The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  I wonder if you would mind, she said, wrinkling her nose and poking a squeamish finger at the little bird, mind putting it back in the bag for me. He did. Holding the slip of paper delicately in one hand and waving the ink to dry he went to collect his bounty.

  He left through the open door with the wind hollowing through into the hall and skirmishing with the papers on the bulletin board, warm wind of the summer forenoon fused with a scent of buckeyes, swirling chains of soot about on the stone steps. He held the dollar in his hand, folded neatly twice. When he got outside he took it and folded it again, making a square of it, and thrust it down between the copper rivets into the watchpocket of his overall pants. He patted it flat and went down the walk past the grimy trees, the monuments, the poised and interminably peering statue, and out to the street.

  A band was playing, wavering on the heat of the city strains of old hymns martial and distantly strident. Rows of cars were herded in shimmering somnolence beneath a vapor of exhaust fumes and at the intersection stood a policeman at parade rest.

  He crossed the street and the music came suddenly louder as if a door had opened somewhere. When he got to the corner he could see them coming, eight and ten abreast, a solemn phalanx of worn maroon, the drill-cloth seedy and polished even at that distance, and their instruments glinting dully in the sun. In a little knot to the fore marched the leader, tall-hatted and batoned, and the four guidons bracing up their masts, the colors furling listlessly. A pair of tubas in the mass behind them bobbed and rode like balloons, leaped ludicrously above the marchers’ heads and belched their frog-notes in off-counterpoint to the gasping rattle of the other instruments. Behind the marchers came a slowly wending caravan of buses through the windows of which flocks of pennants waved and fluttered.

  He watched, gathered up and pressed in the crowd, the people sweating in their thin summer clothes, a maze of shapes and colors similar only in the dark patches under their armpits, straining their necks, toe-standing, holding up children. The marchers passed them under the canopy of heat, sweaty and desperate-looking. He saw the near tuba player redfaced and wild as if perhaps he were obliged to puff at his instrument to keep it from deflating and drooping down over the heads of his fellows. They passed in an enormous shudder of sound and the buses came, laborious in low gear, churning out balls of hazy blue smoke, their windows alive with streamers, pennants, placards, small faces. Long paper banners ran the length of the buses proclaiming for Christ in tall red letters, and for sobriety, offering to vote against the devil when and wherever he ran for office. One by one they passed and again the multicolored flags in small children’s hands waving at the spectators who in turn mopped listlessly at their necks and faces with handkerchiefs. A blue and yellow card legended: Don’t Make My Daddy a Drunkard fell to the street like a stricken bird, leaving an empty hand clutching at the window. The next bus splintered and ground the flagstem and printed tiretreads over the sign.

  Then the music stopped abruptly and there was only the uneasy shifting of the crowd, the slow drone of the buses. The pennants and signs came gradually to rest, to a collective embarrassment as if someone had died and they went on that way until the last bus was by, the little faces looking out solemn as refugees, onto the bridge and so out of the city. The crowds ebbed into the streets and thinned and the traffic began, the cars moving and the streetcars clicking past.

  He was still standing on the sidewalk and now he saw the city, steamed and weaving in heat, and rising above the new facings of glass and tile the bare outlandish buildings, towering columns of brick adorned with fantastic motley; arches, lintels, fluted and arabesque, flowered columns and crowstepped gables, bay windows over corbels carved in shapes of feet, heads of nameless animals, Pompeian figures … here and there, gargoyled and crocketed, wreathed dates commemorating the perpetration of the structure. Rows of pigeons dozed on the high ledges and the heat rose in visible waves up from the paving. He patted the folded dollar again and started up Gay Street. When he got to the Strand he stopped and studied the pictures advertising the Saturday serial and fingered the quarter. Then he turned left and went up to Market Square. On the corner a man was screaming incoherently and brandishing a tattered Bible. Next him stood an old woman strapped into an accordion, mute and patient as a draft horse. He crossed the street behind the half-circle of spectators. The man stopped screaming and the accordion began and they sang, the two voices hoarse and high-pitched rising in a sad quaver to the calliope-like creaking of the instrument.

  He went up the far side of the square under the shadow of the market house past brown country faces peering from among their carts and trucks, perched on crates, old women with faces like dried fruit set deep in their hooded bonnets, shaggy, striated and hooktoothed as coconut carvings, shabby backlanders trafficking in the wares of the earth, higgling their goods from a long row of ancient vehicles backed obliquely against the curb and freighted with fruits and vegetables, eggs and berries, honey in jars and boxes of nuts, bundles of roots and herbs from sassafras to boneset, a bordello of potted plants and flowers. By shoe windows where shoddy foot-gear rose in dusty tiers and clothing stores in whose vestibules iron racks stood packed with used coats, past bins of socks and stockings, a meat market where hams and ribcages dangled like gibbeted miscreants and in the glass cases square porcelain trays piled with meat white-spotted and trichinella-ridden, chunks of liver the color of clay tottering up from moats of watery blood, a tray of brains, unidentifiable gobbets of flesh scattered here and there.

  Among overalled men and blind men and amputees on roller carts or crutches, flour and feed bags piled on the walk and pencil pedlars holding out their tireless arms, past stalls and cribs and holes-in-the-wall vending tobacco in cut or plug, leaf or bag, and snuff, sweet or scotch, in little tins, pipes and lighters and an esotery of small items down to pornographic picture books. Past cafés reeking with burned coffee, an effluvium of frying meat, an indistinguishable medley of smells.

  Under the Crystal’s marquee of lightbulbs a group of country men stood gazing hard past the box office where a tired-looking woman sat beneath a sign: Adults 25—Children 11—watching the film through a missing panel of curtain. Sounds of hooves and gunfire issued onto the street. He couldn’t see past or over them and went on by, up the square, until he stood before a window garnished with shapes of wood and metal among which he recognized only a few common handtools. He held his hand up to one eye to break the glare of light on the glass and he could see them in the dim interior, hanging from their nail on the wall. He checked the dollar and went in. His footfalls were muffled on the dark oiled floors, bearing him into an atmosphere heavy with smells of leather and iron, machine-oil, seed, beneath strange objects hung from hooks in the ceiling, past barrels of nails, to the counter. They were hanging down by their chains and looking fierce and ancient among the trace chains and harness, bucksaws and axehelves. A clerk passed behind the counter and waited on a man idly turning a brass doorknob in his hand. Together they disappeared, into the gloom, ducking under a fringe of dangling strap leather, to the rear of the store. A few minutes later a gray haired man came up the aisle and leaned on the counter looking down at him.

  Can I hep ye, son? he said.

  How much are they? He motioned vaguely past the man as if there were but one item of merchandise displayed there. The traps … your traps there.

  The man turned. Traps? Steel traps.

  Yessir.

  Well, he said, let’s see … what size?

  Them. He pointed. Number ones.

  The man studied the dull metal shapes as if aware for the first time of their existence, seemingly puzzled not over their price but as to how they came to be there in the first place. Then he said, Yes. And lifted one down and set it on the counter before the boy at a quarter-angle, straightening the chain, as one might show a watch or a piece of jewelry.

  The boy touched the oiled smoothness of it, pan, trigger, jaws, spring. How much? he asked again.
r />   Thirty cents.

  Thirty cents, the boy repeated.

  Lessen you buy by the dozen. They’re three dollars the dozen.

  The boy turned that over in his mind. That would make em twenty-five then, wouldn’t it?

  Well, the man said, twelve and three … four for a dollar … is right, twenty-five cents is right.

  Well, he said, I aim to get a dozen but I cain’t get all of em together at the same time. So I wonder if I couldn’t get four of em today and then get the rest later on …?

  The man looked at him for a minute and then he smiled. Why I reckon, you could, he said. Course you’d have to sign a pledge for the whole dozen so as for me to let you have the four at the dozen price.

  The boy nodded.

  He reached up and unhooked three more traps and put them on the counter, their chains rattling angrily, reached under the cash register and came up with a book of old order forms. He wrote in it for a while and then tore off two copies and handed one to the boy. Sign that, he said. He was holding out the pen.

  The boy took it and started to write.

  Better read it first, the man cautioned.

  He read it, ciphering out the tall thin handwriting:

  I, the undersigned, do hereby agree to purchase 8 (eight) Victor no. 1 traps from the Farm & Home Supply Store prior to Jan. 1, 1941. Price to be @ 25 cents ea.

  Signed……………

  signed his name to the bottom and handed back the pen.

  The man took the signed paper and handed him the other one, the carbon. Thisn’s your copy, he told him. The boy took it and folded it, then took the dollar from his watchpocket and smoothed it on the counter. The man took the dollar and rang it up in the register. Wait till I get you a poke, he said.

  He pulled a sheet of brown paper from a roll and wrapped the traps in it and tied them with string. The boy took the package, hefting the weight of it in his hands. I’ll be back to get the othern’s afore long, he told the man.

  Then he was gone, out into the blinding sunshine among the high-shouldered crowds, sped and well-wished by an old man’s smile.

  They were still tied up in the brown paper and wedged in back of the rafter. On the morning of the fifteenth of November he got up early and crossed the icy floor of the loft, reached in and pulled them out and went back and sat in bed, feeling the shape of them through the dusty paper. Then he undid the string and dumped them out on the blanket. He set them one by one and touched them off with his thumb under the lower jaw and they leaped in his hand and rang shut viciously. After a while he hung them on a nail over the bed and went down to breakfast.

  He was at the creek all that day wading in the steely water, poking among the dried honeysuckles, noting tracks and droppings, slides and dens. One sleeve was wet past the elbow where he had reached to feel an underwater hole and his toes were numb in the leaky kneeboots. By the time he got home he was chilled and shaking but he had his four sets laid.

  When he left the house the next morning, quietly out through the lean-to, letting the door back softly, light was just coming low in the east, breaking along the gray ridges, and a cold rim of moon still hung over the mountain. The oaks were black and stark and the leaves in the yard were frosted and snapped under his feet with thin glassy sounds. He cut straight through the woods to Saunders’ field, hoary and pale in the hazy cold of that first light, the dead grass sheathed in ice like slender bones, rock shoals lapped in mist and crows ambling stiff-legged on the far side where willows marked the creek’s course. He crossed the fence, the icy wire in the web of his thumb like a cut. The crows skulked off on hooked wings to a clump of gray cedars. He quartered across the field, crossed another fence, near to the creek now, under the mountain, past the slain corn in hushed and battered flanks where doves had fed till late. Already he could hear the riffle and purl of the water and then he was out on the high bank where the slide went down—a slash of packed clay casehardened with frost and pressed with the scrabble-marks of muskrats—and below in the water his trap lying in wait still. He went on up the creek, crossed a shelf of limestone where periwinkles crowded and watercress swayed in the current. In a honeysuckle tunnel reeds and grasses were tramped down and a tangled sheaf of white weed stalks floated over his second trap. The other two were close together just below the pike bridge and there were no sleek muskrats in them either. The creek clattered down through green stone grottoes, over the rocks, curling, eddying under the white roots of cottonwoods where crawfish peered out with stemmed eyes. And the sun running red on the mountain, high killy and stoop of a kestrel hunting, morning spiders at their crewelwork. But no muskrats struggled in his sets.

  After five mornings he pulled one trap and carried it to the bridge. There were fresh tracks on a siltbar there and he set his trap in the shallow water where they came and went. Two mornings later the trap was pulled out in the creek and there was a toenail clamped in the underside of the jaws. He reset it and was at the creek an hour before daylight in the morning with a flashlight.

  Light pale as milk guided the old man’s steps over the field to the creek and then to the mountain, stepping into the black wall of pine-shadows and climbing up the lower slopes out into the hardwoods, bearded hickories trailing grapevines, oaks and crooked waterless cottonwoods, a quarter mile from the creek now, past the white chopped butt of a bee tree lately felled, past the little hooked Indian tree and passing silent and catlike up the mountain in the darkness under latticed leaves scudding against the sky in some small wind. Light saw him through the thick summer ivy and over windfalls and limestone. Past the sink where on a high bluff among trilobites and fishbones, shells of ossified crustaceans from an ancient sea, a great stone tusk jutted.

  The old man kept to a steep path off to the right and came through the last thick brush to the mountain road, breathing heavily. He stopped there to lean on his cane and the first slant light of moon topped the mountain on the far side so that the crest of it was washed in a watery silver and the dust of the road shone like mica. A half mile to his left was the circle at the end of the road and beyond that the fence and the installation. The road to the spray-pit was but a few yards to the right of where he stood in the road now, hearing his breath soar out in the silence. He looked as one peering from vast heights, the sky seeming to lie below him in a measureless spread, flickering like foil by half-light and gleaming lamely into shadow where it folded to the trees.

  Years back on summer nights he used to walk with neighbor boys two miles to the store to buy candy and cigars. They would come back over the warm and deserted roads talking and smoking the cigars. One night taking a shortcut they passed a house and saw through one window a woman undressing for bed. The others had gone back for a second look but he would not go and they laughed at him. The old man remembered it now with dim regret, and remembered such nights when the air was warm as a breath and the moon no dead thing. He started down the road to the orchard path and to the pit for this second look.

  The moon was higher now as he came past the stand of bullbriers into the orchard, the blackened limbs of the trees falling flatly as paper across the path and the red puddle of moon moving as he moved, sliding sodden and glob-like from limb to limb, fatly surreptitious, watching as he watched. His feet moved ahead of him, disembodied and unfamiliar, floating through the banded shadows, and the limecolored grass swished and folded, breaking to light-shivered undersides like glass splintering softly, catching the pale light and then rushing to darkness. Excepting the counterpoint of crickets there was no other sound.

  Where the road curved to bring into view the clearing, the dim outline of the pit, the old man paused. The glade seemed invested with an aura of antiquity, overhung with a silence both spectral and reverent. He could feel something cold rising up in him and was almost of a mind to turn back. Taking a little tighter grip upon his cane he stood so for a while, then stepped into the clearing and came to the edge of the pit, ushering his own presence forward like a child to th
e pale gray lip of concrete stretched in the grass like a fallen monument, stepped up on it and looked into the black square of the pit incised geometrically into the earth.

  The old man had visited here in the years past but never by night. Each winter he came and cut a cedar to serve for wreath and covering, the waxed and ciliate sprigs holding their green well into the spring before the heat blasted them and even then they held their shape, like reproductions in dull copper. It took a year’s weather to fret them into the aromatic humus which steeped in what rainwater the pit held and so rendered in turn a tannic liquor dark as pitchblende by which the old man fancied had long been stained the wormscored bones that lay here. These things he observed, for he was a watcher of the seasons and their work. By the coming Christmas he would have cut the seventh cedar and with this he felt might come an end to his long deadwatch.

  So he stood, looking down, and now he thought it less eerie than he had supposed, the half-darkness about him almost sheltering. Seeing that the range of his visibility extended at least partially into the pit he even sat down on the concrete edge and dangled his feet. He tugged a pipe from the folds of his overalls, filled it from a small sack of tobacco and lit it, puffing deeply, watched the smoke pale against the night by the matchflare. Then he held the match out over the pit and peered down, but he could not see even the rustcolored tips of the cedars and the match burned down to his thumb and he dropped it.

  There was nothing. The dead had risen and gone; no revenant mourned here the unburied remains. Slanting down the near wall was a half square of light and he could see the blotches of moss and fungus on the pale concrete like land-shapes from some ancient atlas. But that was all. Then in the silence there came from the pit a single momentary water-sound, softly, a small, almost tentative slosh.