Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

The old man paid no attention. He pulled his gloves on, gathered the wire in one hand and stepped through, the posts on the downhill side jiggling where they dangled in their wires like sticks in a spiderweb, the earth having long been washed from about their moorings. Some dogs were trailing and after a while he could see them below him where the last finger of bleak trees reached into a cut and met the barren fields, the dogs coming out from behind the timber, moving slow and diminutive, their voices small as a child’s horn, two of them. They dipped into the cut and swarmed up the other side and out, across the fields, their brown and white shapes losing definition in the confectionary landscape of mudclods and snow until only their motion was discernible, like part of the ground itself rumoring upheaval.

He went slowly, the snow heavier now, drifted and billowing in the honeysuckle and breaking it down into the path so that he had to skirt below it in places, teetering with edged steps along the incline, uncovering in his footsteps wet patches of leaf black as swampwater, not even frozen. When he reached the top of the mountain, the road curving away in a white swath through the trees, he paused to brush the snow from his shoulders and turn out the lumps of ice gathered in his cuffs. He plowed his way down the drifts some hundred yards and re-entered the woods to the other side, carrying in his hand now the huge handleless knife forged from an old millfile, receding among the small trees in his stooped and shambling gait, apparitional, a strange yuletide assassin.

A quarter hour later he emerged back into the road again still carrying the knife and dragging behind him a small cedar tree. At the curve below the orchard he stopped and looked back, then relegated the knife to some place in the folds of his coat and shouldered the tree. A little further on he entered the woods again, trace of a path or road leading off to the right. This time he was gone for only a few minutes. When he came back, unburdened of the tree now, he followed his tracks to where he had first come onto the road and so disappeared once more into the woods, down the slope of the mountain the way by which he came.

They threaded their way over the jumbled limestone of the quarry, Warn in the lead, until they came to the cave.

It don’t look like much, Johnny Romines said.

It opens up inside, Warn said. Here, let me hang him up here and I’ll show ye. He wedged the skunk in the fork of a sapling and then disappeared down into the earth, crawling on hands and knees through a small hole beneath the rocks. They followed one by one, the stiff winter nettles at the cave door rattling viperously against the legs of their jeans. Inside they struck matches and Warn took a candlestub from a crevice and lit it, the calcined rock taking shape, tonsiled roof and flowing concavity, like something gone partly to liquid and frozen back again misshapen and awry, their shadows curling threatfully up the walls among the dried and mounded bat-droppings. They studied the inscriptions etched in the soft and curdcolored stone, hearts and names, archaic dates, crudely erotic hieroglyphs — the bulbed phallus and strange centipedal vulva of small boys’ imaginations.

They followed the strip of red clay that traced the cave floor into another and larger room, hooted at their lapping echoes, their laughter rebounding in hollow and mocking derision. Water dripped ceaselessly, small ping and spatter on stone. The two dogs hung close to them, stepping nervously.

This’n here’s the biggest room, Warn said. Then I got me a secret room on back with a rock in front of it so you cain’t see it. Then they’s a tunnel goes back, but I ain’t never been to the end of it. Ain’t no tellin where-all it goes.

Boog came up dragging a load of dead limbs and presently they had a fire going in the center of the big room. This here is the way the cave-men used to do, Boog said.

They used to be cave-men hereabouts, said Warn. Pre-storic animals too. They’s a tush over on the other side of the mountain stickin out of some rock what’s long as your leg. Ain’t no way to get to it lessen you had ropes or somethin.

Johnny Romines took out a packet of tobacco and rolled a cigarette. Boog borrowed it and rolled one too and they sat smoking in long steady pulls. Which’d you rather be, Boog asked John Wesley, white or Indian?

I don’t know, the boy said. White I reckon. They always whipped the Indians.

Boog tipped the ash from his cigarette with his little finger. That’s so, he said. That’s a point I hadn’t studied.

I got Indian in me, Johnny Romines said.

Boog’s half nigger, said Warn.

I ain’t done it, Boog said.

You said niggers was good as whites.

I never. What I said was some niggers is good as some whites is what I said.

That what you said?

Yeah.

I had a uncle was a White-Cap, Johnny Romines said. You ought to hear him on niggers. He claims they’re kin to monkeys.

John Wesley didn’t say anything. He’d never met any niggers.

Tell John Wesley here about the time we dynamited the birds, Warn said. This is last Christmas, he explained. His daddy give him a electric train one time and they got it out for his little brother.

Johnny Romines told it, slowly, smiling from time to time. They had wired the transformer of the train to a dynamite cap stolen from the quarry shack and buried the cap in the snow.

We had us a long piece of lightwire, he said, and we set in the garage with the transformer all hooked up. Warn here claimed it wouldn’t work. Well, we’d sprinkled breadcrumbs all round over where the cap was buried out in the yard and directly you couldn’t see for the birds. I told Warn to thow the switch.

Goddamn but it come a awful blast, said Warn. I eased the switch on over and then BALOOM! They’s a big hoop of snow jumped up in the yard like when you thow a flat rock in the pond and birds goin ever which way mostly straight up. I remember we run out and you could see pieces of em strung all out in the yard and hangin off the trees. And feathers. God, I never seen the like of feathers. They was stit fallin next mornin.

Lord, whispered Boog, I’d of liked to of seen that.

John Wesley had begun to cough. Ain’t it gettin kindly smoky in here to you? he asked. Above their heads smoke roiled and lowered and they noticed they could no longer see the walls of the cave.

Believe it is some, Warn said. He stood up and was closed from sight by the smoke. Hell’s bells, he said, let’s get out of here.

This is the way the cave-men done it, Boog said.

Cave-men be damned, we’re fixin to get barbycued.

They crawled and stumbled to the mouth of the cave — a shifting patch of murky light weaving beyond the smoke combers, came red-eyed and weeping from their crypt, their jacket fronts encrusted with slick red mud. When they had dried their eyes and could see again they were in some volcanic and infernal under-region, the whole of the quarry woods wrapped in haze and smoke boiling up out of the rocky ground from every cleft and fissure.

Mr Eller stood at the counter and watched them come in, the clothes steaming on the backs of the men as they stomped off the slush from their shoes and stood about the stove making cigarettes with chilled fingers, the stove popping and whistling with the snow-wetted coal, the women excited with the cold, making their purchases with deliberation, some towing small children about in the folds of their skirts, leaving again, young boys with shotguns and rifles buying shells not by the box but by fours and sixes and lending to the bustle a purposeful and even militant air. He rang the money up in the cash register or marked it in his credit books.

Odor of smoke and cold, wet clothing and meat cooking. The snow was falling again and they watched it. Lord, Mr Eller said, reckon it’s ever goin to quit.