He started past, then half-turned and said: You'ns find where the good berries is at?
The boy looked up at him as though he hadn't been watching him all the time and said something which cracked in his voice and which the old man couldn't make out. The girl gave up and wailed openly and so he said:
Well now, what's wrong with your little sister? You all right, honey? Did you'ns lose your berry bucket? He talked to them like that. After a while the boy began to blubber too a little and was telling him about back in the pit. For a few minutes he couldn't figure out what was the pit and then it came to him and he said:
Well, come on and show me. I reckon it ain't all this bad whatever it is. So they started up the road, although it was pretty plain they didn't want to go and when they turned down the road to the spray-pit, the boy stopped, still holding the little girl's hand and not crying anymore but just watching the man. He said he didn't want to go, but for him, the old man, to go on and see. So he told them to wait right there and it wasn't nothing.
He saw the berry pails first, one of them turned over and the blackberries spilled out in the grass. A few feet beyond was the concrete pit, and and even before he go to it he caught a trace of odor, sour...a little like bad milk. He stepped onto the cracked rim of the pit and looked down into the water, the furred green top of it quiet and touched with light. Sticks and brush poked up at one corner. The smell was stronger but other than that there was nothing. He walked along the edge of the pit. Down the slope, among the apples, some jays were screaming and flashing in the trees. The morning was well on and it was getting warm. He walked halfway around catching his step along the narrow sandy concrete. Coming back, he glanced down at the water again. The thing seemed to leap at him, the green face leering and coming up through the lucent rotting water with eyeless sockets and green fleshless grin, the hair dark and ebbing like seaweed.
He tottered for a moment on the brink of the pit then staggered off with a low groan and locked his arms about a tree trying to fight down the coiling in his stomach. He didn't go back to look again. He got the berry pails and went back to the road, but the children weren't there...."
The passage above is from Cormac McCarthy's 1965 novel, "The Orchard Keeper". The book, McCarthy's first published work, tells the story of an old recluse living on the south side of Brown's Mountain in South Knox County. The scene above describes the old man's discovery of a rotting corpse mired in a concrete pit in some woods near the orchard road. This scenario may have been particularly easy for McCarthy to put to paper, as it was based on an actual event.
Cormac (Charlie at the time) was friends with my father growing up in South Knoxville, and my father often told me the story of how early one evening, after an afternoon spent squirrel hunting on the south side of the mountain, he and Cormac and two other boys were crossing the ridge heading back home when they smelled something putrid. As they walked on through the gathering dusk, they came to an old concrete pit at the end of a pull-off from the main orchard road. It quickly became apparent that this was the source of the smell, and as they peered down in the half light of the gathering dusk, they could just make out a set of white ribs poking up through the fetid water at the bottom. My father said that once they realized what they had discovered, the boys became terrified and ran all the way home.
The following day curiosity got the best of my father and the others and they returned to the scene to look again at their gruesome discovery. When they got to the pit, they immediately realized the "corpse" they had seen the night before was not human, but rather the carcass of an unfortunate pig that had either fallen or been thrown down into the pit and, having obviously starved to death, had been decomposing there for some time.
When I was a child, my father and I would often climb Brown's Mountain and he would point out the various places from all the boyhood stories he frequently shared with me at bedtime. One of my favorite destinations was always the pit. I remember feeling a particular sense of dread as we neared its edge, as if it were completely plausible that something much more disturbing than the carcass of a pig might actually be lurking there, peering up at us with rheumy eyes from down in the mire.
This past weekend, my oldest daughter and I climbed Brown's Mountain with Dr. Wes Morgan, a preeminent local authority on McCarthy and his work, for the purpose of helping him locate and map the location of the pit. After arriving at the crest, we bushwhacked through undergrowth and brambles for what seemed like an hour in what I was sure had been the general vicinity of the site. Finally Dr. Morgan himself managed to stumble upon it.
The pit was much as I remembered it, only much drier in the bottom now that a majority of the tree cover around it has disappeared. An irregular concrete shelf on one side immediately brought back a vision of box turtles lined up above the muck, each resigned to live the remainder of its days in its new, and suddenly very limited, green and fetid world.
After all of that climbing and bushwhacking, it might have been a pretty anti-climactic discovery- an old insecticide pit, all of seven feet deep, dappled in sunshine and slowly eroding back into the Tennessee red clay. But for just a moment as I watched my own daughter fearlessly walking along the rim, I was an eight year old boy again, holding my father's hand as I stepped out onto the edge of the concrete wall for a glance down; staring deep into the abyss of my own childhood fears.
photo courtesy of Wes Morgan
