The Orchard Keeper (1965) (11 page)

When he was safe around the first curve he relaxed and drove slowly to the gate so as to leave as few signs as possible. He refastened the ring-plate and chain, got back in and turned onto the pike and toward Knoxville. Just beyond the creek he passed an olivecolored truck, the driver and the other man in the cab looking serious and official, but somewhat sleepy and not in any particular hurry. Genial, unofficial, and awake, Marion Sylder drove to town.

His light played on the wet mudbanks among roots and stumps, a sheaf of brown honeysuckle hanging down
and trailing in the water like hair. His boots made sucking sounds as he waded against the slight current, walked softly the silted floor of the creek. He could hear a car on top of the mountain coming down, the exhaust rattling and the tires sounding on the switchbacks. He came to the bridge and waded to the spit of loam filled in against the concrete wall. Throwing his light to the set he could see the trap with the jaws cocked and the pan, all brown-looking under the water and wrinkling in the small ebb and lap of it. He put the flashlight in his pocket and squatted on the sand among tracks of feet and tails, wiggling his numb toes, huddling down in his mackinaw and breathing slowly into his cupped hands, listening in the darkness to the water curling past his feet with small muted water-sounds, to his cough echoing hollow and blankly among the beams overhead.

The tires sounded again, closer, and then the motor revving between engagements of the clutch and the explosive sound of the shift to high gear as the car came out of the last turn at the base of the mountain. He followed with his muscles the downward thrust of the lever, locked the shift home arm and shoulder. The car was on the straight stretch approaching the creek and he could feel the vibrations of it, waiting for it to pass overhead. It did not. He heard the motor building speed and then there was a sudden explosion, a doglike yelp, followed by a suspension of all sound, a momentary eclipse of animation even to the water and his own breathing.

The trees at his left leaped, wild with light, went out again. There came an eruption of limbs cracking, splitting, of wrenched metal screaming like slate, a heavy and final concussion like a steel drum bursting. Silence again through which filtered a thin and diminishing rain of glass. By the pulsing wash of water at his feet he knew that it was in the creek and he tugged his flashlight
free and poked the beam out along the bridge, the bank of the creek where broken saplings and peeled trunks stood out whitely all about like markers and finally to the sleek black flank of the car, upturned in the creek with the hood tilted into the water and the off-wheel still spinning idly. The side window-glass was laced with myriad cracks, shining in the beam like dewed spiderwebbing, and he could not see inside. The waterline angled across it, from cowl to centerpost, giving it an inverted look of anger.

By then he was already in the creek again, scrambling low under the beamed flooring of the bridge and dipping water into his boots with gentle sluicing sounds where he floundered in over the tops, squatting down too far under the canopy of sumacs broken over the bank, and the water on his backside icy as alcohol. He was thinking: I’ll have to pull
up
on the doorhandle. Then he was at the car, stepping and threading the brush it had pulled into the creek with it, reached for the doorhandle, crammed it upward, and jerked back on it with his full weight.

It catapulted outward as if something inside had been galvanized into violent effort, shot open and pitched him backward through a tangle of down saplings and into the creek. In the darkness the water closed over him thickly as running oil, choking off his breath, filling his nose. He floundered to his feet streaming and numb, coughing up creek water. Wiping water from his eyes he looked about and saw the flashlight, still lit, scuttling downstream over the bed of the creek like some incandescent water-creature bent on escape. He waded after it, tearing recklessly about in the freezing water with the boots leaden and rolling about his shins, reached for it, his hand like a bat’s shadow poised over the dome of light, and then it was gone, sucked down through the
silt and mire inexplicably, and he was left balancing on one foot in the darkness with his arm and shoulder deep in the water. He groped about and finally came up with the flashlight and shook it. The metal cylinder sloshed softly water among the batteries. He stuck it in his pocket and surged noisily back upstream to the car.

He was aware for the first time now of a sickly-sweet odor, faintly putrescent, and by the time he reached the car again it was thick in the air and he knew it was whiskey without having ever smelled it. Then he could see the man taking shape out of the gloom, sprawled on the upturned headliner and half out through the open door, one arm hanging into the water. The sour smell of the whiskey, the mustiness of the old car upholstery, and what he perceived to be blood on the man’s face—these burned such an image of death into his brain that he made for the bank, panicky, clawing wildly at the brush, up to the field where light in fragile shellpink reefs broke on an unreal world.

But the man wasn’t dead. The boy was already on the bank, catching his breath and teetering with the dry rollings of his breakfastless stomach, when he heard a voice out of the void, hollow and half lost among the chatterings of the creek.

Hey, the call came.

He turned, hanging to a jagged sapling, saw in the shade below him a movement among the wreckage, a pale face against the dark interior of the car, the man propped up on his hands looking at him. Hey you, he said.

He hung there looking at him. A sweep of lights tracked the shadows of the mountain and a car hammered the bridge, echoing the noise of its passage in the creek. Finally he said: What do you want?

The man groaned. There was a moment of silence
and then he said, Goddamn, man; how about giving me a hand.

Okay, he said. He wasn’t afraid any more, just cold, sliding down the mud and into the creek again and then squatting in the water facing the man, wondering what he should say. He could see him quite clearly now, there was a dark smear of blood down the side of his face. The man looked at him, a suggestion of a grin breaking painfully on his face. Played hell, didn’t I? he said.

You hurt? His own words rattled like bb’s through a clatter of teeth. He started to say something else but a further chill rendered him inarticulate, his palsied jaw jerking like an idiot’s.

I don’t rightly know, the man was saying. Yes. Here … he reached out one hand and the boy steadied it on his shoulder while the man drew up one knee and stepped out into the water. Then he pulled the other leg out, his face wrinkling with pain, and so was standing in the creek, his hand still on the boy’s shoulder in an attitude of fatherly counsel. When he started for the bank the hand withdrew for a moment, one faltering half-step, and then flew back and clamped there like a predatory bird striking. Whew, the man said. I must of busted the shit out of my leg.

It took them some time to get up the bank, the boy trying to push him up and him pulling himself along by trees, roots, handfuls of dead grass, holding the leg out behind him. Then they sat in the weeds at the edge of the field breathing white plumes into the cold morning air. In the quarter-darkness the fields looked like water, flat and gray. The boy was wet and cold; everything was wet and very cold. The man ran his hand along his leg trying to tell whether it was broken or not. His trousers were clammy against his skin. The boy sat in front
of him hugging his shoulders and shivering, his toes lifeless, squishing in his boots when he wiggled them and sand and grit rasping in his socks. He said: Your head’s bleeding.

The man ran his hand along the side of his face. Other side.

He reached across and his hand came away sticky with blood and he wiped it on his trouser leg and turned to the boy. You want to do something for me?

Sure, the boy said.

Go down and get them keys then, and let’s get the hell out of here.

The boy disappeared over the cut of the bank; the man could hear him in the water. Presently he came back and handed the keys over.

Thanks, he said. Here. He took the boy’s hand and turned it over. What’d you do here?

The boy looked down at his palm. There was a black and jagged line across it.

You jest do that? the man asked.

The boy looked at it dumbly. No, he said. I don’t think so. I must of done it when I fell in the creek. Before …

The man dropped the keys in his pocket and struggled to his feet. Well, come on, he said. We better get ourselves patched up. This way, he added, seeing the boy start for the road. He motioned toward the field and set off with a hopping gait, muttering under his breath Whew, Mother.

The boy followed him for a few paces, then quartered off to the creek again and the man watched him go, his legs disappearing in the mist, then the rest of him, so that he seemed to be gliding away toward the line of willows marking its course like some nightwraith fleeing
the slow reaching dawn until the man wasn’t sure that he had really been there at all. Then he came back with a pole and handed it to him. Thanks, the man said.

They moved on across the field, through vapors of fog and wisps of light, to the east, looking like the last survivors of Armageddon.

Their path led them up the creek, along the edges of the fields that terminated there—a curve of fields and the creek and the cupped slope of the mountain rising up to their right along which shafts of light now appeared laterally among the ghostgray trees. They struggled through the last fence, the boy holding the wire and trying to help him and him cussing, crossed a plank bridge at the fork of the creek, out through a cattle gate and onto the road, Henderson Valley Road.

The boy fastened the gate behind them and the man said, We got to stay off this road. They might of found it by now what with the light and all.

They crossed the road and started up a steep dirt drive on the other side. We can call here, the man said. The boy could see him better now. He needed a shave and the blood crusted on the side of his face was broken in fine cracks like old dark pottery where he winced with the pain of his slow progress, leaning heavily on the pole and breathing hoarsely. He was leanhipped and tall and his poplin jacket hung loosely about his shoulders. The boy thought he must be awfully cold dressed no warmer than that and wet to the knees besides. His own feet he couldn’t feel at all now; they were like hooves rattling inside his boots. He hadn’t stopped shivering the whole time. The drive climbed and turned and then there was a house.

It was an older man came to the door, a tremendous paunch slung in a gray and ragged undershirt drooped
pendulously over the waist of his trousers like a sacked hog carcass. Out of a meaty face, jowled and white-stubbled with beard, two porcine eyes regarded them, blinking. Hot-toe-mitty, he said, slow and evenly. Then: Well, come on in if you’re able. They entered, the man hobbling in with his pole and the boy following. The room was warm and suffused with odors of cooking meat.

Hey, old woman, their host called out, they’s two fellers here jest fell out of a aryplane.

A woman came to the door at the far end and looked at them. Lord God, she said. She looked as if she might be going to say something else, then she clamped her jaw shut and disappeared with an air of briskness.

The room itself was comfortable with the new catalog store prosperity of china lamps, linoleum floors, a Warm Morning heater in front of which he installed himself while the two men stood talking. They paid little attention to him and he just watched them, the injured man waving his arms, telling the story, the other scratching alternately belly and head and saying Godamighty softly to himself from time to time by way of comment. After a while the woman came to the door again and called them in for coffee.

As they started for the kitchen the younger man motioned at him. This here is … he nodded to the boy.

John Wesley, he said.

John Wesley. This here is June Tipton—and this is his Mrs.

Mrs Tipton nodded back at him as they entered the kitchen and said, How do, John Wesley.

They sat down at the table and June said to the woman: John Wesley’s the one what pulled Marion out of the creek.

She looked at her husband and then to him and smiled
appreciatively. The one called Marion was fishing through his pockets for cigarettes. That’s right, he said. I might near of drownded.

She smiled again. After a while she turned to her husband and said, What all was he doin in the creek?

Jest laying there, June said. He blowed a tire and his car fell in.

She looked at the boy again and smiled and went on sipping her coffee demurely. The boy lowered his face to the steaming mug before him. Small waterdrops tripped down from his thawing hair, beaded and dropped from his earlobes. He was still in his soaked mackinaw and a puddle of water was gathering on the linoleum beneath his chair. Raising his eyes above the rim of the cup he saw the woman looking at him, leaning forward. She reached out and squeezed his coat. It made a funny squishing sound.

Lord God, she said, this youngern’s wet clear through. He’s a-fixin to take pneumony. She set down her cup and began pulling at the coat, trying to help him off with it. He seemed bent and tottering under the sheer weight of it.

They got him out of his coat and by then the man had finished his coffee and stood and he said he was ready to go if June didn’t mind taking them.

So they thanked the woman, declining breakfast two or three times, and filed through the door, him holding the mackinaw in his arms now like a great bundle of wet wash, and got into a pickup truck parked behind the house and pointing down the drive. June kicked the blocks from under the front wheels and got in and they began rolling silently, gaining speed, and then he let in the clutch and the motor came to life angrily and they catapulted down to the road, turned left toward the mountain, the truck coughing and lurching and a bluish
haze boiling up in the cab. He sat in the middle between the two men, trying to keep his knees clear of the gearshift. Through a missing slat in the floorboard he could see the gray road sliding under and a slip of bitter wind angled up one jean-leg.