Kings of the Earth: A Novel (25 page)

Ruth

S
OME THINGS THERE ARE
that will not freeze, whiskey in a flask among them. He slides the slim leather-wrapped thing into the breast pocket of his coveralls like a charm against bad luck. The flask is battered enough to have warded off an army of devils, for in years past he has variously dropped it and fallen hard upon it and used it for a hammer. But it still holds whiskey and that is as much as he requires of it.

He gathers up what else he will need. Fish line and hooks. A square of hard cheese for bait. Matches just in case. Vernon and Audie watch him until he says that if they mean to come along they’ll put on their coats right now and fetch in some firewood for their mother. She has said she doesn’t have enough to last and the baby will be keeping her indoors. Then he works newspaper into his tall rubber pack boots and puts on his second pair of socks over those he is already wearing and pulls on his coat to leave. In the barn he unearths a saw from beneath a pile of rusted tools and puts it under his arm and finds a coal shovel against the wall and hoists that over his shoulder. In haste the boys stamp their feet and drop the wood and say good-bye to their mother and the new baby. They promise to bring him back one of the million things he has not yet seen in the world, a flapping fish, and with wet eyes he glares back at them. They kiss their mother and slip out the door into the barn, and then out the barn door to find their father’s footprints already filling up with snow.

The creek runs above the property and along the farthest edge of it, and in summer it tumbles milky over rocks and plummets into deep round pools that it has hollowed out for itself. The next farmer owns the land and the creek and the falls too, if such things can be owned. A half-mile below and far from sight of any road or habitation the creek empties into the weedy stillness of Marshall’s Pond, and where it goes from there Lester has never wondered. There is fishing in Marshall’s Pond summer and winter both, but the snow is coming down hard and he thinks he might better keep to the creek.

He knows a natural pool where in summer a sunken log provides cover for trout, and although he has never dropped a line there in winter he reasons why not. Surely fish are creatures of habit. Surely they lack such powers of cognition as might compel them to vary their behavior by the season. Besides, there is a high flat rock above the water where he can arrange his things and sit comfortably with his legs dangling just as he does in summer. Watching the line and drinking a little. In the summer to cool down and in the winter to warm up. A fine miracle of transformation.

The boys catch up to him and in a line they crunch over the snow toward the fence. Audie wonders aloud if his father has brought a fish line for each of them and Lester says no particular setup will belong to any particular fisherman if they plan to eat. This is not a competition or a pleasure trip, in case he hasn’t noticed. Audie wonders if this means he cannot have his own fish line and Lester says yes, that is exactly what it means. Audie sniffs and looks at the snow and walks. Vernon pulls his hand to stop him short and lifts his earflap and whispers that he will let him have his if he keeps quiet about it. It will be their secret.

A wind barrels out of the west and the trees bend and a frozen rag caught on barbed wire makes a hard horselike whickering. The snow is deep here at the margin of the property, three quarters of the way up the fence posts and nearly overtopping the last strand of wire. They sink into it but not far. Lester stands for a second with his boot sole on the top strand and the boys flail over it in a panic and he lifts his boot and moves on toward the line of bent trees that marks the creek. They draw near. Small branches and twigs clothed in old ice and clacking.

The falls is frozen buttermilk, long ropy strands of it descending. By some mysterious power, water moves beneath it. Lester stamps up to the rock ledge above the pool and kicks away the snow that covers it and drops his tackle and stamps back down. He sends the boys up. “Don’t touch them lines,” he says. He uncorks his flask and swallows some and corks it again. He edges toward the water, not trusting the ground underfoot, holding to a sapling that bends and showers down snow and ice in clumps. He slips and recovers but drops the shovel. It falls and tips in slow motion and lands handle-first on the ice and he follows it warily, testing as he goes. The snow is thin on the ice and the ice curves like wind-cut stone and he hears the water running beneath it. He takes up the shovel and clears a space. There is a crack here, round-edged, and dark water gleams below it. Between his native impatience and this lucky opening he decides that he will not need to use the saw after all. He strikes the curved ice with the sharp fore-edge of the shovel and after repeated blows it cracks. Chunks fall in and bump downstream and collect. He strikes some more and thin cracks spread both where there is no snow and where there is and more chunks fall in and he judges that he has opened a target large enough to hit from the high rock even in this wind. He regains the bank and leans the coal shovel against a tree and stoops to collect two thin branches snapped off and fallen. Then he stamps up to where the boys wait.

He squats in the center of the rock and arranges his tackle. The boys gather around, aping his pose, their little hands hanging down between their knees. Vernon takes up the thin branches and gives one of them to his brother while their father finds the hooks and untangles the lines and makes them up. He hands the lead sinkers to Vernon and Vernon tries fixing them to the lines but the lead is too cold and his hands are too cold and he ends up using his teeth instead. Lester tells the boys that he would notch the poles if he hadn’t forgotten his jackknife and they know this already for they have helped before and have done it themselves fifty times the same way. Audie has an idea. He gnaws at the growth end of one branch until he has notched it. He yields it up proudly, his mouth all ice and bark, and his father laughs. “You’re all right,” the old man says, handing him the other to chew on.

They bait the hooks with cheese. Lester sits on the edge of the rock and the boys sit to one side of him, Vernon first and then Audie. Through their thin trousers the cold knits them to the spot. They lower the lines into the hole and wait, listening to the wind and the water. Lester has one pole and the boys have the other and they do not argue over it. Instead Vernon has given it outright to Audie and now sits warily watching him, on the lookout for some slip.

Lester clamps his pole between his knees and finds the flask. He unstoppers it with his teeth and takes the cork in one hand and drinks, the flask tipped straight up and gurgling. The boys watch, shifting their gaze from their father to the lines in the dark water below and back again. “You watch them lines,” he says. The lines waver in the water and the wind and they are difficult to track from here. He presses the cork back in and slides the flask into his pocket and sits restored against the cold.

Vernon says maybe the fish are all sleeping or frozen and Audie says maybe the fish are all dead. Their father says they had better not be or there’ll be short rations tonight. Vernon says what if they have all gone downstream to Marshall’s Pond and his father says all right if he wants to walk all the way down there in the snow to find out it’s no skin off his nose. Vernon sighs. Lester takes another drink of whiskey. Audie squirms where he sits and the line jumps and he yanks on it hard. The line and the baited hook and the lead sinker all fly out of the hole in the ice and everything lands in a snowbank and Audie laughs. His father does not. “Get that back in the water if you mean to eat,” he says.

“He thought he had a bite.”

“I know that. He didn’t have no bite. Not yet.”

“But he thought.”

“I know what he thought and he didn’t have no bite. That’d be no way to set it if he did.”

Vernon takes the pole to get the line back in the water and gives it back to Audie and they sit for a while. Audie is nervous and he watches the line as if it has threatened to bite him. Lester uncorks the flask and drinks and corks the flask again and what movement there is in the water is current only.

“He needs a bobber,” says Vernon.

“He’ll learn to get along without.”

Audie

T
HEY NEVER CAME
to take down the tape so the time came we just took it down ourselves. Took it down and went on back in. Nobody ever gave us any trouble about it.