Kings of the Earth: A Novel (16 page)

Preston

T
HE BOY CAME RIGHT OVER
big as life. I’d never seen him take an interest in a horse before, but he sure had an interest then. I guess he’d either put down the bucket or left it with Audie. He’d definitely set aside any ideas he had about picking any more raspberries. He came straight up to where I was hammering things out with Tubbs.

His eyes were lit up and I could see DeAlton Poole in them. His old man. He said he’d heard the mare was on her way to the glue factory. He wondered where the glue factory was and how it operated. Tubbs told him for Christ’s sake there wasn’t any such thing as a glue factory and the boy said he was a liar because there was glue wasn’t there so there must be a glue factory someplace and Tubbs said maybe so but he didn’t run any goddamned glue factory. If there was any glue factory it was somewhere else and somebody else ran it. He could only speak for his own operation. The horse wasn’t going straight to any glue factory anyhow. They’d haul her back to the slaughterhouse and take her to pieces first.

Tubbs got a little cagey right about then, and I could see he was torn between peacocking around for that curious boy on the one hand and leveling with me on the other. I told him to go on ahead, I knew where the bear shit in the buckwheat, and he said all right. Then he turned to Tom and stuck up the fingers of his left hand and started counting off what would become of every part of that mare. Where it would go and how it would end up. Animal feed and shoe polish and soap. Gelatin and paint and glue. He taught that boy a lesson I don’t think he’ll ever forget. Opened his eyes for the first time I believe they’d ever been opened on that farm.

I figured a lesson like that was worth about twenty dollars, so I let him keep that much extra.

Ruth

T
HE MEN WHO ARRIVE
to frame the new house work as silently as things conjured. Spirits or elves or carved statues brought to life. Only one among them ever speaks—the one who appears just once or twice a day and not for long, the one who wears not coveralls but a light woolen suit, the one who upon removing his fine jacket and hanging it on a nail shows himself the privileged inverse of his workmen. Narrow shoulders where theirs are broad, and thin arms where theirs are solid iron, and a contented little potbelly where they have none to speak of. In his difference he reigns over them and causes them to do his bidding, for his will has given them life in this dead time.

There is a boy with him now, a child older than hers but not by as much as perhaps he thinks. With a wary eye he proceeds heel and toe down a suspended plank or a narrow nailed beam. Arms out like a boy flying. She has worked at sweeping the yard with a corn broom and as she has worked she has seen him and she has seen too that this wariness of his is not confined to the placement of his own footsteps but takes in as well the rolling countryside and this poor dirt farm and herself and her own two children Audie and Vernon, at play in the fields. They keep their distance, her boys. They send looks her way that ask if they might introduce themselves to this new child and she sends looks back that say they might if they want to and still they do not. They lack the courage for any such transgression if transgression it is. For his part the balancing boy signals no openness to them or even curiosity. He walks and he wavers. He keeps his gaze low and his arms high. In the field the younger boy begins to do the same, heel and toe, arms outstretched, until his older brother tackles him.

Audie

M
Y BROTHER WENT FIRST
. My mother said don’t do it in the house since she didn’t need to be sweeping up after that mess too, so all four of us went in the barn. My father and us three. Vernon sat on a bucket and I sat on the ground and waited my turn. I had Creed on my lap watching. My father said you take your shirts off now or you’ll wish you did. He said you’ll itch like hell. Vernon told him the regular man had a white sheet and put a little bit of paper wrapping around your neck but our father told him the regular man cost money and we didn’t need the regular man anymore. We didn’t need any white sheet when we could take our shirts right off in the barn. He took out the clippers. If I’d gone first I don’t think I’d let myself holler like Vernon did, but since Vernon hollered already it didn’t make any difference. Those clippers pulled more than they cut. Our father greased them up and took a file to the blade and tightened the screws but that didn’t help any. I bawled just like Vernon did and there was bloody hair on the dirt floor and some on my knees where it fell. Just pulled clean out. It could be that he got better at it as he went from one of us to the next but I don’t think so. When it came his turn Creed didn’t holler even though he was the youngest. He didn’t cry either. He just took it.

Preston

M
Y FATHER OWNED
a mower that ran on gasoline and he had me push it around the yard once or twice a week. He was always a great one for getting the first of anything. He had connections from the lumberyard. I suspect it was a demonstration model he talked somebody out of. Anyhow I was pushing that gas mower around the yard and over the sound of it I heard the worst kind of hollering you could imagine. Just a terrible racket. Bleating and crying and carrying on. I thought maybe Lester had gotten some new sheep and was notching their ears, but that wasn’t it. It wasn’t any sheep. I cut the engine and looked down the hill and one after another those boys came tearing out of the barn like he was firing them from a gun. Vernon first. He ran out and stuck his head in the water trough and blubbered around some. Then Audie came out and he did the same. The crying and hollering stopped then but I went down out of curiosity and no sooner did I get near than here comes Creed flying out the barn door just like the first two, only when he made for the trough they grabbed his arms and legs and stuck his whole self straight in.

With those haircuts they looked like a family of porcupines. They were all bleeding a little but not too bad. You could see it trickle down their necks and around their ears and there was some in the trough. The water had a pinkish tinge to it if you looked at it right, unless that’s just how I remember it. My memory may have colored things. Either way I said they ought to drain the trough and fill it up again if they didn’t want their father taking it out of their hides. He’d say the animals didn’t want to be drinking that and then they’d have to drain it out and pump it full again anyway and on top of that he’d give them a licking. They did like I said. Later on I guess I’d have done it myself and saved them the trouble. By later on I mean years. But I was just finding my way with those boys then.

The old man learned a little about giving a haircut, but not much. Around our own house when I was wasteful with anything my own father would say we ought to start economizing and for a first step he was going to let old man Proctor cut my hair. He never did it, though.

Burnes

F
RANKLY
, I was just glad to get a little fresh air.

Del

W
E’D BEEN AT IT
since the morning and we were all a little bit frayed around the edges. It wasn’t that there’d been anything adversarial about it. Not by any means. It just makes a long day. For a person like Creed, who’s not accustomed to the back-and-forth, it can be especially difficult. And then there’s the fact that you’ve got him talking about things that he’d probably rather not talk about. You’ve got him going over them again and again just to get them straight and understand what happened. As much as that’s possible.

While Burnes was typing up the confession and it was just the two of us in the office, Creed got a little agitated regarding his brother. I had an officer call out to the house but there wasn’t any answer so I had him call the neighbor instead, Mr. Hatch, to see if he could go over there and knock on the door. I didn’t want to send a car out. I thought the brother had seen enough police cars for one day. I thought if Mr. Hatch could just check on him, that would be enough to reassure everybody. I didn’t think we’d be much longer anyhow. The officer rang back and said he’d gotten Mrs. Hatch, and her husband was on his way to see about the brother. That made Creed feel a little better. He was very lucid, there’s no question about that. Once he was reassured about the brother he asked if we could bring home a hamburger for him when we went, and I said I thought we could probably arrange that.

Burnes brought in four copies of the confession, one for each of us and one more. We cleared the table and sat around it. Right off Creed said he had difficulty reading without his glasses, which I took to indicate at least some measure of illiteracy, although I suspect that he must be able to read at least a little. I know he’s had some schooling, but I don’t know how much of it took.

Preston

C
REED COULD NO MORE
read that paper than he could talk Chinese.

Creed

T
HEY BRUNG ME
some reading glasses but I can’t say they helped too much. That paper had a lot of words on it I didn’t know. Burnes was awful good with words. Del Graham said he’d go over it out loud if I wanted but I said he didn’t need to. I said if I run into something I couldn’t make out I’d ask. He read parts of it out loud anyhow and I didn’t tell him not to.

This was after supper and my stomach was growling from too many hamburgers in one day. Restaurant food don’t always agree with me. I said so and Burnes showed me to the bathroom again like he thought I’d forgot where it was since the afternoon. I looked out the window and seen the cars sitting out there in the dark. I was thinking about Audie.

A lot of what was on the paper was about how Vernon died and what all I had to do with it. I told Del Graham that’s how we talked about it all right but it’s not the way it went. I never said it was. Burnes got it all just right the way we talked about it even though he used some different words. He did a good job. Del Graham read some of it out loud and explained it here and there and I said if that’s what those words mean then that’s what we talked about. But that don’t mean it’s what happened. It’s only what we talked about. Del Graham said wasn’t I telling the truth before and I said I was but it sounds different now, the way Burnes put it on that paper. Real things and things you talk about and things somebody puts on a paper sound different. They sound like different things.

The phone rang and Del Graham said maybe it was Preston, but it wasn’t. I said I thought it was time to go home. Time to go see about Audie. Del Graham said he’d let me know when that time come and then he’d take me himself in his own car.