Kings of the Earth: A Novel (4 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
ER HUSBAND SAYS
he ought to lay into her with that pail if she’s going to be so careless of it. Look at the trouble she’s brought on, with her filling the washtub and her emptying it, with her going out and her coming in. With her inexplicable commitment to hygiene. Look at what she has brought down on his family. He behaves as if that tin pail and her use of it are the cause of every woe he has ever endured in this world, as if by getting free of them he might enter paradise early. If he weren’t so drunk, someone might get hurt.
Now they have Vernon alone in his bed and Audie in the front room alongside the stove. Ruth has made him a soft place on the table and has him laid out on it with his legs under a blanket and a couple of old burlap sacks over his bare arms and the rest of him uncovered. He lies on his stomach, with that rooster tattooed on his back throbbing in the soft light of the stove and in the hard light of the one electric bulb. He cannot keep quiet. He cries out from pain and he cries out for his brother Vernon. His mother strokes his leg through the blanket and he cries out over that too. His back gleams with an ointment that his father uses on the udders of cows. The old man was loath to part with any but he acquiesced in the end. It smells like pine. Like Christmas in the house. At some point in the past Lester used the lid of the big round tin for some other purpose and left the rest to sit uncovered in the barn, so the ointment has flecks of chaff and clods of dirt and something that is probably bat droppings sifted down from the rafters in it, but she has done her best to pick them out.
She pulls up a chair alongside her son and she wants to touch him but she does not. She draws breath and lets it out. Even the passage of that little air over his raw back pains him. He calls out for his brother. For Vernon.
Audie
I
FELT THAT OLD RED ROOSTER
on my back and I saw its twin brother on the stove. I was lying on my belly with my head turned that way. I couldn’t much move and I didn’t want to. My mother was there. The stove was black and the rooster on the side of it was painted red and it was red from the heat too. I knew those two old birds were the same size and that they come from the same form and so when the one on my back got bigger in my mind the one on the stove got bigger right along with it. Bigger and drawing close. I didn’t say anything about that.
Preston
W
E MOVED FROM TOWN
when I was twelve years old. People out there called where we came from the city but it wasn’t a city any more than I’m the King of England. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now. I’ve seen cities. I go to the VA hospital in Syracuse every six months. I’ve seen New York City on two occasions, and I’ve seen Washington from a tour bus, and one time I saw Montreal. That was with Margaret. We were on a tour bus then too just like in Washington, and we came through that town twice now that I think of it, but I’ll just count it the once because it was the same trip. I’ve seen cities all right, but I didn’t grow up in one. Cassius couldn’t have been home to more than four or five thousand souls then and it doesn’t have more than half again that many now.
On the other hand I suppose it depends on your point of view. When the Proctor boys talked about town they meant a wide spot in the road with a sign in front of it that said
CARVERSVILLE
. I’d call it a village or maybe a settlement if that. A hamlet, if that’s still a word. Carversville is the same now as it was in those days: a crossroads with six or eight houses and a Methodist church and a tavern. A filling station and a store that never has anything you might want because they’ve always just sold the last one of anything and they ought to be getting more in two weeks. Anyhow the Proctor boys and the other folks around those parts called Carversville the town and they called Cassius, where I came from when I was twelve years old, the city, and there wasn’t any changing their minds so you didn’t try.
The Proctor brothers said I was a city boy and I took it for a compliment. They didn’t mean any harm by it that I could tell. Besides, they were younger. Six and seven, to my twelve. I don’t believe they meant it by way of a judgment. It was just a means to sort things out so you could look at them and understand them and see them clearer one by one. It was like keeping the cows and the sheep and the chickens all separate in your mind or in pens or wherever, each with its own place in the world and its own use.
That’s what I think, although you can’t ever really tell another person’s mind. People say you have to know where he came from and that’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. I know where those boys came from—I knew Audie and Vernon since they were six and seven years old, and I’ve known the last brother, Creed, from the hour he was born in that back bedroom until this very day—but that still doesn’t mean I understand any one of them. Where a man comes from isn’t enough. You’ve got to go all the way back to the seed of a man and the planting of it, and a person can’t go back that far ever I don’t think. Because there’s always another seed behind that one and another planting of it too. All the way back to Adam. By which I don’t mean to suggest that I’m a religious man. Margaret goes to church every Sunday but I just go along to keep her from getting lonesome.
So I was twice as old as those two when we moved here in 1932, even though today people take me for a good bit younger. I suppose that’s because I’m the one who enjoyed all the advantages in life. The blessings and the benefits. My father owned a lumberyard and he built this house during the Depression when nobody wanted anything he had to sell. It was either make use of it or let it rot in the weather, he used to say, so he kept his people on as best he could and he set them to work building this place. He had a little money saved up from doing a cash business all his life. He’d never put it in the bank so he never lost it. I don’t know whether he was smart or just lucky and it doesn’t matter much either way. Not then and not anymore. He drew up the elevations himself and the floor plans and all the rest, and he oversaw every bit of the work, and when it was all done the Depression was starting to lift and he sent his men back to the lumberyard. He and my mother hung on to the empty house in town until the war broke out and then they sold it for a nice profit. I was in France then and I didn’t get to see it go.
We came in the summertime and Creed came in the fall.
Lester didn’t put any stock in hospitals and I don’t guess he could have afforded to if he did, so that was all right. I don’t know how they could have gotten to the hospital if they’d wanted to. The only vehicle they had was a wagon without so much as a single round wheel on it. Put a woman in labor on a wagon like that and she’ll be giving birth before you get her a half-mile down the road. Not that that would have troubled Lester any. The boys got hold of an old Farmall tractor once he was gone—this was while I was in France with General Patton—they got hold of an old Farmall tractor after the old man passed on and how they’ve kept it running all this time I can’t say but they have. They had it when I came back. I walked home from the train with my bag over my shoulder and Lester was two years dead and they were all three riding that tractor around the yard like it was some kind of a carousel ride. God knows where they got the money for it. I used to kid them that they bought it with Lester’s estate money.
Anyhow when Creed was born they just let nature take its course. The same thing when Donna was born a few years later. I don’t believe they so much as knew the name of a doctor. Like I said, I was the one who had all the advantages.
Audie
T
HE BOY NEVER HAD WINGS
that I knew of but he was flying.
Donna
S
HE’D INTENDED TO BUY
tickets for all of them, but they were too proud to let their little sister pay their way. She stood at the folding table in the high school lobby realizing that if she had thought to get the tickets ahead of time it would have been an end to it, but she hadn’t thought. Vernon had money in the breast pocket of his overalls. He unsnapped the pocket and fished out the money and counted it. He put it back in and waited a minute and fished for it again and counted it all over. They had been the last in line for a while but it only seemed that way, because other people arriving to see the show would come near to them and scent the brothers and withdraw.
Vernon was chewing a wad of tobacco and Audie wanted some, but his brother wouldn’t give him any because they would be in the auditorium in just a minute and what would he do with it then. Audie made his complaint and any number of people lingering along the walls of the big room turned their heads and looked. “Hush up and wait,” Vernon said. “You’ll forget all about that Red Man soon enough.”
“Four adults,” Donna said. Her husband, DeAlton, was out of town selling and wouldn’t be back until the next afternoon. They would go together tomorrow night, just the two of them.
She put down two dollars and Vernon watched her and he put down six, placing each bill on the table as carefully as if he were putting it to bed, licking his thumb between one and the next. It gave him visible satisfaction. She thought that maybe letting her brothers pay their own way wasn’t so terrible if doing it pleased him this much. She forgave him, and she forgave herself for having put her own satisfaction above his.
She spoke again to the woman with the cash box. “Four. Please.”
The woman looked from her to the pile of stiff bills that Vernon had laid out and back again. The bills were brown all over and flaking. Crusted with cow manure like bark. As if they’d been planted and fertilized and grown up all brown and green in some field.
Donna opened her pocketbook and took another bill from her wallet. “How about I give you a ten and you can just give me back two singles,” she said. Scooping up the money she’d just put down and her brother’s money too. Putting it all in her wallet, where it wouldn’t bother anybody. “Would that be easier?”
They took mimeographed programs from the smiling boy at the door and went in to find seats. The auditorium was brightly lit by mercury vapor lamps hung high overhead like captive flying saucers, pulsing all but invisibly and emitting a high, thin sizzle. Most of the crowd didn’t notice, but here and there some unfortunate blinked and poked a curious finger into his ear and felt overwhelmed by a sense of agitation and dread that dissipated only when the big lamps snapped off and the room was plunged not into darkness but into another kind of illumination altogether, the light of a hundred evenly spaced recessed bulbs on a bank of dimmers, promising relief.
“Thank God,” said Donna to another mother on her right. “I thought they were going to make us take the SAT.”
“You and me both.”
She and her brothers sat examining their programs, Vernon paging methodically and running his finger down one column after another like a speed reader; Audie following his brother’s example but going back to front, front to back, whichever way the wind blew; Creed narrowing his eyes and puckering his lips and flipping angrily past page after page in search of his nephew’s printed name. Donna found it first and showed it to the rest of them. Also to the woman at her side. “My son’s Michael,” she said. “I mean he
plays
Michael. The youngest boy.” Pointing. “His name’s Tom. He’s only ten.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” said the other woman. “You must be very proud.” She might have flicked a glance past Donna and let herself size up the menagerie she’d brought in with her for comparison against the prospective child, but it was hard to say for certain. Donna didn’t care anyhow. The orchestra, such as it was, had trooped in and begun to play, and the lights overhead were fading and the curtain was rising like fog, and on the stage thus revealed a thousand stars twinkled beyond an open bedroom window. Three children lay asleep in their beds. A tiny spotlight from somewhere over the shoulders of the crowd began to dance along the dark wall of the nursery.
Donna slid forward in her seat and held her breath and sought out the smallest of the three forms on the three high beds, the one that belonged to Michael Darling. Her boy, Tom. She had no interest in Peter Pan, the child who could never grow up.
When Tom finally jerked into the air, the crowd roared and his uncle Audie jumped clean out of his skin. All the pixie dust in Neverland could not have raised him higher. All the lovely thoughts in London could not have lifted him any more suddenly. And by the look on his face he was prepared never to come down again.
Since this was a special occasion, the brothers had refused Donna’s offer of a ride and taken their old tractor the six miles into town. Vernon on the curved seat of perforated steel, Audie and Creed perched on the running gear to his right and his left. Audie’s beard was long even then, and it streamed out behind him like a pennant. Vernon’s was shorter than his brother’s by a foot and roughly shaven above the lip in the manner of a haphazard Abraham Lincoln. Creed didn’t have a beard at all in those days unless you counted what grew back weekly. Not one of them had yet gone white.
Now Donna wanted to drive them home. The springtime was well along but it was still chilly at night, even cold, and they weren’t dressed for it. She said they could go on and leave the tractor in the high school lot, and she’d fetch one of them back for it tomorrow. They could pull it right around back by the cafeteria entrance. Nobody would care. Tomorrow was Saturday anyhow.
But there was a field to be plowed in the morning, and they couldn’t afford her kindness.
She stood alongside them in the lobby as the crowd passed around them like water around stones and she tried to be reasonable. “Does that thing even have a headlight?”
“You bet,” said Vernon. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lump of Red Man and started on it, considering. “It’s got a headlight all right.”
“If I know you, it doesn’t work.”
“If it don’t work, we’ll go slow,” he said. Which was true enough. They would go slow regardless.
“You wait here while I get Tom,” she said. “Maybe he can talk some sense into you.”
The three of them brightened at the idea, as if they were about to make the acquaintance of some favorite Hollywood star they knew from television. Andy Griffith maybe, or Little Joe from
Bonanza
. Groups of high school students passed them by, noisy and full of life, some with instrument cases in their arms and some still half in and half out of costumes. A few eyed the brothers like naturalists happening upon a rare species and a few sized them up like old jurists grown intolerant with the passing of too many years and the rest seemed not to notice them at all. The girl who had played Tom’s mother flickered in and out of Vernon’s vision and he recognized her right off, although she looked younger than he had expected. He thought she was pretty and he said so to Creed under his breath. Creed looked at him as if he’d just made a lascivious remark about their own sister, and he took a half-step away.