Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark

HE WORE a shapeless and dusty suit of black linen that was small on him and his beard and hair were long and black and tangled. He wore neither shirt nor collar and his bare feet were out at the toes of a pair of handmade brogans. He said nothing. They gave before him until he reached the wagon and stood looking down at the man in the bed of it. They waited, a mass of grave faces. He turned slowly and looked about him. It’s old man Salter, one said. Dead. Stobbed and murdered. He nodded. All right, he said. Let’s be for findin the man that done it. And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing of his beard or the suit he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night .

In the cool and smoking dawn there hung from a blackhaw tree in a field on the edge of the village the bodies of two itinerant millhands. They spun slowly in turn from left to right and back again. As if charged with some watch. That and the slight flutter of their hair in the morning wind was all the movement there was about them .

ONCE IN THE NIGHT she heard a horse coming along over the country road, a burning horse beneath the dead moonlight that trailed a wake of pale and drifting dust. She could hear the labored breath and harness creak and the clink of its iron caparisons and then the hoofs exploded over the planking of the bridge. Dust and fine gravel sifted down upon her and hissed in the water. The pounding faded down the road to the faintest sound of heartbeat and the heartbeat was in her own thin chest. She pulled the stained bundle of clothing closer beneath her face and slept again.

She slept through the first wan auguries of dawn, gently washed with river fog while martins came and went among the arches. Slept into the first heat of the day and woke to see toy birds with sesame eyes regarding her from their clay nests overhead. She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road again. Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child’s song from an old dead time.

In half a mile she began to come upon houses and barns, fields in which crude implements lay idled. She went more slowly. She could smell food cooking. The house she chose was a painted frame house that stood in a well-tended yard. She approached, wary of dogs, up a walkway past rank growths of beebalm and phlox terraced with fieldstone, past latticed morning glories strung against the blinding white clapboards. Bonneted and bent to the black earth a woman with a trowel, a small cairn of stones and a paper of plants beside her.

Howdy, she said.

The woman looked over her shoulder, sat back on her heels and tapped the clods from the trowel. Mornin, she said. Can I help you?

Yes mam. I’m huntin the lady of the house.

Well, you found her.

Yes mam. What I was wonderin was if maybe you needed some house help or not.

The woman rose, dusting her skirts with the backs of her hands. Her eyes were very blue even in the shade of her bonnet. Help, she said. Yes. I reckon it looks like I need a gardener, don’t it?

It’s a right pretty garden. As pretty a one as I’ve seed.

Well thank you.

Yes mam.

You married?

No mam.

In other words you could stay on.

Yes mam.

Regular?

Well, I don’t know right off for how long. You ain’t said if you needed me.

I don’t need somebody for just a week. I had them kind. More trouble than they’re worth. Who was it told you I needed a girl?

Nobody.

Nobody sent you?

No mam. I just come by myself. To ast if maybe you did.

You’re not one of them Creech girls are you?

No mam. I’m a Holme.

The woman smiled and she smiled back. The woman said: That’s my granddaughter now. Then she heard it, a child’s wail from within the house.

They’re here the rest of this week. You come along while I see about her.

She followed the woman along the stone path to the rear of the house where they entered through the kitchen, the woman taking down her bonnet and laying it across a chair, saying: Just sit down and rest a minute and I won’t be long.

She sat. Already she could feel it begin warm and damp, sitting there holding her swollen breasts, feeling it in runnels down her belly until she pressed the cloth of her dress against it, looking down at the dark stains.

Mam.

Yes? The woman turning at the door.

About workin here … I don’t believe …

Yes, just a minute now, I won’t be a minute.

She heard the woman on the steps, treading upward into the sound of the child’s crying until both ceased, and she rose and left for them the empty room with table and stove and cooking pots, holding her own things to her breast where thin blue milk welled from the rotting cloth, going down the path to the road again.

She went on through the town past houses and yard gardens with tomatoes and beans yellowed with road dust and poles rising skewed into the hot air, past rows of new corn putting up handhigh through the gray loam, along old fences of wormy rail, the spurs of dust from her naked heels drifting arcwise in pale feathers to the road again. If crows had not risen from a field she might never have looked that way to see two hanged men in a tree like gross chimes.

She stood for a moment watching them, clutching the bundle of clothes, wondering at such dark work in the noon of day while all about sang summer birds. She went on, walking softly. Once she looked back. Nothing moved in that bleak tree.

Further along she spied a planting of turnips. She crossed a fence and made her way toward them over the turned black earth. They were already seeding and she could smell the musty hemlock odor of them sweet in the air. They were small, bitter, slightly soft. She pulled half a dozen and cleaned away the dirt with the gathered hem of her dress. While she was chewing the first of them a voice hallooed across the field. She could see a house and a barn beyond the curve in the road and now in the barn-lot she made out a man there watching her. His voice drifted over the hot spaces lost and thin:

Get out of them turnips.

She looked at the handful of turnips, at him, then broke off the tops of them and pushed the bulbs into her parcel and started back to the road. When she reached the house the man was standing there waiting for her. She swallowed and nodded to him. Mornin, she said.

Mornin eh? You’ve had a long day of it. What are you doin roguin in my garden?

I wouldn’t of took nothin if I’d knowed anybody cared. It was just some little old thin turnips. I’ve not eat today.

Ain’t? How come you ain’t? You ain’t run off from somewheres are ye?

No, she said. I ain’t even got nowheres to run off from.

He considered this for a moment, one eye almost shut. If you ain’t got nowheres to run from you must not have no place to run to. Where is it you are goin if it’s any of my business?

I’m startin to wish it was somebody else’s besides just mine.

I believe you’ve run off from somewheres, the man said.

I’ve been run off from.

Ah, said the man. He looked her up and down.

I’m a-huntin this here tinker, she said.

Tinker?

Yessir. He’s got somethin belongs to me.