The Orchard Keeper(18)

They paid no tax on it, for it did not exist in the county courthouse records, nor on the land, for they did not own it. They paid no rent on either house or land, as claimants to either or both properties were nonexistent in deed as the house itself. They paid Oliver Henderson, who brought water to them three times a week on his milk route.

The well hidden in the weeds and Johnson grass that burgeoned rankly in the yard had long shed its wall of rocks and they were piled in the dry bottom in layers between which rested in chance interment the bones of rabbits, possums, cats, and other various and luckless quadrupeds.

He didn’t know that, but only guessed because he had found a young rabbit in the well one spring and was afraid to climb down after it. He brought green things to it every day and dropped them in and then one day he fluttered a handful of garden lettuce down the hole and he remembered how some of the leaves fell across it and it didn’t move. He went away and he could see for a long time the rabbit down in the bottom of the well among the rocks with the lettuce over it.

She had finished now and put one lamp on the mantel and was looking at it with the shirt in her hand held up against her. She stood that way for a while and then she turned and saw him watching her over his shoulder, each of them touched with light and the space between them through the narrow door dark. He couldn’t see her eyes and he made out that he was looking at something else and finally turned back to the window and the rain.

Boy, she said.

Yesm.

You get to bed.

Yesm, he said again. He did not move.

Your bed ain’t got wet, is it?

No mam.

It would be wet, always was when it rained even if it didn’t blow. It was musty and smelled good then and cool enough for the blanket. This year, this summer, he had moved to the porch off the kitchen, carrying his bed down one Sunday evening while she was at church and in it by the time she got back, breathing deeply when she stopped at the door on her way in. Then he could hear her at the dishes in the kitchen humming to herself, and she never said anything about it except she made him carry out the two boxes of bottles and cans he had evicted from the corner. The lean-to porch was screened in from waist-high up; after he was in bed a while he could see even the acorns in the yard oaks. Some nights a tall gaunt hound came and peered in the screendoor at him and he would speak to it, it standing there high-shouldered and flat-looking, not moving, and then it would be gone and he could hear its feet padding off through the yard and the clink of its collar.

He pulled the bed out from the corner, turned back the spread and felt the pillow. Then he turned it over and took the blanket from under his arm and put it on the bed and got in. That was the last night of that summer. He fell asleep to the water and metal sounds of the rain runneling over the tin and sluicing through the gutterpipe, the rapid slash of it in a gust of wind and the fine mist spraying his face through the bellying screen. The oaks stirred restlessly, low admonitions, shhh …


In the morning the rain had stopped and there was a chill in the air and smoke. He smiled at that, for he was waiting and weathers and seasons were his timepiece now. There were still warm days but that didn’t matter to him. Jays were in the blackoaks mornings and the grackles had come back, great flocks of them bending the trees, their feathers glinting dark metal colors and their calls harshly musical, like a rusty swing. Or they would be on the ground, the yard rolling blackly with them, and he would run out and pop his hands once and see them explode sunward, a flapping shrieking horde bearing leaves and debris into the air on the updraft of their wings.

The first weeks of September went and the weather held and no frost. The veins were coming up in his arms and he would press them and then raise his fist and feel the blood in the soft tubes.

He was pushing time now and he could feel it give. She canned the remainder of the garden in two days and was after him to get his bed back up to the loft before he took cold. It rained and the pond went blood-red and one afternoon he caught a bass from the willows in water not a foot deep and cleaned it and held the tiny heart in the palm of his hand, still beating.

His bed was still on the porch. These nights he could not bear to be in the house. He would go out after dinner and come back at bedtime—and then out again directly she was asleep, walking the dark roads, passing by the shacks and houses, the people illumined yellowly behind the windowlights in gestures mute and enigmatic…

One night cutting through a field he came upon two figures struggling in the grass, naked, white and frantic in the gloss of the quarter-moon as stranded fish. He went on. They did not see him. When he got to the road he began to run, his shoes slapping loud on the asphalt till they burned and stung, ran till his chest was seared. Below the forks of the road in Stiefel’s yard was a great tulip poplar. He crawled up the kept-grass bank and folded in the shadows of the trunk like a malefactor gone to earth, his breath dragging coals through his lungs.