. Spinning .

For me, the story seems to end here:

Neither spoke until they saw the dog and that was very near to the pike, on the last turn above the gate.  They had overtaken it and even in the few minutes in which he was allowed to watch it alive Gifford was struck by its behavior.  It was walking in the wheelruts with an exotic delicacy, like a trained dog on a rope, and holding its head so far back, its nose near perpendicular, that Gifford looked up instinctively to see what threat might be materializing out of the sky.  The shovel bounced in the road with a dull bong and when he turned it was in time only to see Legwater recoil under the shotgun and to recoil himself as the muzzleblast roared in his ears.  He spun and saw the dog lurch forward, still holding up its head, slew sideways and fold up in the dust of the road. (p. 241)

The Orchard Keeper begins with a man walking down a dusty road, and at the time I read it, I had the feeling and remarked that amid the expanse of horizon and the wide split of earth and sky, the story would come down to the fine grains of dust that were the reality of life.  And so it would seem to be true.

The man’s ashes, his dust, is shoveled and blows in the wind to cover the digger as well as the trees that surround the burial pit.  This same man, who has been a part of the lives of all the main characters has lain silently throughout the story as it unravels in their walking around him, by him, to him.  Sylder has buried him, Uncle Ather protects him, and his son finds him a boyhood fascination until his identity is discovered and still, he ends up a lie.

Who is the cat?  And who does the new watcher, the faithful hound, Scout, represent as he leaves his own bones in the trail?

Lots of other meanings here, lots of layers of dust.  Now dust piles up, but dust also blows away.  What’s constant lies beneath it all, and yet it is hidden, revealed, and never looks quite the same.

I’m not quite ready to write a finale on this novel.  Perhaps there is a touch of disappointment after having first read McCarthy’s finer pieces. 

When finishing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, I was struck by how cleverly all the threads he had strung throughout the book were neatly tied up at the end.  In The Orchard Keeper, McCarthy seems to do this, but it is, to me, a bit bordering on authorly telling as well as a neat, justified resolution.  Marion Sylder goes to jail for running whiskey, and Uncle Ather goes to jail–subsequently ending up in a mental institution–for shooting up government property.  John Wesley Rattner stays free of the law, and we’re not sure what he’s learned from his relationship with either of the two men.  His father’s skeleton is found, and its identity surmised, though there is a question of whether it’s truly him because he may have lied to his wife about a plate in his head. 

There is McCarthy’s dark humor here, as a greedy officer, Legwater, sifts through the ashes where the remains were burnt to find the valuable metal plate.  Stirring up the old to cover the new with its dustly touch?

More, as Uncle Ather’s old hound dog, Scout, appears almost ghostly through the woods where he spent the whole novel walking beside his master.  Shot by Legwater and killed; when we didn’t think he’d make it on his own very long and wonder how he survived when Ather was taken into custody.  I still cringe when I see him standing forlorn on the road, padding behind the car that takes Ather away.

I don’t need to agree with why McCarthy’s characters do what they do; this is who they are.  I’ve never found myself arguing with him over a lack of realism in their strange comings and goings.  But there’s a touch of unfulfillment with The Orchard Keeper.  Even to the point of wondering why, with a peach tree here, and a green apple or two dropping there, we’ve climbed mostly through mountains or onto a stool at the bar back in town.

More later.

In the mountains where Marion Sylder runs whiskey, John Wesley Rattners hunts and traps, Uncle Ather ceaselessly walks to oversee and keep track of changes, there is a painter cat who does what predators do; survives by stalking and killing prey.

Softly and with a slow grace her leathered footpads fell, hind tracking fore with a precision profoundly feline, a silken movement where her shoulders rolled, haunches swayed.  (p. 216)

When Uncle Ather is taken into custody for shooting up a government tank and shooting a few officers who come to arrest him, he is visited by a government agent who tells him he is there to help him, seeking information about this strange old man.  He leaves, somewhat unfulfilled and totally at a loss to understand Ather.

The agent thanked the desk sargeant as he passed through the outer room.  He swung the briefcase to his left hand and dabbed his handerkerchief 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.  (p. 222)

Though the cat, and the man, are not the likeable characters, they are both necessary in the playout of their environments.

It is obvious that McCarthy uses his extraordinary skill with language to paint the settings of his stories in rich and deeply intense detail that intimates a close love and knowledge of nature.

Then he was straddle-legged with one foot on the bank and the other in the creek, the water boiling between his legs, ribboning high on his calf.  He got the other foot down and turned, carefully, facing upstream, standing with the thin brown wings of water flying over his shins with a slicing sound, standing so in an illusion of fantastic motion.  (p.178)

But several places in this book, and after the deadly, almost living river of Suttree, I wonder why McCarthy always paints his water brown.  Here in particular, a creek, away from the muddying debris of man, seemingly safe in the cool forested mountain, a fast moving body fed by the rains, yet it carries the undercurrent of evil perhaps, just as all the other workings of life; such as man.

You know what scares me?  I don’t see the darkness in McCarthy any more.

It was warm in the room, he could feel the sweat in his armpits, but the man was swathed heavily in blankets.  Thickness of them under his hand..here shape of arm, of shoulder, chest…sleeping on his back.  Gifford snuffled.  One gluey eyelid came unstuck as the covers receded from his chin with maternal solicitude.

He even raised his head a little, wonderingly, sleep leaving him in slow grudging waves, so that he seemed to be coming up to meet it, the shut fist rocketing down out of blackness and into his face with a pulpy sound like a thrown melon bursting.  (p. 167)

There’s horror here, blood and guts McCarthy-style without holding back.  And yet what is the scenario, really:  Sylder warning Gifford to not question the kid, to leave the drowned car and whiskey to sit where they lay.  Sneaking into his house in the dead dark of night, chuckling, "Es muy malo que no tengas un perro," he says; It’s very bad that you don’t have a dog.

Somehow, this shows more honesty, less malice than so much I’ve seen lately in the guise of a smile.

Glad I’m catching up on the old, since the new is coming at us fast and furiously. 

Just a thought this morning, and one that comes up in my mind quite a bit:  How much does the author know about what he presents in a story, what is planned, and what can still surprise him?  What is offered to the reader and what does a reader pull out in deep digging that is his, and his alone?

With Faulknerian influence on this first novel of McCarthy’s, there is a difficulty in recognizing the three main characters of Uncle Ather, Sylder, and John Wesley.  Often starting action without definite character appointment, it is up to the reader to recognize both who, and in what time period this event is occurring.  The novel opens with an unnamed hitchhiker.  Sylder is then introduced.  We find the man Rattner, and then there is a boy.  We’re never quite sure who’s the "he" that McCarthy begins a new thread with until we’ve gotten more acquainted and set back into time.

Is this feeling of becoming lost at times in the reading a plot technique?  Does it gear us towards latching onto a character, learning him and his ways as he weaves his way through the countryside, in the hope that he knows his way around and will lead us on through the story?

One thing about the actors in McCarthy’s stories is that they are always on the move.  Sometimes they know what they’re seeking, sometimes they don’t, but they always seem to know their environment.  They understand it, even if they’re lost to both God and man.

…that is, if we come to understand Benjy, of Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and the way stream of consciousness reveals the revealer, then we can come to understand the method enough to understand McCarthy’s characters, or anyone else’s.  Here, Uncle Ather’s thoughts on his wife, Ellen:

On the sixth day he went out and knocked a plank from the back of the barn with the poll of his axe, cut from it two boards.  On one he carefully incised her name with the point of his knife.  Then he chopped a stake-point on the other board and nasiled the two together in the form of a cross.  He took it and took her clothes and a spade down to a corner of the lot where he scooped a hold, buried the clothes, and with the shank of the spade pounded the cross into the ground. 

(…) That goddamned bibledrummer, wadn’t it?  (p. 156)

I believe that Ather is thinking about his wife, and the days after she left, and how he buried her and his memories of her out back.  With his close connection to the earth, he needs to take her out of the house and put his life with her into the ground, bury it there, under a cross.  It existed, and then it was gone.

One thing McCarthy does not do, is race the reader through his stories.  Nor does he tell us about his characters. We follow at a steady pace, and decide by what they do, who they are.  We’re following three different men in this, John Wesley Rattner, a fatherless young man who lives with his mother and is just beginning to stretch his limits of the world.  He moves his bed from the loft out to the porch, freezing at night until his mother puts it back one day while he is away. 

Marion Sylder, a bit older, whisky runner and hell-raiser.  Good hearted though, it would seem, as he gives the boy who’s helped him out of an accident, one of his favorite dog’s puppies.  But, he’s killed a man, a hitchhiker who tried to take him for a ride long ago.

And an old man who sees all that’s going on in the hills, the boys walking around hunting, visiting the pit where a skeleton lies quietly, Sylder running his Plymouth loaded down with booze through the woods.  He’s knows who’s coming and who’s going, and they all walk through his part of the world.  As we walk with the travelers, we stand with the old man, Uncle Ather.  Because we know that these three men will meet up when their paths cross.

Except the hitchhiker, who lies in his water-filled open grave.  And all three now know he is there.