The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  At Gay or Market he would pull to the curb and yell: One stop! and watch them erupt from the car like circus clowns—five, six, as many as eight of them, all bound for the show, farmboys with no more farm than some wizened tomato plants and a brace of ravenous hogs. In the rearview mirror he could see them watching the car scoot away, hovering and bobbing on the sidewalk like a flock of curious birds.

  Sundays the Knoxville beer taverns were closed, their glass fronts dimmed and muted in sabbatical quietude, and Sylder turned to the mountain to join what crowds marshaled there beyond the dominion of laws either civil or spiritual.

  Jack the Runner’s mouth was blue, his tongue blue-black as a chow’s. At the table by the door of the Green Fly Inn he sipped blackberry wine from a liniment bottle.

  Where’d you leave em? Sylder was asking.

  Ahh, Jack gurgled. Over on mountain.

  You’re on the mountain now, Sylder said.

  Over, Jack emphasized. Hen’son Valley Road.

  Henderson Valley Road? Whereabouts?

  Top o mountain, like I tol ye …

  You reckon he’s tellin us right? June asked.

  Sylder looked from him to the runner again. Jack studied a huge and evil-looking cigar he had found in his shirtpocket and fell to turning it against his tongue with drunken singlemindedness. Yeah, Sylder said. Most likely he is.

  Right feisty, Jack was saying, holding now the cigar at arm’s length. A loop of spittle woggled mucously from its underside. Right feisty.

  Caught in the yellow glare of the headlights they had the temporarily immobilized look of wildlife, deer perhaps, frozen in attitudes of surprise predicating imminent flight. Sylder drove past and up the mountain.

  Ain’t you goin to stop? June asked.

  Comin back, Sylder said. Behind em, like I was goin their way. I never figured they’d be headed wrong. Way they’re goin, through Sevierville, it’s near thirty mile.

  Between them in the crevice of the seat nestled a mason jar of whiskey. Sylder heard the skirling tin sound of the lid being unscrewed and he reached out his hand for June to pass the jar. Moths loomed whitely before the windshield, incandesced, dusted the glass with mica. A ballet of gnats rioted in the path of the headlights. He drank and handed the jar back. Under the black hood the motor hummed its throaty combustions.

  Sylder thought about old man Tipton saying it wasn’t sensible as any fool could see that with the pistons going on an angle like that—lop-ass-sided, he’d said—they were bound to wear through on one side. Pistons were supposed to go up and down. Street’s are full of em, he said, if it’s any comfort to know you wadn’t the only one took.

  They turned at the quarry and came back down the mountain coasting silently, the tires making a soft slapping sound at the cracks in the asphalt. When the lights picked them up they began to group and sidle to the ditch as cows will. Sylder brought the coupe to a stop slowly alongside of them.

  Howdy, said June right into the ear of the girl on the outside. You-all need a ride?

  The other one was standing next to her then. They looked at each other and the first one said, Thank ye, I reckon we can make it all right. The boy hung back behind them. Across June’s shoulder Sylder could see him looking not at them or at the women either, but at the car.

  How fer ye goin? June wanted to know.

  The two exchanged glances again. This time the taller one spoke up. We jest goin down the road a piece, she explained.

  Tell her let’s all go down the road for a piece, Sylder suggested.

  What? the short one said. Then the boy piped up and they both turned to glare at him.

  How fer is it to Knoxville? That was his question.

  Knoxville? June couldn’t believe it. You say Knoxville? Why you-all cain’t walk to Knoxville. It’s twenty mile or better—ain’t it, Marion?

  A groan went up from the travelers. Sylder was already motioning him out the door.

  Here, June said, climbing out. You’ns get in here. We goin to Knoxville, proud to hep ye out.

  Sylder presented them each with a welcoming smile as they climbed in and studied each in turn his face under the domelight.

  He dropped into the Hopper—the steep twin fork road—without braking. The little one between him and Tipton squealed once and then hushed with her hand clapped over her mouth as they swerved across the pike and shot out into blackness, the lights slapping across the upper reaches of trees standing sharply up the side of the hollow. The coupe dropped, squatted for a moment in the gravel of the lower road, sprang again and slithered away obliquely with the exhaust bellowing from the cutout and gravel popping and rattling in the woods like grapeshot.

  The one in the back was making small sobbing noises. No one spoke for a few minutes and then the little one said, Where’s this go?

  Goes to the gettin pla …

  Town, June broke in. Goes to town. Shorter this way. He thought she seemed to have edged closer to Sylder although she turned and was talking to him. He saw Sylder’s hand greenly phosphorescent under the dashlights pulling out the choke.

  They reached the first bridge before it began to sputter enough for her to notice. Above here the road began to climb again and Sylder let it buck a time or two before he shifted to second. She didn’t move her leg. He was watching her out of the corner of his eye, her sitting forward on the seat and peering out intensely at the unfamiliar night. A moth whipped beneath the windscreen, brushed her cheek. He cranked the glass in a turn. When the car bucked again she flinched and asked what was wrong.

  He started to tell her the generator was out of water but thought about the boy in the back seat. No word from him at all. The tall one in the back had leaned forward, breathing in Tipton’s collar and fixing the windshield with a look grim and harassed as if contemplating one desperate leap at the black passing night country.

  Vapor lockin, he said finally. Overheats on these hills and you have to stop and let her cool off.

  She looked at him and then looked away again, not saying anything. A phantom rabbit froze in the headlights, rolled one white eye, was gone. June was talking to her in a low voice, her still looking straight ahead, saying nothing. The one in the rear had sat back. No sound from her. In the mirror Sylder could see half a head dark and bushy in silhouette as a bear’s. He recognized the smell then. A tepid odor of urine, musty-sweet, circulated on the air now as they slowed.

  They jerked around the last curve below the pine thicket and shuddered to a stop in front of the Olive Branch Negro Baptist Church. Sylder switched off the ignition. I guess that’s all she wrote, he said.

  He opened the door and started to get out when he felt her hand on his leg. He stopped and turned.

  Not him, she said. Not the other one.

  No, he said. O.K. Come on.

  He switched off the lights and then they were gone, negated in the sudden darkness. Marion, June whispered hoarsely. Hey, Marion?

  From his porch Arthur Ownby had watched them pass and now he heard the slam of the car door up the road where they had stopped. It had begun to rain. A yellow haze in the woods flicked out. He could hear low voices, near-sounding on the warm night air. With one foot he tapped out the time of some old ballad against the corner post of the porch. From under the brim of the roof he studied the movements of stars. A night for meteors tonight. They cannonaded the towering hump of Red Mountain. Rain falling now from a faultless sky. A girl’s laugh on the road. He remembered her sitting high on the wagon seat Sunday morning that the mule broke wind in his ear while he unhooked the singletree and he stove two fingers in on a rib and it never even flinched. Late hours for an old man. Arthur Ownby had watched from his porch. He dozed.

  When the boy came past on the road he looked up at the house on the sidehill, dark and abandoned-looking. He could not see the old man and the old man was asleep.

  It was near daylight when they started back from Knoxville, a pale cold graying to the east.

  Where’d you take he
r? Sylder asked.

  June reached for the cigarettes riding in the visor. Goddamn she’s ugly, he said. You know what she told me?

  What’s that, said Sylder, grinning. That I was the nicest boy ever needled her. Needled, for God’s sake. Where at? Huh?

  Where’d you take her. You come down from the church but I never heard you come up. Where’d you go?

  Ah. Up in the backhouse.

  Backhouse?

  Shithouse then.

  Sylder was looking at him in amazed incredulity, acceptance and belief momentarily suspended, unable to picture it yet. He had one more question:

  Standing up?

  Naw, well … she sort of sat down and leant back and I … she … But that was beyond his powers of description, let alone Sylder’s imagination.

  You mean to say you—Sylder paused for a moment trying to get the facts in summary—you screwed her in a nigger shithouse sittin on the …

  Well Goddamnit at least I never took her in no Goddamn church, June broke in.

  The coupe wobbled to a halt at the side of the road and Sylder collapsed against the door epileptic with laughter. After a while he stopped and said:

  Was she the one that …

  Yes, Goddamn you, she was the one.

  Whooeee! Sylder screamed and rolled out the door where he lay in the wet morning grass shaking soundlessly.

  The place was dimly lit and barnlike. A polished dance floor in which at the far end fell the reflection of the jukebox lights and those of the bar. Behind the bar a long mirror in which he was surprised to see himself, silhouetted in the doorframe, poised nimbly atop a stack of glasses. He came down and crossed the floor, limping slightly, and clambered up on the corner stool.

  The bartender was sitting in a captain’s chair reading a magazine. He folded it carefully and shuffled down to where the man was sitting.

  Beer, Rattner said. His tongue swept his lower lip in anticipation. The bartender went to the barrel and drew off a schooner, flicked away the foam with a stick and brought it to him. He reached and tilted one side of the glass up and lowered his face into it; his lips sought the glassrim and fastened on it white and fat as leeches while under the yellowgray skin his throatcords jerked spastically, pumping the beer down. He drank it all, lifting the glass finally to drain it, and slid it back toward the bartender, who had been watching with both fascination and disgust, as one might watch pigs mate.

  Say now, that sure was all right. Yessir, jest believe I’ll have me anothern.

  Ten cents, said the bartender.

  He struggled with his pocket and came up with a dime. You betcher, he said. The bartender took the glass, gingerly, and refilled it.

  Rattner had been gone for a year this time. He had moved from Maryville to Red Branch, taken up quarters in an abandoned log house with his wife and son, and left there four days later with twenty-six dollars in his pocket, alone and southbound in an empty L&N reefer. An incident at the Green Fly Inn had been his windfall:

  The rear door through which Cabe swept the night’s litter had once given onto a porch that ran the width of the building, supported by joists that were extensions of the floor timbers and braced frugally with two-by-fours angled up beneath them. On summer evenings the drinkers gathered here, bringing with them their chairs or cases or perching riskily upon the narrow railing like roosting birds. Weather and termites conspired against this haven and brought it to ruin. This was in 1933 then, a hot summer night, that Ef Hobie came to the Green Fly Inn. A prodigal return (Petros—Brushy Mountain—eighteen months, illegal possession of liquor) that attracted a great number of well-wishers. One by one they retired through the rear door to take up their stations on the porch. Hobie was a favorite and carried on a running monologue of anecdotes. He was telling how his old lady had loaned the family soupbone to Mrs Fenner, who had cooked peas with it and ruined it, when a sharp dry crack issued from somewhere in the floor. It was a calm windless night, laden with heat, and the sound had an ominous quality about it. The talk paused a moment, resumed.

  He came through the door and onto the porch, circumspectly, nodding across them all with diffidence, as if someone he knew might be there, beyond the railing itself and suspended mysteriously in the darkness, leaned against the doorframe and lifted the bottle to his mouth, his eyes shifting among them or when they looked closing or seeking again that being in the outer dark with whom only he held communion, smiling a little to himself, the onlooker, the stranger. The talk eddied and waned, but he offered neither comment nor question and after a while they ignored him. He came from the doorway and took a seat on the rail at the near end of the porch.

  There was a long creaking sound like a nail being pulled and again the sharp detonation of strained wood giving way. There followed a dead and immobile silence during which the faces searched from one to the other uncertainly. A few began to rise and mill about, still not saying anything. Already they had begun to eye the narrow door, the one point of egress, weighing in their minds not so much numbers as tonnage and freight of men, calculating speed and congestion with the concern of traffic experts.

  With the third report a section of flooring listed visibly.

  Fellers, Ef started, rising himself, I think this here … But that was all, or as much as anyone heard at least. There ensued a single rush as of so many marionettes on one string being drawn in violent acceleration toward the door while above the noise of their retreat the joists popped like riflefire, snapping off in rackety succession, and the floor drooped in long and gathering undulations in their wake.

  They hit the opening in one concerted mass and wedged there tight as a peg at the same instant that the far end of the porch came away, swung out from the building in a long swooping and not ungraceful arc.

  Now from the knot of men clawing at the door single figures began to be sucked away in attitudes of mute supplication one by one down the dangling incline of the porch, gaining momentum among leaping cans and bottles, and dropping at last with wild cries into the pit below. A few caught at the rails and dangled there with stricken looks eying their fellows rocketing past into the night.

  From within the building Cabe and a few others were trying desperately to untangle the mass that writhed in the doorway, resorting finally to taking hold of what limb presented itself and pulling until something gave. Thus the survivors came aboard bereft of one shoe, or both, or pants, or as with Hobie himself naked save for one half of a shirt. Until the frame of the door exploded inward carrying a good section of wall and they entered in a roil of bodies and crashing wood.

  The porch had swung out and downward and now tottered for a moment on the strength of a single two-by-six before it too snapped and the whole affair slewed away with a great splintering sound. The figures clutching at the rails began to turn loose their holds, coming away by ones and twos like beetles shaken from a limb, and the entire wreckage descended in a slow tableau of ruin to pitch thunderously into the hollow.

  The atmosphere inside seethed with an inchoate violence. Scared men, torn, unclothed and crushed, breathing loudly and sweating the sweat of subsiding panic, mounting outrage and indignity. One by one the fallen were entering through the front door red with blood and clay and looking like the vanquished in some desperate encounter waged with sabers and without quarter. As they gathered strength from below two factions became apparent and they fell upon each other murderously and fought far into the night.

  Kenneth Rattner nursed a slashed hand as he squatted in a blackberry thicket below the inn and listened with quiet bemusement to the thrashings and curses of the victims. Someone had brought a light; he could see the flicker and sweep of it through the bramble wall. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and tied it around his hand, pulling the knot to with his teeth. Then he worked his way carefully up to the road and started for home. Small groups of men were running up the mountain to the scene of disaster bearing lanterns and whispering hoarsely.

  I got a job, he told her.

>   Praise God, she said. Whereabouts?

  Greenville South Carolina, showing her the money now. Trainfare, he said. But he gave her five of the thirty-one dollars and they went to the store. He bought the boy an orange drink, lifted him onto the box where he sat holding it in both hands, watching. Mrs Eller was telling about it.

  That Coy Tipton showed up here this mornin looked like he’d fell in a combine. Said they’s three or four of em what lost their britches—I’d like to know how they done that my own sef—and when they clumb down in the holler to get em somebody had beat em there and stole their pocketbooks. She sat atilt in her rocker, fanned slowly with a church tract. Thiefs and drunks runs together I expect, she said. Ain’t none of em but got what they’s lookin for.

  Mildred Rattner pinched from loaf to loaf across the bread rack. When them as wallers in sin thinks they’s gettin by with it, she said, that’s when He strikes em in His holy wrath. He jest bides His time.

  Kenneth Rattner stroked his stiffening leg, flexed his ankle. It was past midnight and people were coming in now. The bartender had abandoned his magazine and was moving nervously up and down the counter and filling glasses for the newcomers.

  He drained the last of the beer and set the glass upon the bar. Hey, buddy, he called. Give us anothern over here. Hey, old buddy.

  Saturday afternoons Marion Sylder would come in the store fresh-looking in starched khakis or overall breeches and go to the glass case and point out the socks to Mr Eller. Mr Eller would put the box on top of the counter and Sylder would hold up a pair and say: How much are these?

  Quarter, Mr Eller would say. No change in price, still a quarter. All a quarter, ain’t got no other kind.

  Sylder would spin a quarter on the glass, take his socks and sit down on a milkcase in front of the stove. He would do them one at a time, taking off one shoe and sock and waving his bare foot about while he reached for the stove door, opened it, and swung in the old sock, holding it delicately. Then he would put on his fresh sock, lace up his shoe, and proceed to the other foot, the one with the big toe nailless and truncate. He was working in the fertilizer plant now. Noontimes he ate in the café the regular lunches, the thirty-cent specials with the lightbread that clove gluily to the palate, three slices with a thumbprint in the center served on a piece of waxed paper. Beans and fatmeat oozing grease into the greasy gravy that leaked down from the potatoes, a beaded scum of grease on the coffee, everything in fact lubricated as if all who ate there suffered from some atrophy of the deglutitive muscles which precluded swallowing. In late afternoon he returned, parked the coupe and crossed the gullied and wasted clay of the yard where an old tire still hung from the one knobby and leafless oak, and so into the unpainted house.