Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International)

by Cormac McCarthy

  The man grinned. He reached a third time. The kid set the bowl between his legs and drew the pistol and cocked it and put the muzzle against the man’s forehead.

  They sat quite still. The others watched. After a while the kid lowered the pistol and let down the hammer and put it in his belt and picked up the bowl and commenced eating again. The man gestured toward the pistol and spoke to his friends and they nodded and then they sat as before.

  Qué pasó con ustedes.

  The kid watched the man over the rim of the bowl with his dark and hollow eyes.

  The indian looked at the expriest.

  Qué pasó con ustedes.

  The expriest in his black and crusted cravat turned his whole torso to look at the man who’d spoken. He looked at the kid. He’d been eating with his fingers and he licked them and wiped them on the filthy leg of his trousers.

  Las Yumas, he said.

  They sucked in air and clucked their tongues.

  Son muy malos, said the speaker.

  Claro.

  No tiene compañeros?

  The kid and the expriest eyed each other.

  Sí, said the kid. Muchos. He waved his hand to the east. Llegaran. Muchos compañeros.

  The indians received this news without expression. A woman brought more of the piñole but they had been without food too long to have appetites and they waved her away.

  In the afternoon they bathed in the creek and slept on the ground. When they woke they were being watched by a group of naked children and a few dogs. When they went up through the camp they saw the indians sitting along a ledge of rock watching tirelessly the land to the east for whatever might come out of it. No one spoke to them of the judge and they did not ask. The dogs and children followed them out of the camp and they took the trail up into the low hills to the west where the sun was already going.

  They reached Warner’s Ranch late the following day and they restored themselves at the hot sulphur springs there. There was no one about. They moved on. The country to the west was rolling and grassy and beyond were mountains running to the coast. They slept that night among dwarf cedars and in the morning the grass was frozen and they could hear the wind in the frozen grass and they could hear the cries of birds that seemed a charm against the sullen shores of the void out of which they had ascended.

  All that day they climbed through a highland park forested with joshua trees and rimmed about by bald granite peaks. In the evening flocks of eagles went up through the pass before them and they could see on those grassy benches the great shambling figures of bears like cattle grazing on some upland heath. There were skifts of snow in the lee of the stone ledges and in the night a light snow fell upon them. Reefs of mist were blowing across the slopes when they set out shivering in the dawn and in the new snow they saw the tracks of bears that had come down to take their wind just before daylight.

  That day there was no sun only a paleness in the haze and the country was white with frost and the shrubs were like polar isomers of their own shapes. Wild rams ghosted away up those rocky draws and the wind swirled down cold and gray from the snowy reeks above them, a smoking region of wild vapors blowing down through the gap as if the world up there were all afire. They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. They drank from the cold mountain streams and bathed their wounds and they shot a young doe at a spring and ate what they could and smoked thin sheets of the meat to carry with them. Although they saw no more bears they saw sign of their vicinity and they moved off over the slopes a good mile from their meatcamp before they put down for the night. In the morning they crossed a bed of thunderstones clustered on that heath like the ossified eggs of some primal ground-bird. They trod the shadowline under the mountains keeping just in the sun for the warmth of it and that afternoon they first saw the sea, far below them, blue and serene under clouds.

  The trail went down through the low hills and picked up the wagontrack and they followed where the locked wheels had skidded and the iron tires scarred the rock and the sea down there darkened to black and the sun fell and all the land about went blue and cold. They slept shivering under a wooded boss among owlcries and a scent of juniper while the stars swarmed in the bottomless night.

  It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach.

  Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Down-shore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.

  He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach.

  He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

  XXII

  Under arrest – The judge pays a call – An arraignment – Soldier, priest, magistrate – On his own recognizance – He sees a surgeon – The arrowshaft removed from his leg – Delirium – He journeys to Los Angeles – A public hanging – Los ahorcados – Looking for the expriest – Another fool – The scapular – To Sacramento – A traveler in the west – He abandons his party – The penitent brothers – The deathcart – Another massacre – The eldress in the rocks.

  Going back through the streets past the yellow windowlights and barking dogs he encountered a detachment of soldiers but they took him for an older man in the dark and passed on. He entered a tavern and sat in a darkened corner watching the groups of men at the tables. No one asked him what he wanted in that place. He seemed to be waiting for someone to come for him and after a while four soldiers entered and arrested him. They didnt even ask him his name.

  In his cell he began to speak with a strange urgency of things few men have seen in a lifetime and his jailers said that his mind had come uncottered by the acts of blood in which he had participated. One morning he woke to find the judge standing at his cage, hat in hand, smiling down at him. He was dressed in a suit of gray linen and he wore new polished boots. His coat was unbuttoned and in his waistcoat he carried a watchchain and a stickpin and in his belt a leathercovered clip that held a small silvermounted derringer stocked in rosewood. He looked down the hallway of the crude mud building and donned the hat and smiled again at the prisoner.

  Well, he said. How are you?

  The kid didnt answer.

  They wanted to know from me if you were always crazy, said the judge. They said it was the country. The country turned them out.

  Where’s Tobin?

  I told them that the cretin had been a respected Doctor of Divinity from Harvard College as recently as March of this year. That his wits had stood him as far west as the Aquarius Mountains. It was the ensuing country that carried them off. Together with his clothes.

  And Toadvine and Brown. Where are they?

  In the desert where you left them. A cruel thing. Your companions in arms. The judge shook his head.

  What do they aim to do with me?

  I believe it is their intention to hang you.


  What did you tell them?

  Told them the truth. That you were the person responsible. Not that we have all the details. But they understand that it was you and none other who shaped events along such a calamitous course. Eventuating in the massacre at the ford by the savages with whom you conspired. Means and ends are of little moment here. Idle speculations. But even though you carry the draft of your murderous plan with you to the grave it will nonetheless be known in all its infamy to your Maker and as that is so so shall it be made known to the least of men. All in the fullness of time.

  You’re the one that’s crazy, said the kid.

  The judge smiled. No, he said. It was never me. But why lurk there in the shadows? Come here where we can talk, you and me.

  The kid stood against the far wall. Hardly more than a shadow himself.

  Come up, said the judge. Come up, for I’ve yet more to tell you.

  He looked down the hallway. Dont be afraid, he said. I’ll speak softly. It’s not for the world’s ears but for yours only. Let me see you. Dont you know that I’d have loved you like a son?

  He reached through the bars. Come here, he said. Let me touch you.

  The kid stood with his back to the wall.

  Come here if you’re not afraid, whispered the judge.

  I aint afraid of you.

  The judge smiled. He spoke softly into the dim mud cubicle. You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man’s share compared to another’s. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that one was?

  It was you, whispered the kid. You were the one.

  The judge watched him through the bars, he shook his head. What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. But if I was your enemy with whom would you have shared me? With whom? The priest? Where is he now? Look at me. Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met. Yet even so you could have changed it all.

  You, said the kid. It was you.

  It was never me, said the judge. Listen to me. Do you think Glanton was a fool? Dont you know he’d have killed you?

  Lies, said the kid. Lies, by god lies.

  Think again, said the judge.

  He never took part in your craziness.

  The judge smiled. He took his watch from his waistcoat and opened it and held it to the failing light.

  For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

  He looked up. He pressed the case shut and restored the instrument to his person. Time to be going, he said. I have errands.

  The kid closed his eyes. When he opened them the judge was gone. That night he called the corporal to him and they sat on either side of the bars while the kid told the soldier of the horde of gold and silver coins hid in the mountains not far from this place. He talked for a long time. The corporal had set the candle on the floor between them and he watched him as one might watch a glib and lying child. When he was finished the corporal rose and took the candle with him, leaving him in darkness.

  He was released two days later. A Spanish priest had come to baptize him and had flung water at him through the bars like a priest casting out spirits. An hour later when they came for him he grew giddy with fear. He was taken before the alcalde and this man spoke to him in a fatherly manner in the spanish language and then he was turned out into the streets.

  The doctor that he found was a young man of good family from the east. He cut open his trouserleg with scissors and looked at the blackened shaft of the arrow and moved it about. A soft fistula had formed about it.

  Do you have any pain? he said.

  The kid didnt answer.

  He pressed about the wound with his thumb. He said that he could perform the surgery and that it would cost one hundred dollars.

  The kid rose from the table and limped out.

  The day following as he sat in the plaza a boy came and led him again to the shack behind the hotel and the doctor told him that they would operate in the morning.

  He sold the pistol to an Englishman for forty dollars and woke at dawn in a lot underneath some boards where he’d crawled in the night. It was raining and he went down through the empty mud streets and hammered at the grocer’s door until the man let him in. When he appeared at the surgeon’s office he was very drunk, holding onto the doorjamb, a quart bottle half full of whiskey clutched in his hand.

  The surgeon’s assistant was a student from Sinaloa who had apprenticed himself here. An altercation ensued at the door until the surgeon himself came from the rear of the premises.

  You’ll have to come back tomorrow, he said.

  I dont aim to be no soberer then.

  The surgeon studied him. All right, he said. Let me have the whiskey.

  He entered and the apprentice shut the door behind him.

  You wont need the whiskey, said the doctor. Let me have it.

  Why wont I need it?

  We have spirits of ether. You wont need the whiskey.

  Is it stronger?

  Much stronger. In any case I cant operate on a man and him dead drunk.

  He looked at the assistant and then he looked at the surgeon. He set the bottle on the table.

  Good, said the surgeon. I want you to go with Marcelo. He will draw you a bath and give you clean linen and show you to a bed.

  He pulled his watch from his vest and held it in his palm and read it.

  It is a quarter past eight. We’ll operate at one. Get some rest. If you require anything please let us know.

  The assistant led him across the courtyard to a whitewashed adobe building in the rear. A bay that held four iron beds all empty. He bathed in a large riveted copper boiler that looked to have been salvaged from a ship and he lay on the rough mattress and listened to children playing somewhere beyond the wall. He did not sleep. When they came for him he was still drunk. He was led out and laid on a trestle in an empty room adjoining the bay and the assistant pressed an icy cloth to his nose and told him to breathe deeply.

  In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions existing only in the claims of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.

  In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through
the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.

  The light in the room altered, a door closed. He opened his eyes. His leg was swathed in sheeting and it was propped up with small rolls of reed matting. He was desperate with thirst and his head was booming and his leg was like an evil visitant in the bed with him such was the pain. By and by the assistant came with water for him. He did not sleep again. The water that he drank ran out through his skin and drenched the bedding and he lay without moving as if to outwit the pain and his face was gray and drawn and his long hair damp and matted.

  A week more and he was hobbling through the town on crutches provided him by the surgeon. He inquired at every door for news of the expriest but no one knew him.

  In June of that year he was in Los Angeles quartered in a hostel that was no more than a common dosshouse, he and forty other men of every nationality. On the morning of the eleventh all rose up still in darkness and turned out to witness a public hanging at the cárcel. When he arrived it was paling light and already such a horde of spectators at the gate that he could not well see the proceedings. He stood at the edge of the crowd while day broke and speeches were said. Then abruptly two bound figures rose vertically from among their fellows to the top of the gatehouse and there they hung and there they died. Bottles were handed about and the witnesses who had stood in silence began to talk again.

  In the evening when he returned to that place there was no one there at all. A guard leaned in the gatehouse portal chewing tobacco and the hanged men at their rope-ends looked like effigies for to frighten birds. As he drew near he saw that it was Toadvine and Brown.