The Orchard Keeper (Vintage International)

by Cormac McCarthy

East of Knoxville Tennessee the mountains start, small ridges and spines of the folded Appalachians that contort the outgoing roads to their liking. The first of these is Red Mountain; from the crest on a clear day you can see the cool blue line of the watershed like a distant promise.

In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest—littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills—has about it a primordial quality, some

steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.

Low in the east a red moon was coming up through the clouds, a crooked smile, shard of shellrim pendant from some dark gypsy ear. He raised his horn. His call went among the slopes echoing and re-echoing, stilling the nightbirds, rattling the frogs in the creek to silence, and on out over the valley where it faded thin and clear as a bell for one hovering breath before the night went clamorous with hounds howling in rondelays, pained wailings as of phantom dogs lamenting their own demise. From the head of the hollow Scout and Buster yapped sharply and started down the creek again. The old man lowered his horn and chuckled, turned down the gully wash taking the stickrimmed

basins like stairs, cautiously, turning as alternate feet descended. He had cut a pole of hickory, hewed it octagonal and graced the upper half with hex-carvings—nosed moons, stars, fish of strange and pleistocene aspect. Struck in the rising light it shone new white as the face of an apple-half.

Who writes like that? Guess we know the answer.

In spring the mountain went violent green, billowing low under the sky. It never came slowly. One morning it would just suddenly be there and the air rank with the smell of it. The old man sniffed the rich earth odors, remembering other springs, other years. He wondered vaguely how people remembered smells … Not like something you see. He could still remember the odor of muskrat castor and he hadn’t smelled it for forty years. He could even remember the first time he had smelled that peculiar sweet odor; coming down Short Creek one morning a lot more years ago than forty, the cottonwoods white and cold-looking and the creek smoking. Early in the spring it was, toward the close of the trapping season, and he had caught an old bull rat with orange fur, the size of a housecat. The air was thick with the scent of musk and had reminded him then of something else, but he could never think what.

Sense of season, place and smells ... in rank odor.

The house was musty, dank and cellar-like. He felt his way to the corner table and lit a coal-oil lamp, the ratty furniture leaping out from the shadows in the yellow light. He went into the kitchen and lit the lamp there, took down a plate of beans and a pan of dry cornbread from the warmer over the stove. He sat at the table and ate them cold, and when he had finished went outside with

a handful of biscuits and threw them to the dog. The rain had almost stopped. The hound bolted down the biscuits and looked up after him. The screendoor banged to, the square of light on the porch floor narrowed and went out with the click of the latch. The old man did not appear again. The dog lowered his head on his paws and peered out at the night with wrinkled and sorrowing eyes.

Cats troubled the old man’s dreams and he did not sleep well any more. He feared their coming in the night to suck his meager breath. Once he woke and found one looking in the window at him, watching him as he slept. For a while he had kept the shotgun loaded and lying on ...

When he was a boy in Tuckaleechee there was a colored woman lived in a shack there who had been a slave. She came there because, as she said, there weren’t any other niggers and because she felt the movements and significations there. She wore a sack of hellebore at her neck and once he had seen her on the road and hadn’t been afraid of her, as he was very young then, so she put three drops of milfoil on the back of his tongue and chanted over him so that he would have vision. She told him that the night mountains were walked by wampus cats with great burning eyes and which left no track even in snow, although you could hear them screaming plain enough of summer evenings. Ain’t no sign with wampus cats, she told him, but if you has the vision you can read where common folks ain’t able.

In the morning the rain had stopped and there was a chill in the air and smoke. He smiled at that, for he was waiting and weathers and seasons were his timepiece now. There were still warm days but that didn’t matter to him. Jays were in the blackoaks mornings and the grackles had come back, great flocks of them bending the trees, their feathers glinting dark metal colors and their calls harshly musical, like a rusty swing. Or they would be on the ground, the yard rolling blackly with them, and he would run out and pop his hands once and see them explode sunward, a flapping shrieking horde bearing leaves and debris into the air on the updraft of their wings.

Seasons come in and then fly away.

He was pushing time now and he could feel it give. She canned the remainder of the garden in two days and was after him to get his bed back up to the loft before he took cold. It rained and the pond went blood-red and one afternoon he caught a bass from the willows in water not a foot deep and cleaned it and held the tiny heart in the palm of his hand, still beating. His bed was still on the porch. These nights he could not bear to be in the house. He would go out after dinner and come back at bedtime—and then out again directly she was asleep, walking the dark roads, passing by the shacks and houses, the people illumined yellowly behind the windowlights in gestures mute and enigmatic …

Pushing time for sure, fleeting time.

He was pushing hard now and the days were bending under and cold weather came. His cot was still on the porch and daily he checked the undoing of the yard trees, woke to a red world with the sun wedged huge and squat in the mountain gap and the maples incandesced. Couched in his musty blanket he sniffed to test the air. A limp breeze water-wrought and tempered with smoke came lisping through the screen with no news yet. He waited. In the slow bleeding month of October he watched, looking torpid and heavylidded as

a toad, his nerves coiled and tuned like a waiting cat’s.

He went on with his bread, home, his face burning in the chill of the low October sun. When he came in through the porch he saw that his bed was gone. She was in the kitchen. He put the bread on the table and went up to the loft, his tread hollow on the boxed steps, up to the cobwebby gloom under the slanting eaves where the bed had been set and made with fresh linen.

her sitting fiercely sedate and her feet maybe tucked under the rung, her skirt gathered about her. She was humming something in her high nasal hum, faint evocation of summer bees. The coals chuckled, settled with easy sifting sounds. She rocked. That was how winter came that year.

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.

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.

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 here 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Get older, he said, you don’t need to count. You can read the signs. You can feel it in your ownself. Knowed a blind man oncet could tell lots of things afore they happent. But it’ll be hot and dry. Late frost is one sign if you don’t know nothin else. So they won’t but very little make because folks thinks that stuff grows by seasons and it don’t. It goes by weather. Game too, and folks themselves if they knowed it. I recollect one winter, I was jest a young feller, they wadn’t no winter.

Not hardly a frost even. It was a sight in the world the things that growed. That was a seventh year seventh and you’ll be old as me afore it comes again. The old man paused, consulted a trouser button. Then he said: I look for this to be a bad one. I look for real calamity afore this year is out.

Cats is smart, allowed the old man. Course it could of been a common everday housecat. They’ll tear up anything they come up on, a cat will. Housecats is smart too. Smarter’n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain’t on account of you cain’t learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won’t learn nothin. They too smart. Knowed a man oncet had a cat could talk. Him and this cat’d talk back and forth of one another like ary two people. That’s one cat I kept shy of. I knowed what it was. Lots of times that happens, a body dies and their soul takes up in a cat for a spell. Specially somebody drownded or like that where they don’t get buried proper.

Yes, he said, they’s lots of things folks don’t know about sech as that. Cats is a mystery, always has been. He stopped, passed a hand across his face dreamily. Then he turned to the boy. Believe you’ve growed some, ain’t ye? he said.

A man gets older, he said, he finds they’s lots of things he can do jest as well without and so he don’t have to worry about this and that the way a young feller will. I worked near all my life and never had nothin. Seems like a old man’d be allowed his rest but then he comes to find they’s things you have to do on account of nobody else wants to attend to em. Like that would make em go away. And maybe they don’t look like much but then they lead you around like you might start a rabbit dog to hunt a fence-corner and get drug over half the county against nightfall. Which a old man ain’t good at noway.

man loves peace, he said, and none better than a old man.

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.

Mr. McCarthy is off to a hell of a good start.