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  Cormac McCarthy - Child Of God THEY CAME LIKE A CARAVAN of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behin and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddle peg and listened with a wrinkled face. They passed under flowering apple trees and passed a log crib chinked with orange mud and forded a branch and came in sight of an aged clapboard house that stood in blue shade under the wall of the. mountain. Beyond it stood a barn. One of the men in the truck bonged on the cab roof with his fist and the truck came to a halt. Cars and trucks came on through the weeds in the yard, people afoot. To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. 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. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barn slats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom. The man stands straddle legged, has made in the dark humus a darker pool wherein swirls a pale foam with bits of straw. Buttoning his jeans he moves along the barn wall, himself fiddlebacked with light, a petty annoyance flickering across the wallward eye. Standing in the forebay door he blinks. Behind him there is a rope hanging from the loft. His thinly bristled jaw knots and slacks as if he were chewing but he is not chewing. His eyes are almost shut against the sun and through the thin and blue veined lids you can see the eyeballs moving, watching. A man in a blue suit gesturing from the truckbed. A lemonade stand going up. The musicians striking up a country reel and the yard filling up with people and the loudspeaker making a few first squawks. All right now let's get everbody up here and get registered for ye free silver dollars. Right up here. That's the way. How you little lady? Well all right. Yessir. All right now. Jessie? Have you got it ... ? All right now. Jess and them is got the house open for them that wants to see inside. That's all right. We're fixin to have some music here in just a minute and we want to get everbody registered fore we have the drawins. Yessir? What's that? Yessir, that's right. That's right everbody, we will bid on the tracts and then we'll have a chance to bid on the whole. They's both sides of the road now, it goes plumb across the creek to them big timbers on the other side yonder. Yessir. We'll get into that directly. Bowing, pointing, smiling. The microphone in one hand. Among the pines on the ridge the sound of the auctioneer's voice echoed muted, redundant. An illusion of multiple voices, a ghost chorus among old ruins. Now they's good timber up here too. Real good timber. It's been cut over fifteen twenty year ago and so maybe it ain't big timber yet, but looky here. While you're a laying down there in your bed at night this timber is up here growin. Yessir. And I mean that sincerely. They is real future in this property. As much future as you'll find anywheres in this valley. Maybe more. Friends, they is no limit to the possibilities on a piece of property like this. I'd buy it myself if I had any more money. And I believe you all know that ever

  penny I own is in real estate. And ever one I've made has been from real estate. If I had a million dollars I would have it ever cent invested in real estate within ninety days. And you all know that. They ain't no way for it to go but up. A piece of land like this here I sincere believe will give ye ten percent on your investment. And maybe more. Maybe as high as twenty percent. Your money down here in this bank won't do that for ye and you all know that. There is no sounder investment than property. Land. You all know that a dollar won't buy what it used to buy. A dollar might not be worth but fifty cents a year from now. And you all know that. But real estate is goin up, up, up. Friends, six year ago when my uncle bought the Prater place down here everbody tried to talk him out of it. He give nineteen-five for that farm. Said I know what I'm a doin. And you all know what happent down there. Yessir. Sold for thirty-eight thousand. A piece of land like this ... Now it needs some improvin. It's rough. Yes it is. But friends you can double your money on it. A piece of real estate, and particular in this valley, is the soundest investment you can make. Sound as a dollar. And I'm very sincere when I say that. In the pines the voices chanted a lost litany. Then they stopped. A murmur went through the crowd. The auctioneer had handed over the microphone to another man. The other man said: Holler at the sheriff yonder, C B. The auctioneer waved his hand at him and bent to the man standing in front of him. Small man, ill shaven, now holding a rifle. What do you want, Lester? I done told ye. I want you to get your goddamn ass off my property. And take these fools with ye. Watch your mouth, Lester. They's ladies present. I don't give a fuck who's present. It ain't your property. The hell it ain't. You done been locked up once over this. I guess you want to go again. The high sheriff is standin right over yonder. I don't give a good goddamn where the high sheriff is at. I want you sons of bitches off of my goddamned property. You hear? The auctioneer was squatting on the tailboard of the truck. He looked down at his shoes, plucked idly at a piece of dried mud in the welt. When he looked back up at the man with the rifle he was smiling. He said: Lester, you don't get a grip on yourself they goin to put you in a rubber room. The man took a step backward, the rifle in one hand. He was almost crouching and he held his free hand out with the fingers spread toward the crowd as if to hold them back. Get down off that truck, he hissed. The man on the truck spat and squinted at him. What you aim to do, Lester, shoot me? I didn't take your place off of ye. County done that. I was just hired as auctioneer. Get off that truck. Behind him the musicians looked like compositions in porcelain from an old county fair shooting gallery. He's crazy, C B. C B said: You want to shoot me, Lester, you can shoot me where I'm at. I ain't going nowheres for you.

  LESTER BALLARD NEVER could hold his head right after that. It must of thowed his neck out someway or another. I didn't see Buster hit him but I seen him layin on the ground. I was with the sheriff. He was layin flat on the ground lookin up at everbody with his eyes crossed and this awful pumpknot on his head. He just laid there and he was bleedin at the ears. Buster was still standin there holdin the axe. They took him on in the county car and C B went on with the auction like nothin never had happent but he did say that it caused some folks not to bid that otherwise would of, which may of been what Lester set out at, I don't know. John Greer was from up in Grainger County. Not sayin nothin against him but he was. RED KIRBY WAS SQUATTING in his front yard next to the water tap where he used to sit all the time when Ballard came by. Ballard stood in the road and looked up at him. He said: Hey Fred. Kirby lifted his hand and nodded. Come up, Lester, he said. Ballard came to the edge of the cut bank and looked up to where Kirby was sitting. He said: You got any whiskey? Might have some. Why don't you let me have a jar. Kirby stood up. Ballard said: I can pay ye next week on it. Kirby squatted back down again. I can pay ye tomorrow, Ballard said. Kirby turned his head to one side and gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sneezed a gout of yellow snot into the grass and wiped his fingers on the knee of his jeans. He looked out over the fields. I cain't do it, Lester, he said. Ballard half turned to see what he was looking at out there but there was nothing but the same mountains. He shifted his feet and reached into his pocket. You want to trade it out? he said. Might do. What ye got? Got this here pocketknife. Let's see it. Ballard opened the knife and pitched it up the bank at Kirby. It stuck up in the ground near his shoe. Kirby looked at it a minute and then reached down and got it and wiped the blade on his knee and looked at the name on it. He closed it and opened it again and he pared a thin peeling from the sole of his shoe. All right, he said. He stood up and put the kn
ife in his pocket and crossed the road toward the creek. Ballard watched him scout along the edge of the field, kicking at the bushes and honeysuckle. Once or twice he looked back. Ballard was watching off toward the blue hills. After a while Kirby came back but he didn't have any whiskey. He handed Ballard his knife back. I cain't find it, he said. Cain't find it? No. Well shit fire. I'll hunt some more later on. I think I was drunk when I hid it. Where'd ye hide it at? I don't know. I thought I could go straight to it but I must not of put it where I thought it was. Well goddamn. If I cain't find it I'll get some more. Ballard put the knife in his pocket and turned and went back up the road.

  ALL THAT REMAINED OF THE outhouse were a few soft shards of plan king grown with a virid moss and lying collapsed in a shallow hole where weeds sprouted in outsized mutations. Ballard passed by and went behind the barn where he trod a clearing in the clumps of jimson and nightshade and squatted and shat. A bird sang among the hot and dusty bracken. Bird flew. He wiped himself with a stick and rose and pulled his trousers up from the ground. Already green flies clambered over his dark and lumpy stool. He buttoned his trousers and went back to the house. This house had two rooms. Each room two windows. Looking out the back there was a solid wall of weeds high as the house eaves. In the front was a porch and more weeds. From the road a quarter· mile off travelers could see the gray shake roof and the chimney, nothing more. Ballard trampled a path through the weeds to the back door. A hornet nest hung from the corner of the porch and he knocked it down. The hornets came out one by one and flew away. Ballard went inside and with a piece of cardboard swept the floor. He swept up the old newspapers and he swept out the dried dung of foxes and possums and he swept out bits of brick colored mud fallen from the board ceiling with their black husks of pupae. He closed the window. The one pane left tilted soundlessly from the dry sash and fell into his hands. He set it on the sill. In the hearth lay a pile of bricks and mortarday. Half an iron firedog. He threw the bricks out and swept up the clay and on his hands and shinbones craned his neck to see up the chimney. In the patch of rheumy light a spider hung. A rank odor of earth and old wood smoke. He wadded newspapers and set them in the hearth and lit them. They burned slowly. Small flames sputtered and ate their way along the rims and edges. The papers blackened and curled and shivered and the spider descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth. Late in the afternoon a small thin mattress of stained ticking forded the brake toward the cabin. It was hinged over the head and shoulders of Lester Ballard whose muffled curses at the bull briers and blackberries reached no ear. When he got to the cabin he pitched the mattress off onto the floor. A frame of dust plumed from under and rolled out along the cupped floorboards and subsided. Ballard raised the front of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face and from his head. He looked half crazy. By dark he had all he owned about him in the barren room and he had lit a lamp and set it in the·middle of the floor and he was sitting cross legged before it. He was holding a coat hanger skewered with sliced potatoes over the lamp chimney. When they were nearly black he slid them off the wire with his knife onto a plate and speared one up and blew on it and bit into it. He sat with his mouth open sucking air in and out, the piece of potato cradled on his lower teeth. He cursed the potato for being hot while he chewed it. It was raw in the middle, tasted of coal oiI. When he had eaten the potato he rolled himself a cigarette and lit it over the quaking cone of gas at the rim of the lamp chimney and sat there sucking in the smoke and letting it curl from his lip, his nostrils, idly tapping the ash with his little finger into his trouser cuff. He spread the newspapers he had gathered and muttered over them, his lips forming the words. Old news of folks long dead, events forgotten, ads for patent medicine and livestock for sale. He smoked the cigarette down until it was just a burnt nubbin in his fingers, until it was ash. He turned down the lamp until just the faintest orange glow tinged the lower bowl of the chimney and he shucked out of his brogans and his trousers and shirt and lay back on the mattress naked save for his

  socks. Hunters had stripped most of the boards from the inside walls for firewood and from the bare lintel above the window hung part of the belly and tail of a blacksnake. Ballard sat up and turned up the lamp again. He rose and reached and prodded the pale blue underside of the snake with his finger. It shot forward and dropped to the floor with a thud and rifled over the boards like ink running in a gutter and was out the door and gone. Ballard sat back down on the mattress and turned the lamp down again and lay back. He could hear mosquitoes droning toward him in the hot silence. He lay there listening. After a while he turned over on his stomach. And after a while he got up and got the rifle from where it stood by the fireplace and laid it on the floor alongside the mattress and stretched out again. He was very thirsty. In the night he dreamt streams of ice black mountain waters lying there on his back with his mouth open like a dead man. I REMEMBER ONE THING HE done one time. I was raised with him over in the tenth. I was ahead of him in school. He lost a softball down off the road that rolled down into this field about ... it was way off down in a bunch of briers and stuff and he told this boy, this Finney boy, told him to go and get it. Finney boy was some bit younger'n him. Told him, said: Go get that softball. Finney boy wouldn't do it. Lester walked up to him and said: You better go get that ball. Finney boy said he wasn't about to do it and Lester told him one more time, said: You don't get off down in there and get me that ball I'm goin to bust you in the mouth. That Finney boy was scared but he faced up to him, told him he hadn't thowed it off down in there. Well, we was standin there, the way you will. Ballard could of let it go. He seen the boy wasn't goin to do what he ast him. He just stood there a minute and then he punched him in the face. Blood flew out of the Finney boy's nose and he set down in the road. Just for a minute and then he got up. Somebody give him a kerchief and he put it to his nose. It was all swoll up and bleedin. The Finney boy just looked at Lester Ballard and went on up the road. I felt, I felt . I don't know what it was. We just felt real bad. I never liked Lester Ballard from that day. I never liked him much before that. He never done nothin to me. BALLARD LAY IN THE NIGHT damp with his heart hammering against the earth. He was watching a parked car through the sparse pale of leaning weeds that rimmed the Frog Mountain turnaround. Inside the car a cigarette flared and lapsed and a late night D J commented with mindless chatter on the seduction in the rear seat. A beer can clattered in the gravel. A mockingbird that had been singing stopped. He came from the roadside ducked in a loping run, a shadow that washed up against the cold dusty hind fender of the automobile. His breath was shallow, his eyes wide, his ears pricked to sort the voices from the ones on the radio. A girl said Bobby. Then she said it again. Ballard had his ear to the quarterpanel. The car began to rock gently. He raised himself up and chanced one eye at the windowcorner. A pair of white legs sprawled embracing a shade, a dark incubus that humped in a dream of slaverous lust. It's a nigger, whispered Ballard. o Bobby, 0 god, said the girl. Ballard, unbuttoned, spent himself on the fender. O shit, said the girl. On buckling knees the watcher watched. The mockingbird began.

  A nigger, said Ballard. But it was not a black face that loomed in the window, that looked so enormous there behind the glass. For a moment they were face to face and then Ballard dropped to the ground, his heart pounding. The radio music ended in a muted click and did not start again. The door opened on the far side of the car. Ballard, a misplaced and loveless simian shape scuttling across the turnaround as he had come, over the clay and thin gravel and the flattened beer cans and papers and rotting condoms. You better run, you son of a bitch. 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. The car started. The· lights came on and swung around the circle and went down the· road. I DON'T KNOW. THEY SAY HE never was right after his daddy killed hisself. They was just the one boy. The mother had run off, I don't know where to nor who with
. Me and Cecil Edwards was the ones cut him down. He come in the store and told it like you'd tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hangin. We just cut him down, let him fall in the floor. Just like cuttin down meat. He stood there and watched, never said nothin. He was about nine or ten year old at the time. The old man's eyes was run out on stems like a crawfish and his tongue blacker'n a chow dog's. I wisht if a man wanted to hang hisself he'd do it with poison or somethin so folks wouldn't have to see such a thing as that. He didn't look so pretty hisself when Greer got done with him. No. But I don't mind honest blood. I'd rather to see that than eyeballs hangin out and such. I'll tell ye what old Gresham done when his wife died and how crazy he was. They buried her up here at Sixmile and the preacher he said a few words and then he called on Gresham, ast him did he want to say a few words fore they thowed the dirt over her and old Gresham he stood up, had his hat {n his hand and all. Stood up there and sung the chickenshit blues. The chickenshit blues. No, I don't know the words to it but he did and he sung em ever one fore he set back down again. But he wasn't a patch on Lester Ballard for crazy. WERE THERE DARKER provinces of night he would have found them. Lying with his fingers plugged in the bores of his ears against the strident cheeping of the myriad black crickets with which he kept household in the barren cabiri. One night on his pallet while half asleep he heard something scamper through the room and vault ghostly (he saw, struggling erect) through the open window. He sat there looking after it but it was gone. He could hear foxhounds in full cry, tortured wails and yelps nigh unto agony coming up the creek, up the valley. They flooded into the cabin yard in a pandemonium of soprano howls and crashing brush. Ballard standing naked saw by palest starlight the front door full from floor sill up with bawling dogs. They hung there for a moment in a pulsing frame of piebald fur and then bowed through and filled the room, circled once with rising volume dog on dog and then swept out the window howl on howl carrying first the muntins, then the sash, leaving a square and naked hole in the wall and a ringing in his ear. While he stood there cursing two more dogs came through the door. He kicked one as it