Cormac McCarthy - Child of God

Long before morning the house that had kept Ballard from the elements was only a blackened chimney with a pile of smoldering boards at its feet. Ballard crossed the soggy ground and climbed onto the hearth and sat there like an owl. For the warmth of it. He’d long been given to talking to himself but he didn’t say a word.

IT WAS STILL DARK IN THE morning when he woke with the cold. He’d piled dead weeds and brush to lay the mattress on and gone to sleep with his feet to the embers of the house, snowflakes falling on him from out of the blackness of the heavens. The snow melted on him and then in the colder hours of morning froze so that he woke beneath a blanket of ice that cracked like glass when he stirred. He hobbled to the hearth in his thin jacket and tried to warm himself. It was still snowing lightly and he knew not what hour it might be.

When he had stopped shivering he got his pan and filled it with snow and set it among the embers. While it was heating he found the axe and cut two poles with which to hang the blanket to dry.

When day came he was sitting in a nest of weeds he’d made on the hearth and he was sipping coffee from a large porcelain cup which he held in both hands. With the advent of this sad gray light he shook the last few drops out of the cup and climbed down from his perch and began to poke through the ashes with a stick. He spent the better part of the morning stirring through the ruins until he was black with woodash to the knees and his hands were black and his face streaked with black where he’d scratched or puzzled. He found not so much as a bone. It was as if she’d never been. Finally he gave it up. He dusted the snow from the remainder of his provisions and fixed himself two baloney sandwiches and squatted in a warm place among the ashes eating them, black fingerprints on the pale bread, eyes dark and huge and vacant.

WITH THE BLANKETLOAD OF provisions over his shoulder he looked like some crazy winter gnome clambering up through the snowfilled woods on the side of the mountain. He came on falling and sliding and cursing. It took him an hour to get to the cave. The second trip he carried the axe and the rifle and a lardpail filled with hot coals from the fire at the house.

The entrance to the cave was no more than a crawl-way and Ballard was slick with red mud down the front of him from going in and out. Inside there was a large room with a bore of light that climbed slantwise from the red clay floor to a hole in the roof like an incandescent treetrunk. Ballard blew up a flame from wisps of dry grass with his coals and assembled the lamp and lit it and kicked at the remains of an old fire in the center of the cave beneath the roof hole. He came dragging in slabs of hardwood from the upright shells of dead trees on the mountain and soon he had a good fire going in the cave. When he started back down the mountain for the mattress a steady plume of white smoke was rising from the hole in the ground behind him.

THE WEATHER DID NOT change. Ballard took to wandering over the mountain through the snow to his old homeplace where he’d watch the house, the house’s new tenant. He’d go in the night and lie up on the bank and watch him through the kitchen window. Or from the top of the wellhouse where he could see into the front room where Greer sat before Ballard’s very stove with his sockfeet up. Greer wore spectacles and read what looked like seed catalogs. Ballard laid the rifle foresight on his chest. He swung it upward to a spot just above the ear. His finger filled the cold curve of the trigger, Bang, he said.

BALLARD STAMPED THE snow from his shoes and leaned his rifle against the side of the house and tapped at the door. He glanced about. The sofa lay mantled in snow and over the snow lay a fine stippling of coalsoot and cat tracks. Behind the house stood the remains of several cars and from the rear glass of one of them a turkey watched him.

The door fell open and the dumpkeeper stood there in his shirtsleeves and suspenders. Come in, Lester, he said.

Ballard entered, his eyes wheeling about, his face stretched in a china smile. But there was no one to see. A young girl was sitting on a car seat holding a baby and when Ballard came in she got up and went into the other room.

Get over here and warm fore ye take your death, said the dumpkeeper, making for the stove.

Where’s everbody at? said Ballard.

Shoot, said the dumpkeeper, they’ve all left out of here.

The mizzes ain’t left is she?

Aw naw. She’s a visitin her sister and them. Ever one of the girls is left savin the least’n though. We still got two of the babies here.

How come em to all leave of a sudden like that?

I don’t know, said the dumpkeeper. Young people these days, you cain’t tell em nothin. You ort to be proud, Lester, that you ain’t never married. It is a grief and a heartache and they ain’t no reward in it atall. You just raise enemies in ye own house to grow up and cuss ye.

Ballard turned his backside to the stove. Well, he said. I never could see it.

That’s where you’re smart, said the dumpkeeper.

Ballard agreed mutely, shaking his head.

I heard you got burned out over at your place, the dumpkeeper said.

Plumb to the ground, said Ballard. You never seen such a fire.

What caused it?

I don’t know. It started in the attic. I believe it must of been sparks from the chimney.

Was you asleep?

Yeah. I just did get out of there.

What did Waldrop say?

I don’t know. I ain’t seen him. I ain’t lookin for him.

Be proud you wasn’t like old man Parton up here got burned down in his bed that time.

Ballard turned around and warmed his hands at the stove. Did they ever find any of him? he said.

WHEN HE GOT TO THE HEAD OF the hollow he rested, watching behind him the while. The tracks he followed had water standing in them and they went up the mountain but they did not come back down. He lost them later and found some different ones and he spent the afternoon in the woods stalking about like any hunter but when he returned to the cave just short of nightfall with his feet numb in the leaky shoes he had not found any of the whiskey and he had not seen Kirby.

He ran into Greer the next morning. It had begun to rain, a small cold winter rain that Ballard cursed. He lowered his head and tucked the rifle under his arm and stepped to one side to pass but the other would not have it so.

Howdy, he said.

Howdy, said Ballard.

You’re Ballard ain’t ye?

Ballard did not raise his head. He was watching the man’s shoes there in the wet leaves of the overgrown logging road. He said: No, I ain’t him, and went on.

LORD THEY CAUGHT ME, LESTER, said Kirby.

Caught ye?

I’m on three year probation.

Ballard stared around the little room with its linoleum floor and cheap furniture. Well kiss my ass, he said.

Ain’t it a bitch? I never thought about them bein niggers.