Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

The old man rocked, dwarflike in his ponderous chair. He seemed to be weighing some dark problem posed in the yellowed pages before him.

Toward late morning a rooster called and the old man’s window blushed in a soft wash of rose. He slept and color drained from the glass and the east paled ash-gray. The rooster called once again, questioningly, and shortly the old man jerked awake in his chair, knocking the jelly glass to the floor where it rolled about woodenly.

He peered through the hazy light of the room. It was morning, the lamp out and the stove too, and he found himself stiff and shivering with the cold, rubbing his eyes now, then his back. He rose gingerly and opened the door of the stove, poked among the feathery ashes. He went to the window and looked out. The snow had stopped. Scout was standing in snow to his belly, gazing out at the fantastic landscape with his bleary eyes. Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.

There were three of them coming up the trackless road past the house, and two dogs. One of them carried a rabbit, holding it loosely by the hind legs, its head jerking limply as they went. The other two carried guns and the boy knew one of them. He hadn’t seen him since school started in September.

They were talking and gesturing and they didn’t notice him standing there in the yard so he moved out toward the road, making for the mailbox, plopping his feet into the dazzling and unbroken drifts. The one carrying the rabbit had his feet wrapped — wound and encased in burlap sacks to the knee and held with twine. He saw him coming and then Warn turned and saw him too and waved.

Heyo, John Wesley.

Howdy, he said, sliding down the bank.

He met Warn Pulliam in the summer, headed toward the pond one afternoon when he saw the buzzard circling low over Tipton’s field and noticed that there was a string looping down from its leg. He came up through the field to the crest of the hill and there was Warn holding the other end of the string while the buzzard soared with lazy unconcern above his head .

Howdy, Warn said .

Howdy. He was looking up at the buzzard. What you doin?

Ah, jest flyin the buzzard some. He cain’t get up lessen they’s some wind. So when we get a little wind I gen’ly fly him some .

Where’d you get him, he asked. The back of his neck was already beginning to ache from staring up at the wheeling bird .

Caught him in a steel trap. You want to see him?

Sure .

He pulled the bird out of the sky by main force, heaving on the cord against the huge and ungiving expanse of wing, lowering him circle by circle until he brought him to earth. There the buzzard flopped about on its one good leg and came to rest eying them truculently, beady eyes unblinking in the naked and obscene-looking skull .

Turkey buzzard, Warn explained. They’s the ones got red heads .

Where do you keep him?

Been keepin him in the smokehouse, he said .

Don’t nobody care for you to keep him?

Naw. The old lady set up a fuss but I told her I was goin to bring him in the house and learn him to set at table and that calmed her down some. Here, don’t get too close or he’ll puke on ye. He puked on Rock and Rock like to never got over it — stit won’t have nothin to do with him. Don’t nobody think much of him I reckon but me. I like him cause he’s about a mean son of a bitch and twice as ugly. What’s your name?

The two dogs were beagles, shortlegged and frantic, leaping in and out of the chest-high fall of snow, or plowing their noses through it and furrowing snow up and past their ears, their tails spinning, then looking up with white brows and whiskers, gnomic and hoary-faced as little old men.

Where you-all goin? he asked them.

T’wards the quarry, Warn said. Come on go with us — I got me a skunk in a hole I got to get out. This here’s Johnny Romines — motioning at the tall boy with the shotgun — and that there’s Boog.

Howdy, he said. They nodded.

We done got us a rabbit, Boog said, holding up the snow-dusted and stiffening quarry. Johnny shot him in the field yonder.

The dogs circled him, sniffing his cuff. Them’s Johnny’s dogs, Boog added. Rabbit dogs. Bugles.

Beagles, idjit, Warn said.

Yeah, Boog said. Them’s what they are.

Where’s Rock? the boy asked.

He’s layin up under the house still lickin his foot where he accidental stepped in the snow this mornin. Cain’t get him to stir a stump. Sides he won’t run rabbits noway. He’s a bear dog.

I got me a dog now, he told them. Half bluetick and half walker. Makes as good a tree dog as they is goin. They were moving up the road, the beagles for outriders prancing and frisking.

You run him? Boog asked.

Naw. He’s jest a pup. I been keepin him with a feller over on Henderson Valley Road raises dogs. He’s the one give him to me.

You don’t need no more excuse to run wild at night. That was what she said to him standing there in the kitchen with the pup under his arm. She must be a pistol, Sylder said when he returned with it, embarrassed, explaining why he couldn’t keep it. Don’t make no difference though. He’s stit yourn; you jest keep him here is all and come get him any time you’ve a mind to .

I got me a old musket at home belonged to my great-grandaddy, Boog said. It’s nigh on long as me my own sef.

They left the road and crossed a field dotted with scrub cedars, the beagles coursing now and Johnny Romines calling to them to hunt. He and Warn trampled the brush piled all down a rock draw and scouted the frozen drainage ditches but no rabbits appeared. They crossed a fence and came out onto the railroad, following it south across the white quilted fields, the sun on them now glinting and the last traces of icefog dispersing in myriad blue crystals on the shining air.

At the sinkhole they stopped and skittered down the bank to test the ice; it was black and evil-looking and woven with sticks and weeds. The beagles came to the edge and whined, pawing tentatively. After a while they came out too and rushed wheeling and sliding in a game of tag, their hindquarters spinning from under them as they turned. Boog couldn’t skate because of his feet being wrapped so he sat on the bank holding the rabbit and watching them. Later he built a fire, making a platform of hickory bark and piling dead cedar branches on top and they came and sat around it.

This here’s where Johnny caught the bullfrog, Warn said. Right over yander off the end of that log. By the ass in a mousetrap.

How’d he do that? John Wesley asked.

He bet me a dope on it. I seen him come by the house with this mousetrap on a piece of bailin wire. Said he was fixin to catch him a bullfrog. We come on over and he set it on the end of that log there and then we went on to the store. I thought the poor bastard had done lost his rabbit-assed mind …

Johnny Romines grinned. He told everybody in the store, he said.

Yeah, we all like to of fell out laughin. So the son of a bitch bets me a dope he’s caught one by the time we come back and sure as hell there he is. Pinched right by the ass. I like to never got over it. And wouldn’t nothin do but we come straight back to the store frog trap and all and me buy him the dope right there.

It’s a old Indian trick, said Boog.

What’s that?

Puttin bark down like that. To lay your fire on.

When he reached the fence he rested again, removed his gloves and blew into his cupped hands. Along the face of the mountain and down the valley floor guns were sounding, echoing in diminishing reiteration. The trees were all encased in ice, limbless-looking where their black trunks rose in aureoles of lace, bright seafans shimmering in the wind and tinkling with an endless bell-like sound, a carillon in miniature, and glittering shards of ice falling in sporadic hail everywhere through the woods and marking the snow with incomprehensible runes. Something flicked rapid and invisibly past and struck with a soft pock into the bark of a poplar above him. The thin spat and whine of a rifle followed.