The Orchard Keeper(62)
His voice was beginning to rise and he had about him a look almost furious. But you, he went on, you want to be some kind of a goddamned hero. Well, I’ll tell ye, they ain’t no more heroes.
The boy seemed to shrink, his face flushing.
You understand that? Sylder said.
I never claimed I wanted to be no hero, the boy said sullenly.
Nobody never claimed it, Sylder said. Anyway I never done nothin on your account like you said. I don’t do nothin I don’t want to. You want to do me a favor jest stay away from Gifford. Stay away from me too. You ought not to of come here. You’ll get me charged with delinquency to a minor. Go on now.
He leaned back against the wall and stared at the emptiness before him. After a while the boy got up and went to the door and tried it, and Sylder, not looking up or speaking to the boy, called for the jailer. He heard him come and the clank of keys, the cell door grating open. Then quiet. He looked up. The boy was standing in the doorway, half turned, looking at him with a wan smile, puzzled, like one who aspires to disbelief in the face of immutable fact. Sylder lifted one hand in farewell. Then the door clanged to.
He sat up, half rose from the cot, would call him back to say That’s not true what I said. It was a damned lie ever word. He’s a rogue and a outlaw hisself and you’re welcome to shoot him, burn him down in his bed, any damn thing, became he’s a traitor to boot and maybe a man steals from greed or murders in anger but he sells his own neighbors out for money and it’s few lie that deep in the pit, that far beyond the pale.
Softly and with slow grace her leathered footpads fell, hind tracking fore with a precision profoundly feline, a silken movement where her shoulders rolled, haunches swayed. Belly swaying slightly too, lean but pendulous. Head low and divorced of all but linear motion, as if fixed along an unseen rail. A faint musty odor still clung to her, odor of the outhouse where she had slept all day, restless in the heat and languishing among the dusty leaves in the corner, listening to the dry scratch and slither of roaches, the interstitial boring of wood-beetles. Now she came down the patch obscure with parched weeds shedding thin blooms of sifting dust where she brushed them. At dusk-dark from her degenerate habitation, emerging to make her way down the narrow patch as cats go.
She passed through the honeysuckles by a dark tunnel where the earth still held moisture, down the bank to a culvert by which she crossed beneath the road and came into a field and into a dry gully, the cracked and curling clay like a paving of potsherds, and turned up an artery of the wash, grown here with milkweed and burdock, following a faint aura of vole or shrew, until she came to a small burrow in the grasses. She scratched at the matted whorl, caved it in and trod it down, moved on across the field, crickets scuttling, grasshoppers springing from their weed-stems and whirring away. A shadow passed soundlessly overhead, perhaps a flock of late-returning birds.
Near the center of the field was a single walnut tree bedded in a crop of limestone which had so far fended it against axe and plowshare. Among these rocks she nosed, in their small labyrinths undulant as a ferret. Odor of walnuts and ground squirrels. But she found nothing.
When she left the rocks, was clear of the overreaching branches of the tree, there grew about her a shadow in the darkness like pooled ink spreading, a soft-hissing feathered sound which ceased even as she half turned, saw unbelieving the immense span of wings cupped downward, turned again, already squalling when the owl struck her back like a falling rock.
Mr Eller closed the lionheaded door behind him and rattled the latch to see that it was secure. Then he checked the plaited fob on the notecase in his hip pocket, adjusted his straw hat, and started up the road toward the house. At the mailbox he was arrested by the high thin wail of a cat coming apparently from straight overhead. He looked up but there were no trees there. He shook his head and went on, stepping carefully in the gutted drive. The squall sounded once more, this time more distant and to the ridge of pines behind the house. He continued on, to the porch where a yellow bulb held forth its dull steadfast light, to a place of surcease.
A young social worker recently retained by the Knox County Welfare Bureau, having been notified through his office of the detention of one aged and impecunious gentleman at the county jail pending hearing of his case (charges ranging from Destruction of Government Property to Assault with Intent to Kill) proceeded to make such investigation as would determine whether the gentleman had relatives, and if not, to what department or agency he might properly be assigned as ward. The agent, having been admitted into the cell where the elderly gentleman was confined, addressed him: