Cormac McCarthy - Outer Dark

It wasn’t his to name. Besides names dies with the namers. A dead man’s dog ain’t got a name. He reached and drew from his boot a slender knife.

Holme seemed to be speaking to something in the night beyond them all. My sister would take him, he said. That chap. We could find her and she’d take him.

Yes, the man said.

I been huntin her.

Harmon was watching the man. Even the mute one stirred. The man took hold of the child and lifted it up. It was watching the fire. Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat’s eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child’s throat and went all broken down the front of it. The child made no sound. It hung there with its one eye glazing over like a wet stone and the black blood pumping down its naked belly. The mute one knelt forward. He was drooling and making little whimpering noises in his throat. He knelt with his hands outstretched and his nostrils rimpled delicately. The man handed him the child and he seized it up, looked once at Holme with witless eyes, and buried his moaning face in its throat.

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON she entered the glade, coming down a footpath where narrow cart tracks had crushed the weeds and through the wood, half wild and haggard in her shapeless sundrained cerements, yet delicate as any fallow doe, and so into the clearing to stand cradled in a grail of jade and windy light, slender and trembling and pale with wandlike hands to speak the boneless shapes attending her.

And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage. She poked among the burnt remains of the tinker’s traps, the blackened pans confused among the rubble, the lantern with its skewed glass, the axle and iron wheelhoops already rusting. She went among this charnel curiously. She did not know what to make of it. She waited, but no one returned.

She waited all through the blue twilight and into the dark. Bats came and went. Wind stirred the ashes and the tinker in his tree turned slowly but no one returned. Shadows grew cold across the wood and night rang down upon these lonely figures and after a while little sister was sleeping.

The tinker in his burial tree was a wonder to the birds. The vultures that came by day to nose with their hooked beaks among his buttons and pockets like outrageous pets soon left him naked of his rags and flesh alike. Black mandrake sprang beneath the tree as it will where the seed of the hanged falls and in spring a new branch pierced his breast and flowered in a green boutonniere perennial beneath his yellow grin. He took the sparse winter snows upon what thatch of hair still clung to his dried skull and hunters that passed that way never chanced to see him brooding among his barren limbs. Until wind had tolled the tinker’s bones and seasons loosed them one by one to the ground below and alone his bleached and weathered brisket hung in that lonesome wood like a bone birdcage.

IN LATER YEARS he used to meet a blind man, ragged and serene, who spoke him a good day out of his constant dark. He overtook him tapping through the bright noon dust with his cane, his head erect in that air of wonder the blind wear. Holme would go by but now the blind man has stopped him with his greeting.

How you, said Holme.

Well as ever, said the blind man. Have ye a smoke?

No sir. I ain’t.

Nary a-tall?

I don’t have the habit.

Aye, said the blind man. He unbuttoned the bib of his overalls and brought forth tobacco. Well, he said, it’s good to see the sun again ain’t it.

Holme looked at the cups of blue phlegm which regarded him. It is, he said.

Aye. After so long a time. He trickled tobacco into the slender trough of paper his fingers held and put away the pouch.

It is a right pretty day, Holme said.

The blind man smiled. I know ye, he said. I’ve spoke afore with ye.

You might of, Holme said, I don’t remember.

The blind man twisted up the ends of his cigarette and took it between his lips. Yes, he said. I’ve passed ye on these roads afore.

They’s lots of people on the roads these days, Holme said.

Yes, the blind man said. I pass em ever day. People goin up and down in the world like dogs. As if they wasn’t a home nowheres. But I knowed I’d seen ye afore.

Holme spat. I got to get on, he said.

Yes, the blind man said. Is they anything you need?

Need?

Anything you need.

I don’t need nothin.

I always like to ast.

What are ye sellin?

I ain’t sellin nothin. I’m at the Lord’s work. He don’t need your money.

It’s good he don’t need mine. I reckon you’re some kind of a preacher.

No. No preacher. What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.

Holme smiled. What have you got to give? Old blind man like you astin folks what they need.

I don’t know. Nobody’s never said.

Well how would you expect to get it.

Just pray for it.

You always get what you pray for?

Yes. I reckon. I wouldn’t pray for what wasn’t needful. Would you?

I ain’t never prayed. Why don’t ye pray back your eyes?

I believe it’d be a sin. Them old eyes can only show ye what’s done there anyways. If a blind man needed eyes he’d have eyes.

Still I believe you’d like to see your way.

What needs a man to see his way when he’s sent there anyhow?

I got to get on, Holme said.

The blind man leaned one hand on the cane where he had rested it against his leg. He sucked on the cigarette and two jets of blue smoke slid from his thin nostrils and faded in the air. I heard a preacher in a town one time, he said. A healin preacher wanted to cure everbody and they took me up there. They was a bunch of us there all cripple folks and one old man they did claim had thowed down his crutches and they told it he could make the blind see. And they was a feller leapt up and hollered out that nobody knowed what was wrong with. And they said it caused that preacher to go away. But they’s darksome ways afoot in this world and it may be he weren’t no true preacher.

I got to get on, Holme said.

I always did want to find that feller, the blind man said. And tell him. If somebody don’t tell him he never will have no rest.

I’ll see ye, Holme said.

Aye, said the blind man. It might be we’ll meet again sometime.

Holme raised a hand in inane farewell and set off down the road again. The blind man’s cane softly tapping faded behind him. He went on, soundless with his naked feet, shambling, gracelorn, down out of the peaceful mazy fields, his toed tracks soft in the dust among the cratered shapes of horse and mule hoofs and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress. The road went on through a shadeless burn and for miles there were only the charred shapes of trees in a dead land where nothing moved save windy rifts of ash that rose dolorous and died again down the blackened corridors.

Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.

Going back the way by which he came he met again the blind man tapping through the dusk. He waited very still by the side of the road, but the blind man passing turned his head and smiled upon him his blind smile. Holme watched him out of sight. He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.