All The Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1)

by Cormac McCarthy

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.

His grandfather was the oldest of eight boys and the only one to live past the age of twenty-five. They were drowned, shot, kicked by horses.

He’d the notion that there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world was or was becoming but there was not. There was nothing in it at all.

The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway.

He took her hand, small in his, familiar. He’d never shaken hands with a woman before. Take care of yourself, she said.

You ever get ill at ease? said Rawlins. About what? I dont know. About anything. Just ill at ease. Sometimes. If you’re someplace you aint supposed to be I guess you’d be ill at ease. Should be anyways.

They’d stuffed their boots upside down into their jeans and stuffed their shirts and jackets after along with their warbags of shaving gear and ammunition and they belted the jeans shut at the waist and tied the legs loosely about their necks and dressed only in their hats they led the horses out onto the gravel spit

The boiler was made from the lower half of a galvanized watertank and to bring it to this location they’d run a wooden axleshaft through the bottom and made a wooden spider whereby to bed the axle in the open end and with a team of horses rolled the tank across the desert from Zaragoza eighty miles to the east.

John Grady saw it first and he could have named things he’d rather have seen.

Let’s go, said John Grady. They still got a lot of ground to cover. I’d rather to make a good run as a bad stand.

I’ll say one thing about him, said Rawlins. Who? Blevins. What’s that? The little son of a bitch wouldnt stand still for nobody high-jackin his horse.

A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman, he said. They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done.

Yeah. I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you’re done there’s wars and ruination and all hell. You dont know what’s goin to happen. I’d say He’s just about got to. I dont believe we’d make it a day otherwise.

They listened with great attention as John Grady answered their questions and they nodded solemnly and they were careful of their demeanor that they not be thought to have opinions on what they heard for like most men skilled at their work they were scornful of any least suggestion of knowing anything not learned at first hand.

We goin to bust em twice? What for? I never saw one that completely believed it the first time or ever doubted it the second.

When they were done the horses stood in the potrero or stepped about trailing their hackamore ropes over the ground with such circumspection not to tread upon them and snatch down

The wild and frantic band of mustangs that had circled the potrero that morning like marbles swirled in a jar could hardly be said to exist and the animals whinnied to one another in the dark and answered back as if some one among their number were missing, or some thing.

You aint tired are you, bud? he said. No, said John Grady. I was tired five hours ago.

Rawlins nodded. It’s sort of like old T-Bone Watts when he worked for daddy they all fussed about him havin bad breath. He told em it was bettern no breath at all.

Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were.

Do you know a book called The Horse of America, by Wallace? Yessir. I’ve read it front to back.

They raced the animals on the road at a fifty-cent bet and John Grady won and they swapped horses and he won on Rawlins’ horse. They rode the horses at a gallop and they rode them at a trot and the horses were hot and lathered and squatted and stamped in the road and the campesinos afoot in the road with baskets of garden-stuff or pails covered with cheesecloth would press to the edge of the road or climb through the roadside brush and cactus to watch wide eyed the young horsemen on their horses passing and the horses mouthing froth and champing and the riders calling to one another in their alien tongue and passing in a muted fury that seemed scarcely to be contained in the space allotted them and yet leaving all unchanged where they had been: dust, sunlight, a singing bird.

Under the bandshell the accordion player struggled with his instrument and slammed his boot on the boards in countertime and stepped back and the trumpet player came forward. Her eyes above the shoulder of her partner swept across him where he stood. Her black hair done up in a blue ribbon and the nape of her neck pale as porcelain. When she turned again she smiled. He’d never touched her and her hand was small and her waist so slight and she looked at him with great forthrightness and smiled and put her face against his shoulder. They turned under the lights.

The hacendado was less sure. But there were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to a man.

Like him she was lefthanded or she played chess with her left hand.

Yes. It was invented by the Irish champion Pollock. He called it the King’s Own opening. I was afraid you might know it. I’d like to see it again some time. Yes. Of course.

Well. I guess I ought to say that you didnt have to invite me over just to tell me that. You’re quite right, she said. It was because of it that I almost didnt invite you.

I think we dont believe that people can be improved in their character by reason. That seems a very french idea.

Yet the captain inhabited another space and it was a space of his own election and outside the common world of men. A space privileged to men of the irreclaimable act which while it contained all lesser worlds within it contained no access to them. For the terms of election were of a piece with its office and once chosen that world could not be quit.

I never knowed there was such a place as this. I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of. Rawlins nodded. I wouldnt of thought of this one, he said.

He sat back easily. He tapped his temple. It is not that he is stupid. It is that his picture of the world is incomplete. In this rare way. He looks only where he wishes to see. You understand me? I understand you.

He looked deep into those dark eyes and there were deeps there to look into. A whole malign history burning cold and remote and black.

The knife passed across his chest and passed back and the figure moved with incredible speed and again stood before him crouching silently, faintly weaving, watching his eyes. They were watching so that they could see if death were coming. Eyes that had seen it before and knew the colors it traveled under and what it looked like when it got there.

He lay in the dark thinking of all the things he did not know about his father and he realized that the father he knew was all the father he would ever know.

So he thought about horses and they were always the right thing to think about.

So like some site of siege in an older time, in an older country, where the enemies were all from without.

They walked out across the tiled courtyard where the rain was falling lightly and found the room and opened the door and turned on the light. A man sat up in the bed and looked at them. They backed out and turned off the light and shut the door and went back to the desk where the man gave them another key.

And after and for a long time to come he’d have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.

He said that those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart but that it is just that misfortune which is their gift and which is their strength and that they must make their way back into the common enterprise of man for without they do so it cannot go forward and they themselves will wither in bitterness. He said these things to me with great earnestness and great gentleness and in the light from the portal I could see that he was crying and I knew that it was my soul he wept for. I had never been esteemed in this way. To have a man place himself in such a position. I did not know what to say.

That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

that scared money cant win and a worried man cant love.

He crossed on through the high country and in the evening descended the north slope and rode out onto the foreplain where the creosote

deep olive from the rains stood in solemn colonies as it had stood a thousand years and more in that tenantless waste, older than any living thing that was.