Читать онлайн «The Orchard Keeper»

Cormac McCarthy

The Orchard Keeper

PRAISE FOR CORMAC MCCARTHY

“[McCarthy] puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy. ”

— The New York Times Book Review

“McCarthy is a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters…. In [his] hands, everything is done with consummate skill — a kind of maximalism with precision crafting. ”

— Village Voice

“No other novelist in America seems to have looked the work of Faulkner in the eye without blinking and lived to write in his spirit without sounding like a parody of the master. ”

— Dallas Morning News

“A master in perfect command of his medium. ”

— Washington Post Book World

“A true American original. ”

— Newsweek

“Mr. McCarthy has the best kind of Southern style, one that fuses risky eloquence, intricate rhythms and dead-to-rights accuracy. ”

— The New York Times

“McCarthy is a born narrator, and his writing has, line by line, the stab of actuality. ”

— Robert Penn Warren

THE ORCHARD KEEPER

~ ~ ~

The tree was down and cut to lengths, the sections spread and jumbled over the grass. There was a stocky man with three fingers bound up in a dirty bandage with a splint. With him were a Negro and a young man, the three of them gathered about the butt of the tree. The stocky man laid aside the saw and he and the Negro took hold of the piece of fence and strained and grunted until they got the log turned over. The man got to one knee and peered into the cut. We best come in this way, he said. The Negro picked up the crosscut and he and the man began sawing again. They sawed for a time and then the man said, Hold it. Goddamn, that’s it again. They stopped and lifted the blade from the cut and peered down into the tree. Uh-huh, said the Negro. It sho is now, ain’t it?

The young man came over to see.

Here, said the man, look sideways here. See? He looked. All the way up here? he said. Yep, the man said. He took hold of the twisted wrought-iron, the mangled fragment of the fence, and shook it. It didn’t shake. It’s growed all through the tree, the man said. We cain’t cut no more on it. Damned old elum’s bad enough on a saw.

The Negro was nodding his head. Yessa, he said. It most sholy has. Growed all up in that tree.

PART I

1

For some time now the road had been deserted, white and scorching yet, though the sun was already reddening the western sky. He walked along slowly in the dust, stopping from time to time and hobbling on one foot like some squat ungainly bird while he examined the wad of tape coming through his shoe-sole. He turned again. Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless mass had emerged and was struggling toward him. It loomed steadily, weaving and grotesque like something seen through bad glass, gained briefly the form and solidity of a pickup truck, whipped past and receded into the same liquid shape by which it came.

He swung his cocked thumb after it in a vague gesture. Little fans of dust scurried up the road shoulder and settled in his cuffs.