Cormac McCarthy: The Orchard Keeper

From within the building Cabe and a few others were trying desperately to untangle the mass that writhed in the doorway, resorting finally to taking hold of what limb presented itself and pulling until something gave. Thus the survivors came aboard bereft of one shoe, or both, or pants, or as with Hobie himself naked save for one half of a shirt. Until the frame of the door exploded inward carrying a good section of wall and they entered in a roil of bodies and crashing wood .

The porch had swung out and downward and now tottered for a moment on the strength of a single two-by-six before it too snapped and the whole affair slewed away with a great splintering sound. The figures clutching at the rails began to turn loose their holds, coming away by ones and twos like beetles shaken from a limb, and the entire wreckage descended in a slow tableau of ruin to pitch thunderously into the hollow .

The atmosphere inside seethed with an inchoate violence. Scared men, torn, unclothed and crushed, breathing loudly and sweating the sweat of subsiding panic, mounting outrage and indignity. One by one the fallen were entering through the front door red with blood and clay and looking like the vanquished in some desperate encounter waged with sabers and without quarter. As they gathered strength from below two factions became apparent and they fell upon each other murderously and fought far into the night .

Kenneth Rattner nursed a slashed hand as he squatted in a blackberry thicket below the inn and listened with quiet bemusement to the thrashings and curses of the victims. Someone had brought a light; he could see the flicker and sweep of it through the bramble wall. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and tied it around his hand, pulling the knot to with his teeth. Then he worked his way carefully up to the road and started for home. Small groups of men were running up the mountain to the scene of disaster bearing lanterns and whispering hoarsely .

I got a job, he told her .

Praise God, she said. Whereabouts?

Greenville South Carolina, showing her the money now. Trainfare, he said. But he gave her five of the thirty-one dollars and they went to the store. He bought the boy an orange drink, lifted him onto the box where he sat holding it in both hands, watching. Mrs Eller was telling about it .

That Coy Tipton showed up here this mornin looked like he’d fell in a combine. Said they’s three or four of em what lost their britches — I’d like to know how they done that my own sef — and when they clumb down in the holler to get em somebody had beat em there and stole their pocketbooks. She sat atilt in her rocker, fanned slowly with a church tract. Thiefs and drunks runs together I expect, she said. Ain’t none of em but got what they’s lookin for .

Mildred Rattner pinched from loaf to loaf across the bread rack. When them as wallers in sin thinks they’s gettin by with it, she said, that’s when He strikes em in His holy wrath. He jest bides His time .

Kenneth Rattner stroked his stiffening leg, flexed his ankle. It was past midnight and people were coming in now. The bartender had abandoned his magazine and was moving nervously up and down the counter and filling glasses for the newcomers.

He drained the last of the beer and set the glass upon the bar. Hey, buddy, he called. Give us anothern over here. Hey, old buddy.

Saturday afternoons Marion Sylder would come in the store fresh-looking in starched khakis or overall breeches and go to the glass case and point out the socks to Mr Eller. Mr Eller would put the box on top of the counter and Sylder would hold up a pair and say: How much are these?

Quarter, Mr Eller would say. No change in price, still a quarter. All a quarter, ain’t got no other kind.

Sylder would spin a quarter on the glass, take his socks and sit down on a milkcase in front of the stove. He would do them one at a time, taking off one shoe and sock and waving his bare foot about while he reached for the stove door, opened it, and swung in the old sock, holding it delicately. Then he would put on his fresh sock, lace up his shoe, and proceed to the other foot, the one with the big toe nailless and truncate. He was working in the fertilizer plant now. Noontimes he ate in the café the regular lunches, the thirty-cent specials with the lightbread that clove gluily to the palate, three slices with a thumbprint in the center served on a piece of waxed paper. Beans and fatmeat oozing grease into the greasy gravy that leaked down from the potatoes, a beaded scum of grease on the coffee, everything in fact lubricated as if all who ate there suffered from some atrophy of the deglutitive muscles which precluded swallowing. In late afternoon he returned, parked the coupe and crossed the gullied and wasted clay of the yard where an old tire still hung from the one knobby and leafless oak, and so into the unpainted house.

Within the hour he was out, washed and combed, blasting away the peaceful cricket sounds with the open cutout, tooling carefully down the corroded drive and onto the pike and gone.

To Happy Hollow or McAnally Flats. Mead’s Quarry or Pennyroyal. Smoking shacks yellow with coal-oil light and areek with the sweetmold smell of splo whiskey.

Drinking, courting with ribald humor the country slatterns that hung on the city’s perimeter like lost waifs; his favorites the ill-shapen: Wretha, white lisle uniform, thighs the dimensions of oiltuns. The too thin. A nameless one, bony rump that cut into his leg. Experimentally he wet a finger and cut a white streak on the grime of her neck.

Some nights he made it to the Green Fly Inn and rocked away with those old boozers to the last man, this affluent son returned upon them bearing no olive branch but hard coin and greenbacks and ushering in an era of prosperity, a Utopia of paid drinks.

He was hard-pressed now on eighteen dollars a week, who had spent that in an evening. He turned twenty-one in August.

The following Friday he lost his job at the fertilizer plant. Aaron Conatser needled him into a fight, and he fought, not out of any particular dislike toward Conatser, or even in any great anger, but only to get the thing over with, settled. Conatser was the only man in the plant his size and had been looking to try him.

He was on one knee with his arms locked around Conatser’s neck when he heard Conatser’s hoarse breathing stop. There was no sound in the shipping room and when he raised his head he saw that the men standing around them were looking past him at something else and knew before he turned that Mr Petree had joined the circle. Not the dock foreman, or even the supervisor, either of whom would have said Break it up. He turned loose of Conatser and stood. Conatser came up too, stretching his neck like a mute rooster, and put his hands in his back pockets with elegant indifference.

He licked at the trickle of blood from his nose, tasting it salty and metallic, and turned to see what the old man would have to say. But Petree spun on his square leather heel and stalked briskly back down the aisle, the shipping-room floor echoing his hollow footfalls among the tiers of bags.

The three or four men who had gathered to watch the fray dispersed in silence, faded or slunk away in the dark malodorous aisles, less brazen than the rats that nested beneath the pallets. He and Conatser stood glaring at each other for a small minute, breathing laboriously. Then Conatser turned his head and spat, looked once obliquely across his shoulder at him and sauntered away toward the dock.

The dock foreman came down just before quitting time and told him. I tried to put in a word for you, he said, but he wadn’t hearing any.

Sylder doubted him but muttered a thanks anyway and started for the office. Where you goin? he asked. Get my pay.