Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

As he turned his steps up the path a shadow swirled past his knees and fled soundlessly into the night.

In one corner of the front room there was an old wooden footlocker and the old man cleared away papers and clothes from the top of it and set the lamp on the floor close by. Then he undid the broken hasp and lifted it open. He rummaged through it, stopping now and again to examine some object: a brass watch weighing perhaps a quarter of a pound, a pair of cock-gaffs, a.32 rimfire revolver with owlhead grips and the hand broken so that the cylinder spun smooth as a barrel in water. Reams and sheafs of old catalogs and lists he thumbed through. An eight-gauge shotgun shell. At length he came up with a small square box decorated with flying ducks and this he set on the floor beside the lamp. He dropped the lid of the locker closed and the lamp flickered, on the wall a black ghoul hulking over a bier wavered.

He took the lamp and the box to the kitchen and placed them on the table. From the drawer he took a short curved meat knife and tested the edge on his thumb, pulled the drawer out further and reaching back in it came out with a worn gray piece of soapstone. With this he honed the knife, trying it from time to time on the hair of his arm until he was satisfied, then replaced the stone and opened the box. There were twelve bright red waxed tubes in it and he set them out on the table one by one, their dull brass bases orange in the lampglow. He selected one and with the knife made a thin cut around the base of the paper where the brass met. He examined it carefully, then deepened the cut, turning the shell against the blade. He checked it again, nodded to his nodding shadow and put the shell back in the box. He performed the same operation on the remaining eleven, putting each in turn in the box again. When he had finished he replaced the knife in the drawer and returned to the front room where he took them one by one, the twelve circumcised shotgun shells, and deposited them in the pocket of his coat.

Ef Hobie’s father had been dead too long for the people who admired Ef to remember him. They were a whiskey-making family before whiskey-making was illegal, their family history mythical, preliterate and legendary. They had neither increased nor prospered and now Garland was the last surviving son. Ef had died in a car wreck in 1937, less than a year after coming out of Brushy Mountain. Not in the wreck either — he lived three weeks and was even back on his feet, where he wasn’t supposed to be at all, and in the store where people looked uneasily at his gaunt frame, who had weighed just short of three hundred pounds. He had been thrown clear of the car and then the car had rolled on top of him and they had removed a good part of his insides in the process of restoring him to health. He was showing them the slick red scar that angled across his withered paunch and sucking long drafts from an orange dope.

They performed a autopsy on me and I lived, he told them. Then he laughed and got down off the drink box, emptied his orange and reached to put it in the rack. The bottle clattered on the floor, he lurched once, wildly, collapsed into the bread rack and went to the floor in a cascade of cupcakes and moonpies.

So there were only two Hobies, Garland and his mother, and hard luck dogged them. Within the month Jack the Runner was arrested and sent up to Brushy for three years himself and county deputies broke into their smokehouse and took off what whiskey was there and took Mrs Hobie, aged seventy-eight, off to jail, sending her back home only when it was discovered she had cancer of the duodenum.

So Garland had to carry the whiskey up the mountain now to a den in the honeysuckles just below the circle and leave it there for Marion Sylder to pick up and haul to Knoxville. There was a gate across the orchard road since the installation had been set up on the mountain and only official carriers were permitted access — olive-painted trucks with gold emblems on the doors, passing in and out of the gate, the men in drab fatigues locking and unlocking the chain sedulously. With like diligence Sylder bolted and unbolted the ring-plate that held the chain on his comings and goings in the old Plymouth. But the two parties using the road kept different hours and they never met.

It was four o’clock in the morning when Sylder heard the old man shoot the first hole in the tank. He almost let go the case of whiskey he was carrying and then when the second shot came, hard upon the first, he set the case down carefully and stood dead still, waiting for cries, commands — an explanation. All was quiet. The birds were stilled in their first tentative and querulous chirpings. Low in the east and beyond the town a gray soulless dawn gnawed the horizon into shape. He was braced for another report, holding his breath, echoing the outrageously loud concussion in his inner ear before it came — two more shots, evenly spaced, something deliberate about them. Sylder made his way stealthily along the edge of the honeysuckle jungle, crossed an open space, arm of the orchard, going in the direction of the shooting.

When he got to the edge of the clearing where the installation stood he could see the man with the muzzle of the gun sticking through the fence-wire. He fired and the barrel came up short, sending waves out along the woven mesh and back. The man jerked under the recoil and the smoke spurted, slowed and billowed in the damp air. There were six neat black holes in the polished skin of the tank, angled up across it in a staggered line. The man broke the gun and picked the shells out. Slyder saw him hold them up for brief inspection before throwing them to one side, and saw them dance in the new light and knew what they were: the brass bases of the shells only, flicking and turning like coins as they fell.

The man was putting two more shells into the breech of the shotgun and Sylder could see them now, and the dull red of the waxed cardboard tubes that had been missing from the extracted cases. The man didn’t hesitate; he raised the gun and breeched it in one quick motion. Two more blasts ripped the silence and two holes appeared now in the lower corner. He was making a huge crude X across the face of the tank. Again he examined the bits of brass before reloading.

Sylder watched wide-eyed from his retreat in the bushes. He could hear the solid whop of the full cases lamming into the tank and the tank seemed to reel under the impact like a thing alive. There was something ghastly and horrific about it and he had the impression that this gnomic old man had brought with him an inexhaustible supply of shells and would cease his cannonading only when he became too weary to lift the gun. He backed out of his hiding place and returned to the car. Daylight was coming on fast and he began to worry lest the old man’s shooting bring investigation. He was late anyway and didn’t know but that the legal, the official, carriers might use the road at this hour even if a crazy old man wasn’t shooting holes in their responsibility with a shotgun and rung shells. There were six cases of whiskey still in the honeysuckles and he brought them out two at a time with a hobbling half-run. The firing had ceased. He got the turtledeck loaded and fastened, got in and started the motor. When he pulled out of the weeds and into the road he looked back and there was the old man standing on the hill above him at the turnaround, holding the shotgun in one hand and leaning on a cane. Sylder lowered his head and floor-boarded the gas pedal.

When he was safe around the first curve he relaxed and drove slowly to the gate so as to leave as few signs as possible. He refastened the ring-plate and chain, got back in and turned onto the pike and toward Knoxville. Just beyond the creek he passed an olivecolored truck, the driver and the other man in the cab looking serious and official, but somewhat sleepy and not in any particular hurry. Genial, unofficial, and awake, Marion Sylder drove to town.