Kings Of The Earth Part 14

"Tell me about your brother," she said. "Vernon."

Considering how interested everyone else had been in Creed, this simple question was gift enough. "There's not much to tell," she said.

"Oh, there's always something."

"He was a simple man."

"There you go." The preacher smiled. "That's something."

"To tell you the truth, he grew up in a simpler time."

"We all did."

"Only he never left it."

The preacher adjusted her hand on a small and battered black volume in her lap, which Donna had taken for a notebook. She saw now that the edges of the pages were gilded. A New Testament with the Psalms. Just the essentials. The preacher caught Donna's eyes on it and neither concealed it nor disclosed it further. "He was a good bit older than you." It was not a question.

"Eleven years. Vernon was the oldest, and I was the youngest. Am Am. I am the youngest."

Light dawned. "Your parents kept trying until they got a daughter."

Donna c.o.c.ked her head. "I'd never thought of it that way."

"I'll bet they did." The preacher gave a broad smile. "Why else would they keep going through three boys in a row?"

"Boys are useful around a farm."

"I'll bet your parents kept them busy."

"They sure did."

"And then when your time came, they let you go your own way." The preacher let her gaze wander around the sun porch, the more or less manicured yard, the late-model Toyota in the driveway.

"I guess they did. Pretty much."

"That's what happens when you wait for a child. My husband and I did the reverse. We had our two girls first and then our boy. Of course they're all grown up now."

"Mine too. My one."

"They go their own ways."

"They do."

"Time goes by."

"It does."

The preacher's fingers rubbed at the gilt edges of the book in her lap. Donna got the impression that she might be about to turn the conversation toward other ends, so she half-rose from the creaking chair and made an offer of some nice cold iced tea and the preacher said yes that would be a pleasure and a relief on this hot afternoon. She said she'd help Donna get it and Donna didn't say no, so they went together into the cool kitchen.

Del.

PEOPLE TALK. Things get out. In a perfect world it wouldn't happen, but this isn't a perfect world and it does. Then again, in a perfect world people wouldn't die under mysterious circ.u.mstances.

It could be that's just it. If the world were perfect, Vernon Proctor would pa.s.s on in his sleep exactly the way he did and n.o.body would give it a second thought. But we know things. We suspect things. Our brains start working on them and we can't help it. We want it all to be perfect and it's not perfect, it isn't going to be, but we keep trying to make some sense of it.

A hundred years back, I don't know. Things were different. Fifty years, even. You go to the doctor and he asks what did your grandparents die from and you realize you can't say. People died, that's all. When there was any record they had different words for things or they used the same words we use now but they meant something else. The words meant something that people might have been sort of unsure about, but it didn't make any difference. It didn't change things.

I guess we've come a long way. We're all experts in everything now. We might just be the poorer for it.

Anyhow people say things who shouldn't say things. An old fellow like Vernon dies and it wouldn't make a ripple under normal circ.u.mstances. It's nothing out of the ordinary. My men went out there because Creed Proctor called us. The emergency technicians went out there because of the same call. No big deal. Simple as that. An unattended death, we'd have had to look into it anyhow. We went out the next day because the medical examiner found some things and we had to see about them. A reporter can look at that from any angle he wants-it's all there on the public record, or he could come straight to me for a statement-but until somebody in the district attorney's office begins shooting his mouth off there's no reason to start talking about murder. And there's definitely no reason for everybody and his mother to know about how that poor old man signed a confession.

But you have to think it through all the same. So when I first heard about it I wondered if maybe the story had come from the night clerk at the Mobil station. The one who witnessed. The one who sold us that pizza for Audie. I thought maybe he'd gotten an idea about talking to the newspaper, but if he had they wouldn't have said what they did about an unnamed source in the district attorney's office. That would have been a lie. An unnecessary lie. And as little as I trust the Courier Courier, I think I was starting to trust Ben Wilson's office a little less.

1989.

DeAlton.

HOW YOU DIDN'T KNOW this road was back here I'll never know. this road was back here I'll never know.

You bet I'd call it a road. You can drive on it, it's a road.

If I'm putting up money then you're going to have to take the bad with the good. Get used to it. We've got plans to retire on that money, your mother and me, not just this little bit but the rest of it I'm going to have to pump into this operation, and we're going to want it back with interest. That's why they call it interest. I'm here looking out for my interest.

That's right.

I say we're we're going to want it back, but I mean going to want it back, but I mean me me. If she knew about this she'd kill the both of us.

Ow. Watch your head. This'll get better in the summertime once the mud dries up.

I'm all right. You all right? This d.a.m.ned VW's got no padding anywhere. It's like riding around in a d.a.m.ned freezer chest.

So. How many ways you got to get up here?

Just the one? Just the one straight up through the pasture?

Unbelievable. How in h.e.l.l have you stayed out of the penitentiary all this time?

Well now you got two ways up. We'll find a couple more, quick as we can. Maybe park down by Marshall's Pond and come up cross-lots. Blaze a trail. We'll get around to it. The main thing right now is to get this s.h.i.t moved up and finish digging out the trenches and run the drip lines without that busybody next door deciding he ought to start taking pictures for his sc.r.a.pbook.

It's a figure of speech. Preston's an old woman is all and he doesn't miss a thing. He thinks he runs the world. That's why we had to go to Canastota for the parts. You think I'm buying this kind of merchandise from anyplace Preston Hatch hangs around, you're crazy. He'd ask what I needed it for and I'd tell him I was thinking about maybe starting up a little garden and he'd say he didn't know I had the room out back for it and I'd say well maybe I was going in with a neighbor or something and he'd say that was a pretty good idea and why didn't I bring him some nice tomatoes when they came on. And he'd be waiting for them. He wouldn't forget.

That's why we had to go to Canastota. You can't be too careful.

Audie.

THEY COME AT NIGHT SOMETIMES. Tom and that friend of his. People say if you sleep the night you're sleeping like a baby but a baby will be up crying all hours. I know that from when Creed and Donna were little. They'd be up hollering and my mother would be up with them. I guess I must sleep like a baby then. Up half the night.

The first time they came I thought it was burglars. Vernon was making that hard swallowing noise he makes and I couldn't sleep and I heard them come. I got out of bed and I got a stick of firewood and I didn't turn on the light since it wouldn't do me too much good. I didn't open the door but a crack and I slid out into the barn and they were loading. The two men. One of them had a little penlight he shined at me and somebody said h.e.l.lo Uncle Audie how you doing it's just me Tom. I asked if they needed my help and they said they didn't. I went on back to bed. It was the three of us in it. This was a while back and Vernon hadn't gone on ahead. Not yet.

Tom.

HIS FATHER SAID it was all about leverage. Not the mechanical kind but the financial kind, although in the end it came to the same thing. He'd put money into Tom's crop and they'd multiply his yield by five or six times and then they'd have some leverage over that Nick. Make him into a junior partner, if that. Leverage was the only thing little creeps like him understood. Once they had Nick where they wanted him they'd take that leverage and a little more of DeAlton's retirement money-as much as it took to get noticed-and go talk turkey with Henri up in Canada. Take it right to him on his own turf. Put their offer on the table and tell him take it or leave it if he wants to play with the big boys. They had other places they could get the low-end c.r.a.p he was selling if it came to that. There was Mexico, wasn't there. Mexico made more sense than Canada. You didn't have to be a genius to see that. Canada, for Christ's sake. Henri could go sell that garbage to the Eskimos if he didn't see things their way. it was all about leverage. Not the mechanical kind but the financial kind, although in the end it came to the same thing. He'd put money into Tom's crop and they'd multiply his yield by five or six times and then they'd have some leverage over that Nick. Make him into a junior partner, if that. Leverage was the only thing little creeps like him understood. Once they had Nick where they wanted him they'd take that leverage and a little more of DeAlton's retirement money-as much as it took to get noticed-and go talk turkey with Henri up in Canada. Take it right to him on his own turf. Put their offer on the table and tell him take it or leave it if he wants to play with the big boys. They had other places they could get the low-end c.r.a.p he was selling if it came to that. There was Mexico, wasn't there. Mexico made more sense than Canada. You didn't have to be a genius to see that. Canada, for Christ's sake. Henri could go sell that garbage to the Eskimos if he didn't see things their way.

In the end they'd have the Canuck selling to them at their price and Nick doing the grunt work and a happy future lined up for everybody. Everybody meaning the Poole family.

In the meantime, it was dirty work. Dirty but familiar. Back when DeAlton was barely out of short pants, he'd helped his father build an irrigation system for a newly broken field. He'd maintained that one and others pretty much like it until he'd finally grown up all the way and cut loose of his old man and gotten the h.e.l.l out of the onion business, but he couldn't deny that the experience had served him well. He prided himself on being able to help out if some old farmer he called on was having trouble with a water system. When it came to ingratiating yourself with these old-timers, by which he meant selling them a truckload of milking equipment, nothing beat a readiness to get your hands dirty. That was one lesson it wouldn't hurt Tom to learn.

For a water source they thought about the creek back in the hills, but the slope was steep and the pressure might be too great. They didn't want that. So they settled on hooking into an old waterline that Tom's uncles had put in sometime back in the fifties or sixties. Who even knew what it was meant for? Maybe to pasture cows up there someplace or maybe to water the gra.s.s in the graveyard even though it was a good distance away. It was uphill of the graveyard, though, so maybe they'd had a trench. The tap was rusted open when they found it and the line was dry so it was either broken somewhere or shut off. Tom said ice had probably busted it during the winter sometime but his father said if it was busted there'd be water running wouldn't there and there wasn't any. Sure enough the line was just shut off at the wellhead. They wrenched it back on and all of a sudden there was plenty of water up there, as if the line had been put in just for that purpose, and since it came straight from the well there'd be no telltale b.u.mp in the water bill. You had to think these things through, DeAlton said. This was the stuff they didn't teach you at the community college.

The spring pa.s.sed and summer came on again. Tom found himself busting his a.s.s up in the field more than he'd have liked, all alone at that, but his father had to work and to tell the truth he enjoyed the chance to be all by himself without the old man plaguing him. There was no income from the dope yet and there wouldn't be for a while, so right now he was more or less an indentured servant to a bunch of green sprouts. A bunch of green sprouts and DeAlton Poole. His father had him wearing different shoes every day of the week and taking a different route up every time he went and looking for his own tracks as he did, and it was starting to make him a little crazy. One minute he was a dirt farmer and the next minute he was some kind of secret agent and either way there wasn't much glamour to it. Sometimes late in the day when he'd come walking down through the pasture and see his uncles waiting for the co-op truck he'd have an impulse to embrace the three of them like brothers in arms, like they were all members of that Solidarity from over in Poland, but he never did. He'd have needed two showers, one for the dirt and one for the cow s.h.i.t, and he had places to go.

Preston.

I KNEW KNEW D DEALTON'D STUCK his nose into it. I could tell you when it happened, right down to the day. his nose into it. I could tell you when it happened, right down to the day.

DeAlton's been a disappointment to me. I never knew his father all that well but I knew him enough to speak to. They were from over by Wampsville someplace, so he didn't come in much unless he needed something that Willis didn't have over in Canastota. He was a gentleman, I'll tell you that. Neat in his habits and prompt in his payments and never an unkind word, not from Leon Poole. I never knew his wife. Maybe she's to blame for how DeAlton turned out.

The old man did stink like onions though. I'll tell you that.

Anyway Donna deserved better. She worked to get away from her beginnings and DeAlton worked to get away from his, but it wasn't the same thing. There's ways to get away and there's ways to get away. And by get away I guess I mean grow up. Donna got away from a little place with a pretty narrow horizon. DeAlton got away from the onion stink but that's as far as he got, and I'm not even sure that entirely took. Like I said there's ways and there's ways. There's ways to and there's ways from. Donna went to and DeAlton went from. But regardless of what he had in mind he never went very far.

That's not always a bad thing. I never left my father's lumberyard except to go to France, and even that wasn't my idea. I stayed in that lumberyard all my life, but when I was done it was a different place than it'd been under my dad. We'd expanded into the lot next door and we'd leased the railroad yard across the tracks and we'd bought the old depot building and made it over into a little boutique for home goods. Margaret picked out every single thing in there by hand and she did a good job. My father never would've thought of that. Then again the depot was a going concern in his time. Six pa.s.senger trains a day when I was a boy and then down to four and then down to one in each direction and then that was the end of it. The train that brought me back from the war dropped me off at that depot and it was the same for Creed. Generations came back that way from everywhere. Generations left too.

I tried to keep an open mind when I saw DeAlton and Tom going up there with their carload of pipe and whatnot. DeAlton's father taught him a few things and from the look of it I guess DeAlton pa.s.sed a couple of them on to Tom. That irrigation system, I mean. Not that I would have put it together the way they did. They took a few shortcuts, made some compromises I wouldn't have. Then again I wouldn't have done it at all. So that's how much my opinion on the subject is worth.

I was in the graveyard when I first saw them go by on the old tractor path. The one along the treeline up toward the creek. n.o.body uses that path too much anymore. Not even Audie, and he does most of the tractor work. He just goes cross-lots. I was up paying my respects to Lester and Ruth and I saw them go by in Tom's car with the back open, loaded up. I didn't go over on account of I knew they were up to something, but I did have a look after they went home. They didn't get much done that first day but they came back every day until they were finished, just like it was a regular job.

That first week I got more exercise than I get in a year, going up and down to check how they were doing. Margaret thought I'd gone crazy. Once or twice I thought about fixing a couple of their mistakes but I never did. It just about killed me to leave them alone, but DeAlton would have been suspicious. Tom, he probably wouldn't have noticed a thing. Or else maybe he'd have thought they had elves.

1932.

Ruth.

CERTAIN THINGS ARE SAID to sober a man in a hurry. Peril, shock, ice water. The combination works on Lester and if it does not entirely overwhelm the whiskey then it does at least subdue it. His woes are everywhere at once and his mind goes everywhere with them. He drags Vernon from the water and clasps him tight, wringing out water in sheets. The boy shivers like his brother Audie and his teeth chatter like the bones they are and he gasps but he seems unable to speak. As if some mechanism within him has frozen solid. to sober a man in a hurry. Peril, shock, ice water. The combination works on Lester and if it does not entirely overwhelm the whiskey then it does at least subdue it. His woes are everywhere at once and his mind goes everywhere with them. He drags Vernon from the water and clasps him tight, wringing out water in sheets. The boy shivers like his brother Audie and his teeth chatter like the bones they are and he gasps but he seems unable to speak. As if some mechanism within him has frozen solid.

Lester debates giving him his coat. To wrap the boy in it now will only soak it through and cost him the use of it and then where will they be. He hesitates and shakes his head to clear it. The boy is freezing. Anyone can see that. His skin is blue beneath the white of the ice. He lets him go and nearly permits kindness to overwhelm what pa.s.ses in this instance for sense, stepping away and half-removing the coat and then deciding otherwise. If he freezes to death there will be no one to aid the boys.

Vernon's hair is frozen. His hat, Audie's hat, still hangs beneath the ice, a dim and shifting shadow. The ties of it, come loose in the fall, reach around the edge of the hole and flutter in the black water like slow pennants. There is no use for it now save as a reminder of the younger boy. Lester tells Vernon to wait here and then he tells him to come on and then when neither admonition makes the slightest difference or even seems to register he picks him up, staggering. As he lifts the boy, one foot slips back and finds thin ice that cracks beneath their combined weight and he lurches forward. Careening toward the rocky bank, utterly lacking purchase. They spin and swoop and recover and the wet boy has already soaked his coat through and he wonders why he did not just give it over to begin with. What kind of monster he might be.

They reach the pathway to the high rock and he sets Vernon down. He asks how he is doing and the boy does not answer, which could mean anything. He considers the wisdom of perhaps giving him his coat now, but the useless old thing is half soaked through so why bother. Instead he pulls it about himself and heads up the path. Calling for Audie. "You come, boy. We ain't got all day. Your brother's fell in the water in case you ain't noticed."

But Audie does not come. When Lester reaches the top he is still lying on the stone, whimpering and shaking and banging first one leg and then the other against the hard world. He has let go of the pole and it has slid off the far side of the rock, hook and sinker and line and all, each of them worth good money, and Lester curses him for his carelessness. The very tip of it is still within reach and he bends over his son to grab it but a tremor pa.s.ses through Audie and his fingertips just brush it and down it goes. He strains after it and falls short. Perhaps it will be recoverable in the spring, but not now. With the back of his frozen hand he cuffs the boy and that seems to wake him up.

He takes him by the collar and hoists him bodily. The boy's feet skitter on the slick rock as he brings him up and the father lets go of his coat and the boy crumples down again. The father gives him the toe of his boot. "Get up, you." The boy rises to his knees like a beggar man and his blue eyes turn upward to his father but his father sees them not, for he has already turned away. "Get up if you're coming, and bring them fish. I can't do everything."

In his arms the boy is but a groaning log. A stiff, rotten thing pulled up from the deep and conjured into some kind of life that is not life exactly. Lester trudges through deep snow, following the footprints he made earlier, sinking into his own covered-over tracks and remaking them. They reach the barbed-wire fence and rather than stretch it down for Audie he stumbles straight across and Audie stumbles after him. The boy catches his pant leg and tears it and catches his sock and tears that too. He cries and keeps going. What will his mother say. He keeps crying and he works to catch up.

Lester shifts his hold on Vernon to apply a little warmth to new places. Against his icy coat the boy's face is blue and he unb.u.t.tons and wraps the hard fabric partway around him, at least so far as he can and still keep moving. Perhaps that will help. Within his breast pocket the flask presses against the boy's head and he can feel the hardness of it with his arm but he leaves it where it is and looks back instead to see about Audie. "You'll cry plenty if you left them fish behind." Audie wails but Vernon in his arms makes no sound at all.

Soon they will see the barn and the house. Just over a rise and down. The wind picks up but they do not notice it. They squint and keep on. The clouds scud low and the rain comes in pellets. They top the rise and slide down through the pasture, too fast for their own good. They teeter and they tumble and they send up snow. There are trees in low, wet places down here and the cows are sheltered among them and Lester knows that he should see to them but not now.

He calls out his wife's name although she would have to be looking out the bedroom window in order to see them and that window is covered over with feed sacks to keep out the cold. He calls nonetheless and the sound causes Vernon to stir just the slightest. He calls again and Audie joins in, perhaps only for the companionship of it.

He turns. "You left them fish you'll holler all right."

The pasture flattens out as they near the barn and the snow is less deep for having been blown elsewhere, off into low spots and up against the buildings in drifts. They push on through it and Lester hauls the barn door open a crack and they slip inside. Out of the wind it is warmer already. He bellows his wife's name again and this time she comes. "Whyn't you boil some water," he says as he staggers in through the door. Only that.

She has the good sense not to ask how this has come about. She merely takes Vernon and tells his father that she will see to him. He can pump the water and set it to boil. This ch.o.r.e being hers by custom, he balks. She says he will get it done faster than she can, and still he refuses. She says that doing it will warm him up, and he gives in at last. She takes Vernon to the bed over on the cold side of the house, then she thinks better of it and strips away his clothes and wraps him in a blanket and brings him back to the cherry-red stove. Sitting there in the straight kitchen chair, rubbing color back into him. Lester strips off his own wet coat and throws it steaming on the floor in front of the stove and starts working the pump. Audie stands hugging himself against the wall, shivering as he does, and a single green fish slides from his coat to lie dead on the plank floor. His father laughs for the first time in eternity. The boy laughs too. Then he spreads wide his arms and the icy fish come showering down.

1990.

Margaret.

MONEY CAME IN from all over, and for some reason I got the job of handling it. Better that it fell to me than to some others I could name. I'm a trustee at the church and I've been bonded for counting what comes into the collection plate, although n.o.body thought to ask that. They just started handing it to me. I suppose I have an honest face. At least we know where every nickel went. from all over, and for some reason I got the job of handling it. Better that it fell to me than to some others I could name. I'm a trustee at the church and I've been bonded for counting what comes into the collection plate, although n.o.body thought to ask that. They just started handing it to me. I suppose I have an honest face. At least we know where every nickel went.

Preston got it started. He was storming around here one morning, going on about how the Proctor boys were never going to be able to pay for a proper lawyer if they lived to be a thousand, and I suggested that he ought to go storm around the lumberyard for a while instead of bothering me. I won't deny that it was purely self-defense on my part. We've been married a long time and you get to know your limits. So he went to the lumberyard and sat down with his old cronies, and to hear him tell it the money just started to appear. It wasn't just a trickle, either. People opened their wallets who didn't know Creed Proctor from Adam. People opened their wallets who'd never spoken a word to him their whole lives and surely wouldn't have sat on a stool alongside him at the Homestead, not and been able to keep their suppers down. People opened their wallets who couldn't afford to.

Preston said Creed could have his choice of the best lawyers in the county with that kind of money, but Creed let Preston pick for him.

Del.

I WENT UP WENT UP to the farm for the burial. I can see how a person might interpret my being there as intrusive, but Creed and I had squared things between us and I thought he'd understand that I was there for honorable reasons. By which I don't mean law enforcement. I was there for him. You don't go to a funeral for the sake of the dead. You go for the living, and that one I went to for Creed. No matter what might come next. to the farm for the burial. I can see how a person might interpret my being there as intrusive, but Creed and I had squared things between us and I thought he'd understand that I was there for honorable reasons. By which I don't mean law enforcement. I was there for him. You don't go to a funeral for the sake of the dead. You go for the living, and that one I went to for Creed. No matter what might come next.

It was one of the nicest services I can remember, and I've been called upon to attend some. I didn't know the pastor and I doubt very much that she knew the deceased, but you'd never have guessed that from the sound of it. She spoke plainly about life and death and she didn't soften anything too much. I never knew Vernon, but from what I know of his brother I think he would have appreciated that. On a farm you live around death your whole life.

Not a lot of people came out and those who came out didn't shed many tears. Creed sniffled some but he might have had a cold. He stepped away in the middle of the sermon and blew his nose with one finger the way a farmer will. He just let fly into the tall gra.s.s and came back mopping himself with the back of his hand. I don't think anybody thought the less of him for that, although it did complicate the receiving line a little if you let yourself think about it, which I tried not to.