Mountain Customs

The Orchard Keeper 

by Cormac McCarthy

“They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.”   ― Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper

Rereading McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, reminds me of the origins of his novels as he describes the mountain culture of East Tennessee. The story revolves around three characters: Uncle Arthur Ownby, an isolated woodsman, who lives beside a rotting apple orchard; John Wesley Rattner, a young mountain boy; and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger. It begins as the young bootlegger Marion Sylder disposes of a man's body in an abandoned peach orchard, a place that serves as a metaphor for the culture's impending decline, after killing him out of self-defense. The body is discovered by the kindly guardian of the orchard, Arthur Ownby, who chooses not to report it. For seven years, he let it to rest in peace. The elderly man also values his personal solitude and tranquility, and when they are invaded by a government holding tank placed on a neighboring hill, he shoots his X at the tank.

Both men adhere to ancient mountain customs, which are by definition ungoverned by the laws of the encroaching contemporary world. In contrast to them, the law enforcement officials who eventually apprehend Sylder, beat him, and committed him to a mental facility appear degenerate. John Wesley Rattner, a youngster who hunts and traps, who is befriended by the two men, and who matures in the novel, represents another important aspect of the book. Ironically, he is the dead man's son. Even though the ancient customs are out of date, he chooses to remain faithful to them.

This first novel shows signs of the novelist that McCarthy will become as he travels further west in his some of his subsequent novels. It is a great place to introduce yourself as a reader of one of our country's greatest novelists.