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

Looked like that Connie Chung on television. They come out here the three of them and they went on in her room like they owned the place, which I guess they were trying to. But she wouldn’t sign. She wouldn’t sign. She laid there in the bed and she asked that Italian feller how about if she just turned the place over to the four of us before she went. There weren’t no chance we’d throw her out. That Italian feller scratched his head and said he had to allow she had a point, and the little gal with the papers looked like she wanted to laugh but couldn’t. DeAlton pushed them all back out to the car and they left.

Audie
    M Y MOTHER WENT on ahead. After they took her out I went in and arranged her things. I made up the bed. She always kept her clothes in the chest of drawers and I left them right where they lay. Creed came in and said it was about time we had the use of that furniture but I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him have the use of it. I was in her room and he came in with some things he wanted to put in that chest of drawers. He had some old hats and his winter coat and mine too and Vernon’s, but I told him they could just keep on hanging in the barn the way they always did. There wasn’t any reason to use up her chest of drawers that way. I asked him where we would put her things if we took them out and he said we ought to give them to the poor.

Preston
    Y OU HAD TO GO through Ruth’s bedroom to get to the jakes. It’d been that way from a long time back, when Lester and Ruth lived there just the two of them. It was all right in those days, I guess. Before the boys came and Donna. Anyhow the jakes was in between the house and the barn and you had to go through Ruth’s bedroom to get to it. I would imagine there was a parade all night long with those four children.
    When Ruth passed on and they closed up her bedroom, I think they were surprised at not having the use of it anymore. The jakes, I mean. I don’t think they saw that coming. They were pretty well occupied about her and I don’t blame them. This was in the summertime. I believe they used the woods for a while, somewhere up by the still. They used the woods as long as the weather held but the seasons change whether you like it or not and they couldn’t keep on that way forever. I’d see the three of them coming and going up that hill and down again one by one and I’d feel sorry for them, but I wasn’t about to offer up the use of our facilities either. I could blame that on Margaret but I won’t, since I felt the same way she did. It was a failing and I know it but there are limits to everything, even kindness.
    What brought it on was that pretty soon Audie wouldn’t come out of her bedroom for anything. That’s why they had to close it up. She had an old caned chair by the bed and he sat in it and he wouldn’t even come out to work on his whirligigs. A person who knew him would have figured that that work and those whirligigs were the things he loved most in all this world—those and his brother Vernon—but in the end that distinction went to his mother.

Donna
    S HE WAS GLAD that her mother had passed away in the summertime, if you could say such a thing. The ground would be soft. Nobody ever got buried in the winter. She had been three years old the winter her father died, and although she believed that she remembered his funeral she knew that such memories may have been hearsay. Her mother’s words made flesh. On the other hand she was certain that she did recall his burial, which took place one bright spring afternoon on a little plot of ground that bordered Hatch’s woods. Her brothers dug the hole. The world was green, and stepping into the woods was stepping into a bottle. To put her father into that fertile ground was to be assured that he would rise up again. At some point in her youth she realized that she did not know where his body had been kept during the months following the funeral, and rather than have to