Child of God

by Cormac McCarthy

He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps.

FATE’S ALL RIGHT. HE’S plainspoken but I like him. I’ve rode with him a lot of times.

I’m a fugitive from the ways of this world. I’d be a fugitive from my mind if I had me some snow.

You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn’t outstrip em all.

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

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

he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.

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?

those were sorry people all the way around, ever man jack 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 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.