blood meridian or the evening redness in the west by cormac mccarthy

Men from lands so far and queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind itself vindicated. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors. They break up the float and sell the lumber and he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the black waters all alight like cities adrift.

He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown bottomland toward night. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. 'BLOOD MERIDIAN: OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST' By: CORMAC McCARTHY 1985 I Childhood in Tennessee - Runs away - New Orleans - Fights - Is shot - To Galveston - Nacogdoches - The Reverend Green - Judge Holden - An affray - Toadvine - Burning of the hotel - Escape.

Blood meridian or the evening redness in the west by cormac mccarthy