The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  I reckon it was about two weeks we’d had him when one evenin I heard one of the hogs squeal. I got the lannern and went out but I couldn’t find nothin wrong and went on back in and never thought no more about it. Well, next mornin they’s a hog gone. I hadn’t never heard of nobody stealin hogs but I figured maybe they’s hog thieves jest like ary other kind, up in Sevier County leastwise as that was purty woolly country at that time. But they wadn’t a whole lot I could do about it, not knowin where to even start lookin. Then two nights later anothern of em went. Well, I says, they gettin slicker now. The secont one never even squealt.

  Next night I laid up on the roof of the house with the shotgun—a old single-barrel muzzleloader and me with not enough money to buy caps with even—I was usin matchheads and cottonseed hulls—and here’s somebody stealin my hogs. So I laid up there all night, no further’n from here to the porch yonder from that hogpen. I never seed nothin nor heard nothin. Come mornin I never even looked at the hogs even. Then when she, Ellen, went out later on and slopped em she come back in and she says, Ather, they’s another hog gone.

  I was settin in a chair about half asleep and I come from there. I don’t recollect how many hogs it was that we had but seven or eight I reckon anyway, and I run out and counted em and come up short one more hog. I’d been mad afore but now I was scared.

  Here the old man found the cup of wine in his hand and he regarded it for a moment with mild surprise, raised it and took a drink. He closed his eyes for a moment,

  the high wagon and them coming up to the house, wagon and house both belonging to his uncle, and him owning nothing more than he could carry in his two hands, her things in an old leather trunk tied down behind the seat.

  That her? he asked.

  Yessir.

  He walked around the wagon slowly, studying her as a man might a horse. Then he said, Well, light.

  He got down and she was still sitting there.

  What’s she? goin to put the mule up?

  Nosir, he said. Ellen. Here.

  He took her hand and she got down.

  You go on with Uncle Whitney, he said. I’ll get the things.

  Helen, he said.

  It’s Ellen, she said. The wagon moved away behind her.

  Ellen.

  Daddy said he’d kill him, she said.

  Ain’t nobody goin to kill nobody, he said. Here, watch the mud.

  She said something else. He watched them go in.

  What happent then, Uncle Ather, Warn said.

  Hmm? Oh, well I’d done lost three of them I think it was then. That was three more’n I was willin to lose and two more’n I thought I would lose without I caught somebody. Aside that it looked like I would lose jest as many as whoever I was losin em to was willin to take, which probably meant all of them. So I was mad-scared. Ellen, she claimed I’d gone to sleep on the roof, but I knowed better.

  That was late of a summer. I was stit on the road crew and workin twelve and fourteen hours a day and here I got to come home nights and set up with a bunch of hogs. But we never lost no more for a week or better. Then one night Ellen went to the door to thow out a pan of water and I heard her holler. I run out and she grabbed on to me like she’d seen a hant or somethin, and I ast her what it was but she jest stood there and shook like she’s freezin to death. I walked her back in and went out and looked but I never seen nothin, so I got the pan and come on in. Somethin had scared her real bad but she couldn’t tell me what all it was. After a while all she’d say was I don’t know, or I couldn’t tell what it was.

  The old man paused again, arrested but for the rise and fall of his breathing, the slow mechanical rotation of his jaws, gazed upward—the image of the lampflame on the ceiling, the split corona a doubling egg, like the parthenogenesis of primal light.

  He kept on for a week, coming back each night to the dark and empty house. Then he stopped going to work. That morning he took out the few things she had left—a housecoat, odds and ends, and put them on the bed. He sat and looked at them for a long time. When he got up it was evening.

  He stayed for five more days, wandering about the house or sitting motionless, sleeping in chairs, eating whatever he happened to find until there wasn’t any more and then not eating anything. While the chickens grew thin and the stock screamed for water, while the hogs perished to the last shoat. An outrageous stench settled over everything, a vile decay that hung in the air, filled the house.

  On the sixth day he went out and knocked a plank from the back of the barn with the poll of his axe, cut from it two boards. On one he carefully incised her name with the point of his knife. Then he chopped a stake-point on the other board and nailed the two together in the form of a cross. He took it and took her clothes and a spade down to a corner of the lot where he scooped a hole, buried the clothes, and with the shank of the spade pounded the cross into the ground. Then he walked straight through the house and out again, across the yard, to the road and toward Sevierville. He had gone half a mile before he noticed the shovel in his hand and pitched it into the weeds.

  I know you cain’t, he said.

  I ain’t goin back.

  I’ll go out tomorrow. Corne on, you clean up and eat some.

  What?

  And get some rest, sleep. I’ll go out tomorrow.

  Well, you can. I ain’t.

  I was goin out anyways. R. L. come by yesterday mornin to see if you was comin back. You goin back?

  I don’t know. No. I ain’t goin back.

  You aim to sell your place?

  It don’t… I don’t care.

  Well. I do.

  He looked at him for the first time, the older face, dark and hard as a walnut. Why? he asked.

  Count of you owe me two hunderd dollars, mainly.

  Oh. He thought for a minute, then he said, Yes. Here, I got to clean up.

  The old man was swaying slowly in his rocker holding the cup before him in both hands like a ciborium. After a minute Warn said, Did you ever find out what it was?

  The old man turned and spat into a coffeecan.

  That goddamned bibledrummer, wadn’t it?

  Don’t say nothin else.

  Well, nobody never died from it.

  Don’t say nothin else I told you.

  Yessir, he said. It was the old she-painter, come after the little one. You boys care for some more wine?

  They still had some. The old man labored up from his rocker and went to the table where he had set the wine, refilled his cup. Yep, he said, that had to of been what she seen.

  Did you shoot it? the boy asked.

  Nope. Never even seen her. I lost one more hog and then I give it up. I turnt the little one loose and that’s the last I ever seen of it and the last hog I lost. You see, he said slowly, darkly, they’s painters and they’s painters. Some of em is jest that, and then others is right uncommon. That old she-painter, she never left a track one. She wadn’t no common kind of painter.

  Early next morning the old man worked his way up the mountain, following the prints of the two boys. The snow was drifted deeply in places and it was hard going. He stopped often to catch his breath, leaning on the shotgun, the stock sunk cleanly through the crust to the depth of the triggerguard. By the time he reached the road he was winded and leg-weary. From here he could see out into the valley, through the stark trees standing blackly in an ether of white like diffused milk, glazed and crystalline as shattered ice where the sun probed, the roofs thatched with snow, pale tendrils of smoke standing grayly in the still air.

  He could smell smoke, but he didn’t think about it until it occurred to him that it had a sharp and pungent quality about it and he realized that it was cedar burning—postwood, not firewood—elusive in the cold air, in his nostrils, faintly antiseptic.

  He turned up the road and walked steadily until he carne to the cut-off to the pit. The snow was dry and powdered as marble-dust on his trouser legs. Now he could see the faint pall of smoke through the trees. The tracks t
urned here and furrowed in two drunken lanes, curving into the woods. He followed them, moving faster, stumbling in and out of the snow ruts, shadowed by some presentiment of ruin, into the clearing.

  When he saw the smoke rolling up from out of the pit he stopped for a moment and he could feel the old fierce pull of blood in power and despair, the pulse-drum of the irrevocable act. And it was done, what soul rose in the ashes forever unknown, out of his hands now. He squatted on one knee in the snow, watching. On his face a suggestion of joy, of anguish—something primitive and half hidden. The pale eyes burned cold and remote in their hollows like pockets of smoldering gas.

  He rose and retraced his steps back to the road. In the pit the amber coals glowed molten in their bed beneath the charred skeletons of the cedars.

  Because the car was pulled over up the road and I couldn’t see it from the creek. And he wadn’t on the bridge when I come down but after I waded through and come out the other side he was standin on it lookin down at me and I seen him then and he said Come here. So he took your traps.

  All of em ceptin one, the boy said. He’d of had to of waded to find it so I never told him about it. He took the three of em. I didn’t have but four.

  Lowlife son of a bitch, Sylder said. What’d you tell him?

  I never told him nothin. He said he was goin to take me to jail for trappin without license and bettin criminals. I told him I didn’t know nothin bout some criminals.

  Legwater, what’d he say?

  Not much. Jest sort of grinned like a possum. Yeah, he said it’d go a lot easier on me if I was to tell em about it. That it was the same thing—bettin a criminal—as bein one your ownself. Then Gifford said that was right, how I’d likely get three to five years but that if I’d hep em out and tell who it was I might get off with jest a suspendered sentence.

  But they didn’t take you in?

  No. He turned me loose at the forks, the store. He said soon as they got the rest of the evidence they’d pick me up and how it wouldn’t do me no good to try to run.

  He sat back in the chair, finished now and waiting to know what to do, just beginning to be not so scared.

  Sylder leaned toward him. Listen, he said. You know that’s all horseshit, don’t you? You know what a ass it’d make him look to come draggin a fourteen-year-old boy in? Even for helpin a runner, let alone trappin without license? He’s jest tryin to scare you. I know him. He cain’t prove no way in the world you helped me and if they caught me it’d have to be with a load, in which case they wouldn’t need nobody’s testifyin, let alone yours, and even if they did I’d swear I never seen you before in my life and you’d do the same thing so they still couldn’t bother you. It’s all horseshit, tryin to bluff and scare you into helpin him poke his nose where it don’t belong. He bothers you again you tell him nothin, tell him you’ll get him for false arrest. Cept I don’t think he’s goin to bother you no more.

  He said he’d catch you anyway.

  He couldn’t catch cowshit in a warshtub. It ain’t even his business; he ain’t the A. T. U. Anyway don’t you let him bother you. I’ll tend his apples for him my ownself. He knowed you didn’t have no daddy, nobody to take up for you in the first place is the reason he figured he could jump on you. He’s a lowlife son of a bitch and a caird to boot. Here, come take a look at your pup; he’s fat as a butterball. Come on, I got em on the back porch on account of it bein so cold.

  The pike had been cleared some time in the afternoon so that he didn’t even need the chains after he came off the orchard road, dark now, something after six o’clock, the rear end of the car heavy and swaying low over the wheels even with the love joys set up as far as they would go. It was very cold and his toes had not yet thawed under the gas heater. He thought how the stump of a toe in his left boot was particularly sensitive, remembering again the sweep of the cutter’s lights on the stanchions of the bridge, the glazed and blinding eye of the spotlight when it picked him out, standing on the forward deck under a canopy of mangrove with his foot braced on the cleat and holding the anchor rope. When the light caught him he yelled once down into the cabin and began hauling in on the rope. The starter whirred and the motor coughed gutturally at the water, the boat jostling, already moving. He got the anchor in and watched the cutter lights. Even above the high wheening of their own motor he could hear her revving the big double Gray engines as she swung about, then voices, commands, detached and sourceless on the steamy calm of the Gulf. The cutter’s spot followed them, swamping them in light as they came out of the backwater. He might have been a ballerina pirouetting there. He could see the twin spume flaring from the prow of the cutter, rising as she took speed, and the running lights bobbing and bobbing again in the black wash of the cutwater. He heard the shots too, quite clearly, but made no association between them and himself. It didn’t occur to him that he was being shot at until a real flurry broke out and he could see the muzzleflashes minute and intermittent like cigarettes glowing and hear the pebbly thoop thoop of the bullets in the passing water. Then he jumped and started for the cabin. Instantly there came the sounds of splintering wood and then something tore at his foot and threw him to the deck. He crawled to the companionway and slid down it on his belly.

  Jimmy, he called, a hoarse whisper as if someone might hear them. Ho, Jimmy.

  It was dark in the compartment except for the skittering glow of the searchlight passing and repassing the portholes, the portholes in bright silhouette wandering back and forth on the far wall.

  Hey, kid. What you say?

  Jimenez standing in the passageway. The tiller momentarily abandoned, the craft tilting full throttle across the water, the pulsing slap slap of it under the keel.

  I’m shot, he said.

  Jimenez holding the flashlight while he removed the shredded shoe, the sock sticky with blood, examined the pulpy mess of his big toe.

  Where else, Mario?

  I reckon that’s it, he said.

  Jimmy patting his shoulder commiseratingly. Is hard on the feets that, he said.

  They went forward and he wrapped his toe in a strip torn from his shirt and sat there miserably, watching Jimenez’s face green and serious in the glow of the panel lights.

  He drove slowly, coming through the gap with the moon riding low over the pines that edged the long and barren slash of white beneath the power line, icefog coming up from the hollow, scintillant in the lights. Here where the inn stood, the carnival atmosphere with the few cars strung alongside the road, the heat flickering over them and the men standing about passing the last of the bottles back and forth, talking quietly now, their faces flushed and convivial. Some late arrivals claimed the blaze to have been visible from Vestal. Someone saying You done missed it, Marion.

  Was it a good’n?

  Best you ever seen.

  Nothin to be done there. A drink of whiskey, sneaking it now, Gifford having arrived. Gifford with a long pole poking steaming holes in the melt of glass. Gloop gloop. Vitreous tar. Damndest thing I ever seen. One brogan toe began to blister and blacken and a moment later he was hopping away snatching at his shoelaces. Goddamn. Whew. Leaning against a tree with his naked foot cradled in his hands like a hurt bird he dared a snicker with fierce eyes.

  And two days later the charred shaft of the pine tree still smoldering, pitch bubbling gently from the shell of the bark and small electricblue flames seeping and curling, the spire of smoke standing straight up in the motionless air like a continuation of the tree itself.

  On the curve below the gap the rear wheels drifted slightly and he realized that there was a thin sheet of ice on the road. He sat up over the wheel and wiped the glass with a rag. He passed Tipton’s, the lights above the road warm and friendly-looking through the trees. Old married men. Sylder chuckled, reached for his cigarettes. He was the nicest boy … the rain peening steadily the tin roof of the church, obelisks of light slanting down from the high windows like buttresses. After the creak of the door nothing but the huge breathing
silence, musty odor, the patient and quiet abandonment, chairs, benches, the pulpit, all orderly and still in their coats of dust, an air of mild surprise about them at this late visitation. Their steps ghostly on the warping boards, rousing an owl from the beams, passing over them on soundless wings, a shadow, ascending into the belfry like an ash sucked up a flue and as silently. She gripped his arm. Together to the mourners’ bench. O Lord, O Lord. Witnessed by one nightbird.

  Topping the hill above the creek he came upon a half-ton truck with a horse on it, the long bland face peering down at him over the slatted tailgate with eyes luminous and round as bottlebottoms in the carlights. The truck was laboring at the hill with beetle-like industry, the gears grinding out a low whine. He watched the snow swirling over the road behind it, serpentine, white wisps like smoke on glass, eased up the shiftlever and passed them, the horse’s off eye rolling wildly, past the cab, the driver dimly lit within, puffing at a cigar, looking down at him once.

  One side for the hooch man, Sylder said. New Year’s whiskey comin. Figure ten headaches to the gallon, makes … a thousand … about twelve hunderd real hat stretchers. How about that, old man?

  Old man puffed his cigar, receding rearward, dimmed his lights to one dull orange globe.

  He drove straight down Gay Street, halting obediently at the stoplights, gazing at the numbed traffic officers with insolent bemusement.

  Howdy, Blue-boy. Keer for a drink?

  Out on the west side of town he pulled into a drive and around behind an aged and ill-kept frame house. He backed the coupe up to the garage and got out, stretching a little. Two men came from the house, the kitchen, where a small window was lit. Another man came to the door and stood there leaning against the jamb, his shirttail out, smoking a cigarette and taking the air. A woman’s voice small and shrill somewhere in the house behind him: Shet the door, idjit. You raised in a barn? He didn’t move.