The Orchard Keeper(24)
Them. He pointed. Number ones.
The man studied the dull metal shapes as if aware for the first time of their existence, seemingly puzzled not over their price but as to how they came to be there in the first place. Then he said, Yes. And lifted one down and set it on the counter before the boy at a quarter-angle, straightening the chain, as one might show a watch or a piece of jewelry.
The boy touched the oiled smoothness of it, pan, trigger, jaws, spring. How much? he asked again.
Thirty cents.
Thirty cents, the boy repeated.
Lessen you buy by the dozen. They’re three dollars the dozen.
The boy turned that over in his mind. That would make em twenty-five then, wouldn’t it?
Well, the man said, twelve and three … four for a dollar … is right, twenty-five cents is right.
Well, he said, I aim to get a dozen but I cain’t get all of em together at the same time. So I wonder if I couldn’t get four of em today and then get the rest later on …?
The man looked at him for a minute and then he smiled. Why I reckon, you could, he said. Course you’d have to sign a pledge for the whole dozen so as for me to let you have the four at the dozen price.
The boy nodded.
He reached up and unhooked three more traps and put them on the counter, their chains rattling angrily, reached under the cash register and came up with a book of old order forms. He wrote in it for a while and then tore off two copies and handed one to the boy. Sign that, he said. He was holding out the pen.
The boy took it and started to write.
Better read it first, the man cautioned.
He read it, ciphering out the tall thin handwriting:
I, the undersigned, do hereby agree to purchase 8 (eight) Victor no. 1 traps from the Farm & Home Supply Store prior to Jan. 1, 1941. Price to be @ 25 cents ea.
Signed……………
signed his name to the bottom and handed back the pen.
The man took the signed paper and handed him the other one, the carbon. Thisn’s your copy, he told him. The boy took it and folded it, then took the dollar from his watchpocket and smoothed it on the counter. The man took the dollar and rang it up in the register. Wait till I get you a poke, he said.
He pulled a sheet of brown paper from a roll and wrapped the traps in it and tied them with string. The boy took the package, hefting the weight of it in his hands. I’ll be back to get the othern’s afore long, he told the man.
Then he was gone, out into the blinding sunshine among the high-shouldered crowds, sped and well-wished by an old man’s smile.
They were still tied up in the brown paper and wedged in back of the rafter. On the morning of the fifteenth of November he got up early and crossed the icy floor of the loft, reached in and pulled them out and went back and sat in bed, feeling the shape of them through the dusty paper. Then he undid the string and dumped them out on the blanket. He set them one by one and touched them off with his thumb under the lower jaw and they leaped in his hand and rang shut viciously. After a while he hung them on a nail over the bed and went down to breakfast.
He was at the creek all that day wading in the steely water, poking among the dried honeysuckles, noting tracks and droppings, slides and dens. One sleeve was wet past the elbow where he had reached to feel an underwater hole and his toes were numb in the leaky kneeboots. By the time he got home he was chilled and shaking but he had his four sets laid.
When he left the house the next morning, quietly out through the lean-to, letting the door back softly, light was just coming low in the east, breaking along the gray ridges, and a cold rim of moon still hung over the mountain. The oaks were black and stark and the leaves in the yard were frosted and snapped under his feet with thin glassy sounds. He cut straight through the woods to Saunders’ field, hoary and pale in the hazy cold of that first light, the dead grass sheathed in ice like slender bones, rock shoals lapped in mist and crows ambling stiff-legged on the far side where willows marked the creek’s course. He crossed the fence, the icy wire in the web of his thumb like a cut. The crows skulked off on hooked wings to a clump of gray cedars. He quartered across the field, crossed another fence, near to the creek now, under the mountain, past the slain corn in hushed and battered flanks where doves had fed till late. Already he could hear the riffle and purl of the water and then he was out on the high bank where the slide went down—a slash of packed clay casehardened with frost and pressed with the scrabble-marks of muskrats—and below in the water his trap lying in wait still. He went on up the creek, crossed a shelf of limestone where periwinkles crowded and watercress swayed in the current. In a honeysuckle tunnel reeds and grasses were tramped down and a tangled sheaf of white weed stalks floated over his second trap. The other two were close together just below the pike bridge and there were no sleek muskrats in them either. The creek clattered down through green stone grottoes, over the rocks, curling, eddying under the white roots of cottonwoods where crawfish peered out with stemmed eyes. And the sun running red on the mountain, high killy and stoop of a kestrel hunting, morning spiders at their crewelwork. But no muskrats struggled in his sets.