The Orchard Keeper (1965)

by McCarthy, Cormac

  The old man came awake late in the afternoon and ate some cold cornbread, sharing it with the hound. He did not eat much and the cornbread was enough. Then he started down the mountain, trucking behind him his sorry chattel, picking a course through the small trees and laurel jungles. Some time after midnight he came out on a road and turned south along it, crossed a wooden bridge, a purling clearwater stream, climbed with the road into the mountains again, the sledge drifting easily behind him and the hound plodding.

  The light at the house the old man came to that morning he could see a good while before he got to it. He caught glimpses of it once or twice somewhere on the ridge above him as he was coming through a mountain meadow, a huge pool in the darkness swept with the passing shadows of nightbirds, but he had no way of knowing that the road would take him there. He didn’t see the light again until he topped the hill where the house stood and where a section of road was banded out of the night in a tunnel of carlights. Some men were talking and he could hear the sound of the motor running.

  He kept on, into the light. The voices stopped. The old man looked up at them, two men leaning against the side of the automobile, another seated inside. He didn’t stop. They faded behind the glare of the headlights, reappeared filmily, not moving, watching him. With the lights out of his eyes the old man stopped and nodded to them. Howdy, he said.

  You ain’t lost, are ye?

  Don’t reckon, he said.

  One of them said something. The car eased down the drive, the two men walking alongside. The man in the car leaned out toward him. This road don’t go thew, he said. It jest loops and comes on back.

  How fer is it to the Harrykin? the old man wanted to know.

  The man turned out the lights. The other two had come up now and said Howdy, each in turn. Scout clambered up onto the sledge and eyed them balefully.

  Wants to know how fer is it to the Harrykin, the driver said.

  What fer?

  The other one stepped forward and eyed the old man with bland curiosity, the sledge heaped with his worthless paraphernalia and topped by the prone and wasted hound. You cain’t hardly get there from here, he said. You ort to of come thew Sunshine, crost the river there … it ain’t easy to get to from nowhere but that there’d of been a nigher cut. What you aim to do in there, cut timber?

  No, said the old man. Jest fixin to put up some kind of a piece of a house and kindly settle there.

  In the Harrykin?

  Yessir.

  Where-all you from? the man in the car wanted to know.

  From t’wards Knoxville.

  The man in the car was silent for a minute. Then he said, I’m goin in to Sevierville here in jest a minute. I can carry you that fer if you don’t keer to ride in a old beat-up car such as it is.

  Much obliged, the old man said, but I reckon I’ll jest get on.

  Well, the man said. He turned to the other two. I got to get, myself, he said. We’ll see yins.

  They nodded. You come back. The car eased away, the lights coming on again, rattled out of sight down the road. The old man had the sledge rope in hand and was saying a goodbye to the men.

  You best come on in and have some breakfast with us, one of them said.

  Much obliged, the old man said, but I reckon I’ll jest be gettin on.

  Might as well eat some with us, the other said. We jest fixin to. Well, the old man said. If you-all don’t care.

  The house the old man entered that morning was no shotgun shack but a mountain cabin of squared logs rent deeply with weather-checks and chinked with clay. It was long and saddle-bowed, divided into two rooms of equal size, and at the far end of one a fireplace of river rock, rocks tumbled smooth as eggs, more ancient than the river itself. From a door to the right a woman’s face peered at them furtively as they sat, the taller of the men motioning the old man to a chair cut from a buttertub and padded in hair-worn cowhide. They produced tobacco and papers and passed them to him not ceremoniously but with that deprecatory gesture of humility which country people confer in a look, a lift of the hand. The old man began to feel right homey.

  Say you from t’wards Knoxville? the tall man said.

  Yessir, he answered, taping down the paper of his cigarette.

  I got a sister lives over thataway. Meanest kids I ever seen. Married a boy from Mead’s Quarry—you know where that’s at?

  Shore, the old man said. I come from Red Mountain my ownself. We used to whup Mead’s Quarry boys of a Sunday afternoon jest to keep a hand in.

  The man grinned. That’s what he told me about you-all, he said.

  Then the old man grinned.

  The other one broke in. Don’t reckon you’d keer fer a little drink this early of a mornin?

  Not lessen you fellers is fixin to have one.

  He disappeared through the door into the lean-to and presently came back with a mason jar. Less see if this here is the one I wanted, he said, tilting it, watching the slow-rising chain of beads. He took off the cap and stretched a draught down his lean corded neck, swallowed deep, cocked his head in a listening attitude, then passed the jar to the old man. That’s the one, he said. It’s right good drinkin whiskey.

  The old man accepted the jar and took a good drink. His legs were beginning to feel a little heavy and he lifted first one and then the other, slightly, testing their weight. He raised the jar again, drank and handed it back to the man. Now that’s a right nice little whiskey, he said.

  The two men relayed the jar between them and then it was capped and set on the floor. The shorter man was looking out the tiny window. Gettin daylight, he said.

  He turned to the old man. You get a right early start, don’t ye?

  The old man recrossed his legs, taking a look out himself.

  Well, he said, kindly early, yes.

  You come up from Walland this mornin I reckon?

  No, the old man said, Knoxville.

  I mean on foot, comin up the mountain …

  I come straight acrost, the old man said.

  They looked at each other. The tall one hesitated a moment, then he said: You say you goin to the Harrykin?

  Aim to, the old man said.

  Cain’t say as it seems like much of a place to jest go to, he said. I’ve knowed one or two people at different times what was there and would of give some to of been away from it though. Daddy I remember would leave dogs treed there of a night rather’n go in after em. He said they was places you could walk fer half a mile thout ever settin foot to the ground—jest over laurel hells and down timber, and a rattlesnake to the log … I never been there myself.

  You aimin to stay there long? the other one asked.

  But before the old man could answer that, the woman thrust her face through the door and announced breakfast. Both men rose instantly and started for the kitchen, then paused, remembering the old man still seated with the slow words forming on his lips. They had the uneasy look of boys sneaking to table with dirty hands. The old man stood and walked between them, the shorter one smiling a sort of half-smile and saying: I reckon we jest about forgot how to act, ain’t we?

  Pshaw, said the old man.

  At the foot of the mountain the old man found himself in a broad glade grown thick with rushes, a small stream looping placidly over shallow sands stippled with dace shadows, the six-pointed stars of skating waterspiders drifting like bright frail medusas. He squatted and dipped a palmful of water to his lips, watched the dace drift and shimmer. Scout waded past him, elbow-deep into the stream, lapped at it noisily. Strings of red dirt receded from his balding hocks, marbling in the water like blood. The dace skittered into the channel and a watersnake uncurled from a rock at the far bank and glided down the slight current, no more demonstrative of effort or motion than a flute note.

  The old man drank and then leaned back against the sledge. The glade hummed softly. A woodhen called from the timber on the mountain and to that sound of all summer days of seclusion and peace the old man slept.

&n
bsp; Yessir, the storekeeper said. Yessir, now I believe I do recollect who tis. You some kin of hisn?

  No, the man said. No kin. Jest somethin I got to see him about.

  He was dressed in clean gray chinos and had a neat felt hat tipped back on his head. Huffaker stole a look out the window to where his car was parked at the side of the porch, a plain black Ford, a late model.

  The man saw him look, watched the glint of suspicion narrow the storekeeper’s eyes.

  Well, Huffaker said, I couldn’t tell you offhand where-all you might find him at. He lives up yander somewheres—a random gesture at the brooding hills that cupped in the valley.

  He trade here? the man wanted to know.

  Well, I couldn’t? rightly say he did, nosir. Not regular at all. I ain’t seen him in here but once or twicet and that’s back several week ago. He’s a right funny old feller, don’t have no money at all I don’t reckon.

  What’d he buy then?

  Well, he got him some backer and a sack of corn-meal. Little sidemeat last time he’s in.

  He got credit?

  Well, no. I don’t give out a whole lot of credit. He brings in sang. Ginseng roots. Had some goldenseal too but it ain’t worth a whole lot. I give trade on that.

  Roots?

  Yessir, Huffaker said. I send em off to St. Louis. Same place as I send hides.

  The man looked puzzled but he didn’t ask any more about that.

  You from around here? the storekeeper asked.

  From over t’wards Maryville.

  Oh, Huffaker said. I got kin over there myself.

  He still got that dog?

  Who’s that?

  The old feller … the one …

  Oh. Yessir, did have one with him. A old redbone looked like he’d been drug half to death or warshed in lye one. Didn’t have no hair hardly at all. Right pitiful-lookin, like.

  Well, the man said, you say you don’t know where-all he lives at?

  Nosir, I shore don’t.

  Well, much obliged.

  Yessir. You come back.

  He did. He came every day for seven days.

  He was there next morning early among the un-churched Sunday idlers, hovering on the edge of the circle they formed about the fireless stove, their conviviality so broken by his presence that they took on the look of refugees grimly awaiting bulletins of some current disaster, the news of flood or fire or plague. From time to time he got a drink from the box and stood sipping it, hand on hip, gazing up at the phantasmagoria of merchandise hung about the ceiling beams. Or peered solemnly out the window, beyond the river and the narrow bridge to where a broad green hollow rose and rose into the mountains.

  Monday when Huffaker came down he was not there yet but half an hour later when he went out to unlock the gas pump the car was parked on the gravel ramp approaching the store and the man was perched upon the fender in the same creased and tireless clothes sipping coffee from a paper cup. The sun was coming up behind him and to the west fog was breaking, lifting off the slopes to leave the laurel balds burning with the fierce green light of morning. The man was watching again, the peaks across the river, as if with those slategray eyes he might mark out an old man and a hound somewhere on the face of a mountain not less than four miles distant.

  When Huffaker let the door to, the man turned. He lifted a palm in greeting and the man nodded. He went down to the pump and undid the lock.

  Looks like another purty day, don’t it? he called.

  Does at that, the man said. He drained the coffee and pitched the cup away, got down from the fender and took a few steps up and down the gravel, stretching himself. Huffaker returned to the store.

  Around eleven o’clock he came in, nodding once again to the proprietor. He bought a box of soda crackers and some cheese, looked for a long time at the cake rack and finally took a moonpie. He laid his lunch on the counter and Huffaker began to total it laboriously on a scratch pad, adding the figures aloud.

  And a quart of sweet milk, the man said.

  He put that down, then went to the cooler and brought back the milk in a quart mason jar. The man looked at it, turned it around on the counter.

  That’s Mrs Walker’s milk, he reassured the man. It’s good as ever you drunk, garntee ye.

  The man nodded and pulled a clip of bills from his pocket.

  Forty-five cents, Huffaker said.

  He paid it and went out on the porch where he sat back against a post and ate his lunch. After he had finished he squatted there a long time smoking cigarettes. Then he brought the jar back inside and set it on the counter. Huffaker took it out again and washed it under the tap at the side of the building. Some customers were coming up toward the store and he waved at them and went in.

  Later on in the afternoon the man came in again and drank a Coca-Cola. Before he went back out to his car he asked Huffaker what time it was that the old man usually came in.

  The old feller?

  The one I was astin you about.

  Oh. Well, times he come in it was genly of a mornin. But then he don’t come regular enough for me to say when a feller be most likely to expect him.

  Light gained on the high peaks and in the dawn quiet first birdcalls fell like water on stone. In the wood mists like old gray spirits paled and scattered, by moss coverlets the dark earth stirred and nightfurled wild-flowers unbent their withered fronds all down the path where came the derelict hound shambling along in an aureole of its own incredibility, the old man picking his steps over the schist and quartz chines, his hex-cane bobbing lightly on his shoulder, carrying a limp and greasy paper bag of the curious twisted roots with which he bartered. They crossed a broad rock slide emblazoned with sun and threaded by a trickle of water in a rock channel rusted copper-dark. The old man paused to scale a slate down into the gorge where trees lay tossed and broken. The dog peered down, looked at the old man inquisitively, studied the empty gorge again and then moved on, the old man taking up his cane and following. The sole of his brogan was all but off now and he limped, favoring the odd shoe to save the binder twine with which he had tied it together.

  Crossing the slide they entered the deep woods once more, the sun winnowed in tall fans among the spiring trunks, greengold and black verrniculated on the forest floor. With his cane the old man felled regiments of Indian Pipe, poked the green puffballs to see the smoke erupt in a poisonous verdant cloud. The woods were damp with the early morning and now and again he could hear the swish of a limb where a squirrel jumped and the beaded patter of waterdrops in the leaves. Twice they flushed mountain pheasants, Scout sidestepping nervously as they roared up out of the laurel.

  The path the old man took was a fire trail that had been built by the C C C. From the glade in which he now made his home he had to climb nearly a thousand feet to reach it, but once on the trail the walking was easy and excepting the injured shoe he would have swung along at a good pace. It was six miles to the river where he crossed and came to the highway and the same ubiquitous crossroads store with the drunken porch, the huge and rock-battered Nehi signs, the weather-curled laths, the paintless stonecolored wood—but the old man had taken an early start. Through a gap in the trees he could see the valley far below him where the river ran, a cauldron in the mountain’s shadow where smoke and spume seethed like the old disturbance of the earth erupting once again, black mist languid in the cuts and trenches as flowing lava and the palisades of rock rising in the high-shored rim beyond the valley—and beyond the valley, circling the distant hoary cupolas now standing into morning, the sun, reaching to the slope where the old man rested, speared mist motes emblematic as snowflakes and broke them down in spangled and regimental disorder, reached the trees and banded them in light, struck weftwork in the slow uncurling ferns—the sun in its long lightfall recoined again in leafwater.

  Brogan and cane and cracked pad clatter and slide on the shelly rocks and stop where a snake lies curled belly-up to the silent fold and dip of a petal-burst of butterflies fann
ing his flat and deadwhite underside. Scout smells cautiously at the snake, the butterflies in slow riot over his head, flowery benediction of their veined and harlequin wings. With his cane the old man turns the snake, remarking the dusty carpet pattern of its dull skin, the black clot of blood where the rattles have been cut away.

  They go on—steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing—coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley.

  Huffaker would have said it was by chance that he happened to be looking out the window toward the river the morning the old man came, but he had been watching not much less keenly than the patient and taciturn visitor in the pressed gray chinos. So he had been looking for him for a week and there he was on the bridge with the crudely carved staff, carrying a small paper bag in his hand, a moldy crokersack tied at his waist in front like an immense and disreputable sporran, and the wreckage of dog padding at his heels, raising its bitten muzzle into the air from time to time in a sort of hopeless and indomitable affirmation—proceeding on the weathered sun-washed bridge, jaunty and yet sad, like maimed soldiers returning. Huffaker stepped to the door and the man, coming from the car with slow bootcrunch in the gravel, shot him a quick look. Huffaker walked to the broken thermometer on the tin snuff sign at the corner of the store and pretended to check it, gazed at the mounting sun and sniffed at the air, went back in. The old man was on the road, coming toward the store. The man was standing on the porch with one arm hooked loosely about a post, his forefinger in his watchpocket, chewing a straw slowly and watching his approach with the composed disinterest of a professional assassin.

  The old man climbed onto the porch and the man said:

  Arthur Ownby.