Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark

Woods? she said.

They don’t nourish out of the earth like corn.

He was give to ye. Was he not give to ye?

He was not give to nobody.

What did ye have to give for him?

Yes, the tinker said. What did I have to give for him.

I’ll make it up to ye, she said. Whatever it was.

Will ye now, said the tinker.

I’ll work it out, she said. I can work if I ain’t never had nothin.

Nor never will.

Times is hard.

Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.

Whatever it was you give, she said softly. I’ll give it and more.

The tinker spat bitterly into the fire. They ain’t more, he said.

You promised.

I promised, the tinker said. I promised nothin.

He’s mine, she whispered.

The tinker looked at her. She had both thumbs in her mouth. Yourn, he said. You ain’t fit to have him.

That ain’t for you to judge.

I’ve done judged.

She had leaned forward and her eyes were huge and hungered. She touched his ragged sleeve with two fingers. What did ye give? she said. I’ll make it up to ye. Whatever ye give. And that nurse fee.

The tinker jerked his arm away. He leaned his face toward her. Give, he said. I give a lifetime wanderin in a country where I was despised. Can you give that? I give forty years strapped in front of a cart like a mule till I couldn’t stand straight to be hanged. I’ve not got soul one in this world save a old halfcrazy sister that nobody never would have like they never would me. I been rocked and shot at and whipped and kicked and dogbit from one end of this state to the other and you cain’t pay that back. You ain’t got nothin to pay it with. Them accounts is in blood and they ain’t nothin in this world to pay em out with.

Let me have him, she moaned. You could let me have him.

Let you have him, the tinker sneered. I’d care for him, she said. They wouldn’t nobody like me.

Like you done?

He done it. I never.

Who? the tinker said.

My brother. He’s the one.

Yes, the tinker said. He’s the one would of laid it to early rest save my bein there. Cause I knowed. Sickness. He’s got a sickness. He … the tinker stopped. It was very quiet in the cabin. They could hear the branch murmuring. Or perhaps it was the wind. The tinker stopped and stared at her with his viper’s eyes gone wild in their black wells. It ain’t hisn, he said.

It ain’t nothin to you.

The tinker leaned and seized her wrist in his boney grip. It ain’t, he said. Is it?

Yes.

Neither of them moved. The tinker did not turn loose of her arm. That’s a lie, he said.

What do you care?

That’s a lie, he said again. You say it’s a lie.

She didn’t move.

You say it’s a lie now, the tinker said.

You don’t want him, she whispered. You wouldn’t of took him if you’d of knowed …

The tinker pulled her close. You say that’s a lie damn you.

It’s no right child, she said. You don’t want him. Her body was contorted with pain and her eyes closed.

Yes, said the tinker. You’d try it wouldn’t ye? You lyin little bitch. He flung her arm back and she crumpled up and held it in her other hand. The tinker rose and stood gaunt and trembling above her. You’ll see me dead fore ye see him again, he said.

You won’t never have no rest, she moaned. Not never.

Nor any human soul, he said.

The fire had died to coals. The tinker swung down the lamp and their shadows wheeled wildly from each other and froze on opposite walls. Don’t foller me, the tinker said. You foller me and I’ll kill ye.

She didn’t move.

Bitch, he said. Goddamn lyin bitch.

She had begun to keen softly into her hands. The tinker could hear it a long way down the road.

He could hear it far over the cold and smoking fields of autumn, his pans knelling in the night like buoys on some dim and barren coast, and he could hear it fading and hear it die lost as the cry of seabirds in the vast and salt black solitudes they keep.

HOLME WALKED across the stony earth with his eyes on his broken boots, crossing a black and fallow bottom newly turned, the wind coming very steady and cold and with it like pieces of scaled slate martins with shrill chittering cast up motionless to break and wheel low along the ground past him once again. When he reached the fence he stopped for a moment to look back at the road and then he went on, crossing into a field of rank weeds that heeled with harsh dip and clash under the wind as if fled through by something unseen.

He stood before the cabin uncertainly, his palms resting in the small of his back. He looked toward the road again. Then he mounted the steps to the porch and crossed and entered through the open door.

It was a very old cabin and the ceiling of the room he stood in was little higher than his head, the unhewn beams smoked a foggy and depthless black and trellised with cobwebbing of the same color. The floor was buckled and the walls seemed tottering and he could see nothing plane or plumb anywhere. There was a small window mortised crookedly into the logs of one wall, the sash hung with leather hinges. That and the long clayless chinks among the logs let in the waning light of this day and wind crossed the room with the steady cool pull of running water. There was a claymortared fireplace of flatless and illfitted fieldstone which bulged outward in the room with incipient collapse, a wagon spring for lintel, the hearth of poured mud hard and polished as stone. A serpentine poker. Two wooden bedsteads with tickings of husks and a halfbed with a mattress on which lay curled a dead cat leering with eyeless grimace, a caved and maggoty shape that gave off a faint dry putrescence above the reek of aged smoke. He took hold of the mattress and pulled it from the bed and dragged it to the door, fighting it through the narrow opening and outside and long bright red beetles coming constantly from beneath the cat to scatter in radial symmetry outward and drop audibly to the floor. He threw the mattress in the yard and went back in. In the kitchen a doorless woodstove propped in the front with two bricks against the floor’s fierce incline. A partitioned mealbin with sifter and a hard dry crust of meal adhering to the wood, the meal impregnated with worms whose shed husks littered the floor of the bin among micedroppings and dead beetles. A solid butternut safe in which languished some pieces of cheap white crockery, chipped and handleshorn coffeecups, plates serrated about their perimeters as though bitten in maniacal hunger, a tin percolator in which an inverted salmoncan sat for a lid. A nameless gray dust lay over everything. He returned to the front room and at the bed pressed one spread palm down in the center of the ticking and looked about him wearily.

Later he went out and gathered wood. He found beanpoles in a log crib behind the house and brought them in and he found some roughsawn chestnut boards. When he had got the fire going he pulled one of the beds up toward the hearth and sat down and watched the flames. Smoke seeped from under the wagon spring and stood in blue tiers and he could hear swifts in the flue fluttering like wind in a bottle. He sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his knees. The window light had crept from the floor onto the far wall and the room lay traversed with a bar of bronze and hovering dust. After a while he rose again and went out for more wood.

When he came back he built up the fire and pulled off the stinking boots and stretched out on the bed. There was a string of dried peppers hanging from a nail in the beam over the fireplace. They looked like leather. In the chimney’s throat frail curds of old soot quivered with the heat. A deermouse came down from somewhere in the logs, soundless as a feather falling, paused with one foot tucked to his white bib and regarded him with huge black eyes. He watched it. He blinked and it was gone. He slept.