Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark

When he came out on the creek a colony of small boys erupted from a limestone ledge like basking seals alarmed and pitched white and naked into the water. They watched him with wide eyes, heads bobbing. He crossed at the shallows above them with undiminished speed, enclosed in a huge fan of water, and plunged into a canebrake on the far side. Crakes, plovers, small birds clattered up out of the dusty bracken into the heat of the day and cane rats fled away before him with thin squeals. He crashed on blindly. When he emerged from the brake he was in a road, appearing suddenly in a final and violent collapse of stalks like someone fallen through a prop inadvertently onstage, looking about in terror of the open land that lay there and still batting at the empty caneless air before him for just a moment before turning and lurching back into the brake. He went on at a trot, one eye walled to the sun for a sextant and his heart pumping in his gorge. When he came out of the cane again he was in deep woods. He paused to get his breath and listen but he could hear nothing save his pounding blood. Then he was kneeling like something broken or penitent among the corrugate columns. A dove called softly and ceased. He was kneeling in wild iris and mayapple, his palms spread on his thighs. He raised his head and looked at the high sun and the light falling long and plumb through the forest. No sounds of chase or distant cries reached him in this green serenity. He rose to his feet and went on. Nightfall found him crouched in a thicket, waiting. With full dark he came forth, a solitary traveler going south. He walked all night. Not even a dog spoke him down that barren road.

When he talked to the man with the barn roof he had eaten nothing but some early field turnips for two days. He had washed and shaved in a branch and tried to wash the shirt. The collar of it was frayed open and the white cheesecloth lining stood about his neck with a kind of genteel shabbiness like a dickie of ruined lace.

You paint? the man said.

Sure, he said. I paint all the time.

The man looked him over. I got a barn roof needs paintin, he said. You do roofs?

I done lots of roofs, he said.

You contract or just do day wages?

Holme wiped his lips with two fingers. Well, he said, if it ain’t but just the one roof I’d as soon do wages.

You pretty fast on roofs?

I make right good time on a roof.

The man regarded him a moment more. All right, he said. I pay a dollar a day. You want to start tomorrow I’ll get the paint this evenin and have it ready for ye.

That suits me, he said. What time you want me to start?

We start here at six. Ceptin the nigger. He gets down early on account of the feedin.

Holme nodded.

All right, the man said.

He started away.

Where you stayin at? the man said.

Holme stopped. Well, I’ve not found a place as yet. I just got here.

You can stay in the barn if ye ain’t proud, the man said. You goin to be on it all day you might as well get under it at night.

All right, Holme said. I thank ye.

I don’t want no smokin in there.

I ain’t never took it up, Holme said.

From the roof ridge he could see a good distance over the rolling country. He adjusted his ladders and sat for a moment, watching the sun bleed across the east, watching a small goat go along the road. The rusted weathercock cried soft above him in the morning wind. He kneaded the bristles of his brush and adjusted his bucket. His shadow moiled cant and baneful over the lot below him and over the waking land a chorale of screaming cocks waned and ceased and began again. When the sun struck the eastern bank of the roof the water drew steaming up the tin and vanished almost instantly. He stirred the thick green paste and began.

By midmorning the roof had reached such a temperature that the wet paint flashed on the tin like lacquer. The paint in the bucket healed over when he rested, and the base of the brush had taken on a skirt of dull green scum. He continued along, marking his progress by the crimped panels. Through the haze of heat rising from the roof he watched a girl come and go from the house with washing, watched her move along the line in the yard, stooping at her basket and reaching up, and the shape of her breasts pulling against the cloth. Paint seeped from the uplifted handle down his poised wrist. He scraped it away with one finger and slapped the paint out of the butt of the brush. He watched her go in again.

By afternoon of the third day he had done one half of the roof and had moved his ladder to the other side, the ladder hanging from the ridge by its cleats, the bucket balanced in the rungs and him painting his way down the first panel. If they had come the day before or even that morning he would not have seen them. They were four, already in the barnlot and coming down the fence high-footed in the green bog of manure and mud. One had a shotgun and the others carried slats, their faces upturned brightly, watching him. He set the brush down, wedging it under a rung, and started up the ladder toward the top, coming erect on the peak and walking it carefully, watching his boots, until he was above the ground ladder. He squatted on his heels and coasted to it, braking with his hands and the soles of his boots and then almost overriding it. He heard one of them yell. He looked down again to see them but they had come under the lee of the barn.

Head him, one of them called.

Other side, Will, other side.

Run him around thisaway and I’ll break him down like a shotgun.

He came down the ladder frontways, half running, falling the last six feet and stumbling up again, running along the side of the barn. At the corner a man sprang up, a face pale and contorted in a whitelipped smile, and brought the slat flatwise across his back with a sound that exploded clear through him. He went headlong in the dried chaff, not even stopping, running again from the ground up and across the fence through the hoglot where a boar came up out of a wallow with a scream and charged him and across the far fence and into the upper pasture. He could hear the man behind him saying Goddamn, Goddamn, leaping and stepping as the boar came at him, trying to get back to the fence and saying You son of a bitch you, and the boar screaming and cutting at him and him sliding and dancing in the mud and above it all the whack of the slat on the boar’s hide.

He went on, through waisthigh grass, listening for the shot until his head hummed. It didn’t come. When he topped out on the hill he turned to look back. They were deployed across the field a hundred yards below him. They stopped, one and the next and the third and the last as if wired together and the one with the shotgun raised it and a black flower bloomed about him. Holme wheeled. The pellets went up his back like wasps. He winced and put one hand to his neck and came away with a thin smear of blood and already he was running again. He came down out of the field running and into a pine wood at the bottom running hard on the open ground with the trees dodging past. When he fell he slid his length again headlong in the pineneedles, rising out of a dark trough with swatches of them stuck to the paint and blood on his palms. When he looked back he had seized his wild face in both hands as if main strength were needed to look there and when he went on he went at a crazed pace deeper into the woods.

He came out upon a ravine and ran along it until it began to draw away to the right and then he plunged and slid down the embankment and leaped to clear the creek at the bottom. But the soft turf gave beneath his foot and he went face down in the water. When he tried to rise he could not. He got himself propped on his elbows, gasping, listening. The creek murmured away down the dark ravine. He leaned his face into the shallow water and drank, choking, and after a while he vomited. And after a while he drank again.