The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  The first weeks of September went and the weather held and no frost. The veins were coming up in his arms and he would press them and then raise his fist and feel the blood in the soft tubes.

  He was pushing time now and he could feel it give. She canned the remainder of the garden in two days and was after him to get his bed back up to the loft before he took cold. It rained and the pond went blood-red and one afternoon he caught a bass from the willows in water not a foot deep and cleaned it and held the tiny heart in the palm of his hand, still beating.

  His bed was still on the porch. These nights he could not bear to be in the house. He would go out after dinner and come back at bedtime—and then out again directly she was asleep, walking the dark roads, passing by the shacks and houses, the people illumined yellowly behind the windowlights in gestures mute and enigmatic…

  One night cutting through a field he came upon two figures struggling in the grass, naked, white and frantic in the gloss of the quarter-moon as stranded fish. He went on. They did not see him. When he got to the road he began to run, his shoes slapping loud on the asphalt till they burned and stung, ran till his chest was seared. Below the forks of the road in Stiefel’s yard was a great tulip poplar. He crawled up the kept-grass bank and folded in the shadows of the trunk like a malefactor gone to earth, his breath dragging coals through his lungs.

  He sat there for a long time, watching the lights go out one by one over the valley. Sound of voices close and urgent on the acoustic night air, doors falling to, laughter … An encampment settling for rest, council fires put out … In caverns by torchlight a congress of fiends and warlocks rattling old dry bones in wistful hunger.

  You goin to hunt him out. When you’re old enough. Goin to find the man that took away your daddy. (Remember: fierce and already aging face downthrust into his, sweetsour smell …)

  How can I? He had begun to cry.

  Your daddy’d of knowed how. He was a Godfearin man if he never took much to church meetin … The Lord’ll show you, boy. He will not forsake them what believe. Pray and the way will be made known to ye. He … You swear it, boy.

  His arm was growing numb with pain … could feel her tremble through the clutched hand … I swear, he said.

  You won’t never forgit.

  No.

  Never long as you live.

  Long as I live.

  Yes, she said.

  Long as I …

  I won’t forgit neither, she said, tightening once more on his arm for a moment, leaning her huge face at him. And, she hissed, he won’t forgit neither.

  I live …

  He never forgot. From somewhere in the darkness came the sound of a banjo, tentative chords … a message … what news? Old loves reconsummated, sickness, a child’s crying. Silence now in the houses. Repose. Even to those for whom no end of night could bring rest enough. And silence, the music fled in the seeping amber warmth of innumerable dreams laid to death upon the hearth, ghostly and still … The morning is yet to the nether end of the earth, and he is weary. Bowing the grass in like sadness the dew followed him home and sealed his door.

  Still the weather held, and the rain. The days were gray and misty and in the night the trees dripped and spattered. The pond had been bottled and he watched them drifting about one morning while still-fishing from the limestone ledge at the upper end. Later a man came in a skiff poling through the fog and he saw him stop what bottles skittered and jerked and lift up the lines to take off the fish. The man saw him and nodded his head and he nodded back. The skiff circled at the upper end and returned down the pond, silent but for the thud of the pole on the stern-boards.

  He was pushing hard now and the days were bending under and cold weather came. His cot was still on the porch and daily he checked the undoing of the yard trees, woke to a red world with the sun wedged huge and squat in the mountain gap and the maples incandesced. Couched in his musty blanket he sniffed to test the air. A limp breeze water-wrought and tempered with smoke came lisping through the screen with no news yet.

  He waited. In the slow bleeding month of October he watched, looking torpid and heavylidded as a toad, his nerves coiled and tuned like a waiting cat’s.

  One evening coming from the store he saw her on the road and she smiled at him and said Hidy. He nodded and went on, heard them giggle behind him. He hadn’t seen her since late in the summer.

  He was crossing Saunders’ field and bound for the creek, the homemade crokersack seine riding his shoulder like a tramp’s dunnage. He never saw her until she spoke, leaning against a post with her hands capping the top of it and her chin resting on them. She looked as if she might have been standing there for days with an incalculable patience just waiting for him to come by.

  Well, he thought, she ain’t old enough to own the land to want to run me off of it even if she is big enough. So he said Howdy back to her.

  Your name’s John Wesley, ain’t it?

  He started to say, Yesm, but he said, Yep, that’s my name.

  She moved down from the post and came toward him, unhurried, sauntering. She wore a cotton print dress that buttoned up like a housecoat and where it stretched across her belly or strained to cover her rolling breasts white flesh and pink silk pursed out between the buttons. She pulled a weed and began chewing on it, eying him sidewise, standing in front of him now and favoring one leg so that her hip tilted out. What you doin? she asked.

  Jest messin around, he said.

  Messin around?

  Yeah. That’s all.

  She nudged a stone with the toe of her slipper. Who you messin around with?

  Why, nobody. Jest me.

  The tips of her breasts were printed in the cloth like coins. She was watching him watch. You ain’t supposed to mess around with yourself, she told him, part of a smile at her mouthcorners and eyes squinting in mischief.

  Who says that? he asked.

  Me. Preacher says that too.

  I got to get on, he said.

  You goin to mess with yourself some more?

  He started on and she fell in alongside him. Where you goin? she asked.

  Pond, he said.

  What you goin there for?

  Fish.

  Fish. Fishin? You ain’t got a pole.

  Got one over there, he told her.

  Hid. You don’t carry your pole with you?

  Nah.

  She giggled.

  They were walking along slow, much slower than he walked. After a while when she didn’t say anything he asked her where she was going.

  Me? she said. I ain’t goin nowhere. Jest messin around. Who you goin to mess around with?

  Hmph, she laughed. You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?

  Nah. I don’t care who you mess with.

  He walked on, looking up at the trees, the sky.

  You carry your fish in that?

  What’s that?

  She was pointing at the croker seine. That, she said.

  Oh. Naw, that’s a seine. I got to seine me some minners first afore I go to the pond.

  She didn’t leave. Wading up the creek poking the pole of the seine up under the banks he would see her walking along or standing and watching. Where the honeysuckles thinned at one place she came up to the bank and took off her shoes and kicked at the water with her toes as he went by. When he looked back she was in the creek to her knees with her skirt hiked up and tucked under in the waist of her bloomers and her thighs were incredibly white against the surge of brown water where she walked unsteadily into the current, leaning, her breasts swinging. She caught up to him and splashed water at him. She said:

  You don’t know my name, do you?

  All right, he said. What’s your name?

  What do you care?

  I don’t care, you jest…

  What’d you ast me for then?

  You … I never … He stopped. You was the one ast me if …

  Wanita, she said. If you jest got to know. Wanita Tipton. I live over yande
r. She motioned vaguely beyond the creek, across the late summer ruins of a cornfield, a stand of walnut trees surrounding a stained house with a green tin roof. He nodded, fell to seining again. He didn’t have enough floats and the minnows kept going over the back. Still he had half a dozen in the can tied to his belt.

  You like to do this? she asked over his shoulder.

  He turned around and looked at her. She was standing on a rock with her legs together. The back of her dress had come down and was dark and wet.

  You got a leech, he said.

  I got to what?

  Leech, he said. You got one on your leg.

  She looked down; it didn’t take her long to find it, a fat brown one just below her knee with a thin ribbon of blood going pink on the wetness of her shin. She put her hand to her mouth and just stood there looking at it. It was a pretty good-sized leech for the creek although the pond leeches came much bigger. She just kept looking at it and after a while he said:

  Ain’t you goin to take him off?

  That moved her. She looked up at him and her face went red. Goddamn you, she said. Goddamn you for a … a … Goddamn you anyway.

  Hell, I never put him there.

  Take it off! Damn you! God … will you take it off?

  He sloshed over to where she was. Standing like that in water halfway to his waist and her up on the rock he could see up her thighs to where the skirt was tucked into her bloomers. He got hold of the leech, trying to look up and not to at the same time, and feeling giddy, shaky, and pulled it loose and flipped it past her onto the bank. He said: You ought not to wade barefooted.

  He had felt for a minute that he wasn’t even afraid of her any more and all he could remember now was running. The huge expanse of flesh and the bloomers and her holding him by the collar with her feet somehow in the water on either side of him until he jerked away with his shirt ripping loudly and splashed back through the creek to the bank and out and across Saunders’ field shedding water and minnows from his bucket with the foolish little seine still in his hand and water squishing in his shoes, running.

  She said something to the other one and they giggled again. He went on with his bread, home, his face burning in the chill of the low October sun. When he came in through the porch he saw that his bed was gone. She was in the kitchen. He put the bread on the table and went up to the loft, his tread hollow on the boxed steps, up to the cobwebby gloom under the slanting eaves where the bed had been set and made with fresh linen.

  By now in the early mornings the pond was steeped in mist, thick and coldly swirling, out of which sounded the gabble of phantom ducks. At sunrise the whole valley would be glazed white and crystal and the air smoked and tangy from the stoves and later from the open fires where women gathered about the kettles with long wooden paddles, elvish-looking in their shawls and bonnets, a clutch of trolls at their potions. First days of frost, cold smoky days with hogs screaming and now and again the distant hound-calls of geese howling down the south in thin V’s flattening on the horizon to a line and then gone. He cut wood, went out early to the rising stacks of new pine kindling rimed and shining in the morning frost like wedges of frozen honey. He worked hard at it and the days went. For that much time he would have buried the yard house-high in stovewood.

  If he’d lived, she told him one evening, you wouldn’t want for nothin. And him disabled in the war with that platmium plate in his head and all—turned down the govmint disability, he did. Too proud. Wouldn’t take no handout from nobody even if it was the govmint. He was a provider all right, may the Lord God Jesus keep him.

  Yes, she said, eying him doubtfully, you make half the man he was an you’ll be goin some.

  The fire ticked on in the little stove, cherrying softly the one side of it till the cracks in the old iron showed like thin spiders sprawled there.

  Rocking quietly in her chair she had the appearance of one engaged in some grim and persevering endeavor in which hope was the only useful implement. Not even patience. As if perhaps in some indistinct future the chair itself would rise and bear her away to glory with her sitting fiercely sedate and her feet maybe tucked under the rung, her skirt gathered about her. She was humming something in her high nasal hum, faint evocation of summer bees. The coals chuckled, settled with easy sifting sounds. She rocked. That was how winter came that year.

  Through the weary slide of the wiper on the glass, the water sluicing away, Sylder watched the rain dance in the lights, flash from the black road. Behind him the siren sounded again, louder and with a new sense of urgency. I never tried it in the rain, he was thinking. The accelerator pedal was crushed hard under his foot and he watched the needle strain upward to sixty before he let off for the next curve. Got to do it afore I start up the mountain, he told himself, or I’m in a sling. So it would have to be at the forks of the road.

  Lightning glared in threatful illusions of proximity and quick shapes appeared in the road, leapt from ditch or tree in configurations antic and bizarre. Ghosts of mist rose sadly from the paving and broke in willowy shreds upon the hood, the windshield. One curve more. Behind him the rear window blackened, then the slow inexorable reach of lights crept out and fingered their way across the hillside off to his left, remarking scrub pines, ropes of limestone stretched in a yellow path like rows of somnolent sheep. When he reached the top of the hill the lights dropped away and the siren sounded again.

  I can take a wide sweep, he told himself hopefully. The road looked like oil. Then there was no more time and he was there, nerve and muscle on their own and him just watching. He went into it at forty by the speedometer, saw the store blink its square eyes, cut the wheel to the left, one hand locking for just a moment the handbrake.

  He couldn’t see any more then. He brought the wheel back, the brake already released. Except he couldn’t pull it sharp enough and the front end was sliding away and not turning. Then it gave and a streaming herd of trees swam past in the lights as if rushing headlong off the very rim of the earth and the store loomed again, glazed onto the green frieze, spinning past starkly white and in incredible elongation. And yet once more, trees and building in one long blur and then he was jarred from the rear by a solid whump of a sound and heard something snap like a dry stick cracking and then a rattling spray of glass. The lights had come to rest straight back down the road and he already had the shiftlever up in second, the tires whining, inching forward, when the cruiser leapt over the hill before him. Then the tires bit and he was gone, raking a fender of the other car on the way out with deliberate skill. Behind him the store squinted with half a post leaning in through one window and a corner of the porch sagging down, abject and humble in the pounding rain.

  Sylder popped a match on the dash and lit a cigarette. Adios, John, he said. He sang quietly to himself: Long gone, ain’t he lucky? Long gone, from Kentucky … rocking slightly with the car’s motion as it strung the curves.

  It was in August that he had found the sparrowhawk on the mountain road, crouched in the dust with one small falcon wing fanned and limp, eying him without malice or fear—something hard there, implacable and ungiving. It followed his movements as he approached and then turned its head when he reached out his hand to it, picked it up, feeling it warm and palpitant in the palm of his hand, not watching him, not moving, but only looking out over the valley calmly with its cold-glinting accipitral eyes, its hackles riffling in the wind. He carried it home and put it in a box in the loft and fed it meat and grasshoppers for three days and then it died.

  Saturday he went into town with Mr Eller, holding the bag in one hand and sitting up high in the cab of the old truck watching the fields go by and then houses and more of them and finally stores and filling stations, the river-bridge, and beyond that the shape of the city against the hot morning sky.

  How you gettin back? Mr Eller asked.

  I’ll get back, he said. I got some things to do.

  He was standing on the runningboard, one foot in the street at the corner of Gay a
nd Main. Here, Mr Eller said, leaning across the seat, holding his hand down.

  What?

  Here.

  I got money, he said. It’s okay.

  Go on, damn it, the man said. He was shaking the quarter at him. Behind them a horn sounded.

  Okay, he said. He took the quarter. Thanks, I’ll see ye.

  He slammed the door and the truck pulled away, Mr Eller lifting his hand once in parting; he waved at the back of his head in the rear glass, crossed the street and went up the walk to the courthouse, up the marble stairs and inside.

  There was a woman at a small desk just inside the door fanning herself with a sheaf of forms. He stood for a few minutes looking around the hall and reading the signs over the doors and finally she asked him what it was that he needed.

  He held the bag up. Hawk bounty, he said.

  Oh, she said. I think you go in yonder.

  Where’s that?

  Over there—she pointed to a hallway. Much obliged, he said.

  There was a long counter and behind it were other women at desks. He stood there for a while and then one of them got up and came over to him and said, Yes?

  He hefted the ratty little bag to the counter. From the sweat-crinkled neck exuded an odor rich and putrid even above the stale musty smell of the old building. The woman eyed the package with suspicion, then alarm, as the seeping gases reached her nostrils. Delicately with two fingers she touched the pinked mouthing of the bag, withdrew. He upended it and slid the malodorous contents out on the polished wood in a billowing well of feathers. She stepped back and looked at it. Then she said, not suspiciously or even inquiringly, but only by way of establishing her capacity as official:

  Is it a chickenhawk?

  Yesm, he said. It’s a youngern.

  I see. She turned sharply and disappeared on a click of heels behind a tier of green filing cabinets. In a few minutes she was back with a little pad of printed forms, stopping further down the counter and writing now with a pen from a gathering of inkstands there. He waited. When she had finished she tore the form from the pad and came back and handed it to him. Sign where the X’s are, she told him. Then take it to the cashier’s office. Down the hall—she pointed. He signed the two lines with the pen, handed it back and started away when she called him back.