The Orchard Keeper(51)

He got up and started along the path over the shelf of woods between the creek and the mountain, by hickories feathered in mist, by cottonwoods still coldly skeletal for all the new green of the spring. He began to climb, his approach forewarned by the patter of nut hulls, a dipping branch, scrabble of small feet on bark. He crossed the spine of the ridge and started down, seeing the horseshoe bend of the creek below him distended with blisters of brown water spread out into the fields, down the slope to the creek again—a shortcut he took, who measured only horizontal travel.

He couldn’t find it. The creek was none that he had ever seen before, and when he turned his back to it at what looked like a place he knew he was surprised to see a draw, a fence-corner, a stand of locust oddly mis-located. He passed the place and came back. He had been too far down. He hurried along upstream for another fifty yards and then stopped short. The rock where his trap had been was submerged, but a dome of water rose over it and now he saw the wire reaching up to the sapling on the opposite bank. Just above here the creek narrowed—it was the place where he usually crossed on a long and mossy pier of stone, that too lost now beneath the floodwaters. In the narrows the current leaped in a slick chute, plummeted into the pool below, churning a chocolate-dark foam and spreading again, a hissing sheet of flecks and bubbles, small twigs, bark and debris. A naked and swollen young bird turned up its round white belly briefly, rolled and folded into the thick brown liquid like a slowly closing eye. And below the rock something roiled darkly to the surface, sank again, as if struggling with some unseen assailant. He watched. A moment later it flared again and he could make it out better, the hair floating undulant as black grass wracked in the eddies. He looked along the bank until he found a stick, came back and leaned on tiptoes out over the water, poking. He found the ledge of rock, tested along it with his stick and then stepped out, panicky for a moment as his foot sank. Then he was straddle-legged with one foot on the bank and the other in the creek, the water boiling between his legs, ribboning high on his calf. He got the other foot down and turned, carefully, facing upstream, standing with the thin brown wings of water flying over his shins with a slicing sound, standing so in an illusion of fantastic motion. He worked his way crabwise to within a yard of the other bank, to the channel where the rocks terminated, launched out wildly across the remaining stretch of water. He went in nearly to his waist, his feet chopping rapidly at the slick and steep-pitched mud, flailing mightily with his stick before he could get a proper foothold. Then he was across, pulling himself up the bank by what roots or weeds would hold his weight, cold and mud-slavered.

He hobbled down to where the sapling was and slid down the bank to it, catching himself with one foot against the slender trunk, took hold of the wire and undid it, the wire humming electrically in his hand, took a good grip on it and climbed the bank again pulling it after him. When he got to the top and turned around he could see his catch floating in the grass and even before he pulled it up to him he could see the white places on it like hanging leeches. Then he had it in his hand, feeling the fur gritty with mud, the cusped bone-end jutting from the foreleg wrecked between the jaws of the trap, the white bib smeared with clay and the fine yellow teeth bared in a fierce grin. And turning it slowly in his hand, studying dumbly the clean ugly slits, white and livid. Wounds, but like naked eyelids or dead mouths gaping.

He took it from the trap and put it in his pocket, wound the wire around the trap and put that in the other pocket. The sun was well up, but already the promised light was drowned in a sweep of wet clouds rolling and building darkly to the southeast. He did not recross the creek but headed out into the field. Before he reached the woods the first drops of rain had already spattered his shoulder. When he got to the road it was black and slick with water and he hunched his shoulders forward against the mounting downpour, shivering a little. Sheets of spray gusted over the smoking road and over the swamped land—the houses standing bleak and gray—a final desolation seemed to come, as if on the tail of the earth’s last winter a well of water were rising slowly up through the very universe itself.


It had been raining for six days steady when Marion Sylder finally left the house. He came down the drive sideways, slewing sheets of mud from under the cavorting wheels, got straightened out on the road and drove to the forks. A small pond had formed in front of the store and customers were obliged to tread a plankwalk to get to the porch. The rain had settled into a patient drizzle and the people of Red Branch sat around their stoves, looked out from time to time at the gray wet country and shook their heads. Sylder backed his car up to the gas pump and got out, sloshing the mud from his boots in the puddle, waded to the porch and went in. There was a mesh of welding rod over the front windows now and he smiled a little at that.