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

by Cormac McCarthy

  Brown studied the judge. You’re crazy Holden. Crazy at last.

  The judge smiled.

  Might does not make right, said Irving. The man that wins in some combat is not vindicated morally.

  Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man’s vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.

  The judge searched out the circle for disputants. But what says the priest? he said.

  Tobin looked up. The priest does not say.

  The priest does not say, said the judge. Nihil dicit. But the priest has said. For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself.

  Tobin shook his head. You’ve a blasphemous tongue, Holden. And in truth I was never a priest but only a novitiate to the order.

  Journeyman priest or apprentice priest, said the judge. Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.

  I’ll not secondsay you in your notions, said Tobin. Dont ask it.

  Ah Priest, said the judge. What could I ask of you that you’ve not already given?

  On the day following they crossed the malpais afoot, leading the horses upon a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood, threading those badlands of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land accursed, shouldering the little cart over the rifts and ledges, the idiot clinging to the bars and calling hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates. They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable as the burnedout floor of hell and they climbed up through a low range of barren granite hills to a stark promontory where the judge, triangulating from known points of landscape, reckoned anew their course. A gravel flat stretched away to the horizon. Far to the south beyond the black volcanic hills lay a lone albino ridge, sand or gypsum, like the back of some pale seabeast surfaced among the dark archipelagos. They went on. In a day’s ride they reached the stone tanks and the water they sought and they drank and bailed water down from the higher tanks to the dry ones below for the horses.

  At all desert watering places there are bones but the judge that evening carried to the fire one such as none there had ever seen before, a great femur from some beast long extinct that he’d found weathered out of a bluff and that he now sat measuring with the tailor’s tape he carried and sketching into his log. All in that company had heard the judge on paleontology save for the new recruits and they sat watching and putting to him such queries as they could conceive of. He answered them with care, amplifying their own questions for them, as if they might be apprentice scholars. They nodded dully and reached to touch that pillar of stained and petrified bone, perhaps to sense with their fingers the temporal immensities of which the judge spoke. The keeper led the imbecile down from its cage and tethered it by the fire with a braided horsehair rope that it could not chew through and it stood leaning in its collar with its hands outheld as if it yearned for the flames. Glanton’s dog rose and sat watching it and the idiot swayed and drooled with its dull eyes falsely brightened by the fire. The judge had been holding the femur upright in order to better illustrate its analogies to the prevalent bones of the country about and he let it fall in the sand and closed his book.

  There is no mystery to it, he said.

  The recruits blinked dully.

  Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.

  He rose and moved away into the darkness beyond the fire. Aye, said the expriest watching, his pipe cold in his teeth. And no mystery. As if he were no mystery himself, the bloody old hoodwinker.

  Three days later they reached the Colorado. They stood at the edge of the river watching the roiled and claycolored waters coming down in a flat and steady seething out of the desert. Two cranes rose from the shore and flapped away and the horses and mules led down the bank ventured uncertainly into the eddying shoals and stood drinking and looking up with their muzzles dripping at the passing current and the shore beyond.

  Upriver they encountered in camp the remnants of a wagon train laid waste by cholera. The survivors moved among their noonday cookfires or stared hollowly at the ragged dragoons riding up out of the willows. Their chattels were scattered about over the sand and the wretched estates of the deceased stood separate to be parceled out among them. There were in the camp a number of Yuma indians. The men wore their hair hacked to length with knives or plastered up in wigs of mud and they shambled about with heavy clubs dangling in their hands. Both they and the women were tattooed of face and the women were naked save for skirts of willowbark woven into string and many of them were lovely and many more bore the marks of syphilis.

  Glanton moved through this balesome depot with his dog at heel and his rifle in his hand. The Yumas were swimming the few sorry mules left to the party across the river and he stood on the bank and watched them. Downriver they’d drowned one of the animals and towed it ashore to be butchered. An old man in a shacto coat and a long beard sat with his boots at his side and his feet in the river.

  Where’s your all’s horses? said Glanton.

  We ate them.

  Glanton studied the river.

  How do you aim to cross?

  On the ferry.

  He looked crossriver to where the old man gestured. What does he get to cross ye? he said.

  Dollar a head.

  Glanton turned and studied the pilgrims on the beach. The dog was drinking from the river and he said something to it and it came up and sat by his knee.

  The ferryboat put out from the far bank and crossed to a landing upstream where there was a deadman built of driftlogs. The boat was contrived from a pair of old wagonboxes fitted together and caulked with pitch. A group of people had shouldered up their dunnage and stood waiting. Glanton turned and went up the bank to get his horse.

  The ferryman was a doctor from New York state named Lincoln. He was supervising the loading, the travelers stepping aboard and squatting along the rails of the scow with their parcels and looking out uncertainly at the broad water. A half-mastiff dog sat on the bank watching. At Glanton’s approach it stood bristling. The doctor turned and shaded his eyes with his hand and Glanton introduced himself. They shook hands. A pleasure, Captain Glanton. I am at your service.

  Glanton nodded. The doctor gave instructions to the two men working for him and he and Glanton walked out along the downriver path, Glanton leading the horse and the doctor’s dog following some ten paces behind.

  Glanton’s party was camped on a bench of sand partially shaded by river willows. As he and the doctor approached the idiot rose in his cage and seized the bars and commenced hooting as if he’d warn the doctor back. The doctor went wide of the thing, glancing at his host, but Glanton’s lieutenants had come forward and soon the doctor and the judge were deep in discourse to the e
xclusion of anyone else.

  In the evening Glanton and the judge and a detail of five men rode downriver into the Yuma encampment. They rode through a pale wood of willow and sycamore flaked with clay from the high water and they rode past old acequias and small winter fields where the dry husks of corn rattled lightly in the wind and they crossed the river at the Algodones ford. When the dogs announced them the sun was already down and the western land red and smoking and they rode single file in cameo detailed by the winey light with their dark sides to the river. Cookfires from the camp smoldered among the trees and a delegation of mounted savages rode out to meet them.

  They halted and sat their horses. The party approaching were clad in such fool’s regalia and withal bore themselves with such aplomb that the paler riders were hard put to keep their composure. The leader was a man named Caballo en Pelo and this old mogul wore a belted wool overcoat that would have served a far colder climate and beneath it a woman’s blouse of embroidered silk and a pair of pantaloons of gray cassinette. He was small and wiry and he had lost an eye to the Maricopas and he presented the Americans with a strange priapic leer that may have at one time been a smile. At his right rode a lesser chieftain named Pascual in a frogged coat out at the elbows and who wore in his nose a bone hung with small pendants. The third man was Pablo and he was clad in a scarlet coat with tarnished braiding and tarnished epaulettes of silver wire. He was barefooted and bare of leg and he wore on his face a pair of round green goggles. In this attire they arranged themselves before the Americans and nodded austerely.

  Brown spat on the ground in disgust and Glanton shook his head.

  Aint you a crazylookin bunch of niggers, he said.

  Only the judge seemed to weigh them up at all and he was sober in the doing, judging as perhaps he did that things are seldom what they seem.

  Buenas tardes, he said.

  The mogul tossed his chin, a small gesture darkened with a certain ambiguity. Buenas tardes, he said. De dónde viene?

  XVIII

  The return to camp – The idiot delivered – Sarah Borginnis – A confrontation – Bathed in the river – The tumbril burned – James Robert in camp – Another baptism – Judge and fool.

  When they rode out of the Yuma camp it was in the dark of early morning. Cancer, Virgo, Leo raced the ecliptic down the southern night and to the north the constellation of Cassiopeia burned like a witch’s signature on the black face of the firmament. In the nightlong parley they’d come to terms with the Yumas in conspiring to seize the ferry. They rode upriver among the floodstained trees talking quietly among themselves like men returning late from a social, from a wedding or a death.

  By daylight the women at the crossing had discovered the idiot in his cage. They gathered about him, apparently unappalled by the nakedness and filth. They crooned to him and they consulted among themselves and a woman named Sarah Borginnis led them to seek out the brother. She was a huge woman with a great red face and she read him riot.

  What’s your name anyways? she said.

  Cloyce Bell mam.

  What’s his.

  His name’s James Robert but there dont anybody call him it.

  If your mother was to see him what do you reckon she’d say.

  I dont know. She’s dead.

  Aint you ashamed?

  No mam.

  Dont you sass me.

  I’m not trying to. You want him just take him. I’ll give him to you. I cant do any more than what I’ve done.

  Damn if you aint a sorry specimen. She turned to the other women.

  You all help me. We need to bathe him and get some clothes on him. Somebody run get some soap.

  Mam, said the keeper.

  You all just take him on to the river.

  Toadvine and the kid passed them as they were dragging the cart along. They stepped off the path and watched them go by. The idiot was clutching the bars and hooting at the water and some of the women had started up a hymn.

  Where are they takin it? said Toadvine.

  The kid didnt know. They were backing the cart through the loose sand toward the edge of the river and they let it down and opened the cage. The Borginnis woman stood before the imbecile.

  James Robert come out of there.

  She reached in and took him by the hand. He peered past her at the water, then he reached for her.

  A sigh went up from the women, several of whom had hiked their skirts and tucked them at the waist and now stood in the river to receive him.

  She handed him down, him clinging to her neck. When his feet touched the ground he turned to the water. She was smeared with feces but she seemed not to notice. She looked back at those on the riverbank.

  Burn that thing, she said.

  Someone ran to the fire for a brand and while they led James Robert into the waters the cage was torched and began to burn.

  He clutched at their skirts, he reached with a clawed hand, gibbering, drooling.

  He sees hisself in it, they said.

  Shoo. Imagine having this child penned up like a wild animal.

  The flames from the burning cart crackled in the dry air and the noise must have caught the idiot’s attention for he turned his dead black eyes upon it. He knows, they said. All agreed. The Borginnis woman waded out with her dress ballooning about her and took him deeper and swirled him about grown man that he was in her great stout arms. She held him up, she crooned to him. Her pale hair floated on the water.

  His old companions saw him that night before the migrants’ fires in a coarsewoven wool suit. His thin neck turned warily in the collar of his outsized shirt. They’d greased his hair and combed it flat upon his skull so that it looked painted on. They brought him sweets and he sat drooling and watched the fire, greatly to their admiration. In the dark the river ran on and a fishcolored moon rose over the desert east and set their shadows by their sides in the barren light. The fires drew down and the smoke stood gray and chambered in the night. The little jackal wolves cried from across the river and the camp dogs stirred and muttered. The Borginnis took the idiot to his pallet under a wagonsheet and stripped him to his new underwear and she tucked him into his blanket and kissed him goodnight and the camp grew quiet. When the idiot crossed that blue and smoky amphitheatre he was naked once again, shambling past the fires like a balden groundsloth. He paused and tested the air and he shuffled on. He went wide of the landing and stumbled through the shore willows, whimpering and pushing with his thin arms at things in the night. Then he was standing alone on the shore. He hooted softly and his voice passed from him like a gift that was also needed so that no sound of it echoed back. He entered the water. Before the river reached much past his waist he’d lost his footing and sunk from sight.

  Now the judge on his midnight rounds was passing along at just this place stark naked himself—such encounters being commoner than men suppose or who would survive any crossing by night—and he stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows.

  XIX

  The howitzer – The Yumas attack – A skirmish – Glanton appropriates the ferry – The hanged Judas – The coffers – A deputation for the coast – San Diego – Arranging for supplies – Brown at the farrier’s – A dispute – Webster and Toadvine freed – The ocean – An altercation – A man burned alive – Brown in durance vile – Tales of treasure – An escape – A murder in the mountains – Glanton leaves Yuma – The alcalde hanged – Hostages – Returns to Yuma – Doctor and judge, nigger and fool – Dawn on the river – Carts without wheels – Murder of Jackson – The Yuma massacre.

  The doctor had been bound for California when the ferry fell into his hands for the most by chance. In the ensuing months h
e’d amassed a considerable wealth in gold and silver and jewelry. He and the two men who worked for him had taken up residence on the west bank of the river overlooking the ferry-landing among the abutments of an unfinished hillside fortification made from mud and rock. In addition to the pair of freightwagons he’d inherited from Major Graham’s command he had also a mountain howitzer—a bronze twelvepounder with a bore the size of a saucer—and this piece stood idle and unloaded in its wooden truck. In the doctor’s crude quarters he and Glanton and the judge together with Brown and Irving sat drinking tea and Glanton sketched for the doctor a few of their indian adventures and advised him strongly to secure his position. The doctor demurred. He claimed to get along well with the Yumas. Glanton told him to his face that any man who trusted an indian was a fool. The doctor colored but he held his tongue. The judge intervened. He asked the doctor did he consider the pilgrims huddled on the far shore to be under his protection. The doctor said that he did so consider them. The judge spoke reasonably and with concern and when Glanton and his detail returned down the hill to cross to their camp they had the doctor’s permission to fortify the hill and charge the howitzer and to this end they set about running the last of their lead until they had close on to a hatful of rifleballs.

  They loaded the howitzer that evening with something like a pound of powder and the entire cast of shot and they trundled the piece to a place of advantage overlooking the river and the landing below.