Cormac McMonthly: The Orchard Keeper (1965)

A book club not for the faint of heart

Cormac McCarthy is, according to many, one of the greatest living American writers of fiction. Based on his work that I’ve read in the past, I’m inclined to agree. He has published 12 novels. 2023, like most years, is expected to have 12 months. I will read one McCarthy novel each month, in publishing order, over the course of this year. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.

Why read a book by a man who’s now 89 years old, which he published in 1965, and tells a story set in the late 1930s?

Because we used to do things – damn near everything ­– differently. And if we don’t remind ourselves of that fact one way or another, we’ll forget the old ways. And if we forget the old ways, we’ll forget how we got here, where we are now. And that’s cultural amnesia.

The other reason is: Cormac McCarthy is a virtuoso, capable of painting lush still-life portraits in your mind’s eye. When I read McCarthy’s description of an elderly recluse in the Appalachian mountains, reflecting on the scents he remembers from his youth and watching rain fall into the creek, I am transported there. To a place and time that is much more serene than now, but also fraught with the darkness of the soul. It is beautiful and it is terrifying. Is it a particularly exciting place to be? No. Are the numerous scenes like this one in service of a riveting narrative or a crackling plot? No.

But that’s entirely the point.

McCarthy fascinates me because the America he writes about, while mythic in its grandeur, feels honest. More honest than most depictions of America in fiction. It is a hostile place, built on hopes (threats) that may or may not ever have come to fruition. Justice. Peace. Christian ideals. He’s not writing about The American Dream – he’s writing about a godforsaken land that stubborn men try to conquer, but mostly ends up conquering them.  

---

“They came and went, unencumbered as migratory birds, each succeeding family a replica of the one before and only the names on the mailboxes altered, the new ones lettered crudely in above a rack of paint smears that obliterated the former occupants back into the anonymity from which they sprang.”

---

I want to be clear about one thing: I’m not valorizing the way of life depicted in The Orchard Keeper. This is not “the good old days,” nor is it a lifestyle I think we should return to.

Mostly, this is a book about men (yes, men, specifically) behaving poorly, simply because they can. Not in a bawdy or titillating way. Just, back then, things were different. You had to do things to get by, and sometimes that involved making unsavoury choices. There was less societal infrastructure, so the cracks were wider, and more people fell into them.

Just about all of the characters in this book are either uneducated, or they have a mean streak, or both. At least some of them are explicitly racist. They drink homemade moonshine and have no money, and no prospects.

Yet there is something romantic in the freedom these men feel. We’re given an inside look at a small town in rural Tennessee, in between World Wars I and II. Clearly, there’s not going to be a whole hell of a lot going on. When you combine poverty, a lack of law enforcement, and wilderness, it’s hard to imagine much other than hard living. Alcoholism, social isolation, violence in its many forms.

But I’m enchanted by the small moments McCarthy shares with us: a man sitting outside a corner store where he’s just purchased a mason jar of milk, which he returns to the storekeeper when it’s empty. With nothing in particular to do, he just sits there, smoking a few cigarettes, until it’s time to move on. Who decides when it’s time to move on? He does. His reasons are his own. The book is full of moments like this one.

Characters in The Orchard Keeper are not bound by the quotidian tasks that govern our lives in 2023. Marion Sylder does not feel compelled to go to the gym, or check in with his team on a weekly Zoom stand-up, or take a rush-hour commuter train.

These men make moves on a whim. They explore darkness and their relationship to it. They act in accordance with natural urges, as if humanity might, in fact, be directly connected to nature at all times, no matter how hard we try to escape it.

---

“A man gets older, he said, he finds they's lots of things he can do jest as well without and so he don't have to worry about this and that the way a young feller will. I worked near all my life and never had nothin. Seems like a old man'd be allowed his rest but then he comes to find they's things you have to do on account of nobody else wants to attend to em.”

---

Here in 2023, we’re all inundated by information, like so much sewage. We can’t outrun it. And so we learn to filter it out, in order preserve our fragile sanity.

In the world of The Orchard Keeper, information must be willfully sought out­—none of it comes to you unbidden. When it does come, it’s in dribs and drabs. It’s precious, it’s hard won, and it’s unreliable. Much of what’s held as truth by these backwoods people is in fact hearsay, and there’s always room for interpretation and skepticism. Without a single screen to stare at, these people are blessed with mental blank space, where they can ruminate, or stew, or simply do nothing with their minds.

One character flips through a single magazine which he has memorized—articles, pictures, advertisements and all. When you’ve mostly got nothing, every little thing you do acquire takes on an outsized importance. There’s less to say, less to do, less pressure. Moments have the potential stretch out indefinitely, and McCarthy can make you hope that they will, even if it’s just so you can keep watching a cat stalk its way through a field.

---

“Housecats is smart too. Smarter’n a dog or a mule. Folks thinks they ain’t on account of you cain’t learn em nothin, but what it is is that they won’t learn nothin. They too smart.”

---

Time doesn’t stand still in The Orchard Keeper. It flows, like the water in the rivers that wind through its country, and the blood both inside and out of the veins of its characters. These all mix together, and tumble in roughly the same direction.

Eventually, social institutions do catch up to the main characters, removing them from their isolated places in nature, both for their own good and for the perceived and prescribed good of the people around them.

Is this progress?

We keep trying to remove ourselves from nature, and sever our connection to it. Except when it’s convenient for us.

Is this folly?

---

The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.

---

The Orchard Keeper ends with a central character returning home after a few years gone, only to find desolation. Certain forces only move in one direction. Best not to try and struggle against the tide.