Outer Dark

by Cormac McCarthy

Ever man to grind his own axe.

a sound so labored and remorseless as should have spoken something more than mere progress upon the earth’s surface.

Lord God he’s kilt hisself,

He needs that mouth attended to,

The man got down from the wagon wearing a look of m...

In the powdered dust of the street he had created a small amphitheatre with the sole of one shoe.

It’s a goodly sizeable world to set out huntin somebody in.

Wouldn’t turn Satan away for a drink,

They said they had to break ever bone in his body to get him laid out in his box. Coroner took a sixpound maul to him.

I know things I ain’t never studied. I know things I ain’t never even thought of.

praying silent and godless in his heart

On a rock was a pan of black and mummified meat.

The man’s teeth appeared and went away again as if he had smiled.

It’s a hard thing to know what daylight will bring any day,

The flowers in the dooryard have curled and drawn as if poisoned by dark and there is a mockingbird to tell what he knows of night.

a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.

Now the entire herd had begun to wheel wider and faster along the bluff and the outermost ranks swung centrifugally over the escarpment row on row wailing and squealing and above this the howls and curses of the drovers that now up-reared in the moil of flesh they tended and swept with dust had begun to assume satanic looks with their staves and wild eyes as if they were no true swineherds but disciples of darkness got among these charges to herd them to their doom.

The drovers looked at him, a bizarre collection of faces that seemed assembled from scraps and oddments, all hairyfaced and filthy and half toothless and their weathered chops lumpy with tobacco chews.

A feller never knows what day’ll be his last in this vale of tears.

In a world darksome as this’n I believe a blind man ort to be better sighted than most.

WHAT DISCORDANT vespers do the tinker’s goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction.

and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress.