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

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.

Del
    T HEY WRAPPED THAT MATTRESS up in plastic and left it in the hall outside the lab, but you still couldn’t stand to go anywhere near it. People complained. I’m told that the guard outside the morgue, which is down the hallway a little bit and around the corner, just plain refused to sit at his desk as long as it was out there. He propped open the door and dragged that old metal desk right into the morgue proper and shut the door behind him. He snaked the phone line in and did his business there. He said he was more comfortable associating with the newly deceased than with that mattress, and I don’t blame him.
    I’d guess he got an eyeful when the medical examiner worked on Vernon, but I couldn’t say with any certainty. I’ve seen the preliminary report but I didn’t notice any mention of a witness.
    The technicians finally caved in and took samples and bagged them up and hauled the mattress back outside. Somebody got the duty of returning it to the farm. I can’t say who. The crime scene is still sealed, so they probably just stuck it in the barn. Crime scene. I still don’t know about that. I’ve read the report but I still don’t know. I don’t know that you ever do.

Audie
    W HEN IT’S HOT that old red rooster starts itching. He woke me up in the night and rolled me right on over. I saw we were in the barn by the light through the walls and I didn’t mind too much. It was different. Creed wouldn’t let us sleep in the house on account of the tape. He said the tape was supposed to keep us out but I said it couldn’t keep me out and I showed him but he pulled me back so I guess it worked. When we came down from the pasture at milking time we found the mattress leaning on a fence post over by Preston’s. There was a cat sniffing around it because she’d never seen a mattress out there against the fence post before and neither had I. I thought maybe the other things they took might end up out there just like it. The ashtray they took and the blanket and the glass and Vernon’s coat and so forth. Just lying around in the grass for us to find. I didn’t tell Creed. We put the mattress in the barn and slept on it there and when the sun came up I looked over by Preston’s but there wasn’t anything else. That trooper came to visit later and he was loaded up with questions but I didn’t have any time for him as long as he wouldn’t let me sleep in my own house.

Preston
    T HIS HAPPENED WHEN Lester was still alive. He didn’t go the same way his wife Ruth did, or like Vernon did either for that matter. Cancer couldn’t get him. He was too hard. Then again maybe it could’ve and he just didn’t live long enough, but either way he worked like a mule right up to the end. It took an awful lot to kill him.
    This was when he was still around, though. I was a senior in high school and those three boys looked awful young to me, but God bless them they did men’s work. Vernon particularly, although I don’t know why I say that. I guess because whenever Lester didn’t have him running, his brothers did. He always had Creed to