Free The Orchard Keeper (1965) by Cormac McCarthy

belt
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    You like to do this? she asked over his shoulder
.
    He turned around and looked at her. She was standing on a rock with her legs together. The back of her dress had come down and was dark and wet
.
    You got a leech, he said
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    I got to what?
    Leech, he said. You got one on your leg
.
    She looked down; it didn’t take her long to find it, a fat brown one just below her knee with a thin ribbon of blood going pink on the wetness of her shin. She put her hand to her mouth and just stood there looking at it. It was a pretty good-sized leech for the creek although the pond leeches came much bigger. She just kept looking at it and after a while he said:
    Ain’t you goin to take him off?
    That moved her. She looked up at him and her face went red. Goddamn you, she said. Goddamn you for a … a … Goddamn you anyway
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    Hell, I never put him there
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    Take it off! Damn you! God … will you take it off?
    He sloshed over to where she was. Standing like that in water halfway to his waist and her up on the rock he could see up her thighs to where the skirt was tucked into her bloomers. He got hold of the leech, trying to look up and not to at the same time, and feeling giddy, shaky, and pulled it loose and flipped it past her onto the bank. He said: You ought not to wade barefooted
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    He had felt for a minute that he wasn’t even afraid of her any more and all he could remember now was running.
The huge expanse of flesh and the bloomers and her holding him by the collar with her feet somehow in the water on either side of him until he jerked away with
his shirt ripping loudly and splashed back through the creek to the bank and out and across Saunders’ field shedding water and minnows from his bucket with the foolish little seine still in his hand and water squishing in his shoes, running
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    She said something to the other one and they giggled again. He went on with his bread, home, his face burning in the chill of the low October sun. When he came in through the porch he saw that his bed was gone. She was in the kitchen. He put the bread on the table and went up to the loft, his tread hollow on the boxed steps, up to the cobwebby gloom under the slanting eaves where the bed had been set and made with fresh linen.
    By now in the early mornings the pond was steeped in mist, thick and coldly swirling, out of which sounded the gabble of phantom ducks. At sunrise the whole valley would be glazed white and crystal and the air smoked and tangy from the stoves and later from the open fires where women gathered about the kettles with long wooden paddles, elvish-looking in their shawls and bonnets, a clutch of trolls at their potions. First days of frost, cold smoky days with hogs screaming and now and again the distant hound-calls of geese howling down the south in thin V’s flattening on the horizon to a line and then gone. He cut wood, went out early to the rising stacks of new pine kindling rimed and shining in the morning frost like wedges of frozen honey. He worked hard at it and the days went. For that much time he would have buried the yard house-high in stovewood.
    If he’d lived, she told him one evening, you wouldn’t want for nothin. And him disabled in the war with that platmium plate in his head and all—turned down the govmint disability, he did. Too proud. Wouldn’t takeno 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.
    The fire ticked on in the little stove, cherrying softly the one side of it till the cracks in the old iron showed like thin spiders sprawled there.
    Rocking quietly in her chair she had the appearance of one engaged in some grim and persevering endeavor in which hope was the only useful implement. Not even patience. As if perhaps in some indistinct future the chair itself would rise and bear her away to glory with her sitting fiercely sedate and