Child of God Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Cormac McCarthy

  "[McCarthy] is a very fine writer--one of our best."

  --Peter Matthiessen

  "Cormac McCarthy's supple and stunning language, the breadth in his characters, his sense of the physicality of the landscape, an evocation of biblical themes to which he is equal, and a pure gift for conveyance distinguish him as a contemporary writer almost without equal."

  --Barry Lopez

  "[McCarthy] puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy."

  --The New York Times Book Review

  "No other novelist in America seems to have looked the work of Faulkner in the eye without blinking and lived to write in his spirit without sounding like a parody of the master."

  --Dallas Morning News

  "McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly--envied."

  --Ralph Ellison

  Cormac McCarthy

  CHILD OF GOD

  Cormac McCarthy is the author of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, The Stonemason (a play), and All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  BOOKS BY Cormac McCarthy

  The Orchard Keeper

  Outer Dark

  Child of God

  Suttree

  Blood Meridian

  The Stonemason (a play)

  All the Pretty Horses

  The Crossing

  Cities of the Plain

  First Vintage International Edition, June 1993

  Copyright (c) 1973 by Cormac McCarthy All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by

  Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada

  Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by

  Random House, Inc., New York, in 1973.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCarthy, Cormac, 1933-

  Child of God / Cormac McCarthy. -- 1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-30776248-1

  I. Title.

  PS3563.C337C4 1993

  813'.54--dc20 92-50587

  Author photograph (c) Marion Ettlinger

  v3.1_r2

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Part II

  Part III

  I

  THEY CAME LIKE A CARAVAN of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. They passed under flowering appletrees and passed a log crib chinked with orange mud and forded a branch and came in sight of an aged clapboard house that stood in blue shade under the wall of the mountain. Beyond it stood a barn. One of the men in the truck bonged on the cab roof with his fist and the truck came to a halt. Cars and trucks came on through the weeds in the yard, people afoot.

  To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom. The man stands straddlelegged, has made in the dark humus a darker pool wherein swirls a pale foam with bits of straw. Buttoning his jeans he moves along the barn wall, himself flddlebacked with light, a petty annoyance flickering across the wallward eye.

  Standing in the forebay door he blinks. Behind him there is a rope hanging from the loft. His thinly bristled jaw knots and slacks as if he were chewing but he is not chewing. His eyes are almost shut against the sun and through the thin and blueveined lids you can see the eyeballs moving, watching. A man in a blue suit gesturing from the truckbed. A lemonade stand going up. The musicians striking up a country reel and the yard filling up with people and the loudspeaker making a few first squawks.

  All right now let's get everbody up here and get registered for ye free silver dollars. Right up here. That's the way. How you little lady? Well all right. Yessir. All right now. Jessie? Have you got it ...? All right now. Jess and them is got the house open for them that wants to see inside. That's all right. We're fixin to have some music here in just a minute and we want to get everbody registered fore we have the drawins. Yessir? What's that? Yessir, that's right. That's right everbody, we will bid on the tracts and then we'll have a chance to bid on the whole. They's both sides of the road now, it goes plumb across the creek to them big timbers on the other side yonder. Yessir. We'll get into that directly.

  Bowing, pointing, smiling. The microphone in one hand. Among the pines on the ridge the sound of the autioneer's voice echoed muted, redundant. An illusion of multiple voices, a ghost chorus among old ruins.

  Now they's good timber up here too. Real good timber. It's been cut over fifteen twenty year ago and so maybe it ain't big timber yet, but looky here. While you're a laying down there in your bed at night this timber is up here growin. Yessir. And I mean that sincerely. They is real future in this property. As much future as you'll find anywheres in this valley. Maybe more. Friends, they is no limit to the possibilities on a piece of property like this. I'd buy it myself if I had any more money. And I believe you all know that ever penny I own is in real estate. And ever one I've made has been from real estate. If I had a million dollars I would have it ever cent invested in real estate within ninety days. And you all know that. They ain't no way for it to go but up. A piece of land like this here I sincere believe will give ye ten percent on your investment. And maybe more. Maybe as high as twenty percent. Your money down here in this bank won't do that for ye and you all know that. There is no sounder investment than property. Land. You all know that a dollar won't buy what it used to buy. A dollar might not be worth but fifty cents a year from now. And you all know that. But real estate is goin up, up, up.

  Friends, six year ago when my uncle bought the Prater place down here everbody tried to talk him out of it. He give nineteen-five for that farm. Said I know what I'm a doin. And you all know what happent down there. Yessir. Sold for thirty-eight thousand. A piece of land like this ... Now it needs some improvin. It's rough. Yes it is. But friends you can double your money on it. A piece of real estate, and particular in this valley, is the soundest investment you can make. Sound as a dollar. And I'm very sincere when I say that.

  In the pines the voices chanted a lost litany. Then they stopped. A murmur went through the crowd. The auctioneer had handed over the microphone to another man. The other man said: Holler at the sheriff yonder, C B.

  The auctioneer waved his hand at him and bent to the man standing in front of him. Small man, ill-shaven, now holding a rifle.

  What do you want, Lester?

  I done told ye. I want you to get your goddamn ass off my property. And take these fools with ye.

  Watch your mouth, Lester. They's ladies present.

  I don't give a fuck who's present.

  It ain't your property.

  The hell it ain't.

&nbs
p; You done been locked up once over this. I guess you want to go again. The high sheriff is standin right over yonder.

  I don't give a good goddamn where the high sheriff is at. I want you sons of bitches off of my goddamned property. You hear?

  The auctioneer was squatting on the tailboard of the truck. He looked down at his shoes, plucked idly at a piece of dried mud in the welt. When he looked back up at the man with the rifle he was smiling. He said: Lester, you don't get a grip on yourself they goin to put you in a rubber room.

  The man took a step backward, the rifle in one hand. He was almost crouching and he held his free hand out with the fingers spread toward the crowd as if to hold them back. Get down off that truck, he hissed.

  The man on the truck spat and squinted at him. What you aim to do, Lester, shoot me? I didn't take your place off of ye. County done that. I was just hired as auctioneer.

  Get off that truck.

  Behind him the musicians looked like compositions in porcelain from an old county fair shooting gallery.

  He's crazy, C B.

  C B said: You want to shoot me, Lester, you can shoot me where I'm at. I ain't going nowheres for you.

  LESTER BALLARD NEVER could hold his head right after that. It must of thowed his neck out someway or another. I didn't see Buster hit him but I seen him layin on the ground. I was with the sheriff. He was layin flat on the ground lookin up at everbody with his eyes crossed and this awful pumpknot on his head. He just laid there and he was bleedin at the ears. Buster was still standin there holdin the axe. They took him on in the county car and C B went on with the auction like nothin never had happent but he did say that it caused some folks not to bid that otherwise would of, which may of been what Lester set out at, I don't know. John Greer was from up in Grainger County. Not sayin nothin against him but he was.

  FRED KIRBY WAS SQUATTING in his front yard next to the watertap where he used to sit all the time when Ballard came by. Ballard stood in the road and looked up at him. He said: Hey Fred.

  Kirby lifted his hand and nodded. Come up, Lester, he said.

  Ballard came to the edge of the cutbank and looked up to where Kirby was sitting. He said: You got any whiskey?

  Might have some.

  Why don't you let me have a jar.

  Kirby stood up. Ballard said: I can pay ye next week on it. Kirby squatted back down again.

  I can pay ye tomorrow, Ballard said.

  Kirby turned his head to one side and gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sneezed a gout of yellow snot into the grass and wiped his fingers on the knee of his jeans. He looked out over the fields. I cain't do it, Lester, he said.

  Ballard half turned to see what he was looking at out there but there was nothing but the same mountains. He shifted his feet and reached into his pocket. You want to trade it out? he said.

  Might do. What ye got?

  Got this here pocketknife.

  Let's see it.

  Ballard opened the knife and pitched it up the bank at Kirby. It stuck up in the ground near his shoe. Kirby looked at it a minute and then reached down and got it and wiped the blade on his knee and looked at the name on it. He closed it and opened it again and he pared a thin peeling from the sole of his shoe. All right, he said.

  He stood up and put the knife in his pocket and crossed the road toward the creek.

  Ballard watched him scout along the edge of the field, kicking at the bushes and honeysuckle. Once or twice he looked back. Ballard was watching off toward the blue hills.

  After a while Kirby came back but he didn't have any whiskey. He handed Ballard his knife back. I cain't find it, he said.

  Cain't find it?

  No.

  Well shit fire.

  I'll hunt some more later on. I think I was drunk when I hid it.

  Where'd ye hide it at?

  I don't know. I thought I could go straight to it but I must not of put it where I thought it was.

  Well goddamn.

  If I cain't find it I'll get some more.

  Ballard put the knife in his pocket and turned and went back up the road.

  ALL THAT REMAINED OF THE outhouse were a few soft shards of planking grown with a virid moss and lying collapsed in a shallow hole where weeds sprouted in outsized mutations. Ballard passed by and went behind the barn where he trod a clearing in the clumps of jimson and nightshade and squatted and shat. A bird sang among the hot and dusty bracken. Bird flew. He wiped himself with a stick and rose and pulled his trousers up from the ground. Already green flies clambered over his dark and lumpy stool. He buttoned his trousers and went back to the house.

  This house had two rooms. Each room two windows. Looking out the back there was a solid wall of weeds high as the house eaves. In the front was a porch and more weeds. From the road a quarter mile off travelers could see the gray shake roof and the chimney, nothing more. Ballard trampled a path through the weeds to the back door. A hornetnest hung from the corner of the porch and he knocked it down. The hornets came out one by one and flew away. Ballard went inside and with a piece of cardboard swept the floor. He swept up the old newspapers and he swept out the dried dung of foxes and possums and he swept out bits of brickcolored mud fallen from the board ceiling with their black husks of pupae. He closed the window. The one pane left tilted soundlessly from the dry sash and fell into his hands. He set it on the sill.

  In the hearth lay a pile of bricks and mortarclay. Half an iron firedog. He threw the bricks out and swept up the clay and on his hands and shinbones craned his neck to see up the chimney. In the patch of rheumy light a spider hung. A rank odor of earth and old woodsmoke. He wadded newspapers and set them in the hearth and lit them. They burned slowly. Small flames sputtered and ate their way along the rims and edges. The papers blackened and curled and shivered and the spider descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.

  Late in the afternoon a small thin mattress of stained ticking forded the brake toward the cabin. It was hinged over the head and shoulders of Lester Ballard whose muffled curses at the bullbriers and blackberries reached no ear.

  When he got to the cabin he pitched the mattress off onto the floor. A frame of dust plumed from under and rolled out along the cupped floorboards and subsided. Ballard raised the front of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face and from his head. He looked half crazy.

  By dark he had all he owned about him in the barren room and he had lit a lamp and set it in the middle of the floor and he was sitting crosslegged before it. He was holding a coathanger skewered with sliced potatoes over the lampchimney. When they were nearly black he slid them off the wire with his knife onto a plate and speared one up and blew on it and bit into it. He sat with his mouth open sucking air in and out, the piece of potato cradled on his lower teeth. He cursed the potato for being hot while he chewed it. It was raw in the middle, tasted of coaloil.

  When he had eaten the potato he rolled himself a cigarette and lit it over the quaking cone of gas at the rim of the lampchimney and sat there sucking in the smoke and letting it curl from his lip, his nostrils, idly tapping the ash with his little finger into his trouser-cuff. He spread the newspapers he had gathered and muttered over them, his lips forming the words. Old news of folks long dead, events forgotten, ads for patent medicine and livestock for sale. He smoked the cigarette down until it was just a burnt nubbin in his fingers, until it was ash. He turned down the lamp until just the faintest orange glow tinged the lower bowl of the chimney and he shucked out of his brogans and his trousers and shirt and lay back on the mattress naked save for his socks. Hunters had stripped most of the boards from the inside walls for firewood and from the bare lintel above the window hung part of the belly and tail of a blacksnake. Ballard sat up and turned up the lamp again. He rose and reached and prodded the pale blue underside of the snake with his finger. It shot forward and dropped to the floor with a thud and rifled over the boards like ink running in a gutter and was out t
he door and gone. Ballard sat back down on the mattress and turned the lamp down again and lay back. He could hear mosquitoes droning toward him in the hot silence. He lay there listening. After a while he turned over on his stomach. And after a while he got up and got the rifle from where it stood by the fireplace and laid it on the floor alongside the mattress and stretched out again. He was very thirsty. In the night he dreamt streams of ice black mountain water, lying there on his back with his mouth open like a dead man.

  I REMEMBER ONE THING HE done one time. I was raised with him over in the tenth. I was ahead of him in school. He lost a softball down off the road that rolled down into this field about ... it was way off down in a bunch of briers and stuff and he told this boy, this Finney boy, told him to go and get it. Finney boy was some bit younger'n him. Told him, said: Go get that softball. Finney boy wouldn't do it. Lester walked up to him and said: You better go get that ball. Finney boy said he wasn't about to do it and Lester told him one more time, said: You don't get off down in there and get me that ball I'm goin to bust you in the mouth. That Finney boy was scared but he faced up to him, told him he hadn't thowed it off down in there. Well, we was standin there, the way you will. Ballard could of let it go. He seen the boy wasn't goin to do what he ast him. He just stood there a minute and then he punched him in the face. Blood flew out of the Finney boy's nose and he set down in the road. Just for a minute and then he got up. Somebody give him a kerchief and he put it to his nose. It was all swoll up and bleedin. The Finney boy just looked at Lester Ballard and went on up the road. I felt, I felt ... I don't know what it was. We just felt real bad. I never liked Lester Ballard from that day. I never liked him much before that. He never done nothin to me.

  BALLARD LAY IN THE NIGHT-DAMP with his heart hammering against the earth. He was watching a parked car through the sparse pale of leaning weeds that rimmed the Frog Mountain turnaround. Inside the car a cigarette flared and lapsed and a latenight D J commented with mindless chatter on the seduction in the rear seat. A beercan clattered in the gravel. A mockingbird that had been singing stopped.