Kings of the Earth: A Novel (6 page)

Ruth

A
PERSON CANNOT
forever beat back the predations of time and the world. The house where she lives is the house where she raised up the children and the house from which she buried her husband, but it is not the same place. Her room in the back is a dank and airless cell. Her daughter, Donna, is gone and with her such standards of cleanliness and order as a woman will maintain. She ascribes it to that. Now and then Audie will slip into her room and reposition the lace doily on the bedside table or blow away a rime of dust that has gathered there along its edges but that is the extent of it. The extent of anyone’s intervention or upholding on her behalf. He means well and she thanks him. When he is done he vanishes through the door that he and his brother Vernon hung in the cut hole so many years ago, when their father went on before them and a barrier between their bedroom and that of their mother was required. It was as if they had been waiting all that time.

In those days Donna slept in the first of the front rooms. The kitchen and the living room and whatever else was required of it. Her bedroom too, then, for seventeen years. In the winter she slept alongside the black and red stove and in the summer she slept beneath the blowing lace curtain. She grew up and she graduated from high school and she moved out to start college. She married DeAlton Poole and he paid for her to study nursing in Syracuse, for all the good it has done her forebears.

These days she comes back to the house with her belly protruding, the child growing in her and the sickness growing in her mother. One to enter the world and one to leave it.

She comes in her car and she takes her mother to the hospital in Cassius. The old woman doesn’t see any point in going but since it’s Donna she goes. They sit together on a hard bench in the laboratory. Everyone in the hospital knows Donna and by now everyone knows her fading mother too. Ruth parts with three tinkling vials of blood, watching it drain from her arm and imagining that living within it are certain invisible creatures that she is better off getting shut of. If only she could rid herself of it entirely. One more part of her gone, although minus the sickness there might be nothing left. She asks her daughter the nursing school graduate why she cannot draw the blood at home and just bring the vials of it to the hospital herself without troubling an invalid to make the trip. That way she wouldn’t even have to get out of bed. But Donna reminds her that after they have visited the drugstore they will stop for lunch at McDonald’s or the Madison Street Dineraunt, her choice, and this takes a little of the sting out.

The nurse pulls the needle and covers the red spot with a cotton ball and asks Ruth to keep it there please, which the old woman does with a look of vast seriousness and intensity, holding her thin forearm as if it is the most precious thing on earth. Cradling herself to herself there on a hard plastic bench the color of poison. The puckered vein when the nurse returns to cover it over is a pale road map drawn on parchment, the road itself lost and gone, the map of no use to anyone. Not even as a memento.

DeAlton

W
HEN YOUR FATHER DIED
without a will it was ignorance, but if your mother goes the same way it’s nothing but stupidity and pigheadedness. I know they’re simple people, she’s a simple person, and I don’t mean any offense by that. But the law isn’t particularly kind to simple people. It doesn’t make any exceptions for them.

Hand me that ketchup.

Intestate
is the word for it. It means without a testament.

Latin? Is that right? Latin? Well I’ll be. You did get all the brains in the family. I don’t mean any offense by that either.

Anyhow I talked with Vince over lunch at the Rotary. He’ll do it for nothing. Professional courtesy. The truth is he does a little corporate work for Dobson and he’ll probably just bury it, but he’d never say so. That’s the kind of thing that if you keep it to yourself it’s a favor and if you say it out loud it becomes an ethics violation. Nobody wants that.

It’s not going to come as any surprise to her. She’s been getting ready to die as long as I can remember. You’re not going to hurt her feelings.

Vernon

S
HE OUTSMARTED THEM
city lawyers. DeAlton come out here with that Italian feller and this pretty little gal the Italian feller had with him carrying the papers. She was a little bitty thing. Looked like that Connie Chung on television. They come out here the three of them and they went on in her room like they owned the place, which I guess they were trying to. But she wouldn’t sign. She wouldn’t sign. She laid there in the bed and she asked that Italian feller how about if she just turned the place over to the four of us before she went. There weren’t no chance we’d throw her out. That Italian feller scratched his head and said he had to allow she had a point, and the little gal with the papers looked like she wanted to laugh but couldn’t. DeAlton pushed them all back out to the car and they left.

Audie

M
Y MOTHER WENT
on ahead. After they took her out I went in and arranged her things. I made up the bed. She always kept her clothes in the chest of drawers and I left them right where they lay. Creed came in and said it was about time we had the use of that furniture but I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him have the use of it. I was in her room and he came in with some things he wanted to put in that chest of drawers. He had some old hats and his winter coat and mine too and Vernon’s, but I told him they could just keep on hanging in the barn the way they always did. There wasn’t any reason to use up her chest of drawers that way. I asked him where we would put her things if we took them out and he said we ought to give them to the poor.

Preston

Y
OU HAD TO GO
through Ruth’s bedroom to get to the jakes. It’d been that way from a long time back, when Lester and Ruth lived there just the two of them. It was all right in those days, I guess. Before the boys came and Donna. Anyhow the jakes was in between the house and the barn and you had to go through Ruth’s bedroom to get to it. I would imagine there was a parade all night long with those four children.

When Ruth passed on and they closed up her bedroom, I think they were surprised at not having the use of it anymore. The jakes, I mean. I don’t think they saw that coming. They were pretty well occupied about her and I don’t blame them. This was in the summertime. I believe they used the woods for a while, somewhere up by the still. They used the woods as long as the weather held but the seasons change whether you like it or not and they couldn’t keep on that way forever. I’d see the three of them coming and going up that hill and down again one by one and I’d feel sorry for them, but I wasn’t about to offer up the use of our facilities either. I could blame that on Margaret but I won’t, since I felt the same way she did. It was a failing and I know it but there are limits to everything, even kindness.

What brought it on was that pretty soon Audie wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for anything. That’s why they had to close it up. She had an old caned chair by the bed and he sat in it and he wouldn’t even come out to work on his whirligigs. A person who knew him would have figured that that work and those whirligigs were the things he loved most in all this world—those and his brother Vernon—but in the end that distinction went to his mother.

Donna

S
HE WAS GLAD
that her mother had passed away in the summertime, if you could say such a thing. The ground would be soft. Nobody ever got buried in the winter. She had been three years old the winter her father died, and although she believed that she remembered his funeral she knew that such memories may have been hearsay. Her mother’s words made flesh. On the other hand she was certain that she did recall his burial, which took place one bright spring afternoon on a little plot of ground that bordered Hatch’s woods. Her brothers dug the hole. The world was green, and stepping into the woods was stepping into a bottle. To put her father into that fertile ground was to be assured that he would rise up again. At some point in her youth she realized that she did not know where his body had been kept during the months following the funeral, and rather than have to find out she was glad that her mother had chosen to pass away when the weather was warm.

Her brothers dug this hole too, right alongside the other and sharing the headstone. Careful not to interfere with what was already there, hidden in the earth and not risen up after this score of years but still worthy of veneration. Preston came up and helped them map the hole with a snap line and a carpenter’s square. He drove pegs into the ground and he strung the line and they worked within the perimeter of it, heading straight down. Audie didn’t dig but sat vigil at some remove on an upturned bucket, keeping an eye on the hole. He had the look about him of a man considering not just what had to go down into it but what might come up.

The preacher who served the church in Carversville had another charge in Lenox and one more in Peterboro, and he was a hard man to pin down. During the week he was nowhere and on Sunday he was everywhere. For a while Donna wasn’t sure that she could even get him. The undertaker from Cassius swore that he could find somebody else in a pinch but she didn’t want a stranger. The preacher from Carversville was stranger enough. She thought his name was Tuttle.

Her mother’s body went to the funeral home and stayed there overnight and came back again like something on loan, twelve miles altogether in the most luxurious conveyance she had ever ridden. Inside a box the whole distance. DeAlton paid for it. Someone from the state came out to assess the burial ground, a barrel of a man who paced off the yardage between Preston Hatch’s wellhead and the hole and declared the operation unacceptable on account of something having to do with groundwater. Preston scoffed. He said he’d been drinking the remains of the deceased’s husband, Lester, for twenty-one years and he wasn’t the worse for it yet. Worse things died all the time up there in the woods and nobody cared. The state man had a face like a boiled egg and it ran with sweat in the sun and he didn’t feel like arguing either chemistry or philosophy with someone he took for a bumpkin. Regulations were regulations, and the new hole was fifty feet short of squaring with them. Preston asked what the fine would be. The man from the state told him, and Preston said he’d pay it himself. He volunteered to pay it himself right then and there if that was what it took and the man from the state looked tempted and he fidgeted some and put the forms back into his pocket but when all was said and done he didn’t take him up on it. He just got back in the car and drove off. Preston went inside and drew himself a glass of water.

Tuttle drove up while Audie was prying the old hasp away from the track door on the side of the barn. Vernon had given him a hammer and a crowbar, and although the hammer had but one claw and the crowbar was too big the outcome was certain nonetheless. Audie would not have quit without Vernon’s authority. He would not have quit even if he had understood the full import of his work: that his brothers meant to use the hasp to seal their mother’s room against him. The nails that held it to the barn were old cut iron and they were driven into a solid oak upright and they screamed as they yielded inch by inch. They screamed and gave up their straightness, and Audie cursed them in his own way. If Tuttle minded or even understood he made no mention of it. He had certainly heard worse, for there is something about the nearness of death that shows men plain and unadorned. An individual may conceal himself before God but not before that. The preacher wore a straw fedora against the sun and he tipped it to Audie and he went on past. He knocked at the door but no answer came. He put his nose against the screen. It smelled of rust and he called through it into the dark but his voice in that small space was no larger than his knocking and it produced the same result. He wiped the reddened and checkered tip of his nose on the back of his hand and hitched up his pants and went down from the porch, on past Audie again and around the empty barn and up into the fields.

Creed was on the tractor, his silhouette atop the ridge making a slice against the sky. He saw Tuttle coming and he cut the engine and it took a while to quit. The ridge where he was working was a little bit of a walk, and although it took Tuttle some time to reach him he made no effort to climb down and meet him halfway. He sat in the sun and waited, and Tuttle came on slowly.

“I’m sorry about your mother.” Tuttle said it without introducing himself, trusting that Creed would know him by his collar.

“She was dying for a long time.”

“I guess we all are.” Tuttle shaded his eyes and looked up toward Creed where he sat on the Farmall. “We’re all dying from the moment we’re born.”

“I mean the cancer,” Creed said.

“Right. Right you are. The cancer.” There in the dry field with dust on his shoes, he turned and surveyed the landscape from beneath the shade of his hand. He turned his back on Creed and sighted down toward the barn. “I know she was a fine woman,” he said. Such were the words that came under these circumstances. He said them with his back turned, as if to allow for some doubt that he’d even spoken. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“So how much for the job?”

Tuttle turned back. “What was that?”

“The funeral ain’t until tomorrow so I guess you come about the charge.”

“Oh, no. There’s no charge. I appreciate the thought, but there’s no charge.”

“All right. She paid her debts and I won’t have her go out owing.”

“Oh, no. Never fear.”

“All right, I won’t.”

Tuttle brightened a little. “You could make a donation, though. If you like.” And then, by instinct, “The church is always in need.”

“Vernon keeps hold of the money,” said Creed. He put his foot on the starter.

“Actually, what I came for was to see if there’s something you’d like me to say about your mother.”

Creed pulled at his lip, brown teeth behind a brown hand. “She paid her debts,” he said. “She done her best with the four of us. That’s all.”

“She did her best.”

“It weren’t easy.” His eyes glassed over thinking it, and his foot bounced on the starter.

“She did a fine job.”

“Just say that.”

“I will.”

Creed pressed the starter once and nothing happened and he pressed it again and nothing happened and then on the third try it kicked in.