Cormac McCarthy: Child of God

You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.

The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.

As they ascended the courthouse stairs he was telling them how an old hermit used to live out on House Mountain, a ragged gnome with kneelength hair who dressed in leaves and how people were used to going by his hole in the rocks and throwing in stones on a dare and calling to him to come out.

IN THE SPRING BALLARD watched two hawks couple and drop, their wings upswept, soundless out of the sun to break and flare above the trees and ring up again with thin calls. He eyed them on, watching to see if one were hurt. He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought. He left the old wagonroad where it went through the gap and took a path that he himself kept, going across the face of the mountain to review the country that he’d once inhabited.

He sat with his back to a rock and soaked the warmth from it, the wind still cold that shivered the sparse high mountain bracken, the brittle gray ferns. He watched an empty wagon come up the valley below him, distant clatter of it, the mule pausing in the ford and the clatter of the immobile wagon rolling on regardless as if the sound authored the substance, until it had all reached his ears. He watched the mule drink and then the man on the wagonseat lifted one arm and they commenced again, now soundless, out of the creek and up the road and then again came the far muted wooden rumbling.

He watched the diminutive progress of all things in the valley, the gray fields coming up black and corded under the plow, the slow green occlusion that the trees were spreading. Squatting there he let his head drop between his knees and he began to cry.

LYING AWAKE IN THE DARK of the cave he thought he heard a whistling as he used to when he was a boy in his bed in the dark and he’d hear his father on the road coming home whistling, a lonely piper, but the only sound was the stream where it ran down through the cavern to empty it may be in unknown seas at the center of the earth.

He dreamt that night that he rode through woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule’s barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

ON A GOOD MAY MORNING John Greer turned out to dig a septic tank at the back of his house. While he was digging, Lester Ballard in frightwig and skirts stepped from behind the pump-house and raised the rifle and cocked the hammer silently, holding back the trigger and easing it into the notch as hunters do.

When he fired the shovel was coming past Greer’s shoulder with a load of dirt. Long after the crack of the rifle had died in the lee of the mountain he could hear the gong of turned doom that rang above the man’s head as he froze there with the shovel aloft on which had splattered in a bright medallion the small piece of lead, the man looking at whatever it was standing there cursing to itself while it worked the lever of the rifle, an apparition created whole out of nothing and set upon him with such dire intent. He flung away the shovel and began to run. Ballard shot him through the body as he passed and stitched a falter in his pace. He shot him once more before he rounded the corner of the house but he could not tell where he hit him. He himself was running now, cursing steadily, working the lever of the rifle again, taking the corner of the house, one foot almost going from under him as he turned and making a vicious slash in the mud, the rifle now in one hand and his thumb hooked over the hammer, mounting the steps in a crazy sort of hopping gait and rushing toward the door.

He looked like something come against the end of a springloaded tether or some slapstick contrivance of the filmcutter’s art, swallowed up in the door and discharged from it again almost simultaneously, ejected in an immense concussion backwards, spinning, one arm flying out in a peculiar limber gesture, a faint pink cloud of blood and shredded clothing and the rifle clattering soundless on the porchboards amid the uproar and Ballard sitting hard on the floor for a moment before he pitched off into the yard.

Even though Greer was shot through the upper chest himself he wobbled from the doorway with the shotgun and down the steps to examine this thing he’d shot. At the foot of the steps he picked up what appeared to be a wig and saw that it was fashioned whole from a dried human scalp.

BALLARD WOKE IN A ROOM dark to blackness.

He woke in a room day bright.

Woke in a room at dawn or dusk he knew not which where motes of dust passing through an unseen bar of light incandesced briefly and random and drifted like the smallest fireflies. He studied them for a while and then raised his hand. No hand came up. He raised the other and a thin stripe of yellow sunlight fell across his forearm. He looked about the room. Some stainless steel pots on a steel table. A pitcher of water and a glass. Ballard in a thin white gown in a thin white room, false acolyte or antiseptic felon, a practitioner of ghastliness, a part-time ghoul.

He had been awake for some few minutes before he began to feel about for the missing arm.

It was not in the bed at all.

He pulled the sheet from about his neck and studied the great swathings of bandage at his shoulder apparently with no surprise. He looked about. A room scarce wider than the bed. There was a small window behind him but he could not see out without craning his neck and it pained him to do so.

No one spoke to him. A nurse came with a tin tray and helped him to sit erect, Ballard still trying to use the missing arm to fetch his balance. A cup of soup, a cup of custard, a quarterpint of sweetmilk in a waxed cardboard box. Ballard prodded at the food with his spoon and lay back.

He lay in a waking dream. The cracks in the yellowed plaster of the ceiling and upper walls seemed to work on his brain. He could close his eyes and see them anyway. Thin fissures traversing the otherwise blank of his corroded mind. He looked at the swaddled nub that poked from the short sleeve of the county hospital gown. It looked like an enormous bandaged thumb. He wondered what they’d done with his arm and decided to ask.

When the nurse came with his supper he said: What’d they do with my arm?

She swung the tabletop and set the tray on it. You got it shot off, she said.

I know that. I just wanted to know what all they done with it.

I don’t know.

It don’t make a damn to you, does it?

No.

I’ll find out. I can. Who’s that feller at the door all the time?

He’s a county deputy.

County deputy.

Yes, she said. What about the man you shot?