The Orchard Keeper(58)

Crossing the slide they entered the deep woods once more, the sun winnowed in tall fans among the spiring trunks, greengold and black verrniculated on the forest floor. With his cane the old man felled regiments of Indian Pipe, poked the green puffballs to see the smoke erupt in a poisonous verdant cloud. The woods were damp with the early morning and now and again he could hear the swish of a limb where a squirrel jumped and the beaded patter of waterdrops in the leaves. Twice they flushed mountain pheasants, Scout sidestepping nervously as they roared up out of the laurel.

The path the old man took was a fire trail that had been built by the C C C. From the glade in which he now made his home he had to climb nearly a thousand feet to reach it, but once on the trail the walking was easy and excepting the injured shoe he would have swung along at a good pace. It was six miles to the river where he crossed and came to the highway and the same ubiquitous crossroads store with the drunken porch, the huge and rock-battered Nehi signs, the weather-curled laths, the paintless stonecolored wood—but the old man had taken an early start. Through a gap in the trees he could see the valley far below him where the river ran, a cauldron in the mountain’s shadow where smoke and spume seethed like the old disturbance of the earth erupting once again, black mist languid in the cuts and trenches as flowing lava and the palisades of rock rising in the high-shored rim beyond the valley—and beyond the valley, circling the distant hoary cupolas now standing into morning, the sun, reaching to the slope where the old man rested, speared mist motes emblematic as snowflakes and broke them down in spangled and regimental disorder, reached the trees and banded them in light, struck weftwork in the slow uncurling ferns—the sun in its long lightfall recoined again in leafwater.

Brogan and cane and cracked pad clatter and slide on the shelly rocks and stop where a snake lies curled belly-up to the silent fold and dip of a petal-burst of butterflies fanning his flat and deadwhite underside. Scout smells cautiously at the snake, the butterflies in slow riot over his head, flowery benediction of their veined and harlequin wings. With his cane the old man turns the snake, remarking the dusty carpet pattern of its dull skin, the black clot of blood where the rattles have been cut away.

They go on—steps soft now in the rank humus earth, or where carapaced with lichens the texture of old green velvet, or wet and spongy earth tenoned with roots, the lecherous ganglia of things growing—coming down, pursuing the shadowline into the smoking river valley.


Huffaker would have said it was by chance that he happened to be looking out the window toward the river the morning the old man came, but he had been watching not much less keenly than the patient and taciturn visitor in the pressed gray chinos. So he had been looking for him for a week and there he was on the bridge with the crudely carved staff, carrying a small paper bag in his hand, a moldy crokersack tied at his waist in front like an immense and disreputable sporran, and the wreckage of dog padding at his heels, raising its bitten muzzle into the air from time to time in a sort of hopeless and indomitable affirmation—proceeding on the weathered sun-washed bridge, jaunty and yet sad, like maimed soldiers returning. Huffaker stepped to the door and the man, coming from the car with slow bootcrunch in the gravel, shot him a quick look. Huffaker walked to the broken thermometer on the tin snuff sign at the corner of the store and pretended to check it, gazed at the mounting sun and sniffed at the air, went back in. The old man was on the road, coming toward the store. The man was standing on the porch with one arm hooked loosely about a post, his forefinger in his watchpocket, chewing a straw slowly and watching his approach with the composed disinterest of a professional assassin.

The old man climbed onto the porch and the man said:

Arthur Ownby.

Arthur Ownby’s eyes swam slowly across, fixed upon him.

Yessir, he said.

Get in that car over yonder. Let’s go.

The old man had stopped. He was looking at the man, and then he was looking past him, eyes milkblue and serene, studying the dipping passage of a dove, and beyond, across the canted fields of grass to the green mountain, and to the thin blue peaks rising into the distant sky with no crestline of shape or color to stop them, ascending forever.

You hear?

The old man turned. You don’t keer if I trade first, do ye? he said.

You’re under arrest. You don’t need to trade nothin.

The old man turned back toward the store with an empty gesture, holding the sack of ginseng in his hand.

Let’s go, the man said again.

So he started down off the porch with a forlorn air and the dog, bland, patient, turning behind him with myopic and near-senseless habituation until, led by the man in the starched and rattling clothes, they reached the car. The man swung the door open and the old man fumbled and climbed his way onto the front seat. As the door was closing it began to occur to him that the dog was still out and apparently not under arrest as he was and he flailed violently at the glass and upholstery swinging toward him and checked it. The man looked at him questioningly.