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

than I am. If you looked hard enough you’d find fingerprints of dead people. And I don’t mean Vernon either. I mean the old couple, what were their names, Lester and Ruth. The parents.
    The only evidence, if you could call it that, was on the body. I never noticed it myself, but I’m no doctor. The sister didn’t notice it either even though I had her look. At least she didn’t say. The medical examiner did his job, though, and what I took for sunburn turned out in his opinion to be sunburn and something else on top of that or rather underneath it. Burst blood vessels. Petechiae is the word he used. The blood vessels break from pressure, which can indicate asphyxiation. Strangling. You’d see them on the cheeks and on the neck and in the eyeballs, and Vernon had them in all three places. I don’t know. They can burst from coughing too, as I understand it. And maybe a million other things. It’s plain that Vernon wasn’t a well man to begin with. So I don’t know. I think you’d have to have more than that to go on. But the medical examiner saw what he saw and they had to go out there and put up that yellow tape, regardless of what I thought. It was procedure. Plain and simple.

Donna
    V ERNON ONCE DREAMED his own death. He dreamed it one night in the bed with his brothers, and all the next day it would give him no peace. It hung in his mind like the lace curtain in the front window in the summertime, always in motion, never revealing itself entirely, flickering around the edges of his mind. It showed itself over and over, different parts of it in different orders, troubling stark snippets of black menace that would not let go. He saw himself dead in the bed and he saw one of his own brothers arrested and charged. He could not be sure which. It varied. He saw himself alive at bedtime in the comfort of his usual valley and he saw himself not waking up. He never saw himself dying but he saw himself dead. Dead with a brother on either side of him, the younger to one side and the youngest to the other, one of them to blame in the eyes of the law.
    Because he could not shake the dream, he shared it. He sat on the overstuffed chair that was his by right of seniority and he gathered his brothers onto the porch and he told them. One said, “It weren’t me.” So did the other. The first said it was the cancer. Had Vernon known the Judas if a Judas there was, it would have been easier but no more satisfactory.
    “One way or the other I’m going soon,” he said with an air of resignation and boding, and they offered no argument. He sat plucking bits of cotton batting from the chair and rolling it into pellets between his fingers. “Maybe I’ll take a gun and shoot myself. Get it over with. Save you boys the trouble.”
    His youngest brother, Creed, said he would help by hiding the gun if he wanted. He would do whatever was required.
    “Don’t worry about that,” said Vernon. “There won’t be no need to hide it. As long as I go during the daytime, you’ll be all right.”
    It is in the nature of visions to be communicated. Vernon told Preston Hatch, who told Donna because she had a right to know. She told DeAlton and a few people on her shift at the hospital, and before long it was everywhere. Those brothers of hers. Who knew where they got their ideas. Certain individuals decided maybe they got them from one another, and that Vernon was doomed.

    If the yellow tape was meant to prohibit contamination, it was put up years too late. Its only functions now were those of superstition and formality. The two troopers from Cassius who strung it up and the forensics technician from Syracuse who gave them a hand with it began their day with a cold professional air, but when the work was done they would go home to their families glassy-eyed and incredulous. Not one would describe what he had seen.
    The bedsheets were yellow and brown, perhaps more so in the middle where Vernon slept but not by much. They smelled like