The Orchard Keeper(30)

The boy looked down at his palm. There was a black and jagged line across it.

You jest do that? the man asked.

The boy looked at it dumbly. No, he said. I don’t think so. I must of done it when I fell in the creek. Before …

The man dropped the keys in his pocket and struggled to his feet. Well, come on, he said. We better get ourselves patched up. This way, he added, seeing the boy start for the road. He motioned toward the field and set off with a hopping gait, muttering under his breath Whew, Mother.

The boy followed him for a few paces, then quartered off to the creek again and the man watched him go, his legs disappearing in the mist, then the rest of him, so that he seemed to be gliding away toward the line of willows marking its course like some nightwraith fleeing the slow reaching dawn until the man wasn’t sure that he had really been there at all. Then he came back with a pole and handed it to him. Thanks, the man said.

They moved on across the field, through vapors of fog and wisps of light, to the east, looking like the last survivors of Armageddon.

Their path led them up the creek, along the edges of the fields that terminated there—a curve of fields and the creek and the cupped slope of the mountain rising up to their right along which shafts of light now appeared laterally among the ghostgray trees. They struggled through the last fence, the boy holding the wire and trying to help him and him cussing, crossed a plank bridge at the fork of the creek, out through a cattle gate and onto the road, Henderson Valley Road.

The boy fastened the gate behind them and the man said, We got to stay off this road. They might of found it by now what with the light and all.

They crossed the road and started up a steep dirt drive on the other side. We can call here, the man said. The boy could see him better now. He needed a shave and the blood crusted on the side of his face was broken in fine cracks like old dark pottery where he winced with the pain of his slow progress, leaning heavily on the pole and breathing hoarsely. He was leanhipped and tall and his poplin jacket hung loosely about his shoulders. The boy thought he must be awfully cold dressed no warmer than that and wet to the knees besides. His own feet he couldn’t feel at all now; they were like hooves rattling inside his boots. He hadn’t stopped shivering the whole time. The drive climbed and turned and then there was a house.

It was an older man came to the door, a tremendous paunch slung in a gray and ragged undershirt drooped pendulously over the waist of his trousers like a sacked hog carcass. Out of a meaty face, jowled and white-stubbled with beard, two porcine eyes regarded them, blinking. Hot-toe-mitty, he said, slow and evenly. Then: Well, come on in if you’re able. They entered, the man hobbling in with his pole and the boy following. The room was warm and suffused with odors of cooking meat.

Hey, old woman, their host called out, they’s two fellers here jest fell out of a aryplane.

A woman came to the door at the far end and looked at them. Lord God, she said. She looked as if she might be going to say something else, then she clamped her jaw shut and disappeared with an air of briskness.

The room itself was comfortable with the new catalog store prosperity of china lamps, linoleum floors, a Warm Morning heater in front of which he installed himself while the two men stood talking. They paid little attention to him and he just watched them, the injured man waving his arms, telling the story, the other scratching alternately belly and head and saying Godamighty softly to himself from time to time by way of comment. After a while the woman came to the door again and called them in for coffee.

As they started for the kitchen the younger man motioned at him. This here is … he nodded to the boy.

John Wesley, he said.

John Wesley. This here is June Tipton—and this is his Mrs.

Mrs Tipton nodded back at him as they entered the kitchen and said, How do, John Wesley.

They sat down at the table and June said to the woman: John Wesley’s the one what pulled Marion out of the creek.

She looked at her husband and then to him and smiled appreciatively. The one called Marion was fishing through his pockets for cigarettes. That’s right, he said. I might near of drownded.

She smiled again. After a while she turned to her husband and said, What all was he doin in the creek?

Jest laying there, June said. He blowed a tire and his car fell in.

She looked at the boy again and smiled and went on sipping her coffee demurely. The boy lowered his face to the steaming mug before him. Small waterdrops tripped down from his thawing hair, beaded and dropped from his earlobes. He was still in his soaked mackinaw and a puddle of water was gathering on the linoleum beneath his chair. Raising his eyes above the rim of the cup he saw the woman looking at him, leaning forward. She reached out and squeezed his coat. It made a funny squishing sound.