The Orchard Keeper (1965) (19 page)

He got up and started along the path over the shelf of woods between the creek and the mountain, by hickories feathered in mist, by cottonwoods still coldly skeletal for all the new green of the spring. He began to climb, his approach forewarned by the patter of nut hulls, a dipping branch, scrabble of small feet on bark. He crossed the spine of the ridge and started down, seeing the horseshoe bend of the creek below him distended with blisters of brown water spread out into the fields, down the slope to the creek again—a shortcut he took, who measured only horizontal travel.

He couldn’t find it. The creek was none that he had ever seen before, and when he turned his back to it at what looked like a place he knew he was surprised to see a draw, a fence-corner, a stand of locust oddly mis-located. He passed the place and came back. He had been too far down. He hurried along upstream for another fifty yards and then stopped short. The rock where his trap had been was submerged, but a dome of water rose over it and now he saw the wire reaching up to the sapling on the opposite bank. Just above here the creek narrowed—it was the place where he usually crossed on a long and mossy pier of stone, that too lost now beneath the floodwaters. In the narrows the current
leaped in a slick chute, plummeted into the pool below, churning a chocolate-dark foam and spreading again, a hissing sheet of flecks and bubbles, small twigs, bark and debris. A naked and swollen young bird turned up its round white belly briefly, rolled and folded into the thick brown liquid like a slowly closing eye. And below the rock something roiled darkly to the surface, sank again, as if struggling with some unseen assailant. He watched. A moment later it flared again and he could make it out better, the hair floating undulant as black grass wracked in the eddies. He looked along the bank until he found a stick, came back and leaned on tiptoes out over the water, poking. He found the ledge of rock, tested along it with his stick and then stepped out, panicky for a moment as his foot sank. Then he was straddle-legged with one foot on the bank and the other in the creek, the water boiling between his legs, ribboning high on his calf. He got the other foot down and turned, carefully, facing upstream, standing with the thin brown wings of water flying over his shins with a slicing sound, standing so in an illusion of fantastic motion. He worked his way crabwise to within a yard of the other bank, to the channel where the rocks terminated, launched out wildly across the remaining stretch of water. He went in nearly to his waist, his feet chopping rapidly at the slick and steep-pitched mud, flailing mightily with his stick before he could get a proper foothold. Then he was across, pulling himself up the bank by what roots or weeds would hold his weight, cold and mud-slavered.

He hobbled down to where the sapling was and slid down the bank to it, catching himself with one foot against the slender trunk, took hold of the wire and undid it, the wire humming electrically in his hand, took a good grip on it and climbed the bank again pulling
it after him. When he got to the top and turned around he could see his catch floating in the grass and even before he pulled it up to him he could see the white places on it like hanging leeches. Then he had it in his hand, feeling the fur gritty with mud, the cusped bone-end jutting from the foreleg wrecked between the jaws of the trap, the white bib smeared with clay and the fine yellow teeth bared in a fierce grin. And turning it slowly in his hand, studying dumbly the clean ugly slits, white and livid. Wounds, but like naked eyelids or dead mouths gaping.

He took it from the trap and put it in his pocket, wound the wire around the trap and put that in the other pocket. The sun was well up, but already the promised light was drowned in a sweep of wet clouds rolling and building darkly to the southeast. He did not recross the creek but headed out into the field. Before he reached the woods the first drops of rain had already spattered his shoulder. When he got to the road it was black and slick with water and he hunched his shoulders forward against the mounting downpour, shivering a little. Sheets of spray gusted over the smoking road and over the swamped land—the houses standing bleak and gray—a final desolation seemed to come, as if on the tail of the earth’s last winter a well of water were rising slowly up through the very universe itself.

It had been raining for six days steady when Marion Sylder finally left the house. He came down the drive sideways, slewing sheets of mud from under the cavorting wheels, got straightened out on the road and drove to the forks. A small pond had formed in front of the store and customers were obliged to tread a plankwalk to get to the porch. The rain had settled into a patient drizzle and the people of Red Branch sat around
their stoves, looked out from time to time at the gray wet country and shook their heads. Sylder backed his car up to the gas pump and got out, sloshing the mud from his boots in the puddle, waded to the porch and went in. There was a mesh of welding rod over the front windows now and he smiled a little at that.

Mr Eller looked up from his chair by the meat block. Well, he said, ain’t seen you for a while. Bring some money with ye?

Sylder ignored that. Gas, he said. Where’s the keys?

Mr Eller sighed and rose from his chair, went to the cash register, rang open the drawer, handed the keys across the counter.

Hope you don’t keer to wade, he said.

Sylder took the keys and went out to the pump. He unlocked it and began cranking the lever, pumping gas up into the glass bowl at the top of the rusty orange tank. When he had it full he unscrewed the cap from the fender, let in the hose and depressed the lever. The gas in the bowl surged and bubbled, sluiced into the tank of the car. After the bowl emptied it remained beaded on the inside, a greasy look to it. Sylder didn’t notice. He re-hung the hose and locked the pump, waded back to the porch and inside to give the keys to Mr Eller. A loosed box of kittens came tottering aimlessly over the floor, rocking on their stub legs and mewling. Their eyes were closed and festered with mucus as if they might have been struck simultaneously with some biblical blight.

Them’s the nastiest-lookin cats I ever did see, Sylder said.

That’s what Mrs Fenner said, droned the storekeeper. Young Puiliam told her she ought to see the ones back in the back propped up with sticks. He picked the keys up off the counter and rang them back in the cash drawer again.

Put it on the bill, Sylder said.

Seems like they ought to be a handsign for that, Mr Eller said. Like for Howdy or we’ll see ye. Save a lot of talk in here.

If I had your money I’d retire for life.

It’d pay about the same.

Sure it would, Sylder said.

Seems to me like, Mr Eller began …

Never mind, Sylder said. I got to get on. Poor folks don’t have time to stand around jawin all day.

He waved and went out, stopped at the door a minute and looked back. Say, he called.

What’s that?

A Christian’d of drownded em.

What’s that? Mr Eller asked again.

Leaning in the door and grinning Sylder pointed at the kittens bobbing over the floor like blown lint.

Mr Eller shooed his hand at him and he left.

The storekeeper drummed his nails on the marble ledge of the cash register for a minute. Then he turned and went back to his chair. He had been resting for only a short time when the clock among the canned goods began a laborious unwinding sound as if about to expire violently in a jangle of wheels and leaping springs, stopped, tolled off four doomlike gongs evocative of some oriental call to temple, then hushed altogether.

Mr Eller stirred from his chair, went to the clock and wound it with a key hanging down from a string. It made a loud ratcheting noise. Then he seized it from the shelf and slammed it back. It set up once more a low wooden ticking.

One of the cats had wandered behind the meat block and on his return to the chair he stepped over it carefully. It went by in a drunken reel, caromed off the
meat case, continued. Lost, they wandered about the floor, passing and repassing each other, unseeing. One staggered past a coffecan set next the stove, slipped, fell in the puddle of tobacco spittle surrounding it. He struggled to his feet again, back and side brown-slimed and sticky, tottered across to the wall where he stood with blind and suppurant eyes and offered up to the world his thin wails.

Mr Eller dozed and his head rocked in small increments down his shoulder, onto his chest. After a while a little girl in a thin and dirty dress came through the door behind the counter and gathered up all the kittens, now wailing louder and in broken chorus, carried them out again, talking to them in low remonstrances.

Mr Eller dozed, the clock ticked. The flypaper revolved in slow spirals. The wind had come up again and the rainwater blown from the trees pattered across the tin roof of the store, muffled and distant-sounding through the wallboard ceiling.

Sylder closed the gate behind him and started up the orchard road. It was guttered and channeled and sluices of water still seeped along the myriad mud deltas that filled the flats between the inclines. The car slewed giddily on the turns, bogged finally to a frantic stop skittering quarterwise like a nervous horse and the rear wheels unwinding thick ropes of mud that broke and shot precipitately across the low hem of brush and on into the woods where they slapped up against the trees with a sound oddly hollow. Sylder cut the motor and stepped out into the bright mud. It was a quarter mile to the turnaround and he started straightaway, his leather boots sucking.

There were apples on the trees the size of a thumbnail and green with a lucent and fiery green, deathly
green as the bellies of bottleflies. He plucked one down in passing and bit into it … venomously bitter, drew his mouth like a persimmon. If green apples made you sick, Sylder reflected, he would have been dead long ago. Most people he knew could eat them. Didn’t take poison ivy either. The boy John Wesley, he was bad about poison ivy. Bad blood.

It took him until dark to get done, joggling the cases two at a time back down the road, nine trips in all. When he had stacked the last two cases in the turtle he locked it and opening the door of the car sat down and took off his boots, shapeless with mud, and stood them on the floor just behind the front seat.

He got the car rocked loose and then had to back down for almost half a mile before he could find a place that looked wide and solid enough to turn around in. By the time he got out on the pike a wind had come up and small spits of rain were breaking on the glass. He propped his left sock foot on the handbrake and drove leisurely down the mountain.

The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes: the shapeless splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.

Sylder’s motor spat and jerked, caught again for a handful of revolutions, died with a spastic sucking noise. He let in the clutch and coasted for a minute, engaged it again. The motor bucked and the car shuddered violently and came to a stop.

He sat at the wheel of the motionless car for a minute
or two before he tried the starter. It cranked cheerfully, caught and sputtered once or twice without ever running. He flipped the switch off, reached a flashlight from the glove compartment, took a deep breath and surged wildly out into the rain. Waist-deep in the engine compartment with the upturned hood sheltering him like the maw of some benevolent monster he checked the wiring, the throttle linkages. Then he removed the float-bowl from the fuel pump, held the flashlight up to the glass and looked at it. The liquid in it was a pale yellow. He poured it out and replaced the bowl, dropped the hood and got back in the car. He had to crank the engine for some time before the bowl filled again and then the motor caught and he engaged the gears. He drove along cautiously, listening. The streetlamps passed bleary whorls along the window; there was no more traffic Before he got to the end of the bridge the motor rattled and died again.

The old man awoke to darkness and water running, trickling and coursing beneath the leaves, and the rain very soft and very steady. The hound was lying with its head on crossed forepaws watching him. He reached out one hand and touched it and the dog rose clumsily and sniffed at his hand
.

The wind had died and the night woods in their faintly breathing quietude held no sound but the kind rainfall, track of waterbeads on a branch—their measured fall in a leaf-pool. With grass in his mouth the old man sat up and peered about him, heard the rain mendicant-voiced, soft chanting in that dark gramarye that summons the earth to bridehood
.

T
hey came three times for the old man. At first it was just the Sheriff and Gifford. They were one foot up the porch steps when he swung the door open and threw down on them and they could see the mule ears of the old shotgun laid back viciously along the locks. They turned and went back down the yard, not saying anything or even looking back, and the old man closed the door behind them.

The second time they pulled up in the curve of the road with three deputies and a county officer. The old man watched them from his window darting and skulking among the bushes, slipping from tree to tree like boys playing Indians. After a while when everyone was set the Sheriff called from his place under the bank of the road.

Come out with your hands up, Ownby. We got you surrounded.

The old man never even turned his head. He was in the kitchen with the shotgun propped over the back of the chair and he was watching one of the deputies hunkered up under a lilac bush in the west corner of the lot. The old man kept watching him and then the Sheriff called out again for him to surrender and somebody shot out a window-glass in the front room so he didn’t wait any more but pulled the stock in against his cheek and cut down on the deputy. The man came up out of the bushes like a rabbit and hopped away toward the road with a curious loping gait, holding the side of his leg. He’d expected the man to yell and he didn’t, but then the old man remembered that he hadn’t yelled either.