45 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyThe Orchard Keeper
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Chapter 1 Summary
Snow falls in December. Arthur wakes up early and watches the flakes. While sipping homemade alcohol, he rereads an old issue of Field and Stream. He falls asleep in his chair, waking in the morning, “stiff and shivering with the cold“ (69).
Warn Pulliam, Boog, and Johnny Romines are young kids who live in Red Branch. They are roughly the same age as John. After the trio returns from a hunting expedition with a rabbit, they encounter John. He recognizes Warn, whom he met when Warn was flying his pet buzzard on a long piece of string. Warn invites John to join them on a hunt. They are pursuing a skunk with Johnny Romines’s two beagles. John talks about the puppy Marion gave him, proudly declaring it to be “as good a tree dog as they is goin” (71). His mother refuses to have the dog in her house, so Marion is keeping the puppy at his home for the time being. At the frozen sinkhole, the boys build a fire and swap stories about trapping animals.
As guns fire through the valley in “diminishing reiteration,” Arthur crosses the snow-strewn landscape to the metal tank. He carries a handless knife and cuts down a young cedar tree, fashioning another wreath for the pit where Kenneth’s body still lies.
John and the trio of boys find a cave. They set a fire inside while Boog explains the intricacies of the cave and its history. They talk about their various ethnic backgrounds, influenced by their families’ various racist ideas. John says nothing. As Johnny Romines tells a story about the time they “dynamited the birds” (74), John complains that the cave is becoming smoky. Later, they take their captured skunk to the store.
Arthur walks to the place where the Green Fly Inn once stood. An owl watches him.
Warn leads John on a mink hunt. They pass near Garland Hobie’s house and Warn tells them that anyone who gets too close is at risk of being shot because Garland is a bootlegger. He shows them the African American church that was forced to close by Ef Hobie, who threatened the members of the congregation. Warn and John pass by a house belonging to a man whom Warn knows as Uncle Ather (Arthur). They go into his house and hear stories about old hunting trips, wampus cats, owls, and “painters,” an Appalachian word for panthers. Arthur pours them a drink from his mason jar, telling them that it is “muskydine wine.” The young boys insist that it tastes fine. Arthur tells a story about wrestling a panther. In his younger days, he came across a panther cub and took it home to his then-wife, Ellen. The panther cub was the size of “a everyday walkin-around cat” and immediately bonded with Ellen (80). When a journalist wrote a story about the pet panther, people came to see the animal. Then the mother of the panther cub began to attack Arthur’s pigs. Ellen saw the panther one evening and was terrified. Arthur set the cub free and the panther never bothered him again. Later, Ellen left Arthur for a Bible salesman and Arthur buried her belongings in the backyard of their home.
Early the next morning, Arthur follows the boys’ footsteps. He finds the cedars in the pit smoldering and thinks about the way in which Kenneth’s bones are being burned in some kind of “irrecoverable act” (83).
Part 3, Chapter 2 Summary
John tells Marion that Legwater has confiscated all but one of his traps. However, he told Legwater nothing about Marion. Legwater told John he suspects that he has been “bettin [abetting] a criminal” (84), for which he could receive three to five years in jail, though this could be reduced to a suspended sentence if he gave them information leading to Marion’s conviction. Marion assures John that the men are bluffing. Marion remembers his time in the Navy when he was shot in the foot and lost two toes. He remembers the fire that ripped through the Green Fly Inn. He meets with his whiskey buyers and hands over his latest shipment. Marion drives back across the mountain, slowing down and turning off his headlights when he reaches a gravel drive. He visits Gifford’s house, finds the man asleep, and beats him. Returning home after midnight, he nurses his sore knuckles and climbs into bed beside his wife. He is still laughing about Gifford asking who was hitting him. The sudden recollection of Arthur shooting the metal tank fills him with worry.
Part 3 Analysis
In Part 3, John finds a new group of friends. Warn Pulliam, Boog, and Johnny Romines are much closer in age to John than Marion or Arthur. Furthermore, they are less embroiled in the criminality that defines Marion (or even John’s father, Kenneth). These young men are presented as naïve and innocent. When they enter a cave, for example, they foolishly set a fire and insist that they are doing it exactly “the way the cave-men done it” (74). Nevertheless, the boys are still swept up in the Cyclical Violence that affects everyone in the novel. It is hinted that their families have violent backgrounds. Johnny Romines’s status as a Native American gestures to the violence that predates the formation of the United States, when European colonizers chased and killed his ancestors. Even their mention of cavemen alludes to an awareness of the weight of history, including its violence. The boys are doing nothing new. They are imitating their parents and their forebears, whether they are setting traps or setting fires, and they seem to enjoy being part of a historic lineage. To them, even a violent heritage is better than no heritage at all, as it provides purpose and meaning in a potentially listless life.
The panthers also symbolize the world’s inherent violence. Arthur’s recollections reveal a nearly complete cycle of this brutality, which begins when he and a friend detonate an explosion. This creates the context in which the panther cub can be forcibly taken from its still-living mother. Soon the mother panther responds in kind and begins killing Arthur’s pigs. Furthermore, the mother panther terrifies Ellen, whose fear, the novel implies, creates a rupture in their marriage that will culminate with Ellen leaving Arthur. Even though Arthur returns the cub and the panther stops attacking his pigs, the violence continues. The trauma of losing Ellen will echo through the rest of Arthur’s life, eventually leading to his showdown with the police. Violence begets violence, even when it is unintended.
In a structural sense, the novel’s treatment of Ellen’s estrangement from Arthur illustrates the effect her departure had on him. Arthur welcomes Warn and John into his home. Though he has been portrayed earlier in the novel as a distant loner, he is shown to be a convivial host. He offers them food and drink and then tells long-ranging and far-fetched stories. The boys enjoy Arthur’s stories and he enjoys telling them. Certain stories, however, are not meant to be shared. Arthur is a seemingly open man with a buried secret. The stories of Ellen’s departure—like every flashback in the novel—are portrayed in italics. The italicization of the memory indicates that these are internal thoughts, juxtaposing what is shared and what remains hidden. Arthur tells funny stories but hides the pain of his past. However, he cannot hide from himself, and the fact that these painful memories keep coming back to him suggests that he never truly resolved his feelings regarding Ellen’s departure. By keeping certain stories to himself, Arthur reveals his isolation to be a protective measure—a way to ensure that he never becomes vulnerable enough to be hurt again.
If Arthur can protect himself emotionally, however, he cannot do the same physically. The owl that watches him as he visits the site of the inn is a predatory bird that will later reappear attacking the panther. This is on the one hand a reminder of The Chaos of the Wilderness, which Arthur knows well. However, the scene does not foreshadow Arthur’s demise at the hands of nature. What is stalking Arthur is law enforcement, and he eventually falls prey to The Encroachment of Modernity.
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