Kings of the Earth: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

that one was kind of dim and crusted over. It cast a yellow light that wobbled. I’d never seen it lit up before but all the same it’s how I recognized them coming up the road. Who else would it have been? That one headlight was the only bright thing for miles around except the lamppost at the end of my little gravel driveway, the one I’d put on a timer a year or two before. Their farm was dark as always and the roads were dark too. The only light over there most times is the TV, and it was an old set when they got it and it gives off a blue light and they sit there in that light still. I don’t know what all they get out of watching it. They just look at cop shows and lawyer shows like everybody else. I don’t have much use for television, so I was sitting in the front room with a book in my lap when I saw them coming up the road.
    I set down my reading and I went. I put on my jacket and I stood on the porch and I watched that little yellow light come passing back and forth up the dirt lane among the fields. If it’d been high summer and the corn was up I’d never have seen it, but this was in the springtime and there wasn’t anything in the ground yet.
    They rounded the one last curve onto that level stretch past my lamppost and in the light of it I saw Vernon at the wheel as usual, with Creed beside him holding on. They were both looking steady and hard into the night as if they’d been expecting trouble all the way from town and hadn’t seen any of it yet but wouldn’t quit looking out for it just in case. Behind them with his feet hooked on a piece of plow chain was Audie, balanced on the back end of that tractor like some kind of trick rider. He had his eyes shut tight and his arms out to both sides like wings, and he was flying. Flying on that tractor in the dark. All the way up the road from town.

Audie
    I ALWAYS KEPT at it just like I learned from Vernon. It’s close work and I favor that. There’s turning in the doing of it and there’s turning when it’s done. When we cut a tree we save a little out for the straight pieces. Vernon helps me put them up in the hayloft to dry out. Vernon or Creed these days if Vernon can’t. It takes straight pieces for the turning and flat pieces for the other. None of them with knots if I can help it. I find a piece with a knot I burn it. I’ve got no use for knots. An old-timer named Driscoll keeps a sawmill over on the other side of town, down there in a little hollow where the creek runs by, and sometimes we take a nice piece down there and Driscoll saws it up and planes it smooth and then I’ve got my flat pieces. Sometimes I use paint and sometimes I don’t. It depends. Sometimes I don’t have any paint and sometimes I can’t see to use it.

DeAlton
    N OW THIS HAS GOT to be the shortest goddamned par-three in the state. I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed to bring you out here and have you see it, but there it is.
    I know you don’t play much and that’s fine. I understand. It’s still good to get out, though. I never played much myself until a few years back and if I had nothing but this course to play on I don’t believe I’d play at all. You start getting a little good it bores you right to death. Someday we’ll go play Green Lakes. Now there’s a course. It’s a state park but it’s a nice course all the same. Your tax dollars at work. Might as well make use of it.
    Shit. That’s all right. Take another ball and we’ll act like it never happened. I got plenty.
    You know who owns this land? Same old fellow owned it all along. He just leases it to the club. It takes a certain kind of individual to turn good farmland into something as useless as a golf course. I’d say it takes imagination. It takes a different turn of mind from other folks. He does all right with it, though. He does all right. Don’t you worry about him. Me, I’m the same way. I guess that makes me the black sheep of my family but that’s all right.
    No, you’re fine.