The Orchard Keeper(25)

After five mornings he pulled one trap and carried it to the bridge. There were fresh tracks on a siltbar there and he set his trap in the shallow water where they came and went. Two mornings later the trap was pulled out in the creek and there was a toenail clamped in the underside of the jaws. He reset it and was at the creek an hour before daylight in the morning with a flashlight.





Light pale as milk guided the old man’s steps over the field to the creek and then to the mountain, stepping into the black wall of pine-shadows and climbing up the lower slopes out into the hardwoods, bearded hickories trailing grapevines, oaks and crooked waterless cottonwoods, a quarter mile from the creek now, past the white chopped butt of a bee tree lately felled, past the little hooked Indian tree and passing silent and catlike up the mountain in the darkness under latticed leaves scudding against the sky in some small wind. Light saw him through the thick summer ivy and over windfalls and limestone. Past the sink where on a high bluff among trilobites and fishbones, shells of ossified crustaceans from an ancient sea, a great stone tusk jutted.

The old man kept to a steep path off to the right and came through the last thick brush to the mountain road, breathing heavily. He stopped there to lean on his cane and the first slant light of moon topped the mountain on the far side so that the crest of it was washed in a watery silver and the dust of the road shone like mica. A half mile to his left was the circle at the end of the road and beyond that the fence and the installation. The road to the spray-pit was but a few yards to the right of where he stood in the road now, hearing his breath soar out in the silence. He looked as one peering from vast heights, the sky seeming to lie below him in a measureless spread, flickering like foil by half-light and gleaming lamely into shadow where it folded to the trees.

Years back on summer nights he used to walk with neighbor boys two miles to the store to buy candy and cigars. They would come back over the warm and deserted roads talking and smoking the cigars. One night taking a shortcut they passed a house and saw through one window a woman undressing for bed. The others had gone back for a second look but he would not go and they laughed at him. The old man remembered it now with dim regret, and remembered such nights when the air was warm as a breath and the moon no dead thing. He started down the road to the orchard path and to the pit for this second look.

The moon was higher now as he came past the stand of bullbriers into the orchard, the blackened limbs of the trees falling flatly as paper across the path and the red puddle of moon moving as he moved, sliding sodden and glob-like from limb to limb, fatly surreptitious, watching as he watched. His feet moved ahead of him, disembodied and unfamiliar, floating through the banded shadows, and the limecolored grass swished and folded, breaking to light-shivered undersides like glass splintering softly, catching the pale light and then rushing to darkness. Excepting the counterpoint of crickets there was no other sound.

Where the road curved to bring into view the clearing, the dim outline of the pit, the old man paused. The glade seemed invested with an aura of antiquity, overhung with a silence both spectral and reverent. He could feel something cold rising up in him and was almost of a mind to turn back. Taking a little tighter grip upon his cane he stood so for a while, then stepped into the clearing and came to the edge of the pit, ushering his own presence forward like a child to the pale gray lip of concrete stretched in the grass like a fallen monument, stepped up on it and looked into the black square of the pit incised geometrically into the earth.

The old man had visited here in the years past but never by night. Each winter he came and cut a cedar to serve for wreath and covering, the waxed and ciliate sprigs holding their green well into the spring before the heat blasted them and even then they held their shape, like reproductions in dull copper. It took a year’s weather to fret them into the aromatic humus which steeped in what rainwater the pit held and so rendered in turn a tannic liquor dark as pitchblende by which the old man fancied had long been stained the wormscored bones that lay here. These things he observed, for he was a watcher of the seasons and their work. By the coming Christmas he would have cut the seventh cedar and with this he felt might come an end to his long deadwatch.

So he stood, looking down, and now he thought it less eerie than he had supposed, the half-darkness about him almost sheltering. Seeing that the range of his visibility extended at least partially into the pit he even sat down on the concrete edge and dangled his feet. He tugged a pipe from the folds of his overalls, filled it from a small sack of tobacco and lit it, puffing deeply, watched the smoke pale against the night by the matchflare. Then he held the match out over the pit and peered down, but he could not see even the rustcolored tips of the cedars and the match burned down to his thumb and he dropped it.