The Orchard Keeper(33)

The man picked out one and handed it to him. He took it, the fat slick little belly filling his palm, legs dangling, took it and looked at the quiet and already sad eyes, the pushed-in puppy face with the foolish ears.

Four weeks old, the man was saying. That’s the best’n, but you can pick whichever one you want.

Do what?

His daddy’s a blooded bluetick—half bluetick half walker, the pups. Makes as good a treedog as they is goin. You like that’n?

Yessir, he said.

Well, he’s yourn then. You can take him home with ye in about another month, say.


Jefferson Gifford thumbed his galluses onto his shoulders, took a last swallow of coffee from the still full earthenware cup and crossed with heavy boot-tread the curling linoleum of the kitchen floor to the rear entrance way where he took down his hat and jacket from a peg.

A Plymouth? he repeated.

Legwater was buttoning his coat. That’s what he said. I ain’t been down there. All I know is he said it was a Plymouth. He come straight to my place on account of it was on his milk route and he ast for me to call you. So I jest come on over. He said it was a Plymouth.

Gifford adjusted his hat and opened the door. Well, come on, he said. I sure never heard of nobody hauling whiskey in a Plymouth.

Ain’t you goin to call the Sheriff?

Reckon I’ll see what all it is I’m callin him about first, Gifford said.

They parked the car just beyond the creek and climbed through the wire fence and walked along slow, studying the swath the car had cut through the brush and small trees. It had cleared the fence completely, peeling a limb from a cottonwood that grew by the bridge, and come to earth some thirty feet from the road. It was upside down in the creek against the far bank and facing back the way it came. Gifford couldn’t see anything yet but the undercarriage, but he knew it wasn’t a Ford this time by the two semi-elliptic springs at the rear axle. They had to go back to the road and cross the bridge to get to the car. It was smashed up against some roots on the bank and they could see the glass leaking from the trunk lid.

Later when they got a truck down and winched the wreck out the lid fell off and glass poured into the creek—someone said later for thirty minutes—for a long time anyway. There were even two or three jars unbroken, which pleased Gifford—evidence, he said …

It was a Plymouth, a 33 coupe; there was a hole in the right front tire you could put three fingers in. Other than that there was nothing remarkable about it except that it was wrecked in Red Branch with the remains of a load of whiskey in the back end.

Gifford examined the ground carefully, walking back and forth along the bank as if he had lost something there. He had written the license number down on a slip of paper but on looking closer saw that they were last year’s plates repainted and threw the paper away in disgust.

Looks to me like he’d of been hurt, Legwater was saying. They.

They what?

Them, Gifford said. They’s two of em.

You mean tracks? Them’s most likely Oliver’s; he come down to see was they anybody hurt …

Cept he never clumb down into the creek to … See? Here … Gifford paused, staring at the ground. After a long minute he looked up at Legwater. Earl, he said, I reckon you’re right.

Figured I was …

Yep. The othern wadn’t in the car. He jest come along and got whoever was in out.

It wadn’t Oliver, Legwater persisted. He never even seen nobody around when he come by. He …

Ain’t talkin about him, the constable said. Come on, if you’re ready.

It had begun to rain a little by then.

Believe it may warm up for a spell, Gifford said. If it don’t turn snow.


In the store the old men gathered, occupying for endless hours the creaking milkcases, speaking slowly and with conviction upon matters of profound inconsequence, eying the dull red bulb of the stove with their watery vision. Shrouded in their dark coats they had a vulturous look about them, their faces wasted and thin, their skin dry and papery as a lizard’s. John Shell, looking like nothing so much as an ill-assembled manikin of bones on which clothes were hung in sagging dusty folds, his wrists protruding like weathered sticks from his flapping prelate sleeves, John Shell unhinged his toothless jaw with effort, a slight audible creaking sound, to speak his one pronouncement: It ain’t so much that as it is one thing’n another.

An assemblage of nods to this. In the glass cases roaches scuttled, a dry rattling sound as they traversed the candy in broken ranks, scaled the glass with licoriced feet, their segmented bellies yellow and flat. Summer and winter they patrolled the candy case, inspected handkerchiefs, socks, cigars. Occasionally too they invaded the meat case, a medicinal white affair rusted from sweat where the lower edge of the glass was mortised, so that brown stains like tobacco spit or worse seeped down the enamel, but they soon perished here from the cold. Their corpses lay in attitudes of repose all along the little scupper to the front of the case.