Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

He sat at the wheel of the motionless car for a minute or two before he tried the starter. It cranked cheerfully, caught and sputtered once or twice without ever running. He flipped the switch off, reached a flashlight from the glove compartment, took a deep breath and surged wildly out into the rain. Waist-deep in the engine compartment with the upturned hood sheltering him like the maw of some benevolent monster he checked the wiring, the throttle linkages. Then he removed the float-bowl from the fuel pump, held the flashlight up to the glass and looked at it. The liquid in it was a pale yellow. He poured it out and replaced the bowl, dropped the hood and got back in the car. He had to crank the engine for some time before the bowl filled again and then the motor caught and he engaged the gears. He drove along cautiously, listening. The streetlamps passed bleary whorls along the window; there was no more traffic Before he got to the end of the bridge the motor rattled and died again.

The old man awoke to darkness and water running, trickling and coursing beneath the leaves, and the rain very soft and very steady. The hound was lying with its head on crossed forepaws watching him. He reached out one hand and touched it and the dog rose clumsily and sniffed at his hand .

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 .

They came three times for the old man. At first it was just the Sheriff and Gifford. They were one foot up the porch steps when he swung the door open and threw down on them and they could see the mule ears of the old shotgun laid back viciously along the locks. They turned and went back down the yard, not saying anything or even looking back, and the old man closed the door behind them.

The second time they pulled up in the curve of the road with three deputies and a county officer. The old man watched them from his window darting and skulking among the bushes, slipping from tree to tree like boys playing Indians. After a while when everyone was set the Sheriff called from his place under the bank of the road.

Come out with your hands up, Ownby. We got you surrounded.

The old man never even turned his head. He was in the kitchen with the shotgun propped over the back of the chair and he was watching one of the deputies hunkered up under a lilac bush in the west corner of the lot. The old man kept watching him and then the Sheriff called out again for him to surrender and somebody shot out a window-glass in the front room so he didn’t wait any more but pulled the stock in against his cheek and cut down on the deputy. The man came up out of the bushes like a rabbit and hopped away toward the road with a curious loping gait, holding the side of his leg. He’d expected the man to yell and he didn’t, but then the old man remembered that he hadn’t yelled either.

The kitchen glass exploded in on him then and he got behind the stove. There was a cannonade of shots from the woods and he sat there on the floor listening to it and to the spat spat of the bullets passing through the house. Little blooms of yellow wood kept popping out on the planks and almost simultaneously would be the sound of the bullet in the boards on the other side of the room. They did not whine as they passed through. The old man sat very still on the floor. One shot struck the stove behind him and leaped off with an angry spang, taking the glass out of the table lamp. It was like being in a room full of invisible and malevolent spirits.

He had the shotgun across his knees, broken, still holding the empty shell in his hand. The firing died in a few minutes and he crawled along the cupboard and got his shells off the table and came back and reloaded the empty chamber. Then he rolled a cigarette. He could hear them calling to one another. Someone wanted to know if anyone was hurt. Then the Sheriff told them to hold up a minute, that the old bastard hadn’t shot since the first time, and hollered loud, as if a person couldn’t hear him anyway, wanting to know if Ownby was ready to come out now.

The old man lit his cigarette and took a deep pull. Outside all was silence.

Ownby, the Sheriff called, come out if you’re able.

There was more silence and finally he heard some voices and after that they fired a few more rounds. The stick propping up the glassless window leaped out on the floor and the window dropped shut. He could hear the bits of lead hopping about in the front room, chopping up the furniture and scuttling off through the walls and rafters like vermin.

They stopped and the Sheriff was talking again. Spread out, he was saying. Keep under cover as much as you can and remember, everybody goes together.

That didn’t make much sense to the old man. He pulled twice more on his cigarette and put it out and crawled under the stove. Through a split board he could see them coming, looking squat above the grass from his low position. Two deputies were moving down from the south end with drawn pistols. One of them was dressed in khakis and looked like an A T U agent. The old man marked their position, wiggled back out from under the stove, riposted to the window and shot them both in quick succession, aiming low. Then he ducked back to his stove, broke the shotgun, extracted the shells and reloaded. No sound from outside. The Sheriff did not call again and after a while when he heard the cars starting he got up and went to the front room to see what they’d shot up.

Toward late afternoon it began to rain again but the old man couldn’t wait any longer. Black clouds were moving over the mountain, shading the sharp green of it, and in the coombs horsetails of mist clung or lifted under the wind to lace and curl wistfully, break and trail across the lower slopes. A yellowhammer crossed the yard to his high hole in the jagged top of a lightning-wrecked pine, under-wings dipping bright chrome.

The old man carried out the last of his things and piled them on the sledge, buckled them down with the harness straps he had nailed under the sides. He went back in one more time and looked around. Some last thing he could save. He came out at length with a small hooked rug, shook the dust from it and put it over the top of the sledge. He took up the rope and pulled the sledge to the road and called for Scout. The old dog came from under the porch, peering with blue rheumy eyes at his indistinct world of shapes. The old man called again and the dog started for the road, hobbling stiffly, and they set out together, south along the road, until they were faint and pale shapes in the rain.

So when they came for the old man the third time he was not there. They lobbed teargas bombs through the windows and stormed the ruined house from three sides and the house jerked and quivered visibly under their gunfire. A county officer was wounded in the neck. He sat on the muddy ground with the blood running down his shirtfront, crying, and calling out to the others to Get the dirty son of a bitch. When they came back out of the house no one would look at him. Finally the Sheriff and another man came to where he was and helped him up and took him to the car.

No, the Sheriff said. He got away.

Got away? How could he get away. The man asked two or three times but the Sheriff just shook his head and after that the man didn’t ask any more. They left in a spray of mud, four cars of them, with sirens going.

When the old man came out upon the railroad the rain had moved off the mountain and in the last light under the brim of the clouds he could see the long sharp ridges like lean burning hounds racing down the land to the land’s end westward, hard upon the veering sun. He turned his back to them, going east on the railbed, the sledge rocking over the moidering ties. It was still raining and dark was coming on fast. From time to time he stopped to check his load and cinch the harness straps up. For two hours he followed the tracks, down out of the darkening fields through cuts where night fell on the high banks and fell upon the honeysuckle drawing shadow forms there, grotesques, shapes of creatures mythical or extinct and silently noting his passage. The old man bent east along the tracks, leaning into the rope, into the rich purple dusk.