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

her market value. For milk or meat or reproduction. There is an animal quality to the looks he gives her, and as she endures them she wonders if this kind of thing might underlie every single impulse in the civilized world. Even the innocent glances that she receives from boys in the town. She wonders why she keeps coming out here, and then she lights a Chesterfield and looks over at sweet, homely Preston and catches the near-swoon in his eyes and wonders no more.
    The truth is that the boys don’t know much about women. They have their mother and their little sister, Donna, and the teachers at school, but beyond these their world is a kind of male fortress. To them Margaret looks like royalty, as inaccessible as she is incomprehensible. Like their mother and their father she smokes cigarettes, but she smokes pristine store-bought Chesterfields instead of rolling her own and that only adds to her mystery. Vernon slips one of them from her pack one afternoon when she has gone inside to use the facilities. He slips it from the pack where it lies open on the railing and he slides it into the breast pocket of his overalls just as nice as you please. Nobody sees, not even his brothers. Later he goes up into the woods and smokes it down to the filter but he does not think much of it. He does not think much of the kind his parents smoke either, but at least they’ve never made him feel that he is having to draw the smoke through a stopper. In the end he concludes that the best thing about Margaret is the power of her lungs.
    The Three Chevaliers bring little Donna with them one afternoon. Whether they think she might enjoy the music or just mean her as a distraction is long past knowing. She is two years old and mobile. She is as filthy as her brothers, but for reasons of her own. As they leave the barnyard, Vernon tries wrangling her into his arms but she kicks loose and will submit only to holding Audie’s hand as they cross the little dirt lane. She follows the sound of the banjo music like a scenting hound and climbs onto the porch and makes a try for Margaret’s lap, but Margaret rebuffs her.

Vernon
    W E ALL DONE IT TOGETHER . I took the cigarette and Audie pulled a hair from the horse’s tail and I sent Creed into the house for a darning needle. I seen a cigarette explode in the funny papers once but I don’t know where you’d get a thing like that. Something would blow up a cigarette. That weren’t the idea anyhow. I seen Margaret didn’t like our smell and she didn’t like our sister either so I thought maybe she ought to smell something worse. We took that cigarette and strung the needle with horsehair and run it right down through the middle of it like running it down a pipe. We run it through and back three or four times I think. I trimmed the loose ends of it with my knife. Audie was pretty good with the knife but I didn’t want to take no chances that he’d cut himself or cut that cigarette or crush it down or bleed on it or something like that. Ruin it some way. Then where would we be. We’d have to start over.

Audie
    V ERNON HAD BROWN FINGERS against the white. He said he had to be careful how he handled that cigarette but he had brown fingers against the white of it and some of the dirt rubbed off and I thought we were done for but it didn’t turn out that way. She was watching Preston and listening to that banjo music of his and she didn’t notice. She just took it and lit it right up. She didn’t look.

Vernon
    I SLID THE CIGARETTE back in the pack just the same way I took it out. We stood against the porch and waited. I did anyway. I waited. Me and Creed. Audie turned to see what Margaret was up to but I give him a slap and he come back around. Then he seen the way I was just standing there against the porch like always and he copied me at it. He stood there with his back against the porch waiting. He was shaking some because he couldn’t tell what was going to happen next. I asked Preston would