Child of God

by Cormac McCarthy

All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He’d often heard men say as much. All the trouble I ever was in was caused by gettin caught, said the black.

Mr Ballard, he said. You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.

Give me some of that there cheese. He bought a sack of cigarette tobacco and stood there rolling a smoke and nodding at the groceries. Add them up, he said. The storekeeper figured the merchandise on his scratchpad, sliding the goods from one side of the counter to the other as he went. He raised up and pushed his glasses back with his thumb. Five dollars and ten cents, he said. Just put it on the stob for me. Ballard, when are you goin to pay me? Well. I can give ye some on it today. How much on it. Well. Say three dollars. The storekeeper was figuring on his pad. How much do I owe altogether? said Ballard. Thirty-four dollars and nineteen cents. Includin this here? Includin this here. Well let me just give ye the four dollars and nineteen cents and that’ll leave it thirty even. The storekeeper looked at Ballard. Ballard, he said, how old are you? Twenty-seven if it’s any of your business. Twenty-seven. And in twenty-seven years you’ve managed to accumulate four dollars and nineteen cents? The storekeeper was figuring on his pad. Ballard waited. What are you figurin? he asked suspiciously. Just a minute, said the storekeeper. After a while he raised the pad up and squinted at it. Well, he said. Accordin to my figures, at this rate it’s goin to take a hundred and ninety-four years to pay out the thirty dollars. Ballard, I’m sixty-seven now. Why that’s crazy. Of course this is figured if you don’t buy nothin else. Why that’s crazier’n hell. Well, I could of made a mistake i...

He’d long been wearing the underclothes of his female victims but now he took to appearing in their outerwear as well. A gothic doll in illfit clothes, its carmine mouth floating detached and bright in the white landscape.

He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.

You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said. The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.

He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.