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
Kings of the Earth: A Novel (12 page)
“No place special. It’s summertime.”
Tom sat watching her work on her coconut cream pie, trying to persuade himself that she looked like college material.
She had grown up in Canastota and she had a brother just a little bit older than Tom. She said he always called her Baby and Tom could too if he wanted but he didn’t want to. That was all right, he said.
It was turning into a good day to sit on the beach but first they had to get some Slim Jims and a bag of chips and a couple of six-packs. At the register Tom splurged on two packs of cigarettes, different brands, his and hers. He had a foam cooler they used for the beer. The store was out of ice and the lake water was pretty warm already, so he filled the cooler up with water from a hose alongside a house that faced the beach. He and Shelly tried lifting it but they couldn’t. So they tipped it over and emptied it on the guy’s driveway and walked it down as far as the hose would reach and filled it up again but only halfway this time. Then they worked it down the rest of the way, picking it up sometimes and sometimes sliding it on the grass and then on the sand. They left the hose.
The beach was full of kids. There was a playground over by the snack bar with an iron carousel that wouldn’t stop going around and around, sending up a screech that Tom thought was going to saw his head in two. Shelly watched the kids jumping onto it and flying off again. She had a dreamy look in her eyes that Tom thought made her look like a babysitter. You’d never get that innocence back. She turned from the carousel and leaned back on her elbows to look out over the lake. He did the same. The water smelled better since the sewage regulations had gone in when he was a kid, but he still didn’t feel like getting his feet wet. He didn’t even own a suit. He lived right here, and he didn’t even own a suit.
Shelly said her brother was the one got her started smoking. Dope, she meant, not cigarettes. She could hardly remember when she hadn’t smoked cigarettes. The dope came later, when Nick was out of two-year college and living back home those years and she was what, maybe fifteen. Nick was a bad apple. That’s what her father used to say: His son kept coming back like a bad apple.
“I think he meant a bad penny,” Tom said. “It’s a bad penny that comes back.”
Either way, he was the best brother there ever was. He always treated her like an equal and he trusted her to do anything she wanted. Anything at all. That was why she’d left her parents’ place and moved in with him.
Tom finished his beer and started another one and looked over at the girl and then back down at the lake. He’d been in trouble with fathers before, but never with brothers. He wasn’t sure how much he liked the idea. Then again if Nick was such a bad apple they might turn out to have a lot in common. They might share a whole worldview. How about that.
Preston
T
OM HAD SOME BUSINESS
or other up in the hayloft. I always thought it was funny how when he was a little boy and DeAlton’d bring him out he’d sneak around like he didn’t dare touch anything, and now that he was all grown up he felt different. I always got a kick out of that. The irony of it. How he’d come to see the use of certain things. I believe that’s something that happens to a man when he gets his growth. He starts seeing the use of things he never cared about or understood before.
Tom was in the hayloft and the rest of us were on the porch and Vernon was saying how his throat hurt. He had a sack of horehound drops that he sucked on when he wasn’t chewing tobacco. He’d take them one right after another. I don’t believe they helped even the slightest little bit. I think he knew that, but I guess he always hoped for the placebo effect. He had his left hand in his lap and he was rolling up little pellets of stuffing from the chair with his right hand when he wasn’t rubbing at the place on his leg where that tooth from the harrow went in. They say Audie has a nervous problem, but it runs straight through that whole family. There isn’t one of them could keep still if you put him on the payroll for it. It goes all the way back to Lester and maybe beyond him.
We knew when Tom came down because we heard his car doors open and shut. First one door and then a little wait and then the other. He was fooling with something in the car. Vernon said he hoped Tom would come around to the porch and pay his respects before he went home, on account of he was tired and didn’t want to get up. He said he’d just as soon sit right there and if that no-good nephew of his didn’t see fit to bother coming around then so be it. They all could do without. But after a few minutes Tom did come around. He had a little plastic bag and he put it on Vernon’s lap, and Vernon gave him a look like it was trick or treat. I had a suspicion about that bag but I didn’t know for sure. Not then. When Tom told his uncle he ought to be careful since that right there was a good fifteen dollars’ worth, I knew.
Creed knew the same. “If that’s fifteen dollars’ worth,” he said, “I don’t know why I been fooling with feed corn.” Words to that effect. You couldn’t blame him.
Vernon asked him could he chew it because he didn’t care much for smoking anymore and Tom said that wasn’t how most people used it. He didn’t know if chewing it would work or not, but he couldn’t make any promises and since that little bag was worth a good fifteen dollars of anybody’s money why take chances with it. Most folks either smoked it or made brownies. Vernon said he wasn’t much good in the kitchen so he thought he’d just stick with the regular way. Tom had some papers in his pocket and he gave them to him and then he left.
I’d heard that before about the brownies, but I’d always thought they were just pulling my leg. It turned out it was true.
Audie
V
ERNON WAS FEEDING TURKEYS
through the window. He had the feed sack lifted up and he was tossing in handfuls and the turkeys were jumping behind the glass. I couldn’t hear them holler but I knew they were. Behind the window the air was all feathers. Vernon was smoking and there was smoke in the air outside and feathers inside. I was over by the woodpile. Tom drove up the road and he parked by the barn and came on around. He was coming about every day. He waved and I waved back. He went toward the barn but then he saw Vernon feeding the turkeys and he went there right off instead. He was in a hurry. He didn’t wave at Vernon like he waved at me. He just went straight over to the bus where Vernon was feeding turkeys through the window.
Tom
Y
OU HAVE TO TELL
some people everything. Take, for example, the old farmer alongside the school bus with a homemade cigarette dangling from his bottom lip like a regular smoke. Just working on it slow, the way anybody might work on something he’d lost the savor of. The thing was stuck to his sun-split lip, it had been there so long. Dangling, dripping ash and weed. Tom just about blew his top.
He stamped over to where his uncle stood not even sucking on it and he snatched it out of his mouth. He almost put it in his own but reconsidered. The turkeys were squawking in the school bus and he could barely make himself heard over their racket. “You don’t do this in the yard,” he said. “And you don’t do it that way. You roll it up tight and you suck it in and you hold on to it. It ain’t a regular smoke. You keep it in your lungs. You concentrate on it and you get the value from it. And above all you don’t do it in the goddamned yard.”
He pinched it out and twisted it up and stuck it in his uncle’s breast pocket, then he thought better of his haste and gave him an apologetic pat right there where he’d put it. Just over his heart. He turned his back and went off across the dirt yard and up to the hayloft for some of what he kept there, and then back down to the car. He had dirt on his hands from the hayloft ladder and he rubbed it off against his pant legs before he got in. Shelly was in the front seat and they were headed someplace. She put up a hand and waved to Audie over by the woodpile and he waved back, tentative, looking like he’d fallen in love.
Preston
T
HE OLD MAN
was made of nails. I never saw the hay bale he couldn’t lift or the mule he couldn’t drive or the roofline he couldn’t walk with his eyes shut. The weather he couldn’t withstand. He was a figure from a world that was pretty much gone even then, and you knew right off there was something about him you had to respect even if you might never understand it.
He knew how to last, is what it was. He knew how to endure and he knew how to bend things to the way he wanted them. He used whiskey for medicine and entertainment both. And if you were smart you didn’t cross him. That goes without saying.
What else? Like I said, it took an awful lot to kill him.
Audie
W
E WERE COMING DOWN
the road from school and we saw him up ahead and he was on the tree. Everything was white all around. He had his arms out straight and he was on the tree and he wasn’t moving any. That wasn’t like him.
Ruth
O
N A FARM
in winter, the very work of survival will keep a man alive. The warmth he generates by chopping wood for the stove, by working the pump to fill the frozen trough, by shoveling a path to the barn door to admit the cows. If he is to live he must remain in motion, and so he hastens through the world with a shroud of his own weather wrapped tight about himself. The margin is thin.
The boys have gone to school in their rags, smelling richly of wood smoke. In the classroom their pungency will be enough to distinguish them from the other boys and in fact to tell their history, here at this juncture where coal is king and oil has made inroads and only the poorest of the poor still keep woodlots. Creed’s garments are the thinnest of the three for having been handed down the most. He wears them doubled and he makes no complaint.
Lester hunches his shoulders against the cold and stands in the barn smoking. He knows he should not, he understands fully the risk of fire, but where else can he go. He has finished the milking but he lingers here still, unwilling just yet to forfeit the great hot stirring of these massed animals. Soon he will open the door and send them steaming into the pasture one by one and two by two, but just now he moves among them, alive to their rising warmth, traversing the narrow spaces between their bodies like a ship through ice. Overhead the wind sighs in the hayloft.
Preston
W
E WON’T EVER KNOW
why he left. I would say he was after a little whiskey, except when I went in the back bedroom later there was a good half-bottle of it right there on the floor. Then again I don’t know how much of it he’d go through in a day or a night or whatever. I wonder how much you can know about anything.
Anyway he was done with his chores and the roads were clear enough and I imagine he wasn’t expecting any trouble. Who does? It’s in some people’s nature I suppose, but not most. By the time a man gets as far along in life as Lester did—he was what, pushing toward forty when he died—by the time a man gets that far he generally expects more of the same. More of what he’s already seen. Life’s taught him that. So off he went. Ruth stayed to home. She never even knew he was gone till we brought him back.
He always said you could count on a mule for surefootedness. Eight or nine months out of the year he’d let the horse draw the wagon, but not in the winter. Come the first snow he’d go in the barn and fiddle with that harness until he got the mule into it. He could have used the setup he kept for the plow but he never did. I don’t know why. Lester had his own way of doing things. The wagon rig was old and the older it got the harder he had to work at it. Pieces stiffened up and other pieces broke. When he was done some parts of it were slack and some parts of it weren’t quite slack enough but it worked all right. The mule didn’t much like it, but then a mule doesn’t much like anything.
Ruth
O
UT HERE THERE IS
no such thing as a main road. Nothing exists that cannot trace its beginnings to a farm track or a game trail. Everything winds and nothing sees traffic. Back behind the clopping mule Lester tops a rise and hunches forward against the crosswind and starts back down, threading between high snowbanks under a sky as blue as water.
The mule plods on, hoof-deep and kicking up clods. The wagon wavers side to side. Skating slanted over ice the bald wheels lose their purchase, and sliding they gain on the steady mule. The chain traces go slack, sag down toward the snow. The singletree strikes the beast across her hind legs and draws from her one complaint of a lifetime’s litany. The impact urges her on. The man pulls the brake lever but the wheels only lock and skid. The rear goes out, unluckily to the left, and the wagon nearly wedges itself across the road but recovers. The delay has cut certain slack and righted some of the rigging that binds mule to wagon: harness and traces and singletree. All is right with the white world. They reach the bottom of this hill and plod through drifted snow and rise again with the next.
An upward slope is harder for the mule but easier for the man. He rests. He reaches into his coat for his flask and he finds it. He unstoppers it with his teeth and holds the cork in his rein hand and pours fire down his throat. He puts it back and goes into an inner pocket for tobacco only to have the wind take it. He curses this loss, this life. Where he is bound he can buy more makings, but he has not counted on the expense and his wallet may be low. He refuses ever to run a tab. He has raised his sons to do likewise when their time comes. Separate honor from mulishness if you can.
This upward climb is rimmed with evergreens, natural windbreaks on both sides that block the snow. The mule’s hooves strike sparks from plain stone undrifted. Where that thieving gust came from he cannot tell but such is forever his lot and he shoulders it. Atop the rise the mule hits snow again and the wagon does not. Not right off. Which throws them out of rhythm once more and sets the stage for what will come on the downhill course. Pure physics. The wagon’s dead weight. The steady mule. Ice and lost traction, slippage and slack chain.
The mule, struck from behind by the singletree a second time, has used up such patience as she possesses. She balks and stumbles and the wagon swings, fishtails, the outside wheel striking the snowbank and piercing its uncompacted depths, drawn low by gravity. The man barks at the mule, menacing her with threats. She strains and the wagon sinks. She staggers. One leg goes off the road as well and then another, the angle between mule and wagon gone entirely wrong. Chain snaps. Ironwork strains. Harness leather tangles and tightens. The bit jams and the mule screams, headed facedown in snow. She flails and falls and the man is flung forward from the box. He tumbles down and down, entangled, arms outstretched. The mule strains and the traces tighten and he is pinned by chain. The singletree snaps in two, flies free, and the ragged place of its raw breakage pierces his useless coat. In the shoulder only, but un-stanched and thus sufficient. The mule expires. The man fights on but cannot last forever. The bright day descends.