Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

  Well. Adequate, I would say. I'd say adequate in money.

  Glanton studied the man. I'll tell you what I'll do with you, he said. Are you wantin to go to Californy or are you just mouth?

  California, said the owner. By all means.

  I'll carry ye for a hundred dollars, paid in advance.

  The man's eyes shifted from Glanton to the judge and back. I like some of having that much, he said.

  We'll be here a couple of days, said Glanton. You find us some more fares and we'll adjust your tariff accordingly.

  The captain will treat you right, said the judge. You can be assured of that.

  Yessir, said the owner.

  As they passed out by the cage Glanton turned to look at the idiot again. You let women see that thing? he said.

  I dont know, said the owner. There's none ever asked.

  By noon the company had moved on to an eatinghouse. There were three or four men inside when they entered and they got up and left. There was a mud oven in the lot behind the building and the bed of a wrecked wagon with a few pots and a kettle on it. An old woman in a gray shawl was cutting up beefribs with an axe while two dogs sat watching. A tall thin man in a bloodstained apron entered the room from the rear and looked them over. He leaned and placed both hands on the table before them.

  Gentlemen, he said, we dont mind servin people of color. Glad to do it. But we ast for em to set over here at this other table here. Right over here.

  He stepped back and held out one hand in a strange gesture of hospice. His guests looked at one another.

  What in the hell is he talkin about?

  Just right over here, said the man.

  Toadvine looked down the table to where Jackson sat. Several looked toward Glanton. His hands were at rest on the board in front of him and his head was slightly bent like a man at grace. The judge sat smiling, his arms crossed. They were all slightly drunk.

  He thinks we're niggers.

  They sat in silence. The old woman in the court had commenced wailing some dolorous air and the man was standing with his hand outheld. Piled just within the door were the satchels and holsters and arms of the company.

  Glanton raised his head. He looked at the man.

  What's your name? he said.

  Name's Owens. I own this place.

  Mr Owens, if you was anything at all other than a goddamn fool you could take one look at these here men and know for a stone fact they aint a one of em goin to get up from where they're at to go set somewheres else.

  Well I caint serve you.

  You suit yourself about that. Ask her what she's got, Tommy.

  Harlan was sitting at the end of the table and he leaned out and called to the old woman at her pots and asked her in Spanish what she had to eat.

  She looked toward the house. Huesos, she said.

  Huesos, said Harlan.

  Tell her to bring em, Tommy.

  She wont bring you nothin without I tell her to. I own this place.

  Harlan was calling out the open door.

  I know for a fact that man yonder's a nigger, said Owens.

  Jackson looked up at him.

  Brown turned toward the owner.

  Have you got a gun? he said.

  A gun?

  A gun. Have you got a gun.

  Not on me I aint.

  Brown pulled a small fiveshot Colt from his belt and pitched it to him. He caught it and stood holding it uncertainly.

  You got one now. Now shoot the nigger.

  Wait a goddamn minute, said Owens.

  Shoot him, said Brown.

  Jackson had risen and he pulled one of the big pistols from his belt. Owens pointed the pistol at him. You put that down, he said.

  You better forget about givin orders and shoot the son of a bitch.

  Put it down. Goddamn, man. Tell him to put it down.

  Shoot him.

  He cocked the pistol.

  Jackson fired. He simply passed his left hand over the top of the revolver he was holding in a gesture brief as flintspark and tripped the hammer. The big pistol jumped and a double handful of Owens's brains went out the back of his skull and plopped in the floor behind him. He sank without a sound and lay crumpled up with his face in the floor and one eye open and the blood welling up out of the destruction at the back of his head. Jackson sat down. Brown rose and retrieved his pistol and let the hammer back down and put it in his belt. Most terrible nigger I ever seen, he said. Find some plates, Charlie. I doubt the old lady is out there any more.

  They were drinking in a cantina not a hundred feet from this scene when the lieutenant and a half dozen armed troopers entered the premises. The cantina was a single room and there was a hole in the ceiling where a trunk of sunlight fell through onto the mud floor and figures crossing the room steered with care past the edge of this column of light as if it might be hot to the touch. They were a hardbit denizenry and they shambled to the bar and back in their rags and skins like cavefolk exchanging at some nameless trade. The lieutenant circled this reeking solarium and stood before Glanton.

  Captain, we're going to have to take whoever's responsible for the death of Mr Owens into custody.

  Glanton looked up. Who's Mr Owens? he said.

  Mr Owens is the gentleman who ran the eatinghouse down here. He's been shot to death.

  Sorry to hear it, said Glanton. Set down.

  Couts ignored the invitation. Captain, you dont aim to deny that one of your men shot him do you?

  I aim exactly that, said Glanton.

  Captain, it wont hold water.

  The judge emerged from the darkness. Evening, Lieutenant, he said. Are these men the witnesses?

  Couts looked at his corporal. No, he said. They aint witnesses. Hell, Captain. You all were seen to enter the premises and seen to leave after the shot was fired. Are you going to deny that you and your men took your dinner there?

  Deny ever goddamned word of it, said Glanton.

  Well by god I believe I can prove that you ate there.

  Kindly address your remarks to me, Lieutenant, said the judge. I represent Captain Glanton in all legal matters. I think you should know first of all that the captain does not propose to be called a liar and I would think twice before I involved myself with him in an affair of honor. Secondly I have been with him all day and I can assure you that neither he nor any of his men have ever set foot in the premises to which you allude.

  The lieutenant seemed stunned at the baldness of these disclaimers. He looked from the judge to Glanton and back again. I will be damned, he said. Then he turned and pushed past the men and quit the place.

  Glanton tilted his chair and leaned his back to the wall. They'd recruited two men from among the town's indigents, an unpromising pair that sat gawking at the end of the bench with their hats in their hands. Glanton's dark eye passed over them and alighted on the owner of the imbecile who sat alone across the room watching him.

  You a drinkin man? said Glanton.

  How's that?

  Glanton exhaled slowly through his nose.

  Yes, said the owner. Yes I am.

  There was a common wooden pail on the table before Glanton with a tin dipper in it and it was about a third full of wagonyard whiskey drawn off from a cask at the bar. Glanton nodded toward it.

  I aint a carryin it to ye.

  The owner rose and picked up his cup and came across to the table. He took up the dipper and poured his cup and set the dipper back in the bucket He gestured slightly with the cup and raised and drained it.

  Much obliged.

  Where's your ape at?

  The man looked at the judge. He looked at Glanton again.

  I dont take him out much.

  Where'd you get that thing at?

  He was left to me. Mama died. There was nobody to take him to raise. They shipped him to me. Joplin Missouri. Just put him in a box and shipped him. Took five weeks. Didnt bother him a bit. I opened up the box and there he set.

 
Get ye another drink there.

  He took up the dipper and filled his cup again.

  Big as life. Never hurt him a bit. I had him a hair suit made but he ate it.

  Aint everbody in this town seen the son of a bitch?

  Yes. Yes they have. I need to get to California. I may charge four bits out there.

  You may get tarred and feathered out there.

  I've been that. State of Arkansas. Claimed I'd given him something. Drugged him. They took him off and waited for him to get better but of course he didnt do it. They had a special preacher come and pray over him. Finally I got him back. I could have been somebody in this world wasnt for him.

  Do I understand you correctly, said the judge, that the imbecile is your brother?

  Yessir, said the man. That's the truth of the matter.

  The judge reached and took hold of the man's head in his hands and began to explore its contours. The man's eyes darted about and he held onto the judge's wrists. The judge had his entire head in his grip like an immense and dangerous faith healer. The man was standing tiptoe as if to better accommodate him in his investigations and when the judge let go of him he took a step back and looked at Glanton with eyes that were white in the gloom. The recruits at the end of the bench sat watching with their jaws down and the judge narrowed an eye at the man and studied him and then reached and gripped him again, holding him by the forehead while he prodded along the back of his skull with the ball of his thumb. When the judge put him down the man stepped back and fell over the bench and the recruits commenced to bob up and down and to wheeze and croak. The owner of the idiot looked about the tawdry grogshop, passing up each face as if it did not quite suffice. He picked himself up and moved past the end of the bench. When he was halfway across the room the judge called out to him.

  Has he always been like that? said the judge.

  Yessir. He was born that way.

  He turned to go. Glanton emptied his cup and set it before him and looked up. Were you? he said. But the owner pushed open the door and vanished in the blinding light without.

  The lieutenant came again in the evening. He and the judge sat together and the judge went over points of law with him. The lieutenant nodded, his lips pursed. The judge translated for him latin terms of jurisprudence. He cited cases civil and martial. He quoted Coke and Blackstone, Anaximander, Thales.

  In the morning there was new trouble. A young Mexican girl had been abducted. Parts of her clothes were found torn and bloodied under the north wall, over which she could only have been thrown. In the desert were drag marks. A shoe. The father of the child knelt clutching a bloodstained rag to his chest and none could persuade him to rise and none to leave. That night fires were lit in the streets and a beef killed and Glanton and his men were host to a motley collection of citizens and soldiers and reduced indians or tontos as their brothers outside the gates would name them. A keg of whiskey was broached and soon men were reeling aimlessly through the smoke. A merchant of that town brought forth a litter of dogs one of whom had six legs and another two and a third with four eyes in its head. He offered these for sale to Glanton and Glanton warned the man away and threatened to shoot them.

  The beef was stripped to the bones and the bones themselves carried off and vigas were dragged from the ruined buildings and piled onto the blaze. By now many of Glanton's men were naked and lurching about and the judge soon had them dancing while he fiddled on a crude instrument he'd commandeered and the filthy hides of which they'd divested themselves smoked and stank and blackened in the flames and the red sparks rose like the souls of the small life they'd harbored.

  By midnight the citizens had cleared out and there were armed and naked men pounding on doors demanding drink and women. In the early morning hours when the fires had burned to heaps of coals and a few sparks scampered in the wind down the cold clay streets feral dogs trotted around the cookfire snatching out the blackened scraps of meat and men lay huddled naked in the doorways clutching their elbows and snoring in the cold.

  By noon they were abroad again, wandering red-eyed in the streets, fitted out for the most part in new shirts and breeches. They collected the remaining horses from the farrier and he stood them to a drink. He was a small sturdy man named Pacheco and he had for anvil an enormous iron meteorite shaped like a great molar and the judge on a wager lifted the thing and on a further wager lifted it over his head. Several men pushed forward to feel the iron and to rock it where it stood, nor did the judge lose this opportunity to ventilate himself upon the ferric nature of heavenly bodies and their powers and claims. Two lines were drawn in the dirt ten feet apart and a third round of wagers was laid, coins from half a dozen countries in both gold and silver and even a few boletas or notes of discounted script from the mines near Tubac. The judge seized that great slag wandered for what millennia from what unreckonable corner of the universe and he raised it overhead and stood tottering and then lunged forward. It cleared the mark by a foot and he shared with no one the specie piled on the saddleblanket at the farrier's feet for not even Glanton had been willing to underwrite this third trial.

  XVII

  Leaving Tucson - A new cooperage - An exchange - Saguaro forests - Glanton at the fire - Garcia's command - The paraselene - The godfire - The expriest on astronomy - The judge on the extraterrestrial, on order, on teleology in the universe - A coin trick - Glanton's dog - Dead animals - The sands - A crucifixion - The judge on war - The priest does not say - Tierras quebradas, tierras desamparadas - The Tinajas Atlas - Un hueso de piedra - The Colorado - Argonauts - Yumas - The ferrymen - To the Yuma camp.

  They rode out at dusk. The corporal in the gatehouse above the portal came out and called to them to halt but they did not. They rode twenty-one men and a dog and a little flatbed cart aboard which the idiot and his cage had been lashed as if for a sea journey. Lashed on behind the cage rode the whiskey keg they'd drained the night before. The keg had been dismantled and rebound by a man Glanton had appointed cooper pro-tem to the expedition and it now contained within it a flask made from a common sheep's stomach and holding perhaps three quarts of whiskey. This flask was fitted to the bung at the inside and the rest of the keg was filled with water. So provisioned they passed out through the gates and beyond the walls onto the prairie where it lay pulsing in the banded twilight. The little cart jostled and creaked and the idiot clutched at the bars of his cage and croaked hoarsely after the sun.

  Glanton rode at the fore of the column in a new Ringgold saddle ironbound that he'd traded for and he wore a new hat which was black and became him. The recruits now five in number grinned at one another and looked back at the sentry. David Brown rode at the rear and he was leaving his brother here for what would prove forever and his mood was foul enough for him to have shot the sentry with no provocation at all. When the sentry called again he swung about with his rifle and the man had the sense to duck under the parapet and they heard no more from him. In the long dusk the savages rode out to meet them and the whiskey was exchanged for upon a Saltillo blanket spread on the ground. Glanton paid little attention to the proceedings. When the savages had counted out gold and silver to the judge's satisfaction Glanton stepped onto the blanket and kicked the coins together with his bootheel and then stepped away and directed Brown to take up the blanket. Mangas and his lieutenants exchanged dark looks but the Americans mounted up and rode out and none looked back save the recruits. They'd become privy to the details of the business and one of them fell in alongside Brown and asked if the Apaches would not follow them.

  They wont ride at night, said Brown.

  The recruit looked back at the figures gathered about the keg in that scoured and darkening waste.

  Why wont they? he said.

  Brown spat. Because it's dark, he said.

  They rode west from the town across the base of a small mountain through a dogtown strewn with old broken earthenware from a crockery furnace that once had been there. The keeper of the idiot rode downside of the tre
stled cage and the idiot clutched the poles and watched the land pass in silence.

  They rode that night through forests of saguaro up into the hills to the west. The sky was all overcast and those fluted columns passing in the dark were like the ruins of vast temples ordered and grave and silent save for the soft cries of elf owls among them. The terrain was thick with cholla and clumps of it clung to the horses with spikes that would drive through a bootsole to the bones within and a wind came up through the hills and all night it sang with a wild viper sound through that countless reach of spines. They rode on and the land grew more spare and they reached the first of a series of jornadas where there would be no water at all and there they camped. That night Glanton stared long into the embers of the fire. All about him his men were sleeping but much was changed. So many gone, defected or dead. The Delawares all slain. He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

  Across from him sat the vast abhorrence of the judge. Half naked, scribbling in his ledger. In the thornforest through which they'd passed the little desert wolves yapped and on the dry plain before them others answered and the wind fanned the coals that he watched. The bones of cholla that glowed there in their incandescent basketry pulsed like burning holothurians in the phosphorous dark of the sea's deeps. The idiot in his cage had been drawn close to the fire and he watched it tirelessly. When Glanton raised his head he saw the kid across the fire from him, squatting in his blanket, watching the judge.

  Two days later they encountered a ragged legion under the command of Colonel Garcia. They were troops from Sonora seeking a band of Apaches under Pablo and they numbered close to a hundred riders. Of these some were without hats and some without pantaloons and some were naked under their coats and they were armed with derelict weapons, old fusils and Tower muskets, some with bows and arrows or nothing more than ropes with which to garrote the enemy.