The Orchard Keeper(67)

He stood in front of the courthouse again, again the heat and the sulphurous haze in fixed and breathless canopy above the traffic. He took the dollar from his pocket and pressed out the creases between his palms. It would leave him two dollars and what was left of the fifty cents, since he had gotten five and a half for the hides of which, he had paid the two to Sylder and now this dollar which he hadn’t even known that he owed. Then he climbed the walk, the dollar in his hand, past the arch and past the tireless bronze soldier and under the new shade of the buckeyes. He mounted the gritty footworn steps upward in a rush, into the hall, turning left and coming again to the long counter with the desks behind it. There was only one woman there, not the one he had traded with before. She was at a typewriter, the machine clacking loudly in the empty room. He stood at the counter watching her. After a while he coughed. She stopped and looked up. Can I help you? she said.

Yesm.

She still sat, hands poised over the machine. He stared back at her. She lowered her hands into her lap, swiveled the chair about to face him. He said no more and she rose and crossed slowly to the counter, adjusting her glasses as she went.

Well, she said, what can I do for you?

It’s about the bounty, mam. Hawks.

Oh. You have a hawk. She was looking down at him.

No mam, I done give it to ye. He had the dollar out in his hand now and waving it feebly, wondering could the price have gone up. I was figuring on trading back with ye if you-all don’t care, he said.

Her brows pinched up a small purse of flesh between them. Trade back? she said. You mean you want to get the hawk back?

Yesm, he said. If you-all don’t care.

When did you bring it in?

He looked to the ceiling, back again. Let’s see, he said. I believe it was around in August but it could of been early in September I reckon.

They Lord God, son, the woman said, it wouldn’t still be here. Last August? Why …

What all do you do with em? he asked, somehow figuring still that they must be kept, must have some value or use commensurate with a dollar other than the fact of their demise.

Burn em in the furnace I would reckon, she said. They sure cain’t keep em around here. They might get a little strong after a while, mightn’t they?

Burn em? he said. They burn em?

I believe so, she said.

He looked about him vaguely, back to her, still not leaning on or touching the counter. And thow people in jail and beat up on em.

What? she said, leaning forward.

And old men in the crazy house.

Son, I’m busy, now if there was anything else you wanted …

He smoothed the dollar in his hand again, made a few tentative thrusts, pushed it finally across the counter to her. Here, he said. It’s okay. I cain’t take no dollar. I made a mistake, he wadn’t for sale. He turned and started for the door.

You, she called. Here! You come back here, you cain’t …

But that was all he heard, through the door now, running down the long hall toward the wide-flung outer doors where a breeze riffled the posters and notices on the wall and past them and again into the candent May noon.





The boy had already gone when they came from Knoxville, seven years now after the burial and seven months after the cremation, and sifted the ashes, since whipped to a broth by the rains of that spring and now dried again, caked and crusted, sifted them and there found the chalked sticks and shards of bone gray-white and brittle as ash themselves, and the skull, worm-riddled, vermiculate with the tracery of them and hollowed and fired to the weight and tensile cohesiveness of parched cardboard, the caried teeth rattling in their sockets. And a zipper of brass, fused shapeless, thick-coated with a dull green paste.

That was all. They were there four hours, the two officers deferential before the coroner, dusting the pieces with their handkerchiefs and passing them on to him who placed them in a clean bag of white canvas.

Mr Eller bit with his small teeth a piece from his plug of spiced tobacco, refolded the cellophane and put it again into his breast pocket. And the skull, he said. With all the fillins melted out of the teeth.

Okay. And the skull. Johnny Romines stopped, the cigarette half rolled in his left hand and leaking as he gestured with it. So, he said, what I want to know is did the boy know about it or not, and would he know was it his daddy?

I don’t know, Mr Eller said. If he did I never heard it. Asides he’s been gone off now since May or June and this is the fourth day of August they jest now gettin up there. I figure maybe the old man was the only one that knowed.

Old man Ownby? Was he the one done it?

No, Mr Eller said. Course they liable to thow it off on him to save huntin somebody else.

But he was the one told it?

Near as I can find out he was.