Outer Dark

by Cormac McCarthy

They rode on through the new green woods under the rising sun where wakerobins marked the roadway with their foiled wax spears, climbing, the man jiggling the reins across the mule’s tattered withers, through a cutback and into brief sunlight where the old woman hooked her bonnet more forward on her head and peered sideways at the others like a cowled mandrill, her puckerstrung mouth working the snuff that lay in her lower lip, turning again, a jet of black spittle lancing without trajectory across the edge of the wagon and into the woods, descending, the man working the brake, the wagon creaking and sidling a little in loose gravel, onto the flatland again, fording a weedgrown branch where dead water rusted the stones and through a canebrake where myriad small birds flitted and rustled dryly like locusts.

The more I study a thing the more I get it backards. Study long and ye study wrong. That’s what a old rifleshooter told me oncet beat me out of half a beef in a rifleshoot. I know things I ain’t never studied. I know things I ain’t never even thought of.

It’s a hard thing to know what daylight will bring any day, the tinker said.

Hard people makes hard times. I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why God ain’t put out the sun and gone away.

He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.