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

find out she was glad that her mother had chosen to pass away when the weather was warm.
    Her brothers dug this hole too, right alongside the other and sharing the headstone. Careful not to interfere with what was already there, hidden in the earth and not risen up after this score of years but still worthy of veneration. Preston came up and helped them map the hole with a snap line and a carpenter’s square. He drove pegs into the ground and he strung the line and they worked within the perimeter of it, heading straight down. Audie didn’t dig but sat vigil at some remove on an upturned bucket, keeping an eye on the hole. He had the look about him of a man considering not just what had to go down into it but what might come up.
    The preacher who served the church in Carversville had another charge in Lenox and one more in Peterboro, and he was a hard man to pin down. During the week he was nowhere and on Sunday he was everywhere. For a while Donna wasn’t sure that she could even get him. The undertaker from Cassius swore that he could find somebody else in a pinch but she didn’t want a stranger. The preacher from Carversville was stranger enough. She thought his name was Tuttle.
    Her mother’s body went to the funeral home and stayed there overnight and came back again like something on loan, twelve miles altogether in the most luxurious conveyance she had ever ridden. Inside a box the whole distance. DeAlton paid for it. Someone from the state came out to assess the burial ground, a barrel of a man who paced off the yardage between Preston Hatch’s wellhead and the hole and declared the operation unacceptable on account of something having to do with groundwater. Preston scoffed. He said he’d been drinking the remains of the deceased’s husband, Lester, for twenty-one years and he wasn’t the worse for it yet. Worse things died all the time up there in the woods and nobody cared. The state man had a face like a boiled egg and it ran with sweat in the sun and he didn’t feel like arguing either chemistry or philosophy with someone he took for a bumpkin. Regulations were regulations, and the new hole was fifty feet short of squaring with them. Preston asked what the fine would be. The man from the state told him, and Preston said he’d pay it himself. He volunteered to pay it himself right then and there if that was what it took and the man from the state looked tempted and he fidgeted some and put the forms back into his pocket but when all was said and done he didn’t take him up on it. He just got back in the car and drove off. Preston went inside and drew himself a glass of water.

    Tuttle drove up while Audie was prying the old hasp away from the track door on the side of the barn. Vernon had given him a hammer and a crowbar, and although the hammer had but one claw and the crowbar was too big the outcome was certain nonetheless. Audie would not have quit without Vernon’s authority. He would not have quit even if he had understood the full import of his work: that his brothers meant to use the hasp to seal their mother’s room against him. The nails that held it to the barn were old cut iron and they were driven into a solid oak upright and they screamed as they yielded inch by inch. They screamed and gave up their straightness, and Audie cursed them in his own way. If Tuttle minded or even understood he made no mention of it. He had certainly heard worse, for there is something about the nearness of death that shows men plain and unadorned. An individual may conceal himself before God but not before that. The preacher wore a straw fedora against the sun and he tipped it to Audie and he went on past. He knocked at the door but no answer came. He put his nose against the screen. It smelled of rust and he called through it into the dark but his voice in that small space was no larger than his knocking and it produced the same result. He wiped the reddened and checkered tip of his nose on the back of his