Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

They rode on, following the course of the Santa Cruz, up through stands of immense riverbottom cottonwoods. They did not cut the sign of the Apache again and they found no trace of the missing scouts. The following day they passed the old mission at San Jose de Tumacacori and the judge rode off to look at the church which stood about a mile off the track. He'd given a short disquisition on the history and architecture of the mission and those who heard it would not believe that he had never been there. Three of the party rode with him and Glanton watched them go with dark misgiving. He and the others rode on a short distance and then he halted and turned back.

  The old church was in ruins and the door stood open to the high walled enclosure. When Glanton and his men rode through the crumbling portal four horses stood riderless in the empty compound among the dead fruit trees and grapevines. Glanton rode with his rifle upright before him, the buttplate on his thigh. His dog heeled to the horse and they approached cautiously the sagging walls of the church. They would have ridden their horses through the door but as they reached it there was a rifleshot from inside and pigeons flapped up and they slipped down from their mounts and crouched behind them with their rifles. Glanton looked back at the others and then walked his horse forward to where he could see into the interior. Part of the upper wall was fallen in and most of the roof and there was a man lying in the floor. Glanton led the horse into the sacristy and stood looking down with the others.

  The man in the floor was dying and he was dressed altogether in homemade clothes of sheephide even to boots and a strange cap. They turned him over on the cracked clay tiles and his jaw moved and a bloody spittle formed along his lower lip. His eyes were dull and there was fear in them and there was something else. John Prewett stood the butt of his rifle in the floor and swung his horn about to recharge the piece. I seen anothern run, he said. They's two of em.

  The man in the floor began to move. He had one arm lying in his groin and he moved it slightly and pointed. At them or at the height from which he had fallen or to his destination in eternity they did not know. Then he died.

  Glanton looked about the ruins. Where did this son of a bitch come from? he said.

  Prewett nodded toward the crumbling mud parapet. He was up yonder. I didnt know what he was. Still dont. I shot the son of a bitch out of there.

  Glanton looked at the judge.

  I think he was an imbecile, the judge said.

  Glanton led his horse through the church and out by a small door in the nave into the yard. He was sitting there when they brought the other hermit out. Jackson prodded him forward with the barrel of his rifle, a small thin man, not young. The one they'd killed was his brother. They had jumped ship on the coast long ago and made their way to this place. He was terrified and he spoke no english and little Spanish. The judge spoke to him in german. They had been here for years. The brother had his wits stole in this place and the man now before them in his hides and his peculiar bootees was not altogether sane. They left him there. As they rode out he was trotting up and back in the yard calling out. He seemed not to be aware that his brother was dead in the church.

  The judge caught Glanton up and they rode side by side out to the road.

  Glanton spat. Ort to of shot that one too, he said.

  The judge smiled.

  I dont like to see white men that way, Glanton said. Dutch or whatever. I dont like to see it.

  They rode north along the river trace. The woods were bare and the leaves on the ground clutched little scales of ice and the mottled and bony limbs of the cottonwoods were stark and heavy against the quilted desert sky. In the evening they passed through Tubac, abandoned, wheat dead in the winter fields and grass growing in the street. There was a blind man on a stoop watching the plaza and as they passed he raised his head to listen.

  They rode out onto the desert to camp. There was no wind and the silence out there was greatly favored by every kind of fugitive as was the open country itself and no mountains close at hand for enemies to black themselves against. They were caught up and saddled in the morning before light, all riding together, their arms at the ready. Each man scanned the terrain and the movements of the least of creatures were logged into their collective cognizance until they were federated with invisible wires of vigilance and advanced upon that landscape with a single resonance. They passed abandoned haciendas and roadside graves and by midmorning they had picked up the track of the Apaches again coming in off the desert to the west and advancing before them through the loose sand of the riverbottom. The riders got down and pinched up samples of the forced sand at the rim of the tracks and tested it between their fingers and calibrated its moisture against the sun and let it fall and looked off up the river through the naked trees. They remounted and rode on.

  They found the lost scouts hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree. They were skewered through the cords of their heels with sharpened shuttles of green wood and they hung gray and naked above the dead ashes of the coals where they'd been roasted until their heads had charred and the brains bubbled in the skulls and steam sang from their noseholes. Their tongues were drawn out and held with sharpened sticks thrust through them and they had been docked of their ears and their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests. Some of the men pushed forward with their knives and cut the bodies down and they left them there in the ashes. The two darker forms were the last of the Delawares and the other two were the Vandiemenlander and a man from the east named Gilchrist. Among their barbarous hosts they had met with neither favor nor discrimination but had suffered and died impartially.

  They rode that night through the mission of San Xavier del Bac, the church solemn and stark in the starlight. Not a dog barked. The clusters of Papago huts seemed without tenant. The air was cold and clear and the country there and beyond lay in a darkness unclaimed by so much as an owl. A pale green meteor came up the valley floor behind them and passed overhead and vanished silently in the void.

  At dawn on the outskirts of the presidio of Tucson they passed the ruins of several haciendas and they passed more roadside markers where people had been murdered. Out on the plain stood a small estancia where the buildings were still smoking and along the segments of a fence constructed from the bones of cactus sat vultures shoulder to shoulder facing east to the promised sun, lifting one foot and then the other and holding out their wings like cloaks. They saw the bones of pigs that had died in a claywalled lot and they saw a wolf in a melonpatch that crouched between its thin elbows and watched them as they passed. The town lay on the plain to the north in a thin line of pale walls and they grouped their horses along a low esker of gravel and surveyed it and the country and the naked ranges of mountains beyond. The stones of the desert lay in dark tethers of shadow and a wind was blowing out of the sun where it sat squat and pulsing at the eastern reaches of the earth. They chucked up their horses and sallied out onto the flat as did the Apache track before them two days old and a hundred riders strong.

  They rode with their rifles on their knees, fanned out, riding abreast. The desert sunrise flared over the ground before them and ringdoves rose out of the chaparral by ones and by pairs and whistled away with thin calls. A thousand yards out and they could see the Apaches camped along the south wall. Their animals were grazing among the willows in the periodic river basin to the west of the town and what seemed to be rocks or debris under the wall was the sordid collection of leantos and wickiups thrown up with poles and hides and wagonsheets.

  They rode on. A few dogs had begun to bark. Glanton's dog was quartering back and forth nervously and a deputation of riders had set out from the camp.

  They were Chiricahuas, twenty, twenty-five of them. Even with the sun up it was not above freezing and yet they sat their horses half naked, naught but boots and breechclouts and the plumed hide helmets they wore, stoneage savages daubed with clay paints in obscure charges, greasy, stinking, the paint on the horses pale under the dust and the horses
prancing and blowing cold. They carried lances and bows and a few had muskets and they had long black hair and dead black eyes that cut among the riders studying their arms, the sclera bloodshot and opaque. None spoke even to another and they shouldered their horses through the party in a sort of ritual movement as if certain points of ground must be trod in a certain sequence as in a child's game yet with some terrible forfeit at hand.

  The leader of these jackal warriors was a small dark man in cast-off Mexican military attire and he carried a sword and he carried in a torn and gaudy baldric one of the Whitneyville Colts that had belonged to the scouts. He sat his horse before Glanton and assessed the position of the other riders and then asked in good Spanish where were they bound. He'd no sooner spoken than Glanton's horse leaned its jaw forward and seized the man's horse by the ear. Blood flew. The horse screamed and reared and the Apache struggled to keep his seat and drew his sword and found himself staring into the black lemniscate that was the paired bores of Glanton's doublerifle. Glanton slapped the muzzle of his horse twice hard and it tossed its head with one eye blinking and blood dripping from its mouth. The Apache wrenched his pony's head around and when Glanton spun to look at his men he found them frozen in deadlock with the savages, they and their arms wired into a construction taut and fragile as those puzzles wherein the placement of each piece is predicated upon every other and they in turn so that none can move for bringing down the structure entire.

  The leader was the first to speak. He gestured at the bloodied ear of his mount and spoke angrily in apache, his dark eyes avoiding Glanton. The judge pushed his horse forward.

  Vaya tranquilo, he said. Un accidente, nada mas.

  Mire, said the Apache. Mire la oreja de mi caballo.

  He steadied the animal's head to show it but it jerked loose and slung the broken ear about so that blood sprayed the riders. Horseblood or any blood a tremor ran that perilous architecture and the ponies stood rigid and quivering in the reddened sunrise and the desert under them hummed like a snaredrum. The tensile properties of this unratified truce were abused to the utmost of their enduring when the judge stood slightly in the saddle and raised his arm and spoke out a greeting beyond them.

  Another eight or ten mounted warriors had ridden out from the wall. Their leader was a huge man with a huge head and he was dressed in overalls cut off at the knees to accommodate the leggingtops of his moccasins and he wore a checked shirt and a red scarf. He carried no arms but the men at either side of him were armed with shortbarreled rifles and they also carried the saddle pistols and other accoutrements of the murdered scouts. As they approached the other savages deferred and gave way before them. The indian whose horse had been bitten pointed out this injury to them but the leader only nodded affably. He turned his mount quarterwise to the judge and it arched its neck and he sat it well. Buenos dias, he said. De donde viene?

  The judge smiled and touched the withered garland at his brow, forgetting possibly that he had no hat. He presented his chief Glanton very formally. Introductions were exchanged. The man's name was Mangas and he was cordial and spoke Spanish well. When the rider of the injured horse again put forth his claim for consideration this man dismounted and took hold of the animal's head and examined it. He was bandylegged for all his height and he was strangely proportioned. He looked up at the Americans and he looked at the other riders and waved his hand at them.

  Andale, he said. He turned to Glanton. Ellos son amigables. Un poco borracho, nada mas.

  The Apache riders had begun to extricate themselves from among the Americans like men backing out of a thornthicket. The Americans stood their rifles upright and Mangas led the injured horse forward and turned its head up, containing the animal solely with his hands and the white eye rolling crazily. After some discussion it became plain that whatever the assessment of damage levied there was no specie acceptable by way of payment other than whiskey.

  Glanton spat and eyed the man. No hay Whiskey, he said.

  Silence fell. The Apaches looked from one to the other. They looked at the saddle wallets and canteens and gourds. Como? said Mangas.

  No hay whiskey, said Glanton.

  Mangas let go the rough hide headstall of the horse. His men watched him. He looked toward the walled town and he looked at the judge. No whiskey? he said.

  No whiskey.

  His among the clouded faces seemed unperturbed. He looked over the Americans, their gear. In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk. The judge and Glanton sat their mounts and offered nothing further in the way of parley.

  Hay whiskey en Tucson, said Mangas.

  Sin duda, said the judge. Y soldados tambien. He put forward his horse, his rifle in one hand and the reins in the other. Glanton moved. The horse behind him shifted into motion. Then Glanton stopped.

  Tiene oro? he said.

  Si.

  Cuanto.

  Bastante.

  Glanton looked at the judge then at Mangas again. Bueno, he said. Tres dias. Aqui. Un barril de whiskey.

  Un barril?

  Un barril. He nudged the pony and the Apaches gave way and Glanton and the judge and those who followed rode singlefile toward the gates of the squalid mud town that sat burning in the winter sunrise on the plain.

  The lieutenant in charge of the little garrison was named Couts. He had been to the coast with Major Graham's command and returned here four days ago to find the town under an informal investment by the Apaches. They were drunk on tiswin they'd brewed and there had been shooting in the night two nights running and an incessant clamor for whiskey. The garrison had a twelvepound demiculverin loaded with musketballs mounted on the revetment and Couts expected the savages would withdraw when they could get nothing more to drink. He was very formal and he addressed Glanton as Captain. None of the tattered partisans had even dismounted. They looked about at the bleak and ruinous town. A blindfolded burro tethered to a pole was turning a pugmill, circling endlessly, the wooden millshaft creaking in its blocks. Chickens and smaller birds were scratching at the base of the mill. The pole was a good four feet off the ground yet the birds ducked or squatted each time it passed overhead. In the dust of the plaza lay a number of men apparently asleep. White, indian, Mexican. Some covered with blankets and some not. At the far end of the square there was a public whippingpost that was dark about its base where dogs had pissed on it. The lieutenant followed their gaze. Glanton pushed back his hat and looked down from his horse.

  Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said.

  It was the first word any of them had spoken. Couts looked them over. Haggard and haunted and blacked by the sun. The lines and pores of their skin deeply grimed with gunblack where they'd washed the bores of their weapons. Even the horses looked alien to any he'd ever seen, decked as they were in human hair and teeth and skin. Save for their guns and buckles and a few pieces of metal in the harness of the animals there was nothing about these arrivals to suggest even the discovery of the wheel.

  There are several places, said the lieutenant. None open yet though, I'm afraid.

  They're fixin to get that way, said Glanton. He nudged the horse forward. He did not speak again and none of the others had spoken at all. As they crossed the plaza a few vagrants raised their heads up out of their blankets and looked after them.

  The bar they entered was a square mud room and the proprietor set about serving them in his underwear. They sat on a bench at a wooden table in the gloom drinking sullenly.

  Where you all from? said the proprietor.

  Glanton and the judge went out to see if they could recruit any men from the rabble reposing in the dust of the square. Some of them were sitting, squinting in the sun. A man with a bowieknife was offering to cut blades with anyone at a wager to see who had the better steel. The judge went among them with his smile.

  Captain what all you got in them saddlegrips?

  Glanton turned. He and the judge carried their valises across their shoulders
. The man who'd spoken was propped against a post with one knee drawn up to support his elbow.

  These bags? said Glanton.

  Them bags.

  These here bags are full of gold and silver, said Glanton, for they were.

  The idler grinned and spat.

  That's why he's a wantin to go to Californy, said another. Account of he's done got a satchel full of gold now.

  The judge smiled benignly at the wastrels. You're liable to take a chill out here, he said. Who's for the gold fields now.

  One man rose and took a few steps away and began to piss in the street.

  Maybe the wild man'll go with ye, called another. Him and Cloyce'll make ye good hands.

  They been tryin to go for long enough.

  Glanton and the judge sought them out. A rude tent thrown up out of an old tarp. A sign that said: See The Wild Man Two Bits. They passed behind a wagonsheet where within a crude cage of paloverde poles crouched a naked imbecile. The floor of the cage was littered with filth and trodden food and flies clambered about everywhere. The idiot was small and misshapen and his face was smeared with feces and he sat peering at them with dull hostility silently chewing a turd.

  The owner came from the rear shaking his head at them. Aint nobody allowed in here. We aint open.

  Glanton looked about the wretched enclosure. The tent smelled of oil and smoke and excrement. The judge squatted to study the imbecile.

  Is that thing yours? Glanton said.

  Yes. Yes he is.

  Glanton spat. Man told us you was wantin to go to Californy.

  Well, said the owner. Yes, that's right. That is right.

  What do you figure to do with that thing?

  Take him with me.

  How you aim to haul him?

  Got a pony and cart. To haul him in.

  You got any money?

  The judge raised up. This is Captain Glanton, he said. He's leading an expedition to California. He's willing to take a few passengers under the protection of his company provided they can find themselves adequately.

  Well now yes. Got some money. How much money are we talking about?

  How much have you got? said Glanton.