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
Del
T
HEY WRAPPED THAT MATTRESS
up in plastic and left it in the hall outside the lab, but you still couldn’t stand to go anywhere near it. People complained. I’m told that the guard outside the morgue, which is down the hallway a little bit and around the corner, just plain refused to sit at his desk as long as it was out there. He propped open the door and dragged that old metal desk right into the morgue proper and shut the door behind him. He snaked the phone line in and did his business there. He said he was more comfortable associating with the newly deceased than with that mattress, and I don’t blame him.
I’d guess he got an eyeful when the medical examiner worked on Vernon, but I couldn’t say with any certainty. I’ve seen the preliminary report but I didn’t notice any mention of a witness.
The technicians finally caved in and took samples and bagged them up and hauled the mattress back outside. Somebody got the duty of returning it to the farm. I can’t say who. The crime scene is still sealed, so they probably just stuck it in the barn. Crime scene. I still don’t know about that. I’ve read the report but I still don’t know. I don’t know that you ever do.
Audie
W
HEN IT’S HOT
that old red rooster starts itching. He woke me up in the night and rolled me right on over. I saw we were in the barn by the light through the walls and I didn’t mind too much. It was different. Creed wouldn’t let us sleep in the house on account of the tape. He said the tape was supposed to keep us out but I said it couldn’t keep me out and I showed him but he pulled me back so I guess it worked. When we came down from the pasture at milking time we found the mattress leaning on a fence post over by Preston’s. There was a cat sniffing around it because she’d never seen a mattress out there against the fence post before and neither had I. I thought maybe the other things they took might end up out there just like it. The ashtray they took and the blanket and the glass and Vernon’s coat and so forth. Just lying around in the grass for us to find. I didn’t tell Creed. We put the mattress in the barn and slept on it there and when the sun came up I looked over by Preston’s but there wasn’t anything else. That trooper came to visit later and he was loaded up with questions but I didn’t have any time for him as long as he wouldn’t let me sleep in my own house.
Preston
T
HIS HAPPENED WHEN
Lester was still alive. He didn’t go the same way his wife Ruth did, or like Vernon did either for that matter. Cancer couldn’t get him. He was too hard. Then again maybe it could’ve and he just didn’t live long enough, but either way he worked like a mule right up to the end. It took an awful lot to kill him.
This was when he was still around, though. I was a senior in high school and those three boys looked awful young to me, but God bless them they did men’s work. Vernon particularly, although I don’t know why I say that. I guess because whenever Lester didn’t have him running, his brothers did. He always had Creed to amuse and he always had Audie to occupy. You’d think a boy would take some pleasure in that but I’m not sure he did. I’m not sure he could.
Everybody knew you couldn’t trust Audie with anything sharp, but Vernon had ideas of his own. He had a jackknife with a blade about four or five inches long. He always kept it sharp. How I heard it later was he took Audie and laid the back of his hand flat down on the lid of a milk can and he took that jackknife and opened up the blade and held the point of it to the palm of Audie’s hand and pulled. Just pulled on it in a straight line as nice as you please, pressing down gently all the while, as if he was drawing a picture or something, until the blade sank in a little and started making its cut and the blood came. Audie watched it come for a second like it was a magic trick or like the red was coming out of the point of the jackknife instead of from him—like it was a fountain pen, even though he didn’t know the first thing about fountain pens and he doesn’t to this day—until Vernon picked up the tip and showed him what was what. Audie felt the sting and he saw the cut and he began howling right off. It seemed like he didn’t realize he was hurt until then. I must have been in school at the time or else I’d have heard him holler and come running. I don’t know if Lester heard him or if he was up in the fields somewhere, but the result was the same. The old man kept his distance like always. He’d have whipped Vernon if he’d found out.
Vernon knew what he was up to. If anybody else had stuck Audie that way, it would have been what they call the end of a beautiful friendship. Then again nobody else would have thought to do it. But anyhow no power on earth could diminish Audie’s admiration for his big brother. Not even something that an ordinary person would take for cruelty. It wasn’t normal, but you had to respect it. Vernon had Audie wipe off that cut on his pant leg or somewhere and he shushed him and he took him over to the woodpile. They picked out some sticks of wood and went back over to the porch and sat down. Vernon pulled out the knife again and Audie took one look at it and started to shake all over but Vernon calmed him down. He took the knife to the wood and cut. I guess he had a talent for that kind of thing although he never showed it but that once. He’d spied an old barn cat sitting on the fence and he pointed it out to Audie and then he whittled up the very likeness of that old tom faster than you could blink. I still have that carving, is how I know. It sits on my mantelpiece to this day. Now that Vernon’s gone I don’t guess he’ll be doing any more of them. It’s a collector’s item.
He shut the knife and he set the little wooden cat on the porch rail, and they admired it the two of them. A minute went by and he picked up another piece of wood and gave it to Audie. He opened the knife and he tried to give that to him too but Audie turned away and started to shake so he had to quit for a little. They just sat and admired the wooden cat, with the knife lying there on the board floor between them. After a while he picked up the knife again and took the carving off the rail and made some little improvement to it. Maybe he cut in the slits for the whiskers. I don’t know. Then when he was done he tried handing the knife over again and this time Audie took hold of it. He took hold of it like it was a live bird or something on that order but he took hold of it all the same. I don’t think he’s ever let it go since. The lathe came later and he’s just as cautious with that.
Not that he’s ever gotten much good at it for all the time he’s put in. He never did have much of an eye, to tell you the truth, and now that he’s three-quarters blind it’s worse. But he keeps at it. He’ll still do a cat sometimes or a sheep that you can make out but the rest could be anything. Some folks like it. There’s a shop over in Clinton that keeps two or three of them right out on the counter and you can’t tell what they are but they’ve got pretty good prices on them. Margaret dragged me over there and the gal running it had a sign up saying they were antiques, and I had to set her straight. I reminded her how honesty is the best policy. What she calls them these days is folk art.
Every now and then somebody’ll come out here and watch those whirligigs spinning away in the yard like they’re visiting some kind of an open-air museum. Sometimes they’ll give Audie a little money if he’ll part with one. They don’t give him much, but he doesn’t need much. He won’t part with that dog one I don’t guess, but he’d part with most of the others if you asked nice enough. I’ve seen cars here with plates from New Jersey, Ohio. I don’t know where people find out about it but they do. The whole yardful of those things just creaking away, and it all started with that knife cut on the palm of his hand on the milk can lid. You could say it’s just one more thing he owes his brother Vernon. That’s how he’d put it, I think. Just one more thing he owes his dead brother.
Ruth
P
RESTON
H
ATCH COMES HOME
with a girl. She isn’t a pretty girl, but Preston isn’t a handsome boy either. She is from a good family in town and she radiates the certainty that she is something special and that Preston is privileged to be courting her. She carries herself in a fastidious way and she holds her head erect and her nose elevated and she keeps her face composed into a supercilious mask, even during moments of repose, as if to offset the failed dull frustration of her ordinariness. Her name is Margaret Willbanks, and she is taller than Preston by a head, and by and by she will marry him.
Her visits begin in the springtime. The days are not yet long but they are getting longer and the world is greening. She and Preston sit on the porch and he admires her and she ignores him utterly and smokes Chesterfield cigarettes, one after another, to ward off the warm pasture stink already rising on every hand. Preston has a little tenor banjo that he plays for her amusement, and the looks that pass across her face suggest that she does not know whether to be amused by it or appalled. Preston keeps his eyes on the fret board and does not notice either way. He plays pretty well, but he will give it up and lose the knack once they get engaged. “After she’d taken the bait,” he will say, “I was able to quit fishing.” And Margaret will roll her eyes.
His banjo music draws the boys from the farm next door and Margaret’s presence draws them too. Vernon nearing the edge of manhood and Audie right behind him as usual, in both chronology and position. After they finish their chores they leave the barnyard and cross the narrow dirt lane to the Hatch property and stroll up the gravel driveway as nonchalant as a pair of boulevardiers. Six-year-old Creed overtakes them sometimes, his feet clapping up a flurry of dust. He knows where they are headed even if they like to pretend that they do not. Then the three of them slouch against the side of the elevated porch with their backs to Preston and Margaret and their hats tilted down over their eyes, sucking on stems of new grass, listening as the mysteries of music and romance unfold all at once.
“The Three Chevaliers,” Preston calls them under his breath, having taken Margaret to see that debonair Frenchman in
The Beloved Vagabond
and desiring to continue harvesting the benefits.
The Three Chevaliers are always caked with cow manure and they smell worse up close than the fields do at a distance, so Margaret scowls in their direction no matter what Preston calls them. Sometimes she catches Vernon shooting her sly looks from beneath his cap, which gives her the willies. He does not seem to be modestly appraising her as a boy from the town would, but evaluating her in a kind of raw and strictly material way instead. As if assessing her market value. For milk or meat or reproduction. There is an animal quality to the looks he gives her, and as she endures them she wonders if this kind of thing might underlie every single impulse in the civilized world. Even the innocent glances that she receives from boys in the town. She wonders why she keeps coming out here, and then she lights a Chesterfield and looks over at sweet, homely Preston and catches the near-swoon in his eyes and wonders no more.
The truth is that the boys don’t know much about women. They have their mother and their little sister, Donna, and the teachers at school, but beyond these their world is a kind of male fortress. To them Margaret looks like royalty, as inaccessible as she is incomprehensible. Like their mother and their father she smokes cigarettes, but she smokes pristine store-bought Chesterfields instead of rolling her own and that only adds to her mystery. Vernon slips one of them from her pack one afternoon when she has gone inside to use the facilities. He slips it from the pack where it lies open on the railing and he slides it into the breast pocket of his overalls just as nice as you please. Nobody sees, not even his brothers. Later he goes up into the woods and smokes it down to the filter but he does not think much of it. He does not think much of the kind his parents smoke either, but at least they’ve never made him feel that he is having to draw the smoke through a stopper. In the end he concludes that the best thing about Margaret is the power of her lungs.
The Three Chevaliers bring little Donna with them one afternoon. Whether they think she might enjoy the music or just mean her as a distraction is long past knowing. She is two years old and mobile. She is as filthy as her brothers, but for reasons of her own. As they leave the barnyard, Vernon tries wrangling her into his arms but she kicks loose and will submit only to holding Audie’s hand as they cross the little dirt lane. She follows the sound of the banjo music like a scenting hound and climbs onto the porch and makes a try for Margaret’s lap, but Margaret rebuffs her.
Vernon
W
E ALL DONE IT TOGETHER
. I took the cigarette and Audie pulled a hair from the horse’s tail and I sent Creed into the house for a darning needle. I seen a cigarette explode in the funny papers once but I don’t know where you’d get a thing like that. Something would blow up a cigarette. That weren’t the idea anyhow. I seen Margaret didn’t like our smell and she didn’t like our sister either so I thought maybe she ought to smell something worse. We took that cigarette and strung the needle with horsehair and run it right down through the middle of it like running it down a pipe. We run it through and back three or four times I think. I trimmed the loose ends of it with my knife. Audie was pretty good with the knife but I didn’t want to take no chances that he’d cut himself or cut that cigarette or crush it down or bleed on it or something like that. Ruin it some way. Then where would we be. We’d have to start over.
Audie
V
ERNON HAD BROWN FINGERS
against the white. He said he had to be careful how he handled that cigarette but he had brown fingers against the white of it and some of the dirt rubbed off and I thought we were done for but it didn’t turn out that way. She was watching Preston and listening to that banjo music of his and she didn’t notice. She just took it and lit it right up. She didn’t look.