Cormac McCarthy ended his literary and extra-literary journeying and mapmaking in June 2023. A traveler across American places and spaces, he was, like his outstanding predecessor William Faulkner, both a memorable storyteller and a mapmaker. Since his work and life are now complete and completed, the current text surveys one stage of his journeying, storytelling, and mapmaking endeavors in the rural Appalachian settings of his seedtime Tennessee, The Orchard Keeper. Considering Robert T. Tally Jr.’s distinction and link between an author’s literary cartography and a reader’s attempt at fashioning an appropriate literary geographic configuration, what follows makes connections between these approaches to the creative spaces of Cormac McCarthy’s debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, while acknowledging both roots and routes, ideological and creative, with the emerging cartography of violence and evil to be reckoned with by the survivors and by the careful readers themselves.