Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

The hound came back after dark. He could hear it padding in the leaves, stop, shuffle again. He had eaten the last of what food he had brought and could hardly sleep for the cramping in his belly. He held the shotgun and waited for the hound to enter the firelight. It did not. Finally he went to sleep with the shotgun lying across his lap. He was very tired.

When he went to the pit the following morning the first thing he saw was an old goatskull, the brainpan crammed with tinfoil. He pitched it away in disgust and fell to shoveling.

By late in the afternoon his hunger had subsided and he had cleared the pit so that in one end the bare concrete was visible, blackened and encrusted with an indefinable burnt substance that scaled away under the shovel and showed green beneath.

He was shoveling faster, approaching desperation as the residue of unsifted ashes diminished, when Gifford showed up, badly winded from his climb up the mountain. Legwater stopped and watched him come across the little clearing, his shoes weighted with clay, his face inflamed with a red scowl. When he got to the pit Legwater leaned on the shovel and looked up at him. Well, he said, you want shares I reckon? After I done …

Idjit, Gifford said. Goddamn, what a idjit. He was standing on the concrete rim now looking down at the humane officer gaunt and fantastically powdered with ash, and looking at the great heaps of ashes and the screen, the bedroll, rucksack, shotgun.

You think so? Legwater said.

I know so. He wadn’t no war hero. It ain’t for sure it was even him, but if it was he never had no — no thing in his head.

I’ll be the jedge of that, Legwater said, bending with his shovel.

Gifford watched him, moving around to the upwind side to keep clear of the dust. In a few minutes the humane officer leaped from the pit and began shoveling the new ashes onto the screen, then shaking it back and forth to sift them through, a fevered look in his eye like some wild spodomantic sage divining in driven haste the fate of whole galaxies against their imminent ruin. The constable lit a cigarette and leaned back against the tree.

Legwater threw out two more piles of ash and sifted them and then when he disappeared into the pit again Gifford could hear him scraping around but not shoveling. He ventured over and peered in. Legwater was on hands and knees, going over the scraped floor of the pit carefully, scratching here and there with the tip of the shovel. Finally he stopped and looked up. The little bastard was lyin, he said. He got it his ownself, the lyin little son of a bitch.

Let’s go, Earl.

His own daddy, the humane officer was saying.

Gifford started toward the road with long disgusted strides. When he got to the apple trees he turned and looked back. Legwater was standing in the pit, just his head showing, staring vacantly.

Well, said the constable.

He kept staring.

Hey! Gifford called.

Legwater turned his head to give him a dumb look, the incredulous and empty expression common to victims of tragedy, disaster and loss.

You want a ride or not?

He pulled himself from the pit and began walking toward the constable, then he was hurrying, loping along, the shovel still in his hand and bouncing behind him. Gifford let him get all the way to him before he sent him back after the shotgun and the camping gear.

They went down the orchard road together, their steps padding in the red dust, the constable swaggering slightly as he did and the humane officer, haggard-looking, his black and sleepless eyes all but smoking, grimly apparitional with the shotgun and the spade dangling one at either side from his gaunt claws. Gifford carried the other’s rucksack and blanket roll with light effort and from time to time he sidled his eyes to study Legwater with pity, or with contempt. Neither spoke until they saw the dog and that was very near to the pike, on the last turn above the gate. They had overtaken it and even in the few minutes in which he was allowed to watch it alive Gifford was struck by its behavior. It was walking in the wheelruts with an exotic delicacy, like a trained dog on a rope, and holding its head so far back, its nose near perpendicular, that Gifford looked up instinctively to see what threat might be materializing out of the sky. The shovel bounced in the road with a dull bong and when he turned it was in time only to see Legwater recoil under the shotgun and to recoil himself as the muzzleblast roared in his ears. He spun and saw the dog lurch forward, still holding up its head, slew sideways and fold up in the dust of the road.

The few small windows were glassless but for a jagged side or corner still wedged in the handmade sashes. The roofshakes lay in windrows on the broad loft floors and this house housed only the winds.

Dervishes of leaves rattled across the yard and in the wind the oaks dipped and creaked, and in the wind even the spavined house hung between the stone chimneys seemed to give a little. The doors stood open and wind scurried in the parlor, riffled the drift leaves on the kitchen floor and stirred the cobwebbed window corners. He did not go to the loft. The lower rooms were dusty and barren and but for some half-familiar rags of clothes altogether strange. He came back into the yard and sat quietly for a while beneath one of the trees. Watched a waterbird skim beneath the shadowline of the mountain, cupped wings catching the slant light of the sun, then holding the wide curve in a wingset sweep low over the trees to the pond, homing to the warm black waters. He watched it down. What caught his ear? The high thin whicker of a feather, a shadow passing, nothing. Light was breaking in thin reefs through the clouds shelved darkly up the west. Old dry leaves rattled frail and withered as old voices, trailed stiffly down, rocking like thinworn shells downward through seawater, or spun, curling ancient parchments on which no message at all appeared.

Young Rattner finished his cigarette and went back out to the road. An aged Negro passed high on the seat of a wagon, dozing to the chop of the half-shod mule-hooves on the buckled asphalt. About him the tall wheels veered and dished in the erratic parabolas of spun coins unspinning as if not attached to the wagon at all but merely rolling there in that quadratic symmetry by pure chance. He crossed the road to give them leeway and they swung by slowly, laboriously, as if under the weight of some singular and unreasonable gravity. The ruined and ragged mule, the wagon, the man … up the road they wobbled, rattle and squeak of the fellies climbing loose over the spokes … shimmered in waves of heat rising from the road, dissolved in a pale and broken image.

He followed along behind, going toward the forks. Once at the top of the hill he paused and looked back and he could see the roof of the house deep-green with moss, or gaping black where patches had caved through. But it was never his house anyway.

Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.

It was like having your name in the paper, he thought, reading the inscription:

MILDRED YEARWOOD RATTNER

1906–1945

If thou afflict them in any wise,

And they cry at all unto me,

I will surely hear their cry.

Exod.

the stone arrogating to itself in these three short years already a gray and timeless aspect, glazed with lichens and nets of small brown runners, the ring of rusted wire leaning awry against it with its stained and crumpled rags of foliage. He reached out and patted the stone softly, a gesture, as if perhaps to conjure up some image, evoke again some allegiance with a name, a place, hallucinated recollections in which faces merged inextricably, and yet true and fixed; touched it, a carved stone less real than the smell of woodsmoke or the taste of an old man’s wine. And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.