Kings of the Earth: A Novel (33 page)

Preston

T
HERE WASN’T ANY QUESTION
what Creed was up to. He was going courting.
He’d set his cap for somebody
, is how they used to say it. Along about suppertime I’d seen him start down the road with that old three-legged mutt they had back then trailing behind him until its legs gave out. I mentioned it to Margaret and her eyes lit up and she clapped her hand over her mouth and fessed up about the uniform. Like it had been a secret between her and Creed and now it was out. I asked her if he’d said anything about a girl when he’d come about his khakis and she said no, but the both of us put two and two together.

A young fellow that age it was to be expected.

Then again this wasn’t just any young fellow. It was Creed Proctor. I don’t remember he’d been lucky with a girl ever. Of course I can’t speak for what might have happened over in Korea or even up to Camp Drum. A lot of things can happen to a young fellow in the service. Things he might not be in a hurry to bring home. Not all of them will have to do with what you’re required to do regarding the enemy, either. Some of them you come up with yourself, or among the other fellows. Out there in the world.

Anyhow the Proctor boys had always been shy around girls as far as I knew. Not that they were the kind of men that girls would have gone seeking out. Far from it. But then again there’s all kinds of girls. A fellow I know in the car business will tell you there’s an ass for every seat.

Look how Ruth married Lester. You never know who’ll come along or what’ll happen or why.

So even though I thought it was comical that he’d get his sights set on some little gal, Margaret thought it was sweet.

Ruth

T
HE AFTERNOON IS FIERCELY HOT
and wickedly close and a couple of mile-high thunderheads hang in the sky like anvils. Vernon is bent over inside the henhouse wielding a short-handled shovel, scraping the worst of the chicken manure into piles by the door and pushing lumpy hailstorms of it out into the yard, much to the irritation of the chickens. They squawk and storm around as if the flying manure is a surprise every single time, as if they have no idea where it came from in the first place. Audie is up at the edge of the high pasture underneath the Farmall tractor, unscrewing the plug to let the old oil drain out into a swale that runs along the fence line. He has half a case of fresh oil on the wagon behind it because he can never remember how much it takes and he wants to make sure he has enough. Creed has lifted the hatch to the pumphouse and let himself down into its coolness to tap at joints and knock on valves and pretend to himself that he is forestalling future problems.
Preventative maintenance
, they called it in the motor pool. Pipes clang and rust rains down. He may as well be banging on the works of a nuclear generator or a rocket ship for all he grasps of it and all the good it does, but the temperature is comfortable down there below the ground and the day is hastening on and he doesn’t want to begin anything too demanding. He is thinking of the girl at the Dineraunt.

He climbs out and lowers the hatch behind him and brushes cobwebs and red rust from the front of his overalls, then he bends and claps the same mess out of his pant legs as best he can. More or less satisfied, he stretches up straight and gets a look at the sky and judges that by the appearance of things there are worse places to be right now than underground. With those storm clouds. He goes and stands in the shadow of the barn and hollers Vernon’s name toward the henhouse and Vernon sticks his head out the door.

“You go on up there get Audie and bring him back,” Creed says.

“If you want him brung back you go.”

“Storm’s coming,” says Creed.

“I know that,” says Vernon.

“Go bring him back.”

“You want him brung back you do it. I’m busy.” Pulling his head back inside the henhouse. Mr. Punch on a traveling stage.

Creed raises his voice further. “He’ll get hit while you fool around with them chickens and then what.”

“He’ll come if he wants to.”

“He won’t come. He’ll hide under them trees and them trees’ll get hit and then what.”

Chicken manure flies from the door of the henhouse. “Far as I remember the old man never run home on account of a little rain.”

“The old man never learned what I learned in the army. He never had my army training.”

“I guess he didn’t, but he done all right.” Then, sticking his head back out and playing his trump, “You didn’t know him like I did. You was always too little.”

The storm does not come but Audie does, rattling down from the high pasture aboard the Farmall, grinning as if he’s just taken the whole thing to pieces and put it back together again, blindfolded. Creed watches him come, imagining a spiny finger of lightning leaping from one of those great distant piles of cloud to the very crown of his brother’s head, seeing the impact and the power of it illuminating him all blue and yellow before burning him to a cinder, thinking that the whole tragedy will be Vernon’s fault if it happens. But it doesn’t happen, and Audie draws the tractor up alongside the barn and switches off the engine and climbs down from the iron seat. He disconnects the wagon and puts the leftover oil cans in the barn and throws the empties into the trash. Then he says something that Creed does not quite catch and goes around to the front of the house to sit on the porch and carve on a piece of wood for a while. It is half an hour at least until milking time and if Creed is going to take a rest then maybe he will take a rest too. Their mother comes out and sits beside him, watching something emerge from the wood and watching the storm come on. Marveling at both of them.

Preston

H
AVING THE LAWYER THERE
was my idea so I was the one who had to suffer for it. First he made us wait on him the better part of the morning, and then when he finally made his appearance he blustered around like a little banty rooster. As if it was all his show to begin with. When he finally settled down and we got going he didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done on my own, except for just being a lawyer, which I guess counts for something. I don’t know why.

We had to do a lot of whispering back and forth. Audie got nervous right off and I didn’t think he’d stay with it for long, but Graham backed off a little on the deathbed stuff and I said how what we were doing was just like on one of those crime shows they always watched on television. He brightened up like we were putting on a show. Or like the people on those programs weren’t playacting but doing it for real and now here we were doing it just the same way they did. He’d whisper something to me and then he’d bend forward and watch me whisper it on to Chapman, all smiles. Then the lawyer would nod and tell me to go ahead and I’d say out loud what Audie had told me and he’d sit there listening to it and nodding up and down just as satisfied as a person could possibly be. He even began to drink a little of his coffee, but it had to be cold by then, so Graham buzzed somebody on the intercom and they brought in a fresh pot of it on a hot plate. Audie’s eyes lit right up to see it come. He doesn’t see too well but he could see well enough to make that out. You would have thought he was getting room service at the Ritz.

The problem was that it all went on for too long. Graham has a roundabout way of getting at things. He’s a very methodical person, and that’s all right. He has to be. He has a job to do like the rest of us. I believe he wanted to take it kind of easy on Audie, but as a result he ended up going all the way back to the Civil War. He got Audie talking about how it’d been growing up right behind Vernon, and then how Creed came along next and then Donna. The things they did as children and young people and so forth. I remembered an awful lot of those things myself, since very little of what went on in that family went on inside the house. They weren’t much of an indoor bunch then and they still aren’t.

One of the things Graham asked about was killing. I mean as a general thing. Mercy killing and slaughtering livestock and what have you. It’s part of living on a farm and he had to know that. Audie answered his questions all right, though, passing on what he remembered and staying pretty calm, and I spoke his answers out again just the way he said them. Stories of his various experiences. The lawyer Chapman got impatient after a while. He asked were they here for a questioning or for an installment of
This Is Your Life
, which was a program I remembered but I didn’t think he was old enough to. He threw down some papers on the table and pushed his chair back like he meant to leave even though there was no way he would’ve dared do that. It was all just for show. But when Chapman got agitated Audie got agitated right along with him. Jumpy. I blame it on Chapman more than I do Graham. Audie was doing well enough right up until then and he might very well have kept it up if that damned lawyer hadn’t flown off the handle and got him started.

Graham did as the lawyer wanted, and got right down to brass tacks. He asked Audie if he knew what it meant to die from suffocation. Audie cocked his head like he didn’t understand the question and Graham said like strangling. Like strangling a man. Audie said he knew about that and Chapman let him say it. That is, he let me say it for him. Audie went on to say he’d seen that kind of thing on crime shows on television and Chapman let me say that for him too. Audie was shaking pretty badly. He was starting to draw his neck in the way he does and he kept looking down at the table. Graham went on because he had to. He asked Audie if he’d heard about how that was the way his brother died. Being strangled. The lawyer hit the table with his fist and objected to that and Audie jumped like he’d been hit by lightning and Graham tried a different way. He asked Audie if he’d heard that his brother’d passed on from suffocation and Audie said yes he’d heard about it and the lawyer let him say that too. Graham nodded. Then he said he wanted to clarify if Audie had only heard about it, or if maybe he knew something about the subject firsthand. You can bet the lawyer raised an almighty objection to that, but Audie didn’t know he was objecting because he’d kind of shut him off by then and he wasn’t paying much attention to him. Only to Graham and me. Like we were two fellows with a couple of life preservers and he was drowning. He answered the question and I guess it was a good thing I was there to do his talking for him because I bent over to repeat what he’d said more or less to Chapman and Chapman said don’t you dare say it. Just flat out like that.
Don’t you dare say it
. Even to him. He said it didn’t matter what the answer was since it wasn’t a fair question. He cited some fancy legal reason, I don’t know what. I can’t say if it was a good reason or a made-up one, but either way Graham accepted it and shrugged his shoulders and moved on. That other trooper, Burnes, was writing away like mad, doing his best to get it all down. I don’t know how he could have kept it straight.

About then Audie gave up and just put his head on the table. Leaned over with his hands in his lap and laid his head on the table with his eyes shut. Graham asked could he please sit up and he didn’t answer. His head was kind of drumming on the table and the coffee in his cup shook in circles. I picked it up and moved it away to keep it from spilling over. Chapman said all right, that’s enough, and it was. It was enough.