Kings of the Earth: A Novel (21 page)

Audie

U
P
I
CLIMBED
and the higher I went the darker it got. I came to the trapdoor and pushed it open and it hit something. The light turned gray and swimming. With the trapdoor up I saw better. I saw the light and the dust swimming in the light. I stuck my head out and sneezed from the dust and I banged my head on the trapdoor. It wouldn’t lie down flat because something was in the way of it. I wanted it to lie down flat. How I go to the hayloft is I climb up and open the trapdoor and I keep going the rest of the way on the ladder that goes on up against the wall and I come out to the side and close the trapdoor all the way shut again so I don’t fall down it and break my neck like Vernon says. Then I get what I came up for. I always do it the same because I’ll need to if my eyes keep up the way they’re going. I wouldn’t fall in if I didn’t shut it because I know right where it is and I can see the dark of it and the shape of it but I like knowing. I’m used to it. I might not even notice when my eyes get worse if I keep doing everything the same way. The lathe is up here still but I don’t use it too much. I was up to fetch wood. The trapdoor was bumping on something that belonged to Tom. He keeps things up there and sometimes he leaves a mess. This was a couple of plastic buckets and a bag of fertilizer tipped over. I didn’t clean it up but I moved it.

Donna

S
HE MADE AN APPOINTMENT
for Vernon with a doctor she knew. He said that he would see her brother as a professional courtesy, but she would be on her own for whatever tests he might need. Medicaid would cover some of it and she knew a social worker who could arrange for whatever help might be available from the county. There was always a way. If her mother taught her anything growing up, it was that there is always a way. How else could she have raised four children on nothing?

The doctor’s name was Franklin. He was a general practitioner of the old school, drawing near to retirement. A widower. He could recall the days when doctors spent half of their hours traveling from sickbed to sickbed with nothing to rely on but the contents of their black bags. He believed still that a man with a sharp eye and a good ear could accomplish certain commonplace miracles with a stethoscope and a tongue depressor, a scalpel and set of good forceps, a curved needle and sufficient thread. He kept up with the latest information but he was cautious about putting too much stock in it. His bag still sat on the top shelf in the front hall closet, pebbled and snapdragon-mouthed, full of old secrets.

His office was in a square, hip-roofed, three-story house opposite the former Cassius hospital, which was now a nursing home populated mainly by the indigent. Both properties were once the best in town, but with the passage of the years they had slipped downhill together. Thus had Franklin’s patients aged with him and returned in this new guise. He joked that one day he would walk across the street to make his rounds and they would keep him. He believed that it would not be such a terrible fate, for at least he would be among friends.

The day was young and the office was empty. Donna delivered her brother to the nurse guarding Franklin’s door from behind a massive desk of black walnut. Mrs. Waverly was her name and she had been with Franklin since the days when her position required that she wear a curved white cap starched as stiff as whalebone. She ushered Vernon into an examining room and weighed him on a scale minus his shoes. She took his temperature and his blood pressure. Vernon remarked that so far he hadn’t received any treatment that his sister could not have given him at home if they’d had a scale and whatnot, and she laughed politely and told him to be patient. She made some final notes and pulled a paper gown from a cabinet and asked him to wait until she shut the door and then remove his coveralls and put on the gown. She said it tied in the back.

The stink of Vernon Proctor in the closed room, undamped by the thin barrier of his clothing, was the smell of some ailing beast gone to ground in a long-used den. Franklin knew to expect such a smell from the residue of it that lingered in the hallway and from a quick pantomime on Mrs. Waverly’s part, but he was struck by the sour animal pungency of it all the same. Some things are worse than we can imagine in advance. A lump or a cough can only hint at the multifarious complexity of the cancer etched upon an X-ray, and that image in turn can only suggest that ramifying reality of the disease at work in a living matrix of ruined tissue. Some things are worse than we can imagine and fifty-odd years in practice had taught him this again and again. So although nothing had quite prepared him for the precise stink of Vernon Proctor naked in a closed room, he persevered.

He sat on a stool with Vernon before him on the examining table. He asked how long it had been since Vernon last saw a doctor and Vernon recalled the incident with the spike-tooth harrow which had not required a doctor visit and the subsequent blood poisoning which had.

“So you’re an old-timer like me,” said Franklin, clapping a hand on the examining table alongside Vernon’s draped leg. “Nobody calls it
blood poisoning
anymore.”

“Is that so.”

“These days they call it fifty different things, depending. All fifty of which they treat like blood poisoning.”

Vernon laughed and Franklin observed his teeth, warily, his mind clicking.

Franklin smiled and nodded and moved smoothly to the business at hand. “Your sister tells me you haven’t been feeling your best.”

“That’s right.”

“She’s a fine person, your sister.”

“I guess it runs in the family,” said Vernon. He was having a pleasant enough time of it now, in spite of sitting naked on a table with nothing between him and the world but a sheet of pale blue paper. To tell the truth he had feared doctors all along or at least mistrusted them, given his mother’s fate. But this wasn’t so bad.

“Runs in the family,” said Franklin. “I guess maybe it does.” Then he cocked his head and something shifted behind his eyes that changed everything. “Donna tells me you have some specific complaints, but I’d really like to hear about them from you.”

Vernon swallowed. “I guess the main one’s cancer,” he said.

“Cancer,” said Franklin. He paused, waited, thought. “I knew your mother,” he said.

“She died from it.”

“I know.”

“I got it like she did.”

“Whereabouts? Whereabouts on your body?”

“My throat that I know of.” Touching it with a knobby finger. “My pecker.”

Franklin did not doubt that either of these could be true, but he mistrusted Vernon’s diagnostic skills. “How does it feel, exactly?”

“I can’t swallow too good. Sometimes I can’t hold my water.”

“That probably wouldn’t be your pecker, but it might be something connected to it.” Franklin sat nodding, assessing such of his patient as he could see without lifting the blue paper. Vernon’s skin a wrecked Rorschach of sun damage. The calf of his right leg puckered on both sides around the old wound. One finger sheared away at the second knuckle. “You saw a doctor for that too, I suppose.” Pointing to that last. “One of your many engagements with the medical community.”

“No,” said Vernon. “My dad done that on the stove. I cut it off and he cauterized it.”

Franklin drew breath.

“I don’t know what become of the rest.” Sitting under the blue paper, holding the hand up and studying it as if it possesses vatic properties, his mind going back to the missing flesh and bone as to some lost opportunity for divining. “I was a boy. I never did ask what he done with it.”

Ruth

H
ER COUGH SHAKES THE HOUSE
. In cold weather it emerges on smoke and steam. She usually has a cigarette burning but even when she does not her breath in the frigid house is white like all the rest. At least in her cold back bedroom, never mind the grate. Not that she does not appreciate the work that went into it or the compassion. She remembers the day they put it in, Vernon and Audie and Creed and Preston. She remembers how they cut the hole in the wall and filled it back up, all for her comfort. She does not have the heart to say how far the actual fell short of the intended, but they all know. They all know by the blankets they bring her when the weather gets cold and her cough shakes the house.

She relies on her sons and she relies on her daughter gone off to nursing school in Syracuse and she relies on the cancer that will kill her if she lives long enough. Her breath comes hard. She lies awake in the black of night listening to the gunshot bursts of sap exploding in distant trees. She coughs blood and she balls tissues and drops them to the floor alongside her cold bed and she waits. Morning does not come and death does not come either and so she lights a cigarette in the dark and listens to the bursting of trees and the snoring of her grown sons in the next room. The three in one bed. Then and now and forever and ever.

Preston

A
UDIE HAS A LONG MEMORY
. You have to grant him that.

Audie

I
WANTED HER
to stop was all.

Ruth

H
ER MIDDLE SON
goes from the house to the barn, from cold to colder still. Opening the door just a crack and sliding through it and closing it again. There are chickens in the barn, chickens and an old horse and a wind that howls between the barn boards where the drifts have not yet blocked its entry, bearing snow that spills over itself and tumbles down its own alluvial flanks like sand.

He has something hidden in the breast pocket of his coveralls. He stops and unbuttons his coat and presses his fingers against the fabric, fearing that his passage through the narrow door crack has squashed his treasure flat. Cursing his careful thoughtlessness. But the denim is shit-stiff and his fingers are frozen and he cannot determine much. He creeps along the wall, stepping in snow, toward a bright window where he can draw the thing out and look. Chickens scatter. Cellophane gleams. A half-pack of cigarettes shakes in the snowlight. Crushed yes but not beyond salvaging. He takes one out and holds it like some venomous thing alive and bent on treachery. Runs his fingers along it to nurse it back to shape. Blows into the pack to expand it and shakes out the rest and does the same, restoring them one by one. All is not lost.

He climbs to the hayloft where the wind howls wilder yet. The lathe has a worktable built into one end of it and he clears it off. A single electric bulb crusted with sawdust hangs low above it and he switches it on. He puts the cigarettes down on the worktable where they skitter, wind-shifted. He reaches into the pocket of his coat and draws out a darning needle he has kept there, stolen likewise from his mother. Through the eye of it a hair from the horse’s tail, just as he remembers. He sets it down on the worktable and it slides a little and he recovers it and stabs it through his cuff for safekeeping and then he takes out the first cigarette and applies himself to it. Squinting. Summoned here as to the night-dark shop of some poor shoemaker, working wordless magic.

Preston

H
E SURE DIDN’T MEAN IT
as any joke. Not like they all did with Margaret that first time. What he wanted was to kill his mother’s taste for cigarettes, which by then was going to take a whole lot more than a little bit of horsehair. I don’t know that it would have done her any good if it’d worked. If she’d taken the hint and just up and quit. Probably not. It was probably too late. Maybe she would have breathed better toward the end but it still would have been the end.

To hear Vernon tell it, she smoked the first one that evening without even taking note of the difference. The house was shut up tight and it raised a stink like you wouldn’t believe and she didn’t even take note of it. Most people it’ll make sick to their stomach quick enough. That’s how far gone she was even then, and she still had a few years left. Creed got his coat and went out into the barn for a little fresh air but Audie just sat there and took it. He was waiting to see what would happen and he wanted to be there when it did. Vernon stayed with him. He knew what was up. He wasn’t anybody’s fool. And he figured he ought to be there right along with his brother.

After she smoked the first one Audie went in to check on her and the smell was worse in there but she didn’t seem to mind it. He sat down at her bedside for a while and she lit up another. That one must have been the last straw. I guess it got to her stomach directly without going through her nose because the next thing you know, up comes dinner. She wasn’t eating much by then, but it came up.