The Orchard Keeper (1965) (6 page)

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
.

He started past, then half turned and said: You’ns find where the good berries is at?

The boy looked up at him just as though he hadn’t been watching him all the time and said something which cracked in his voice and which the old man couldn’t make out. The girl gave up and wailed openly. So he said:

Well now, what’s wrong with little sister? You all right, honey? Did you’ns lose your berry bucket? He talked to them like that. After a while the boy began to blubber too a little and was telling him about back in the pit. For a few minutes he couldn’t figure out what was the pit and then it came to him and he said:

Well, come on and show me. I reckon it ain’t all this bad whatever it is. So they started up the road although it was pretty plain they didn’t want to go, and when they turned down the road to the spray-pit the boy stopped, still holding the little girl’s hand and not crying any more but just watching the man. He said he didn’t want to go, but for him, the old man, to go on and see. So he told them to wait right there that it wasn’t nothing
.

He saw the berry pails first, one of them turned over and the blackberries spilled out in the grass. A few feet beyond was the concrete pit and even before he got to it he caught a trace of odor, sour … a little like bad milk. He stepped onto the cracked rim of the pit and looked down into the water, the furred green top of it quiet and touched with light. Sticks and brush poked up at one corner. The smell was stronger but other than that there was nothing. He walked along the edge of the
pit. Down the slope among the apples some jays were screaming and flashing in the trees. The morning was well on and it was getting warm. He walked halfway round, watching his step along the narrow sandy concrete. Coming back he glanced down at the water again. The thing seemed to leap at him, the green face leering and coming up through the lucent rotting water with eyeless sockets and green fleshless grin, the hair dark and ebbing like seaweed
.

He tottered for a moment on the brink of the pit and then staggered off with a low groan and locked his arms about a tree trying to fight down the coiling in his stomach. He didn’t go back to look again. He got the berry pails and went back to the road, but the children weren’t there and he couldn’t think how to call them. After a while he called out, Hey! I got your berry buckets …

Some wind turned the apple leaves, shadow of a buzzard skated on the road and broke up in the fencing of briers. They were gone. He walked up the road a way, then back down, but there was no trace of them
.

Three days later when he came back it was still there, no one had come. With his pocketknife he cut a small cedar tree with which to put it from sight
.

It was still there, what of it had weathered the seasons and years. He went on along the road, an old man pedaling the scorched dust.

The sun was high now, all the green of the morning shot with sunlight, plankton awash in a sea of gold. Even late spring had dried nothing but the dust in the road, and the foliage that overhung either side had not yet assumed its summer coat of red talc. In the early quiet all sounds were clear and equidistant—a dog barking out in the valley, high thin whistle of a soaring hawk, a lizard scuttling dead leaves at the roadside. A sumac would
turn and dip in sudden wind with a faint whish, in the woods a thrash, water-voiced …

The old man took a sidepath that led along a spur of the mountain, cutting a spiderstick as he went to clear the way where huge nets were strung tree to tree across the path dew-laden and glinting like strands of drawn glass, bringing them down with a sticky whisper while the spiders fled over the wrecked and dangling floss. He came out on a high bald knoll that looked over the valley and he stopped here and studied it as a man might cresting a hill and seeing a strange landscape for the first time. Pines and cedars in a swath of dark green piled down the mountain to the left and ceased again where the road cut through. Beyond that a field and a log hogpen, the shakes spilling down the broken roof, looking like some diminutive settler’s cabin in ruins. Through the leaves of the hardwoods he could see the zinc-colored roof of the church faintly coruscant and a patch of boarded siding weathered the paper-gray of a waspnest. And far in the distance the long purple welts of the Great Smokies.

If I was a younger man, he told himself, I would move to them mountains. I would find me a clearwater branch and build me a log house with a fireplace. And my bees would make black mountain honey. And I wouldn’t care for no man.

He started down the steep incline.—Then I wouldn’t be unneighborly neither, he added.

The path followed along the south face of the mountain and came out on the pike; a dirt road dropped off into a steep hollow to the left. The old man went this way, down under the wooded slope where water dripped and it was cool. Half a mile farther and the road turned up a hill, emerging from the woods to poke through a cornfield where a brace of doves flushed out and faired
away to the creek on whistling wings. Beyond the field and set back up from the road was a small board shack with the laths curling out like hair awry, bleached to a metal-gray. It was to this place that the man came, carrying the stick across his shoulders now as one might carry a yoke of waterbuckets, his hands flapping idly.

The hillside in front of the house was littered with all manner of cast-off things: barrel hoops, a broken axehead, fragments of chicken-wire, a chipped crock … small antiquated items impacted in the mud. There was a black hog-kettle which he didn’t use any more; it was flecked with rust. The porch was shy the first step and he had to climb up, using his stick for support. The front of the house in the shade under the porch roof was green with fungus and the old man sat wearily on the floor and leaned back against it, stretched his legs out flat and opened his collar. It was damp and cool. The house faced to the north with a slope of trees behind it and snow lay in his yard longer than in most places.

In spring the mountain went violent green, billowing low under the sky. It never came slowly. One morning it would just suddenly be there and the air rank with the smell of it. The old man sniffed the rich earth odors, remembering other springs, other years. He wondered vaguely how people remembered smells … Not like something you see. He could still remember the odor of muskrat castor and he hadn’t smelled it for forty years. He could even remember the first time he had smelled that peculiar sweet odor; coming down Short Creek one morning a lot more years ago than forty, the cottonwoods white and cold-looking and the creek smoking. Early in the spring it was, toward the close of the trapping season, and he had caught an old bull rat with orange fur, the size of a housecat. The air was thick with
the scent of musk and had reminded him then of something else, but he could never think what.

He dozed, slept, for a long time. Late in the afternoon clouds began to pile up in the gap of the mountain and a fresh breeze came past the corner of the porch to rock gently the gourds swung from the eaves.

He woke before the rain started. The breeze had cooled and cooled, fanning his face and the beads of sweat on his forehead. He sat up and rubbed his neck. A pair of mockingbirds were pinwheeling through the high limbs of the maples, were still; and then, arriving as if surprised themselves in the greengold heat of the afternoon, the first drops of rain splatted dark on the packed mud below the house. A flat shade undulated across the yard, the road, and climbed the mountain face with an illusion of sudden haste; the rain increased, growing in the distance with the wind and leaching the trees beyond the creek lime-silver. The old man watched the rain advance across the fields, the grass jerking under it, the stones in the road going black and then the mud in the yard. A gust of spray wet his cheek and he could hear the roofshakes dancing.

When the one gutterpipe wired to the porch roof overflowed, the water fell in a single translucent fan and the landscape bleared and weaved. The rain splashed in until there was a dark border about the porch. He took out his tobacco and rolled a cigarette with trembly hands, neat and perfect. The wind had gone and he sat back with his head against the green plankings and watched the smoke standing in the air under the dampness and very blue. After a while the rain began to slacken and it was darkening, the sky above the mountain black but for a thin reef of failing gray, and then that was gone and it was night, staccato with lightning in the distance. The old man began to feel a chill and
was ready to go in when something cracked on the mountain and he looked up in time to see the domed metal tank on the peak illuminated, quivering in a wild aureole of light. There was a sound like fingernails on slate and the old man shivered and blinked his eyes, the image burning white hot in the lenses for another moment, and when he looked again it was gone and he stood in darkness with the sound of the rain slipping through the trees and a thin trickle of water coming off the roof somewhere to spatter in a puddle below. He waggled his hand in front of his face and couldn’t even see it.

He stood up and batted his eyes. Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly. Corner post and porch began to materialize slowly out of the murk and he could see the hound when it loomed up over the edge of the porch, snuffling, ears flapping and collar jingling as he shook the rain from his reeking hide. He came up, toenails clicking on the planks, and snuffed at the old man’s trousers.

Where you been, old dog? the old man said. The dog began to rub against his leg and the old man pushed him away with his foot, saying Go on, Scout. Scout moved over against the house and settled. The man rubbed the back of his neck, stretched and went in.

The house was musty, dank and cellar-like. He felt his way to the corner table and lit a coal-oil lamp, the ratty furniture leaping out from the shadows in the yellow light. He went into the kitchen and lit the lamp there, took down a plate of beans and a pan of dry cornbread from the warmer over the stove. He sat at the table and ate them cold, and when he had finished went outside with a handful of biscuits and threw them to the dog. The rain had almost stopped. The hound bolted down
the biscuits and looked up after him. The screendoor banged to, the square of light on the porch floor narrowed and went out with the click of the latch. The old man did not appear again. The dog lowered his head on his paws and peered out at the night with wrinkled and sorrowing eyes.

Cats troubled the old man’s dreams and he did not sleep well any more. He feared their coming in the night to suck his meager breath. Once he woke and found one looking in the window at him, watching him as he slept. For a while he had kept the shotgun loaded and lying on the floor beside the bed but now he only lay there and listened for them. Very often they would not start until late and he would still be awake, his ears ringing slightly from having listened so long. Then would come a thin quavering yowl from some dark hollow on the mountain. He had used to trot to the window and peer out at the hills, at the silhouette of pines in the low saddle above Forked Creek like a mammoth cathedral gothically spired … Now he only lay in his gray covers and listened. He did not sleep much at night and he was sore and bone-worn from napping in chairs, against logs and trees, sprawled on the porch.

When he was a boy in Tuckaleechee there was a colored woman lived in a shack there who had been a slave. She came there because, as she said, there weren’t any other niggers and because she felt the movements and significations there. She wore a sack of hellebore at her neck and once he had seen her on the road and hadn’t been afraid of her, as he was very young then, so she put three drops of milfoil on the back of his tongue and chanted over him so that he would have vision. She told him that the night mountains were walked by wampus
cats with great burning eyes and which left no track even in snow, although you could hear them screaming plain enough of summer evenings.

Ain’t no sign with wampus cats, she told him, but if you has the vision you can read where common folks ain’t able.

He related this to his mother and she held the cross of Jesus against his forehead and prayed long and fervently.

The old man lay on his back listening to the heart surge under his ribcage, his breath wheening slow and even. In the fall before this past winter he had come awake one night and seen it for the second time, black in the paler square of the window, a white mark on its face like an inverted gull wing. And the window frame went all black and the room was filling up, the white mark looming and growing. He reached down and seized the shotgun by the barrel, spun it around and thumbed the hammer and let it fall. The room erupted … he remembered the orange spit of flame from the muzzle and the sharp smell of burnt powder, that his ears were singing and his arm hurt where the butt came back against it. He got up and stumbled to the table, dragging the gun by its warm barrel, found and struck a match and got the lantern lit. Then he went to the window, the light flickering thin shadows up the wall, playing to the low ceiling and whitening the spiderwebs. He held the lamp up. Above the window the boards were blasted and splintered clean and honeycolored. He didn’t keep the shotgun by the bed any more but over in the corner behind the table.