The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  For Christ’s sake, he gasped. Jesus Christ, just turn me loose.

  Sylder put his face to the man’s and in a low voice said, You better call on somebody closer than that. Then he saw his shoulder, saw the man looking at it. He dug his thumb into the man’s windpipe and felt it collapse like a dried tule. The man got his hand up and began with his eyes closed to beat Sylder about the face and chest. Sylder closed his eyes too and buried his face in his shoulder to protect it. The flailings grew violent, slowed, finally stopped altogether. When Sylder opened his eyes again the man was staring at him owlishly, the little tongue tipped just past the open lips. He relaxed his hand and the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider. He tried to open it again but could not. He looked at the man again and time was coming back, gaining, so that all the clocks would be right.

  The man had been dead for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Sylder staggered to the car and sat on the runningboard, stared unblinking into the brass eye of the sun ponderous and unreal on the red hills until he lost consciousness.

  Morning. Lying with his cheek in the dust of the road he had a child’s view, the jack looming like a fallen tree and beyond that the man face-upward like a peaceful giant composed for sleep. The rocks in the road threw long shadows and the first birds were about.

  Sylder had already started dragging the heavy body off into the Johnson grass and poison ivy when he heard the sound of a motor somewhere on the curves behind him. He stopped, then turned and started toward the coupe again trying to run and dragging the carcass behind him with one hand, stumbling, knowing halfway there that he would never make it, that he had made a mistake. So he didn’t even open the door but dropped the body as he reached the car, squatted over it, and gripping the underside of the runningboard for support jacked his feet up into the man’s armpits and slid him toes up beneath the car for three-fourths his length just as a truck rounded the far curve and caught him struggling to his feet.

  The sun was well up. Across the open country, the wale of pines shedding scarves of mist like swamp gases rising on the steamy air, some crows were hawking their morning calls. Sylder scooted from under the car, stood and was idly toeing out the drag-marks when the truck pulled alongside. He knew they would stop and already he began to think that he had done the best thing, that they would have seen the man inside, would insist on helping when they saw his … His arm: he snapped his head and two faces peering from the halted truck blurred and he looked down and saw the great smear of blood on his arm and dried and blackening on his shirtfront, was still looking at it sickly when a voice from the truck said:

  Kin we hep ye?

  He didn’t look up for a second, caught in the pain of his wrecked shoulder raging now as if loosed by the voice from the truck cab, and not lost either to the irony of it. Then he raised his face to the curious sympathetic eyes watching him with a bland serenity that not even the bloody vision of himself could ruffle.

  They were on the far side, he looking at them across the incline of the open turtledeck, so that even as he said We he thought: They can’t see him. Yet he couldn’t get his mind that far ahead, and even afterwards could not trace the possibilities on their separate courses. He reconciled the whole thing by this: that there was no way to keep them from getting out of the truck anyway. So he said: We had a little accident, and thought Yes, they will get out anyway. These bastards will jest have to get out and see good.

  The truck doors spread simultaneously like rusty wings and fell to in a rattle of glass uncushioned by any upholstery. They were a man and his son, the elder heavy and red, with creased skin, the younger a tall and thinner duplication. They came shuffling around the rear of the car with an air of infinite and abiding patience. Sylder turned slowly, his eye raking over the scene, trying to imagine what it looked like: the feet protruding solemnly from under the car, the car itself with the hole torn in the quarterpanel and in the door, the dent where the base of the jack hit and the jack lying in the road …

  You hurt bad? the man asked.

  Naw, Sylder grunted. The man was looking past him.

  What happent?

  Car fell, Sylder said. No-account piece of a jack give way on me. He kicked at the handle.

  The man eyed the strewn jack. Shore did now, didn’t it, he said. Whew. Them things’r dangerous as a cocked gun. Always have maintained it. How about your buddy there? Nodding at the upturned feet.

  Yeah, Sylder said to himself. How about him now. Then to the man: He’s all right. Knocked the muffler down when she fell. Soon’s he gets her wired back we’ll be set. The man was moving around him; Sylder cut him off. Say, he said, tell you what you might do.

  What’s that?

  Get your dead ass out of here, Sylder thought. He said: Well, you might carry me down to Topton, see a doctor. Durned arm’s bleeding pretty bad.

  Shore, said the man, I guess we might better at that. Looks pretty bad. You come on.

  They started for the truck, Sylder behind them, herding them. He moved around to the cab, hung back till the older one got in, then stooped to one knee and spoke loudly to the corpse:

  Listen, these fellers going to carry me in to Topton to the doc’s. You come on when you get done … You all done? He rose and turned to the man sitting now in the truck, the motor already started. Listen, he said. He’s about done, I’ll jest go on in with him. You fellers go on, we’ll be all right now … and thinking Will you go now? Will you go?

  Well, the man said, leaning across the boy (wide-eyed, still silent, getting into the truck), you sure you okay now?

  Sure, Sylder said, already waving to them. Much obliged.

  You’re more’n welcome, the man said. His face moved back, the boy nodded. The gears shifted with a grating sound and the motor died, hushed suddenly in the blue stillness of the broken day.

  Sylder stood there listening to the tortured cranking of the starter and thinking: Ah, God. I should’ve knowed. That raggedy-assed son of a bitch ain’t goin to …

  But it did. The motor coughed a few times, then clattered to a low roar. The gears raked again and the truck pulled away sifting up dustspurs from the rear wheels and was gone almost instantly beyond the curve of the road.

  They never seen the hole, Sylder said. They must never of even seen it. Then he thought: How in hell would they know how long it’d been there if they had?

  He turned and made for the far side of the car, listing badly, staggerfooted, reeled at the rear bumper and collapsed into the trunk whacking his broken shoulder against the spare tire. There he sat for some minutes dazed and his mind threatening unconsciousness again.

  Got to get the hell out of here, he said, shaking his head and wobbling to his feet. He steadied himself with one hand against the cool skin of the coupe, worked his way to the other side and squatted there above the brogans. He cursed them for a while, then took hold of one worn heel and bracing a foot against the runningboard began to pull the man out. He tried not to look when the head emerged, then gave up and had a good look. The eyes were leaping from their sockets, an expression of ghastly surprise, the tongue still poking out. Sylder pulled him to the back of the car, got his hand in the shirt collar, lifting him bodily, and jerked him into the trunk. Only the legs dangled over the bumper and these he folded in after. Then he collected the jack and threw it in, dropped the lid, went to the switch for the keys and locked the trunk.

  Night. The coombs of the mountain fluted with hound voices, a threnody on the cooling air. Flying squirrels looped in feathery silence from tree to tree above the old man sitting on a punk log, his feet restless trampling down the poison ivy, listening to Scout and Buster flowing through the dark of the flats below him, a swift slap slap of water where they ghosted through the creek, pop of twig or leaf-scuttle brought to his ear arcanely—they were a quarter mile down—and the long bag-throated trail-call again.

  When Sylder turned the key, the handle, and swung the lid up, he didn’t expect the stench
that followed, poured out upon him in a seething putrid breath. He didn’t even have time to step back. The spume of vomit roiled up from the pit of his stomach and he staggered away through the brush and saplings, retching, finally falling to his knees and heaving in dry and tortured paroxysms. After a while it stopped. He sat there for a long time with the sour green taste of bile in his mouth, lightheaded, trying to make himself believe that he could go back and do what he had to. He stood up and smoked a cigarette.

  A smell of honeysuckle came up the mountain, wafted on the cooling updrafts, Treefrogs and crickets called. A whippoorwill. Abruptly the yap of hounds treeing. His shoulder was pounding again and the cast had begun to cut into his armpit. He still couldn’t take a full breath. He started back, the Ford outlined through the silhouettes of trunks and branches like a night animal feeding, a shape massive and bovine. At the rear bumper he sniffed tentatively, then resolutely reached into the foul darkness and clamped his hand over one leg. Turning his head he stepped away, hearing the rasp and slide of it following and the thump and jar when it fell to the ground. Past the car, edging along the screen of brush he dragged it, thirty yards or better before stopping to rest. It felt lighter. He pulled it the rest of the way to the pit without stopping and then he couldn’t breathe any more. He lay in the grass very quietly, waiting for the shoulder to stop, and held on to the leg, afraid if he turned loose he would not touch it again. His breath came back and he sat up a little, not hurting, conscious only of his hand hooked around the suppurant flesh. Then he got to his feet, jerked the body to the edge of the pit in three long steps, talking in a voice skirting hysteria: You son of a bitch. You rotten son of a bitch.

  Dropping the leg he planted one foot in the man’s side and shoved him violently over the rim, the arms flapping briefly in some simulation of protest before crashing into the moldery water below.

  Going back down the mountain he left the ruts twice, cutting a swath the second time through a stand of sumac one of which caught in the bumper and rode there like a guidon. A limb whipped in the window and laid open his cheek. He didn’t even know the trunk was open until a car passed him on the pike where he had forced himself to slow down and he realized that he had seen no lights in the rearview mirror.

  From his log the old man watched the shape of the retreating lights cutting among the trees. When they went from sight he brought a pipe from his jacket, filled and lit it. The dogs had treed some time past and their calls were now less urgent. He smoked his pipe down, knocked out the ashes on the log and rose stiffly, fingering a chambered goat-horn slung from his neck by a thong. Low in the east a red moon was coming up through the clouds, a crooked smile, shard of shellrim pendant from some dark gypsy ear. He raised his horn. His call went among the slopes echoing and re-echoing, stilling the nightbirds, rattling the frogs in the creek to silence, and on out over the valley where it faded thin and clear as a bell for one hovering breath before the night went clamorous with hounds howling in rondelays, pained waitings as of phantom dogs lamenting their own demise. From the head of the hollow Scout and Buster yapped sharply and started down the creek again. The old man lowered his horn and chuckled, turned down the gully wash taking the stickrimmed basins like stairs, cautiously, turning as alternate feet descended. He had cut a pole of hickory, hewed it octagonal and graced the upper half with hex-carvings—nosed moons, stars, fish of strange and pleistocene aspect. Struck in the rising light it shone new white as the face of an apple-half.

  The Green Fly Inn burned on December twenty-first of 1936 and a good crowd gathered in spite of the cold and the late hour. Cabe made off with the cashbox and at the last minute authorized the fleeing patrons to carry what stock they could with them, so that with the warmth of the fire and the bottles and jars passing around, the affair took on a holiday aspect. Within minutes the back wall of the building fell completely away, spiraling off with a great rushing sound into the hollow. The rooftree collapsed then and the tin folded inward, the edges curling up away from the walls like foil. By now the entire building was swallowed in flames rocketing up into the night with locomotive sounds and sucking on the screaming updraft half-burned boards with tremendous velocity which fell spinning, tracing red ribbons brilliantly down the night to crash into the canyon or upon the road, dividing the onlookers into two bands, grouped north and south out of harm’s way, their faces lacquered orange as jackolanterns in the ring of heat. Until the stilts gave and the facing slid backward from the road with a hiss, yawed in a slow curvet about the anchor of the pine trunk, overrode the crumpling poles, vaulting on them far out over the canyon before the floor buckled and the whole structure, roof, walls, folded neatly about some unguessed axis and dropped vertically into the pit.

  There it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet, shaped in ripples and flutings, encysted with crisp and blackened rubble, murrhined with bottlecaps. It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon.

  II

  Curled in a low peach limb the old man watched the midmorning sun blinding on the squat metal tank that topped the mountain. He had found some peaches, although the orchard went to ruin twenty-years before when the fruit had come so thick and no one to pick it that at night the overborne branches cracking sounded in the valley like distant storms raging. The old man remembered it that way, for he was a lover of storms.

  The tank was on high legs and had a fence around it with red signs that he had been pondering for some time, not just today. From time to time he sliced a bite from one of his peaches. They were small and hard, but he had good teeth. He propped one foot up in the limb with him and fell to stropping the knife slowly on the smooth-worn toe of his boot. Then he wet a patch of hair on his arm and tested the blade. Satisfied, he reached for another peach and began peeling it.

  When he had finished this one he wiped the blade of the knife on his cuff, folded and pocketed it, passed a handful of loose sleeve across his mouth. Then he got down from his limb and started up through the wreckage of the orchard, threading his way among the old gray limbs and stopping to look out over the valley now and again, at the black corded fields and the roofs winking in the sun. When he came out on the road he turned down to the right, his brogans making small padding sounds in the red dust, his huge knobby-kneed trousers rolling and moiling about him urgently as if invested with a will and purpose of their own.

  This was the orchard road red and quiet in the early sun, winding from the mountain’s spine with apple trees here along the road and shading it, gnarled and bitten trees, yet retaining still a kept look and no weeds growing where they grew. Farther up was a side road that went off among the trees, shade-dappled, grass fine as hair in the ruts. It went to the spray-pit, a concrete tank set in the ground that had once been used to mix insecticide. These six years past it had served as a crypt which the old man kept and guarded. Passing it now he remembered how he had been coming up from the hollow with a gallon bucket when a boy and a girl, neither much more than waist-high to him, had rounded the curve. They stopped when they saw him and it took him a while, coming toward them with his pail, to see that they were scared, huge-eyed and winded with running. They looked ready to bolt so he smiled, said Howdy to them, that it was a pretty day. And them there in the road, balanced and poised for flight like two wild things, the little girl’s legs brightly veined with brier scratches and both their mouths blue with berry stain. As he came past she began to whimper and the boy, holding her hand, jerked at her to be still, he standing very straight in his overall pants and striped jersey. They edged to the side of the road and turned, watching him go by.

  He started past, then half turned and said: You’ns find where the good berries is at?

  The boy looked up at him just as though he hadn’t been watching him all the time and said something which cracked in his voice and which the old man couldn’t ma
ke out. The girl gave up and wailed openly. So he said:

  Well now, what’s wrong with little sister? You all right, honey? Did you’ns lose your berry bucket? He talked to them like that. After a while the boy began to blubber too a little and was telling him about back in the pit. For a few minutes he couldn’t figure out what was the pit and then it came to him and he said:

  Well, come on and show me. I reckon it ain’t all this bad whatever it is. So they started up the road although it was pretty plain they didn’t want to go, and when they turned down the road to the spray-pit the boy stopped, still holding the little girl’s hand and not crying any more but just watching the man. He said he didn’t want to go, but for him, the old man, to go on and see. So he told them to wait right there that it wasn’t nothing.

  He saw the berry pails first, one of them turned over and the blackberries spilled out in the grass. A few feet beyond was the concrete pit and even before he got to it he caught a trace of odor, sour … a little like bad milk. He stepped onto the cracked rim of the pit and looked down into the water, the furred green top of it quiet and touched with light. Sticks and brush poked up at one corner. The smell was stronger but other than that there was nothing. He walked along the edge of the pit. Down the slope among the apples some jays were screaming and flashing in the trees. The morning was well on and it was getting warm. He walked halfway round, watching his step along the narrow sandy concrete. Coming back he glanced down at the water again. The thing seemed to leap at him, the green face leering and coming up through the lucent rotting water with eyeless sockets and green fleshless grin, the hair dark and ebbing like seaweed.

  He tottered for a moment on the brink of the pit and then staggered off with a low groan and locked his arms about a tree trying to fight down the coiling in his stomach. He didn’t go back to look again. He got the berry pails and went back to the road, but the children weren’t there and he couldn’t think how to call them. After a while he called out, Hey! I got your berry buckets …