The Orchard Keeper(16)
He dozed, slept, for a long time. Late in the afternoon clouds began to pile up in the gap of the mountain and a fresh breeze came past the corner of the porch to rock gently the gourds swung from the eaves.
He woke before the rain started. The breeze had cooled and cooled, fanning his face and the beads of sweat on his forehead. He sat up and rubbed his neck. A pair of mockingbirds were pinwheeling through the high limbs of the maples, were still; and then, arriving as if surprised themselves in the greengold heat of the afternoon, the first drops of rain splatted dark on the packed mud below the house. A flat shade undulated across the yard, the road, and climbed the mountain face with an illusion of sudden haste; the rain increased, growing in the distance with the wind and leaching the trees beyond the creek lime-silver. The old man watched the rain advance across the fields, the grass jerking under it, the stones in the road going black and then the mud in the yard. A gust of spray wet his cheek and he could hear the roofshakes dancing.
When the one gutterpipe wired to the porch roof overflowed, the water fell in a single translucent fan and the landscape bleared and weaved. The rain splashed in until there was a dark border about the porch. He took out his tobacco and rolled a cigarette with trembly hands, neat and perfect. The wind had gone and he sat back with his head against the green plankings and watched the smoke standing in the air under the dampness and very blue. After a while the rain began to slacken and it was darkening, the sky above the mountain black but for a thin reef of failing gray, and then that was gone and it was night, staccato with lightning in the distance. The old man began to feel a chill and was ready to go in when something cracked on the mountain and he looked up in time to see the domed metal tank on the peak illuminated, quivering in a wild aureole of light. There was a sound like fingernails on slate and the old man shivered and blinked his eyes, the image burning white hot in the lenses for another moment, and when he looked again it was gone and he stood in darkness with the sound of the rain slipping through the trees and a thin trickle of water coming off the roof somewhere to spatter in a puddle below. He waggled his hand in front of his face and couldn’t even see it.
He stood up and batted his eyes. Far back beyond the mountain a thin wire of lightning glowed briefly. Corner post and porch began to materialize slowly out of the murk and he could see the hound when it loomed up over the edge of the porch, snuffling, ears flapping and collar jingling as he shook the rain from his reeking hide. He came up, toenails clicking on the planks, and snuffed at the old man’s trousers.
Where you been, old dog? the old man said. The dog began to rub against his leg and the old man pushed him away with his foot, saying Go on, Scout. Scout moved over against the house and settled. The man rubbed the back of his neck, stretched and went in.
The house was musty, dank and cellar-like. He felt his way to the corner table and lit a coal-oil lamp, the ratty furniture leaping out from the shadows in the yellow light. He went into the kitchen and lit the lamp there, took down a plate of beans and a pan of dry cornbread from the warmer over the stove. He sat at the table and ate them cold, and when he had finished went outside with a handful of biscuits and threw them to the dog. The rain had almost stopped. The hound bolted down the biscuits and looked up after him. The screendoor banged to, the square of light on the porch floor narrowed and went out with the click of the latch. The old man did not appear again. The dog lowered his head on his paws and peered out at the night with wrinkled and sorrowing eyes.
Cats troubled the old man’s dreams and he did not sleep well any more. He feared their coming in the night to suck his meager breath. Once he woke and found one looking in the window at him, watching him as he slept. For a while he had kept the shotgun loaded and lying on the floor beside the bed but now he only lay there and listened for them. Very often they would not start until late and he would still be awake, his ears ringing slightly from having listened so long. Then would come a thin quavering yowl from some dark hollow on the mountain. He had used to trot to the window and peer out at the hills, at the silhouette of pines in the low saddle above Forked Creek like a mammoth cathedral gothically spired … Now he only lay in his gray covers and listened. He did not sleep much at night and he was sore and bone-worn from napping in chairs, against logs and trees, sprawled on the porch.
When he was a boy in Tuckaleechee there was a colored woman lived in a shack there who had been a slave. She came there because, as she said, there weren’t any other niggers and because she felt the movements and significations there. She wore a sack of hellebore at her neck and once he had seen her on the road and hadn’t been afraid of her, as he was very young then, so she put three drops of milfoil on the back of his tongue and chanted over him so that he would have vision. She told him that the night mountains were walked by wampus cats with great burning eyes and which left no track even in snow, although you could hear them screaming plain enough of summer evenings.