The Orchard Keeper
Chapters - Cormac McCarthy
Prologue
Three men - a stocky man with bandaged fingers, a Negro, and a young man - are cutting a downed elm tree into lengths. They discover a twisted piece of wrought-iron fence that has grown entirely through the tree, making it impossible to saw any further. The iron is fused into the wood, immovable, a relic of some forgotten boundary absorbed into the living tree over decades.
The brief scene establishes the novel's central image: the entanglement of human artifacts with the natural world, the way time and growth consume and incorporate the remnants of human presence.
Part 1: I
Chapter 1
A hitchhiker makes his way toward Knoxville, cadging rides and shoplifting from a grocery store near Atlanta. He gives his name inwardly as Kenneth Rattner. The narrative introduces Red Mountain and the community of Red Branch, Tennessee, where Marion Sylder was born in 1913. At nineteen, Sylder left to work as a carpenter's apprentice for Increase Tipton, bought fine clothes and a new Ford coupe with his savings, and disappeared for five years.
The Green Fly Inn, a precarious box-shaped bar built on stilts over a hollow in the mountain gap, is described in vivid detail. Sylder returns to the inn resplendent in gabardines, buying drinks for everyone. Meanwhile, Rattner arrives at a roadside bar near Atlanta, nursing a wounded leg and a stolen billfold. The narrative cuts between Sylder's life - driving local boys to town, courting women, drinking at the inn with June Tipton - and Rattner's separate journey. Sylder and June pick up three walkers on the mountain road and take the women to Knoxville, while old Arthur Ownby watches from his porch.
POV: Kenneth Rattner, Marion Sylder·On page: June Tipton, Arthur Ownby, Cabe
Chapter 2
Sylder settles into a routine working at a fertiliser plant, buying new socks each Saturday from Mr Eller's store, eating greasy lunches, and spending his evenings at drinking establishments and courting rough women. He loses his job after fighting Aaron Conatser and is fired by Mr Petree. That night he packs a bag and drives south through the mountains toward Atlanta.
At a roadhouse near the city, a man is sitting uninvited in his car - Rattner. Despite every instinct warning him, Sylder cannot bring himself to physically remove the repulsive stranger and drives him north. On the road, Rattner's ceaseless talk wears Sylder into a trance. At dawn, while changing a tyre, Rattner attacks Sylder with the jack handle, smashing his shoulder. Sylder fights back one-handed and strangles Rattner to death. He hides the body under the car when a truck appears, then talks his way free. That night, he carries the corpse up Red Mountain and dumps it in the old spray-pit, an abandoned concrete insecticide tank in the ruined orchard.
POV: Marion Sylder·On page: Kenneth Rattner, Cabe, Earl Eller
Chapter 3
The Green Fly Inn burns down on the twenty-first of December 1936. The patrons carry out what bottles they can, and the building collapses spectacularly into the hollow, where its accumulated glass refuse melts into a single fused sheet that remains as the last trace of the landmark.
Rattner's brief history is filled in: he had moved his wife Mildred and young son to Red Branch, then left four days later with stolen money from the Green Fly Inn's porch collapse - a disaster in which the back porch gave way and dropped drinkers into the hollow, and Rattner picked the pockets of fallen men. He told Mildred he had a job in Greenville, South Carolina, and departed.
On page: Kenneth Rattner, Mildred Rattner, Cabe
Part 2: II
Chapter 4
Arthur Ownby sits in a peach tree in the ruined orchard, watching the metal government tank that has been installed on the mountaintop. He remembers how, years earlier, two children stumbled upon the spray-pit and were terrified by something in the water. The old man investigated and saw a decomposing face rising through the green water - the body Sylder had dumped there. He cut a cedar to cover it and has been tending the makeshift grave ever since.
The old man walks to his house in the hollow, a small weathered shack. He dozes on his porch through a rainstorm, watching lightning strike the government tank on the mountaintop. His old hound Scout appears. That night, the old man is troubled by his fear of cats - wampus cats from the stories of a former slave woman in Tuckaleechee who blessed him with vision as a child. He remembers shooting at a cat-shape in his window. He lies awake listening to distant sounds.
POV: Arthur Ownby
Chapter 5
Mildred Rattner sits sewing buttonholes beneath a framed photograph of Captain Kenneth Rattner in his overseas cap, described as soldier, father, ghost. Her son watches her from the kitchen lean-to, listening to the rain. The boy - John Wesley Rattner - tries to remember his father, who never returned after the family moved from Maryville.
The log house where they live is ancient and unregistered, built with hand-squared timbers and wooden pegs. They pay no tax and no rent; they pay Oliver Henderson for water deliveries. John Wesley's bed is moved to the screened porch for summer, and as autumn approaches he roams the dark roads at night, restless and wakeful. A memory surfaces: his mother gripping his arm, making him swear to find the man who took away his daddy. The oath is fierce and binding - he swears never to forget. Winter comes with frost and wood-cutting, and Mildred rocks in her chair by the stove, humming.
POV: John Wesley Rattner·On page: Mildred Rattner·Mentioned: Kenneth Rattner
Chapter 6
Sylder flees through a rainy night, pursued by a police cruiser with sirens blaring. He executes a dangerous skidding turn at the forks of the road, clipping the store's porch post but escaping. The scene cuts to John Wesley, who has found a dying sparrowhawk on the mountain road and kept it for three days before it died.
John Wesley rides into Knoxville with Mr Eller and goes to the courthouse to collect a hawk bounty - one dollar for the dead bird. He watches a temperance parade pass through the city, then goes to the Farm and Home Supply Store where he buys four steel traps at the dozen price, signing a pledge to purchase the remaining eight. He sets his traps along the creek for muskrat on the fifteenth of November and checks them each freezing morning, finding nothing for five days. He relocates one trap to the bridge where fresh tracks appear.
POV: Marion Sylder, John Wesley Rattner·On page: Earl Eller
Chapter 7
Arthur Ownby climbs the mountain at night to visit the spray-pit where the body lies. Each winter he cuts a cedar to serve as covering for the remains, and this will be the seventh year. He sits on the edge of the pit, smokes his pipe, and hears a small water-sound from below. He retreats, then wanders to the government tank at the mountaintop, where he clings to the chain-link fence for perhaps an hour, licking the cold wire.
Back home, he opens an old footlocker containing keepsakes - a brass watch, cock-gaffs, a broken revolver, catalogs. He takes out a box of twelve shotgun shells and carefully scores each one around the base with a knife, separating the brass from the paper tube - preparing what are called rung shells, designed so that only the brass base ejects while the waxed cardboard tube fires as a solid projectile.
POV: Arthur Ownby
Chapter 8
The Hobie family history is recounted: Ef Hobie died after a car wreck in 1937, and Jack the Runner was sent to prison. Only Garland Hobie and his mother remain, making whiskey. Garland now carries the whiskey up the mountain for Sylder to haul to Knoxville in his Plymouth.
At four in the morning, Sylder hears Ownby shooting holes in the government tank with the rung shells - twelve shots forming a huge crude X across its face. Sylder watches from the bushes, astonished and horrified, then quickly loads his whiskey and drives to Knoxville. Meanwhile, John Wesley waits under the creek bridge for muskrats when Sylder's car crashes off the road into the creek. The boy pulls Sylder from the overturned wreck despite the freezing water. They make their way to June Tipton's house, then to Sylder's home, where his wife tends to them both. Sylder shows the boy a litter of hound puppies and gives him his pick. Constable Jefferson Gifford and county humane officer Legwater investigate the wrecked Plymouth and find broken glass from the whiskey load.
POV: Marion Sylder, John Wesley Rattner·On page: Arthur Ownby, June Tipton, Jefferson Gifford, Legwater·Mentioned: Garland Hobie
Chapter 9
Gifford and Legwater examine the Plymouth wreck in the creek, deducing from the tracks that a second person helped the driver escape. They have the car towed to town. At the store, Gifford drops hints about the Plymouth to the gathered old men, probing for information. John Wesley, leaning against the meat case, speaks up to ask what kind of car it was. Gifford notices the boy's slippers - borrowed footwear from Sylder's house - and makes a pointed remark about them before leaving with Legwater.
POV: Jefferson Gifford·On page: Legwater, John Wesley Rattner, Earl Eller·Mentioned: Garland Hobie
Chapter 10
Sylder and John Wesley go coon hunting together with Lady, the hound Sylder gave him. They track a raccoon through the freezing night woods with two other hunters, Cas and Bill. The raccoon fights the dogs in the icy creek, and Lady is dragged underwater. John Wesley plunges into the freezing water to rescue the drowning hound, pulling her to shore. Sylder builds a fire, strips the boy's wet clothes and dries them, and drives him home.
Sylder drops John Wesley off at the dark house. The boy crosses the frosted yard and climbs through the gable window to bed.
Part 3: III
Chapter 11
On the twenty-first of December, snow begins to fall and blankets the valley for days. Arthur Ownby sits out the storm by his stove with muscadine wine and a Field and Stream. When the snow stops, John Wesley joins Warn Pulliam, Johnny Romines and Boog on a rabbit and skunk hunt, exploring Warn's cave at the quarry and almost smoking themselves out. Warn shows John Wesley his culvert mink-set in the hollow and points out Garland Hobie's place, then the boys take their dead skunk up to Uncle Ather, who pours them muscadine wine and spins long tales of a hoot-owl mistaken for a painter and of catching a painter kit in his youth, his memory drifting to his lost wife Ellen. The next morning Ownby climbs the mountain through the snow, cuts a small cedar and carries it to the orchard pit, where he kindles a fire and watches the cedar burn over the wrecked Plymouth's grave.
Chapter 12
John Wesley tells Sylder that Gifford and Legwater stopped him at the creek, confiscated three of his four traps, and threatened him with jail for trapping without a licence and abetting criminals. Sylder reassures the boy that it is all bluster - Gifford cannot prove anything and would look foolish dragging a fourteen-year-old into court.
Sylder drives to Knoxville on New Year's Eve with a load of whiskey, remembering a past incident in which he was shot in the toe by Coast Guard officers while running contraband on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico with a man named Jimenez. He delivers the whiskey to a house on the west side of Knoxville, then drives to Gifford's house on Bay's Mountain Road in the middle of the night, breaks in through a window, and punches the sleeping constable in the face. He returns home to his wife, laughing silently in bed, but feels a foreboding about the old man shooting holes in the government tank.
POV: John Wesley Rattner, Marion Sylder·On page: Jefferson Gifford, Legwater
Part 4: IV
Chapter 13
A warm wind and a sudden ice plague break over the mountain, then six days of unrelenting rain. Arthur Ownby is caught in the storm and goes down in the woods as a chestnut shatters around him, lying soaked beneath the trees while his hound waits in the cellar. A stray cat menaces Mildred Rattner in her smokehouse and is harried across the flooded country by crows. John Wesley wades the swollen creek to find his trapped mink mauled and ruined. After the rains, Sylder drives to Eller's store, takes on gas from the water-fouled pump and trades barbs with the storekeeper, then runs a load of whiskey down from the orchard. On the Henley Street Bridge the water in the petrol kills his engine and the wrecked Plymouth strands him in the rain.
POV: Arthur Ownby, John Wesley Rattner·On page: Warn Pulliam, Earl Eller, Johnny Romines·Mentioned: Garland Hobie
Chapter 14
The authorities come for Arthur Ownby three times. On the first visit, the Sheriff and Gifford retreat when the old man throws down on them with his shotgun from the porch. On the second, a posse of deputies surrounds the house and a long exchange of gunfire wrecks the kitchen; Ownby shoots two men low and they pull back. Knowing they will come again, Ownby loads his sledge with his belongings, calls Scout out from under the porch and walks south along the road into the rain. When the lawmen storm the house the third time with tear gas and gunfire, wounding one of their own, they find him gone. The old man drags his sledge through the night past the quarry and over Chilhowee Mountain, beds down on the crest, then descends to a mountain cabin where two men offer him whiskey and breakfast before he goes on toward the Harrykin.
POV: John Wesley Rattner, Marion Sylder·On page: Arthur Ownby, Mildred Rattner, Earl Eller
Chapter 15
A man in pressed grey chinos drives a plain black Ford up to Huffaker's crossroads store and asks after Ownby. Huffaker, wary of the stranger's clean clothes and questions, claims he barely knows the old man and watches him hover on the porch for the next seven days, eating moonpies and milk and watching the mountains across the river. On the seventh morning Ownby comes down off the trail with his ginseng sack, his cane and the old hound at his heels, crosses the bridge to the store and is met by the man, who arrests him without ceremony. Ownby tries to fetch Scout into the car; the agent will not allow it. As the Ford pulls away in a spray of gravel, the old hound sets out behind them at a staggering trot.
POV: Arthur Ownby·On page: Jefferson Gifford, Huffaker