The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  He took it from the trap and put it in his pocket, wound the wire around the trap and put that in the other pocket. The sun was well up, but already the promised light was drowned in a sweep of wet clouds rolling and building darkly to the southeast. He did not recross the creek but headed out into the field. Before he reached the woods the first drops of rain had already spattered his shoulder. When he got to the road it was black and slick with water and he hunched his shoulders forward against the mounting downpour, shivering a little. Sheets of spray gusted over the smoking road and over the swamped land—the houses standing bleak and gray—a final desolation seemed to come, as if on the tail of the earth’s last winter a well of water were rising slowly up through the very universe itself.

  It had been raining for six days steady when Marion Sylder finally left the house. He came down the drive sideways, slewing sheets of mud from under the cavorting wheels, got straightened out on the road and drove to the forks. A small pond had formed in front of the store and customers were obliged to tread a plankwalk to get to the porch. The rain had settled into a patient drizzle and the people of Red Branch sat around their stoves, looked out from time to time at the gray wet country and shook their heads. Sylder backed his car up to the gas pump and got out, sloshing the mud from his boots in the puddle, waded to the porch and went in. There was a mesh of welding rod over the front windows now and he smiled a little at that.

  Mr Eller looked up from his chair by the meat block. Well, he said, ain’t seen you for a while. Bring some money with ye?

  Sylder ignored that. Gas, he said. Where’s the keys?

  Mr Eller sighed and rose from his chair, went to the cash register, rang open the drawer, handed the keys across the counter.

  Hope you don’t keer to wade, he said.

  Sylder took the keys and went out to the pump. He unlocked it and began cranking the lever, pumping gas up into the glass bowl at the top of the rusty orange tank. When he had it full he unscrewed the cap from the fender, let in the hose and depressed the lever. The gas in the bowl surged and bubbled, sluiced into the tank of the car. After the bowl emptied it remained beaded on the inside, a greasy look to it. Sylder didn’t notice. He re-hung the hose and locked the pump, waded back to the porch and inside to give the keys to Mr Eller. A loosed box of kittens came tottering aimlessly over the floor, rocking on their stub legs and mewling. Their eyes were closed and festered with mucus as if they might have been struck simultaneously with some biblical blight.

  Them’s the nastiest-lookin cats I ever did see, Sylder said.

  That’s what Mrs Fenner said, droned the storekeeper. Young Puiliam told her she ought to see the ones back in the back propped up with sticks. He picked the keys up off the counter and rang them back in the cash drawer again.

  Put it on the bill, Sylder said.

  Seems like they ought to be a handsign for that, Mr Eller said. Like for Howdy or we’ll see ye. Save a lot of talk in here.

  If I had your money I’d retire for life.

  It’d pay about the same.

  Sure it would, Sylder said.

  Seems to me like, Mr Eller began …

  Never mind, Sylder said. I got to get on. Poor folks don’t have time to stand around jawin all day.

  He waved and went out, stopped at the door a minute and looked back. Say, he called.

  What’s that?

  A Christian’d of drownded em.

  What’s that? Mr Eller asked again.

  Leaning in the door and grinning Sylder pointed at the kittens bobbing over the floor like blown lint.

  Mr Eller shooed his hand at him and he left.

  The storekeeper drummed his nails on the marble ledge of the cash register for a minute. Then he turned and went back to his chair. He had been resting for only a short time when the clock among the canned goods began a laborious unwinding sound as if about to expire violently in a jangle of wheels and leaping springs, stopped, tolled off four doomlike gongs evocative of some oriental call to temple, then hushed altogether.

  Mr Eller stirred from his chair, went to the clock and wound it with a key hanging down from a string. It made a loud ratcheting noise. Then he seized it from the shelf and slammed it back. It set up once more a low wooden ticking.

  One of the cats had wandered behind the meat block and on his return to the chair he stepped over it carefully. It went by in a drunken reel, caromed off the meat case, continued. Lost, they wandered about the floor, passing and repassing each other, unseeing. One staggered past a coffecan set next the stove, slipped, fell in the puddle of tobacco spittle surrounding it. He struggled to his feet again, back and side brown-slimed and sticky, tottered across to the wall where he stood with blind and suppurant eyes and offered up to the world his thin wails.

  Mr Eller dozed and his head rocked in small increments down his shoulder, onto his chest. After a while a little girl in a thin and dirty dress came through the door behind the counter and gathered up all the kittens, now wailing louder and in broken chorus, carried them out again, talking to them in low remonstrances.

  Mr Eller dozed, the clock ticked. The flypaper revolved in slow spirals. The wind had come up again and the rainwater blown from the trees pattered across the tin roof of the store, muffled and distant-sounding through the wallboard ceiling.

  Sylder closed the gate behind him and started up the orchard road. It was guttered and channeled and sluices of water still seeped along the myriad mud deltas that filled the flats between the inclines. The car slewed giddily on the turns, bogged finally to a frantic stop skittering quarterwise like a nervous horse and the rear wheels unwinding thick ropes of mud that broke and shot precipitately across the low hem of brush and on into the woods where they slapped up against the trees with a sound oddly hollow. Sylder cut the motor and stepped out into the bright mud. It was a quarter mile to the turnaround and he started straightaway, his leather boots sucking.

  There were apples on the trees the size of a thumbnail and green with a lucent and fiery green, deathly green as the bellies of bottleflies. He plucked one down in passing and bit into it … venomously bitter, drew his mouth like a persimmon. If green apples made you sick, Sylder reflected, he would have been dead long ago. Most people he knew could eat them. Didn’t take poison ivy either. The boy John Wesley, he was bad about poison ivy. Bad blood.

  It took him until dark to get done, joggling the cases two at a time back down the road, nine trips in all. When he had stacked the last two cases in the turtle he locked it and opening the door of the car sat down and took off his boots, shapeless with mud, and stood them on the floor just behind the front seat.

  He got the car rocked loose and then had to back down for almost half a mile before he could find a place that looked wide and solid enough to turn around in. By the time he got out on the pike a wind had come up and small spits of rain were breaking on the glass. He propped his left sock foot on the handbrake and drove leisurely down the mountain.

  The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes: the shapeless splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.

  Sylder’s motor spat and jerked, caught again for a handful of revolutions, died with a spastic sucking noise. He let in the clutch and coasted for a minute, engaged it again. The motor bucked and the car shuddered violently and came to a stop.

  He sat at the wheel of the motionless car for a minute or two before he tried the starter. It cranked cheerfully, caught and sputtered once or twice without ever running. He flipped the switch off, reached a flashlight from the glove compartment, took a deep breath and surged wildly out into the rain. Waist-deep in the engine compartment with the upturned hood sheltering
him like the maw of some benevolent monster he checked the wiring, the throttle linkages. Then he removed the float-bowl from the fuel pump, held the flashlight up to the glass and looked at it. The liquid in it was a pale yellow. He poured it out and replaced the bowl, dropped the hood and got back in the car. He had to crank the engine for some time before the bowl filled again and then the motor caught and he engaged the gears. He drove along cautiously, listening. The streetlamps passed bleary whorls along the window; there was no more traffic Before he got to the end of the bridge the motor rattled and died again.

  The old man awoke to darkness and water running, trickling and coursing beneath the leaves, and the rain very soft and very steady. The hound was lying with its head on crossed forepaws watching him. He reached out one hand and touched it and the dog rose clumsily and sniffed at his hand.

  The wind had died and the night woods in their faintly breathing quietude held no sound but the kind rainfall, track of waterbeads on a branch—their measured fall in a leaf-pool. With grass in his mouth the old man sat up and peered about him, heard the rain mendicant-voiced, soft chanting in that dark gramarye that summons the earth to bridehood.

  They came three times for the old man. At first it was just the Sheriff and Gifford. They were one foot up the porch steps when he swung the door open and threw down on them and they could see the mule ears of the old shotgun laid back viciously along the locks. They turned and went back down the yard, not saying anything or even looking back, and the old man closed the door behind them.

  The second time they pulled up in the curve of the road with three deputies and a county officer. The old man watched them from his window darting and skulking among the bushes, slipping from tree to tree like boys playing Indians. After a while when everyone was set the Sheriff called from his place under the bank of the road.

  Come out with your hands up, Ownby. We got you surrounded.

  The old man never even turned his head. He was in the kitchen with the shotgun propped over the back of the chair and he was watching one of the deputies hunkered up under a lilac bush in the west corner of the lot. The old man kept watching him and then the Sheriff called out again for him to surrender and somebody shot out a window-glass in the front room so he didn’t wait any more but pulled the stock in against his cheek and cut down on the deputy. The man came up out of the bushes like a rabbit and hopped away toward the road with a curious loping gait, holding the side of his leg. He’d expected the man to yell and he didn’t, but then the old man remembered that he hadn’t yelled either.

  The kitchen glass exploded in on him then and he got behind the stove. There was a cannonade of shots from the woods and he sat there on the floor listening to it and to the spat spat of the bullets passing through the house. Little blooms of yellow wood kept popping out on the planks and almost simultaneously would be the sound of the bullet in the boards on the other side of the room. They did not whine as they passed through. The old man sat very still on the floor. One shot struck the stove behind him and leaped off with an angry spang, taking the glass out of the table lamp. It was like being in a room full of invisible and malevolent spirits.

  He had the shotgun across his knees, broken, still holding the empty shell in his hand. The firing died in a few minutes and he crawled along the cupboard and got his shells off the table and came back and reloaded the empty chamber. Then he rolled a cigarette. He could hear them calling to one another. Someone wanted to know if anyone was hurt. Then the Sheriff told them to hold up a minute, that the old bastard hadn’t shot since the first time, and hollered loud, as if a person couldn’t hear him anyway, wanting to know if Ownby was ready to come out now.

  The old man lit his cigarette and took a deep pull. Outside all was silence.

  Ownby, the Sheriff called, come out if you’re able.

  There was more silence and finally he heard some voices and after that they fired a few more rounds. The stick propping up the glassless window leaped out on the floor and the window dropped shut. He could hear the bits of lead hopping about in the front room, chopping up the furniture and scuttling off through the walls and rafters like vermin.

  They stopped and the Sheriff was talking again. Spread out, he was saying. Keep under cover as much as you can and remember, everybody goes together.

  That didn’t make much sense to the old man. He pulled twice more on his cigarette and put it out and crawled under the stove. Through a split board he could see them coming, looking squat above the grass from his low position. Two deputies were moving down from the south end with drawn pistols. One of them was dressed in khakis and looked like an A T U agent. The old man marked their position, wiggled back out from under the stove, riposted to the window and shot them both in quick succession, aiming low. Then he ducked back to his stove, broke the shotgun, extracted the shells and reloaded. No sound from outside. The Sheriff did not call again and after a while when he heard the cars starting he got up and went to the front room to see what they’d shot up.

  Toward late afternoon it began to rain again but the old man couldn’t wait any longer. Black clouds were moving over the mountain, shading the sharp green of it, and in the coombs horsetails of mist clung or lifted under the wind to lace and curl wistfully, break and trail across the lower slopes. A yellowhammer crossed the yard to his high hole in the jagged top of a lightning-wrecked pine, under-wings dipping bright chrome.

  The old man carried out the last of his things and piled them on the sledge, buckled them down with the harness straps he had nailed under the sides. He went back in one more time and looked around. Some last thing he could save. He came out at length with a small hooked rug, shook the dust from it and put it over the top of the sledge. He took up the rope and pulled the sledge to the road and called for Scout. The old dog came from under the porch, peering with blue rheumy eyes at his indistinct world of shapes. The old man called again and the dog started for the road, hobbling stiffly, and they set out together, south along the road, until they were faint and pale shapes in the rain.

  So when they came for the old man the third time he was not there. They lobbed teargas bombs through the windows and stormed the ruined house from three sides and the house jerked and quivered visibly under their gunfire. A county officer was wounded in the neck. He sat on the muddy ground with the blood running down his shirtfront, crying, and calling out to the others to Get the dirty son of a bitch. When they came back out of the house no one would look at him. Finally the Sheriff and another man came to where he was and helped him up and took him to the car.

  No, the Sheriff said. He got away.

  Got away? How could he get away. The man asked two or three times but the Sheriff just shook his head and after that the man didn’t ask any more. They left in a spray of mud, four cars of them, with sirens going.

  When the old man came out upon the railroad the rain had moved off the mountain and in the last light under the brim of the clouds he could see the long sharp ridges like lean burning hounds racing down the land to the land’s end westward, hard upon the veering sun. He turned his back to them, going east on the railbed, the sledge rocking over the moidering ties. It was still raining and dark was coming on fast. From time to time he stopped to check his load and cinch the harness straps up. For two hours he followed the tracks, down out of the darkening fields through cuts where night fell on the high banks and fell upon the honeysuckle drawing shadow forms there, grotesques, shapes of creatures mythical or extinct and silently noting his passage. The old man bent east along the tracks, leaning into the rope, into the rich purple dusk.

  By full dark he had left the tracks and turned into the woods to the south, feeling out the path with his feet, shivering a little now in his wet clothes. They came past the old quarry, the tiered and graceless monoliths of rock alienated up out of the earth and blasted into ponderous symmetry, leaning, their fluted faces pale and recumbent among the trees, like old temple ruins. They went silently along over the trace of the quarry roa
d, the sledge whispering, the gaunt dog padding, past the quarryhole with its vaporous green waters and into the woods again, the limestone white against the dark earth, a populace of monstrous slugs dormant in a carbon forest. Groups of trees turned slowly like masted carousels, blending shadows and parting in darkness and wonder. The rain stopped falling. They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship’s wake.

  Morning found them on the south slope of Chilhowee Mountain, the dog buckled down on top of the sledge now and the old man pulling them tree by tree up the steep and final rise. From his high place on the slope he could see the first strawcolored light sourceless beyond the earth’s curve, the horizon warped in a glaucous haze. An hour later and they had gained the crest of the mountain and stood in a field of broom sedge bright as wheat, treeless but for a broken chestnut the color of stone.

  The sun was up by then and the old man rested, leaning against the tree. After a while he fell asleep, the sledge’s painter still wrapped in his blistered hand. The dog stretched out in the sun too, wrinkling his ragged hide at the flies. Far below them shades of cloud moved up the valley floor like water flowing, darkened the quilted purlieus, moved on, the brushed land gone green and umber once again. The clouds broke against the mountain, coral-edged and bent to the blue curve of the sky. A butterfly struggled, down through shells of light, down to the gold and seagreen tree tips …