The Orchard Keeper(39)
At the sinkhole they stopped and skittered down the bank to test the ice; it was black and evil-looking and woven with sticks and weeds. The beagles came to the edge and whined, pawing tentatively. After a while they came out too and rushed wheeling and sliding in a game of tag, their hindquarters spinning from under them as they turned. Boog couldn’t skate because of his feet being wrapped so he sat on the bank holding the rabbit and watching them. Later he built a fire, making a platform of hickory bark and piling dead cedar branches on top and they came and sat around it.
This here’s where Johnny caught the bullfrog, Warn said. Right over yander off the end of that log. By the ass in a mousetrap.
How’d he do that? John Wesley asked.
He bet me a dope on it. I seen him come by the house with this mousetrap on a piece of bailin wire. Said he was fixin to catch him a bullfrog. We come on over and he set it on the end of that log there and then we went on to the store. I thought the poor bastard had done lost his rabbit-assed mind …
Johnny Romines grinned. He told everybody in the store, he said.
Yeah, we all like to of fell out laughin. So the son of a bitch bets me a dope he’s caught one by the time we come back and sure as hell there he is. Pinched right by the ass. I like to never got over it. And wouldn’t nothin do but we come straight back to the store frog trap and all and me buy him the dope right there.
It’s a old Indian trick, said Boog.
What’s that?
Puttin bark down like that. To lay your fire on.
When he reached the fence he rested again, removed his gloves and blew into his cupped hands. Along the face of the mountain and down the valley floor guns were sounding, echoing in diminishing reiteration. The trees were all encased in ice, limbless-looking where their black trunks rose in aureoles of lace, bright seafans shimmering in the wind and tinkling with an endless bell-like sound, a carillon in miniature, and glittering shards of ice falling in sporadic hail everywhere through the woods and marking the snow with incomprehensible runes. Something flicked rapid and invisibly past and struck with a soft pock into the bark of a poplar above him. The thin spat and whine of a rifle followed.
The old man paid no attention. He pulled his gloves on, gathered the wire in one hand and stepped through, the posts on the downhill side jiggling where they dangled in their wires like sticks in a spiderweb, the earth having long been washed from about their moorings. Some dogs were trailing and after a while he could see them below him where the last finger of bleak trees reached into a cut and met the barren fields, the dogs coming out from behind the timber, moving slow and diminutive, their voices small as a child’s horn, two of them. They dipped into the cut and swarmed up the other side and out, across the fields, their brown and white shapes losing definition in the confectionary landscape of mudclods and snow until only their motion was discernible, like part of the ground itself rumoring upheaval.
He went slowly, the snow heavier now, drifted and billowing in the honeysuckle and breaking it down into the path so that he had to skirt below it in places, teetering with edged steps along the incline, uncovering in his footsteps wet patches of leaf black as swampwater, not even frozen. When he reached the top of the mountain, the road curving away in a white swath through the trees, he paused to brush the snow from his shoulders and turn out the lumps of ice gathered in his cuffs. He plowed his way down the drifts some hundred yards and re-entered the woods to the other side, carrying in his hand now the huge handleless knife forged from an old millfile, receding among the small trees in his stooped and shambling gait, apparitional, a strange yuletide assassin.
A quarter hour later he emerged back into the road again still carrying the knife and dragging behind him a small cedar tree. At the curve below the orchard he stopped and looked back, then relegated the knife to some place in the folds of his coat and shouldered the tree. A little further on he entered the woods again, trace of a path or road leading off to the right. This time he was gone for only a few minutes. When he came back, unburdened of the tree now, he followed his tracks to where he had first come onto the road and so disappeared once more into the woods, down the slope of the mountain the way by which he came.
They threaded their way over the jumbled limestone of the quarry, Warn in the lead, until they came to the cave.
It don’t look like much, Johnny Romines said.
It opens up inside, Warn said. Here, let me hang him up here and I’ll show ye. He wedged the skunk in the fork of a sapling and then disappeared down into the earth, crawling on hands and knees through a small hole beneath the rocks. They followed one by one, the stiff winter nettles at the cave door rattling viperously against the legs of their jeans. Inside they struck matches and Warn took a candlestub from a crevice and lit it, the calcined rock taking shape, tonsiled roof and flowing concavity, like something gone partly to liquid and frozen back again misshapen and awry, their shadows curling threatfully up the walls among the dried and mounded bat-droppings. They studied the inscriptions etched in the soft and curdcolored stone, hearts and names, archaic dates, crudely erotic hieroglyphs—the bulbed phallus and strange centipedal vulva of small boys’ imaginations.