The Orchard Keeper(37)
The two men were warming their hands at the fire, the shorter one grinning goodnaturedly at the boy. The other hound had appeared, hovering suddenly at the rim of light and snuffling at the steaming wool and then slouching past them with nervous indifference, the slack hound grace, to where Lady lay quietly peering across her paws into the fire. He nosed at her and she raised her head to look at him with her sad red eyes. He stood so for a minute, looking past her, then stepped neatly over her and melted silently into the black wickerwork of the brush. The other man moved over to her and reached down to pat her head. One ear was mangled and crusting with blood.
Coon’s hard on a walker, he said. Walker’s got too much heart. Old redbone like that—he motioned toward the blackness that encircled them—he’ll quit if it gets too rough. Little old walker though—he addressed the dog now—she jest got too much heart, ain’t she?
When Sylder let him out of the car his clothes were still wet. You better scoot in there fast, he told him. Your maw raise hell with you?
Naw, he said, she’ll be asleep.
Well, Sylder said. We’ll go again. You got to stay out of the creek though. Here, I got to get on. My old lady’ll be standin straight up.
All right, we’ll see ye. He let the door fall.
Night, Sylder said. The car pulled away trailing ropy plumes of smoke, the one red taillight bobbing. He turned toward the house, lightless and archaic among the crumbling oaks, crossed the frosted yard. His shadow swept upward to the lean-to roof, dangled from a limb, upward again, laced with branches, stood suddenly upon the roof. He slid downward over the eaves and disappeared in the black square of the gable window.
III
Some time after midnight on the twenty-first of December it began to snow. By morning in the gray spectral light of a brief and obscure winter sun the fields lay deadwhite and touched with a phosphorous glow as if producing illumination of themselves, and the snow was still wisping down thickly, veiling the trees beyond the creek and the mountain itself, falling softly, and softly, faintly sounding in the immense white silence.
On that morning the old man rose early and stared long out at the little valley. Nothing moved. The snow fell ceaselessly. When he pushed the screendoor it dragged heavily in the drifts packed on the porch and against the house. He stood there in his shirtsleeves watching the great wafers of snow list and slide, dodging the posts at the corner of the house. It was very cold. The hiss of the coffeepot boiling over on the stove brought him in again.
All day it darkened so that when night came no one could tell just when it had come about. Yet the snow fell, undiminished. Windless, pillowed in silence, down-sifting … No one was about. All the dogs were quiet. In his house the old man lit a lamp and settled back in a stout rocker near the stove. He selected a magazine from a rack alongside, an ancient issue of Field and Stream, limp and worn, the pages soft as chamois, spread it on his lap and began to leaf through it who knew it now almost by heart—stories, pictures, advertisements. From time to time he could hear scuffling sounds beneath him, scratchings in the darkness under the floor where Scout turned uneasily in his nest of rotting sacks.
He turned the pages for a while and then got up and went to the kitchen where from a high cupboard above the tapless sink he fetched down a molasses jar near filled with a viscous brickcolored liquid opaque as clay. He screwed off the cap, took a clean jelly jar from the sideboard and poured it full. Then he went back to his chair, settled the drink on its broad arm, adjusted the magazine in his lap and began to rock gently back and forth, the liquid in the glass lapping sluggishly with the motion. Now and again he took a sip, staining the white stubble beneath his lip a deep maroon. The oil-lamp glowed serenely at its image, a soft corolla, inflaming the black window-glass where a curled and withered spider dangled from a dusty thread.
The old man rocked, dwarflike in his ponderous chair. He seemed to be weighing some dark problem posed in the yellowed pages before him.
Toward late morning a rooster called and the old man’s window blushed in a soft wash of rose. He slept and color drained from the glass and the east paled ash-gray. The rooster called once again, questioningly, and shortly the old man jerked awake in his chair, knocking the jelly glass to the floor where it rolled about woodenly.
He peered through the hazy light of the room. It was morning, the lamp out and the stove too, and he found himself stiff and shivering with the cold, rubbing his eyes now, then his back. He rose gingerly and opened the door of the stove, poked among the feathery ashes. He went to the window and looked out. The snow had stopped. Scout was standing in snow to his belly, gazing out at the fantastic landscape with his bleary eyes. Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.