Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

In the night they followed a mountain torrent in a wild gorge choked with mossy rocks and they rode under dark grottoes where the water dripped and spattered and tasted of iron and they saw the silver filaments of cascades divided upon the faces of distant buttes that appeared as signs and wonders in the heavens themselves so dark was the ground of their origins. They crossed the blackened wood of a burn and they rode through a region of cloven rock where great boulders lay halved with smooth uncentered faces and on the slopes of those ferric grounds old paths of fire and the blackened bones of trees assassinated in the mountain storms. On the day following they began to encounter holly and oak, hardwood forests much like those they had quit in their youth. In pockets on the north slopes hail lay nested like tectites among the leaves and the nights were cool. They traveled through the high country deeper into the mountains where the storms had their lairs, a fiery clangorous region where white flames ran on the peaks and the ground bore the burnt smell of broken flint. At night the wolves in the dark forests of the world below called to them as if they were friends to man and Glanton’s dog trotted moaning among the endlessly articulating legs of the horses.

Nine days out of Chihuahua they passed through a gap in the mountains and began to descend by a trail that ran carved along the solid stone face of a bluff a thousand feet above the clouds. A great stone mammoth watched from the gray escarpment above them. They picked their way down singlefile. They passed through a tunnel hewn in the rock and on the other side miles below them in a gorge lay the roofs of a town.

They descended by rocky switchbacks and across the beds of streams where small trout stood on their pale fins and studied the noses of the drinking horses. Sheets of mist that smelled and tasted of metal rose out of the gorge and crossed over them and moved on through the woods. They nudged the horses through the ford and down the trace and at three oclock in the afternoon in a thin and drizzling rain they rode into the old stone town of Jesús María.

They clattered over the rainwashed cobbles stuck with leaves and crossed a stone bridge and rode up the street under the dripping eaves of the galleried buildings and along a mountain torrent that ran through the town. Small oremills had been ground into the polished rocks in the river and the hills above the town were everywhere tunneled and scaffolded and scarred with drifts and tailings. The raggletag advent of the riders was howled about by a few wet dogs crouched in doorways and they turned into a narrow street and halted dripping before the door of an inn.

Glanton pounded on the door and it opened and a young boy looked out. A woman appeared and looked at them and went back in. Finally a man came and opened the gate. He was slightly drunk and he held the gate while the horsemen rode through one by one into the little flooded courtyard and then he closed the gate behind them.

In the morning the rain had stopped and they appeared in the streets, tattered, stinking, ornamented with human parts like cannibals. They carried the huge pistols stuck in their belts and the vile skins they wore were deeply stained with blood and smoke and gunblack. The sun was out and the old women on their knees with bucket and rag washing the stones before the shopdoors turned and looked after them and shopkeepers setting out their wares nodded them a wary good morning. They were a strange clientele among such commerce. They stood blinking before the doorways where finches hung in small withy cages and green and brassy parrots that stood on one foot and croaked uneasily. There were ristras of dried fruit and peppers and clusters of tinware that hung like chimes and there were hogskins filled with pulque that swung from the beams like bloated swine in a knacker’s yard. They sent for cups. A fiddler appeared and crouched on a stone doorsill and began to saw out some Moorish folktune and none who passed on their morning errands could take their eyes from those pale and rancid giants.

By noon they’d found a bodega run by a man named Frank Carroll, a low doggery once a stable whose shed doors stood open to the street to admit the only light. The fiddler had followed in what seemed a great sadness and he took up his station just without the door where he could watch the outlanders drink and clack their gold doubloons on the board. In the doorway there was an old man taking the sun and he leaned with a goathorn eartrumpet to the rising din within and nodded in continual agreement although no word was spoken in any language he had understanding of.

The judge had spied the musician and he called to him and tossed a coin that clinked upon the stones. The fiddler held it briefly to the light as if it might not serve and then slipped it away among his clothes and fitted his instrument beneath his chin and struck up an air that was old among the mountebanks of Spain two hundred years before. The judge stepped into the sunlit doorway and executed upon the stones a series of steps with a strange precision and he and the fiddler seemed alien minstrels met by chance in this medieval town. The judge removed his hat and bowed to a pair of ladies detoured into the street to bypass the doggery and he pirouetted hugely on his mincing feet and poured pulque from his cup into the old man’s eartrumpet The old man quickly stoppered the horn with the ball of his thumb and he held the horn with care before him while he augered his ear with one finger and then he drank.

By dark the streets were filled with besotted bedlamites lurching and cursing and ringing the churchbells with pistolballs in a godless charivari until the priest emerged bearing before him the crucified Christ and exhorting them with fragments of latin in a singsong chant. This man was drubbed in the street and prodded obscenely and they flung gold coins at him as he lay clutching his image. When he rose he disdained to take up the coins until some small boys ran out to gather them and then he ordered them brought to him while the barbarians whooped and drank him a toast.

Spectators drifted away, the narrow street emptied. Some of the Americans had wandered into the cold waters of the stream and were splashing about and they clambered dripping into the street and stood dark and smoking and apocalyptic in the dim lampfall. The night was cold and they shambled steaming through the cobbled town like fairybook beasts and it had begun to rain again.

The day that followed was the feast of Las Animas and there was a parade through the streets and a horsedrawn cart that bore a rude Christ in a stained and ancient catafalque. Lay acolytes followed all in company and the priest went before ringing a small bell. A barefoot brotherhood clad in black marched in the rear bearing sceptres of weeds. The Christ jostled past, a poor figure of straw with carven head and feet. He wore a crown of mountain briars and on his brow were painted drops of blood and on his old dry wooden cheeks blue tears. The villagers knelt and blessed themselves and some stepped forward and touched the garment the figure wore and kissed their fingertips. The parade trundled past mournfully and small children sat in the doorways eating pastry skulls and watching the parade and the rain in the streets.

The judge sat alone in the cantina. He also watched the rain, his eyes small in his great naked face. He’d filled his pockets with little candy deathsheads and he sat by the door and offered these to children passing on the walk under the eaves but they shied away like little horses.

In the evening groups of townfolk descended from the cemetery on the side of the hill and later in the dark by candle or lamp light they emerged again and made their way up to the church to pray. None but passed clutches of Americans crazed with drink and these grimy visitants would doff their hats oafishly and totter and grin and make obscene suggestions to the young girls. Carroll had closed his squalid bistro at dusk but opened it again to save the doors being stove. Sometime in the night a party of horsemen bound for California arrived, every man of them slumped in exhaustion. Yet within the hour they’d ridden out again. By midnight when the souls of the dead were rumored to be about the scalphunters were again howling in the streets and discharging their pistols in spite of rain or death and this continued sporadically until dawn.