Read The Orchard Keeper (1965) for Free Online

to the wounded. He pushed the head back into the crook of his leg, straightened his arm, and bore down upon the man’s neck with all his weight and strength. The boneless-looking face twitched a few times but other than that showed no change of expression, only the same rubbery look of fear, speechless and uncomprehending, which Sylder felt was not his doing either but the everyday look of the man. And the jaw kept coming down not on any detectable hinges but like a mass of offal, some obscene waste matter uncongealing and collapsing in slow folds over the web of his hand. It occurred to him then that the man was trying to bite him and this struck him as somehow so ludicrous that a snort of laughter wheezed in his nose. Finally the man’s hands came up to rest on his arm, the puffy fingers trailing over his own hand and wrist reminding him of baby possums he had seen once, blind and pink.
    Sylder held him like that for a long time. Like squeezing a boil, he thought. After a while the man did try to say something but no words came, only a bubbling sound. Sylder was watching him in a sort of mesmerized fascination, noting blink of eye, loll of tongue. Then he eased his grip and the man’s eyes widened.
    For Christ’s sake, he gasped. Jesus Christ, just turn me loose.
    Sylder put his face to the man’s and in a low voicesaid, You better call on somebody closer than that. Then he saw his shoulder, saw the man looking at it. He dug his thumb into the man’s windpipe and felt it collapse like a dried tule. The man got his hand up and began with his eyes closed to beat Sylder about the face and chest. Sylder closed his eyes too and buried his face in his shoulder to protect it. The flailings grew violent, slowed, finally stopped altogether. When Sylder opened his eyes again the man was staring at him owlishly, the little tongue tipped just past the open lips. He relaxed his hand and the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider. He tried to open it again but could not. He looked at the man again and time was coming back, gaining, so that all the clocks would be right.
    The man had been dead for perhaps a quarter of an hour. Sylder staggered to the car and sat on the runningboard, stared unblinking into the brass eye of the sun ponderous and unreal on the red hills until he lost consciousness.
    Morning. Lying with his cheek in the dust of the road he had a child’s view, the jack looming like a fallen tree and beyond that the man face-upward like a peaceful giant composed for sleep. The rocks in the road threw long shadows and the first birds were about.
    Sylder had already started dragging the heavy body off into the Johnson grass and poison ivy when he heard the sound of a motor somewhere on the curves behind him. He stopped, then turned and started toward the coupe again trying to run and dragging the carcass behind him with one hand, stumbling, knowing halfway there that he would never make it, that he had made a mistake. So he didn’t even open the door but droppedthe body as he reached the car, squatted over it, and gripping the underside of the runningboard for support jacked his feet up into the man’s armpits and slid him toes up beneath the car for three-fourths his length just as a truck rounded the far curve and caught him struggling to his feet.
    The sun was well up. Across the open country, the wale of pines shedding scarves of mist like swamp gases rising on the steamy air, some crows were hawking their morning calls. Sylder scooted from under the car, stood and was idly toeing out the drag-marks when the truck pulled alongside. He knew they would stop and already he began to think that he had done the best thing, that they would have seen the man inside, would insist on helping when they saw his … His arm: he snapped his head and two faces peering from the halted truck blurred and he looked down and saw the great smear of blood on his arm and dried and blackening on his