Cormac McCarthy: Child of God

In the morning there was a spiderweb between himself and the sky. He seized a clawful of rubble and hurled it up the shaft. And again, until the web was gone every trace. He pulled himself up and began to dig.

He’d wake with his head against the wall and the stone tool still in his hand and dig again. Late that day he loosed a thin slab of stone and let it clatter down into the hole. In wrenching it loose he’d laid his finger open and he sat with it in his mouth, the earth’s musty taste mingled with the ironrust tincture of blood. Dry dirt sifted down from the hole. He could see treelimbs against the sky.

Climbing up again he set to work, hammering now at actual stone, stratified layers of it that flaked off, Ballard using the larger chunks to pry and dig with. Before dark fell he raised his head up through the earth and looked out.

The first thing he saw was a cow. It was about a hundred feet away in a field beyond the wood in which he’d risen and beyond the cow was a barn and beyond that a house. He watched the house for signs of life but saw none. He lowered himself back into his hole and rested.

It was hours past dark and a black night when he finally emerged from the earth. Down at the house there were lights. He cast about among the stars for some kind of guidance but the heavens wore a different look that Ballard did not trust. He crossed through the woods and climbed a fence and crossed a field until he came to a road. It was no place he’d ever stood in before. Seeing that uphill it led toward the mountains he took the other way and soon was hobbling along weak but able, the night being as fine as you could wish and a faint bloom of honeysuckle already on the air. At this time he had not eaten for five days.

He’d not gone far before a churchbus hove into sight behind him. Ballard scuttled into the roadside weeds and crouched there watching. The bus clattered past. It was all lit up and the faces within passed each in their pane of glass, each in profile. At the last seat in the rear a small boy was looking out the window, his nose puttied against the glass. There was nothing out there to see but he was looking anyway. As he went by he looked at Ballard and Ballard looked back. Then the bus rounded the curve and clattered from sight. Ballard climbed into the road and went on. He was trying to fix in his mind where he’d seen the boy when it came to him that the boy looked like himself. This gave him the fidgets and though he tried to shake the image of the face in the glass it would not go.

When he reached the highway he crossed over into the fields beyond. He stumbled his way over the clods in a new turned bottom and came at last to the river. The river woods were hung with trash and papers from the high water, the trees plastered up with silt and enormous nests of jetsam lodged high in the branches against the sky.

As he neared the town the roosters were calling. Perhaps they sensed a relief in the obscurity of night that the traveler could not read, though he kept watch eastward. Perhaps some freshness in the air. Everywhere across the sleeping land they called and answered each to each. As in olden times so now. As in other countries here.

It was dawn when he presented himself at the county hospital desk. The nightduty nurse had just come down the hall with a cup of coffee and found Ballard leaning against the counter. A weedshaped onearmed human swaddled up in outsized overalls and covered all over with red mud. His eyes were caved and smoking. I’m supposed to be here, he said.

HE WAS NEVER INDICATED for any crime. He was sent to the state hospital at Knoxville and there placed in a cage next door but one to a demented gentleman who used to open folks’ skulls and eat the brains inside with a spoon. Ballard saw him from time to time as they were taken out for airing but he had nothing to say to a crazy man and the crazy man had long since gone mute with the enormity of his crimes. The hasp of his metal door was secured with a bent spoon and Ballard once asked if it were the same spoon the crazy man had used to eat the brains with but he got no answer.

He contracted pneumonia in April of 1965 and was transferred to the University Hospital where he was treated and apparently recovered. He was returned to the state hospital at Lyons View and two mornings later was found dead in the floor of his cage.

His body was shipped to the state medical school at Memphis. There in a basement room he was preserved with formalin and wheeled forth to take his place with other deceased persons newly arrived. He was laid out on a slab and flayed, eviscerated, dissected. His head was sawed open and the brains removed. His muscles were stripped from his bones. His heart was taken out. His entrails were hauled forth and delineated and the four young students who bent over him like those haruspices of old perhaps saw monsters worse to come in their configurations. At the end of three months when the class was closed Ballard was scraped from the table into a plastic bag and taken with others of his kind to a cemetery outside the city and there interred. A minister from the school read a simple service.

IN APRIL OF THAT SAME year a man named Arthur Ogle was plowing an upland field one evening when the plow was snatched from his hands. He looked in time to see his span of mules disappear into the earth taking the plow with them. He crawled with caution to the place where the ground had swallowed them but all was darkness there. A cool wind was coming from inside the earth and far below he could hear water running.

The following day two neighbor boys descended into the sink on ropes. They never found the mules. What they did find was a chamber in which the bodies of a number of people were arranged on stone ledges in attitudes of repose.

Late that afternoon the high sheriff of Sevier County with two deputies and two other men crossed the field from Willy Gibson’s old rifle shop where they’d left the car and crossed the creek and went up the old log road. They carried lanterns and coils of rope and a number of muslin shrouds on which was stenciled Property of the State of Tennessee. The high sheriff of Sevier County himself descended into the sink and surveyed the mausoleum there. The bodies were covered with adipocere, a pale gray cheesy mold common to corpses in damp places, and scallops of light fungus grew along them as they do on logs rotting in the forest. The chamber was filled with a sour smell, a faint reek of ammonia. The sheriff and the deputy made a noose from a rope and they slipped it around the upper body of the first corpse and drew it tight. They pulled her from the slab and dragged her across the stone floor of the vault and down a corridor to where daylight fell against the wall of the sink. In this leaning bole of light, standing there among the shifting motes, they called for a rope. When it descended they made it fast to the rope about the corpse and called aloft again. The rope drew taut and the first of the dead sat up on the cave floor, the hands that hauled the rope above sorting the shadows like puppeteers. Gray soapy clots of matter fell from the cadaver’s chin. She ascended dangling. She sloughed in the weem of the noose. A gray rheum dripped.

In the evening a jeep descended the log road towing a trailer in the bed of which lay seven bodies bound in muslin like enormous hams. As they went down the valley in the new fell dark basking nighthawks rose from the dust in the road before them with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the headlights.