The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  Howdy, Sylder, the first man said, going past him to the garage, not even looking at him.

  Howdy, Sylder said.

  The other one stopped. How’s the new car? he asked.

  All right.

  Ward says it come out of Cosby.

  Could be.

  Ward says it’s plenty fast. Says they blockaded the feller on the Newport highway is the only way they ever come to catch him at all.

  Let’s go, Tiny, the other man called from the garage.

  Sylder went to the rear of the coupe and opened the decklid. They began to unload, carrying the cases back into the garage, the car creaking and rising bit by bit until they had finished and it stood with its rear end high in the air like a cat in heat.

  Sylder took a flashlight and wrench from the glove compartment, stooped by the rear wheels each in turn and lowered the car. Then he undid the chains, got in and drove off them, came back and put them in the trunk. The motor was still running and as he slid behind the wheel once more Tiny came to lean on the door.

  Don’t she sound sweet though, he said.

  Sylder looked up at him. That what Ward says?

  Tiny grinned. Naw, he said. Seems to me that’s what McCrary said. When Ward loant him the money to buy it.

  Tell Ward good cars costs good money. Even at a government auction. Or even if you done paid for em oncet.

  He set the gears and ran the motor up once and Tiny-stood up. Come back, he said.

  Sylder was rolling up the glass. We’ll see ye, he said, switched on the headlights and pulled away down the drive.

  He drove slowly back to the mountain, past the forks and the store, the porch posts deadwhite as plaster casts of those untrimmed poles, the huge carved lion’s head in fierce cameo upon the door, the brass knocker brightly pendant from its nostrils, and the barred panes buckling in the light planeless as falling water, passing out of the glare in willowing sheets to darkness, stark and stable once again. Past his own house, dark but for the light on the porch, and then across the mountain, still slowly, pulling the grades down under the wheels easily.

  The road was glazed with ice on the far side and he amused himself by drifting the coupe from curve to curve like a boat tacking. At the foot of the mountain he left Henderson Valley Road and turned right down Bay’s Mountain Road, driving on gravel now, slowing to some ten or fifteen miles an hour and finally switching off the headlights. He drove that way for half a mile, the coupe rolling ghostly over the road, black and silent against the snow. Then he turned the car around in a drive, pointing it back down the road, and got out.

  He walked up the road until he came to the next drive and here he turned in, plodding through the snow to the lightless house where it brooded in a copse of trees, solitary above the empty fields, over and around it the naked branches tangled like ironwork.

  He walked around the house twice. No dogs barked. At the back again he tested a window, lifted it, the weights slithering in the sashes, stepped through and inside. He found himself in an areaway off the kitchen, two doors in front of him, one leading to a large open room, the other one closed.

  Hola, Jeffo, he called, whispered, in mock and inaudible greeting. Dorme? On downpointed cat’s feet he stepped the three steps to the closed door and folded his hand over the knob. Oh, Jeffo, he whispered. Es muy malo que no tengas un perro. Turned the knob and opened the door.

  There was one small high window in the room, a square of gray standing out of the blackness, and other than that he could see nothing. He stood at the door for a few minutes, listening to the rumbling breath of the man asleep. After a while he could make out the shape of the bed, directly in front of him.

  It was warm in the room, he could feel the sweat in his armpits, but the man was swathed heavily in blankets. Thickness of them under his hand … here shape of arm, of shoulder, chest… sleeping on his back. Gifford snuffled. One gluey eyelid came unstuck as the covers receded from his chin with maternal solicitude.

  He even raised his head a little, wonderingly, sleep leaving him in slow grudging waves, so that he seemed to be coming up to meet it, the shut fist rocketing down out of blackness and into his face with a pulpy sound like a thrown melon bursting.

  When he got home it was past midnight and had turned off colder yet. He parked the coupe at the back of the house, scotched the wheel and went in through the kitchen. He took some biscuits and a jar of preserves from the icebox and ate them, walking up and down a little, flexing his knuckles. When he had finished he put the preserves back, took a long drink from a jar of buttermilk, and then went into the bedroom. His right hand was swollen and he picked delicately at the buttons of his coat.

  Marion …?

  Yeah, he said.

  Oh … what time is it?

  Late, I reckon. I got tied up.

  Are you okay?

  Yeah.

  He stepped out of his trousers and crawled in beside her.

  She could feel him laughing silently. What? she said.

  He kept astin who it was.

  What? Who did.

  Hmm? Naw, nothin. Just some feller. Go on to sleep.

  She turned over and put her hand on his chest. She said, Hush.

  He lay on his back, his hand over hers, the other hand stiffening. Suddenly he had a bile-sharp foretaste of disaster. Why was that old man shooting holes in the government tank on the mountain?

  You sure have got cold feet, she said.

  He stared up at the dark ceiling. I’ll be damned if I do, he whispered to himself.

  IV

  A warm wind on the mountain and the sky darkening, the clouds looping black underbellies until a huge ulcer folded out of the mass and a crack like the earth’s core rending rattled panes from Winkle Hollow to Bay’s Mountain. And the wind rising and gone colder until the trees bent as if borne forward on some violent acceleration of the earth’s turning and then that too ceased and with a clatter and hiss out of the still air a plague of ice.

  The old man looked out through a veil of water fringing his hatbrim, beadwork swinging as he turned his head. The hail had stopped and the wind was coming up again with the rain. He had set forth from his refuge under the claybank and already he was wet through. The road had gone from dust shocked up in dark water-balls to geysers of erupting mud, a sluggish flow beginning in the wheelruts and blistering under the rain. The old man began to run, hobbling in an odd bandylegged progress through the blinding rain, great windblown sheets of it sweeping over the road. The air was filled with branches and foliage of trees and the trees whipped and cracked. By the time he left the road and entered the woods they were coming down, the dead and leafless trunks, grasping with brittle gray fingers and going prone on the earth with the muffled thunder of their fall half lost in the fulminations overhead. The old man kept to his course, over last year’s leaves slick with water, hopping and dancing wildly among the maelstrom of riotous greenery like some rain sprite, burned out of the near-darkness in antic configuration against the quick bloom of the lightning. As he passed it thus a barren chestnut silver under the sluice of rain erupted to the heart and spewed out sawdust and scorched mice upon him. A slab fell away with a long hiss like a burning mast tilting seaward. He is down. A clash of shields rings and Valkyrie descend with cat’s cries to bear him away. Already a rivulet is packing clay in one ragged cuff and a quiff of white hair depending from his forelock reddens in the seeping mud.

  Rainwater seeped among the porous boards of the outhouse until the windrowed leaves in the cat’s corner were black and lifeless and the cat left through the leaning door to seek new shelter. Pools of black water stood in the path swirling slowly their wrack of straw and weeds, armadillo beetles coiled round as shot and strangely buoyant. She skirted them on wincing feet, bore squeamishly the wet slide of last year’s limp and slime-brown weeds.

  Arthur Ownby’s hound rooted and burrowed in his wad of ripe sacks, slept again, his tail clasped to his hairless stomach. He did not see the cat
that came to the door of his cellar and stood on three legs.

  Such light as there was to announce the new day filtered thinly through a mizzle of rain and remarked the fluff of her taupe fur curled in a cleft treebole on the south slope of Red Mountain. Hunger drove her out in the late afternoon, cautious, furtive, dusted with wood-rot.

  Still the rain, eating at the roads, cutting gullies on the hills till they ran red and livid as open wounds. The creek came up into the fields, a river of mud questing among the honeysuckles. Fenceposts like the soldiers of Pharaoh marched from sight into the flooded draws.

  In Saunders’ field a shallow marsh, calm and tractable beneath the dimpling rain. And yet rain. What low place did not hold water? At the little end of McCall’s pond water fell thunderously into the sinkhole that drained it. Along Little River the flats stood weed-deep in livercolored water flecked with thatches of small driftwood and foam that coiled and spun near imperceptibly, or rocked with the wind-riffles passing under them. By day flocks of rails gathered. A pair of bitterns stalked with gimlet eyes the fertile shallows. At night the tidelands rang with peepers, with frogs gruffly choral. Great scaly gars from the river invaded the flats, fierce and primitive of aspect, long beaks full of teeth, ancient fishes survived unchanged from mesozoic fens, their yellowed boneless skeletons graced the cracked clay-beds later in the season where the water left them to what querulous harridans, fishcrow or buzzard, might come to glean their frames, the smelly marvel of small boys.

  Rafts of leaves descended the flowage of Henderson Valley Road, clear water wrinkling over the black asphalt. The mud-choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red, roiling heavily, pounding in the gutters with great belching sounds. The cat trod the high crown of the road, bedraggled and diminutive, a hunted look about her.

  A low sun fired the pine knots in the smokehouse wall till they glowed like rubies, veined and pupiled eyes, peering in at the gloom where the cat gnawed a dangling side of pork-ribs. The salt drew her mouth but she kept at it, pausing now and again to listen at the silence. Mildred Rattner’s mule-slippers carried her with care past the bad spots in the mud, chancing rather the dampness of the ragged grass that grew along the path. What with the pat of rain on the tarpaper overhead the cat heard nothing until the keys jangled just beyond the door and the lock rattled. She leapt to a high shelf, poised, sprang again, making for the air vent under the peaked roof. As the door let in she was hanging by one toenail from this opening, hindclaws flailing desperately for purchase, and then a sliver of the molding wood gave way and she lost her grip.

  When Mildred Rattner swung open the door and stepped into the smokehouse she saw a cat drop with an anguished squall from somewhere overhead, land spraddle-legged facing her, and make a wild lunge at her, teeth gleaming in the dimness and eyes incandesced with madness. She screamed and fell backwards and the cat with a long despairing wail flowed over her and was gone.

  In Tipton’s field four crows sat in a black locust, ranged upon the barren limbs with heads low between their wingblades, surveying the silvergray desolation, the silent rain in the country. They watched the cat come across the field at a slow lope, an erratic dancing progress where she veered and leapt, keeping to the spotty dry ground. Their calls in the afternoon stillness had a somber loneliness about them, the mournful quality of freight whistles. They came from the roost and defiled low over her head, dipping and swooping. The cat spun low on her haunches, batted at them. So did they harry her out of the field, her pausing at each attack to make a stand and grapple at the wind of their passage, hard-pressed to preserve dignity, the birds flaring, wheeling, setting to again in high crude humor. They left her at the bank of the creek to return, settle with treading wings among the locust branches. She marked them down, her yellow eyes narrowed in contempt, turned downstream and followed the swollen creek to the bridge. Here she crossed and continued, taking the high wooded ground on the south bank, pausing here and there with random inquisitiveness at holes and hollow logs to smell, shake herself or lick the water from her chest, until a strong odor of mink musk brought her to the creek proper again.

  The mink was dead, swaying in the shore currents among the swamped and flaring grass. She crept to it on cocked legs, leapt to a mud hummock and swatted it with a long reach downward. She stood up and watched it. It bobbed lifelessly. The chain was hung on a stob somewhere out in the water and when she hooked her claws into the mink to pull it toward her it did not come. Finally she ventured one foot into the water and bit into the neck of the animal. The grit impregnated in its fur set her teeth on edge and she attacked it savagely, then stopped suddenly as if her attention had wandered or returned to something of importance which she had forgotten. She left the mink and set a course across the fields toward the pike road.

  The rain had plastered down her fur and she looked very thin and forlorn. She gathered burdock and the curling purple leaves of rabbit weed as she went; a dead stalk of blackberry briar clung to her hind leg. Just short of the road she stopped, shivered her loose skin, ears flat against her head. She squalled once, hugging the ground with her belly, eyes turned upward at the colorless sky, the endless pelting rain.

  On the afternoon of the third day the rain slacked and through the high pall of faint gray, blades of light swung like far beacons, cutting slowly the wisped cloud edges, lace-tatter or swirl of sea mist. Dark fell early, and later as he lay quilted and awake in his black loft the rainless silence of the roof seemed to measure time, something lying in wait. He had already decided to go to the creek in the morning. The water might even have fallen some.

  So it was the morning of the fourth day before he went to his traps again, passing the pond and skirting the lower end where it flared out into the field with the weeds standing in the water like rice, then down along the limestone ledges, past the hail-shattered floats of water lilies, shoals of new green leaves, on across the field and out to the road.

  Before he came to the bridge he left the road, turned down a steep bank and crossed a fence, following a mud path until he came out on the creek bank. It had not fallen any. Troughs of clayey water rocked through the shallow field on the far side, seething in the matted honeysuckle, the tops of milkweeds and willow shoots quivering in the pull of it. The creek itself was a roily misshapen flume more like solid earth in motion than any liquid, cutting past him, each dip and riffle, eddy, glide, uncurling rope coil fixed and changeless and only the slight oily tremor of the water and the rush of noise testifying to motion at all. Unless a limb or stick came down, or here: a fluted belt of water curling upward in a long scoop like a snarled lip broken suddenly by a tree branch lashing out of the perfect opacity of it, rapid and deft as a snake striking, subsiding again and invisible with no ring or ripple to trace it by. He sat down for a few minutes and watched it all. A kingfisher came up the creek, tacking back and forth, saw the boy and flared, veered away over the watery fields trailing in the morning quiet his high staccato call.

  He got up and started along the path over the shelf of woods between the creek and the mountain, by hickories feathered in mist, by cottonwoods still coldly skeletal for all the new green of the spring. He began to climb, his approach forewarned by the patter of nut hulls, a dipping branch, scrabble of small feet on bark. He crossed the spine of the ridge and started down, seeing the horseshoe bend of the creek below him distended with blisters of brown water spread out into the fields, down the slope to the creek again—a shortcut he took, who measured only horizontal travel.

  He couldn’t find it. The creek was none that he had ever seen before, and when he turned his back to it at what looked like a place he knew he was surprised to see a draw, a fence-corner, a stand of locust oddly mis-located. He passed the place and came back. He had been too far down. He hurried along upstream for another fifty yards and then stopped short. The rock where his trap had been was submerged, but a dome of water rose over it and now he saw the wire reaching up to the sapling on the opposite bank. Just above he
re the creek narrowed—it was the place where he usually crossed on a long and mossy pier of stone, that too lost now beneath the floodwaters. In the narrows the current leaped in a slick chute, plummeted into the pool below, churning a chocolate-dark foam and spreading again, a hissing sheet of flecks and bubbles, small twigs, bark and debris. A naked and swollen young bird turned up its round white belly briefly, rolled and folded into the thick brown liquid like a slowly closing eye. And below the rock something roiled darkly to the surface, sank again, as if struggling with some unseen assailant. He watched. A moment later it flared again and he could make it out better, the hair floating undulant as black grass wracked in the eddies. He looked along the bank until he found a stick, came back and leaned on tiptoes out over the water, poking. He found the ledge of rock, tested along it with his stick and then stepped out, panicky for a moment as his foot sank. Then he was straddle-legged with one foot on the bank and the other in the creek, the water boiling between his legs, ribboning high on his calf. He got the other foot down and turned, carefully, facing upstream, standing with the thin brown wings of water flying over his shins with a slicing sound, standing so in an illusion of fantastic motion. He worked his way crabwise to within a yard of the other bank, to the channel where the rocks terminated, launched out wildly across the remaining stretch of water. He went in nearly to his waist, his feet chopping rapidly at the slick and steep-pitched mud, flailing mightily with his stick before he could get a proper foothold. Then he was across, pulling himself up the bank by what roots or weeds would hold his weight, cold and mud-slavered.

  He hobbled down to where the sapling was and slid down the bank to it, catching himself with one foot against the slender trunk, took hold of the wire and undid it, the wire humming electrically in his hand, took a good grip on it and climbed the bank again pulling it after him. When he got to the top and turned around he could see his catch floating in the grass and even before he pulled it up to him he could see the white places on it like hanging leeches. Then he had it in his hand, feeling the fur gritty with mud, the cusped bone-end jutting from the foreleg wrecked between the jaws of the trap, the white bib smeared with clay and the fine yellow teeth bared in a fierce grin. And turning it slowly in his hand, studying dumbly the clean ugly slits, white and livid. Wounds, but like naked eyelids or dead mouths gaping.