In Rough Country

by Joyce Carol Oates

  They fell pregnant one by one. [The dump keeper] beat them. The wife cried and cried. There were three births that summer. The house was filling up, both rooms, the trailer…The twelve year old began to swell. The air grew close. Grew rank and fetid. He found a pile of rags in a corner. Small lumps of yellow shit wrapped up and laid by. One day in the woods…he came across two figures humping away. He watched from behind a tree until he recognized one of his girls. He tried to creep up on them but the boy was wary and leaped up and was away through the woods hauling up his breeches as he went. The old man began to beat the girl with the stick he carried. She grabbed it. He over-balanced. They sprawled together in the leaves. Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins. Her peach drawers hung from a bush. The air about him grew electric. Next thing he knew his overalls were about his knees and he was mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Ohhh.

  Fleeing lawmen, Ballard finds himself trapped in an underground cave:

  In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.

  Tragic farce, or farcical tragedy, Child of God is very likely McCarthy’s most perfectly realized work of fiction for its dramatic compression and sustained stylistic bravura, avoiding the excesses of his later, more ambitious novels.

  Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West, McCarthy’s fifth novel and the first set in the southwest borderlands to which he would lay a passionate literary claim, is the author’s most challenging work of fiction, a nightmare chronicle of American marauders in Mexico in the 1850s rendered in voices grandiloquent and colloquial, ecstatic and debased, biblical and bombastic. Like William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Blood Meridian is a highly idiosyncratic novel much admired by other writers, predominantly male writers, but difficult of access to a general reading audience, if not repellent. Admirers of Blood Meridian invariably dislike and disparage McCarthy’s “accessible” bestselling Border Trilogy, as if these novels were a betrayal of the solemn rites of macho sadism and impacted fury of Blood Meridian1 for which the ideal cover art would be a Hieronymus Bosch rendering of some scenes of Zane Grey.

  Yet Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy are counterpoised: the one a furious debunking of the legendary West, the other a subdued, humane, and subtle exploration of the tangled roots of such legends of the West as they abide in the human heart. Where Blood Meridian scorns any idealism except the jeremiad—“War is god”—the interlinked novels of the Border Trilogy testify to the quixotic idealism that celebrates friendship, brotherhood, loyalty, the integrity of the cowboy-worker as one whose life is bound up with animals in a harsh, exhausting, and dangerous environment: “I love this life,” says Billy Parham of Cities of the Plain. After the phantasmagoria of Blood Meridian, the domestic realism of much of the Border Trilogy comes as a natural corrective.

  All these novels of McCarthy’s memorialize the southwestern landscape and its skies and weather, obsessively. In all, men and boys on horseback are in continual, often repetitive movement. “They rode on” is a mantra persistent as a clatter of hoofbeats. Often, whether in nineteenth-century Mexico or twentieth-century Texas, men may camp “in the ruins of an older culture deep in the stone mountains” oblivious of the history of such indigenous native ruins as they are of what such ruins might suggest of their own mortality. In the most romantic of the novels, All the Pretty Horses, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole rides on his grandfather’s ranch beneath a sun “blood red and elliptic,” along an old Comanche trail:

  At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life…all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only.

  In Blood Meridian the adolescent romance-fantasy of Native American savages on the warpath erupts into an apocalyptic reality experienced by a crew of American mercenaries hired by a Mexican governor to scalp Indians at $100 a head:

  A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stove pipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil…death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke…

  …they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives…and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.

  McCarthy’s scenes of ecstatic violence are interlarded through Blood Meridian with a periodicity the reader will find effective or numbing depending upon his predilection for fantasy violence beyond even the biblical Book of Revelation or the most lurid of comic books.

  Where Child of God is a horror story writ small, depicted with masterly restraint, Blood Meridian is an epic accumulation of horrors, powerful in the way of Homer’s Iliad; its strategy isn’t ellipsis or indirection but an artillery barrage through hundreds of pages of wayward, unpredictable, brainless violence. The “degeneracy of mankind” is McCarthy’s great subject, infinitely demonstrable and as timely in our era of jingoist American aggression as it would have been in the decade following the end of the Vietnam War debacle, when Blood Meridian was published. Early on in the novel, a U.S. army captain broods over the “loss” of Mexican territory in the recent (1846 to 1848) war:

  We fought for it. Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didn’t give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion on God’s earth of honor or justice or the meaning of a republican government…

  The captain leaned back and folded his arms. What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico…We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them…

  We are to be the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land.

  Soon, the nameless kid from Tennessee, eerily adumbrating Cormac McCarthy’s migration westward, has signed up with a renegade band of Americans to embark upon, in a Mennonite prophet’s words, “War of a madman’s making onto a foreign land.”

  Though “the kid” is the closest to a sympathetic protagonist in Blood Meridian, McCarthy makes no effort to characterize him in any but a rudimentary way. We are not meant to identify with him, only just to perceive him, the youngest among a crew of psychopath-killers, as an unreflective participant in a series of violent, often demonic and deranged episodes that soon begin to repeat themselves. Countless men seem to be killed, yet the crew, led by a psychopath named Glanton, seems never to be depleted: “They rode on.” Blood Meridian is coolly detached from any of its subjects, distanced and ironic in the way of a classic Brechtian play; terrible thi
ngs occur but only as in fairy tales, bluntly summarized and soon forgotten:

  When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the [Gileno Indian] village people were running out under the horses’ hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy…One of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and the humans on fire came shrieking forth…

  Among Glanton’s crew, a black man named Jackson resolves his feud with a white man named Jackson:

  The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head.

  Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the expriest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast.

  Apache revenge for the Americans’ atrocities:

  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 their torsos were sliced open with flints until the entrails hung down on their chests…

  Animals, too, are prodigiously slaughtered in Blood Meridian, among them horses, dogs, puppies, even a dancing bear. Here, the Americans attack a Mexican mule team, unleashing an ecstatic gush of language beyond even Faulkner:

  The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth’s heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside.

  Among the mercenaries is an unlikely seer/prophet known as the judge. Initially a figure of uncanny eloquence as he is utterly without conscience, the judge would seem to be McCarthy’s demented spokesman, interpreting what would otherwise be brute, brainless violence passing immediately into oblivion. The judge is a gigantic man nearly seven feet tall, bald, beardless, the “enormous dome of his head when he bared it blinding white and perfectly circumscribed so that it looked to have been painted.” A figure out of some demonic mythology or cartoon Hades, the judge “shone like the moon so pale he was and not a hair to be seen anywhere on that vast corpus, not in any crevice nor in the great bores of his nose and not upon his chest nor in his ears nor any tuft at all above his eyes nor to the lids thereof.” He carries a rifle inscribed Et In Arcadia Ego. He rescues an Apache child from a slaughter only to wantonly scalp him on the trail as, later, he rescues two orphaned puppies only to toss them into a river. Even on the war trail he pauses like a gentleman naturalist to “botanize” and take notes for demented sermons to be delivered between bouts of mayhem and murder:

  The truth about the world…is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither antecedent nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddy field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

  The judge’s constant theme is the “degeneracy of mankind” of which he would seem to be a prime example, preaching an ethic out of Thomas Hobbes in which “all trades are contained in that of war” and “war is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.” Improbably, the obese, often naked judge survives while most of his comrades are killed; the last we see of him, through the kid’s eyes, is in 1878, in a tavern somewhere in Texas “among every sort of man” as their seeming exemplar. Prone to inflated rhetoric, as much buffoon as seer, the judge would seem to be a more deranged and far more malevolent Captain Ahab, or an unstoppered Kurtz (of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) whose succinct judgment “The horror! The horror!” has been replaced here by slews of verbiage and goofy behavior in the way of Marlon Brando’s shamelessly campy performance in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a reimagining of Heart of Darkness set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. But where Conrad presents the “impenetrable darkness” of the debased Kurtz sparingly, McCarthy so frequently unleashes the judge upon the reader that over the sprawl of hundreds of pages he becomes increasingly a caricature:

  Towering over [the dancers] is the judge and he is naked dancing…huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die.

  Cormac McCarthy’s least known and surely most undervalued work is his five-act play The Stonemason (1994), a remarkable feat of ventriloquism in its intimate depiction of four generations of a close-knit black family, descendants of slaves, in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. With its enormous, commercially impractical cast (thirteen named characters in addition to numerous others) and lengthy, eloquent but undramatic monologues, The Stonemason would seem to have been written to be read and not performed.

  Where Blood Meridian celebrates an unflinching and numbing nihilism, The Stonemason celebrates bonds of family love and responsibility. Like the Border Trilogy, it celebrates the integrity of work and the sometimes mystical bond between individuals (in McCarthy’s work, exclusively men) linked by a common craft or trade: “You can’t separate wisdom from the common experience and the common experience is just what the worker has in plenty.” The play’s narrator is a thirty-two-year-old black man, Ben Telfair, who’d originally planned to be a teacher but turned stonemason in emulation of his revered 101-year-old grandfather Papaw; it’s a memory play, with elaborate stage directions intended to “give distance to events and place them in a completed past.” Its central event is the death of the patriarch stonemason Papaw which seems to precipitate, as in a classic tragedy, the sudden disintegration of the Telfair family: the suicide of Ben’s father, a stonemason not content to live within his financial means, and the heroin overdose death of Ben’s nineteen-year-old nephew Soldier. Intelligently tender-hearted, realistic in language, characters, and story, The Stonemason more resembles a play by August Wilson than anything by Cormac McCarthy; it’s a testament to the author’s versatility if not his audacity.

  Much of the play is comprised of beautifully composed language turning upon Ben’s idealization of Papaw and of the sacred vocation of stonemasonry. The play avoids a dramatic resolution but takes us through a period of mourning and regeneration as Ben, grieving for his losses, has a vision of his deceased grandfather that assures him “[Papaw] would guide me all my days and he would not fail me, not fail me, not ever fail me.” Is this ending meant to be taken at face value, or ironically? The Stonemason would seem to be a play lacking a subtext, imagined without irony; its conflicts are open and reiterated. Admirer’s of McCarthy’s lurid grandiloquence and penchant for minutely described scenes of carnage would very likely be baffled by the naive and unquestioned idealism of The Stonemason:

  Grace I know is much like love and you cannot deserve it. It is freely given, without reason or equity. What could you do to deserve it? What?

  And,

  For true masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creati
on itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God…For we invent nothing but what God has put to hand.

  As The Stonemason is a rebuke of sorts to the “war god” of Blood Meridian, so the closely linked novels of the Border Trilogy are a tribute, in their warmly sympathetic depiction of the lives of young ranch hands in Texas and New Mexico in the 1950s, to such traditional values as friendship, loyalty, compassion, courage, physical endurance and (male) stoicism; though suffused with nostalgia for a way of life rapidly coming to an end in the Southwest in the decade following the end of World War II, for the most part the novels avoid sentimentality. (Why “sentimentality” need be avoided in serious literature, as it’s rarely avoided by serious people in actual life, is another issue.) Where the prevailing atmosphere of Blood Meridian is apocalyptic and its structure operatic, erupting into arias of esoteric violence and inflated language at regular intervals, the prevailing atmosphere of the Border Trilogy is something like the common sense of (male) adult maturity as it collides with (male) adolescent passion and idealism. What erupts as drama, often as tragic drama, in the ballad-like tales of John Grady Cole (of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain) and his contemporary Billy Parham (of The Crossing and Cities of the Plain), is adolescent yearning, beautifully rendered by McCarthy in an infinity of ways through hundreds of pages of prose in homage to the West:

  There was an old horseskull in the brush and [John Grady Cole] squatted and picked it up and turned it in his hands. Frail and brittle. Bleached paper white. He squatted in the long light holding it…

  What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.