The Orchard Keeper(64)

The jailer walked with him down the corridor. The agent had regained his composure. Well, he said cheerily, he’s a cantankerous old rascal, isn’t he?

The old feller? I reckon. Been pretty quiet here, but then they shore had a time gettin him here.

How’s that? said the agent.

Why, he shot four men. Luther Boyd’s stit hoppin around on crutches.

Did he kill anyone? the agent asked.

No, but it wadn’t from not tryin. That old man’s ornery enough.

Yes, the agent said, musing. Definitely an anomic type.

Mean as a snake, said the jailer. Here, watch the door.

The agent thanked the desk sergeant as he passed through the outer room. He swung the briefcase to his left hand and dabbled his handkerchief upon his forehead. Over the worn runner on the flagged hall floor his steps were soundless and he moved with a slender grace of carriage, delicate and feline.





In the spring of the year you may see them about the grounds walking or sitting perhaps in the wake and swath of the droning mowers lifting up strewn daisyheads white and torn, softly fallen in the grass. Long monologues rise and fall, they speak of great deeds and men and noble eras gone. The mowers return along the fence in martial formation drowning the babble of voices.

The brick buildings atop the hill are dark with age, formidable yet sad, like old fortress ruins. Families come from the reception room into the pale sun, moving slowly, talking, grieving their silent griefs. The un-visited amble hurriedly about the grounds like questing setters, gesticulant and aimless.

There are others who sit quietly and unattended in the grass watching serene and childlike with serious eyes. Tender voices caress their ears endlessly and they are beyond sorrow. Some wave hopefully to the passing cars of picnickers and bathers. The eldest of all sits a little apart, a grass stem revolving between his yellowed teeth, remembering in the summer.

The mountain road brick-red of dust laced with lizard tracks, coming up through the peach orchard, hot, windless, cloistral in a silence of no birds save one vulture hung in the smokeblue void of the sunless mountainside, rocking on the high updrafts, and the road turning and gated with bullbriers waxed and green, and the green cadaver grin sealed in the murky waters of the peach pit, slimegreen skull with newts coiled in the eyesockets and a wig of moss.


The old man paused at the door, the attendant leading him by one arm through and into the room apparently against his will, peered at the boy through slotted lids as if unused to light of any intensity. He looked older than the boy remembered him. The attendant pulled him into the room, him shuffling in the old brogans with the paper-thin soles, a rasping sound on the concrete floor.

They came over to where the boy sat. Here’s your nephew, the attendant said loudly into the old man’s ear. You remember him?

The old man flashed a glint of blue eyes from deep beneath the closing lids. I reckon, he said.

The attendant pushed him down into the wicker chair next to the boy and left them, going back through the door, high squeak of crepe diminishing in the corridor. The old man sat in his chair staring across at the unrelieved spanse of whitewashed plaster.

Uncle Ather?

He turned. The boy was holding at him a huge bag of chewing tobacco.

I brought you some tobacca, he said. Beech-Nut, like you like.

The old man took it from him slowly and slid it inside his shirtfront. Thank ye, son, he said. I’m much obliged.

They sat quietly. The mowers passed again beneath the window, droning louder and then fading. Laughter and distant voices, someone crying, quite softly, like a child who is just lonely.

Kindly warmin up a little, ain’t it? the old man said.

We had a little rain out to the mountain, the boy said. Sunday week I believe it was.

Yes, the old man said. Well, be little of it this year I reckon. Done had it all at oncet. They’s a good warm spell comin on. Won’t nothin make, won’t nothin keep. A seventh year is what it is.

He gazed at the floor between his shoes, out of the bell-flared tops his shinbones rising hairless, pale and polished as shafts of driftwood and into his trouser legs. Get older, he said, you don’t need to count. You can read the signs. You can feel it in your ownself. Knowed a blind man oncet could tell lots of things afore they happent. But it’ll be hot and dry. Late frost is one sign if you don’t know nothin else. So they won’t but very little make because folks thinks that stuff grows by seasons and it don’t. It goes by weather. Game too, and folks themselves if they knowed it. I recollect one winter, I was jest a young feller, they wadn’t no winter. Not hardly a frost even. It was a sight in the world the things that growed. That was a seventh year seventh and you’ll be old as me afore it comes again.