Kings of the Earth: A Novel (11 page)

Ruth

T
HE ARMY HAS MADE
Preston thinner than he was before—thinner than he will ever be again—and between that and his newfound discipline and his sharply pressed khakis he brings an austere and military air to the project. Just the way he holds himself inspires confidence in the Proctor boys. They respond to him as if he were their commanding officer. Ruth takes Donna out on the porch and calls to Creed but he won’t come. He is all eyes. Twelve years old and all eyes. As if in the marking of the square and the sawing of the hole and the prying loose of the lath and plaster he is present at the revelation of some mystery unseen by ordinary men. Something very nearly constituting religion.

They have moved everything from the front room onto the porch. The table, the chairs, the chest of drawers. The rag rug and the washtub and the icebox. Preston tells Audie to hang a bedsheet over the cabinets to keep sawdust and plaster dust and God knows what other kinds of filth from getting into things once they start cutting. He marks the wall with a carpenter’s pencil and a square. He drills into the corner for a place to start the saw. He works carefully and surely. When the piece is out he drills through the four corners of the hole into the opposite side and goes around into the bedroom and marks those corners with the square and the pencil, and the brothers watch the procedure as if he is performing magic or summoning spirits.

He cuts the second hole and marks where the screws will go. He has brought his father’s electric drill from home and he shows Vernon how to use it to make the pilot holes. When Vernon pulls the trigger it jumps in his hands like something rabid, which draws laughter from everyone but Vernon himself. The first time he touches the bit to the wall it skitters off across the plaster but Preston tells him that’s all right, he’s brought some compound to fill the scrape with and some paint that nearly matches. Later on Audie gives the drill a try and he does no better. They hand it over to Creed for the last couple of holes, and having watched the missteps of his older brothers he takes to it instantly. It must weigh half of what he does, but he shrugs and says there’s nothing to it. Then he puts it down on the floor and goes off to fetch the screws from where Preston left them on the table, just as cool as you please.

Preston

V
ERNON WASN’T EVEN IN
the ground when they started after Creed. I don’t believe that’s right. I don’t believe that’s any way to do things. A man should have an opportunity to put his own brother in the ground before the authorities start giving him the third degree about it.

How can anybody hope to get a straight answer from a man whose brother isn’t even in the ground? A man who isn’t even given time to grieve his own brother has been punished enough.

When I picture it I see Creed sitting at a table in a dark room with a hundred-watt bulb hung right over his head, and even though I guess that’s not the way they do it outside the movies it’s still what I see when I think about it. Poor Creed. I’ll bet that’s how it seemed in his mind too. Like he was getting the third degree in some cop show.

Tell you the truth, the first thing I thought when I saw them go was it might have been Creed’s idea. The way he was just walking along there behind Graham like a puppy. Docile, I’d call it. Like the two of them were going on a fishing trip. That’s how it looked. Like Andy and Opie. Every morning since I quit work I go downtown and have breakfast, a bunch of us drink coffee and shoot the breeze and what have you, and I was just coming out of the garage to go when I saw them out there like that. One behind the other, going toward the car.

I said a puppy, but a lamb to the slaughter is what I should have said.

I pulled up alongside the car and I got out. I said my good-mornings to Creed and Graham both, but they were pretty quiet right back. Audie was up on the porch. His head was faced our way and his hands were shaking. He had his knife in one hand and a piece of wood in the other and I wished that he’d calm down. I was hoping the wind would come up and start those whirligigs turning. That’d been the best thing for him. I don’t believe he could see Creed going from up there but he knew he was going. His eyes looked black and kind of shaded over and his lip jumped a little under his beard. It wasn’t like he was going to cry but more like he was going to come apart. I guess Creed wasn’t the only fuse they lit that day.

Del

W
HEN
I
DROVE OUT
to talk with the Proctor brothers I didn’t have any fixed idea about bringing either one of them back to the barracks with me. It just turned out that way. We sat on the porch and I asked both of them some questions, but not many. What they’d seen, what they remembered. What time they’d gone to bed that night and what time they’d woken up. What they’d watched on television the night before. They couldn’t agree if it was
The Simpsons
or
Roseanne
. I don’t know which of them was right about that since I don’t watch a lot of television myself, but I can check the papers. That’s easy enough. Maybe they watched both. It doesn’t mean anything anyhow. They were just a few questions I was asking.

After a while I asked Creed if he would mind coming back to the barracks with me, and he said that he wouldn’t mind provided we didn’t take too long. He had chores to do, and I could see that he was concerned about seeing to them, but he didn’t hesitate to come. I think it was kind of an adventure in his mind. I let him ride up front. I didn’t think there was any harm in granting him that little bit of dignity, although you could make a case that it gave him the wrong impression as to his circumstance. I did try to be clear about all that, though. A little ways out of town I got his attention and we went through his rights. First I went over the letter of the law and then I explained everything again just as clearly as I possibly could in very simple language. Creed Proctor doesn’t possess a great intellect. He’s a person who’s very easily confused. I did everything I could for him in that department.

He didn’t want an attorney. He made that clear. I asked him if he was certain and I went so far as to determine that he knew exactly what an attorney could do on his behalf. The importance of it. He assured me that he knew all about that from watching the cop shows on television. The cop shows and the lawyer shows. He knew what a district attorney was and what a defense attorney was, and he knew how they’d take opposite sides. I was persuaded that he knew what he was giving up, or else I wouldn’t have let it go.

He didn’t want a defense attorney. He said it just like that. He said he had no use for a defense attorney. I made sure he knew that he wouldn’t have to pay for it if he couldn’t, but he was adamant.

Creed

D
EL
G
RAHAM ASKED
if I wanted us to stop at McDonald’s before we went to the station but I said no. I had my breakfast already. He said how about just a little coffee and I said no I didn’t care for none. I said I seen from the television how they always have a pot of coffee at the police station so I guessed we could do without McDonald’s.

I told him I had to be home by lunch for chores. Audie was all by his lonesome. He said he didn’t know when we’d be finished. He couldn’t make any promises. He said we’d get some hamburgers at lunchtime if we wasn’t finished and we needed some. He was crazy about McDonald’s I guess.

Del

F
IRST WE TALKED
about the farm. We talked about his parents and his brothers, and how they’d had it growing up. Those men lead an isolated life. They see the regular world on television and then in the morning they get up and go back out into a different world all their own. It must seem like a dream.

The sister intrigues me, though. Donna. How did she cut herself loose?

One thing you notice is that there’s been a lot of sickness out there. A lot of pain. Hardly anybody in the family has a full set of fingers. The mother died of cancer thirty years ago, and Vernon’s body showed any number of tumors that the medical examiner identified as quote unquote
potentially malignant
. That’s as far as they take it. There was a large one in his throat. What looked like skin cancer in a number of places too, which is what you’d expect from a man of his age doing outdoor work. Probably more of them elsewhere, but we don’t know yet. I should think that the tumor in his throat may have obstructed his breathing a little, but that would be up to the medical examiner. We’ll have to wait for his final report.

I don’t know what killed the father.

Vernon seems to have developed bladder problems on top of everything. According to Creed he couldn’t hold his water. The bed was always wet. Creed volunteered that information. I hadn’t questioned him along those lines, because I didn’t remember anything in the report that would have suggested it in particular. It would certainly explain the condition of the mattress, although I guess it really could have been any one of them doing it. Or all three. The lab work may tell us more, but to my mind Creed’s statement was telling.

It got me thinking down certain lines.

People were coming and going in the outer office and I could hear them muttering to one another about the smell. They kept their voices low, but I knew what they were talking about. I didn’t think Creed needed to hear that, so after a while I shut my door and switched off the air-conditioning and opened up the windows. There was a little cross breeze coming through and it made his beard flutter. Sitting there, he looked like the old man of the mountain. Rip Van Winkle. Somebody from a fairy tale. He’s not nearly as old as he looks, though. It’s just that the years have been unkind to him. My own father, for example, is a good bit older than anybody in that family, substantially older than Vernon, although you’d never know it to look at him. He retired out of the school district with a good pension. That’s one of the things he raised me to seek out in this life, a good pension. I ended up here. How’s that for an indication of the world I was brought up to live in.

Audie

T
HE MILK TRUCK CAME
and he was full of questions just like that trooper. He wanted to know when the funeral would be but I couldn’t say. I said I guessed we had to dig a hole first. He could keep an eye out for that if he wanted to know about the funeral. He asked where Creed was and I said he’d gone off.

I hoped he would be home for lunch but lunchtime came and he wasn’t home. I was out in the field where I belonged and by the sun it was time but he wasn’t home yet so I just kept going. Some days I never want to get off that tractor.

Creed

W
E WAS HAVING
a nice talk. I had a cup of coffee and there was a breeze through the window. It was nice just to set. I told him Audie needed me back to home but he wouldn’t bring me. He had a million questions. After a while he pushed a button on the telephone and said would somebody go get us some hamburgers. They done it right off. I seen them go, through the window. They come back with the hamburgers and some fries too and a couple little apple pies and we had more coffee from the pot. I was thinking we ought to get Vernon in the ground, and I asked him where they had him and he said in Syracuse at the morgue. The county morgue. I said how about that, Vernon got to Syracuse before me. How about that. I said I ought to be going home once we got done eating. We finished and somebody come in and took the bags. Then we talked for a while more and then he begun talking about how I killed my brother. He had me talk about it too. Before he would bring me home we had to work it out between us. We had hamburgers for supper too.