The Orchard Keeper (1965) (20 page)

The kitchen glass exploded in on him then and he got behind the stove. There was a cannonade of shots from the woods and he sat there on the floor listening to it and to the spat spat of the bullets passing through the house. Little blooms of yellow wood kept popping out on the planks and almost simultaneously would be the sound of the bullet in the boards on the other side of the room. They did not whine as they passed through. The old man sat very still on the floor. One shot struck the stove behind him and leaped off with an angry spang, taking the glass out of the table lamp. It was like being in a room full of invisible and malevolent spirits.

He had the shotgun across his knees, broken, still holding the empty shell in his hand. The firing died in a few minutes and he crawled along the cupboard and got his shells off the table and came back and reloaded the empty chamber. Then he rolled a cigarette. He could hear them calling to one another. Someone wanted to know if anyone was hurt. Then the Sheriff told them to hold up a minute, that the old bastard hadn’t shot since the first time, and hollered loud, as if
a person couldn’t hear him anyway, wanting to know if Ownby was ready to come out now.

The old man lit his cigarette and took a deep pull. Outside all was silence.

Ownby, the Sheriff called, come out if you’re able.

There was more silence and finally he heard some voices and after that they fired a few more rounds. The stick propping up the glassless window leaped out on the floor and the window dropped shut. He could hear the bits of lead hopping about in the front room, chopping up the furniture and scuttling off through the walls and rafters like vermin.

They stopped and the Sheriff was talking again. Spread out, he was saying. Keep under cover as much as you can and remember, everybody goes together.

That didn’t make much sense to the old man. He pulled twice more on his cigarette and put it out and crawled under the stove. Through a split board he could see them coming, looking squat above the grass from his low position. Two deputies were moving down from the south end with drawn pistols. One of them was dressed in khakis and looked like an A T U agent. The old man marked their position, wiggled back out from under the stove, riposted to the window and shot them both in quick succession, aiming low. Then he ducked back to his stove, broke the shotgun, extracted the shells and reloaded. No sound from outside. The Sheriff did not call again and after a while when he heard the cars starting he got up and went to the front room to see what they’d shot up.

Toward late afternoon it began to rain again but the old man couldn’t wait any longer. Black clouds were moving over the mountain, shading the sharp green of it, and in the coombs horsetails of mist clung or lifted
under the wind to lace and curl wistfully, break and trail across the lower slopes. A yellowhammer crossed the yard to his high hole in the jagged top of a lightning-wrecked pine, under-wings dipping bright chrome.

The old man carried out the last of his things and piled them on the sledge, buckled them down with the harness straps he had nailed under the sides. He went back in one more time and looked around. Some last thing he could save. He came out at length with a small hooked rug, shook the dust from it and put it over the top of the sledge. He took up the rope and pulled the sledge to the road and called for Scout. The old dog came from under the porch, peering with blue rheumy eyes at his indistinct world of shapes. The old man called again and the dog started for the road, hobbling stiffly, and they set out together, south along the road, until they were faint and pale shapes in the rain.

So when they came for the old man the third time he was not there. They lobbed teargas bombs through the windows and stormed the ruined house from three sides and the house jerked and quivered visibly under their gunfire. A county officer was wounded in the neck. He sat on the muddy ground with the blood running down his shirtfront, crying, and calling out to the others to Get the dirty son of a bitch. When they came back out of the house no one would look at him. Finally the Sheriff and another man came to where he was and helped him up and took him to the car.

No, the Sheriff said. He got away.

Got away? How could he get away. The man asked two or three times but the Sheriff just shook his head and after that the man didn’t ask any more. They left in a spray of mud, four cars of them, with sirens going.

When the old man came out upon the railroad the rain had moved off the mountain and in the last light under the brim of the clouds he could see the long sharp ridges like lean burning hounds racing down the land to the land’s end westward, hard upon the veering sun. He turned his back to them, going east on the railbed, the sledge rocking over the moidering ties. It was still raining and dark was coming on fast. From time to time he stopped to check his load and cinch the harness straps up. For two hours he followed the tracks, down out of the darkening fields through cuts where night fell on the high banks and fell upon the honeysuckle drawing shadow forms there, grotesques, shapes of creatures mythical or extinct and silently noting his passage. The old man bent east along the tracks, leaning into the rope, into the rich purple dusk.

By full dark he had left the tracks and turned into the woods to the south, feeling out the path with his feet, shivering a little now in his wet clothes. They came past the old quarry, the tiered and graceless monoliths of rock alienated up out of the earth and blasted into ponderous symmetry, leaning, their fluted faces pale and recumbent among the trees, like old temple ruins. They went silently along over the trace of the quarry road, the sledge whispering, the gaunt dog padding, past the quarryhole with its vaporous green waters and into the woods again, the limestone white against the dark earth, a populace of monstrous slugs dormant in a carbon forest. Groups of trees turned slowly like masted carousels, blending shadows and parting in darkness and wonder. The rain stopped falling. They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship’s wake.

Morning found them on the south slope of Chilhowee
Mountain, the dog buckled down on top of the sledge now and the old man pulling them tree by tree up the steep and final rise. From his high place on the slope he could see the first strawcolored light sourceless beyond the earth’s curve, the horizon warped in a glaucous haze. An hour later and they had gained the crest of the mountain and stood in a field of broom sedge bright as wheat, treeless but for a broken chestnut the color of stone.

The sun was up by then and the old man rested, leaning against the tree. After a while he fell asleep, the sledge’s painter still wrapped in his blistered hand. The dog stretched out in the sun too, wrinkling his ragged hide at the flies. Far below them shades of cloud moved up the valley floor like water flowing, darkened the quilted purlieus, moved on, the brushed land gone green and umber once again. The clouds broke against the mountain, coral-edged and bent to the blue curve of the sky. A butterfly struggled, down through shells of light, down to the gold and seagreen tree tips …

The old man came awake late in the afternoon and ate some cold cornbread, sharing it with the hound. He did not eat much and the cornbread was enough. Then he started down the mountain, trucking behind him his sorry chattel, picking a course through the small trees and laurel jungles. Some time after midnight he came out on a road and turned south along it, crossed a wooden bridge, a purling clearwater stream, climbed with the road into the mountains again, the sledge drifting easily behind him and the hound plodding.

The light at the house the old man came to that morning he could see a good while before he got to it. He caught glimpses of it once or twice somewhere on the ridge above him as he was coming through a mountain
meadow, a huge pool in the darkness swept with the passing shadows of nightbirds, but he had no way of knowing that the road would take him there. He didn’t see the light again until he topped the hill where the house stood and where a section of road was banded out of the night in a tunnel of carlights. Some men were talking and he could hear the sound of the motor running.

He kept on, into the light. The voices stopped. The old man looked up at them, two men leaning against the side of the automobile, another seated inside. He didn’t stop. They faded behind the glare of the headlights, reappeared filmily, not moving, watching him. With the lights out of his eyes the old man stopped and nodded to them. Howdy, he said.

You ain’t lost, are ye?

Don’t reckon, he said.

One of them said something. The car eased down the drive, the two men walking alongside. The man in the car leaned out toward him. This road don’t go thew, he said. It jest loops and comes on back.

How fer is it to the Harrykin? the old man wanted to know.

The man turned out the lights. The other two had come up now and said Howdy, each in turn. Scout clambered up onto the sledge and eyed them balefully.

Wants to know how fer is it to the Harrykin, the driver said.

What fer?

The other one stepped forward and eyed the old man with bland curiosity, the sledge heaped with his worthless paraphernalia and topped by the prone and wasted hound. You cain’t hardly get there from here, he said. You ort to of come thew Sunshine, crost the river there … it ain’t easy to get to from nowhere but that
there’d of been a nigher cut. What you aim to do in there, cut timber?

No, said the old man. Jest fixin to put up some kind of a piece of a house and kindly settle there.

In the Harrykin?

Yessir.

Where-all you from? the man in the car wanted to know.

From t’wards Knoxville.

The man in the car was silent for a minute. Then he said, I’m goin in to Sevierville here in jest a minute. I can carry you that fer if you don’t keer to ride in a old beat-up car such as it is.

Much obliged, the old man said, but I reckon I’ll jest get on.

Well, the man said. He turned to the other two. I got to get, myself, he said. We’ll see yins.

They nodded. You come back. The car eased away, the lights coming on again, rattled out of sight down the road. The old man had the sledge rope in hand and was saying a goodbye to the men.

You best come on in and have some breakfast with us, one of them said.

Much obliged, the old man said, but I reckon I’ll jest be gettin on.

Might as well eat some with us, the other said. We jest fixin to. Well, the old man said. If you-all don’t care.

The house the old man entered that morning was no shotgun shack but a mountain cabin of squared logs rent deeply with weather-checks and chinked with clay. It was long and saddle-bowed, divided into two rooms of equal size, and at the far end of one a fireplace of river rock, rocks tumbled smooth as eggs, more ancient than
the river itself. From a door to the right a woman’s face peered at them furtively as they sat, the taller of the men motioning the old man to a chair cut from a buttertub and padded in hair-worn cowhide. They produced tobacco and papers and passed them to him not ceremoniously but with that deprecatory gesture of humility which country people confer in a look, a lift of the hand. The old man began to feel right homey.

Say you from t’wards Knoxville? the tall man said.

Yessir, he answered, taping down the paper of his cigarette.

I got a sister lives over thataway. Meanest kids I ever seen. Married a boy from Mead’s Quarry—you know where that’s at?

Shore, the old man said. I come from Red Mountain my ownself. We used to whup Mead’s Quarry boys of a Sunday afternoon jest to keep a hand in.

The man grinned. That’s what he told me about you-all, he said.

Then the old man grinned.

The other one broke in. Don’t reckon you’d keer fer a little drink this early of a mornin?

Not lessen you fellers is fixin to have one.

He disappeared through the door into the lean-to and presently came back with a mason jar. Less see if this here is the one I wanted, he said, tilting it, watching the slow-rising chain of beads. He took off the cap and stretched a draught down his lean corded neck, swallowed deep, cocked his head in a listening attitude, then passed the jar to the old man. That’s the one, he said. It’s right good drinkin whiskey.

The old man accepted the jar and took a good drink. His legs were beginning to feel a little heavy and he lifted first one and then the other, slightly, testing their weight. He raised the jar again, drank and handed it
back to the man. Now that’s a right nice little whiskey, he said.

The two men relayed the jar between them and then it was capped and set on the floor. The shorter man was looking out the tiny window. Gettin daylight, he said.

He turned to the old man. You get a right early start, don’t ye?

The old man recrossed his legs, taking a look out himself.

Well, he said, kindly early, yes.

You come up from Walland this mornin I reckon?

No, the old man said, Knoxville.

I mean on foot, comin up the mountain …

I come straight acrost, the old man said.

They looked at each other. The tall one hesitated a moment, then he said: You say you goin to the Harrykin?

Aim to, the old man said.

Cain’t say as it seems like much of a place to jest go to, he said. I’ve knowed one or two people at different times what was there and would of give some to of been away from it though. Daddy I remember would leave dogs treed there of a night rather’n go in after em. He said they was places you could walk fer half a mile thout ever settin foot to the ground—jest over laurel hells and down timber, and a rattlesnake to the log … I never been there myself.

You aimin to stay there long? the other one asked.

But before the old man could answer that, the woman thrust her face through the door and announced breakfast. Both men rose instantly and started for the kitchen, then paused, remembering the old man still seated with the slow words forming on his lips. They had the uneasy look of boys sneaking to table with dirty hands. The old man stood and walked between them, the
shorter one smiling a sort of half-smile and saying: I reckon we jest about forgot how to act, ain’t we?