The Orchard Keeper (1965)
Page 20
Legwater threw out two more piles of ash and sifted them and then when he disappeared into the pit again Gifford could hear him scraping around but not shoveling. He ventured over and peered in. Legwater was on hands and knees, going over the scraped floor of the pit carefully, scratching here and there with the tip of the shovel. Finally he stopped and looked up. The little bastard was lyin, he said. He got it his ownself, the lyin little son of a bitch.
Let’s go, Earl.
His own daddy, the humane officer was saying.
Gifford started toward the road with long disgusted strides. When he got to the apple trees he turned and looked back. Legwater was standing in the pit, just his head showing, staring vacantly.
Well, said the constable.
He kept staring.
Hey! Gifford called.
Legwater turned his head to give him a dumb look, the incredulous and empty expression common to victims of tragedy, disaster and loss.
You want a ride or not?
He pulled himself from the pit and began walking toward the constable, then he was hurrying, loping along, the shovel still in his hand and bouncing behind him. Gifford let him get all the way to him before he sent him back after the shotgun and the camping gear.
They went down the orchard road together, their steps padding in the red dust, the constable swaggering slightly as he did and the humane officer, haggard-looking, his black and sleepless eyes all but smoking, grimly apparitional with the shotgun and the spade dangling one at either side from his gaunt claws. Gifford carried the other’s rucksack and blanket roll with light effort and from time to time he sidled his eyes to study Legwater with pity, or with contempt. Neither spoke until they saw the dog and that was very near to the pike, on the last turn above the gate. They had overtaken it and even in the few minutes in which he was allowed to watch it alive Gifford was struck by its behavior. It was walking in the wheelruts with an exotic delicacy, like a trained dog on a rope, and holding its head so far back, its nose near perpendicular, that Gifford looked up instinctively to see what threat might be materializing out of the sky. The shovel bounced in the road with a dull bong and when he turned it was in time only to see Legwater recoil under the shotgun and to recoil himself as the muzzleblast roared in his ears. He spun and saw the dog lurch forward, still holding up its head, slew sideways and fold up in the dust of the road.
The few small windows were glassless but for a jagged side or corner still wedged in the handmade sashes. The roofshakes lay in windrows on the broad loft floors and this house housed only the winds.
Dervishes of leaves rattled across the yard and in the wind the oaks dipped and creaked, and in the wind even the spavined house hung between the stone chimneys seemed to give a little. The doors stood open and wind scurried in the parlor, riffled the drift leaves on the kitchen floor and stirred the cobwebbed window corners. He did not go to the loft. The lower rooms were dusty and barren and but for some half-familiar rags of clothes altogether strange. He came back into the yard and sat quietly for a while beneath one of the trees. Watched a waterbird skim beneath the shadowline of the mountain, cupped wings catching the slant light of the sun, then holding the wide curve in a wingset sweep low over the trees to the pond, homing to the warm black waters. He watched it down. What caught his ear? The high thin whicker of a feather, a shadow passing, nothing. Light was breaking in thin reefs through the clouds shelved darkly up the west. Old dry leaves rattled frail and withered as old voices, trailed stiffly down, rocking like thinworn shells downward through seawater, or spun, curling ancient parchments on which no message at all appeared.
Young Rattner finished his cigarette and went back out to the road. An aged Negro passed high on the seat of a wagon, dozing to the chop of the half-shod mule-hooves on the buckled asphalt. About him the tall wheels veered and dished in the erratic parabolas of spun coins unspinning as if not attached to the wagon at all but merely rolling there in that quadratic symmetry by pure chance. He crossed the road to give them leeway and they swung by slowly, laboriously, as if under the weight of some singular and unreasonable gravity. The ruined and ragged mule, the wagon, the man … up the road they wobbled, rattle and squeak of the fellies climbing loose over the spokes … shimmered in waves of heat rising from the road, dissolved in a pale and broken image.
He followed along behind, going toward the forks. Once at the top of the hill he paused and looked back and he could see the roof of the house deep-green with moss, or gaping black where patches had caved through. But it was never his house anyway.
Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.
It was like having your name in the paper, he thought, reading the inscription:
MILDRED YEARWOOD RATTNER
1906—1945
If thou afflict them in any wise,
And they cry at all unto me,
I will surely hear their cry.
Exod.
the stone arrogating to itself in these three short years already a gray and timeless aspect, glazed with lichens and nets of small brown runners, the ring of rusted wire leaning awry against it with its stained and crumpled rags of foliage. He reached out and patted the stone softly, a gesture, as if perhaps to conjure up some image, evoke again some allegiance with a name, a place, hallucinated recollections in which faces merged inextricably, and yet true and fixed; touched it, a carved stone less real than the smell of woodsmoke or the taste of an old man’s wine. And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.
His trouser legs were wet and clammy against his ankles. Sitting on the small square of marble he removed one shoe, testing the sock for dampness, resting as any traveler might. From across the tall grass and beyond the ruins of the spiked iron fence came the click of the lightbox at the intersection. A car emerged from the trees at his right and rolled to a stop. There were a man and a woman. She looked at him across the man’s shoulder, then turned to the man. They both looked. The box clicked. He waved to them and the man turned, saw the green light and pulled away, the white oval of the woman’s face still watching him. So he waved again to her just as the car slid from sight behind a hedgerow, the wheels whisking up a fine spray from the road.
He sat there for a while, rubbing his foot abstractedly, whistling softly to himself. To the west a solid sheet of overcast sped the evening on. Already fireflies were about. He put on his shoe and rose and began moving toward the fence, through the wet grass. The workers had gone, leaving behind their wood-dust and chips, the white face of the stump pooling the last light out of the gathering dusk. The sun broke through the final shelf of clouds and bathed for a moment the dripping trees with blood, tinted the stones a diaphanous wash of color, as if the very air had gone to wine. He passed through the gap in the fence, past the torn iron palings and out to the western road, the rain still mizzling softly and the darkening headlands drawing off the day, heraldic, pennoned in flame, the fleeing minions scattering their shadows in the wake of the sun.
They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Books by Cormac McCarthy
The Road
The Sunset Limited (a novel in dramatic form)
No Country for Old Men
Cities of the Plain
The Crossing
All the Pretty Horses
The Stonemason (a play)
The G
ardener’s Son (a screenplay)
Blood Meridian
Suttree
Child of God
Outer Dark
The Orchard Keeper
BOOKS BY CORMAC MCCARTHY
“McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame.”
—The New York Times Book Review
THE ORCHARD KEEPER
Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee between the two world wars, this novel tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. Together with Rattner’s Uncle Ather, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72872-6 (trade)
978-0-307-76250-4 (eBook)
OUTER DARK
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy, whom he leaves in the woods and tells her the baby died of natural causes. Discovering her brother’s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72873-3 (trade)
978-0-307-76249-8 (eBook)
CHILD OF GOD
Child of God is a taut, chilling novel that plumbs the depths of human degradation. Falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man who haunts the hill country of East Tennessee—is released from jail and allowed to roam at will, preying on the population with his strange lusts.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72874-0 (trade)
978-0-307-76248-1 (eBook)
SUTTREE
This is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege to live in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community—a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters—he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73632-5 (trade)
978-0-307-76247-4 (eBook)
THE STONEMASON
The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw. Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken—or dishonored—the family trade, McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76280-5
BLOOD MERIDIAN
This is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72875-7 (trade)
978-0-307-76252-8 (eBook)
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
All the Pretty Horses tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border, Mexico beckons—beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74439-9 (trade)
978-0-307-48130-6 (eBook)
THE CROSSING
In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family’s ranch. Instead of killing it, he takes it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and dreamlike journey into a country where men meet like ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76084-9 (trade)
978-0-307-76246-7 (eBook)
CITIES OF THE PLAIN
It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light, a life they value because they know it is about to change forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74719-2 (trade)
978-0-307-77752-2 (eBook)
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. A good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by dead man. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law can contain.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70667-7 (trade)
978-0-307-39053-0 (eBook)
THE SUNSET LIMITED
A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world-views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men—though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27836-4 (trade)
978-0-307-49812-0 (eBook)
THE ROAD
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-38789-9 (trade)
978-0-307-26745-0 (eBook)
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 1993
Copyright © 1965 by Cormac McCarthy
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States
by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published in hardcover by Random House, Inc.,
New York, in 1965.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCarthy, Cormac, 1933–
The orchard keeper / Cormac McCarthy. — 1st Vintage
International ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76250-4
I. Title.
PS3563.C33707 1993
813′.54—dc20 92–56360
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
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