The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy

Light pale as milk guided the old man's steps over the field to the creek and then to the mountain, stepping into the black wall of pine-shadows and climbing up the lower slopes out into the hardwoods, bearded hickories trailing grapevines, oaks and crooked waterless cottonwoods, a quarter mile from the creek now, past the white chopped butt of a bee tree lately felled, past the little hooked Indian tree and passing silent and catlike up the mountain in the darkness under latticed leaves scudding against the sky in some small wind. Light saw him through the thick summer ivy and over windfalls and limestones. Past the sink where on a high bluff among trilobites and fishbones, shells of ossified crustaceans from an ancient sea, a great tusk jutted.

Marion Sylder is a no-account moonshine runner living in East Tennessee during Prohibition. One day on the road, he kills a hitchhiker who has tried to kill and rob him. Later on, he befriends a young boy, John Wesley Rattner, who helps Sylder escape after crashing his car into a river. Neither of them is aware that it was John Wesley's father that Sylder killed, and whose body he dumped on the land of one "Uncle Ather," the Orchard Keeper of the title, who lives a life in communion with the natural forces of the Tennessee mountains. The moonshine in Sylder's car, however, attracts the local police, who set their sights on Sylder, John Wesley, and Uncle Ather.

The Orchard Keeper was Cormac's first, but it's my last. (Time to shed a single tear, briny with the atavistic salt of antediluvian seas in which chthonic beasts plied the formless deep.) Of The Orchard Keeper one can only say: yes, that's Cormac. His style comes out here more or less fully formed, the high Gothic register of words only attested once in the OED, though perhaps the simpler staccato rhythms of his Southwestern novels are still only a faint possibility. What must have seemed remarkable about The Orchard Keeper is the way that register is applied to the rustic lives of Appalachian white trash. I thought this was particularly true in the case of Uncle Ather, a simple guy whose only real companion is his dog (a tussle over what to do with the dog when Ather is arrested is probably the novel's only funny moment), whose life off the grid is ennobled by McCarthy's style. Like Ather, McCarthy has a remarkably detailed knowledge of Appalachian geology and botany, and it was a pleasure just to follow the Orchard Keeper as he walks across the faces of the mountains.

As a novel, it's close to Cormac's weakest, and I would say the weakest, if you're allowed to count the late-life duo Stella Maris and The Passenger as one. There's an interesting irony in the fact that neither John Wesley nor Sylder knows that Sylder killed John Wesley's father, but it's strange how little McCarthy does with the fact. It's most reminiscent of Suttree, another novel about working-class whites in East Tennessee that strikes many of the same notes more successfully. There's nothing much to Sylder or John Wesley. McCarthy contrasts Sylder's corruption and John Wesley's innocence, perhaps, as a way of showing the limited choices left to John Wesley if he can't get out of East Tennessee, but in the larger context of McCarthy's work they seem small, minor. The novel's best creation by far is Uncle Ather, who has a kind of stubbornness and rusticity that are very McCarthy, but still unique.