The Orchard Keeper(50)

A low sun fired the pine knots in the smokehouse wall till they glowed like rubies, veined and pupiled eyes, peering in at the gloom where the cat gnawed a dangling side of pork-ribs. The salt drew her mouth but she kept at it, pausing now and again to listen at the silence. Mildred Rattner’s mule-slippers carried her with care past the bad spots in the mud, chancing rather the dampness of the ragged grass that grew along the path. What with the pat of rain on the tarpaper overhead the cat heard nothing until the keys jangled just beyond the door and the lock rattled. She leapt to a high shelf, poised, sprang again, making for the air vent under the peaked roof. As the door let in she was hanging by one toenail from this opening, hindclaws flailing desperately for purchase, and then a sliver of the molding wood gave way and she lost her grip.

When Mildred Rattner swung open the door and stepped into the smokehouse she saw a cat drop with an anguished squall from somewhere overhead, land spraddle-legged facing her, and make a wild lunge at her, teeth gleaming in the dimness and eyes incandesced with madness. She screamed and fell backwards and the cat with a long despairing wail flowed over her and was gone.


In Tipton’s field four crows sat in a black locust, ranged upon the barren limbs with heads low between their wingblades, surveying the silvergray desolation, the silent rain in the country. They watched the cat come across the field at a slow lope, an erratic dancing progress where she veered and leapt, keeping to the spotty dry ground. Their calls in the afternoon stillness had a somber loneliness about them, the mournful quality of freight whistles. They came from the roost and defiled low over her head, dipping and swooping. The cat spun low on her haunches, batted at them. So did they harry her out of the field, her pausing at each attack to make a stand and grapple at the wind of their passage, hard-pressed to preserve dignity, the birds flaring, wheeling, setting to again in high crude humor. They left her at the bank of the creek to return, settle with treading wings among the locust branches. She marked them down, her yellow eyes narrowed in contempt, turned downstream and followed the swollen creek to the bridge. Here she crossed and continued, taking the high wooded ground on the south bank, pausing here and there with random inquisitiveness at holes and hollow logs to smell, shake herself or lick the water from her chest, until a strong odor of mink musk brought her to the creek proper again.

The mink was dead, swaying in the shore currents among the swamped and flaring grass. She crept to it on cocked legs, leapt to a mud hummock and swatted it with a long reach downward. She stood up and watched it. It bobbed lifelessly. The chain was hung on a stob somewhere out in the water and when she hooked her claws into the mink to pull it toward her it did not come. Finally she ventured one foot into the water and bit into the neck of the animal. The grit impregnated in its fur set her teeth on edge and she attacked it savagely, then stopped suddenly as if her attention had wandered or returned to something of importance which she had forgotten. She left the mink and set a course across the fields toward the pike road.

The rain had plastered down her fur and she looked very thin and forlorn. She gathered burdock and the curling purple leaves of rabbit weed as she went; a dead stalk of blackberry briar clung to her hind leg. Just short of the road she stopped, shivered her loose skin, ears flat against her head. She squalled once, hugging the ground with her belly, eyes turned upward at the colorless sky, the endless pelting rain.


On the afternoon of the third day the rain slacked and through the high pall of faint gray, blades of light swung like far beacons, cutting slowly the wisped cloud edges, lace-tatter or swirl of sea mist. Dark fell early, and later as he lay quilted and awake in his black loft the rainless silence of the roof seemed to measure time, something lying in wait. He had already decided to go to the creek in the morning. The water might even have fallen some.

So it was the morning of the fourth day before he went to his traps again, passing the pond and skirting the lower end where it flared out into the field with the weeds standing in the water like rice, then down along the limestone ledges, past the hail-shattered floats of water lilies, shoals of new green leaves, on across the field and out to the road.

Before he came to the bridge he left the road, turned down a steep bank and crossed a fence, following a mud path until he came out on the creek bank. It had not fallen any. Troughs of clayey water rocked through the shallow field on the far side, seething in the matted honeysuckle, the tops of milkweeds and willow shoots quivering in the pull of it. The creek itself was a roily misshapen flume more like solid earth in motion than any liquid, cutting past him, each dip and riffle, eddy, glide, uncurling rope coil fixed and changeless and only the slight oily tremor of the water and the rush of noise testifying to motion at all. Unless a limb or stick came down, or here: a fluted belt of water curling upward in a long scoop like a snarled lip broken suddenly by a tree branch lashing out of the perfect opacity of it, rapid and deft as a snake striking, subsiding again and invisible with no ring or ripple to trace it by. He sat down for a few minutes and watched it all. A kingfisher came up the creek, tacking back and forth, saw the boy and flared, veered away over the watery fields trailing in the morning quiet his high staccato call.