Kings of the Earth: A Novel (37 page)

Del

I
DON’T KNOW
how much a person is built to endure, but I believe that living under those conditions would be a test of it. Those brothers got whittled away a little at a time. Worn out and used up just going from one day to the next. It’s like how a science program on television will say a rock formation has
weathered
and you don’t even think twice about the meaning of it, until later on you realize that they were talking about actual weather. Rain, wind, some freezing and thawing. One day after another. The ordinary things that wear the world down. We have old mountains around here that are just hills now, and they’re nice to look at but they weren’t always this way.

A person couldn’t be struck on the head and fall down from that hayloft and survive, I wouldn’t think. Not for very long. That would be one sort of limit on endurance. That would be a definite one that you could know the extent of. Something the medical examiner could tell you, if you had any questions about it.

The ambulance came and they loaded the body onto a stretcher and rolled it out of the barn. I said they ought to clean off those rubber wheels before they got into the hospital and they said they would. They carry plenty of rags and various kinds of cleaning supplies in an ambulance. They have to, with the things they run across. I went over and said a few words to Preston. He was sitting on a milk can alongside the barn door, looking pretty tired out. He said he was waiting for the tanker from the coop, and I said I hoped we’d be finished and on our way back to town before they came. That would save everybody some trouble.

Audie didn’t see his brother go. He was around back by the school bus. He had the rear door open to feed the turkeys, and three or four of them had gotten loose just as I came around the corner looking for him. He threw one last handful of feed inside the bus and wrestled the door shut and went after the ones that were still out. They squawked and gobbled around the yard pecking at the ground and looking half crazy the way birds do, especially the big ones, and he chased after them. It was hopeless. He was bent over low to the ground with his arms out wide, walking in a squat, and he wasn’t making a sound, just twitching all over and lunging around on the hard dirt and the dead grass like he was wearing a blindfold. Lurching toward the turkeys and then the turkeys jumping away when he got too close. Feathers everywhere. It occurred to me that he couldn’t see them at all. He was following the noises they made. I watched him for a couple of minutes and I thought about how it was that he’d found his brother Creed’s body in the dark of that barn. How he’d been able to do it. What might have made it possible.

I called to him and he turned his head my way and I wondered how he would endure the heavy weather that lay ahead. I thought it might be for the best if those turkeys just went on back to the wild or whatever they’d do. Escaped their confinement. Got run over in the road or shot for somebody’s supper. It would be that much less for him to take care of. That much less for Preston to take care of. I heard the ambulance pull away and I didn’t watch it go. I looked at the dirt yard full of birds and the old man squatting down among them and flapping his arms as if he wanted to fly himself, and the turkeys flapping like they wanted to fly too but they couldn’t do it any more than he could, and I called his name one more time to let him know I was coming. And then I went into the yard and I helped him gather up those birds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In literature as in life, we have a duty to see that nothing important should ever be lost. Notes of appreciation, then, to those who made this book possible.

To my parents, Joyce and Warren Clinch—who let me hear these voices and gave me many of these stories and instilled in me the urge to tie them all together. Thanks for everything.

To Wendy—who has more good ideas than she knows what to do with. Keep it up, sweetie.

To Emily—who, if her mother and I had stopped right there, would have been achievement enough for both of our lifetimes. May she and JTB always be as happy as we’ve been.

To David Lindgren—long-lost compadre, former partner in crime, and singer/songwriter extraordinaire. A finely tuned reader who knows not just the place and the time but the music, too. He’s still got the ear.

To Ben Hill—who did his best to help keep me honest. Any variances from credibility belong not to Ben, but to me.

To my Proctor forebears—for all they endured, including my theft of their surname.

To Arthur—who said it couldn’t be done (and to Tom Waits, who did it).

To my agent, Amanda Urban, and to my editor, Will Murphy. And to the rest of the believers at Random House: Jennifer Smith, Tom Perry, Sanyu Dillon, Jynne Martin, Susan Kamil, Courtney Turco, Jane von Mehren, Avideh Bashirrad, Christine Cabello, Kim Hovey, and Amy Edelman. It continues to be my honor to labor among you.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in the remote heart of upstate New York, J
ON
C
LINCH
has been an English teacher, a metalworker, a folksinger, an illustrator, a typeface designer, a housepainter, a copywriter, and an advertising executive. Teaching and advertising took him south to the suburbs of Philadelphia for many years, and only with the publication of
Finn
, his first novel, was he able to return to the kind of rural surroundings he’d loved from the start: this time, the Green Mountains of Vermont. He is married to the novelist Wendy Clinch, and they have one daughter.

www.jonclinch.com

Kings of the Earth
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Jon Clinch

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jalma Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Murder in the Red Barn,” written by

Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, copyright © 1983 by Jalma Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Clinch, Jon.
Kings of the earth: a novel / Jon Clinch.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-991-8
1. Rural families—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.L54K56 2010
813′.6—DC22          2009034377

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