Read Online Kings of the Earth: A Novel by Jon Clinch - Free Book Online

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