”
“Whenever. Always. I’d imagine going off somewhere and wherever I’d got to I’d never come back. Wherever turned out to be two-year college. Then nursing school.”
Graham looked at her and thought she wouldn’t mind if he said it. “That makes you the black sheep.”
“I guess it does.” She didn’t mind. It wasn’t the first time.
The technicians had the door open and the front legs of the stretcher unlatched and sprung and they were getting set to slide it in, working slowly, as if it were the only job they would have to do all day. There was a time for urgency and there was a time for this.
“You never got a look at your brother.”
“No.”
“I was wondering maybe you would want to.” He watched the men. “What with the nursing school and all.”
Her right arm hung down straight along her side and she reached behind her back with her left to hold it by the elbow.
“I just thought.”
“There’s a thousand things that could have killed Vernon.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“God knows how he lived this long.” She sighed and let go of her elbow and started down toward the ambulance, just to take a look.
Preston
I
TOOK HIM
to the hospital myself that one time. I had an old blue Nash 600 I’d picked up secondhand and I had him laid out flat in the back of it. Creed was in Korea then and the old man was long dead and Audie was every bit as useless as he is now. This was the spring of fifty-two. Early spring. The snow just gone in most places and in some other places not even.
Vernon and Audie’d taken the spike-tooth harrow down to get it ready. It was an antique even back then. They were dragging it across the floor of the barn and a tooth caught and broke off, and it flew and it took Vernon straight through the calf. It came all the way through and half out the other side. The calf of his right leg. He never did walk right after that.
This was early in the day and I hadn’t gone to work yet. I heard a howl from my upstairs window and I went down and opened the kitchen door and the howling hadn’t quit so I went out. It was a man, I knew that. It wasn’t any animal I ever heard of. I got my coat and I went out and I went straight down the hill through the mud and what snow there was. I followed that howl. I didn’t even go by the driveway. It didn’t occur to me. I just went right straight down.
Of course it wasn’t Vernon. Vernon had himself propped up on that harrow with his leg on the crossbar and he had a piece of angle iron in his one hand. He began to beat on that spike in his leg and Audie was howling and he wouldn’t let up. He beat on it and I hollered at him not to but he kept on, with Audie on his knees and shaking and howling all the while. Six or seven good blows and he drove that spike clear out the other side and it just fell down in the dirt and bounced once and laid there.
Audie kept shaking and howling and he wouldn’t stop even though the spike was out and Vernon was limping toward the stall. The leg of his pants was red and there was blood on his boot and blood on the floor soaking into the dirt and into the straw wherever he stepped. I told him he had to let a doctor see it but he said no. Vernon’d never do anything you told him he had to do. That’d been his way since he was a boy. He shook out a feed bag and tore a strip off it and got him some baling twine and he rolled up that pant leg and wrapped the rag around where the spike had gone through and tied it off. A black hole on both sides, pumping. That’s going to bleed, I told him, that’s going to keep bleeding and you won’t stop it like that. You ought to at least put it up in the air, I said, but there were chores to be done and he shut his ears to me. He said, The sooner I get back to work the sooner that idiot stops his blubbering. He was right about that.
That rusted-through spike was broken off clean and there was no repairing it. Vernon kicked it out into the yard with his good leg and then he hoisted his brother to his feet and the two of them went to work side by side at the bench as if they had just one mind between them. Audie holding that piece of angle iron steady and Vernon hammering at it until they’d made themselves a pretty fair replacement for that rotten spike. Vernon’s leg wasn’t bleeding so much now or at least not so much that he was leaking everywhere. When they were satisfied with the hammering Vernon fetched down a brace and bit and put a couple of holes in the top of it by eye and they mounted that old piece of angle iron on the harrow like it was made for the job. I’d say I’d never seen the like of it but I had. You see a lot, you live alongside those boys their whole lives.
Anyway, that wasn’t the time I took Vernon to the hospital. That came later on, when the blood poisoning set in and he about died from it. He’d bandaged a piece of salt pork over the hole to draw the infection but it hadn’t worked. Vernon rode in the backseat and Audie in the front. I drove fast and we had the windows open and Audie lost his hat. He didn’t mind. I don’t know that he even missed it. He leaned forward and watched the world go by a whole lot faster than he’d ever seen it go by from the seat of a tractor and he looked so happy. He looked happy enough to sing a song if he’d known the words to one.
Ruth
E
VERY SINGLE ONE
of their children will arrive in the fall of the year. From December to April the house is an icebox—just the two little square rooms in front and the long narrow one behind, but it won’t stay warm for anything. Not for all the firewood in the world. Not with the stove in the first of the front rooms and the boys Vernon and Audie sharing a bed in the other and the passage to their parents’ little narrow hallway of a sleeping room going through there. Just a cut in the wall, really. Not even a door to it and in the wintertime not even so much as a curtain, but the heat from the stove in the front room will give out rather than travel that far. Lester is forever promising to saw a hole in the kitchen wall to let the heat through but he never gets around to it. Instead he and Ruth work on the next child. Creed. That third boy still nothing but a temporary refuge against hard weather.
A house is going up on the next lot and it will be much finer than this one. When the workmen dug its foundation the summer before they measured it out probably half again as wide and twice as deep as the stone pilings under the Proctor place and they took it down six or maybe seven feet into the earth, which Lester said would help keep out the cold as long as they were smart enough to seal it off right. They might even put a root cellar down there if they had any sense, or a place for canned goods or any such other excess as the people who live in so grand a two-story house might accumulate. Ruth knows how deep they dug because she’s had to pull one boy or the other out of the hole. But that was back in the summer, and now it is closed off and the walls are framed out and the whole place is boarded up weathertight and roofed over. They haven’t cut the windows yet so it sits there on its little hill blind and poker-faced. It catches the light in the morning, and Ruth leans against the barn door, looking at it and listening to the stretching sounds it makes as it grows warm and comfortable in the sun. Thinking what a shame it is to let such a thing stand empty even for a minute.
Once a week at most—usually Saturday night, according to custom, although when Ruth married Lester she gave up any hope of going to church on Sunday morning—she heats water in a pair of old cooking pots and a Dutch oven and a tea kettle on the black iron stove, and when it draws near to a boil she pours it out into a galvanized washtub and heats more and pours that out in turn until the bath is ready. The boys get clean enough, but considering the work of splitting the wood and stoking the fire and drawing the water from the pump and boiling it on that black iron stove with the rooster on the side, and considering how rapidly they get themselves filthy again, she has her doubts. She gets nothing but complaint from Lester for his role in it, and she has to wonder how long both of those boys will continue to fit into the galvanized tub anyhow. Two separate baths will be too much to manage. She can almost see Vernon handling his own in a year or two, but then there is Audie to consider. There is always Audie to consider and there always will be. He is like the poor, forever with us.
Five and six years old now, they’re still a pair of tadpoles. Slippery in the soapy water. Where it slops over onto the board floor it freezes, and when she shifts her position for better purchase on one boy or the other her knees skid over thin sheets of it. Stuttering beneath her.
She stands them up one after the other and rubs their narrow bodies of bone with a towel thin as gauze, working from the top down with their feet still planted in the warm gray water. Then she lifts them out one after the other too and they stand in turn on the thin-iced floor and she finishes drying their lower parts if they have the patience for it. Then off they go. Chasing each other around the frozen house like the pair of innocent animals they are. Otters. Their little wrinkled toes and fingers and other parts alien. Comfortable in the water or out of it, sun-warm or otherwise.
Bucket by bucket she empties the tub, making trip after trip through the front door and onto the snow-blown porch and over to the edge of it the greatest distance from the barn, stepping to the rail and casting the soapy leavings into black air that freezes it into long, curved, glimmering sheets, lit by stars and falling.
Audie
M
Y BROTHER
V
ERNON
was bare and I was bare too and the old man hollered at us to quit horsing around. The old man was in his bedroom. He was drinking, but not from the still. We didn’t have the still then. Creed built that later and he had plenty of help and the old man was gone on ahead or else he’d helped too and then he’d helped drink whatever came out of it. That was his way. He was handy but he was handy with a drink too. The old man hollered at us to quit horsing around but we didn’t and he didn’t stop hollering and I guess he didn’t stop drinking either. My mother coming and going. My brother Vernon leaned over the washtub and put his hands on the rim of it and dared me to come around and give him a dunking if I thought I could manage it. I thought I could and I done it too but not quite. I come on around and my foot caught a smooth spot that was maybe ice and maybe not but either way it set me aspin and where did I go but into the stove. That old red rooster.
Lester
I
GELDED A HORSE
or two in my time and I cauterized the cut. I helped do it and I learnt how. This was over on the Middle Road with Lawson. He kept horses. I was just a boy. Lawson was a fast hand at that work, fast with the blade and fast with the iron both. You had to be fast. There weren’t no other way. He showed me how to work the blade and the hot iron. The one to cut and the one to cauterize. You’d think it’d have a meat smell but it don’t. I don’t know why. All that burning that’s what you’d think. There’s noise when you first done it but after you was done if you’d done it right the horse’d rise up and shake all over and walk away. Just like that. You’d think there’d be more to it but there ain’t. A horse don’t know how to complain.
Them two boys of mine was making a racket in the front room and I told them to quiet down but they didn’t. Maybe they did a little but it didn’t last. I hollered at them one more time and it didn’t change nothing but I didn’t come out from where I was neither. I weren’t about to. She was opening the door and closing it and opening it again, going in and out. That front room was about froze over and I had the curtain drawn against it and I weren’t coming out from where I was no matter what.
At least I didn’t mean to. But they set up a hollering, first one and then the other, and then their mother come back in and something clanged and she begun hollering too. I can’t say if I judged it was important or if I’d just stood enough of their carrying on and hers too but either way I went. I put down the bottle and went.
What clanged was that tin pail. I seen it right off. Rolling across the floor bent, like that woman didn’t care nothing for it and flung it hard as she could just to be shut of it. Like it was the pail caused everything. She had the young one by his shoulders and he was still hollering. All mouth. A hole big enough to drive a tractor through. And he was hopping too, just hopping up and down and hollering. I seen that rooster on his back like the one on the stove and red like it too and I smelt that smell I remembered from Lawson’s place with that red-hot iron. It weren’t a meat smell but I remembered it the same. I took that boy up and I hugged him to my chest and I hauled him outdoors into the snow and I threw him down. That was the best thing for him. He kept on hollering and he tried to get up but I held him down. Oh how he hollered. If I’d had a knife I ought to’ve finished the job the way Lawson taught me. An idiot child like that. Done us all a favor. Got it over with.