Kings of the Earth: A Novel (24 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
I remembered how that bureaucrat came out from the state when Ruth died and told me we couldn’t bury her in her own plot, so I didn’t bother getting permission. I asked the undertaker to keep quiet and he said he would. I walked up that afternoon with a square and a steel tape and a snap line. I don’t go up there as much as I used to. I go slower when I go. The hill’s gotten steeper. I’d see Vernon go up there with a scythe sometimes when the grass got long, but I don’t know who’ll take care of it now. Audie, I guess. He’d want to.
I paced off the hole and measured it with the tape to make sure I’d gotten it close enough and I marked it. I made sure it was right in line with Ruth and Lester’s. My stride was always just a hair short of three feet but I guess it might be a little less now, and that’s why I brought the tape. After I finished I stood alongside the one headstone up there and took in the view. It was a cool, dry afternoon and the air was as clear as it could be and you could see almost to Hamilton. Green everywhere you looked. I’d forgotten that view. It did my heart good to spend a little time up there, and to imagine those three having the benefit of it. I’m not a religious fanatic and I don’t think I’m overly sentimental and I sure don’t believe in ghosts, but when you get to be my age you think about things. The things you’d miss, if you’d miss things.
Johnson came early the next day, when the boys were just about through with the milking. He was on his way to some paying job and he didn’t even bother to load the backhoe onto a flatbed, just drove it right on over. I heard him coming and I saw him turn off the main road and start up. He had a line of cars backed up behind him for a mile. None of the drivers looked like they were exactly enjoying the wait. I thought if they knew he was here to dig a hole for a person to lie in forever they might count their blessings, but you never know with people.
Audie and Creed came out when they heard the backhoe. They came out slapping the last couple of cows on the flanks and looking for the coop truck but the co-op truck wasn’t there and it was the backhoe instead. I don’t know how many forward gears a backhoe has but it’s not enough. It made an awful racket. The cows ignored it completely. You’d be amazed what a cow can ignore. Johnson pulled up short and asked me where to, and I climbed up alongside the cab and pointed. He asked me was this the farm where that ignorant sonofabitch murdered his own brother and I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said I hadn’t heard about any such thing and he said he didn’t know how I could have missed it. It was all over the place.
He put it back in gear and we headed up. Through the gate into the pasture. The gate was open to let the cows back through after the milking and I thought somebody ought to shut it. Creed or Audie. While I was thinking that I looked back over my shoulder and what did I see but those two boys standing on the rear bumper of the backhoe and hanging on for dear life just the same way I was. Creed jumped off and closed the gate. Audie just rode on along, bumping up and down and side to side as if that backhoe man Johnson wanted to shake parts of him loose. Creed got the gate shut and ran after us and jumped back on again. Up we went and across the ridge, with those boys holding on like they always did on the tractor when Vernon used to drive and they’d climb on. On a farm you take your excitement where you can find it. Those boys always knew that.
I directed Johnson to the spot. Creed and Audie knew where we were going. Nobody told them. It wasn’t any secret. We all got off and helped Johnson lower the stabilizers and chock the wheels. We just did as Johnson told us. He took off his hat and scratched his head and cussed a little bit, saying whoever picked the spot for Vernon’s hole wasn’t much experienced with running a backhoe since it was flatter over on the other side and this side was going to be tricky. Looking right square at me the whole time. Just pulling my leg a little, but meaning it too. The way a fellow will.
Before he climbed back on he asked Audie if those were his parents under that stone and if this hole was for his brother. Audie nodded yes and he said he was sorry for his loss. Sorry but glad they could be in the ground right here at home and glad that he could help with it. He never said word one to Creed. Not that day.
Ben
W
E HAD A LONG WAY
to go, but I thought it was all going to be straightforward enough. The confession was huge, although I suppose it could have been better witnessed. The thing about it that gave me a little agita was the timing of it, by which I mean how late in the day it was. When a person signs a confession after normal business hours, people will start thinking about coercion. You take a shopkeeper who works until ten o’clock every night, or a secretary who has to pull a few evening hours now and then, and you show them a confession signed at nine-thirty
P.M
. and they’ll start to wonder why. They’ll picture a couple of cops in a room with a lightbulb hanging down over a man’s head and the man tied to a chair. Cops with saps in their hands like in the movies. I don’t know why. That’s the image they get in their heads and you can’t entirely get it out no matter what the truth is. The truth is of course that the state police would never have taken that confession if they didn’t believe it to be accurate. I don’t know Del Graham very well on a personal basis, but I’ve worked with him a number of times and I’ve taken testimony from him often enough. He’s as square as they come.
From an evidentiary point of view, this was going to be a complex case. The body. The bed linens and the various bits of clothing. The contents of the room. The histories and the personalities of the parties involved. To say nothing of the confession, which, as I saw it, was bound to be disputed. There were going to be a lot of details and it was going to be complex. A complex case is sometimes hard to make fly, because you can very easily wear a jury out with too many facts. Even if the whole thing fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, you need to remember that some jurors don’t have the patience to work a jigsaw puzzle. Most of them don’t. These days people have short attention spans, and no list of instructions from a judge is going to change that. So the upshot is that as litigator you have to consider the whole narrative, by which I mean not just the story of what happened or the internal logic of the evidence itself but the way that the story and the evidence fit together to make a kind of perfect sense that you can’t get out of the world any other way. People like to believe that the truth is simple, so as a prosecutor you have to talk about these complex things in a simple way. I’m not saying people are stupid or simpleminded. But since they like the world to make sense, you have to keep everything direct and straightforward. Above all—and I know this sounds cynical—you have to keep it
interesting
. I know. You’d think a murder trial would be interesting enough. But you have to remember how much television people watch these days. On television, everybody’s problems are over inside of sixty minutes. Minus commercials.
Some of the most interesting things in the confession didn’t have anything to do with the brother’s death, at least not directly. Like how the three of those grown men slept in the same bed. I could see how three little boys might do that, but not three grown men. That information alone establishes certain questions in your mind. The semen on the deceased’s clothing establishes some of those same questions, or amplifies them. I didn’t know what if anything that might have to do with the events surrounding Vernon Proctor’s death, and if anything I was afraid it might distract the jury. If we ever got to a jury.
The same went for the marijuana found on the scene. I don’t think people mind much if a couple of old men out in the country want to use a little marijuana or even grow it for their own consumption. What people don’t like is if they start killing each other. People will want to put a stop to that.
DeAlton
I
F YOU’D SAVE
your money and get a decent car, you wouldn’t have to borrow your mother’s when it won’t start. I’ve got to move around a golf date so I can bring her home on account of you.
It’s a guy I’ve been working on from down by Binghamton. He’s got a big operation I’d love to get into and I’ll do it one of these days. You watch. I’ll do it, because I don’t give up easy. You know that. He’s a piss-poor golfer, though. I don’t think he devotes enough time to it.
Now don’t smoke in there or I’ll hear about it from your mother.
And I’m not just talking cigarettes either, ha ha ha.
Hey, don’t look at me like that. I’ve been around the barn. I knew Woodstock before it was Woodstock. And don’t kid yourself, sonny. People have been smoking that stuff a lot longer than you might think.
Yes, really. Your old man. I know.
You and your little friends didn’t invent it, that’s all I’m saying.
All right. Drive safe. Don’t park where anything’ll get dropped on it or your mother’ll have your head.
And gas it up before you bring it back.
Preston
I
’D GO OVER THERE
in the evenings sometimes and sit on the porch alongside Vernon, and when I’d come back home Margaret would say I smelled like an opium den. Like some kind of Turkish harem. I guess that was one way to smell after you sat with the Proctor boys for a little while, and it was better than most.
You smell like a seraglio
, she said one time. I didn’t even know what that was. You live with Margaret, you learn as you go along.
Anyhow Vernon was smoking marijuana a good deal that summer. In the evenings he’d stay at it pretty steadily. I think for a while he’d been keeping a plug of it under his lip while he was doing his chores but that didn’t seem to work out. I don’t imagine it tasted all that good, but then again I don’t imagine Red Man tastes all that good either. So what do I know. I used to smoke a little now and then but I never had any interest in chewing tobacco.
He said Tom was a good bit more generous now than he’d been before. He said Tom would pretty much give him all the grass he wanted. That’s what he called it,
grass
. Just like that. It sounded funny coming from Vernon, an old dirt farmer who knew what regular grass was all right. How he’d just pick up that other meaning and go with it, like it was the most natural thing in the whole world.
He said Tom was a good boy and he knew how to take care of his dear old uncle even if Dr. Franklin didn’t. If you think I’d argue with that, you’re crazy. We’d sit and talk and Creed would sit with us and Audie would be over there on the steps working on a piece of wood with his jackknife. He liked the smell of that marijuana all right. That wet muskmelon smell of it. You could tell. He sat on the steps with his eyes kind of lit up and a happy little grin on his face listening to us talk and just carving away. Some of the things he carved you’d thought he was high on marijuana himself if you didn’t know better. Jaggedy things and big swoopy curved things and little strange knobby things that looked like bugs or some kind of bacteria you’d see under a microscope, all blown up bigger than they had any right to be. I don’t know what he thought he was up to. Right to this day city folks, and by that I mean folks from the actual city, not Cassius and not even Utica, city folks will come out here and ooh and ahh at the most outlandish of them. The weirder the better. Smooth-looking little fellows in black outfits and big horn-rimmed glasses like they used to wear in the fifties, sometimes two by two, if you know what I mean, they’ll size them up and take out their wallets and open wide. Audie only takes cash.
Anyhow I was glad to hear that Tom was being more generous than he used to be. It gave me a little bit of faith in him for a change. I knew why it was, or I thought I did. Ever since the springtime I’d seen him show up at the barn a couple of nights a month, maybe two or three in the morning, with this other fellow. I’d call the other fellow a greaser, if they still have greasers these days. He was little but he looked hard. Not the kind who goes out of his way to look hard, but the kind who’s just exactly the way he is and that’s the extent of it and he doesn’t give a damn if you notice or not. You’ll notice just fine when you run up against him. That’s what I thought and I’ve lived a long time and I’ve seen a lot of different people. He and Tom would come at night in that VW of Tom’s and haul a load of something up into the hayloft. I’d take note because my bedroom window looks right down the hill toward the barn door. That and about the time I turned sixty I gave up sleeping the night.
I knew what they were putting up in the hayloft, and I wondered what my obligation was relative to it. I thought it’d been one thing when he was growing his own and storing it up there. That was a hobby, kind of like his own way of following in his uncles’ footsteps whether he wanted to or not. But one thing leads to another, and now here they were bringing drugs in from somewhere else. Drugs and probably trouble. Just the greaser fellow alone meant trouble as far as I could see. I sure didn’t want to mess with him. On the other hand at least Tom was sharing the wealth with his poor old sick uncle Vernon, so I guessed his heart was still in the right place. His father would have gotten Vernon hooked and then started charging him for it. That’s the kind of salesman DeAlton is. So maybe there was decent Proctor blood in Tom after all.
Tom
H
IS UNCLE TRIED
to give him a little money once but he turned it down. Not because he couldn’t use it, although he was definitely doing better now that he and Nick had the business rolling, but because he didn’t like the way it came out of Vernon’s wallet all stiff and crusty. A twenty-dollar bill, twenty perfectly good American dollars, and it looked like it had been buried in a manure pile for a hundred years. It smelled that way too. He’d said no thanks, really, he couldn’t take money from a sick relative.
Thus had he discovered at least one of his limits.
Nick had a bad habit of keeping Henri’s phone number a secret. He wouldn’t give it to Tom even when it made sense to, like when after one misunderstanding or another the phone company had cut off his service for a month.
“I can’t remember whether Henri said he was coming down on the fifteenth or the sixteenth,” he said to Tom as they motored down Route 5.
Tom was doing exactly one mile under the limit, having adopted out of self-preservation the driving habits of an old-maid schoolteacher or a drunk. He hated it, but it was a cost of doing business. You made accommodations. “Call him up and find out,” he said.
“I guess it don’t make no difference. We’ll just be at the Woodshed either way.”
“Call him and find out. What’s the big deal?”
“No big deal. What’s the big deal if I
don’t
call him?”
Tom took his eyes off the road for two seconds. “What’s got into you?”
Nick shifted in his seat and looked out the window. “Look. If you don’t want to inconvenience yourself two nights in a row you just stay home. Watch some television. I’ll go on the fifteenth and if he shows up I’ll call you on the pay phone and you’ll come on over. If he don’t come we’ll know that the fifteenth was the wrong night and you’ll come with me the next night because we’ll know. The sixteenth.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is?”
“How come you won’t call him is the point.”
“Because I don’t need to. Henri’s a busy man. I don’t want to look like the kind of an asshole who can’t mark my own calendar and remember when I’m supposed to be somewhere.”
“What about if that’s the kind of an asshole you are.”
“Shut up.”
“Give me the number and I’ll call him.”
“I thought we were in this together. You and me.”
“We are. That’s why I’ll call him if you won’t.”
“No.”
“Then you’ll call him.”
“Why.”
“Because depending on when he’s coming, I might need to rearrange some things. I might have a customer who needs something he can’t have until he gets here, and if I don’t know when he’s getting here I don’t know what to tell the customer.”
Nick screwed up his mouth. “You ain’t the milkman.”
“I know that.”
“Tell him he’ll get it when he gets it.”
“Look. There isn’t any such customer. It was hypothetical.”
“So what’s your problem?”
They drove past a Byrne Dairy and Nick said he could use a cup of coffee so they turned around and went back. There was a police car in the lot and Tom pulled up right next to it. He hadn’t meant to. He was distracted. But once he was there he figured why the hell not. He had the same rights as anybody. The cop had his windows rolled up and the air-conditioning on and he was working on a Little Debbie fruit pie behind the tinted glass. Before Tom shut down the VW he turned to Nick and said, very slowly and patiently, “I didn’t have a problem until you wouldn’t make the call or give me the goddamned number.”
“So?”
“So is this some kind of power thing? I’ve got as much right to talk to him as anybody.”
Nick got out of the car saying he and Henri went way back and that was all he was going to say on the subject.
In the end, Tom had to get Shelly to go through the stuff in her brother’s room looking for some piece of paper that might have a Canadian phone number written on it. There was only one. The number belonged to Henri. He was coming on the sixteenth, but Tom went along on the fifteenth anyway so as not to rock the boat.