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

table or blow away a rime of dust that has gathered there along its edges but that is the extent of it. The extent of anyone’s intervention or upholding on her behalf. He means well and she thanks him. When he is done he vanishes through the door that he and his brother Vernon hung in the cut hole so many years ago, when their father went on before them and a barrier between their bedroom and that of their mother was required. It was as if they had been waiting all that time.
    In those days Donna slept in the first of the front rooms. The kitchen and the living room and whatever else was required of it. Her bedroom too, then, for seventeen years. In the winter she slept alongside the black and red stove and in the summer she slept beneath the blowing lace curtain. She grew up and she graduated from high school and she moved out to start college. She married DeAlton Poole and he paid for her to study nursing in Syracuse, for all the good it has done her forebears.
    These days she comes back to the house with her belly protruding, the child growing in her and the sickness growing in her mother. One to enter the world and one to leave it.
    She comes in her car and she takes her mother to the hospital in Cassius. The old woman doesn’t see any point in going but since it’s Donna she goes. They sit together on a hard bench in the laboratory. Everyone in the hospital knows Donna and by now everyone knows her fading mother too. Ruth parts with three tinkling vials of blood, watching it drain from her arm and imagining that living within it are certain invisible creatures that she is better off getting shut of. If only she could rid herself of it entirely. One more part of her gone, although minus the sickness there might be nothing left. She asks her daughter the nursing school graduate why she cannot draw the blood at home and just bring the vials of it to the hospital herself without troubling an invalid to make the trip. That way she wouldn’t even have to get out of bed. But Donna reminds her that after they have visited the drugstore they will stop for lunch at McDonald’s or the Madison Street Dineraunt, her choice, and this takes a little of the sting out.
    The nurse pulls the needle and covers the red spot with a cotton ball and asks Ruth to keep it there please, which the old woman does with a look of vast seriousness and intensity, holding her thin forearm as if it is the most precious thing on earth. Cradling herself to herself there on a hard plastic bench the color of poison. The puckered vein when the nurse returns to cover it over is a pale road map drawn on parchment, the road itself lost and gone, the map of no use to anyone. Not even as a memento.

DeAlton
    W HEN YOUR FATHER DIED without a will it was ignorance, but if your mother goes the same way it’s nothing but stupidity and pigheadedness. I know they’re simple people, she’s a simple person, and I don’t mean any offense by that. But the law isn’t particularly kind to simple people. It doesn’t make any exceptions for them.
    Hand me that ketchup.
    Intestate is the word for it. It means without a testament.
    Latin? Is that right? Latin? Well I’ll be. You did get all the brains in the family. I don’t mean any offense by that either.
    Anyhow I talked with Vince over lunch at the Rotary. He’ll do it for nothing. Professional courtesy. The truth is he does a little corporate work for Dobson and he’ll probably just bury it, but he’d never say so. That’s the kind of thing that if you keep it to yourself it’s a favor and if you say it out loud it becomes an ethics violation. Nobody wants that.
    It’s not going to come as any surprise to her. She’s been getting ready to die as long as I can remember. You’re not going to hurt her feelings.

Vernon
    S HE OUTSMARTED THEM city lawyers. DeAlton come out here with that Italian feller and this pretty little gal the Italian feller had with him carrying the papers. She was a little bitty thing.