The Orchard Keeper (1965) (3 page)

Naw, well … she sort of sat down and leant back
and I … she … But that was beyond his powers of description, let alone Sylder’s imagination.

You mean to say you—Sylder paused for a moment trying to get the facts in summary—you screwed her in a nigger shithouse sittin on the …

Well Goddamnit at least I never took her in no Goddamn church, June broke in.

The coupe wobbled to a halt at the side of the road and Sylder collapsed against the door epileptic with laughter. After a while he stopped and said:

Was she the one that …

Yes, Goddamn you, she was the one.

Whooeee! Sylder screamed and rolled out the door where he lay in the wet morning grass shaking soundlessly.

The place was dimly lit and barnlike. A polished dance floor in which at the far end fell the reflection of the jukebox lights and those of the bar. Behind the bar a long mirror in which he was surprised to see himself, silhouetted in the doorframe, poised nimbly atop a stack of glasses. He came down and crossed the floor, limping slightly, and clambered up on the corner stool.

The bartender was sitting in a captain’s chair reading a magazine. He folded it carefully and shuffled down to where the man was sitting.

Beer, Rattner said. His tongue swept his lower lip in anticipation. The bartender went to the barrel and drew off a schooner, flicked away the foam with a stick and brought it to him. He reached and tilted one side of the glass up and lowered his face into it; his lips sought the glassrim and fastened on it white and fat as leeches while under the yellowgray skin his throatcords jerked
spastically, pumping the beer down. He drank it all, lifting the glass finally to drain it, and slid it back toward the bartender, who had been watching with both fascination and disgust, as one might watch pigs mate.

Say now, that sure was all right. Yessir, jest believe I’ll have me anothern.

Ten cents, said the bartender.

He struggled with his pocket and came up with a dime. You betcher, he said. The bartender took the glass, gingerly, and refilled it.

Rattner had been gone for a year this time. He had moved from Maryville to Red Branch, taken up quarters in an abandoned log house with his wife and son, and left there four days later with twenty-six dollars in his pocket, alone and southbound in an empty L&N reefer. An incident at the Green Fly Inn had been his windfall:

The rear door through which Cabe swept the night’s litter had once given onto a porch that ran the width of the building, supported by joists that were extensions of the floor timbers and braced frugally with two-by-fours angled up beneath them. On summer evenings the drinkers gathered here, bringing with them their chairs or cases or perching riskily upon the narrow railing like roosting birds. Weather and termites conspired against this haven and brought it to ruin. This was in 1933 then, a hot summer night, that Ef Hobie came to the Green Fly Inn. A prodigal return (Petros—Brushy Mountain—eighteen months, illegal possession of liquor) that attracted a great number of well-wishers. One by one they retired through the rear door to take up their stations on the porch. Hobie was a favorite and carried on a running monologue of anecdotes. He was telling how his old lady had loaned the family soupbone to Mrs Fenner, who had cooked peas with it and ruined it
,
when a sharp dry crack issued from somewhere in the floor. It was a calm windless night, laden with heat, and the sound had an ominous quality about it. The talk paused a moment, resumed
.

He came through the door and onto the porch, circumspectly, nodding across them all with diffidence, as if someone he knew might be there, beyond the railing itself and suspended mysteriously in the darkness, leaned against the doorframe and lifted the bottle to his mouth, his eyes shifting among them or when they looked closing or seeking again that being in the outer dark with whom only he held communion, smiling a little to himself, the onlooker, the stranger. The talk eddied and waned, but he offered neither comment nor question and after a while they ignored him. He came from the doorway and took a seat on the rail at the near end of the porch
.

There was a long creaking sound like a nail being pulled and again the sharp detonation of strained wood giving way. There followed a dead and immobile silence during which the faces searched from one to the other uncertainly. A few began to rise and mill about, still not saying anything. Already they had begun to eye the narrow door, the one point of egress, weighing in their minds not so much numbers as tonnage and freight of men, calculating speed and congestion with the concern of traffic experts
.

With the third report a section of flooring listed visibly
.

Fellers, Ef started, rising himself, I think this here … But that was all, or as much as anyone heard at least. There ensued a single rush as of so many marionettes on one string being drawn in violent acceleration toward the door while above the noise of their retreat the joists popped like riflefire, snapping off in rackety succession,
and the floor drooped in long and gathering undulations in their wake
.

They hit the opening in one concerted mass and wedged there tight as a peg at the same instant that the far end of the porch came away, swung out from the building in a long swooping and not ungraceful arc
.

Now from the knot of men clawing at the door single figures began to be sucked away in attitudes of mute supplication one by one down the dangling incline of the porch, gaining momentum among leaping cans and bottles, and dropping at last with wild cries into the pit below. A few caught at the rails and dangled there with stricken looks eying their fellows rocketing past into the night
.

From within the building Cabe and a few others were trying desperately to untangle the mass that writhed in the doorway, resorting finally to taking hold of what limb presented itself and pulling until something gave. Thus the survivors came aboard bereft of one shoe, or both, or pants, or as with Hobie himself naked save for one half of a shirt. Until the frame of the door exploded inward carrying a good section of wall and they entered in a roil of bodies and crashing wood
.

The porch had swung out and downward and now tottered for a moment on the strength of a single two-by-six before it too snapped and the whole affair slewed away with a great splintering sound. The figures clutching at the rails began to turn loose their holds, coming away by ones and twos like beetles shaken from a limb, and the entire wreckage descended in a slow tableau of ruin to pitch thunderously into the hollow
.

The atmosphere inside seethed with an inchoate violence. Scared men, torn, unclothed and crushed, breathing loudly and sweating the sweat of subsiding panic, mounting outrage and indignity. One by one the fallen
were entering through the front door red with blood and clay and looking like the vanquished in some desperate encounter waged with sabers and without quarter. As they gathered strength from below two factions became apparent and they fell upon each other murderously and fought far into the night
.

Kenneth Rattner nursed a slashed hand as he squatted in a blackberry thicket below the inn and listened with quiet bemusement to the thrashings and curses of the victims. Someone had brought a light; he could see the flicker and sweep of it through the bramble wall. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and tied it around his hand, pulling the knot to with his teeth. Then he worked his way carefully up to the road and started for home. Small groups of men were running up the mountain to the scene of disaster bearing lanterns and whispering hoarsely
.

I got a job, he told her
.

Praise God, she said. Whereabouts?

Greenville South Carolina, showing her the money now. Trainfare, he said. But he gave her five of the thirty-one dollars and they went to the store. He bought the boy an orange drink, lifted him onto the box where he sat holding it in both hands, watching. Mrs Eller was telling about it
.

That Coy Tipton showed up here this mornin looked like he’d fell in a combine. Said they’s three or four of em what lost their britches—I’d like to know how they done that my own sef—and when they clumb down in the holler to get em somebody had beat em there and stole their pocketbooks. She sat atilt in her rocker, fanned slowly with a church tract. Thiefs and drunks runs together I expect, she said. Ain’t none of em but got what they’s lookin for
.

Mildred Rattner pinched from loaf to loaf across the
bread rack. When them as wallers in sin thinks they’s gettin by with it, she said, that’s when He strikes em in His holy wrath. He jest bides His time
.

Kenneth Rattner stroked his stiffening leg, flexed his ankle. It was past midnight and people were coming in now. The bartender had abandoned his magazine and was moving nervously up and down the counter and filling glasses for the newcomers.

He drained the last of the beer and set the glass upon the bar. Hey, buddy, he called. Give us anothern over here. Hey, old buddy.

S
aturday afternoons Marion Sylder would come in the store fresh-looking in starched khakis or overall breeches and go to the glass case and point out the socks to Mr Eller. Mr Eller would put the box on top of the counter and Sylder would hold up a pair and say: How much are these?

Quarter, Mr Eller would say. No change in price, still a quarter. All a quarter, ain’t got no other kind.

Sylder would spin a quarter on the glass, take his socks and sit down on a milkcase in front of the stove. He would do them one at a time, taking off one shoe and sock and waving his bare foot about while he reached for the stove door, opened it, and swung in the old sock, holding it delicately. Then he would put on his fresh sock, lace up his shoe, and proceed to the other foot, the one with the big toe nailless and truncate. He
was working in the fertilizer plant now. Noontimes he ate in the café the regular lunches, the thirty-cent specials with the lightbread that clove gluily to the palate, three slices with a thumbprint in the center served on a piece of waxed paper. Beans and fatmeat oozing grease into the greasy gravy that leaked down from the potatoes, a beaded scum of grease on the coffee, everything in fact lubricated as if all who ate there suffered from some atrophy of the deglutitive muscles which precluded swallowing. In late afternoon he returned, parked the coupe and crossed the gullied and wasted clay of the yard where an old tire still hung from the one knobby and leafless oak, and so into the unpainted house.

Within the hour he was out, washed and combed, blasting away the peaceful cricket sounds with the open cutout, tooling carefully down the corroded drive and onto the pike and gone.

To Happy Hollow or McAnally Flats. Mead’s Quarry or Pennyroyal. Smoking shacks yellow with coal-oil light and areek with the sweetmold smell of splo whiskey.

Drinking, courting with ribald humor the country slatterns that hung on the city’s perimeter like lost waifs; his favorites the ill-shapen: Wretha, white lisle uniform, thighs the dimensions of oiltuns. The too thin. A nameless one, bony rump that cut into his leg. Experimentally he wet a finger and cut a white streak on the grime of her neck.

Some nights he made it to the Green Fly Inn and rocked away with those old boozers to the last man, this affluent son returned upon them bearing no olive branch but hard coin and greenbacks and ushering in an era of prosperity, a Utopia of paid drinks.

He was hard-pressed now on eighteen dollars a week, who had spent that in an evening. He turned twenty-one in August.

The following Friday he lost his job at the fertilizer plant. Aaron Conatser needled him into a fight, and he fought, not out of any particular dislike toward Conatser, or even in any great anger, but only to get the thing over with, settled. Conatser was the only man in the plant his size and had been looking to try him.

He was on one knee with his arms locked around Conatser’s neck when he heard Conatser’s hoarse breathing stop. There was no sound in the shipping room and when he raised his head he saw that the men standing around them were looking past him at something else and knew before he turned that Mr Petree had joined the circle. Not the dock foreman, or even the supervisor, either of whom would have said Break it up. He turned loose of Conatser and stood. Conatser came up too, stretching his neck like a mute rooster, and put his hands in his back pockets with elegant indifference.

He licked at the trickle of blood from his nose, tasting it salty and metallic, and turned to see what the old man would have to say. But Petree spun on his square leather heel and stalked briskly back down the aisle, the shipping-room floor echoing his hollow footfalls among the tiers of bags.

The three or four men who had gathered to watch the fray dispersed in silence, faded or slunk away in the dark malodorous aisles, less brazen than the rats that nested beneath the pallets. He and Conatser stood glaring at each other for a small minute, breathing laboriously. Then Conatser turned his head and spat, looked once obliquely across his shoulder at him and sauntered away toward the dock.

The dock foreman came down just before quitting time and told him. I tried to put in a word for you, he said, but he wadn’t hearing any.

Sylder doubted him but muttered a thanks anyway and started for the office. Where you goin? he asked. Get my pay.

Here, he said. Sylder turned. He was holding out the envelope toward him.

Sylder went to Monk’s and drank beer till six or seven o’clock, and finally went home. By eight o’clock he had packed some clothes into an old cardboard grip and was sitting grimly behind the wheel of the little coupe with the headlights clearing out the night ahead and a narrow strip of asphalt numbered 129 slipping away beneath him like tape from a spool. He stopped once at a grill outside of Chote, drank two warm beers from coffeecups and bought cigarettes. In the mountains the road was thin and gravel and he slewed down the curves on drifting wheels. Once a bobcat stood highlegged and lanterneyed in the road, bunched, floated away over the roadbank on invisible wires. For miles on miles the high country rolled lightless and uninhabited, the road ferruling through dark forests of owl trees, bat caverns, witch covens.