Cormac McCarthy: Outer Dark

All right. Didn’t mean nothin by it. I hope you’ns well. And your sister.

Thank ye, said the man. He turned and half lifted one arm in tentative farewell, then thrust both hands into his overalls and strode toward the cabin.

I’ll be clost by a few days yet, the tinker called out after him. The man went on. The tinker spat and stepped again between the prone tongues and hoisted the cart and turned it, creaking and jangling, and set off again into the woods the way he had come.

The man had stopped short of the door and stood with one foot propped on the sill watching him out of sight. For a while he could hear the rattle and clang of the cart as it labored over the pocked and rutted road, fading, then ceasing into the faint clash of the pines and the drone of insects, and then he went in.

Culla, she said.

Yes.

That pedlar have ary cocoa?

No.

I sure would admire to have me a cup of cocoa.

She sat huddled in a ragged quilt, her feet gripping the bottom rung of the chair, watching the barren fireplace in which the noon light lay among the ashes and in which her voice trembled and returned about her.

He’s done left, the man said. He ain’t got nothin.

She stirred slightly. You reckon we could have us a fire tonight?

It ain’t cold.

It turned cold last night. You said your own self it was cold. I sure do admire a good fire of the evenin. You reckon if it was to turn off kindly cool we could have us a fire?

He was leaning against the doorframe and slicing thin coils of wood away with his pocketknife. Maybe, he said, not listening, never listening.

Three days after the tinker’s visit she had a spasm in her belly. She said: I got a pain.

Is it it? he said, standing suddenly from the bed where he had sat staring out through the one small glass at the unbroken pine forest.

I don’t know, she said. I reckon.

He swore softly to himself.

You goin to fetch her?

He looked at her and looked away again. No, he said.

She sat forward in the chair, watching across the room with eyes immense in her thin face. You said you’d fetch her when it come time.

I never, he said. I said Maybe.

Fetch her, she said. Now you fetch her.

I cain’t. She’d tell.

Who is they to tell?

Anybody.

You could give her a dollar. Couldn’t you give her a dollar not to tell and she’d not tell?

No. Asides she ain’t nothin but a old geechee nigger witch noway.

She’s been a midnight woman caught them babies lots of times. You said your own self she was a midnight woman used to catch them babies.

She said it. I never.

He could hear her crying. A low bubbling sound, her rocking back and forth. After a while she said: I got anothern. Ain’t you goin to fetch her?

No.

It had begun to rain again. The sun went bleak and pallid toward the woods. He walked into the clearing and looked up at the colorless sky. He looked as if he might be going to say something. After a while he licked the beaded water from his lip and went in again.

Dark came and this time he did have a fire, going out from time to time with the worn axe and splitting kindling and later by lanternlight scouring the near woods for old stumps which he split out and dressed of their rotted hearts, bringing in the hard and weathered shells and stacking them on the floor beside the hearth.

She was propped in the bed now with the frayed and musty quilt still about her. Periodically she would seize the thin iron headrail behind her, coming tautly bowed and slowly up with her breath loud in the room and then subsiding back among the covers like a wounded bird.

He had stopped asking her about it. He just waited, sitting in the chair and nursing the fire.

I wisht they’d hush, she said.

What.

Them varmints.

He drew the poker from the fire where he had been absently stirring the coals. Somewhere between the wind’s cry and the long rip of rain on the tarpaper roof he heard a dog howl. They ain’t botherin you, he said.

He heard her fingers clatter at the iron and her body rattle the springs as it arched. In a few minutes she said: Well I wisht they’d hush.

She wouldn’t eat. He set a pan of cornbread on a brick before the fire and warmed it and ate with it the last of the cold meat he had brought from the store. He took the axe from under the bed and set forth one more time for wood. It was still raining but the wind had died and he could hear the dull lowing of an alligator somewhere on the river. When he came in again he stood the axe in the corner and stacked the wood and squatted once again before the fire. He was there for some time before she said his name.

What, he said.

Could you put it under the bed again? I believe it does ease it some. And it’s for luck.

And toward morning she called him again.

Yes, he said.

What is it? Here.

I don’t hear nothin.

Here. Over here.

He went to her. She put his hand on the crude tick.

Your water’s broke, he said.

The rain had stopped and a gray light lapped at the window glass. There was no sound but the small patter of waterdrops on the roof, no movement but the slow wash of mist over the glade beyond which the trees rose blackly.

It’s done mornin, he said.

I’ve not slept nary wink.

He was holding watch at the window, his own face drawn and sleepless. I believe it wants to clear, he said.

I wonder if they’s ary fire in under them ashes.

He returned to the hearth and poked among the dead coals and blew upon them. I doubt they be a dry stick of wood in the world this mornin, he said.

The sun rose and climbed to a small hot midpoint in the sky. In the yard the man’s shadow pooled at his feet, a dark stain in which he stood. In which he moved. In his hand a chipped enamel waterbucket now, headed for the spring, entering the woods where a path went and following it through kneehigh ferns, by rotting footlogs across a pale green fen and into a pine wood, scrub hardwoods, the ground soft with compost and lichens, coming finally to a cairn of mossgrown rock beneath which water issued limpid and cold over its bed of suncolored sand. He bent with the pail, watched with bloodrimmed eyes a leopard frog scuttle.

Coming into the clearing again he heard her call out. He crossed the glade rapidly toward the cabin, the water licking over the bucket rim and wetting the leg of his overalls. All right, he said. All right.

But that still wasn’t it.

It hurts bad now, she said.

Then let’s get on with it.

But it wasn’t until midafternoon that she began. He stood before the bed in which she lay bowsprung and panting and her eyes mad and his hands felt huge. Hush, he said.

Cain’t ye fetch her?

No. Hush.

The spasms in which she writhed put him more in mind of death. But it wasn’t death with which she labored far into the fading day.

Late in the afternoon he rose and left her and walked in the glade. Doves were crossing toward the river. He could hear them calling. When he went in again she had crawled or fallen from the bed and lay in the floor clutching the bedstead. He did think she had died, lying there looking up with eyes that held nothing at all. Then her body convulsed and she screamed. He struggled with her, lifting her to the bed again. The head had broken through in a pumping welter of blood. He knelt in the bed with one knee, holding her. With his own hand he brought it free, the scrawny body trailing the cord in anneloid writhing down the bloodslimed covers, a beetcolored creature that looked to him like a skinned squirrel. He pinched the mucus from its face with his fingers. It didn’t move. He leaned down to her.