Kings of the Earth: A Novel (19 page)

Preston

I
T TAKES A CERTAIN KIND
of individual to put on pounds in the U.S. Army. Most men lose some, or at least they look it. The ones who’ve been overseas anyhow, which Creed sure had. People don’t think much about Korea anymore but he went through something over there, I guarantee it. I don’t know what it was but he did. There’s no getting clear of a situation like that otherwise.

Men in the service overseas get broader in the shoulders maybe but aside from that they slim down. I know I did. Some fellows will say their years in the army were their best years, but mine weren’t. Not by any means. Still I was probably at my best when I came out. Physically, I mean. Margaret would tell you. Creed came back all filled out and grown up. I swear he looked like a different species from his brothers, but it didn’t last. Farmwork will do that to you. It’ll build you up for a while and then it’ll wear you back down. Back down even farther than you started if you let it. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and working a farm will do the same thing.

He seemed to keep his distance a little when he got back. He hiked home from the train station just the same way I did. Nobody’d said he was coming. This was on a Sunday morning and Margaret and I were on our way home from church in that blue Nash. We drove right on past him. I eased over toward the other lane to give that soldier walking some room and we went right on. I didn’t recognize him from the back and I sure didn’t recognize him in the mirror. I didn’t even think. It was Margaret who said
Creed
. My goodness, she said, there goes Creed Proctor walking and we went right on past him. Home from Korea and we went right on past. We had to turn around and go back.

Compared to him, his brother Vernon looked old. He came limping across the barnyard when we pulled up and you’d have thought he was old enough to be Creed’s own father, dragging his leg behind him from that accident with the spike-tooth harrow and dragging Audie behind him too like he was on a short rope. He never lost that limp until the day he died. But here he came plugging across the yard like Creed was the prodigal son and he was the father. I don’t know what kind of animal they’d have killed for his welcome home dinner if they’d seen him coming. They didn’t have the turkeys then. Probably a chicken. Those Rhode Island Reds they kept used to be a good eating chicken. Anyway Creed got out of the car and his brothers clapped their arms around him. I’d never seen them do that before and I never saw it again. When I was in Washington with Margaret on that bus tour we took they showed us the Iwo Jima monument and it never had the same effect on me as the sight of those three in the barnyard. I know Iwo Jima was my war, but that statue didn’t do a thing for me. Picture those three Proctor boys, two sets of coveralls caked with cow manure and one set of U.S. Army khakis pressed sharp. There’s your war memorial.

Ruth

W
ITH
D
ONNA FINISHING
high school and her brother home from the war, it is a time of awakening and transformation. She will be the first of them to graduate and the first to go on. She has set her sights on the two-year college in Morrisville and she gets in without half-trying. She could have gone anywhere. She could have become anything. Between the height of her ability and the depth of her need she is without practical limitation, but Morrisville is the school closest to home. She rents a plain room in the attic of a house in the town, moves her things out, and never entirely returns.

Creed behaves as if farming is light work after the rigors of army life. The truth is that while he was gone his brothers have learned to make do without him, so upon his return he is a spare hand. He moves from task to task as if he has been granted vast supervisory powers, suggesting needless improvements to practices unchanged since his father’s time. He studies Vernon as he tosses hay bales down from the loft and critiques his form, saying that he had better start lifting with his legs if he doesn’t want back trouble one of these days. He improves the ramp to the chicken coop with new cleats that it does not need. He shows Audie how to hot-wire the tractor with a jackknife, and then he laughs to see him dance away with one scorched hand jammed between his knees. He says he learned all about that from working in the motor pool. All but the dancing part anyway. Ha ha ha.

Evenings he sits by blue television light and studies the plans he got from the Tennessean. When he knows them by heart and can envision in his mind every element of their fitting together he takes his money and asks Preston for a ride to town. He says he needs some things at the hardware store.

What kinds of things, Preston wants to know. He says that the overlap of inventory between the hardware store and the lumberyard generally surprises most people, including himself. Creed ticks off the list on his fingers. A tub with a lid. Copper tubing and pipe. Fittings and elbows and reducing couplers. He gets no further than that before Preston interrupts, saying that if he wants a drink of whiskey it would be easier to purchase it by the bottle.

Creed says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Preston says. “Not if you want my help with your science project.”

Creed clears his throat and reaches into the pocket of his khaki trousers. The crease in them is long gone and they’re stiff with the same excrement that stains every inch of his brothers’ coveralls. They don’t look any great distance from the burn barrel themselves, even though Ruth is still doing her best to keep up with the laundry. So much for the transformations of Korea. He unfolds the paper like a treasure map and hands it over.

Preston pulls off the road and studies it. He takes a pencil from the glove box and makes some notes. His mind begins working with questions that he knows Creed could never answer, but he figures that they can at least make a start and work out the details later on. Get a little help from men who know the specifics.

When they reach the lumberyard he insists on using a proper boiler instead of the jerry-rigged cut-and-welded monstrosity that the Tennessean’s diagram calls for, and he advances it to Creed out of inventory. The truth is that he writes it up on the bill of sale as
miscellaneous hardware, n/c
, figuring he’ll take it out in bad whiskey or at least entertainment.

Preston

I
F HE’D PUT
that thing together the way his army buddy told him, Creed would’ve beat Vernon to the graveyard by thirty years at least. I don’t know which one of them was crazier, him or his army buddy, but I never met the army buddy so I’m at a disadvantage. They say whiskey makes a man do funny things but I guess the want of it can make him do funny things too.

I knew some people in the plumbing and heating business, and my father had a pretty good relationship with old Roy Dobson, who invented that milking machine. Between us we doped out what that Tennessee boy either didn’t know or didn’t see fit to write down. Some of these men I knew from church. They were all churchgoers, good God-fearing Christians every single one, but the idea of a whiskey still had a taste of sin about it that was one hundred percent irresistible. I guess
naughty
is the word you’d use. We were all over that job like a troop of Boy Scouts on a girlie magazine. Creed never knew what hit him.

Years from now, when these buildings have all fallen down and the school bus has rusted away, one thing will be standing on this property and it’s that whiskey still. Solid copper and high-grade stainless steel. Some of it built on site and some of it assembled down at Dobson’s welding shop by the old master himself. NASA couldn’t have done it any better. People to come will find it up on that hillside like a moon lander or something and they’ll scratch their heads trying to figure out what it is. I don’t guess they’ll ever figure it out. It’ll be our little mystery. A message from the past.
This is how we did things
.

Margaret

P
RESTON HAD IT
in his head that Creed and Audie might be up by their whiskey still having a drink. I suppose it made sense, with Vernon just dead. You could see how they might want one. I didn’t know that they kept their whiskey up there where they made it, but I suppose they might have, hidden in the woods. Or maybe they just made it fresh and drank it right away. I wouldn’t know. They weren’t hillbillies staggering around with clay jugs, I can tell you that. That would have been their father.

So Preston went up with his flashlight. I had just settled down to watch television when the phone rang. The phone hangs on the wall in the kitchen, so I stood there listening and looking out the window at the same time. It was a state trooper calling. I didn’t get his name, it went by so fast. He said Creed was still at the barracks in Cassius—he didn’t say they were questioning him, but I knew that’s what he meant—and they were wondering if we’d seen Audie. He must have been young, because he pronounced it like the car instead of like Audie Murphy.

Who remembers Audie Murphy these days? Old folks, that’s who.

I said no, we’d been out all day—I still can’t remember where, isn’t that just the strangest thing?—and when we’d come back we hadn’t seen any lights on but Preston was heading over right now to check. The trooper asked if I would be so kind as to call back when we knew something and I said yes I would, but that’s not the way it turned out.

No sooner had I hung up than I saw Preston’s flashlight coming back down the hill. The beam of it was bouncing up and down with that abrupt walk he has. Nobody else could have been carrying it, not to my mind. We’ve been married for fifty-one years. There’s nothing he could do that I wouldn’t recognize, and vice versa. He didn’t come straight down the hill toward home but across toward the farmhouse. Across the ridgeline and down through the pasture. Every now and then he’d walk through a little patch of moonlight and I could see that he was all by himself, even though I’d guessed that already. If he’d been with Audie he’d have been going more slowly, both because he wouldn’t be hurrying to track him down anymore and because Audie doesn’t go anywhere very fast. You know these things after fifty-one years, even without the moonlight to help.