Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

They jerked around the last curve below the pine thicket and shuddered to a stop in front of the Olive Branch Negro Baptist Church. Sylder switched off the ignition. I guess that’s all she wrote, he said.

He opened the door and started to get out when he felt her hand on his leg. He stopped and turned.

Not him, she said. Not the other one.

No, he said. O.K. Come on.

He switched off the lights and then they were gone, negated in the sudden darkness. Marion, June whispered hoarsely. Hey, Marion?

From his porch Arthur Ownby had watched them pass and now he heard the slam of the car door up the road where they had stopped. It had begun to rain. A yellow haze in the woods flicked out. He could hear low voices, near-sounding on the warm night air. With one foot he tapped out the time of some old ballad against the corner post of the porch. From under the brim of the roof he studied the movements of stars. A night for meteors tonight. They cannonaded the towering hump of Red Mountain. Rain falling now from a faultless sky. A girl’s laugh on the road. He remembered her sitting high on the wagon seat Sunday morning that the mule broke wind in his ear while he unhooked the singletree and he stove two fingers in on a rib and it never even flinched. Late hours for an old man. Arthur Ownby had watched from his porch. He dozed.

When the boy came past on the road he looked up at the house on the sidehill, dark and abandoned-looking. He could not see the old man and the old man was asleep.

It was near daylight when they started back from Knoxville, a pale cold graying to the east.

Where’d you take her? Sylder asked.

June reached for the cigarettes riding in the visor. Goddamn she’s ugly, he said. You know what she told me?

What’s that, said Sylder, grinning. That I was the nicest boy ever needled her. Needled , for God’s sake. Where at? Huh?

Where’d you take her. You come down from the church but I never heard you come up. Where’d you go?

Ah. Up in the backhouse.

Backhouse?

Shithouse then.

Sylder was looking at him in amazed incredulity, acceptance and belief momentarily suspended, unable to picture it yet. He had one more question:

Standing up?

Naw, well … she sort of sat down and leant back and I … she … But that was beyond his powers of description, let alone Sylder’s imagination.

You mean to say you — Sylder paused for a moment trying to get the facts in summary — you screwed her in a nigger shithouse sittin on the …

Well Goddamnit at least I never took her in no Goddamn church, June broke in.

The coupe wobbled to a halt at the side of the road and Sylder collapsed against the door epileptic with laughter. After a while he stopped and said:

Was she the one that …

Yes, Goddamn you, she was the one.

Whooeee! Sylder screamed and rolled out the door where he lay in the wet morning grass shaking soundlessly.

The place was dimly lit and barnlike. A polished dance floor in which at the far end fell the reflection of the jukebox lights and those of the bar. Behind the bar a long mirror in which he was surprised to see himself, silhouetted in the doorframe, poised nimbly atop a stack of glasses. He came down and crossed the floor, limping slightly, and clambered up on the corner stool.

The bartender was sitting in a captain’s chair reading a magazine. He folded it carefully and shuffled down to where the man was sitting.

Beer, Rattner said. His tongue swept his lower lip in anticipation. The bartender went to the barrel and drew off a schooner, flicked away the foam with a stick and brought it to him. He reached and tilted one side of the glass up and lowered his face into it; his lips sought the glassrim and fastened on it white and fat as leeches while under the yellowgray skin his throatcords jerked spastically, pumping the beer down. He drank it all, lifting the glass finally to drain it, and slid it back toward the bartender, who had been watching with both fascination and disgust, as one might watch pigs mate.

Say now, that sure was all right. Yessir, jest believe I’ll have me anothern.

Ten cents, said the bartender.

He struggled with his pocket and came up with a dime. You betcher, he said. The bartender took the glass, gingerly, and refilled it.

Rattner had been gone for a year this time. He had moved from Maryville to Red Branch, taken up quarters in an abandoned log house with his wife and son, and left there four days later with twenty-six dollars in his pocket, alone and southbound in an empty L&N reefer. An incident at the Green Fly Inn had been his windfall:

The rear door through which Cabe swept the night’s litter had once given onto a porch that ran the width of the building, supported by joists that were extensions of the floor timbers and braced frugally with two-by-fours angled up beneath them. On summer evenings the drinkers gathered here, bringing with them their chairs or cases or perching riskily upon the narrow railing like roosting birds. Weather and termites conspired against this haven and brought it to ruin. This was in 1933 then, a hot summer night, that Ef Hobie came to the Green Fly Inn. A prodigal return (Petros — Brushy Mountain — eighteen months, illegal possession of liquor) that attracted a great number of well-wishers. One by one they retired through the rear door to take up their stations on the porch. Hobie was a favorite and carried on a running monologue of anecdotes. He was telling how his old lady had loaned the family soupbone to Mrs Fenner, who had cooked peas with it and ruined it, when a sharp dry crack issued from somewhere in the floor. It was a calm windless night, laden with heat, and the sound had an ominous quality about it. The talk paused a moment, resumed .

He came through the door and onto the porch, circumspectly, nodding across them all with diffidence, as if someone he knew might be there, beyond the railing itself and suspended mysteriously in the darkness, leaned against the doorframe and lifted the bottle to his mouth, his eyes shifting among them or when they looked closing or seeking again that being in the outer dark with whom only he held communion, smiling a little to himself, the onlooker, the stranger. The talk eddied and waned, but he offered neither comment nor question and after a while they ignored him. He came from the doorway and took a seat on the rail at the near end of the porch .

There was a long creaking sound like a nail being pulled and again the sharp detonation of strained wood giving way. There followed a dead and immobile silence during which the faces searched from one to the other uncertainly. A few began to rise and mill about, still not saying anything. Already they had begun to eye the narrow door, the one point of egress, weighing in their minds not so much numbers as tonnage and freight of men, calculating speed and congestion with the concern of traffic experts .

With the third report a section of flooring listed visibly .

Fellers, Ef started, rising himself, I think this here … But that was all, or as much as anyone heard at least. There ensued a single rush as of so many marionettes on one string being drawn in violent acceleration toward the door while above the noise of their retreat the joists popped like riflefire, snapping off in rackety succession, and the floor drooped in long and gathering undulations in their wake .

They hit the opening in one concerted mass and wedged there tight as a peg at the same instant that the far end of the porch came away, swung out from the building in a long swooping and not ungraceful arc .

Now from the knot of men clawing at the door single figures began to be sucked away in attitudes of mute supplication one by one down the dangling incline of the porch, gaining momentum among leaping cans and bottles, and dropping at last with wild cries into the pit below. A few caught at the rails and dangled there with stricken looks eying their fellows rocketing past into the night .