The Orchard Keeper(69)

The ashes in the pit were better than a foot deep and the ground all about was strewn with them. He worked all day, shoveling out piles of ash and then climbing from the pit to sift them with his window-screen. Late in the afternoon some boys came into the clearing and stood for a time watching him. He kept at it, the clouds of ash billowing up out of the pit. Before long they began to comment. He looked at them sharply, not stopping, sifting the ashes, examining charred bits of cedar wood. Soon they were giggling among themselves. He ignored them, adopting an official air about his work. It was no good.

Might be gold teeth too, one of them sang out. A flurry of titters surged and died. Legwater stood up and glared at them. They were five, standing together just at the edge of the trees with grinning faces. He climbed back into the pit with his shovel. From time to time he would stretch his head up over the top of the hole to see what they were about, but about the third time one of them gobbled like a turkey and they all howled with laughter so he gave it up and tried not to look their way. He kept at his shoveling. After a while he heard something clatter near the pit. He looked up and the boys had gone. Then an apple dropped into the ashes at his feet with a soft puff. He stopped and craned his neck up. Sure enough, here; came another. He marked its course, leaped out of the pit and seizing the shotgun as he went began a fast walk in the direction from which the apple had come. Brush began crashing. A voice called: Run, fellers, run! He’ll shoot ye down and scalp ye. Another: You got silver in your teeth you’re a dead’n. He stopped. The sounds died away. On the road further down the mountain high laughter, catcalls. He went back to work. By nightfall he was a feathery gray effigy—face, hair and clothing a single color. He spat gobs of streaky gray phlegm. Even the trees near the pit had begun to take on a pale and weathered look.

The hound came back after dark. He could hear it padding in the leaves, stop, shuffle again. He had eaten the last of what food he had brought and could hardly sleep for the cramping in his belly. He held the shotgun and waited for the hound to enter the firelight. It did not. Finally he went to sleep with the shotgun lying across his lap. He was very tired.

When he went to the pit the following morning the first thing he saw was an old goatskull, the brainpan crammed with tinfoil. He pitched it away in disgust and fell to shoveling.

By late in the afternoon his hunger had subsided and he had cleared the pit so that in one end the bare concrete was visible, blackened and encrusted with an indefinable burnt substance that scaled away under the shovel and showed green beneath.

He was shoveling faster, approaching desperation as the residue of unsifted ashes diminished, when Gifford showed up, badly winded from his climb up the mountain. Legwater stopped and watched him come across the little clearing, his shoes weighted with clay, his face inflamed with a red scowl. When he got to the pit Legwater leaned on the shovel and looked up at him. Well, he said, you want shares I reckon? After I done …

Idjit, Gifford said. Goddamn, what a idjit. He was standing on the concrete rim now looking down at the humane officer gaunt and fantastically powdered with ash, and looking at the great heaps of ashes and the screen, the bedroll, rucksack, shotgun.

You think so? Legwater said.

I know so. He wadn’t no war hero. It ain’t for sure it was even him, but if it was he never had no—no thing in his head.

I’ll be the jedge of that, Legwater said, bending with his shovel.

Gifford watched him, moving around to the upwind side to keep clear of the dust. In a few minutes the humane officer leaped from the pit and began shoveling the new ashes onto the screen, then shaking it back and forth to sift them through, a fevered look in his eye like some wild spodomantic sage divining in driven haste the fate of whole galaxies against their imminent ruin. The constable lit a cigarette and leaned back against the tree.

Legwater threw out two more piles of ash and sifted them and then when he disappeared into the pit again Gifford could hear him scraping around but not shoveling. He ventured over and peered in. Legwater was on hands and knees, going over the scraped floor of the pit carefully, scratching here and there with the tip of the shovel. Finally he stopped and looked up. The little bastard was lyin, he said. He got it his ownself, the lyin little son of a bitch.

Let’s go, Earl.

His own daddy, the humane officer was saying.

Gifford started toward the road with long disgusted strides. When he got to the apple trees he turned and looked back. Legwater was standing in the pit, just his head showing, staring vacantly.

Well, said the constable.

He kept staring.

Hey! Gifford called.

Legwater turned his head to give him a dumb look, the incredulous and empty expression common to victims of tragedy, disaster and loss.