Kings of the Earth: A Novel (9 page)
Read Kings of the Earth: A Novel Online
Authors: Jon Clinch
Tags: #Fiction - General, #Brothers, #Family Life, #General, #Literary, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Fiction, #Rural families
Vernon
I
SLID THE CIGARETTE
back in the pack just the same way I took it out. We stood against the porch and waited. I did anyway. I waited. Me and Creed. Audie turned to see what Margaret was up to but I give him a slap and he come back around. Then he seen the way I was just standing there against the porch like always and he copied me at it. He stood there with his back against the porch waiting. He was shaking some because he couldn’t tell what was going to happen next. I asked Preston would he play that song my brother likes and he said your brother Audie and I said yes that brother my brother Audie and he played the song. “Turkey in the Straw” I think. It set Audie’s feet moving and calmed him down some. About halfway through I heard her strike a match and that was that. Audie always did love “Turkey in the Straw.”
Margaret
T
HEY WERE JUST BOYS
. We were all just children, really, although Preston and I surely didn’t think so at the time. Why should we? A year later we’d be an old married couple. Another year after that, he’d be in France.
I don’t think the Proctor boys liked my intruding into their world. I was an outsider. A foreigner. A
girl
, frankly. They weren’t any more comfortable around girls then than they are around women now. So they punished me by putting that horsehair in my cigarette and letting me smoke it. That’s the way I always understood it. Perhaps there was less to it than that. But everything’s open to interpretation, isn’t it?
Good heavens, it’s a wonder I kept on smoking after that day. It’s definitely a wonder I ever went back to Preston’s parents’ house. If he hadn’t taken my side and run those boys off, I don’t believe I would have. And then where would I be?
My understanding is that the boys got a good scolding from their mother, but that’s as far as it went. I’ll bet their father had a good laugh over the whole thing. I was sick to my stomach for two days, and I’ll bet he had a good laugh at my expense.
Audie
W
E NEVER BUILT
anything much but we sure could tear down. My brother Vernon with the sledgehammer and Creed with the crowbar and me collecting the nails that fell out. They were those old square ones, black iron. You can’t get those old square nails anymore but here they came falling down and bouncing in the plaster dust and there I was collecting them up. That was my job. My brother Vernon gave it to me. The nails left little trails where they bounced. Some of them were still in the uprights or the lath or both and those I had to pull out with the claw hammer. It was broken but I made it work all right. My pockets got full and the one with the hole in it leaked nails down my pant leg and right on out. You can’t get hold of those old square iron nails anymore and I liked the look of them. I could put them to use.
Tom
H
E WAS A FASTIDIOUS BOY
, happiest in the round of his own regular habits, and nothing about the Carversville farm interested him. Not the green fields that lay around it and not the hard mechanics of working it. The animals were the worst. The scratching of a hen on the board floor of the front room would drive him into the yard. The low, wet rooting of a hog made his gorge rise. From the chickens to the sheep to the weary old workhorse, every one of the animals seemed to him inscrutable, treacherous. He hated even the harmless dog, Skip, a mottled mongrel of uncertain heritage and vague origin. Boys may like dogs as a rule, but Tom had no time for Skip.
His father brought him, to demonstrate how far they’d come. To demonstrate it to himself, to the boy, and perhaps to his wife as well. Maybe even to the brothers, although they didn’t seem to care much about anything other than the work that lay in front of them. DeAlton loved bringing Tom with his white tennis shoes and his neat dungarees and his spotless T-shirt out to the place where it all began. The place where his mother had come from.
“Do you know what grows best on a farm like this?” he asked Tom as the three of them turned off the main drag from Cassius and started up the dirt lane. “Opportunity!”
Tom sat and looked out the window, panicky and wide-eyed. The Hatch place next door looked ordinary enough, but he didn’t trust it. It looked like a house that had been plucked from a regular street in town by a tornado or something and then dropped down way out here in the fields all queer and disorienting. It made him think of
The Wizard of Oz
, which in turn made him remember the flickering image of the Wicked Witch of the West cackling in the storm outside Dorothy’s window. Both times he’d seen that movie, he was deeply relieved when things finally settled down and the color came on and Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas anymore. He thought Kansas looked like Carversville.
“Yes, sir,” said DeAlton. “A place like this grows opportunity like weeds. Opportunity to improve yourself, for one thing. Why, just look at your mother!”
She shifted the plate of cookies she had riding on her lap. “You know,” she said to her husband, “I’d think a place like this might even present the opportunity to sell a milking machine, don’t you? Provided a person made a little effort.” She surely knew that this wasn’t true, but it was a topic that never failed to deflate him a little.
DeAlton rolled up his window against the rising dust and Tom did the same. DeAlton hit the gas and the car flew over a couple of bumps and he yanked the wheel hard and spun it into the yard. “We’ve come a long way,” he said as he hit the brakes. “And I don’t mean just up from town.”
Vernon put a thin blanket on the horse and tied a rope around her neck. They didn’t own a saddle and they never had. It would have taken an unusual sort of saddle to fit this particular beast, with her abrupt swayback and her weak shoulders and her bloated stomach that seemed to be getting worse. He guessed maybe she had cancer too or was getting it. There was still plenty of use left in her all the same. Say what you want about her conformation, she had Percheron blood somewhere and she would be a long time losing her strength.
The boy inquired about her name and the uncle told him that he could give her one if he wanted. They’d never seen the need. Tom put a little thought into it but decided he’d leave well enough alone. Instead he stood perfectly still in the corner of the barn, as if by not moving he could prolong this moment of disengagement. Make it last until it was time to go home. He watched milky light pour in through the cracks between the boards. He watched dust motes and chaff rise up and take to the air like spooks. It all got in his nose and made him sneeze. Vernon laughed—a sound like a horse—and he said the mare was ready if Tom still wanted that ride. He had never said he’d wanted it but he moved toward the horse anyhow, and as he did Audie materialized from around an edge of the track door without ever opening it wide enough for a cat to pass through. Vernon indicated Tom and gave Audie the rope and told him not to hang himself with it.
Tom approached the mare as if he were approaching a bomb. As if his uncle were holding a detonator instead of a length of rope. Audie put the rope in between his teeth and bent down and made a step from his hands, and thus he helped Tom climb onto the mare. Before they left the barn Audie reached into his pocket and drew out the better part of one of Donna’s cookies, oatmeal raisin with a dusting of lint and silage and God knew what else. Smiling through his whiskers, he offered it to his nephew. “No, thanks,” said Tom, thinking that what looked like a raisin might be almost anything.
DeAlton
I
SEE YOU BOYS
are doing a little remodeling.
No, that’s good. I like it. It kind of opens the place up, don’t you think? A person needs some room. A little elbow room. A little room to stretch out, make himself comfortable.
Hey, thanks. I don’t mind if I do. Your sister won’t ever bake for us at home. Not for the old home team. No, sir. Not anymore. She used to when we were first married but I guess she kind of ran out of gas for that sort of thing.
Isn’t that right, Donna? Isn’t that right?
Now don’t bother with that, honey. Quit that. There’s no cleaning that up. You try every time and it’s no use. Besides, there’s all this plaster dust everywhere. But like I said, honey, isn’t that right? About when we were first married?
She used to bake just all the time, Creed. All the time, but not anymore. The only way to get a pie or a plate of cookies out of this woman is to come out to the farm.
Come on out to the farm with me
, she says,
and I’ll bake everybody an apple pie
. That’s what she says. And I have to confess I’m a sucker for it. Not that I wouldn’t come out anyway. You know.
Now
that’s
a delicious cookie right there, honey. Oatmeal raisin? Are there walnuts in there too?
Nice. I thought so.
To tell you the truth, I never knew why you boys needed the two rooms here to begin with. It was just the usual, I figure. I mean it was just the way folks ordinarily set things up. A bedroom here, a living room there, what have you. The usual. But now you can lie in bed and watch TV all the way over there by the door. That’s what I call luxury. That’s what I call living. I guess you could move the set over here by the bed if you wanted to, but that would make things kind of cramped.
Oh. I see. Well. If the outlet doesn’t work anymore then you don’t have much choice in the matter. So yeah. This is what I’d call an innovative solution to the problem. Good thinking. A big room like this with the bed and the kitchen table and the fridge and the TV all at once? That’s living. Man oh man.
Tom
H
E KEPT A LITTLE DOPE
in the car, even though he knew it was probably a bad idea. It was in a Baggie, right there in the glove box where any cop would be sure to look right off. He had put the first of it there the summer before, kind of by accident on account of he’d been in a hurry and he wasn’t thinking, and then once the glove box was contaminated and all he figured that he might as well just keep it up. Maybe if he got stopped and they looked in the glove box and found that much they’d quit, instead of just finding a few traces and deciding to search the whole damn car.
He stopped where his uncles’ dirt lane met the pavement and rolled himself a joint and lit it. Just a skinny one. Some of the grass stuck to the red spiral of the cigarette lighter and he wondered if a cop would look there too if one stopped him. At least he wasn’t drinking. He knew guys who didn’t just drink and then drive but actually did both at the same time, guys from the construction site and guys from the community college, and it never failed to freak him out. Fazio, the foreman on the job, showed up every morning in his big red pickup with his big red forearm hanging over the doorsill and a can of Genesee standing right there in his big red hand, the can dressed in a little foam jacket to keep it cold. The foam jacket was Day-Glo orange and it had V
ERNON
D
OWNS
printed on the side of it over and over. They gave them out at the track on week-nights, to drum up business. Fazio thought it made the beer can look like it might be a Coke.
He turned north onto the paved road and hit the gas but the old VW didn’t do much. The road was nothing but hills all the way to Cassius and beyond. The VW had to work hard. The sun was down by the time he got to the beach. He had a little apartment that he rented on the second floor over a body and fender shop on the edge of town, just past the last of the bars. The body shop was closed at night and he was working days so it didn’t matter how much racket they made, banging on fenders or whatever. The whole apartment stank, though. That penetrating plastic smell of solvent got into everything. It made it hard to breathe, and now and then he worried that just living here might be causing him some sort of long-term harm. Plus he was afraid that if he lit a joint or a cigarette the whole place might go up one of these days. On the other hand, that same fear was helping him cut down on the smoking. So you took the good with the bad.
He parked the VW in the body and fender lot and sized up a couple of new wrecks on either side of it but he didn’t go straight into the apartment. Instead he walked down the main drag toward the water. The rides were going full blast, with kids screaming and carnival music blaring and lights shooting out every which way. His parents had never taken him there when he was growing up and he didn’t have much interest in any of it now, but he stopped and watched the carousel go around for a few minutes. He smoked a cigarette and watched the little kids going up and down on the horses. The horses made him think of the old horse on his uncles’ farm, long dead.
He crushed out his cigarette on the sidewalk and went on past the Clam Shack and Harpoon Gary’s without giving either one of them much thought. Growing up around here, he never saw the names of these places as either ironic or aspirational. He never much saw them at all. The places and their battered signs were just what they were. Fixtures. Both Gary’s and the Shack had big decks that looked out in the general direction of the water, and both of the decks were crowded with summer people and people who’d come over for supper from Cassius and Verona and maybe as far away as Rome, the summer people wearing beach clothes and the locals still dressed for work. The beach looked westward across the lake, so these places on the water did a pretty good business around sunset. At least in the summer. Come winter they’d be shut.