The orchard keeper by Cormac McCarthy

Author:Cormac McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Psychological fiction, Community life, General, Psychological, Tennessee, East - Fiction, Community life - Fiction, East
ISBN: 9780679728726
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1993-01-15T01:56:54.639040+00:00

III

Some time after midnight on the twenty-first of December it began to snow. By morning in the gray spectral light of a brief and obscure winter sun the fields lay deadwhite and touched with a phosphorous glow as if producing illumination of themselves, and the snow was still wisping down thickly, veiling the trees beyond the creek and the mountain itself, falling softly, and softly, faintly sounding in the immense white silence.

On that morning the old man rose early and stared long out at the little valley. Nothing moved. The snow fell ceaselessly. When he pushed the screendoor it dragged heavily in the drifts packed on the porch and against the house. He stood there in his shirtsleeves watching the great wafers of snow list and slide, dodging the posts at the corner of the house. It was very cold. The hiss of the coffeepot boiling over on the stove brought him in again.

All day it darkened so that when night came no one could tell just when it had come about. Yet the snow fell, undiminished. Windless, pillowed in silence, down-sifting … No one was about. All the dogs were quiet. In his house the old man lit a lamp and settled back in a stout rocker near the stove. He selected a magazine from a rack alongside, an ancient issue of Field and Stream, limp and worn, the pages soft as chamois, spread it on his lap and began to leaf through it who knew it now almost by heart—stories, pictures, advertisements. From time to time he could hear scuffling sounds beneath him, scratchings in the darkness under the floor where Scout turned uneasily in his nest of rotting sacks.

He turned the pages for a while and then got up and went to the kitchen where from a high cupboard above the tapless sink he fetched down a molasses jar near filled with a viscous brickcolored liquid opaque as clay. He screwed off the cap, took a clean jelly jar from the sideboard and poured it full. Then he went back to his chair, settled the drink on its broad arm, adjusted the magazine in his lap and began to rock gently back and forth, the liquid in the glass lapping sluggishly with the motion. Now and again he took a sip, staining the white stubble beneath his lip a deep maroon. The oil-lamp glowed serenely at its image, a soft corolla, inflaming the black window-glass where a curled and withered spider dangled from a dusty thread.

The old man rocked, dwarflike in his ponderous chair. He seemed to be weighing some dark problem posed in the yellowed pages before him.

Toward late morning a rooster called and the old man’s window blushed in a soft wash of rose. He slept and color drained from the glass and the east paled ash-gray. The rooster called once again, questioningly, and shortly the old man jerked awake in his chair, knocking the jelly glass to the floor where it rolled about woodenly.

He peered through the hazy light of the room.

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