Kings of the Earth: A Novel (29 page)

Lester debates giving him his coat. To wrap the boy in it now will only soak it through and cost him the use of it and then where will they be. He hesitates and shakes his head to clear it. The boy is freezing. Anyone can see that. His skin is blue beneath the white of the ice. He lets him go and nearly permits kindness to overwhelm what passes in this instance for sense, stepping away and half-removing the coat and then deciding otherwise. If he freezes to death there will be no one to aid the boys.

Vernon’s hair is frozen. His hat, Audie’s hat, still hangs beneath the ice, a dim and shifting shadow. The ties of it, come loose in the fall, reach around the edge of the hole and flutter in the black water like slow pennants. There is no use for it now save as a reminder of the younger boy. Lester tells Vernon to wait here and then he tells him to come on and then when neither admonition makes the slightest difference or even seems to register he picks him up, staggering. As he lifts the boy, one foot slips back and finds thin ice that cracks beneath their combined weight and he lurches forward. Careening toward the rocky bank, utterly lacking purchase. They spin and swoop and recover and the wet boy has already soaked his coat through and he wonders why he did not just give it over to begin with. What kind of monster he might be.

They reach the pathway to the high rock and he sets Vernon down. He asks how he is doing and the boy does not answer, which could mean anything. He considers the wisdom of perhaps giving him his coat now, but the useless old thing is half soaked through so why bother. Instead he pulls it about himself and heads up the path. Calling for Audie. “You come, boy. We ain’t got all day. Your brother’s fell in the water in case you ain’t noticed.”

But Audie does not come. When Lester reaches the top he is still lying on the stone, whimpering and shaking and banging first one leg and then the other against the hard world. He has let go of the pole and it has slid off the far side of the rock, hook and sinker and line and all, each of them worth good money, and Lester curses him for his carelessness. The very tip of it is still within reach and he bends over his son to grab it but a tremor passes through Audie and his fingertips just brush it and down it goes. He strains after it and falls short. Perhaps it will be recoverable in the spring, but not now. With the back of his frozen hand he cuffs the boy and that seems to wake him up.

He takes him by the collar and hoists him bodily. The boy’s feet skitter on the slick rock as he brings him up and the father lets go of his coat and the boy crumples down again. The father gives him the toe of his boot. “Get up, you.” The boy rises to his knees like a beggar man and his blue eyes turn upward to his father but his father sees them not, for he has already turned away. “Get up if you’re coming, and bring them fish. I can’t do everything.”

In his arms the boy is but a groaning log. A stiff, rotten thing pulled up from the deep and conjured into some kind of life that is not life exactly. Lester trudges through deep snow, following the footprints he made earlier, sinking into his own covered-over tracks and remaking them. They reach the barbed-wire fence and rather than stretch it down for Audie he stumbles straight across and Audie stumbles after him. The boy catches his pant leg and tears it and catches his sock and tears that too. He cries and keeps going. What will his mother say. He keeps crying and he works to catch up.

Lester shifts his hold on Vernon to apply a little warmth to new places. Against his icy coat the boy’s face is blue and he unbuttons and wraps the hard fabric partway around him, at least so far as he can and still keep moving. Perhaps that will help. Within his breast pocket the flask presses against the boy’s head and he can feel the hardness of it with his arm but he leaves it where it is and looks back instead to see about Audie. “You’ll cry plenty if you left them fish behind.” Audie wails but Vernon in his arms makes no sound at all.

Soon they will see the barn and the house. Just over a rise and down. The wind picks up but they do not notice it. They squint and keep on. The clouds scud low and the rain comes in pellets. They top the rise and slide down through the pasture, too fast for their own good. They teeter and they tumble and they send up snow. There are trees in low, wet places down here and the cows are sheltered among them and Lester knows that he should see to them but not now.

He calls out his wife’s name although she would have to be looking out the bedroom window in order to see them and that window is covered over with feed sacks to keep out the cold. He calls nonetheless and the sound causes Vernon to stir just the slightest. He calls again and Audie joins in, perhaps only for the companionship of it.

He turns. “You left them fish you’ll holler all right.”

The pasture flattens out as they near the barn and the snow is less deep for having been blown elsewhere, off into low spots and up against the buildings in drifts. They push on through it and Lester hauls the barn door open a crack and they slip inside. Out of the wind it is warmer already. He bellows his wife’s name again and this time she comes. “Whyn’t you boil some water,” he says as he staggers in through the door. Only that.

She has the good sense not to ask how this has come about. She merely takes Vernon and tells his father that she will see to him. He can pump the water and set it to boil. This chore being hers by custom, he balks. She says he will get it done faster than she can, and still he refuses. She says that doing it will warm him up, and he gives in at last. She takes Vernon to the bed over on the cold side of the house, then she thinks better of it and strips away his clothes and wraps him in a blanket and brings him back to the cherry-red stove. Sitting there in the straight kitchen chair, rubbing color back into him. Lester strips off his own wet coat and throws it steaming on the floor in front of the stove and starts working the pump. Audie stands hugging himself against the wall, shivering as he does, and a single green fish slides from his coat to lie dead on the plank floor. His father laughs for the first time in eternity. The boy laughs too. Then he spreads wide his arms and the icy fish come showering down.

Margaret

M
ONEY CAME IN
from all over, and for some reason I got the job of handling it. Better that it fell to me than to some others I could name. I’m a trustee at the church and I’ve been bonded for counting what comes into the collection plate, although nobody thought to ask that. They just started handing it to me. I suppose I have an honest face. At least we know where every nickel went.

Preston got it started. He was storming around here one morning, going on about how the Proctor boys were never going to be able to pay for a proper lawyer if they lived to be a thousand, and I suggested that he ought to go storm around the lumberyard for a while instead of bothering me. I won’t deny that it was purely self-defense on my part. We’ve been married a long time and you get to know your limits. So he went to the lumberyard and sat down with his old cronies, and to hear him tell it the money just started to appear. It wasn’t just a trickle, either. People opened their wallets who didn’t know Creed Proctor from Adam. People opened their wallets who’d never spoken a word to him their whole lives and surely wouldn’t have sat on a stool alongside him at the Homestead, not and been able to keep their suppers down. People opened their wallets who couldn’t afford to.

Preston said Creed could have his choice of the best lawyers in the county with that kind of money, but Creed let Preston pick for him.

Tom

N
OT LONG PAST SUPPERTIME
on a sunny day in the middle of September, Tom was in the hayloft and the hayloft was heaven. A light and steady breeze drifted in through one open door and out through the other, keeping the hanging stems in constant motion. Like palm fronds being waved over a pharaoh’s bald head by half-naked slave girls. That was how it seemed to him. The temperature was perfect for both man and marijuana, and the air smelled good up here too, like lush green plants and fresh cool breezes from somewhere else and money. Mixed with the smells of cows and cow manure from downstairs, but you couldn’t have everything.

He’d put in a long couple of days getting the buds trimmed and the stems hung out on clothesline and the rest of it, the tender little stuff, set out to dry on screens that he and his father had dragged back from the municipal dump in Cassius. DeAlton had worried that it was going to be too hot up in the loft but they didn’t have much in the way of alternatives and the results for the last few years had been plenty fine hadn’t they so that was that. Even DeAlton Poole couldn’t very well argue with success. Besides, if today was any indication of how the next few weeks would go, the weather was going to be perfect. Absolutely
primo
.

He squatted in the doorway and looked down, watching his uncles going about their work like ants. Mindless and automatic and driven by something even they couldn’t fully understand. Audie and Vernon had been out in the high field since sunup, harvesting corn for silage. Creed had been mending the fence up by the graveyard. Somewhere in the pit of his heart Tom allowed himself a little throb of gratitude for everything they did, by which he meant how they went about the hard work of practically starving to death around this desolate place. Without them, where would he be? Nowhere, that’s where. Or at the very least out in the open, which was as good as being in the state penitentiary.

He held on to the doorframe and leaned out into the open air and craned his neck either way. The sun was getting low over the Marshall property down the hill to the west, and Nick was still nowhere in sight. Late as usual. That was all right. The work he’d done in the hayloft might look even better once the shadows came up with the dusk. It’d be like a jungle in there, all spooky and mysterious. It would seem to go up and up forever, and all those hanging stems whispering. That would be good. He stood up to stretch his legs and thought about climbing down the ladder to put a nice tidy little joint on Uncle Vernon’s chair for later. The poor old bastard was getting so he shook so much that if you gave him a Baggie he just spilled it all over his lap, so Tom had started rolling them for him. There was less waste that way. Plus it was kind of the least he could do, if you thought about it.