The Orchard Keeper (1965) (25 page)

No, Mr Eller said. Course they liable to thow it off on him to save huntin somebody else.

But he was the one told it?

Near as I can find out he was.

Johnny Romines passed the paper across his tongue and folded it shut. Well, do you reckon it was him? he said.

His daddy you mean? Room for speculatin there too I reckon. Miz Rattner claims that it was and that the boy has gone off to hunt whoever it was put him there. She says it all come to her in a dream—a vision, she called it.

Wonder if she had a vision about him bein wanted in three states, Gifford said.

Mr Eller turned on the constable. No, he said, I doubt she has. I don’t reckon she needs any sech either. She’s a good Christian woman don’t matter who-all she might of been married to and not knowed no better.

The constable looked at the storekeeper.

Or the boy either, Mr Eller added.

Never you mind about the boy, Gifford said. Me and him is due for a nice little talk anyway.

Well, you’ll have to find him first.

Wonder who it was, Johnny Romines said. That put him in there I mean. Reckon it was somebody from around here?

I doubt it was somebody from New York City, the constable said. He turned to Mr Eller. And what about that fancy plate he was supposed to have? In his head from the war.

What about it?

Well, they wadn’t none. How’s she account for that?

I don’t reckon she ever thought to ast about it. She jest never would of doubted or wondered about it in the first place. About whether he had one, if he said he did, or about whether that was him in that dittybag if she’d decided that it was either one. Mr Eller rolled his cheeks and spat soundlessly across the constable’s bow and into a coffeecan. Seems like you ought to tell your sidekick about it though, he said.

Who’s that?

Legwater.

He ain’t my sidekick, Gifford said. And I don’t have to tell nobody nothin cept as I see fit.

Mr Eller studied a passing fly, apparently ruminating on some obscure problem in the dynamics of flight. Well, he said agreeably, I reckon you’re right. Keep him out of mischief anyhow.

Gifford’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. What? What will?

Campin up on the mountain. With his shovel and his winderscreen.

Some coughs went their rounds. A milkcase settled floorward creakily.

Humph, said Gifford, unleaning from the counter
with studied ease. He fingered cigarettes deftly from one straining pocket. Then: What’s he doin up there?

Mr Eller waited while the match rocketed across the counter. Then he said: Huntin platymum I reckon. Lessen he’s siftin them ashes for to make soap.

Legwater was on the mountain three days before anyone could get close enough to him to tell him it wasn’t so, that the man never had any platinum in his head and that he was wasting his time, it was all a mistake. The first night he built his fire and was sitting by it with his shotgun leaning against a tree and was sipping coffee from a canteen cup when the hound staggered into the clearing on the far side of the fire and stood with his blind head swinging back and forth like a bear’s, muzzle up to catch what clue the wind might bring.

Ha! cried Legwater, leaping up, the coffee flying. Ha! he said, stepped to the tree and snatched up the shotgun. But before he could get a proper sight the dog was gone again, absorbed quietly into the darkness. Legwater leveled the gun at the night and fired, listened after the compounding echoes of the shot for a long time and then stepped to the fire and got the cup and poured it full from the pot, squatting, the shotgun leaning against his knee. He listened some more, but could make nothing out. He set the pot back on the little circle of stones he had constructed and tried the hot rim of the cup against his lip. The hound did not reappear. When he had finished the coffee he rolled his blankets out, reloaded the empty chamber of the gun and settled for sleep.

Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had
long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether. He listened. Above the black ranks of trees the midsummer sky arched cloudless and coldly starred. He lay back and stared at it and after a while he slept.

When he woke again the sun was up. He was still lying on his back and now in the depthless blue void above him a hawk wheeled. He got to his feet and began to walk around, feeling stiff and poorly rested. He scouted in the woods and came back with a load of dead limbs, snapped them to length under his foot and soon had a fire going and coffee warming. When it had perked he sat blowing at a cupful and shifting it from hand to hand as it got too hot or he found a new mosquito bite to scratch at. There was an army rucksack hanging from the tree near his blankets and from the pocket he took some cold biscuits and ate them. Then he got to work.

The ashes in the pit were better than a foot deep and the ground all about was strewn with them. He worked all day, shoveling out piles of ash and then climbing from the pit to sift them with his window-screen. Late in the afternoon some boys came into the clearing and stood for a time watching him. He kept at it, the clouds of ash billowing up out of the pit. Before long they began to comment. He looked at them sharply, not stopping, sifting the ashes, examining charred bits of cedar wood. Soon they were giggling among themselves. He ignored them, adopting an official air about his work. It was no good.

Might be gold teeth too, one of them sang out. A flurry of titters surged and died. Legwater stood up and glared at them. They were five, standing together
just at the edge of the trees with grinning faces. He climbed back into the pit with his shovel. From time to time he would stretch his head up over the top of the hole to see what they were about, but about the third time one of them gobbled like a turkey and they all howled with laughter so he gave it up and tried not to look their way. He kept at his shoveling. After a while he heard something clatter near the pit. He looked up and the boys had gone. Then an apple dropped into the ashes at his feet with a soft puff. He stopped and craned his neck up. Sure enough, here; came another. He marked its course, leaped out of the pit and seizing the shotgun as he went began a fast walk in the direction from which the apple had come. Brush began crashing. A voice called: Run, fellers, run! He’ll shoot ye down and scalp ye. Another: You got silver in your teeth you’re a dead’n. He stopped. The sounds died away. On the road further down the mountain high laughter, catcalls. He went back to work. By nightfall he was a feathery gray effigy—face, hair and clothing a single color. He spat gobs of streaky gray phlegm. Even the trees near the pit had begun to take on a pale and weathered look.

The hound came back after dark. He could hear it padding in the leaves, stop, shuffle again. He had eaten the last of what food he had brought and could hardly sleep for the cramping in his belly. He held the shotgun and waited for the hound to enter the firelight. It did not. Finally he went to sleep with the shotgun lying across his lap. He was very tired.

When he went to the pit the following morning the first thing he saw was an old goatskull, the brainpan crammed with tinfoil. He pitched it away in disgust and fell to shoveling.

By late in the afternoon his hunger had subsided and he had cleared the pit so that in one end the bare concrete
was visible, blackened and encrusted with an indefinable burnt substance that scaled away under the shovel and showed green beneath.

He was shoveling faster, approaching desperation as the residue of unsifted ashes diminished, when Gifford showed up, badly winded from his climb up the mountain. Legwater stopped and watched him come across the little clearing, his shoes weighted with clay, his face inflamed with a red scowl. When he got to the pit Legwater leaned on the shovel and looked up at him. Well, he said, you want shares I reckon? After I done …

Idjit, Gifford said. Goddamn, what a idjit. He was standing on the concrete rim now looking down at the humane officer gaunt and fantastically powdered with ash, and looking at the great heaps of ashes and the screen, the bedroll, rucksack, shotgun.

You think so? Legwater said.

I know so. He wadn’t no war hero. It ain’t for sure it was even him, but if it was he never had no—no thing in his head.

I’ll be the jedge of that, Legwater said, bending with his shovel.

Gifford watched him, moving around to the upwind side to keep clear of the dust. In a few minutes the humane officer leaped from the pit and began shoveling the new ashes onto the screen, then shaking it back and forth to sift them through, a fevered look in his eye like some wild spodomantic sage divining in driven haste the fate of whole galaxies against their imminent ruin. The constable lit a cigarette and leaned back against the tree.

Legwater threw out two more piles of ash and sifted them and then when he disappeared into the pit again Gifford could hear him scraping around but not shoveling. He ventured over and peered in. Legwater was on
hands and knees, going over the scraped floor of the pit carefully, scratching here and there with the tip of the shovel. Finally he stopped and looked up. The little bastard was lyin, he said. He got it his ownself, the lyin little son of a bitch.

Let’s go, Earl.

His own daddy, the humane officer was saying.

Gifford started toward the road with long disgusted strides. When he got to the apple trees he turned and looked back. Legwater was standing in the pit, just his head showing, staring vacantly.

Well, said the constable.

He kept staring.

Hey! Gifford called.

Legwater turned his head to give him a dumb look, the incredulous and empty expression common to victims of tragedy, disaster and loss.

You want a ride or not?

He pulled himself from the pit and began walking toward the constable, then he was hurrying, loping along, the shovel still in his hand and bouncing behind him. Gifford let him get all the way to him before he sent him back after the shotgun and the camping gear.

They went down the orchard road together, their steps padding in the red dust, the constable swaggering slightly as he did and the humane officer, haggard-looking, his black and sleepless eyes all but smoking, grimly apparitional with the shotgun and the spade dangling one at either side from his gaunt claws. Gifford carried the other’s rucksack and blanket roll with light effort and from time to time he sidled his eyes to study Legwater with pity, or with contempt. Neither spoke until they saw the dog and that was very near to the pike, on the last turn above the gate. They had overtaken it and even in the few minutes in which he was allowed
to watch it alive Gifford was struck by its behavior. It was walking in the wheelruts with an exotic delicacy, like a trained dog on a rope, and holding its head so far back, its nose near perpendicular, that Gifford looked up instinctively to see what threat might be materializing out of the sky. The shovel bounced in the road with a dull bong and when he turned it was in time only to see Legwater recoil under the shotgun and to recoil himself as the muzzleblast roared in his ears. He spun and saw the dog lurch forward, still holding up its head, slew sideways and fold up in the dust of the road.

T
he few small windows were glassless but for a jagged side or corner still wedged in the handmade sashes. The roofshakes lay in windrows on the broad loft floors and this house housed only the winds.

Dervishes of leaves rattled across the yard and in the wind the oaks dipped and creaked, and in the wind even the spavined house hung between the stone chimneys seemed to give a little. The doors stood open and wind scurried in the parlor, riffled the drift leaves on the kitchen floor and stirred the cobwebbed window corners. He did not go to the loft. The lower rooms were dusty and barren and but for some half-familiar rags of clothes altogether strange. He came back into the yard and sat quietly for a while beneath one of the trees. Watched a waterbird skim beneath the shadowline of
the mountain, cupped wings catching the slant light of the sun, then holding the wide curve in a wingset sweep low over the trees to the pond, homing to the warm black waters. He watched it down. What caught his ear? The high thin whicker of a feather, a shadow passing, nothing. Light was breaking in thin reefs through the clouds shelved darkly up the west. Old dry leaves rattled frail and withered as old voices, trailed stiffly down, rocking like thinworn shells downward through seawater, or spun, curling ancient parchments on which no message at all appeared.

Young Rattner finished his cigarette and went back out to the road. An aged Negro passed high on the seat of a wagon, dozing to the chop of the half-shod mule-hooves on the buckled asphalt. About him the tall wheels veered and dished in the erratic parabolas of spun coins unspinning as if not attached to the wagon at all but merely rolling there in that quadratic symmetry by pure chance. He crossed the road to give them leeway and they swung by slowly, laboriously, as if under the weight of some singular and unreasonable gravity. The ruined and ragged mule, the wagon, the man … up the road they wobbled, rattle and squeak of the fellies climbing loose over the spokes … shimmered in waves of heat rising from the road, dissolved in a pale and broken image.

He followed along behind, going toward the forks. Once at the top of the hill he paused and looked back and he could see the roof of the house deep-green with moss, or gaping black where patches had caved through. But it was never his house anyway.

Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled
with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.

It was like having your name in the paper, he thought, reading the inscription: