(1965) The Orchard Keeper

For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.

Plot Summary

Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, has a simple plot. It tells the story of John Wesley Rattner, the victim of an absent father, and his relationship with two men—Marion Sylder, a bootlegger, and Arthur Ownby, an old hermit. Sylder unwittingly kills a man alleged to be John Wesley’s father, Kenneth Rattner, and hides the body in a pit in an overgrown peach orchard. Ownby finds the body, and takes it upon himself to be its caretaker. The dead man, unbeknownst to John Wesley, Sylder, or Ownby, becomes an invisible link uniting them all. The novel details the relationships built upon this unobserved bond.

Critical Analysis

As simple as the plot is, however, The Orchard Keeper has a much more complex narrative structure. The story is fragmented, frequently shifts perspective, and time is an unreliable guide. The objective of readers, then, is less about getting a handle on the plot than it is about deciphering the meaning behind its presentation.

Matthew R. Horton suggests that The Orchard Keeper is a “metaphor for storytelling,” with McCarthy “deliberately warps conventional appearance, reveals multiple dimensions of perception, and jumbles the sequence of his narrative to simulate how man reconceives the past within memory.” Both Dianne Luce and William Prather take this idea a bit further, claiming that The Orchard Keeper is not merely a simulation of a man remembering and re-conceiving the past, it is exactly that.  Luce comments, “All of the narrative between the framing scenes in the cemetery has been John Wesley’s partly remembered, partly imagined reconstruction of his past,”(They ain’t the thing 26).

The framing scenes Luce references are a short prologue, and the final scene of the book. In the prologue, three men examine a piece of tree into which a metal piece of fence has grown, making it impossible to cut. The men remain unnamed, and the scene ambiguous, until the final scene of the novel in which it’s revealed that one of the men is John Wesley, now grown. He has returned to his hometown of Red Branch, Tennessee after a mysterious absence, and the men are clearing the area surrounding the gravestone of his recently dead mother. “As he walks in the cemetery looking for his mother’s marker,” Luce continues, “John Wesley recollects and invents the story that is this novel.” As Prather explains, John Wesley begins this act of invention because “the act of narration affords him (John Wesley) an opportunity to reorder his past…an occasion to fill gaps in personal knowledge with passages of imagination and hallucination” (40).
The most glaring gap in John Wesley’s life is the one left by his absent father. This is a gap that absolutely must be filled because, as Judge Holden, the antagonist of another McCarthy novel, Blood Meridian, explains:

This son whose father’s existence in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way. (145)

John Wesley has only one memory of his father: “He bought the boy an orange drink, lifted him onto the box where he sat holding it in both hands, watching”(OK, 26). The moment seems absolutely insignificant, but it sets the bar very high for a young boy. A fleeting moment of tenderness—one perfect image—negates years of absence, and his father now stands on a pedestal.

While some memories may tarnish with the years, John Wesley is never allowed to envision his father as anything other than perfect. On the mantle directly opposite the bedroom of the boy rests a framed photograph of “Captain Kenneth Rattner, fleshly of face and rakish in an overseas cap abutting upon his right eyebrow, the double-barred insignia wreathed in light, soldier, father, ghost,” the handsome war hero;Every night the boy must sleep under the constant gaze. (61)  Further, John Wesley’s mother relentlessly glorifies the man:

If he’d lived, she told him one evening, you wouldn’t want for nothing. And him disabled in the war with the platmium plate in his head and all—turned down the govmint disability, he did. Too proud. Wouldn’t take no handout from nobody even if it was the govmint. He was a provider all right, may the Lord God Jesus keep him. Yes, she said, eying him doubtfully, you make half the man he was an you’ll be goin some. (72-73) 

John Wesley’s mother has effectively made Kenneth into the “frozen god” the judge describes and John Wesley the son the judge describes. (146) John Wesley must invent a history for his vagrant father so he can bear witness to his death, and collect his patrimony. The text of The Orchard Keeper gives clues that this type of invention is occurring. Readers do not meet the boy John Wesley until 60 pages in. When they do, he is musing on the photograph of his father. As he contemplates the picture, the narrative voice—John Wesley the young man—tells readers, “The boy thought he could remember his father. Or perhaps only his mother telling about him… He remembered a man, his father or just some other man he was no longer sure (62).” This alerts readers that perhaps the man they have followed for the first 60 pages—the man who ends up in the pit—may not actually be Kenneth Rattner, though the narrative has tricked them into believing so.

Kenneth Rattner is explicitly named only four times in the whole novel. The first is in a short paragraph:

Coming into Atlanta he saw at the top of a fence of signs one that said KNOXVILLE 197. The name of the town for which he was headed. Had he been asked his name he might have given any but Kenneth Rattner, which was his name (10).

The connection between that name and the man the narrative has followed to this point is by insinuation because of the paragraph’s placement in that particular space of the story. Matthew R. Horton quotes Joseph Frank’s essay “The Idea of Spatial Form,” applying it to The Orchard Keeper: “the reader must suspend attention to the temporal sequence of narrative long enough to identify the spatial relationships between different units of meaning in the text”(287).With regards to Kenneth Rattner’s introduction, there are three ‘spaces’ that need to be taken into account; the paragraph’s space in the novel as a whole, the space that physically separates the paragraph on the page from the narrative bits most immediate to it, and the actual space in which the scene is set—the road from Atlanta to Knoxville. The location early in the body of the book nudges the reader into accepting that this man is indeed who the narrator suggests he is. However, the fact that the scene appears as a self contained image immediately puts into question the validity of this claim. The line “had he been asked his name he might have given any but Kenneth Rattner, which was his name,” is less the narrator establishing the character as dubious than it is John Wesley affirming to himself that, yes, this man is who he needs him to be to build the history he needs. Finally, the road from Atlanta to Knoxville is space John Wesley is familiar with—he has just traveled it himself to get back home. This makes it space in which he can easily conceive a path for his newly imagined father.

Familiar space is where the name Kenneth Rattner occurs the second time as well. This time he appears in the Green Fly Inn, the local saloon. The scene details the events leading up to his disappearance, and the last time anyone sees him alive. Again, the scene is set off from the narrative immediately surrounding it—this time by italics. In this instance the break is a flashback to time before the journey readers have been following.

“Memory often condenses the passage of time into smaller units,” Matthew Horton explains, “This essentially puts time in a different container, a different form, which is made possible by cutting it up and placing the pieces within the confines of the present” (294). Something in John Wesley’s recollection has triggered this other memory that does not fit chronologically into his history, but, nevertheless, remains relevant to his conception of the father he’s shaping. Therefore he has placed it in the space of his narrative in which he finds it most useful.

The only part of this specific memory—the flashback—that truly belongs to John Wesley is not the events at the bar, but the image that immediately follows. Kenneth tells his wife and boy he has gotten a job in Greenville, South Carolina, then buys the boy the orange soda that lingers so firmly in his mind. Then the father disappears. The rest of the scene must be built on rumor, speculation, and hearsay. It seems someone robbed the men at the Green Fly Inn. Though the thief is never explicitly named, John Wesley, now with the authority of narrator, piles the evidence against Kenneth. Again, readers are convinced to believe Kenneth is the unnamed man. Portraying his father as a thief and scoundrel is one of the ways John Wesley begins to bring the untouchable man his mother describes down to his own level.

The third explicit naming of Kenneth Rattner occurs on the very next page, again in a short stand-alone paragraph, though the lack of italics suggests a return to the present. Again the setting is a bar. This one remains unnamed, though it has already been introduced. It is a bar just outside Atlanta—on the road to Knoxville. Inside, Kenneth stretches, finishes a beer, then orders another. Then, the scene and the chapter end.

The placement of this image so close to the anecdote of Kenneth’s disappearance, and at the end of John Wesley’s introduction of the man he wants to believe is his father for the sake of his new history is intriguing. The unnamed bar is introduced when the man the narrative follows enters it, and “he was surprised to see himself, silhouetted in the doorframe, poised nimbly atop a stack of glasses” (22). The reflection, not the man, is what John Wesley identifies as Kenneth Rattner. The man is surprised to see the man in the mirror because he has seen him before, most often above the mantel of his childhood home—also the place in which the final explicit naming of Captain Kenneth Rattner occurs as the photograph is described. When John Wesley enters the bar and sees his now grown reflection, he has the shocking realization that, at least in body, he has become Kenneth Rattner. The man the narrator watches drink is John Wesley watching the mirror, and identifying himself as his father.

Just as the presentation of the narrative hints that readers may not actually be following Kenneth, the ambiguous use of pronouns and the last name Rattner without specifying which one allows for this reading of John Wesley as the man at the beginning. He is not just making up experiences and a story for a father that he could not possibly know. Instead, John Wesley merely recalls his own experiences on the road recently traveled to get home, reconstructing the memory with Kenneth in his place. In doing so, John Wesley removes the guilt he feels for the vagrant lifestyle he has been living because his sins are now the sins of his father. Kenneth Rattner is effectively removed from his pedestal; John Wesley only has to follow him to his demise.

Despite its simple story, The Orchard Keeper has a difficult narrative structure that begs for closer examination. Doing so reveals the intricate exploration of a young man’s mind as he recollects and reconstructs his personal history, allowing him to start his life anew.

by Riley Beck