The Orchard Keeper

“Well Goddamnit at least I never took her in no Goddamn church.”

The irony of Marion’s morality is that he laughs at the idea of sexual assault but balks at the prospect of profaning a church. In his bootlegging car, he sexually assaults women. When the idea of having sex with one such women in an outhouse causes laughter, the men agree that doing so would be far less reprehensible than having sex in a church.

“Sylder leaned his head wearily against the roof of the car. He knew the man had not misunderstood him.”

When Marion finds Kenneth in his car, he immediately recognizes the hitchhiker as a fellow criminal. Kenneth functions as a mirror for Marion, reflecting his own immorality back to him. Marion knows that violence is inevitable from the moment he gets into the car. He is exhausted by the situation, leaning his head “wearily” against the car roof as if accepting that violence is unavoidable for men like him and Kenneth.

“The spume of vomit roiled up from the pit of his stomach.”

After he fights Kenneth, Marion feels broken and helpless. The syntax here reflects the damage done to his body. Marion does not vomit; the vomit roils up from inside him, unbound by any control Marion might have over his own body. The term “pit of the stomach” as the source of the vomit and bile also foreshadows the final resting place of Kenneth’s body (25).

“It is there yet, the last remnant of that landmark, flowing down the sharp fold of the valley like some imponderable archeological phenomenon.”

The Green Fly Inn is a local landmark that burns down. The molten remains of the bar are not just bits of glass and metal. Rather, these materials contain the emotional energy and the sentimental meaning of the bar. The fragments of molten glass and metal are artifacts of a bygone era, skeletons of the positive emotions that have long since left Red Branch and reminders of The Encroachment of Modernity.

“The tank was on high legs and had a fence around it with signs that he had been pondering for some time, not just today.”

The tank embodies Arthur’s unspoken fear of modernity and the outside world. He resents the passage of time and the change that comes with it; time erodes his independence and imposes the outside world on him, just as the government built a metal tank on the mountainside he knew so well. He obsessively ponders the tank because it provides a focus for his hatred.

“Ain’t no sign with wampus cats, she told him, but if you has the vision you can read where common folks ain’t able.”

Arthur has always been slightly apart from the world. When he was young, a woman told him about “the vision” that would allow him to see wampus cats and other half-mystical beings. For that woman, magic and superstition expressed the idea that there is something discomforting that exists beyond rational comprehension and is recognized by only a few. With Arthur living on the cusp of 20th-century modernity, however, his nostalgia acts as a form of “the vision” that allows him to differentiate between the world now and the world as it once was.

“He was a Godfearin man if he never took much to church meetin.”

Kenneth is dead, so his widow can spin tales of his life to her son that may not be true. In death, Kenneth has become saintly in his widow’s eyes: a God-fearing moral figure who happened to be on the wrong side of the law. In fact, he was an immoral and unrepentant criminal who died while trying to murder someone else for a few dollars. In death, Kenneth becomes a symbol of what the family’s life might have been, but this symbol has become entirely divorced from his real identity.

“He got hold of the leech, trying to look up and not to at the same time, and feeling terribly giddy, shaky, and pulled it loose and flipped it past her onto the bank.”

In his early adolescence, John struggles with his sexual urges. He is caught between helping the girl remove the leech from her leg and trying to appear as though he is not staring at her body. He is caught in an impossible tug-of-war between social responsibility and social etiquette. He is too young to understand his urges and has no father to guide him, leaving him to rely on alternative father figures such as Marion.

“Ghosts of mist rose sadly from the paving and broke in willowy shreds upon the hood, the windshield.”

The mountains around Red Branch are littered with traces of the pain and violence of the past. Like Kenneth’s body, these sins are buried underground. However, the buried memories cannot help but seep out in the form of ghosts—so much so that even the mist takes on a ghostly quality before new violence shreds it apart.

“Then the music stopped abruptly and there was only the uneasy shifting of the crowd, the slow drone of the buses.”

As depicted in the novel, the attempt to outlaw alcohol is a vain pursuit. Prohibition does nothing to curb the intake or production of alcohol, as evidenced by the existence of the bootleggers and bars in the mountains. The Prohibition parade that Johns sees symbolizes this futility. When the march stops, the steady “drone” of reality seeps back in and—despite the political fervor of the marchers—nothing has changed.

“Years later the leg had begun to weaken.”

The sequence of events leading up to and following violence may require years to become clear. The birdshot in Arthur’s leg is a result of his wife’s estrangement. Narratively, however, this context is slow to emerge. Time provides clarity to men like Arthur, which is then reflected in the structure of the text.

“In the store the old men gathered, occupying for endless hours the creaking milkcases, speaking slowly and with conviction upon matters of profound inconsequence.”

The conversations between the old men are of “profound inconsequence.” The men are part of a marginalized lineage, pushed to the fringes of America and left to ponder matters at their own pace. They exist as part of the furniture of the region, a history of men gathered to discuss nothing often. They are sincere and slow, their words lost to time, but the act of holding the conversation fosters community even where there is seemingly no community at all. By the end of the novel, this communal lineage is broken.

“Get your ass over here in front of the fire.”

The young boys set a fire in a cave and assure themselves that they are mimicking the ancient peoples who came before them. Their interpretation of history is mistaken, as evidenced by the quick accumulation of smoke in the cave and the forced exit of the boys into the night: If “cave-men” had set fires in this fashion, they would have quickly died out. Instead, the boys’ declaration speaks to their desire to locate themselves as part of a genealogical history. They want to mimic the cavemen because doing so would give them some sense of purpose and heritage that they otherwise lack.

“This is the way the cave-men done it.”

The young boys set a fire in a cave and assure themselves that they are mimicking the ancient peoples who came before them. Their interpretation of history is mistaken, as evidenced by the quick accumulation of smoke in the cave and the forced exit of the boys into the night: If “cave-men” had set fires in this fashion, they would have quickly died out. Instead, the boys’ declaration speaks to their desire to locate themselves as part of a genealogical history. They want to mimic the cavemen because doing so would give them some sense of purpose and heritage that they otherwise lack.

“Somethin had scared her real bad but she couldn’t tell me what all it was.”

A breakdown in communication between Arthur and Ellen explains their eventual estrangement. She cannot tell him what has scared her in such a way, evidently believing that he will not be able to understand or empathize with her. Arthur brought home the panther cub, and now the mother has scared Ellen. He has welcomed the wraithlike, vengeful mother into their home and he cannot comprehend what he has done, much less its effects on Ellen.

“When Mildred Rattner swung open the door and stepped into the smokehouse she saw a cat drop with an anguished squall from somewhere overhead.”

The panther symbolizes the haunting nature of the past. After a storm, it is driven into the shadows. Mildred opens the smokehouse door and the panther leaps at her, doing no physical violence but shocking her terribly. It resembles a traumatic memory buried in the recesses of the brain, ready to shock a person when they least expect it.

“They came three times for the old man.”

The police make three attempts to arrest Arthur, the violence and suspense intensifying each time, until Arthur is no longer in the house. The irony of this rising action is that they are trying to arrest Arthur wrongfully. They create the necessity of his arrest by trying to arrest him, meaning that the police create the circumstances of his crimes. Had they never wrongly suspected him, he would never have been forced to shoot at them.

“He cain’t shift for hisself.”

Arthur is worried that his aging dog, Scout, will no longer be able to take care of himself once Arthur has been taken away. His concern for the dog reveals a concern for himself. If he is arrested, separated from the one creature with whom he has a connection, he is worried that he will not be able to cope.

“You think because he arrested me that throws it off again I reckon? I don’t. It’s his job.”

Marion contends that, like the natural world, the human world has an order: Criminals commit crimes, the police hunt them, and everything that happens is a consequence of the decisions they made long ago. Believing in this order allows Marion to avoid blame for his life, as he is just part of a continuing cycle of criminality rather than someone who needs to take responsibility for his actions.

“There grew about her a shadow in the darkness like pooled ink spreading, a soft-hissing sound which ceased even as she half-turned.”

The female panther is attacked from above by an owl that she did not see coming. The unexpected strike demonstrates the brutality of the natural world, where nothing is safe. The panther may seem like the archetypal predator with nothing to fear, but even it is vulnerable to attacks that it could never envisage or expect. Violence and brutality are the only dependable functions of the natural order. Everything else is blurred chaos.

“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.”

The social worker who visits Arthur is prison represents the arrival of a new kind of violent natural order. While Arthur once told horror stories about panthers and big cats, a new kind of feline predator now stalks him. The bureaucrat can damage Arthur as much as any panther; they are described in similar terms, prowling silently along corridors to do damage in an unexpected and incomprehensible manner. In the modern world, violence will take on a new form.

“If’n you count jest the lean and not the plenty, or the other way around, I reckon you could call it every fourteen year.”

Arthur critiques the tendency to focus only on the positive or the negative rather than to conceive of positivity and negativity as two complementary ideas. People should learn to take the bad with the good, he suggests, rather than to expect one or the other. Both are inevitable, providing the world with a form of natural balance that comforts him.

“He spun and saw the dog lurch forward, still holding up its head, slew sideways and fold up in the dust of the road.”

Legwater shoots Scout for no reason. The loyal, aging, helpless dog dies a brutal and unexpected death at the hands of an uncaring human. Scout, like other characters, receives no reward for his loyalty. Instead, he is subject to the same forces of violence and chaos as everything else. Even Legwater, a man who nominally works on the side of justice, cannot bring order to the world.