The Orchard Keeper (1965) (7 page)

The old man lay awake a long time. Once he thought he heard a cry, faintly, beyond the creek and the field, but he wasn’t sure. A car passed on the road and he wondered about that but then he dozed and the crickets had already stopped.

D
eep hole between her neckcords, smokeblue. Laddered boneshapes under the paper skin like rows of welts descending into the bosom of her dress. Eyes lowered to her work, blink when she swallows like a toad’s. Lids wrinkled like walnut hulls. Her grizzled hair gathered, tight, a helmet of zinc wire. Softly rocking, rocking. A looping drape of skirt slung in a curtain-fold down the side of the chair swept softly at the floor. She sat before the barren fireplace stitching buttonholes in a shirt of woolen millends. From out his scrolled and gilded frame Captain Kenneth Rattner, fleshly of face and rakish in an overseas cap abutting upon his right eyebrow, the double-barred insignia wreathed in light, soldier, father, ghost, eyed them.

With the lamps aligned one on either side she had a ritualistic look, a nun at beads perhaps. Later he watched
from the kitchen lean-to because it had a tin roof and a wind had come up now and was blowing the rain across it with long ripping sounds like silk tearing. He turned the pages of his magazine but he had read it so much that he scarcely looked at the pages any more; mostly he watched how the lampflame quivered and the polished work that bound the stove, burnt to peacock colors of bronze and copper, violet-blue, changed patterns, ran to whorls and flamepoints. He waved his hand over the glass and the blue canisters above the stove bowed.

In the kitchen the man on the mantel couldn’t watch him any more either. After a while he put down the magazine and turned around in the chair, sat with his elbows propped on the back and watched out the window for lightning. Thin cracks of it far back over Winkle Hollow like heat lightning. There was no thunder, only the rain and wind.

The boy thought he could remember his father. Or perhaps only his mother telling about him … He remembered a man, his father or just some other man he was no longer sure. His father didn’t come back after they moved from Maryville. He remembered that, the moving.

It was a house of logs, hand-squared and chinked with clay, the heavy rafters in the loft pinned with wooden pegs. There had been a loom in the loft but it had since been burned piece by piece for kindling. It was a huge affair of rough-cut wood that under the dust had retained even then a yellow newness. The rafters still looked that way. In the summer wasps nested over the boards, using the auger-holes where dowels had shrunk in some old dry weather and fallen to the floor to emerge out into the hot loft and drone past his bed to the window where a corner of glass was gone and so out into the sunlight. There had been mud-dobber nests
stacked up the wide planks too but his mother had raked them all down one day and aside from the wasps there were only the borers and woodworms, which he never saw but knew by the soft cones of wood-dust that gathered on the floor, the top log beneath the eaves, or trailed down upon the cobwebs, heavy yellow sheets of them opaque with dust and thick as muslin.

The house was tall and severe with few windows. Some supposed it to be the oldest house in the county. It was roofed with shakes and they seemed the only part of it not impervious to weather and time, for they were blackened and split, and now curling in their ruin they seemed victims of a long-ago fire which the house had somehow escaped altogether, for it was sound and the logs were finely checked and seasoned. They sagged and bellied and seemed supported only by the chimneys of clay and river rock at either end, but the house was strong and settled and no wind could bring a creak from it.

They paid no tax on it, for it did not exist in the county courthouse records, nor on the land, for they did not own it. They paid no rent on either house or land, as claimants to either or both properties were nonexistent in deed as the house itself. They paid Oliver Henderson, who brought water to them three times a week on his milk route.

The well hidden in the weeds and Johnson grass that burgeoned rankly in the yard had long shed its wall of rocks and they were piled in the dry bottom in layers between which rested in chance interment the bones of rabbits, possums, cats, and other various and luckless quadrupeds.

He didn’t know that, but only guessed because he had found a young rabbit in the well one spring and was afraid to climb down after it. He brought green things
to it every day and dropped them in and then one day he fluttered a handful of garden lettuce down the hole and he remembered how some of the leaves fell across it and it didn’t move. He went away and he could see for a long time the rabbit down in the bottom of the well among the rocks with the lettuce over it.

She had finished now and put one lamp on the mantel and was looking at it with the shirt in her hand held up against her. She stood that way for a while and then she turned and saw him watching her over his shoulder, each of them touched with light and the space between them through the narrow door dark. He couldn’t see her eyes and he made out that he was looking at something else and finally turned back to the window and the rain.

Boy, she said.

Yesm.

You get to bed.

Yesm, he said again. He did not move.

Your bed ain’t got wet, is it?

No mam.

It would be wet, always was when it rained even if it didn’t blow. It was musty and smelled good then and cool enough for the blanket. This year, this summer, he had moved to the porch off the kitchen, carrying his bed down one Sunday evening while she was at church and in it by the time she got back, breathing deeply when she stopped at the door on her way in. Then he could hear her at the dishes in the kitchen humming to herself, and she never said anything about it except she made him carry out the two boxes of bottles and cans he had evicted from the corner. The lean-to porch was screened in from waist-high up; after he was in bed a while he could see even the acorns in the yard oaks. Some nights a tall gaunt hound came and peered in the screendoor at him and he would speak to it, it standing there
high-shouldered and flat-looking, not moving, and then it would be gone and he could hear its feet padding off through the yard and the clink of its collar.

He pulled the bed out from the corner, turned back the spread and felt the pillow. Then he turned it over and took the blanket from under his arm and put it on the bed and got in. That was the last night of that summer. He fell asleep to the water and metal sounds of the rain runneling over the tin and sluicing through the gutterpipe, the rapid slash of it in a gust of wind and the fine mist spraying his face through the bellying screen. The oaks stirred restlessly, low admonitions, shhh …

In the morning the rain had stopped and there was a chill in the air and smoke. He smiled at that, for he was waiting and weathers and seasons were his timepiece now. There were still warm days but that didn’t matter to him. Jays were in the blackoaks mornings and the grackles had come back, great flocks of them bending the trees, their feathers glinting dark metal colors and their calls harshly musical, like a rusty swing. Or they would be on the ground, the yard rolling blackly with them, and he would run out and pop his hands once and see them explode sunward, a flapping shrieking horde bearing leaves and debris into the air on the updraft of their wings.

The first weeks of September went and the weather held and no frost. The veins were coming up in his arms and he would press them and then raise his fist and feel the blood in the soft tubes.

He was pushing time now and he could feel it give. She canned the remainder of the garden in two days and was after him to get his bed back up to the loft before he took cold. It rained and the pond went blood-red and one afternoon he caught a bass from the willows in water
not a foot deep and cleaned it and held the tiny heart in the palm of his hand, still beating.

His bed was still on the porch. These nights he could not bear to be in the house. He would go out after dinner and come back at bedtime—and then out again directly she was asleep, walking the dark roads, passing by the shacks and houses, the people illumined yellowly behind the windowlights in gestures mute and enigmatic…

One night cutting through a field he came upon two figures struggling in the grass, naked, white and frantic in the gloss of the quarter-moon as stranded fish. He went on. They did not see him. When he got to the road he began to run, his shoes slapping loud on the asphalt till they burned and stung, ran till his chest was seared. Below the forks of the road in Stiefel’s yard was a great tulip poplar. He crawled up the kept-grass bank and folded in the shadows of the trunk like a malefactor gone to earth, his breath dragging coals through his lungs.

He sat there for a long time, watching the lights go out one by one over the valley. Sound of voices close and urgent on the acoustic night air, doors falling to, laughter … An encampment settling for rest, council fires put out … In caverns by torchlight a congress of fiends and warlocks rattling old dry bones in wistful hunger.

You goin to hunt him out. When you’re old enough. Goin to find the man that took away your daddy. (Remember: fierce and already aging face downthrust into his, sweetsour smell …)

How can I? He had begun to cry.

Your daddy’d of knowed how. He was a Godfearin man if he never took much to church meetin … The Lord’ll show you, boy. He will not forsake them what
believe. Pray and the way will be made known to ye. He … You
swear
it, boy.

His arm was growing numb with pain … could feel her tremble through the clutched hand … I swear, he said.

You won’t never forgit.

No.

Never long as you live.

Long as I live.

Yes, she said.

Long as I …

I won’t forgit neither, she said, tightening once more on his arm for a moment, leaning her huge face at him. And, she hissed, he won’t forgit neither.

I live …

He never forgot. From somewhere in the darkness came the sound of a banjo, tentative chords … a message … what news? Old loves reconsummated, sickness, a child’s crying. Silence now in the houses. Repose. Even to those for whom no end of night could bring rest enough. And silence, the music fled in the seeping amber warmth of innumerable dreams laid to death upon the hearth, ghostly and still … The morning is yet to the nether end of the earth, and he is weary. Bowing the grass in like sadness the dew followed him home and sealed his door.

Still the weather held, and the rain. The days were gray and misty and in the night the trees dripped and spattered. The pond had been bottled and he watched them drifting about one morning while still-fishing from the limestone ledge at the upper end. Later a man came in a skiff poling through the fog and he saw him stop what bottles skittered and jerked and lift up the lines to
take off the fish. The man saw him and nodded his head and he nodded back. The skiff circled at the upper end and returned down the pond, silent but for the thud of the pole on the stern-boards.

He was pushing hard now and the days were bending under and cold weather came. His cot was still on the porch and daily he checked the undoing of the yard trees, woke to a red world with the sun wedged huge and squat in the mountain gap and the maples incandesced. Couched in his musty blanket he sniffed to test the air. A limp breeze water-wrought and tempered with smoke came lisping through the screen with no news yet.

He waited. In the slow bleeding month of October he watched, looking torpid and heavylidded as a toad, his nerves coiled and tuned like a waiting cat’s.

One evening coming from the store he saw her on the road and she smiled at him and said Hidy. He nodded and went on, heard them giggle behind him. He hadn’t seen her since late in the summer.

He was crossing Saunders’ field and bound for the creek, the homemade crokersack seine riding his shoulder like a tramp’s dunnage. He never saw her until she spoke, leaning against a post with her hands capping the top of it and her chin resting on them. She looked as if she might have been standing there for days with an incalculable patience just waiting for him to come by
.

Well, he thought, she ain’t old enough to own the land to want to run me off of it even if she is big enough. So he said Howdy back to her
.

Your name’s John Wesley, ain’t it?

He started to say, Yesm, but he said, Yep, that’s my name
.

She moved down from the post and came toward him, unhurried, sauntering. She wore a cotton print dress that
buttoned up like a housecoat and where it stretched across her belly or strained to cover her rolling breasts white flesh and pink silk pursed out between the buttons. She pulled a weed and began chewing on it, eying him sidewise, standing in front of him now and favoring one leg so that her hip tilted out. What you doin? she asked
.

Jest messin around, he said
.

Messin around?

Yeah. That’s all
.

She nudged a stone with the toe of her slipper. Who you messin around with?

Why, nobody. Jest me
.

The tips of her breasts were printed in the cloth like coins. She was watching him watch. You ain’t supposed to mess around with yourself, she told him, part of a smile at her mouthcorners and eyes squinting in mischief
.

Who says that? he asked
.

Me. Preacher says that too
.

I got to get on, he said
.

You goin to mess with yourself some more?

He started on and she fell in alongside him. Where you goin? she asked
.

Pond, he said
.

What you goin there for?

Fish
.

Fish. Fishin? You ain’t got a pole
.

Got one over there, he told her
.

Hid. You don’t carry your pole with you?

Nah
.

She giggled
.