Child of God

by Cormac McCarthy

The voice washed against the mountain and came back lost and threatless. Then there was nothing but silence and the rich bloom of honeysuckle on the black midsummer night air.

An assortment of cats taking the weak sun watched him go. Ballard pointed the rifle at a large mottled tom and said bang. The cat looked at him without interest. It seemed to think him not too bright. Ballard spat on it and it immediately wiped the spittle from its head with a heavy forepaw and set about washing the spot.

He sat hourlong in the windy sedge with the sun on his back. As if he’d store the warmth of it against the coming winter.

I remember a dog he had one time named Suzie he said was a hellatious bird dog. He let her out of the trunk and I looked at her and I said: I don’t believe Suzie’s feelin too good. He looked at her and felt her nose and all. Said she looked all right to him. I told him, said: I just don’t believe she’s real well today. We set out and hunted all afternoon and killed one bird. Started walk-in back to the car and he says to me, Bill says: You know, it’s funny you noticin old Suzie was not feelin good today. The way you spotted it. I said: Well, Suzie was sick today. He said yes, she was. I said: Suzie was sick yesterday. Suzie has always been sick. Suzie will always be sick. Suzie is a sick dog.

It’s like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye’d just as well to do it all wrong.

Ballard crossed the soggy ground and climbed onto the hearth and sat there like an owl. For the warmth of it. He’d long been given to talking to himself but he didn’t say a word.

You ort to be proud, Lester, that you ain’t never married. It is a grief and a heartache and they ain’t no reward in it atall. You just raise enemies in ye own house to grow up and cuss ye.

You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.

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?

Kneeling in the snow among the fairy tracks of birds and deermice Ballard leaned his face to the green water and drank and studied his dishing visage in the pool. He halfway put his hand to the water as if he would touch the face that watched there but then he rose and wiped his mouth and went on through the woods.

At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them.

Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.

He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up.

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?

he thought he saw toy bears bobbing on the spate but they were lost from sight

Not the stuffed animals they were my favorite characters sob

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 reckon there are just some places the good lord didn’t intend folks to live in?

a three hundred and sixty degree son of a bitch, which my daddy said meant they was a son of a bitch any way you looked at em.

You don’t remember the flood of 1885 do ye? said the deputy. Well, bein as that was the year I was born my memory of it is somewhat dim.

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 did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought.

Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. 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.