Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

Is it a chickenhawk?

Yesm, he said. It’s a youngern .

I see. She turned sharply and disappeared on a click of heels behind a tier of green filing cabinets. In a few minutes she was back with a little pad of printed forms, stopping further down the counter and writing now with a pen from a gathering of inkstands there. He waited. When she had finished she tore the form from the pad and came back and handed it to him. Sign where the X’s are, she told him. Then take it to the cashier’s office. Down the hall — she pointed. He signed the two lines with the pen, handed it back and started away when she called him back .

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 .