Cormac McCarthy: The Orchard Keeper

His trouser legs were wet and clammy against his ankles. Sitting on the small square of marble he removed one shoe, testing the sock for dampness, resting as any traveler might. From across the tall grass and beyond the ruins of the spiked iron fence came the click of the lightbox at the intersection. A car emerged from the trees at his right and rolled to a stop. There were a man and a woman. She looked at him across the man’s shoulder, then turned to the man. They both looked. The box clicked. He waved to them and the man turned, saw the green light and pulled away, the white oval of the woman’s face still watching him. So he waved again to her just as the car slid from sight behind a hedgerow, the wheels whisking up a fine spray from the road.

He sat there for a while, rubbing his foot abstractedly, whistling softly to himself. To the west a solid sheet of overcast sped the evening on. Already fireflies were about. He put on his shoe and rose and began moving toward the fence, through the wet grass. The workers had gone, leaving behind their wood-dust and chips, the white face of the stump pooling the last light out of the gathering dusk. The sun broke through the final shelf of clouds and bathed for a moment the dripping trees with blood, tinted the stones a diaphanous wash of color, as if the very air had gone to wine. He passed through the gap in the fence, past the torn iron palings and out to the western road, the rain still mizzling softly and the darkening headlands drawing off the day, heraldic, pennoned in flame, the fleeing minions scattering their shadows in the wake of the sun.

They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.

Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.