The Orchard Keeper(17)

Ain’t no sign with wampus cats, she told him, but if you has the vision you can read where common folks ain’t able.

He related this to his mother and she held the cross of Jesus against his forehead and prayed long and fervently.

The old man lay on his back listening to the heart surge under his ribcage, his breath wheening slow and even. In the fall before this past winter he had come awake one night and seen it for the second time, black in the paler square of the window, a white mark on its face like an inverted gull wing. And the window frame went all black and the room was filling up, the white mark looming and growing. He reached down and seized the shotgun by the barrel, spun it around and thumbed the hammer and let it fall. The room erupted … he remembered the orange spit of flame from the muzzle and the sharp smell of burnt powder, that his ears were singing and his arm hurt where the butt came back against it. He got up and stumbled to the table, dragging the gun by its warm barrel, found and struck a match and got the lantern lit. Then he went to the window, the light flickering thin shadows up the wall, playing to the low ceiling and whitening the spiderwebs. He held the lamp up. Above the window the boards were blasted and splintered clean and honeycolored. He didn’t keep the shotgun by the bed any more but over in the corner behind the table.

The old man lay awake a long time. Once he thought he heard a cry, faintly, beyond the creek and the field, but he wasn’t sure. A car passed on the road and he wondered about that but then he dozed and the crickets had already stopped.





Deep hole between her neckcords, smokeblue. Laddered boneshapes under the paper skin like rows of welts descending into the bosom of her dress. Eyes lowered to her work, blink when she swallows like a toad’s. Lids wrinkled like walnut hulls. Her grizzled hair gathered, tight, a helmet of zinc wire. Softly rocking, rocking. A looping drape of skirt slung in a curtain-fold down the side of the chair swept softly at the floor. She sat before the barren fireplace stitching buttonholes in a shirt of woolen millends. From out his scrolled and gilded frame Captain Kenneth Rattner, fleshly of face and rakish in an overseas cap abutting upon his right eyebrow, the double-barred insignia wreathed in light, soldier, father, ghost, eyed them.

With the lamps aligned one on either side she had a ritualistic look, a nun at beads perhaps. Later he watched from the kitchen lean-to because it had a tin roof and a wind had come up now and was blowing the rain across it with long ripping sounds like silk tearing. He turned the pages of his magazine but he had read it so much that he scarcely looked at the pages any more; mostly he watched how the lampflame quivered and the polished work that bound the stove, burnt to peacock colors of bronze and copper, violet-blue, changed patterns, ran to whorls and flamepoints. He waved his hand over the glass and the blue canisters above the stove bowed.

In the kitchen the man on the mantel couldn’t watch him any more either. After a while he put down the magazine and turned around in the chair, sat with his elbows propped on the back and watched out the window for lightning. Thin cracks of it far back over Winkle Hollow like heat lightning. There was no thunder, only the rain and wind.

The boy thought he could remember his father. Or perhaps only his mother telling about him … He remembered a man, his father or just some other man he was no longer sure. His father didn’t come back after they moved from Maryville. He remembered that, the moving.

It was a house of logs, hand-squared and chinked with clay, the heavy rafters in the loft pinned with wooden pegs. There had been a loom in the loft but it had since been burned piece by piece for kindling. It was a huge affair of rough-cut wood that under the dust had retained even then a yellow newness. The rafters still looked that way. In the summer wasps nested over the boards, using the auger-holes where dowels had shrunk in some old dry weather and fallen to the floor to emerge out into the hot loft and drone past his bed to the window where a corner of glass was gone and so out into the sunlight. There had been mud-dobber nests stacked up the wide planks too but his mother had raked them all down one day and aside from the wasps there were only the borers and woodworms, which he never saw but knew by the soft cones of wood-dust that gathered on the floor, the top log beneath the eaves, or trailed down upon the cobwebs, heavy yellow sheets of them opaque with dust and thick as muslin.

The house was tall and severe with few windows. Some supposed it to be the oldest house in the county. It was roofed with shakes and they seemed the only part of it not impervious to weather and time, for they were blackened and split, and now curling in their ruin they seemed victims of a long-ago fire which the house had somehow escaped altogether, for it was sound and the logs were finely checked and seasoned. They sagged and bellied and seemed supported only by the chimneys of clay and river rock at either end, but the house was strong and settled and no wind could bring a creak from it.