Kings of the Earth: A Novel (27 page)

Audie’s bobber sinks a little and comes up again. The boy tenses and Vernon puts a hand on his knee.
Wait
. The bobber bounces again and goes fully under and Vernon lets up.
Now
. Audie pulls on the line and sets the hook and brings up a perch, a big one, writhing, frigid as the ice it came from. The boy shivers with cold and delight. Vernon pulls out the hook and Lester takes the fish by the tail and strikes it hard against the stone to stun it or kill it and either way it lies still. Green and yellow and glistening on the gray rock.

“Bait up some more of that cheese,” their father says. “While your luck holds out.”

Audie fumbles with it but Vernon helps and back into the water goes the hook. Lester’s cork floats steady on the little current but Audie’s dips again, and soon he has pulled up another fish. Lester curses and kills it and hands his own pole to Vernon and tells him why doesn’t he try his luck instead, his brother’s so goddamned handy with a fishpole. They do, and while they sit shouldering each other with their eyes on those two corks shouldering each other the same way, he resorts to his flask. Soon enough Vernon’s cork dips and he pulls up a fish and Lester kills it with a slap more aggressive than required.

The cheese dwindles and so does the whiskey. Lester closes his eyes and listens to the sighing of the wind and the hard thin pattering of the rain and the whistling of his own breath. Three fish icing on the rock and then a long wait when nothing happens but the slow nibbling away of bait and the slow diminishment of the whiskey in the flask and the slow faint whitening of the frozen world. The boys pull up their hooks empty and rebait them. Audie wonders if the fish have gotten too smart for them but no sooner has he suggested it than two more tug at the bait and the corks bob, one to each boy. Lester opens his eyes and shakes his head to clear it for he could swear he has seen four fish come up. Either the whiskey or the frozen rain stuck to his eyelashes. He swabs at his face with the back of his hand and he helps unhook the fish and he kills them one by one.

Five nice perch. With Creed still suckling, five nice perch will be more than enough for the four of them. But Lester is warm from the whiskey and the fish will easily keep in this weather—they will all but keep in the bedroom, the house is so frigid—so why not continue as long as their luck runs and the cheese holds out. “Let your old man show you how it’s done,” he says to Audie, holding out his hand for the pole. “You caught your limit.”

Audie cries and shrinks away and Lester wrenches the pole from his hands all the same. His hip strikes the flask and it tilts and he recovers it, but rather than take any further risk he raises it to his lips and drains the rest. His lips adhere to the frosty neck and he pulls it free, uncaring. A little blood. Into the pocket with the flask.

Vernon has already baited both hooks and they lower them into the water. Nothing. Nothing for the longest time. Just the pattering of the frozen rain and the sighing of the wind in the treetops. And then, just when a person of ordinary patience or stubbornness would have abandoned hope, Vernon’s cork jumps a little and he brings up another fish, this one the largest yet, and his little brother Audie laughs both to see it break the iron surface of the water and to see his father’s own cork still floating hopelessly alongside it. Lester reaches around and raps the laughing boy’s head again and this time his hat flies off, spiraling downward into the frozen creek bed. Pellets of rain strike his close-cropped hair and melt down into it. Lester reaches over for the fish but Vernon gives him the pole instead. He takes off his own hat and screws it tight onto his brother’s head and slides down the icy face of the rock into the narrow passage that the creek has cut.

“Let Audie get that,” says his father. “He’s the one dropped it.”

Rather than explain and suffer the consequences, Vernon does not answer. He scrambles over icy rocks to where the hat has come to rest and he kneels on the ice to retrieve it, tugging it free from a clump of brush where it has landed and standing up again to beat it dry against his knee. He puts it on and pulls the earflaps down and ties them underneath his chin, not against the cold but against his father’s ongoing injunction that he let that damned hat be, it’s Audie’s to look after. He sees his father’s jaw working and he points to his stoppered ears and he shrugs, scuffing down the edge of the creek bed through the snow toward the place where they climbed up to begin with. Watching his feet. Beneath the high rock, and under the catenary of the one fish line still dangling there. His father’s. He looks up, thinking to get himself a fish’s eye view of a fish’s fate, and he sees two pairs of boot soles and one branch pole and two curious faces looking down. Freezing rain strikes his face and he blinks and sticks his tongue out to catch some. He spins a little to see it come spiraling hypnotically down from above the trees. Then he loses his balance and slides backward on the frozen rain and on the layer of snow beneath it and on the layer of ice beneath that and first one foot goes into the water and then the ice breaks clear beneath the other foot and then in he goes completely.

The creek is shallow but not here. Here in this pool it is well over a man’s head and deeply treacherous, even in the summertime, with its sunken log and its walls of tumbled stone jointed by cunning time in ways fit to catch an unwary limb. Vernon goes under and bobs up again, not in the clear space but beneath the ice, and with one foot against the submerged log and the top of his head against the ice and his eyes closed against the dark water he cannot judge up from down.

His brother screams and begins to shake, his whole world cast into the void.

His father curses and drops the pole and it skitters down the rock face into the creek bed. He calls the boy’s name. No answer from the wavering black pool. Whiskey-addled and panicking, he cannot decide which route to take to the cursed creek bed, straight down the rock face or along the icy path behind him.

On the rock Audie shakes like a boy puppet, wooden with cold.

Lester stands and takes off his glove and reaches into his pocket for whiskey by way of fortification but he comes up short and curses himself for the instant thus lost. He hollers at Audie to sit up straight and he turns and races down the path, half-sliding.

Underwater Vernon exhales.

Audie does not sit up straight.

Lester loses his footing and goes down on his ass. His hand ungloved scrapes against a rock and his knee through thin coveralls scrapes against another and he leaves two patches of blood, red on gray. Freezing rain merges with them and the red bleeds pale into the new white and Lester regains his feet and goes on. Soon enough there will be no sign of his passage. He lurches toward a sapling and takes it in his bleeding hand and hangs from it to make the last turn onto the margin of the creek bed.

Vernon opens his eyes and sees light and pushes himself toward it.

From the sapling Lester moves to the edge of the hole in the ice. The branch pole slants across the opening and he takes it. He sees the mirage of his own fish son moving beneath the surface. Kneeling, he pokes the end of the branch into the water.

Audie’s cries go on.

“Hush, you,” and “Come on, boy,” says Lester, alternately to each child.

Vernon breaks the surface. His father tells him to grab on but for all the response he gets he may as well be speaking to an otter or a dead man. His son’s eyes are closed and iced over, and apart from certain small movements as may be attributed to the water itself he might be recently dead or near enough that it might not matter. Tears of frustration from Lester. Frustration or frustration combined with something else. He has half a mind to strike the bobbing boy with the branch to rouse him or at least to vent his own fury and no sooner has he drawn back than Vernon opens his mouth gasping. His eyes too.

Lester looks from him to his other son, one leg just visible over the edge of the high rock where he lies in his misery, shaking leaflike and beating against stone.

The boy Vernon looks like some ghastly spirit of the waters, emerging from the black pool blue and white. He lacks the strength to grip the pole so his father edges toward him on his belly and takes his two hands in one of his own, soaking himself in the bargain.

Preston

M
ARGARET WANTED ME OUT
of the house one morning since I wouldn’t quit storming around and making her life miserable on account of Creed, so she sent me down to the lumberyard, and when I got down there what’s everybody talking about but Creed anyhow. It was in the paper but I didn’t take the paper anymore. It’d been in the paper two or three times. The
Cassius Courier
was a daily then even though it’s a weekly now. It was a daily then and it was mostly advertising. Advertising and the funnies and the police blotter was about all there was to it. That’s why I stopped taking it.

Anyhow it’d been in the paper and it’d been on the news out of Syracuse and Utica when I was too busy looking after Creed and Audie to waste my time watching the television. Everybody knew the whole story and nobody believed it. Nobody. By God, who would. You’d have to be crazy.

That fellow Ben Wilson hadn’t been talking to the reporters yet, but there were other people in his office who were.
An unnamed source in the district attorney’s office speaking on condition of anonymity
is what it said in the
Courier
. I don’t know but what it was Wilson himself, now that I think about it. If one person in the office will do that I guess another one will, and it usually goes all the way to the top. The top man sets the tone.

It’d be just like Wilson. I wouldn’t put it past him.

For Christ’s sake that’s not speaking anonymously. It’s just spreading rumors around.

Plus some reporter’d come out to the farm and talked to Audie. This was a fellow from the Syracuse paper. I don’t know when he got out there that I didn’t see him but he did. Maybe it was that same day the troopers talked Creed into making up that confession. That same day Margaret and I were gone wherever. Anyhow he had a camera with him and he took some pictures, and the old farm didn’t look too good when they printed them up in the paper. It looked like a bad place where anything could happen. A place you’d want to get away from. I wouldn’t be surprised if folks in the city just browsing through took it for a Western movie set or a Dust Bowl farm from back when nobody had anything and you couldn’t wait for time to pass and things to get better just so you could maybe quit starving to death. That’s how it looked.

The reporter didn’t get much out of Audie. I guess when he came out from Syracuse he didn’t have any idea what he might find. I thank heavens he ran into him, though, and not Creed. That’d been trouble right there. That was another reason I knew we had to get those boys a good lawyer just as quick as we could do it. I figured we needed a spokesman of our own. I say
we
. You know what I mean.

But anyhow until right then I hadn’t thought about the papers. I’d only thought about the law. And now there I sat behind the service desk reading the stories and my blood pressure was going through the roof, thinking how we had ourselves one agreeable idiot and one half-mute on our side and they had people in the district attorney’s office whispering to reporters no questions asked.

I don’t call that speaking anonymously. I’d go so far as to say it’s the first step toward tampering with a jury. I’ve seen a few lawyer shows myself. I ask you how on earth a person was supposed to get a fair trial if everybody inside of a hundred miles had heard those fellows in Wilson’s office whispering about him like that? Off the record is worse than on, as far as that goes. They knew what they were up to.

And don’t tell me about a change of venue. You take the Proctor boys off that farm for two weeks either one of them and they’ll die dead just from being homesick. You don’t have to be a genius to see that. You want to kill either one of them that’s the way to go.