Outer Dark

by Cormac McCarthy

In the morning he heard the tinker’s shoddy carillon long through the woods and he rose and stumbled to the door to see what new evil this might be.

Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight.

The old woman drew up the wings of her nose between her thumb and forefinger and sneezed forth a spray of mucous and wiped her fingers on the overalls she wore.

He stood in the center of the square where the tracks of commerce lay fossilized in dried mud all about him, turning, an amphitheatrical figure in that moonwrought waste manacled to a shadow that struggled grossly in the dust.

Bitch, he said. Goddamn lyin bitch. She had begun to keen softly into her hands. The tinker could hear it a long way down the road. He could hear it far over the cold and smoking fields of autumn, his pans knelling in the night like buoys on some dim and barren coast, and he could hear it fading and hear it die lost as the cry of seabirds in the vast and salt black solitudes they keep.

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.