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.

Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue.

Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins.

Next thing he knew his overalls were about his knees and he was mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Oooh.

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.

I’ll say one thing about Lester though. You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn’t outstrip em all.

You ain’t even a man. You’re just a crazy thing.

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

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

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

No, 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.

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.