The Orchard Keeper(49)
She could feel him laughing silently. What? she said.
He kept astin who it was.
What? Who did.
Hmm? Naw, nothin. Just some feller. Go on to sleep.
She turned over and put her hand on his chest. She said, Hush.
He lay on his back, his hand over hers, the other hand stiffening. Suddenly he had a bile-sharp foretaste of disaster. Why was that old man shooting holes in the government tank on the mountain?
You sure have got cold feet, she said.
He stared up at the dark ceiling. I’ll be damned if I do, he whispered to himself.
IV
A warm wind on the mountain and the sky darkening, the clouds looping black underbellies until a huge ulcer folded out of the mass and a crack like the earth’s core rending rattled panes from Winkle Hollow to Bay’s Mountain. And the wind rising and gone colder until the trees bent as if borne forward on some violent acceleration of the earth’s turning and then that too ceased and with a clatter and hiss out of the still air a plague of ice.
The old man looked out through a veil of water fringing his hatbrim, beadwork swinging as he turned his head. The hail had stopped and the wind was coming up again with the rain. He had set forth from his refuge under the claybank and already he was wet through. The road had gone from dust shocked up in dark water-balls to geysers of erupting mud, a sluggish flow beginning in the wheelruts and blistering under the rain. The old man began to run, hobbling in an odd bandylegged progress through the blinding rain, great windblown sheets of it sweeping over the road. The air was filled with branches and foliage of trees and the trees whipped and cracked. By the time he left the road and entered the woods they were coming down, the dead and leafless trunks, grasping with brittle gray fingers and going prone on the earth with the muffled thunder of their fall half lost in the fulminations overhead. The old man kept to his course, over last year’s leaves slick with water, hopping and dancing wildly among the maelstrom of riotous greenery like some rain sprite, burned out of the near-darkness in antic configuration against the quick bloom of the lightning. As he passed it thus a barren chestnut silver under the sluice of rain erupted to the heart and spewed out sawdust and scorched mice upon him. A slab fell away with a long hiss like a burning mast tilting seaward. He is down. A clash of shields rings and Valkyrie descend with cat’s cries to bear him away. Already a rivulet is packing clay in one ragged cuff and a quiff of white hair depending from his forelock reddens in the seeping mud.
Rainwater seeped among the porous boards of the outhouse until the windrowed leaves in the cat’s corner were black and lifeless and the cat left through the leaning door to seek new shelter. Pools of black water stood in the path swirling slowly their wrack of straw and weeds, armadillo beetles coiled round as shot and strangely buoyant. She skirted them on wincing feet, bore squeamishly the wet slide of last year’s limp and slime-brown weeds.
Arthur Ownby’s hound rooted and burrowed in his wad of ripe sacks, slept again, his tail clasped to his hairless stomach. He did not see the cat that came to the door of his cellar and stood on three legs.
Such light as there was to announce the new day filtered thinly through a mizzle of rain and remarked the fluff of her taupe fur curled in a cleft treebole on the south slope of Red Mountain. Hunger drove her out in the late afternoon, cautious, furtive, dusted with wood-rot.
Still the rain, eating at the roads, cutting gullies on the hills till they ran red and livid as open wounds. The creek came up into the fields, a river of mud questing among the honeysuckles. Fenceposts like the soldiers of Pharaoh marched from sight into the flooded draws.
In Saunders’ field a shallow marsh, calm and tractable beneath the dimpling rain. And yet rain. What low place did not hold water? At the little end of McCall’s pond water fell thunderously into the sinkhole that drained it. Along Little River the flats stood weed-deep in livercolored water flecked with thatches of small driftwood and foam that coiled and spun near imperceptibly, or rocked with the wind-riffles passing under them. By day flocks of rails gathered. A pair of bitterns stalked with gimlet eyes the fertile shallows. At night the tidelands rang with peepers, with frogs gruffly choral. Great scaly gars from the river invaded the flats, fierce and primitive of aspect, long beaks full of teeth, ancient fishes survived unchanged from mesozoic fens, their yellowed boneless skeletons graced the cracked clay-beds later in the season where the water left them to what querulous harridans, fishcrow or buzzard, might come to glean their frames, the smelly marvel of small boys.
Rafts of leaves descended the flowage of Henderson Valley Road, clear water wrinkling over the black asphalt. The mud-choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red, roiling heavily, pounding in the gutters with great belching sounds. The cat trod the high crown of the road, bedraggled and diminutive, a hunted look about her.