Kings Of The Earth Part 13

"You kidding?" said DeAlton with his eyes shut against the sun. "I've got to work. And don't distract me from my point. Like I said, this is living."

"I know."

"You've got it all figured out, if you can do this on a Tuesday afternoon."

"I guess."

"What are you, working nights?"

"Kind of."

"Kind of."

"I'm kind of working all the time, Pop."

DeAlton squirmed his b.u.t.t around in the seat and said, "Kind of working "Kind of working sounds pretty nice to me. I could go for a career in kind of working." sounds pretty nice to me. I could go for a career in kind of working."

"Now come on. That's not what-"

"You think they could use me?"

"Come on."

"Are they hiring? Are they kind of hiring?"

"Come on, Pop."

DeAlton slitted his eyes open just the least little bit and c.o.c.ked his head toward Tom. "Because I could kind of use a job that let me kind of sit on my a.s.s all day and look at girls in bathing suits."

"It's not what you think."

DeAlton kicked the cooler. "You're right. There's refreshments too."

Tom leaned forward. "Look. I'm making money. I'm paying my bills. You want more than that?"

DeAlton picked a little bacon from between his teeth. "I could use a straight answer."

"I'm working."

"You're not working for the Italians, are you?"

"Not hardly."

"The Italians with the suits, I mean. Not that big fat dope Fazio."

"No. I'm not working for any Italians."

"Good. I don't want you running numbers or something like that. You want to do that, you can get a job over at Vernon Downs. A square job."

"I'm not running numbers. I don't even know what running numbers is."

"Good." He checked his watch. "Keep it that way." He considered the time and decided what the h.e.l.l, that farmer over near Peterboro could wait. He toed the foam cooler again. "On second thought," he said, "how about giving your old man one of those nice cold beers you got."

Vernon.

I GIVE UP SMOKING GIVE UP SMOKING a long time back but it didn't do me no good. I didn't give it up on my own account. I always liked it and I'd kept up with it if it was up to me. I done it for Audie. He wanted me to give it up ever since our mother pa.s.sed. She had cancer and Audie got the idea I was in line for it too and I guess it turned out he was right. It was either quit or wait for a horsehair of my own inside a cigarette and I wasn't in no hurry for that so I just up and quit. I told him I quit and I quit right then. That same day. I started up with Red Man about the same time. Audie didn't have no complaint about that and I didn't either. Sometimes he asked for a chew and I give it to him all right. He wasn't much for it but he'd give it a try every now and then and I didn't see no harm in it. a long time back but it didn't do me no good. I didn't give it up on my own account. I always liked it and I'd kept up with it if it was up to me. I done it for Audie. He wanted me to give it up ever since our mother pa.s.sed. She had cancer and Audie got the idea I was in line for it too and I guess it turned out he was right. It was either quit or wait for a horsehair of my own inside a cigarette and I wasn't in no hurry for that so I just up and quit. I told him I quit and I quit right then. That same day. I started up with Red Man about the same time. Audie didn't have no complaint about that and I didn't either. Sometimes he asked for a chew and I give it to him all right. He wasn't much for it but he'd give it a try every now and then and I didn't see no harm in it.

Anyhow I quit but I still got the same cancer killed my mother. I got my own, though. I didn't get it from her. Cancer ain't like a cold. You don't catch it but it catches you. Since I got the cancer I'm back to smoking but it's different since you don't smoke gra.s.s the same way you smoke a cigarette. Tom showed me. He gives me all I can use but I don't use too much because it's still smoking no matter what you put in the paper and maybe it might make the cancer worse. I don't know. It don't take much anyhow. I smoke a little of it and I feel better. I don't swallow no different than I used to around the cancer but it don't bother me so much either.

Preston told me to drink more orange juice one time and I tried it but it didn't do me no good. Not that I could tell.

DeAlton.

I THOUGHT IT THOUGHT IT was just a hobby. I thought you were just growing a little for yourself and giving some to Vernon. was just a hobby. I thought you were just growing a little for yourself and giving some to Vernon.

By G.o.d I've got to say I never saw you as the agricultural type. My own son. I spend my life running from a G.o.dd.a.m.ned onion farm and you go running right back to it. Like you're some kind of a throwback.

No, I'm just kidding. Of course I'm just kidding.

I know it's dope and not onions. I know that and I don't care. It takes more than that to impress me. I've been around onions and I've been around dope. You've got to be a little more cautious with the one is all.

I know you are. I know. But the more you grow the bigger the risk.

Yes, that's my way of asking how much you're growing.

Well, s.h.i.+t. That's not very much. That's not very much at all. How can you live on that?

I don't care how good it is. That little bit isn't enough to maintain any kind of standard of living. It's not enough to let a person sit on the beach all day looking at girls and drinking beer. It never was that I knew of and I don't bet it is these days either.

Because a nickel bag is still a nickel bag and five dollars isn't worth two dollars these days. You've got to allow for inflation.

Do I look ignorant to you? I know about running a business. You've got fixed costs. You've got storage and packaging and transportation. You've got supplies and hardware. You've got your drip lines and your timers and your pressure-reducing valves and your- Why you G.o.dd.a.m.ned amateur. You don't just throw it in the ground and hope for the best. Dope ain't onions, and you don't even do that with onions.

1932.

Ruth.

A THIN DRIZZLE THIN DRIZZLE of freezing rain comes up but they pay it no mind. Soon something bites, and before Audie can notice or react the fish has nibbled free the cheese and made off with it. The hook comes up bare. Audie squalls and his father squalls too, each in his own way. of freezing rain comes up but they pay it no mind. Soon something bites, and before Audie can notice or react the fish has nibbled free the cheese and made off with it. The hook comes up bare. Audie squalls and his father squalls too, each in his own way.

"How'd you like it if that was your dinner just swum off?"

Audie makes no particular answer and his cry of disappointment goes on as if the thought of hunger troubles him no more and no less than the mere loss of that lively fish, and from the well of his son's stubbornness Lester draws more anger. He reaches around Vernon and knocks the back of Audie's head with his knuckles and only the boy's hat responds, not the boy himself, tilting forward and c.o.c.king crazily over his eyes. Lester snorts and reaches into his coat for his whiskey and while his gaze is downcast Vernon fixes his brother's hat.

Lester has the cork between his teeth. Vernon spies it and has an idea and asks if his father has a knife, and Lester says if I had a knife I'd notched them poles myself. Can't you remember that. Vernon says how about we just break that cork in half then and use it for two bobbers or not break it and use it for just the one. That way Audie can catch something.

His father breaks it with his teeth and makes two rather than have none for himself and he strings them up and rebaits the hook. He sets down the open flask on the rock by his haunch and he eyes it from time to time. He feels in his hip pocket for a rag that he might improvise a stopper but he finds none. Vernon s.h.i.+vers at his side and it startles him and his leg nudges the flask. It tilts away by a few degrees and wobbles and rights itself. He worries that he might get no fish out of this enterprise and lose his whiskey in the bargain.

Audie's bobber sinks a little and comes up again. The boy tenses and Vernon puts a hand on his knee. Wait Wait. The bobber bounces again and goes fully under and Vernon lets up. Now Now. Audie pulls on the line and sets the hook and brings up a perch, a big one, writhing, frigid as the ice it came from. The boy s.h.i.+vers with cold and delight. Vernon pulls out the hook and Lester takes the fish by the tail and strikes it hard against the stone to stun it or kill it and either way it lies still. Green and yellow and glistening on the gray rock.

"Bait up some more of that cheese," their father says. "While your luck holds out."

Audie fumbles with it but Vernon helps and back into the water goes the hook. Lester's cork floats steady on the little current but Audie's dips again, and soon he has pulled up another fish. Lester curses and kills it and hands his own pole to Vernon and tells him why doesn't he try his luck instead, his brother's so G.o.dd.a.m.ned handy with a fishpole. They do, and while they sit shouldering each other with their eyes on those two corks shouldering each other the same way, he resorts to his flask. Soon enough Vernon's cork dips and he pulls up a fish and Lester kills it with a slap more aggressive than required.

The cheese dwindles and so does the whiskey. Lester closes his eyes and listens to the sighing of the wind and the hard thin pattering of the rain and the whistling of his own breath. Three fish icing on the rock and then a long wait when nothing happens but the slow nibbling away of bait and the slow diminishment of the whiskey in the flask and the slow faint whitening of the frozen world. The boys pull up their hooks empty and rebait them. Audie wonders if the fish have gotten too smart for them but no sooner has he suggested it than two more tug at the bait and the corks bob, one to each boy. Lester opens his eyes and shakes his head to clear it for he could swear he has seen four fish come up. Either the whiskey or the frozen rain stuck to his eyelashes. He swabs at his face with the back of his hand and he helps unhook the fish and he kills them one by one.

Five nice perch. With Creed still suckling, five nice perch will be more than enough for the four of them. But Lester is warm from the whiskey and the fish will easily keep in this weather-they will all but keep in the bedroom, the house is so frigid-so why not continue as long as their luck runs and the cheese holds out. "Let your old man show you how it's done," he says to Audie, holding out his hand for the pole. "You caught your limit."

Audie cries and shrinks away and Lester wrenches the pole from his hands all the same. His hip strikes the flask and it tilts and he recovers it, but rather than take any further risk he raises it to his lips and drains the rest. His lips adhere to the frosty neck and he pulls it free, uncaring. A little blood. Into the pocket with the flask.

Vernon has already baited both hooks and they lower them into the water. Nothing. Nothing for the longest time. Just the pattering of the frozen rain and the sighing of the wind in the treetops. And then, just when a person of ordinary patience or stubbornness would have abandoned hope, Vernon's cork jumps a little and he brings up another fish, this one the largest yet, and his little brother Audie laughs both to see it break the iron surface of the water and to see his father's own cork still floating hopelessly alongside it. Lester reaches around and raps the laughing boy's head again and this time his hat flies off, spiraling downward into the frozen creek bed. Pellets of rain strike his close-cropped hair and melt down into it. Lester reaches over for the fish but Vernon gives him the pole instead. He takes off his own hat and screws it tight onto his brother's head and slides down the icy face of the rock into the narrow pa.s.sage that the creek has cut.

"Let Audie get that," says his father. "He's the one dropped it."

Rather than explain and suffer the consequences, Vernon does not answer. He scrambles over icy rocks to where the hat has come to rest and he kneels on the ice to retrieve it, tugging it free from a clump of brush where it has landed and standing up again to beat it dry against his knee. He puts it on and pulls the earflaps down and ties them underneath his chin, not against the cold but against his father's ongoing injunction that he let that d.a.m.ned hat be, it's Audie's to look after. He sees his father's jaw working and he points to his stoppered ears and he shrugs, scuffing down the edge of the creek bed through the snow toward the place where they climbed up to begin with. Watching his feet. Beneath the high rock, and under the catenary of the one fish line still dangling there. His father's. He looks up, thinking to get himself a fish's eye view of a fish's fate, and he sees two pairs of boot soles and one branch pole and two curious faces looking down. Freezing rain strikes his face and he blinks and sticks his tongue out to catch some. He spins a little to see it come spiraling hypnotically down from above the trees. Then he loses his balance and slides backward on the frozen rain and on the layer of snow beneath it and on the layer of ice beneath that and first one foot goes into the water and then the ice breaks clear beneath the other foot and then in he goes completely.

The creek is shallow but not here. Here in this pool it is well over a man's head and deeply treacherous, even in the summertime, with its sunken log and its walls of tumbled stone jointed by cunning time in ways fit to catch an unwary limb. Vernon goes under and bobs up again, not in the clear s.p.a.ce but beneath the ice, and with one foot against the submerged log and the top of his head against the ice and his eyes closed against the dark water he cannot judge up from down.

His brother screams and begins to shake, his whole world cast into the void.

His father curses and drops the pole and it skitters down the rock face into the creek bed. He calls the boy's name. No answer from the wavering black pool. Whiskey-addled and panicking, he cannot decide which route to take to the cursed creek bed, straight down the rock face or along the icy path behind him.

On the rock Audie shakes like a boy puppet, wooden with cold.

Lester stands and takes off his glove and reaches into his pocket for whiskey by way of fortification but he comes up short and curses himself for the instant thus lost. He hollers at Audie to sit up straight and he turns and races down the path, half-sliding.

Underwater Vernon exhales.

Audie does not sit up straight.

Lester loses his footing and goes down on his a.s.s. His hand ungloved sc.r.a.pes against a rock and his knee through thin coveralls sc.r.a.pes against another and he leaves two patches of blood, red on gray. Freezing rain merges with them and the red bleeds pale into the new white and Lester regains his feet and goes on. Soon enough there will be no sign of his pa.s.sage. He lurches toward a sapling and takes it in his bleeding hand and hangs from it to make the last turn onto the margin of the creek bed.

Vernon opens his eyes and sees light and pushes himself toward it.

From the sapling Lester moves to the edge of the hole in the ice. The branch pole slants across the opening and he takes it. He sees the mirage of his own fish son moving beneath the surface. Kneeling, he pokes the end of the branch into the water.

Audie's cries go on.

"Hush, you," and "Come on, boy," says Lester, alternately to each child.

Vernon breaks the surface. His father tells him to grab on but for all the response he gets he may as well be speaking to an otter or a dead man. His son's eyes are closed and iced over, and apart from certain small movements as may be attributed to the water itself he might be recently dead or near enough that it might not matter. Tears of frustration from Lester. Frustration or frustration combined with something else. He has half a mind to strike the bobbing boy with the branch to rouse him or at least to vent his own fury and no sooner has he drawn back than Vernon opens his mouth gasping. His eyes too.

Lester looks from him to his other son, one leg just visible over the edge of the high rock where he lies in his misery, shaking leaflike and beating against stone.

The boy Vernon looks like some ghastly spirit of the waters, emerging from the black pool blue and white. He lacks the strength to grip the pole so his father edges toward him on his belly and takes his two hands in one of his own, soaking himself in the bargain.

1990.

Preston.

MARGARET WANTED ME OUT of the house one morning since I wouldn't quit storming around and making her life miserable on account of Creed, so she sent me down to the lumberyard, and when I got down there what's everybody talking about but Creed anyhow. It was in the paper but I didn't take the paper anymore. It'd been in the paper two or three times. The of the house one morning since I wouldn't quit storming around and making her life miserable on account of Creed, so she sent me down to the lumberyard, and when I got down there what's everybody talking about but Creed anyhow. It was in the paper but I didn't take the paper anymore. It'd been in the paper two or three times. The Ca.s.sius Courier Ca.s.sius Courier was a daily then even though it's a weekly now. It was a daily then and it was mostly advertising. Advertising and the funnies and the police blotter was about all there was to it. That's why I stopped taking it. was a daily then even though it's a weekly now. It was a daily then and it was mostly advertising. Advertising and the funnies and the police blotter was about all there was to it. That's why I stopped taking it.

Anyhow it'd been in the paper and it'd been on the news out of Syracuse and Utica when I was too busy looking after Creed and Audie to waste my time watching the television. Everybody knew the whole story and n.o.body believed it. n.o.body. By G.o.d, who would. You'd have to be crazy.

That fellow Ben Wilson hadn't been talking to the reporters yet, but there were other people in his office who were. An unnamed source in the district attorney's office speaking on condition of anonymity An unnamed source in the district attorney's office speaking on condition of anonymity is what it said in the is what it said in the Courier Courier. I don't know but what it was Wilson himself, now that I think about it. If one person in the office will do that I guess another one will, and it usually goes all the way to the top. The top man sets the tone.

It'd be just like Wilson. I wouldn't put it past him.

For Christ's sake that's not speaking anonymously. It's just spreading rumors around.

Plus some reporter'd come out to the farm and talked to Audie. This was a fellow from the Syracuse paper. I don't know when he got out there that I didn't see him but he did. Maybe it was that same day the troopers talked Creed into making up that confession. That same day Margaret and I were gone wherever. Anyhow he had a camera with him and he took some pictures, and the old farm didn't look too good when they printed them up in the paper. It looked like a bad place where anything could happen. A place you'd want to get away from. I wouldn't be surprised if folks in the city just browsing through took it for a Western movie set or a Dust Bowl farm from back when n.o.body had anything and you couldn't wait for time to pa.s.s and things to get better just so you could maybe quit starving to death. That's how it looked.

The reporter didn't get much out of Audie. I guess when he came out from Syracuse he didn't have any idea what he might find. I thank heavens he ran into him, though, and not Creed. That'd been trouble right there. That was another reason I knew we had to get those boys a good lawyer just as quick as we could do it. I figured we needed a spokesman of our own. I say we we. You know what I mean.

But anyhow until right then I hadn't thought about the papers. I'd only thought about the law. And now there I sat behind the service desk reading the stories and my blood pressure was going through the roof, thinking how we had ourselves one agreeable idiot and one half-mute on our side and they had people in the district attorney's office whispering to reporters no questions asked.

I don't call that speaking anonymously. I'd go so far as to say it's the first step toward tampering with a jury. I've seen a few lawyer shows myself. I ask you how on earth a person was supposed to get a fair trial if everybody inside of a hundred miles had heard those fellows in Wilson's office whispering about him like that? Off the record is worse than on, as far as that goes. They knew what they were up to.

And don't tell me about a change of venue. You take the Proctor boys off that farm for two weeks either one of them and they'll die dead just from being homesick. You don't have to be a genius to see that. You want to kill either one of them that's the way to go.

Audie.

VERNON WAS THE OLDEST and now he was gone on ahead and I was the next in line. I asked Creed about that and he said I didn't have the cancer Vernon had. He said it was cancer that killed him and not being the oldest. I said I thought maybe it was not holding his water too and Creed said not holding your water won't kill you. That didn't have anything to do with it. I said I didn't care I meant to keep holding mine right up to the end and Creed said that was a good idea. We buried him on the hottest day that summer. and now he was gone on ahead and I was the next in line. I asked Creed about that and he said I didn't have the cancer Vernon had. He said it was cancer that killed him and not being the oldest. I said I thought maybe it was not holding his water too and Creed said not holding your water won't kill you. That didn't have anything to do with it. I said I didn't care I meant to keep holding mine right up to the end and Creed said that was a good idea. We buried him on the hottest day that summer.

Donna.

THIRTY YEARS HAD Pa.s.sED since Tuttle had come out from the church in Carversville to put her mother in the ground, and as the time had gone by he'd been replaced by one young preacher after another. A series of innocents thrust from the seminary into the field, alike in their enthusiasm for the Lord and alike in their good-hearted ignorance of His creatures. since Tuttle had come out from the church in Carversville to put her mother in the ground, and as the time had gone by he'd been replaced by one young preacher after another. A series of innocents thrust from the seminary into the field, alike in their enthusiasm for the Lord and alike in their good-hearted ignorance of His creatures.

This new one was different. A woman of late middle age, perhaps five or six years older than Donna herself. Her name was Monroe. She'd retired early from teaching school and put herself through the seminary in Rochester. She had a husband who'd worked all his life in a shoe store in Rome, and she had three grown children and seven grandchildren, counting one who'd died in his first week on this earth. All in all, she liked to say, she had seen a good bit of life and she desired to do the Lord's work nonetheless. She dressed in black from head to toe and people took her for a nun and as a rule she did not see fit to disabuse them. The black, her public secret, was for the grandchild.

She and Donna sat on the screen porch of the house in Ca.s.sius like sisters. Whenever DeAlton came home he liked to turn on the air-conditioning but Donna had never cared for it, so when the hot weather came she naturally retreated out onto the porch. Just because something cost money didn't mean it was good. He never saw it that way.

Donna and the preacher sat in a pair of new white wicker chairs that creaked. "I believe these two could carry on the conversation without us," the preacher had said as they settled in, and Donna had half-hoped she was right. That by some miracle the conversation could go on without her. It would have made things easier, seeing that the last time she'd had anything to do with a church she'd been in the company of that other fellow, Tuttle, up in the same little family graveyard where they would all be heading tomorrow afternoon. But the preacher skipped right over any kind of holy business and got straight down to it.