Free Kings of the Earth: A Novel by Jon Clinch

keeps two or three of them right out on the counter and you can’t tell what they are but they’ve got pretty good prices on them. Margaret dragged me over there and the gal running it had a sign up saying they were antiques, and I had to set her straight. I reminded her how honesty is the best policy. What she calls them these days is folk art.
    Every now and then somebody’ll come out here and watch those whirligigs spinning away in the yard like they’re visiting some kind of an open-air museum. Sometimes they’ll give Audie a little money if he’ll part with one. They don’t give him much, but he doesn’t need much. He won’t part with that dog one I don’t guess, but he’d part with most of the others if you asked nice enough. I’ve seen cars here with plates from New Jersey, Ohio. I don’t know where people find out about it but they do. The whole yardful of those things just creaking away, and it all started with that knife cut on the palm of his hand on the milk can lid. You could say it’s just one more thing he owes his brother Vernon. That’s how he’d put it, I think. Just one more thing he owes his dead brother.

Ruth
    P RESTON H ATCH COMES HOME with a girl. She isn’t a pretty girl, but Preston isn’t a handsome boy either. She is from a good family in town and she radiates the certainty that she is something special and that Preston is privileged to be courting her. She carries herself in a fastidious way and she holds her head erect and her nose elevated and she keeps her face composed into a supercilious mask, even during moments of repose, as if to offset the failed dull frustration of her ordinariness. Her name is Margaret Willbanks, and she is taller than Preston by a head, and by and by she will marry him.
    Her visits begin in the springtime. The days are not yet long but they are getting longer and the world is greening. She and Preston sit on the porch and he admires her and she ignores him utterly and smokes Chesterfield cigarettes, one after another, to ward off the warm pasture stink already rising on every hand. Preston has a little tenor banjo that he plays for her amusement, and the looks that pass across her face suggest that she does not know whether to be amused by it or appalled. Preston keeps his eyes on the fret board and does not notice either way. He plays pretty well, but he will give it up and lose the knack once they get engaged. “After she’d taken the bait,” he will say, “I was able to quit fishing.” And Margaret will roll her eyes.
    His banjo music draws the boys from the farm next door and Margaret’s presence draws them too. Vernon nearing the edge of manhood and Audie right behind him as usual, in both chronology and position. After they finish their chores they leave the barnyard and cross the narrow dirt lane to the Hatch property and stroll up the gravel driveway as nonchalant as a pair of boulevardiers. Six-year-old Creed overtakes them sometimes, his feet clapping up a flurry of dust. He knows where they are headed even if they like to pretend that they do not. Then the three of them slouch against the side of the elevated porch with their backs to Preston and Margaret and their hats tilted down over their eyes, sucking on stems of new grass, listening as the mysteries of music and romance unfold all at once.
    “The Three Chevaliers,” Preston calls them under his breath, having taken Margaret to see that debonair Frenchman in The Beloved Vagabond and desiring to continue harvesting the benefits.
    The Three Chevaliers are always caked with cow manure and they smell worse up close than the fields do at a distance, so Margaret scowls in their direction no matter what Preston calls them. Sometimes she catches Vernon shooting her sly looks from beneath his cap, which gives her the willies. He does not seem to be modestly appraising her as a boy from the town would, but evaluating her in a kind of raw and strictly material way instead. As if assessing