Kings of the Earth: A Novel by Jon Clinch

goes through certain things no matter what. In France or on a farm. A French girl can’t teach you anything you can’t learn about in a cow barn. Audie was slow in a lot of things but I don’t guess he was slow in that. The way I hear it, he was the reason they put up the door. The door between their mother’s room. He wouldn’t stay out of there on his own and she couldn’t keep him out and to tell you the truth nobody knew what he might try sometime. He’s never been a very big individual but he was getting his growth. Not that I hold anything against him. It’s the way he was built. But they put up that door on account of him and once it was up Ruth about froze to death all winter. It didn’t even keep her middle boy out unless she put a chair against it from the inside, but it sure kept out the heat.
    I came back from France in October and she was already complaining that with winter on its way she didn’t know what she’d do. She thought she’d freeze to death. I told Vernon that his father’d always promised to knock a hole in the wall that’d let in the heat from the stove, and Vernon said a hole didn’t seem too much for his own mother to ask for. He guessed he could handle it, but I said there was more to it than he might think. I’d help. I was already back working at the lumberyard then. I told my father what Ruth needed and he told me help myself. I got a matched pair of register grates, one for the kitchen wall and one for the bedroom. Not big. Maybe eighteen inches on a side. Those and some screws and some sandpaper and a little patching compound and a can of paint. My father owned plenty of tools so I borrowed everything else we’d need. You couldn’t count on those boys to have anything. If I hadn’t been there they’d probably done it with a sledgehammer.

Ruth
    T HE ARMY HAS MADE Preston thinner than he was before—thinner than he will ever be again—and between that and his newfound discipline and his sharply pressed khakis he brings an austere and military air to the project. Just the way he holds himself inspires confidence in the Proctor boys. They respond to him as if he were their commanding officer. Ruth takes Donna out on the porch and calls to Creed but he won’t come. He is all eyes. Twelve years old and all eyes. As if in the marking of the square and the sawing of the hole and the prying loose of the lath and plaster he is present at the revelation of some mystery unseen by ordinary men. Something very nearly constituting religion.
    They have moved everything from the front room onto the porch. The table, the chairs, the chest of drawers. The rag rug and the washtub and the icebox. Preston tells Audie to hang a bedsheet over the cabinets to keep sawdust and plaster dust and God knows what other kinds of filth from getting into things once they start cutting. He marks the wall with a carpenter’s pencil and a square. He drills into the corner for a place to start the saw. He works carefully and surely. When the piece is out he drills through the four corners of the hole into the opposite side and goes around into the bedroom and marks those corners with the square and the pencil, and the brothers watch the procedure as if he is performing magic or summoning spirits.
    He cuts the second hole and marks where the screws will go. He has brought his father’s electric drill from home and he shows Vernon how to use it to make the pilot holes. When Vernon pulls the trigger it jumps in his hands like something rabid, which draws laughter from everyone but Vernon himself. The first time he touches the bit to the wall it skitters off across the plaster but Preston tells him that’s all right, he’s brought some compound to fill the scrape with and some paint that nearly matches. Later on Audie gives the drill a try and he does no better. They hand it over to Creed for the last couple of holes, and having watched the missteps of his older brothers he takes to it instantly. It must