Kings of the Earth: A Novel (7 page)

Preston

I
F THEY’D HAD
any common sense they’d have waited awhile to close off that room, but common sense was never their strong suit. I was up at the graveside for the service and I stayed to help put her in the ground. It was just the three boys and Donna and DeAlton and Margaret and me, along with a cousin of DeAlton’s from over in Valley Mills. The eight of us and the reverend. He was a nice enough young fellow although I don’t guess he had a lot of funeral work under his belt yet, and a good deal of what he had to say sounded like he’d gotten it out of a textbook. Like he was just filling in the blanks. Then again he didn’t have much to work with.

Audie was quiet the whole time. He stood alongside his sister and she held his hand. I kept my eye on him and I made up my mind that he wasn’t certain as to who was inside the box. I think he had a picture of his mother in his mind and it didn’t include her lying underneath a coffin lid. After the reverend said his piece he held his Bible to his chest and started in on “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” and we joined in, Donna and Margaret and me. The boys tried to help but kept coming in late. There isn’t a strong voice among them anyway. DeAlton just looked at the ground. I don’t know about his cousin. I didn’t look his way.

I’d helped Vernon and Creed lay out ropes under the box and we used them to lift it up a little bit and edge it over and let it on down. One of the ropes got snagged under the box and gave us a little trouble and I’d have just left it down there if it’d been up to me, but those boys were always great believers in waste not want not. Audie went down for it and came up grinning like a boy who’d caught a snake. He looked young.

We had a little reception on the screen porch out back. You could about see the grave from there for one thing. And anyhow you didn’t necessarily want to spend much time in a closed room with those boys no matter what the occasion was. Margaret set out baloney sandwiches cut up small and macaroni salad and baked beans and a white cake. She put that last under a little screen tent she had that folded up like a parasol when you didn’t need it, even though the porch already had screens. She set out some lemonade too. I’d told her earlier in the day that I was afraid the cake might make things a little too festive but the boys didn’t seem to get that impression. They went at it like a pack of wolves. DeAlton’s cousin ate a little piece of a sandwich and headed on home but the reverend stayed. He didn’t have a wedding ring on his hand so he was probably figuring this would do him for supper. That’s what Margaret said later. She guessed he lived from one potluck dinner to another, and this one was as good as the next. He didn’t push the church on us any.

After a while we wrapped up the leavings in tinfoil and the boys took them home. If it’d been anybody else I guess we’d just let them take the plates and bring them back when they were done. Margaret said they ought to get at the baloney and the macaroni salad and the baked beans right off because they wouldn’t keep in this heat. The cake would last but there wasn’t much of it. They thanked her kindly and went off satisfied. Say what you want, those boys were brought up to be gracious. You can’t take that away from them.

DeAlton went back to work and Donna went home and the reverend left too. It seemed to me there was a good deal more awkwardness over all those good-byes than there had been up at the grave, I guess because the parties involved were all still among the living. Plus up there the reverend was in charge of things and he knew exactly how it was supposed to be done, step by step, even if he did get it out of a book. Afterward it’s every man for himself.

They went down to the house and I sat with Margaret on the porch. The trash needed emptying but I didn’t get at it right away. We hadn’t done all that much, but we were about worn out. A funeral will do that to you no matter how old you are and we weren’t old then. Not yet. We sat side by side and watched them go down the hill and across the little bit of pasture toward the house. Vernon gave his tinfoil to Creed and went around back where the old school bus was that they kept full of turkeys, and Creed and Audie went into the barn. I didn’t know if they would keep going into the house but I figured they wouldn’t because they’d have work to do in the barn the same as always.

It wasn’t until I heard Audie carrying on that I knew they’d kept going into the house. Why Creed couldn’t have waited to get the hasp mounted on her bedroom door I can’t say. There’s such a thing as a decent interval. Why he had to have Audie work on it I don’t know either.

Creed

H
E’S A GOOD WORKER
but he wouldn’t do that job. Preston come and give him some white cake and that calmed him down and then I done it myself.

Donna

V
ERNON ONCE DREAMED
his own death. He dreamed it one night in the bed with his brothers, and all the next day it would give him no peace. It hung in his mind like the lace curtain in the front window in the summertime, always in motion, never revealing itself entirely, flickering around the edges of his mind. It showed itself over and over, different parts of it in different orders, troubling stark snippets of black menace that would not let go. He saw himself dead in the bed and he saw one of his own brothers arrested and charged. He could not be sure which. It varied. He saw himself alive at bedtime in the comfort of his usual valley and he saw himself not waking up. He never saw himself dying but he saw himself dead. Dead with a brother on either side of him, the younger to one side and the youngest to the other, one of them to blame in the eyes of the law.

Because he could not shake the dream, he shared it. He sat on the overstuffed chair that was his by right of seniority and he gathered his brothers onto the porch and he told them. One said, “It weren’t me.” So did the other. The first said it was the cancer. Had Vernon known the Judas if a Judas there was, it would have been easier but no more satisfactory.

“One way or the other I’m going soon,” he said with an air of resignation and boding, and they offered no argument. He sat plucking bits of cotton batting from the chair and rolling it into pellets between his fingers. “Maybe I’ll take a gun and shoot myself. Get it over with. Save you boys the trouble.”

His youngest brother, Creed, said he would help by hiding the gun if he wanted. He would do whatever was required.

“Don’t worry about that,” said Vernon. “There won’t be no need to hide it. As long as I go during the daytime, you’ll be all right.”

It is in the nature of visions to be communicated. Vernon told Preston Hatch, who told Donna because she had a right to know. She told DeAlton and a few people on her shift at the hospital, and before long it was everywhere. Those brothers of hers. Who knew where they got their ideas. Certain individuals decided maybe they got them from one another, and that Vernon was doomed.

If the yellow tape was meant to prohibit contamination, it was put up years too late. Its only functions now were those of superstition and formality. The two troopers from Cassius who strung it up and the forensics technician from Syracuse who gave them a hand with it began their day with a cold professional air, but when the work was done they would go home to their families glassy-eyed and incredulous. Not one would describe what he had seen.

The bedsheets were yellow and brown, perhaps more so in the middle where Vernon slept but not by much. They smelled like ammonia and sulfur and cats, and when the men tried removing them they stuck to the mattress and pulled loose fiber by fiber, making a thin high tearing sound of disintegration. They separated and billowed into clouds that lifted slowly and hung in the air. The men coughed and were glad for their masks, sifting tatters of linen through their fingers and thinking about mummies. In the end they took the whole mattress.

The floorboards by the broken refrigerator, along the wall beyond which stood the jakes, were damp and rotted down to a soft mulch. A yellow haze of mold grew on it. The side of the refrigerator was mossy. The man from Syracuse said his Boy Scout training must be failing him because he’d been given to understand that moss grew on the north sides of trees and this was the east. One of the troopers suggested that maybe the conventional wisdom didn’t apply to iceboxes. A coffee tin stood alongside the bed for a spittoon.
Good to the last drop
, said one of the troopers as he lifted it up. Another tin, the very mate to it but older, lay upset beneath the bed with its contents spilled like black varnish. Insects had died in the spreading tongue of it and they lay there still. On the far bedpost sat a cracked glass containing a quarter-inch of something that looked like turpentine and smelled the same. They dusted it and they took a sample of its contents in a vial. A plastic ashtray from the Olcott Tavern in Cassius sat on the table alongside a stack of ancient seed catalogs and girlie magazines. There were ashes in it and spent kitchen matches and a cigarette butt that had no filter and was twisted up tight around itself and skewered on a piece of copper wire. They took that too.

Preston

T
HE TROOPERS WENT THROUGH
that place like thieves. There wasn’t any justice in it. Those Proctor boys don’t own much and half of what they own those fellows took. They took the mattress, for crying out loud. I don’t know where they’re supposed to sleep but I suppose it doesn’t matter since they’re not supposed to go in the house. I guess the barn.

Who knows when they’ll come take the tape down. I saw Audie come in from the field and stick his head inside the barn but Creed wasn’t there so he walked right on around to the front porch and lifted the tape and went on in. He doesn’t know what it means. He doesn’t know anything about tape, not that kind or any other kind. I suppose maybe he’s seen them use it on
Rockford
or somewhere but that doesn’t mean he understands it. To him that tape’s just a decoration. He probably thinks it’s the Fourth of July.

Tom didn’t have but two uncles left and in spite of that I hadn’t seen him around. He was never much for coming by their place when he was growing up. I think I understood that. They were alien to him. Just one generation away and they were like a tribe of cannibals to that boy, even though his own mother had come up among them. I’d blame it on DeAlton but I don’t think that’s entirely fair either. DeAlton always knew his way around a farmyard, even though you might not know it to look at him. First on that onion farm of his father’s and then selling for Dobson. He’d go from one place to the next like the Fuller Brush man, but with a trunkful of milking equipment instead of brushes. He kept coveralls in the trunk and he’d pull them on right over his suit and tie, and a pair of old Red Wing boots that he’d probably worn for digging onions back before he got his own ideas. A man makes use of what he owns and where he’s been, and DeAlton was no different that way. He never could sell a thing to those Proctor boys, though. Not that they had two nickels to rub together. They did everything just the way Lester did before them and they never made any complaint. I don’t think they even knew the world had changed.

The last few years have been different, at least in the summertime. I mean with regards to Tom coming around and all. Ever since he’s been grown up and working he’s been out to the farm a couple three times a week. Sometimes more. Sometimes to visit and sometimes not. It’s none of my business what he’s up to. I know that. It was none of my business when Creed built that whiskey still after he came home from Korea either, not until he needed help sweating a little copper pipe and I had a blowtorch I knew how to use. My father’d taught me. I’d never even touched that particular blowtorch before then. It was old stock that we’d brought home from the lumberyard when something new came in and nobody wanted the old. It was still sealed up in the box until Creed decided he’d start making whiskey or whatever you’d call it. He needed some other help too and I gave it to him. More than he asked for. The crawl space is still full of that old junk. I ought to have a yard sale one of these days.