Cormac McCarthy: The Orchard Keeper

“[McCarthy] puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“McCarthy is a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters…. In [his] hands, everything is done with consummate skill — a kind of maximalism with precision crafting.”

— Village Voice

“No other novelist in America seems to have looked the work of Faulkner in the eye without blinking and lived to write in his spirit without sounding like a parody of the master.”

— Dallas Morning News

“A master in perfect command of his medium.”

— Washington Post Book World

“A true American original.”

— Newsweek

“Mr. McCarthy has the best kind of Southern style, one that fuses risky eloquence, intricate rhythms and dead-to-rights accuracy.”

— The New York Times

“McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality.”

— Robert Penn Warren

The tree was down and cut to lengths, the sections spread and jumbled over the grass. There was a stocky man with three fingers bound up in a dirty bandage with a splint. With him were a Negro and a young man, the three of them gathered about the butt of the tree. The stocky man laid aside the saw and he and the Negro took hold of the piece of fence and strained and grunted until they got the log turned over. The man got to one knee and peered into the cut. We best come in this way, he said. The Negro picked up the crosscut and he and the man began sawing again. They sawed for a time and then the man said, Hold it. Goddamn, that’s it again. They stopped and lifted the blade from the cut and peered down into the tree. Uh-huh, said the Negro. It sho is now, ain’t it?

The young man came over to see. Here, said the man, look sideways here. See? He looked. All the way up here? he said. Yep, the man said. He took hold of the twisted wrought-iron, the mangled fragment of the fence, and shook it. It didn’t shake. It’s growed all through the tree, the man said. We cain’t cut no more on it. Damned old elum’s bad enough on a saw .

The Negro was nodding his head. Yessa, he said. It most sholy has. Growed all up in that tree .

For some time now the road had been deserted, white and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening the western sky. He walked along slowly in the dust, stopping from time to time and hobbling on one foot like some squat ungainly bird while he examined the wad of tape coming through his shoe-sole. He turned again. Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless mass had emerged and was struggling toward him. It loomed steadily, weaving and grotesque like something seen through bad glass, gained briefly the form and solidity of a pickup truck, whipped past and receded into the same liquid shape by which it came.

He swung his cocked thumb after it in a vague gesture. Little fans of dust scurried up the road shoulder and settled in his cuffs.

Go on, damn ye, he said to the fleeting mirage. He took out his cigarettes and counted them, put them back. He turned his head to the sun. Won’t be no use after dark, he said. Windless silence, not even a rustle from the dusty newsprint and candypapers pressed furtively into the brown wall of weeds at the road edge.

Further on he could see the lights of a filling station, some buildings. Maybe a fork where the traffic slowed. He jerked his thumb at a trailer truck as it whined past, sucking up dust and papers in its wake, watched it wrench the trees farther up the road.

You wouldn’t pick up Jesus Christ, would you, he asked, rearranging his hair with his fingers.

When he got to the filling station he had a long drink of water and smoked one of the cigarettes. There was a grocery store adjoining and he wandered in, cruising with a slithery sound up and down the aisles of boxes and cans and filling his pockets with small items — candy bars, a pencil, a roll of adhesive tape … Emerging from behind some cartons of toilet paper he caught the storekeep eying him.

Say now, he said, you don’t have any, uh — his eyes took a quick last inventory — any tire pumps, do ye?

They ain’t in the cake rack, the man said.

He looked down at a jumbled mound of bread and cakes, quietly lethal in their flyspecked cellophane.

Over here — the storekeep was pointing. In a crate at the back end of the counter were jacks, pumps, tire tools, an odd posthole digger.

Oh yeah, he said. I got em now. He shuffled over and fumbled among them for a few minutes.

Them ain’t the kind I was lookin for, he told the storekeep, making for the door now.

What kind was that? the man asked. I didn’t know they was but one kind.

No, no, he said, musing, standing just short of the door, rubbing his lower lip. He was inventing a new tire pump. Well, he said, they got a new kind now you don’t have to pump up and down thisaway (pumping) but what’s got a kind of lever handle you go at like this (pumping, one hand).

That a fact, said the storekeep.

Bet it is, he said. Makes it a whole lot easier on a feller too.

What kind of car you drivin? the storekeep wanted to know.

Me? Why I got me a new Ford. Brand-new thirty-four, V-eight motor. Scare you jest to set in it…

Lots of tire trouble though, hmm?

Well… no, jest this one time is the only first time I ever had me any tire trouble … Well, I better … say now, how fer is it to Atlana?

Seventeen mile.

Well, I reckon I better get on. We’ll see yins.

Come back, the storekeep said. Shore hope you get your tire blowed up. It would be a sight easier with a pump.

But the screendoor flapped and he was outside. Standing on the store porch he studied the hour. The sun was already down. A cricket sounded and a squadron of bull-bats came up out of the smoldering west, high on pointed wings, harrying the dusk.

There was a car pulled in at the filling station. He cussed the storekeep for a while, then walked back down and had another drink of water. From his pocket he produced a candy bar and began munching it.

In a few minutes a man came from the restroom and passed him, going to the car.

Say now, he said. You goin t’wards town?

The man stopped and looked around, spied him propped against an oil drum. Yeah, he said. You want a ride on in?

Why now I shore would preciate it, he said, shuffling toward the man now. My daughter she’s in the hospital there and I got to get in to see her tonight…

Hospital? Where’s that? the man asked.

Why, the one in Atlana. The big one there …

Oh, said the man. Well, I’m jest goin as fer as Austell.

How fer’s that?

Nine mile.

Well, you don’t care for me to ride that fer with ye, do ye?

Be proud to hep ye out that fer, said the man.

Coming into Atlanta he saw at the top of a fence of signs one that said KNOXVILLE 197. The name of the town for which he was headed. Had he been asked his name he might have given any but Kenneth Rattner, which was his name.

East of Knoxville Tennessee the mountains start, small ridges and spines of the folded Appalachians that contort the outgoing roads to their liking. The first of these is Red Mountain; from the crest on a clear day you can see the cool blue line of the watershed like a distant promise.

In late summer the mountain bakes under a sky of pitiless blue. The red dust of the orchard road is like powder from a brick kiln. You can’t hold a scoop of it in your hand. Hot winds come up the slope from the valley like a rancid breath, redolent of milkweed, hoglots, rotting vegetation. The red clay banks along the road are crested with withered honeysuckle, peavines dried and sheathed in dust. By late July the corn patches stand parched and sere, stalks askew in defeat. All greens pale and dry. Clay cracks and splits in endless microcataclysm and the limestone lies about the eroded land like schools of sunning dolphin, gray channeled backs humped at the infernal sky.