Kings of the Earth
A farming family tragedy about brothers – and a brother's keeper
Reviewed by Richard Whittaker, Fri., Aug. 6, 2010
Kings of the Earth
by Jon ClinchRandom House, 416 pp., $26
In every farming community, there's always one family that everyone knows isn't quite right. In Carversville, deep in rural New York, that's the three Proctor boys. It's not that they're dangerous or even boys anymore: Call them hillbillies or rednecks or bumpkins, the three gray-bearded old men just never had time for anything beyond their farm gate. When Vernon dies in his sleep, the eye of suspicion falls on his younger brothers, simple-minded Audie and silent Creed. So when the cops and prosecutors come calling, modern investigative techniques are confronted with men whose whole world ranges from meadow to milking parlor. What's revealed is less a whodunit and more a biography of an often undocumented way of life.
Inspired by the true story of the Ward brothers (documented in the 1992 film Brother's Keeper), Clinch's book tries to tear the Proctor farm down to the roots. Where the filmmakers explored urban misconceptions about rural life, Clinch sees the Proctors' world as one that has been left behind by progress. His Rashomon-inspired narrative flits from narrator to narrator, jumping back and forth from the quiet days in the 1930s, before Creed was even born, to 1990 and the days after, as Audie puts it, Vernon "went ahead." There's no pastoral romanticism here: The Proctors are the kind of men for whom cleanliness is a luxury, doctors are of less use than a vinegar poultice, and if sharing one bed was good enough for them when they were boys, it's good enough for them 60 years later.
Clinch captures the dung-stained reality of dairy-farm life and the constant grind of its rhythm, but it's his mastery of voices that makes this tale so compelling. From the boys' taciturn neighbor Preston to their garrulous and scheming brother-in-law DeAlton and Donna, the sister that got away, everyone has something to say about what happened to Vernon. Yet, for the Proctors, this is just one more day in a life where death and accidents are part of the daily grind. For Clinch, the old saying is true: You never own a farm, because the farm owns you.
