Cormac McCarthy - The Orchard Keeper

A smell of honeysuckle came up the mountain, wafted on the cooling updrafts, Treefrogs and crickets called. A whippoorwill. Abruptly the yap of hounds treeing. His shoulder was pounding again and the cast had begun to cut into his armpit. He still couldn’t take a full breath. He started back, the Ford outlined through the silhouettes of trunks and branches like a night animal feeding, a shape massive and bovine. At the rear bumper he sniffed tentatively, then resolutely reached into the foul darkness and clamped his hand over one leg. Turning his head he stepped away, hearing the rasp and slide of it following and the thump and jar when it fell to the ground. Past the car, edging along the screen of brush he dragged it, thirty yards or better before stopping to rest. It felt lighter. He pulled it the rest of the way to the pit without stopping and then he couldn’t breathe any more. He lay in the grass very quietly, waiting for the shoulder to stop, and held on to the leg, afraid if he turned loose he would not touch it again. His breath came back and he sat up a little, not hurting, conscious only of his hand hooked around the suppurant flesh. Then he got to his feet, jerked the body to the edge of the pit in three long steps, talking in a voice skirting hysteria: You son of a bitch. You rotten son of a bitch.

Dropping the leg he planted one foot in the man’s side and shoved him violently over the rim, the arms flapping briefly in some simulation of protest before crashing into the moldery water below.

Going back down the mountain he left the ruts twice, cutting a swath the second time through a stand of sumac one of which caught in the bumper and rode there like a guidon. A limb whipped in the window and laid open his cheek. He didn’t even know the trunk was open until a car passed him on the pike where he had forced himself to slow down and he realized that he had seen no lights in the rearview mirror.

From his log the old man watched the shape of the retreating lights cutting among the trees. When they went from sight he brought a pipe from his jacket, filled and lit it. The dogs had treed some time past and their calls were now less urgent. He smoked his pipe down, knocked out the ashes on the log and rose stiffly, fingering a chambered goat-horn slung from his neck by a thong. Low in the east a red moon was coming up through the clouds, a crooked smile, shard of shellrim pendant from some dark gypsy ear. He raised his horn. His call went among the slopes echoing and re-echoing, stilling the nightbirds, rattling the frogs in the creek to silence, and on out over the valley where it faded thin and clear as a bell for one hovering breath before the night went clamorous with hounds howling in rondelays, pained waitings as of phantom dogs lamenting their own demise. From the head of the hollow Scout and Buster yapped sharply and started down the creek again. The old man lowered his horn and chuckled, turned down the gully wash taking the stickrimmed basins like stairs, cautiously, turning as alternate feet descended. He had cut a pole of hickory, hewed it octagonal and graced the upper half with hex-carvings — nosed moons, stars, fish of strange and pleistocene aspect. Struck in the rising light it shone new white as the face of an apple-half.

The Green Fly Inn burned on December twenty-first of 1936 and a good crowd gathered in spite of the cold and the late hour. Cabe made off with the cashbox and at the last minute authorized the fleeing patrons to carry what stock they could with them, so that with the warmth of the fire and the bottles and jars passing around, the affair took on a holiday aspect. Within minutes the back wall of the building fell completely away, spiraling off with a great rushing sound into the hollow. The rooftree collapsed then and the tin folded inward, the edges curling up away from the walls like foil. By now the entire building was swallowed in flames rocketing up into the night with locomotive sounds and sucking on the screaming updraft half-burned boards with tremendous velocity which fell spinning, tracing red ribbons brilliantly down the night to crash into the canyon or upon the road, dividing the onlookers into two bands, grouped north and south out of harm’s way, their faces lacquered orange as jackolanterns in the ring of heat. Until the stilts gave and the facing slid backward from the road with a hiss, yawed in a slow curvet about the anchor of the pine trunk, overrode the crumpling poles, vaulting on them far out over the canyon before the floor buckled and the whole structure, roof, walls, folded neatly about some unguessed axis and dropped vertically into the pit.

There it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet, shaped in ripples and flutings, encysted with crisp and blackened rubble, murrhined with bottlecaps. It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon.

Curled in a low peach limb the old man watched the midmorning sun blinding on the squat metal tank that topped the mountain. He had found some peaches, although the orchard went to ruin twenty-years before when the fruit had come so thick and no one to pick it that at night the overborne branches cracking sounded in the valley like distant storms raging. The old man remembered it that way, for he was a lover of storms.

The tank was on high legs and had a fence around it with red signs that he had been pondering for some time, not just today. From time to time he sliced a bite from one of his peaches. They were small and hard, but he had good teeth. He propped one foot up in the limb with him and fell to stropping the knife slowly on the smooth-worn toe of his boot. Then he wet a patch of hair on his arm and tested the blade. Satisfied, he reached for another peach and began peeling it.

When he had finished this one he wiped the blade of the knife on his cuff, folded and pocketed it, passed a handful of loose sleeve across his mouth. Then he got down from his limb and started up through the wreckage of the orchard, threading his way among the old gray limbs and stopping to look out over the valley now and again, at the black corded fields and the roofs winking in the sun. When he came out on the road he turned down to the right, his brogans making small padding sounds in the red dust, his huge knobby-kneed trousers rolling and moiling about him urgently as if invested with a will and purpose of their own.

This was the orchard road red and quiet in the early sun, winding from the mountain’s spine with apple trees here along the road and shading it, gnarled and bitten trees, yet retaining still a kept look and no weeds growing where they grew. Farther up was a side road that went off among the trees, shade-dappled, grass fine as hair in the ruts. It went to the spray-pit, a concrete tank set in the ground that had once been used to mix insecticide. These six years past it had served as a crypt which the old man kept and guarded. Passing it now he remembered how he had been coming up from the hollow with a gallon bucket when a boy and a girl, neither much more than waist-high to him, had rounded the curve. They stopped when they saw him and it took him a while, coming toward them with his pail, to see that they were scared, huge-eyed and winded with running. They looked ready to bolt so he smiled, said Howdy to them, that it was a pretty day. And them there in the road, balanced and poised for flight like two wild things, the little girl’s legs brightly veined with brier scratches and both their mouths blue with berry stain. As he came past she began to whimper and the boy, holding her hand, jerked at her to be still, he standing very straight in his overall pants and striped jersey. They edged to the side of the road and turned, watching him go by .