The Orchard Keeper(14)
There it continued to burn, generating such heat that the hoard of glass beneath it ran molten and fused in a single sheet, shaped in ripples and flutings, encysted with crisp and blackened rubble, murrhined with bottlecaps. It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon.
II
Curled in a low peach limb the old man watched the midmorning sun blinding on the squat metal tank that topped the mountain. He had found some peaches, although the orchard went to ruin twenty-years before when the fruit had come so thick and no one to pick it that at night the overborne branches cracking sounded in the valley like distant storms raging. The old man remembered it that way, for he was a lover of storms.
The tank was on high legs and had a fence around it with red signs that he had been pondering for some time, not just today. From time to time he sliced a bite from one of his peaches. They were small and hard, but he had good teeth. He propped one foot up in the limb with him and fell to stropping the knife slowly on the smooth-worn toe of his boot. Then he wet a patch of hair on his arm and tested the blade. Satisfied, he reached for another peach and began peeling it.
When he had finished this one he wiped the blade of the knife on his cuff, folded and pocketed it, passed a handful of loose sleeve across his mouth. Then he got down from his limb and started up through the wreckage of the orchard, threading his way among the old gray limbs and stopping to look out over the valley now and again, at the black corded fields and the roofs winking in the sun. When he came out on the road he turned down to the right, his brogans making small padding sounds in the red dust, his huge knobby-kneed trousers rolling and moiling about him urgently as if invested with a will and purpose of their own.
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.