The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  Some wind turned the apple leaves, shadow of a buzzard skated on the road and broke up in the fencing of briers. They were gone. He walked up the road a way, then back down, but there was no trace of them.

  Three days later when he came back it was still there, no one had come. With his pocketknife he cut a small cedar tree with which to put it from sight.

  It was still there, what of it had weathered the seasons and years. He went on along the road, an old man pedaling the scorched dust.

  The sun was high now, all the green of the morning shot with sunlight, plankton awash in a sea of gold. Even late spring had dried nothing but the dust in the road, and the foliage that overhung either side had not yet assumed its summer coat of red talc. In the early quiet all sounds were clear and equidistant—a dog barking out in the valley, high thin whistle of a soaring hawk, a lizard scuttling dead leaves at the roadside. A sumac would turn and dip in sudden wind with a faint whish, in the woods a thrash, water-voiced …

  The old man took a sidepath that led along a spur of the mountain, cutting a spiderstick as he went to clear the way where huge nets were strung tree to tree across the path dew-laden and glinting like strands of drawn glass, bringing them down with a sticky whisper while the spiders fled over the wrecked and dangling floss. He came out on a high bald knoll that looked over the valley and he stopped here and studied it as a man might cresting a hill and seeing a strange landscape for the first time. Pines and cedars in a swath of dark green piled down the mountain to the left and ceased again where the road cut through. Beyond that a field and a log hogpen, the shakes spilling down the broken roof, looking like some diminutive settler’s cabin in ruins. Through the leaves of the hardwoods he could see the zinc-colored roof of the church faintly coruscant and a patch of boarded siding weathered the paper-gray of a waspnest. And far in the distance the long purple welts of the Great Smokies.

  If I was a younger man, he told himself, I would move to them mountains. I would find me a clearwater branch and build me a log house with a fireplace. And my bees would make black mountain honey. And I wouldn’t care for no man.

  He started down the steep incline.—Then I wouldn’t be unneighborly neither, he added.

  The path followed along the south face of the mountain and came out on the pike; a dirt road dropped off into a steep hollow to the left. The old man went this way, down under the wooded slope where water dripped and it was cool. Half a mile farther and the road turned up a hill, emerging from the woods to poke through a cornfield where a brace of doves flushed out and faired away to the creek on whistling wings. Beyond the field and set back up from the road was a small board shack with the laths curling out like hair awry, bleached to a metal-gray. It was to this place that the man came, carrying the stick across his shoulders now as one might carry a yoke of waterbuckets, his hands flapping idly.

  The hillside in front of the house was littered with all manner of cast-off things: barrel hoops, a broken axehead, fragments of chicken-wire, a chipped crock … small antiquated items impacted in the mud. There was a black hog-kettle which he didn’t use any more; it was flecked with rust. The porch was shy the first step and he had to climb up, using his stick for support. The front of the house in the shade under the porch roof was green with fungus and the old man sat wearily on the floor and leaned back against it, stretched his legs out flat and opened his collar. It was damp and cool. The house faced to the north with a slope of trees behind it and snow lay in his yard longer than in most places.

  In spring the mountain went violent green, billowing low under the sky. It never came slowly. One morning it would just suddenly be there and the air rank with the smell of it. The old man sniffed the rich earth odors, remembering other springs, other years. He wondered vaguely how people remembered smells … Not like something you see. He could still remember the odor of muskrat castor and he hadn’t smelled it for forty years. He could even remember the first time he had smelled that peculiar sweet odor; coming down Short Creek one morning a lot more years ago than forty, the cottonwoods white and cold-looking and the creek smoking. Early in the spring it was, toward the close of the trapping season, and he had caught an old bull rat with orange fur, the size of a housecat. The air was thick with the scent of musk and had reminded him then of something else, but he could never think what.

  He dozed, slept, for a long time. Late in the afternoon clouds began to pile up in the gap of the mountain and a fresh breeze came past the corner of the porch to rock gently the gourds swung from the eaves.

  He woke before the rain started. The breeze had cooled and cooled, fanning his face and the beads of sweat on his forehead. He sat up and rubbed his neck. A pair of mockingbirds were pinwheeling through the high limbs of the maples, were still; and then, arriving as if surprised themselves in the greengold heat of the afternoon, the first drops of rain splatted dark on the packed mud below the house. A flat shade undulated across the yard, the road, and climbed the mountain face with an illusion of sudden haste; the rain increased, growing in the distance with the wind and leaching the trees beyond the creek lime-silver. The old man watched the rain advance across the fields, the grass jerking under it, the stones in the road going black and then the mud in the yard. A gust of spray wet his cheek and he could hear the roofshakes dancing.

  When the one gutterpipe wired to the porch roof overflowed, the water fell in a single translucent fan and the landscape bleared and weaved. The rain splashed in until there was a dark border about the porch. He took out his tobacco and rolled a cigarette with trembly hands, neat and perfect. The wind had gone and he sat back with his head against the green plankings and watched the smoke standing in the air under the dampness and very blue. After a while the rain began to slacken and it was darkening, the sky above the mountain black but for a thin reef of failing gray, and then that was gone and it was night, staccato with lightning in the distance. The old man began to feel a chill and was ready to go in when something cracked on the mountain and he looked up in time to see the domed metal tank on the peak illuminated, quivering in a wild aureole of light. There was a sound like fingernails on slate and the old man shivered and blinked his eyes, the image burning white hot in the lenses for another moment, and when he looked again it was gone and he stood in darkness with the sound of the rain slipping through the trees and a thin trickle of water coming off the roof somewhere to spatter in a puddle below. He waggled his hand in front of his face and couldn’t even see it.

  He stood up and batted his eyes. Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly. Corner post and porch began to materialize slowly out of the murk and he could see the hound when it loomed up over the edge of the porch, snuffling, ears flapping and collar jingling as he shook the rain from his reeking hide. He came up, toenails clicking on the planks, and snuffed at the old man’s trousers.

  Where you been, old dog? the old man said. The dog began to rub against his leg and the old man pushed him away with his foot, saying Go on, Scout. Scout moved over against the house and settled. The man rubbed the back of his neck, stretched and went in.

  The house was musty, dank and cellar-like. He felt his way to the corner table and lit a coal-oil lamp, the ratty furniture leaping out from the shadows in the yellow light. He went into the kitchen and lit the lamp there, took down a plate of beans and a pan of dry cornbread from the warmer over the stove. He sat at the table and ate them cold, and when he had finished went outside with a handful of biscuits and threw them to the dog. The rain had almost stopped. The hound bolted down the biscuits and looked up after him. The screendoor banged to, the square of light on the porch floor narrowed and went out with the click of the latch. The old man did not appear again. The dog lowered his head on his paws and peered out at the night with wrinkled and sorrowing eyes.

  Cats troubled the old man’s dreams and he did not sleep well any more. He feared their coming in the night to suck his meager breath. Once he woke and found one looking in the window
at him, watching him as he slept. For a while he had kept the shotgun loaded and lying on the floor beside the bed but now he only lay there and listened for them. Very often they would not start until late and he would still be awake, his ears ringing slightly from having listened so long. Then would come a thin quavering yowl from some dark hollow on the mountain. He had used to trot to the window and peer out at the hills, at the silhouette of pines in the low saddle above Forked Creek like a mammoth cathedral gothically spired … Now he only lay in his gray covers and listened. He did not sleep much at night and he was sore and bone-worn from napping in chairs, against logs and trees, sprawled on the porch.

  When he was a boy in Tuckaleechee there was a colored woman lived in a shack there who had been a slave. She came there because, as she said, there weren’t any other niggers and because she felt the movements and significations there. She wore a sack of hellebore at her neck and once he had seen her on the road and hadn’t been afraid of her, as he was very young then, so she put three drops of milfoil on the back of his tongue and chanted over him so that he would have vision. She told him that the night mountains were walked by wampus cats with great burning eyes and which left no track even in snow, although you could hear them screaming plain enough of summer evenings.

  Ain’t no sign with wampus cats, she told him, but if you has the vision you can read where common folks ain’t able.

  He related this to his mother and she held the cross of Jesus against his forehead and prayed long and fervently.

  The old man lay on his back listening to the heart surge under his ribcage, his breath wheening slow and even. In the fall before this past winter he had come awake one night and seen it for the second time, black in the paler square of the window, a white mark on its face like an inverted gull wing. And the window frame went all black and the room was filling up, the white mark looming and growing. He reached down and seized the shotgun by the barrel, spun it around and thumbed the hammer and let it fall. The room erupted … he remembered the orange spit of flame from the muzzle and the sharp smell of burnt powder, that his ears were singing and his arm hurt where the butt came back against it. He got up and stumbled to the table, dragging the gun by its warm barrel, found and struck a match and got the lantern lit. Then he went to the window, the light flickering thin shadows up the wall, playing to the low ceiling and whitening the spiderwebs. He held the lamp up. Above the window the boards were blasted and splintered clean and honeycolored. He didn’t keep the shotgun by the bed any more but over in the corner behind the table.

  The old man lay awake a long time. Once he thought he heard a cry, faintly, beyond the creek and the field, but he wasn’t sure. A car passed on the road and he wondered about that but then he dozed and the crickets had already stopped.

  Deep hole between her neckcords, smokeblue. Laddered boneshapes under the paper skin like rows of welts descending into the bosom of her dress. Eyes lowered to her work, blink when she swallows like a toad’s. Lids wrinkled like walnut hulls. Her grizzled hair gathered, tight, a helmet of zinc wire. Softly rocking, rocking. A looping drape of skirt slung in a curtain-fold down the side of the chair swept softly at the floor. She sat before the barren fireplace stitching buttonholes in a shirt of woolen millends. From out his scrolled and gilded frame Captain Kenneth Rattner, fleshly of face and rakish in an overseas cap abutting upon his right eyebrow, the double-barred insignia wreathed in light, soldier, father, ghost, eyed them.

  With the lamps aligned one on either side she had a ritualistic look, a nun at beads perhaps. Later he watched from the kitchen lean-to because it had a tin roof and a wind had come up now and was blowing the rain across it with long ripping sounds like silk tearing. He turned the pages of his magazine but he had read it so much that he scarcely looked at the pages any more; mostly he watched how the lampflame quivered and the polished work that bound the stove, burnt to peacock colors of bronze and copper, violet-blue, changed patterns, ran to whorls and flamepoints. He waved his hand over the glass and the blue canisters above the stove bowed.

  In the kitchen the man on the mantel couldn’t watch him any more either. After a while he put down the magazine and turned around in the chair, sat with his elbows propped on the back and watched out the window for lightning. Thin cracks of it far back over Winkle Hollow like heat lightning. There was no thunder, only the rain and wind.

  The boy thought he could remember his father. Or perhaps only his mother telling about him … He remembered a man, his father or just some other man he was no longer sure. His father didn’t come back after they moved from Maryville. He remembered that, the moving.

  It was a house of logs, hand-squared and chinked with clay, the heavy rafters in the loft pinned with wooden pegs. There had been a loom in the loft but it had since been burned piece by piece for kindling. It was a huge affair of rough-cut wood that under the dust had retained even then a yellow newness. The rafters still looked that way. In the summer wasps nested over the boards, using the auger-holes where dowels had shrunk in some old dry weather and fallen to the floor to emerge out into the hot loft and drone past his bed to the window where a corner of glass was gone and so out into the sunlight. There had been mud-dobber nests stacked up the wide planks too but his mother had raked them all down one day and aside from the wasps there were only the borers and woodworms, which he never saw but knew by the soft cones of wood-dust that gathered on the floor, the top log beneath the eaves, or trailed down upon the cobwebs, heavy yellow sheets of them opaque with dust and thick as muslin.

  The house was tall and severe with few windows. Some supposed it to be the oldest house in the county. It was roofed with shakes and they seemed the only part of it not impervious to weather and time, for they were blackened and split, and now curling in their ruin they seemed victims of a long-ago fire which the house had somehow escaped altogether, for it was sound and the logs were finely checked and seasoned. They sagged and bellied and seemed supported only by the chimneys of clay and river rock at either end, but the house was strong and settled and no wind could bring a creak from it.

  They paid no tax on it, for it did not exist in the county courthouse records, nor on the land, for they did not own it. They paid no rent on either house or land, as claimants to either or both properties were nonexistent in deed as the house itself. They paid Oliver Henderson, who brought water to them three times a week on his milk route.

  The well hidden in the weeds and Johnson grass that burgeoned rankly in the yard had long shed its wall of rocks and they were piled in the dry bottom in layers between which rested in chance interment the bones of rabbits, possums, cats, and other various and luckless quadrupeds.

  He didn’t know that, but only guessed because he had found a young rabbit in the well one spring and was afraid to climb down after it. He brought green things to it every day and dropped them in and then one day he fluttered a handful of garden lettuce down the hole and he remembered how some of the leaves fell across it and it didn’t move. He went away and he could see for a long time the rabbit down in the bottom of the well among the rocks with the lettuce over it.

  She had finished now and put one lamp on the mantel and was looking at it with the shirt in her hand held up against her. She stood that way for a while and then she turned and saw him watching her over his shoulder, each of them touched with light and the space between them through the narrow door dark. He couldn’t see her eyes and he made out that he was looking at something else and finally turned back to the window and the rain.

  Boy, she said.

  Yesm.

  You get to bed.

  Yesm, he said again. He did not move.

  Your bed ain’t got wet, is it?

  No mam.

  It would be wet, always was when it rained even if it didn’t blow. It was musty and smelled good then and cool enough for the blanket. This year, this summer, he had moved to the porch off the kitchen, carrying his bed down one Sunday evening while she was at church and in it
by the time she got back, breathing deeply when she stopped at the door on her way in. Then he could hear her at the dishes in the kitchen humming to herself, and she never said anything about it except she made him carry out the two boxes of bottles and cans he had evicted from the corner. The lean-to porch was screened in from waist-high up; after he was in bed a while he could see even the acorns in the yard oaks. Some nights a tall gaunt hound came and peered in the screendoor at him and he would speak to it, it standing there high-shouldered and flat-looking, not moving, and then it would be gone and he could hear its feet padding off through the yard and the clink of its collar.

  He pulled the bed out from the corner, turned back the spread and felt the pillow. Then he turned it over and took the blanket from under his arm and put it on the bed and got in. That was the last night of that summer. He fell asleep to the water and metal sounds of the rain runneling over the tin and sluicing through the gutterpipe, the rapid slash of it in a gust of wind and the fine mist spraying his face through the bellying screen. The oaks stirred restlessly, low admonitions, shhh …

  In the morning the rain had stopped and there was a chill in the air and smoke. He smiled at that, for he was waiting and weathers and seasons were his timepiece now. There were still warm days but that didn’t matter to him. Jays were in the blackoaks mornings and the grackles had come back, great flocks of them bending the trees, their feathers glinting dark metal colors and their calls harshly musical, like a rusty swing. Or they would be on the ground, the yard rolling blackly with them, and he would run out and pop his hands once and see them explode sunward, a flapping shrieking horde bearing leaves and debris into the air on the updraft of their wings.