Kings of the Earth_ A Novel.

by Jon Clinch.

There's always some killin' you got to do around the farm.-TOM WAITS and KATHLEEN BRENNAN, "Murder in the Red Barn"

1990.

Audie.

MY BROTHER V VERNON went on ahead. I woke up and felt for him but the bed was dry and my brother Creed was already up. He had his overalls on and he was telling me that I had to get up too because it was after four-thirty and the cows wouldn't wait. The bed was cold but it was dry. My brother Vernon was still in it and he was cold like the bed was since he had gone on. That left me here with Creed. It made me the oldest. went on ahead. I woke up and felt for him but the bed was dry and my brother Creed was already up. He had his overalls on and he was telling me that I had to get up too because it was after four-thirty and the cows wouldn't wait. The bed was cold but it was dry. My brother Vernon was still in it and he was cold like the bed was since he had gone on. That left me here with Creed. It made me the oldest.

Preston.

I WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED if we'd lost the both of them at the same time. Vernon and Audie I mean. That's how close they've been ever since they were boys. Vernon would lead the way and Audie would follow right along behind. Not that they were two peas in a pod, not by any means. Vernon was the brains of the operation and Audie had problems. if we'd lost the both of them at the same time. Vernon and Audie I mean. That's how close they've been ever since they were boys. Vernon would lead the way and Audie would follow right along behind. Not that they were two peas in a pod, not by any means. Vernon was the brains of the operation and Audie had problems. Has Has problems. problems.

I was sitting in the kitchen with my coffee and down the hill Creed opened the barn door the way he always does first thing, but instead of opening it and looking at the day and then going right back in he kept coming. I've known those boys since they were boys, I've lived right here alongside their place since the thirties, and they've always run in the same track. Everything goes the same today as it went yesterday. That's how it is around a farm. A farm is the master of you and not the other way around. So when Creed opened the barn door and came out and kept on coming instead of going back in, I knew something wasn't right. I believe I stood up at the kitchen table and said so to Margaret. I said something wasn't right.

He was coming across the field toward our place and I guessed by how he was coming that it'd be a good idea to meet him halfway if I could. I put my coffee cup down and I went out onto the porch and then I came back in to put my coat on because it was cooler outdoors than I'd expected it to be and I guessed I might be out there for a while. Creed had on that old wool coat of his that's torn up the back and covered all over with cow manure. It's either his coat or Vernon's. I can never remember. They all swap things around. It's the way they were brought up. Anyway he was wearing the wool coat. That house of theirs doesn't have anything much in the way of insulation, so they probably have a better idea of the weather outdoors than we do. That's why I had to go back in for a coat of my own. Outdoors is no different from indoors to them, except outdoors there's more breeze and it smells better. Even in the barnyard. I don't know if he slept in that coat or not but he might have.

That poor old boy looked like he was about to have a heart attack and I was glad I'd gone out so he didn't have to keep coming up the hill. "Vernon died in the night," he said. He was shaking a little, like he was about to have a fit. I'm no doctor but that's how it seemed. A doctor might tell you something else, or put it another way. "My brother's awful cold," he said.

So we went down. I got him turned back around and we went down the hill and in through the barn instead of up on the porch and in by the front door. Not that I think they ever lock that front door. I don't guess those boys ever owned a lock other than the one on that room they closed off thirty years ago. Why would they? But we didn't go in the front door anyhow. We cut straight through the barn. The cows were coming in all by themselves and they were complaining the way they will, but they were going to have to wait.

The house has just the one room that they use. Audie was on the floor and Vernon was in the bed. I wouldn't say he was cold but he wasn't much better than room temperature. It seemed to me he was stiffening up some. Creed didn't seem to mind my touching him, but I minded it enough for both of us. I've been around death enough that it ought not to bother me, but now that I'm getting nearer to it myself it's different. It's different for an old man.

Audie was the one who needed a hand. He was curled up in a ball in his long johns and he was shaking all over like he was freezing to death. Moving all over, every part of him, the way his brother Creed had done outdoors but worse. Audie will do that some anyhow, just as a regular thing, but this was worse than usual. I said his name and he didn't say anything back. I got down on my hands and knees in front of him and I looked at him hard and I said his name louder. I made an effort to kind of bark it, the way Vernon used to when he wanted to get his attention. I slapped the floor with the flat of my hand and a cloud of dust rose up and I got a splinter but never mind that. He heard me and his eyes popped opened wide and he looked at me like he'd seen a ghost. Or like I was the ghost and he was looking straight through me at something else. Maybe Vernon, up there on the bed. Audie's pretty near blind and one of his eyes is clouded over some, but I've never seen anything so blue.

Audie.

WHEN I I CAME OUT CAME OUT onto the front porch they were turning. onto the front porch they were turning.

A little wind had come up and they were all faced in the same direction and they were turning. I couldn't see them all that clear but I could hear every one separate. They all make a different sound. Every one. I didn't make them that way on purpose, but that's how they come out. They can't help it and I couldn't help it either. They come out how they come out. Vernon says they're like children that way. They were turning in the little wind and I listened to them turn and I felt some better.

Donna.

IT WAS M MARGARET who thought to call the sister. who thought to call the sister.

Margaret Hatch, who'd watched from her kitchen window as her husband walked down the hill between the houses and who'd kept watching when he didn't come back. Margaret, who'd watched as the sun came up and the shadow of her house gathered itself and pushed down the hill to poke at the Proctor boys' barn, and who'd moved with her coffee out onto the screen porch to keep on watching as the shadow withdrew a little and the heat of the day began to rise and the state trooper's patrol car came roaring up the dirt lane.

She figured the boys' telephone must work or else they couldn't have called the troopers, but she didn't figure they would think to call Donna. She was right. She looked up the number and stood in the kitchen and dialed. She wished she had a cigarette, and the idea of it surprised her completely. She hadn't smoked since Harry Truman, but she thought that right now a cigarette might be just the thing to calm her nerves.

The house smelled like cow manure and dry rot and spoiled food. Like tobacco and burnt rope and rat droppings. Like old men and sickness and death. Del Graham was the captain and he arrived first. He walked past the old man who sat rocking on the porch with his long white beard pooling in his lap and his hands knotted over his hairless skull, and he went through the open front door as into a mouth full of rotted teeth. The disarray and the stink. The order and the purposefulness gone to no use in the end.

Creed was sitting at the table alongside the neighbor, Hatch. Preston Hatch who'd made the call. The telephone was on the table between them, and they sat composed on either side of it like a formal double portrait. t.i.tans of industry, awaiting a message from some distant outpost of commerce. The telephone was solid black, square and heavy. All business. The cord that connected it to the wall was wrapped in a kind of woven material that Graham didn't remember having seen for a long time. It looped easily and snakelike in spite of its age, and although it was frayed in places it looked made to last. The telephone was the old-fashioned kind with a dial, rotary phones they called them, and the numbers under the dial were either worn away from use or obscured by dirt. He figured the second. Either way, in the absence of the numbers a person would need to count in order to make a phone call. Graham guessed that such a telephone probably didn't get much use, considering. It was a conduit to a world that had no business here.

The bed was in the corner beyond the table and the man on it had no pulse. There was one empty chair at the table and Graham came back and took it for himself. These two looked like individuals who could be trusted to know death when they laid their hands on it. He knew Creed by sight. He was the double of the old man on the porch except for a full head of hair pushed up crazily in some places and flattened down in other places. He looked about used up. His cheeks were hollow beneath his beard and his mouth was caved in. His nose was spotted and bulbous, something grown underground and dug up and left to wither. His pale eyes, heavy-lidded and sunken, were vague and weary of witness.

"So what happened."

"Vernon's dead. My brother."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"My brother Vernon."

"I know who he is."

Creed held a Red Man cap in his k.n.o.bby hands and he wrung it. "He weren't dead last night when he went to sleep but he's dead now."

"We'll have some fellows up here soon'll take care of him. I live just down the West Road a little, so I came straight from the house. Those other fellows'll be right along."

Creed reached behind him, into a teetering pile of what looked like trash. He drew out a pouch of tobacco. "You mind if I chew?"

"It's your house."

Hatch touched Creed on the arm but only briefly. "You do what you like."

"This ain't no crime scene I guess." He fiddled with the pouch. "I ain't disturbing anything."

"Not so's I can tell," said Graham. He took off his flat-brimmed hat and hung it on his knee. He looked at Creed. Then with the palms of both hands he smoothed back the hair on each side of his head, as if he needed to.

DeAlton answered the telephone in his businesslike way and Margaret asked for his wife without identifying herself. It was no business of his who she was, and he didn't ask, and that suited her fine. Donna got on the line and Margaret told her that there was a state trooper at her brothers' place. Told her everything she knew: that she had seen Creed come out as usual and that she had seen Audie sitting on the porch. That she could see him there still or at least his legs, kicking. But that no, she had not seen Vernon. Not this morning. Not yet.

Now there were a couple more troopers and an ambulance too. That last had come slow up the dirt lane with its lights off. Donna had better drop everything and come.

The room was too small to fit everyone, although it had once been two rooms. The part near the door and the part by the bed were different colors and there was a ragged four-inch line dividing them where a long time ago somebody had torn down a part.i.tion wall. The headboard was pushed up hard against another door that was sealed with a padlock. The hasp on it was oversize and rusted and weathered down, and it had probably seen use on a barn door at some time. The padlock was rusted too from prior seasons in the outdoors. If a person could find the key for it in this mess he'd be eligible for some prize. It was surely rusted tight anyhow. A single solid piece of stubborn ruin.

Two troopers and two emergency technicians had crowded around the bed for no reason anybody could tell anymore. One of the troopers went out to his car and came back in and handed the other one a jar of Vicks so he could rub a little under his nose against the stink. They usually reserved the Vicks for around bodies a good deal more decomposed than this one, but Vernon had the same effect in that department whether he was alive or dead.

A little wind came up and the sheer lace curtain that hung over the front window pushed into the room upon it and fluttered some and died back. A creaking arose from outdoors.

Donna pulled up and parked in the dirt lane since there were no places left in the yard. The technicians had Vernon strapped onto a stretcher already and covered over with a sheet, and everyone had had to clear out of the house to let them angle him through the door clean. Not that it mattered how rough they were. Graham held the door and the two other troopers were up against their cars smoking and Preston Hatch was leaning on the porch rail next to Creed, who chewed and spat into the dirt yard and gave the impression of thought. Preston as short and round as Creed was tall and thin. Preston as pink as Creed was white. The pair of them an apple set against a parsnip, one clean and ruddy and the other dirt-rimmed and root-threaded, arranged for a kind of still life.

Creed spat and wiped his lip on his sleeve and spoke to his sister. "Vernon died."

"Vernon." Coming toward the porch.

"He ain't been so good lately."

"I know. I know that."

"I think he had the same cancer killed her."

Donna looked at Graham and saw him for the authority here and explained that Creed was talking about his mother. Her mother. A long time in the ground. "Where's Audie?" she asked.

Hatch looked around and noticed him gone for the first time and said, "Audie? I don't know. Maybe he's in the barn. If he is, he's the only one of us that's got any sense."

Audie.

THEY ALL CAME OUT TOGETHER. They came out together alive and dead both. The humming of their talk and the grinding of their feet on the boards. The knocking of that plank against the doorframe like Vernon wanted something. I thought I would go feed the turkeys but the cows were calling from the barn all mournful. I heard them through the barn wall so instead of going out to the school bus where we keep the turkeys I pried open the track door and slid on in among them. I got a pail and the milking stool and I squatted down and took hold of the first teat that come to hand and I worked it. I was shaking some and a little of the milk caught me in the knee when it spurted out and it ran down my leg and reminded me how the bed was dry when I woke up. The bed was dry and Vernon was dead in it and I was the oldest, the oldest and left to follow him. But not all the way. Not yet.

Donna.

GRAHAM STEPPED OFF the porch last. "Put out those smokes and give these fellows a hand why don't you?" He was talking to the other troopers. It was his way of giving orders. "Make yourselves useful." the porch last. "Put out those smokes and give these fellows a hand why don't you?" He was talking to the other troopers. It was his way of giving orders. "Make yourselves useful."

Donna stood in the dirt watching the technicians set the brakes on the stretcher and check it and open the rear door of the ambulance. She looked woeful and aghast, collapsed in on herself.

"I'm sorry about your brother."

"I know. Thank you."

He reached into his pocket and took out a white card and gave it to her along with his name.

"They all sleep in that same bed, you know. Slept."

Graham fitted his hat on his head and looked out over the yard. At the bare dirt and the sprays of tobacco juice soaking into it. At the whirligigs turning in the breeze. At the collapsed fence and the fields beyond it and the dirt lane running through. He tilted the hat back on his head by a few degrees and he scratched at his forehead with two fingers and he tilted it back down. "This's a hard way to live," he said.

"I told myself I'd never come back."

"When was that."

"Whenever. Always. I'd imagine going off somewhere and wherever I'd got to I'd never come back. Wherever turned out to be two-year college. Then nursing school."

Graham looked at her and thought she wouldn't mind if he said it. "That makes you the black sheep."

"I guess it does." She didn't mind. It wasn't the first time.

The technicians had the door open and the front legs of the stretcher unlatched and sprung and they were getting set to slide it in, working slowly, as if it were the only job they would have to do all day. There was a time for urgency and there was a time for this.

"You never got a look at your brother."

"No."

"I was wondering maybe you would want to." He watched the men. "What with the nursing school and all."

Her right arm hung down straight along her side and she reached behind her back with her left to hold it by the elbow.

"I just thought."

"There's a thousand things that could have killed Vernon."

"I don't doubt it."

"G.o.d knows how he lived this long." She sighed and let go of her elbow and started down toward the ambulance, just to take a look.

Preston.

I TOOK HIM TOOK HIM to the hospital myself that one time. I had an old blue Nash 600 I'd picked up secondhand and I had him laid out flat in the back of it. Creed was in Korea then and the old man was long dead and Audie was every bit as useless as he is now. This was the spring of fifty-two. Early spring. The snow just gone in most places and in some other places not even. to the hospital myself that one time. I had an old blue Nash 600 I'd picked up secondhand and I had him laid out flat in the back of it. Creed was in Korea then and the old man was long dead and Audie was every bit as useless as he is now. This was the spring of fifty-two. Early spring. The snow just gone in most places and in some other places not even.

Vernon and Audie'd taken the spike-tooth harrow down to get it ready. It was an antique even back then. They were dragging it across the floor of the barn and a tooth caught and broke off, and it flew and it took Vernon straight through the calf. It came all the way through and half out the other side. The calf of his right leg. He never did walk right after that.

This was early in the day and I hadn't gone to work yet. I heard a howl from my upstairs window and I went down and opened the kitchen door and the howling hadn't quit so I went out. It was a man, I knew that. It wasn't any animal I ever heard of. I got my coat and I went out and I went straight down the hill through the mud and what snow there was. I followed that howl. I didn't even go by the driveway. It didn't occur to me. I just went right straight down.

Of course it wasn't Vernon. Vernon had himself propped up on that harrow with his leg on the crossbar and he had a piece of angle iron in his one hand. He began to beat on that spike in his leg and Audie was howling and he wouldn't let up. He beat on it and I hollered at him not to but he kept on, with Audie on his knees and shaking and howling all the while. Six or seven good blows and he drove that spike clear out the other side and it just fell down in the dirt and bounced once and laid there.

Audie kept shaking and howling and he wouldn't stop even though the spike was out and Vernon was limping toward the stall. The leg of his pants was red and there was blood on his boot and blood on the floor soaking into the dirt and into the straw wherever he stepped. I told him he had to let a doctor see it but he said no. Vernon'd never do anything you told him he had to do. That'd been his way since he was a boy. He shook out a feed bag and tore a strip off it and got him some baling twine and he rolled up that pant leg and wrapped the rag around where the spike had gone through and tied it off. A black hole on both sides, pumping. That's going to bleed, I told him, that's going to keep bleeding and you won't stop it like that. You ought to at least put it up in the air, I said, but there were ch.o.r.es to be done and he shut his ears to me. He said, The sooner I get back to work the sooner that idiot stops his blubbering. He was right about that.

That rusted-through spike was broken off clean and there was no repairing it. Vernon kicked it out into the yard with his good leg and then he hoisted his brother to his feet and the two of them went to work side by side at the bench as if they had just one mind between them. Audie holding that piece of angle iron steady and Vernon hammering at it until they'd made themselves a pretty fair replacement for that rotten spike. Vernon's leg wasn't bleeding so much now or at least not so much that he was leaking everywhere. When they were satisfied with the hammering Vernon fetched down a brace and bit and put a couple of holes in the top of it by eye and they mounted that old piece of angle iron on the harrow like it was made for the job. I'd say I'd never seen the like of it but I had. You see a lot, you live alongside those boys their whole lives.

Anyway, that wasn't the time I took Vernon to the hospital. That came later on, when the blood poisoning set in and he about died from it. He'd bandaged a piece of salt pork over the hole to draw the infection but it hadn't worked. Vernon rode in the backseat and Audie in the front. I drove fast and we had the windows open and Audie lost his hat. He didn't mind. I don't know that he even missed it. He leaned forward and watched the world go by a whole lot faster than he'd ever seen it go by from the seat of a tractor and he looked so happy. He looked happy enough to sing a song if he'd known the words to one.

1931.

Ruth.

EVERY SINGLE ONE of their children will arrive in the fall of the year. From December to April the house is an icebox-just the two little square rooms in front and the long narrow one behind, but it won't stay warm for anything. Not for all the firewood in the world. Not with the stove in the first of the front rooms and the boys Vernon and Audie sharing a bed in the other and the pa.s.sage to their parents' little narrow hallway of a sleeping room going through there. Just a cut in the wall, really. Not even a door to it and in the wintertime not even so much as a curtain, but the heat from the stove in the front room will give out rather than travel that far. Lester is forever promising to saw a hole in the kitchen wall to let the heat through but he never gets around to it. Instead he and Ruth work on the next child. Creed. That third boy still nothing but a temporary refuge against hard weather. of their children will arrive in the fall of the year. From December to April the house is an icebox-just the two little square rooms in front and the long narrow one behind, but it won't stay warm for anything. Not for all the firewood in the world. Not with the stove in the first of the front rooms and the boys Vernon and Audie sharing a bed in the other and the pa.s.sage to their parents' little narrow hallway of a sleeping room going through there. Just a cut in the wall, really. Not even a door to it and in the wintertime not even so much as a curtain, but the heat from the stove in the front room will give out rather than travel that far. Lester is forever promising to saw a hole in the kitchen wall to let the heat through but he never gets around to it. Instead he and Ruth work on the next child. Creed. That third boy still nothing but a temporary refuge against hard weather.

A house is going up on the next lot and it will be much finer than this one. When the workmen dug its foundation the summer before they measured it out probably half again as wide and twice as deep as the stone pilings under the Proctor place and they took it down six or maybe seven feet into the earth, which Lester said would help keep out the cold as long as they were smart enough to seal it off right. They might even put a root cellar down there if they had any sense, or a place for canned goods or any such other excess as the people who live in so grand a two-story house might acc.u.mulate. Ruth knows how deep they dug because she's had to pull one boy or the other out of the hole. But that was back in the summer, and now it is closed off and the walls are framed out and the whole place is boarded up weathertight and roofed over. They haven't cut the windows yet so it sits there on its little hill blind and poker-faced. It catches the light in the morning, and Ruth leans against the barn door, looking at it and listening to the stretching sounds it makes as it grows warm and comfortable in the sun. Thinking what a shame it is to let such a thing stand empty even for a minute.

Once a week at most-usually Sat.u.r.day night, according to custom, although when Ruth married Lester she gave up any hope of going to church on Sunday morning-she heats water in a pair of old cooking pots and a Dutch oven and a tea kettle on the black iron stove, and when it draws near to a boil she pours it out into a galvanized washtub and heats more and pours that out in turn until the bath is ready. The boys get clean enough, but considering the work of splitting the wood and stoking the fire and drawing the water from the pump and boiling it on that black iron stove with the rooster on the side, and considering how rapidly they get themselves filthy again, she has her doubts. She gets nothing but complaint from Lester for his role in it, and she has to wonder how long both of those boys will continue to fit into the galvanized tub anyhow. Two separate baths will be too much to manage. She can almost see Vernon handling his own in a year or two, but then there is Audie to consider. There is always Audie to consider and there always will be. He is like the poor, forever with us.

Five and six years old now, they're still a pair of tadpoles. Slippery in the soapy water. Where it slops over onto the board floor it freezes, and when she shifts her position for better purchase on one boy or the other her knees skid over thin sheets of it. Stuttering beneath her.

She stands them up one after the other and rubs their narrow bodies of bone with a towel thin as gauze, working from the top down with their feet still planted in the warm gray water. Then she lifts them out one after the other too and they stand in turn on the thin-iced floor and she finishes drying their lower parts if they have the patience for it. Then off they go. Chasing each other around the frozen house like the pair of innocent animals they are. Otters. Their little wrinkled toes and fingers and other parts alien. Comfortable in the water or out of it, sun-warm or otherwise.