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

he play that song my brother likes and he said your brother Audie and I said yes that brother my brother Audie and he played the song. “Turkey in the Straw” I think. It set Audie’s feet moving and calmed him down some. About halfway through I heard her strike a match and that was that. Audie always did love “Turkey in the Straw.”

Margaret
    T HEY WERE JUST BOYS . We were all just children, really, although Preston and I surely didn’t think so at the time. Why should we? A year later we’d be an old married couple. Another year after that, he’d be in France.
    I don’t think the Proctor boys liked my intruding into their world. I was an outsider. A foreigner. A girl , frankly. They weren’t any more comfortable around girls then than they are around women now. So they punished me by putting that horsehair in my cigarette and letting me smoke it. That’s the way I always understood it. Perhaps there was less to it than that. But everything’s open to interpretation, isn’t it?
    Good heavens, it’s a wonder I kept on smoking after that day. It’s definitely a wonder I ever went back to Preston’s parents’ house. If he hadn’t taken my side and run those boys off, I don’t believe I would have. And then where would I be?
    My understanding is that the boys got a good scolding from their mother, but that’s as far as it went. I’ll bet their father had a good laugh over the whole thing. I was sick to my stomach for two days, and I’ll bet he had a good laugh at my expense.

Audie
    W E NEVER BUILT anything much but we sure could tear down. My brother Vernon with the sledgehammer and Creed with the crowbar and me collecting the nails that fell out. They were those old square ones, black iron. You can’t get those old square nails anymore but here they came falling down and bouncing in the plaster dust and there I was collecting them up. That was my job. My brother Vernon gave it to me. The nails left little trails where they bounced. Some of them were still in the uprights or the lath or both and those I had to pull out with the claw hammer. It was broken but I made it work all right. My pockets got full and the one with the hole in it leaked nails down my pant leg and right on out. You can’t get hold of those old square iron nails anymore and I liked the look of them. I could put them to use.

Tom
    H E WAS A FASTIDIOUS BOY , happiest in the round of his own regular habits, and nothing about the Carversville farm interested him. Not the green fields that lay around it and not the hard mechanics of working it. The animals were the worst. The scratching of a hen on the board floor of the front room would drive him into the yard. The low, wet rooting of a hog made his gorge rise. From the chickens to the sheep to the weary old workhorse, every one of the animals seemed to him inscrutable, treacherous. He hated even the harmless dog, Skip, a mottled mongrel of uncertain heritage and vague origin. Boys may like dogs as a rule, but Tom had no time for Skip.
    His father brought him, to demonstrate how far they’d come. To demonstrate it to himself, to the boy, and perhaps to his wife as well. Maybe even to the brothers, although they didn’t seem to care much about anything other than the work that lay in front of them. DeAlton loved bringing Tom with his white tennis shoes and his neat dungarees and his spotless T-shirt out to the place where it all began. The place where his mother had come from.
    “Do you know what grows best on a farm like this?” he asked Tom as the three of them turned off the main drag from Cassius and started up the dirt lane. “Opportunity!”
    Tom sat and looked out the window, panicky and wide-eyed. The Hatch place next door looked ordinary enough, but he didn’t trust it. It looked like a house that had been plucked from a regular street in town by a tornado or something and then dropped down way out here in the fields all queer and disorienting. It made him think of The