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
Kings of the Earth: A Novel (25 page)
Ruth
S
OME THINGS THERE ARE
that will not freeze, whiskey in a flask among them. He slides the slim leather-wrapped thing into the breast pocket of his coveralls like a charm against bad luck. The flask is battered enough to have warded off an army of devils, for in years past he has variously dropped it and fallen hard upon it and used it for a hammer. But it still holds whiskey and that is as much as he requires of it.
He gathers up what else he will need. Fish line and hooks. A square of hard cheese for bait. Matches just in case. Vernon and Audie watch him until he says that if they mean to come along they’ll put on their coats right now and fetch in some firewood for their mother. She has said she doesn’t have enough to last and the baby will be keeping her indoors. Then he works newspaper into his tall rubber pack boots and puts on his second pair of socks over those he is already wearing and pulls on his coat to leave. In the barn he unearths a saw from beneath a pile of rusted tools and puts it under his arm and finds a coal shovel against the wall and hoists that over his shoulder. In haste the boys stamp their feet and drop the wood and say good-bye to their mother and the new baby. They promise to bring him back one of the million things he has not yet seen in the world, a flapping fish, and with wet eyes he glares back at them. They kiss their mother and slip out the door into the barn, and then out the barn door to find their father’s footprints already filling up with snow.
The creek runs above the property and along the farthest edge of it, and in summer it tumbles milky over rocks and plummets into deep round pools that it has hollowed out for itself. The next farmer owns the land and the creek and the falls too, if such things can be owned. A half-mile below and far from sight of any road or habitation the creek empties into the weedy stillness of Marshall’s Pond, and where it goes from there Lester has never wondered. There is fishing in Marshall’s Pond summer and winter both, but the snow is coming down hard and he thinks he might better keep to the creek.
He knows a natural pool where in summer a sunken log provides cover for trout, and although he has never dropped a line there in winter he reasons why not. Surely fish are creatures of habit. Surely they lack such powers of cognition as might compel them to vary their behavior by the season. Besides, there is a high flat rock above the water where he can arrange his things and sit comfortably with his legs dangling just as he does in summer. Watching the line and drinking a little. In the summer to cool down and in the winter to warm up. A fine miracle of transformation.
The boys catch up to him and in a line they crunch over the snow toward the fence. Audie wonders aloud if his father has brought a fish line for each of them and Lester says no particular setup will belong to any particular fisherman if they plan to eat. This is not a competition or a pleasure trip, in case he hasn’t noticed. Audie wonders if this means he cannot have his own fish line and Lester says yes, that is exactly what it means. Audie sniffs and looks at the snow and walks. Vernon pulls his hand to stop him short and lifts his earflap and whispers that he will let him have his if he keeps quiet about it. It will be their secret.
A wind barrels out of the west and the trees bend and a frozen rag caught on barbed wire makes a hard horselike whickering. The snow is deep here at the margin of the property, three quarters of the way up the fence posts and nearly overtopping the last strand of wire. They sink into it but not far. Lester stands for a second with his boot sole on the top strand and the boys flail over it in a panic and he lifts his boot and moves on toward the line of bent trees that marks the creek. They draw near. Small branches and twigs clothed in old ice and clacking.
The falls is frozen buttermilk, long ropy strands of it descending. By some mysterious power, water moves beneath it. Lester stamps up to the rock ledge above the pool and kicks away the snow that covers it and drops his tackle and stamps back down. He sends the boys up. “Don’t touch them lines,” he says. He uncorks his flask and swallows some and corks it again. He edges toward the water, not trusting the ground underfoot, holding to a sapling that bends and showers down snow and ice in clumps. He slips and recovers but drops the shovel. It falls and tips in slow motion and lands handle-first on the ice and he follows it warily, testing as he goes. The snow is thin on the ice and the ice curves like wind-cut stone and he hears the water running beneath it. He takes up the shovel and clears a space. There is a crack here, round-edged, and dark water gleams below it. Between his native impatience and this lucky opening he decides that he will not need to use the saw after all. He strikes the curved ice with the sharp fore-edge of the shovel and after repeated blows it cracks. Chunks fall in and bump downstream and collect. He strikes some more and thin cracks spread both where there is no snow and where there is and more chunks fall in and he judges that he has opened a target large enough to hit from the high rock even in this wind. He regains the bank and leans the coal shovel against a tree and stoops to collect two thin branches snapped off and fallen. Then he stamps up to where the boys wait.
He squats in the center of the rock and arranges his tackle. The boys gather around, aping his pose, their little hands hanging down between their knees. Vernon takes up the thin branches and gives one of them to his brother while their father finds the hooks and untangles the lines and makes them up. He hands the lead sinkers to Vernon and Vernon tries fixing them to the lines but the lead is too cold and his hands are too cold and he ends up using his teeth instead. Lester tells the boys that he would notch the poles if he hadn’t forgotten his jackknife and they know this already for they have helped before and have done it themselves fifty times the same way. Audie has an idea. He gnaws at the growth end of one branch until he has notched it. He yields it up proudly, his mouth all ice and bark, and his father laughs. “You’re all right,” the old man says, handing him the other to chew on.
They bait the hooks with cheese. Lester sits on the edge of the rock and the boys sit to one side of him, Vernon first and then Audie. Through their thin trousers the cold knits them to the spot. They lower the lines into the hole and wait, listening to the wind and the water. Lester has one pole and the boys have the other and they do not argue over it. Instead Vernon has given it outright to Audie and now sits warily watching him, on the lookout for some slip.
Lester clamps his pole between his knees and finds the flask. He unstoppers it with his teeth and takes the cork in one hand and drinks, the flask tipped straight up and gurgling. The boys watch, shifting their gaze from their father to the lines in the dark water below and back again. “You watch them lines,” he says. The lines waver in the water and the wind and they are difficult to track from here. He presses the cork back in and slides the flask into his pocket and sits restored against the cold.
Vernon says maybe the fish are all sleeping or frozen and Audie says maybe the fish are all dead. Their father says they had better not be or there’ll be short rations tonight. Vernon says what if they have all gone downstream to Marshall’s Pond and his father says all right if he wants to walk all the way down there in the snow to find out it’s no skin off his nose. Vernon sighs. Lester takes another drink of whiskey. Audie squirms where he sits and the line jumps and he yanks on it hard. The line and the baited hook and the lead sinker all fly out of the hole in the ice and everything lands in a snowbank and Audie laughs. His father does not. “Get that back in the water if you mean to eat,” he says.
“He thought he had a bite.”
“I know that. He didn’t have no bite. Not yet.”
“But he thought.”
“I know what he thought and he didn’t have no bite. That’d be no way to set it if he did.”
Vernon takes the pole to get the line back in the water and gives it back to Audie and they sit for a while. Audie is nervous and he watches the line as if it has threatened to bite him. Lester uncorks the flask and drinks and corks the flask again and what movement there is in the water is current only.
“He needs a bobber,” says Vernon.
“He’ll learn to get along without.”
Audie
T
HEY NEVER CAME
to take down the tape so the time came we just took it down ourselves. Took it down and went on back in. Nobody ever gave us any trouble about it.
Preston
T
HE THING WAS
, he wasn’t even charged. He wasn’t held over and he wasn’t charged. I guess the troopers figured they were doing him a kindness by letting him go home. All I know is it didn’t cost them anything, because there sure as hell wasn’t any gamble to it. It’s not like Creed Proctor was what you call a flight risk. They knew where they’d find him all right. Where in hell would he go? He’d never been anywhere.
And if they’d charged him and set bail, how could he have come up with the money? He didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Everybody knew that. So that’s what I mean by the troopers figured they were doing him a kindness. Either that or they just didn’t want to get saddled with him for as long as it was going to take.
I had those lawyers’ names that Mary Spinelli gave me and I started calling them. I didn’t have any way to judge one from another, so I just got prices. You wouldn’t believe what the going rate is for that kind of work. I’m surprised anybody in this country can afford to stay out of jail. I’ll bet the jailhouse has more poor men in it than rich ones, and I’ll bet I can tell you why.
Mary’s name helped and a few of those lawyers gave me a little free advice. Things to keep an eye out for. I appreciated that and once I’d talked to all of them I sat Creed down. I said with that confession he’d signed it wasn’t going to be long before somebody came out here to arrest him and charge him with Vernon’s murder. He said Vernon never was murdered and I said not according to that confession. According to that confession Vernon was murdered in cold blood and he’d done it by his own hand. He said well that was just what it said on a piece of paper and they couldn’t prove nothing by that. It was just a paper. I got so fed up I could have done him in myself, regardless of what the law had in mind.
Margaret
P
RESTON WASN’T SLEEPING MUCH
in those days. People talk about female troubles, but he was having male troubles. He’d get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and he just couldn’t get back to sleep no matter what. Then the business next door got started, on top of everything.
I knew what he was worrying about, even though all he’d say that he was worried about was Creed.
We had a little money. We
have
a little, I should say. There’s my retirement from the school district. We do our best to live on that, as far as it goes, that and our Social Security. The fellow who bought the lumberyard doesn’t always pay his note on time. He’ll call and he’ll say he can’t make the payment because he’s had a bad month or because he has some big contractor stringing him along or whatever. Preston says he understands and lets him go just this once, although by now I don’t know how many just-this-onces there’ve been. More than I’d like to hear about, probably. I’ll hear him on the telephone saying,
I remember February was always hard
, or
Old man Kinney never could pay a bill on time and I guess his son’s no better
, and then I’ll know I ought to think about making the pot roast stretch through another meal. My husband has a good heart and sometimes it gets him into trouble, so we keep within our means on my school retirement and the Social Security if we can’t count on the lumberyard anymore. That’s what he was up worrying about half the night. He didn’t have to tell me.
Ben
T
HE MAIN THING
I didn’t like was the older brother. Audie. It wasn’t that I believed he would contradict anything we already knew if we got him on the stand. I just always kind of wished we didn’t have him. That we didn’t have to deal with him.
From what everyone said—and by
everyone
I don’t mean the gossips around the courthouse or the big talkers at the Kiwanis Club or even the stories in the newspaper; I mean the troopers who’d seen him and the investigators from my office who went out there in a professional capacity and actually tried to take his statement—the older brother was something of an enigma. Nobody ever suggested that he might be involved. On the other hand nobody was one hundred percent sure about what he really knew—including, I began to think, the man himself. When you started with that much uncertainty and added in the descriptions in the paper and the talk on the street and the stuff that got written in letters to the editor and what have you, it was a classic case of the blind men and the elephant. I’m not saying that people saw what they wanted to see in Audie Proctor, and I’m not saying they saw themselves by any means. He was too particular for that. Altogether too colorful.
But for an individual without a lot of endearing personal traits, he was oddly sympathetic.
Weirdly
sympathetic. People in this area have gotten pretty well removed from the agrarian way of life even though it’s still right at their doorstep, and here came this curious little man—I’ve heard him described as looking like a hermit or Rip Van Winkle or a prophet from the Old Testament—here he was in the flesh, reminding them of something they had come from but had let themselves forget about. Something they’d put behind themselves without even knowing it. Everybody in this county probably has a little bit of milk from that farm every day, in their cereal or whatever, and here he was to remind them of it.
There was power in that, I think. People were curious about him at first and definitely a little repelled, but it all had a way of turning into something that I can only describe as compassion. I’m not saying people saw what they wanted to see in Audie Proctor, but I’m not sure they were seeing Audie Proctor either. Not entirely.
