Blood Meridian

Review

Blood Meridian is considered McCarthy’s masterpiece. It bathes in violence. An occasional refrain on the Reading McCarthy podcast is, “no author has killed as many babies as McCarthy.” This is so. One coming to McCarthy with only this perception, and perhaps the images of a burntout country and ash from The Road, they probably think the books are reveling in that violence. That is not so.

The Kid comes out of Tennessee into the West and tumbles and starts problems until he falls in with Captain Glanton’s gang of scalphunters. Among that gang eventually are The Kid, Toadvine, Expriest Tobin, and several others. The Judge is the neonlit attraction. He arrives over and again from nowhere and leaves to nowhere and while he’s there he wanders around nude and glowing and pontificating. The Judge attracts a lot of attention from readers; maybe the expriest attracts just a little less. On this my second read, the expriest stood out the most and it is easy for the reader to imagine the Kid with the Judge on one shoulder and the Expriest on another whispering in his ears.

So much has been written about Blood Meridian. I don’t have anything of worth to add to that after only two reads. I was talking about the book with someone the other day, and they were surprised to hear it is not my favorite from McCarthy, and I said that it is not one I have great love for. It isn’t that I dislike the book. I think it is McCarthy’s second best following The Road, and it is undeniable. But I am not drawn to read it over and over again in the way that I am The Road, it does not speak to a part of me that is looking for something. Blood Meridian is about incarnations of evil and the capacity of humans for violence, and maybe a little about resisting or denying it.

In the morning they rode out to the south. Little was said, nor were they quarrelsome among themselves. In three days they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul.

(Chapter XIII)

[A 10-year-old boy] was lying face down naked in one of the cubicles. Scattered about on the clay were great numbers of old bones. As if he like others before him had stumbled upon a place where something inimical lived. The squatters crowded in and stood about the corpse in silence. Soon they were conversing senselessly about the merits and virtues of the dead boy.

(Chapter IX)

Years after the main events in the book, The Kid (now called The Man) is wandering around the countryside and three youths join his fire. The youths are talking about cruelties and meanness and this pulls one of my favorite lines from The Kid/Man in the book:

He looked at them from one to the other. He reached and took up a stick and roused the fire with it and put the stick in the flames. You all like meanness? he said.

One of them doubts and contradicts everything The Man says, and eventually riles him up. The boy is taken away by the others at the warning of The Man. Later, the boy returns with a rifle. The Man shoots him down.

In this same section, another favorite:

This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.

All of these are things that are interesting to me. And how can one argue with the scene of The Judge making gunpowder, taken straight from Paradise Lost?

There are rivetting passages and I will surely read it many more times, but I doubt it is ever a yearly thing for me. I think because where Blood Meridian is such, The Road is at its core a story about love.

There is a line that caught my attention this time that hasn’t in the past:

Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.

(Chapter XXII, emphasis mine.)

Cormac loves the ledgerbooks. From The Road:

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbooks? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

(The Road, page 196)

So while this is not my favorite McCarthy or favorite book, it is clearly a great work and one I enjoyed reading. It’s a hard book to put down, even with the major violence.

An oft-asked question is, Who should direct an adaptation of Blood Meridian? Many would say that it should not be adapted, and I’m probably in that camp. My usual answer other than this, though, is my favorite director, David Lynch (I’m always thrilled when I see him mentioned in these conversations). Lynch was a director with a great understanding of and ability to utilize violence, rather than just making things look violent. He was able to make one of the most horrifying film scenes out of daylight, a dream, and a lady in makeup.

John Hillcoat is the director that adapted The Road, and he is usually mentioned. He has made allusions to such an adaptation over the past years. I hope this is not so. His adaptation of The Road fundamentally does not understand the text and is poorly acted and poorly made. It is probably the adaptive work I most revile. Occasionally one will see Ridley Scott, responsible for The Counselor (another quite poor film with a script from McCarthy that is unfortunately middling at best). Ridley’s hit rate is pretty low over the past ten years so let’s hope not. And also mentioned generally are the Coen Brothers, who, if they ever reunite, might do well. Blood Meridian has quite a few funny moments and that blend of cruelty and comedy might be well done by them. I recently saw Paul Thomas Anderson put forward, and I think he could do it well.

I like the book. It’s probably not one I’ll ever write a long essay about, but it is a gripping read.

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Notes

Chapter II

• Dont leave it out yonder somethin’ll eat it. This is a hungry country.
• No. It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that? ¶ I dont know. ¶ Believe that.

Chapter V

• I know your kind, he said. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

Chapter VII

• The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

Chapter VIII

• He looked up. Blood, he said. This country is give much blood. This Mexico. This is a thirsty country. The blood of a thousand Christs. Nothing.
• He pointed to his chest. When he turned to the Americans his voice softened again. You are fine caballeros, he said. You kill the barbaros. They cannot hide from you. But there is another caballero and I think that no man hides from him. I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you dont wake up forever.
• Here beyond men’s judgements all covenants were brittle. The black looked up from his pipebowl. About that fire were men whose eyes gave back the light like coals socketed hot in their skulls and men whose eyes did not, but the black man’s eyes stood as corridors for the ferrying through of naked and unrectified night from what of it lay behind to what was yet to come. Any man in this company can sit where it suits him, he said.

Chapter IX

• They were four left out of a party of seven that had set out for the mountains to prospect for precious metals. They had been barricaded in the old presidio for three days, fled here from the desert to the south pursued by the savages. One of the men was shot through the lower chest and he lay propped against the wall in the office. Irving came in and looked at him. ¶ What have you done for him? he said. ¶ Aint done nothin. ¶ What do you want me to do for him? ¶ Aint asked you to do nothin. ¶ That’s good, said Irving. Because there aint nothing to be done.
• It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain and soon all the wild menagerie of that country grew mute. A horse put its long wet face in at the door and Glanton looked up and spoke to it and it lifted its head and curled its lip and withdrew into the rain and the night.
• He was lying face down naked in one of the cubicles. Scattered about on the clay were great numbers of old bones. As if he like others before him had stumbled upon a place where something inimical lived. The squatters crowded in and stood about the corpse in silence. Soon they were conversing senselessly about the merits and virtues of the dead boy.

Chapter X

• The Almighty, the Almighty. The expriest shook his head. He glanced across the fire toward the judge. That great hairless thing. You wouldnt think to look at him that he could outdance the devil himself now would ye? God the man is a dancer, you’ll not take that away from him. And fiddle. He’s the greatest fiddler I ever heard and that’s an end on it. The greatest. He can cut a trail, shoot a rifle, ride a horse, track a deer. He’s been all over the world. Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you’d have give something to of heard them. The governor’s a learned man himself he is, but the judge … ¶ The expriest shook his head. Oh it may be the Lord’s way of showin how little store he sets by the learned. Whatever could it mean to one who knows all? He’s an uncommon love for the common man and godly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as lives in silence themselves. ¶ He watched the kid. ¶ For let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures. ¶ The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice. ¶ The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. ¶ I aint heard no voice, he said. ¶ When it stops, said Tobin, you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life.
• I didnt know but what we’d be required to bleed into it like freemasons but it was not so. He worked it up dry with his hands and all the while the savages down there on the plain drawin nigh to us and when I turned back the judge was standin, the great hairless oaf, and he’d took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with a great vengeance and one hand aloft and he cried out for us to do likewise. ¶ We were half mad anyways. All lined up. Delawares and all. Every man save Glanton and he was a study. We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil’s batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the southfacin rocks, spreadin it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one eye and him smeared with blacking and reekin of piss and sulphur and grinnin and wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life. And when he was done he set back and wiped his hands on his chest and then he watched the savages and so did we all.
• Well the judge closed up his little book and took his leather shirt and spread it out in the little cupped place and called for us to bring the stuff to him. Every knife was out and we went to scrapin it up and him cautionin us not to strike fire on them flints. And we heaped it up in the shirt and he commenced to chop and grind it with his knife. And Captain Glanton, he calls out.

Chapter XI

• As they walked out they spoke of life in such a wild place where such people as you saw you saw but one and never again and by and by they came to the fork in the road and here the traveler told the old man that he had come with him far enough and he thanked him and they took their departure each of the other and the stranger went on his way. But the harnessmaker seemed unable to suffer the loss of his company and he called to him and went with him again a little way upon the road. And by and by they came to a place where the road was darkened in a deep wood and in this place the old man killed the traveler. He killed him with a rock and he took his clothes and he took his watch and his money and he buried him in a shallow grave by the side of the road. Then he went home.
  • TB: In the western country of the Alleghenies…

Chapter XIII

• The governor had tapped his glass and risen to speak in his well-phrased english, but the bloated and belching mercenaries were leering about and were calling for more drink and some had not ceased to scream out toasts, now degenerated into obscene pledges to the whores of various southern cities. The bursar was introduced to cheers, catcalls, hoisted bumpers. Glanton took charge of the long canvas bag stamped with the state cartouche and cutting the governor short he rose and dumped the gold out onto the table among the bones and rinds and pools of spilled drink and in a brisk drumhead disbursement divided out the pile of gold with the blade of his knife so that each man was paid his spoken share and no further ceremony to it. A sort of skiffle band had struck up a lugubrious air in one corner of the hall and first up was the judge who ushered the players and their instruments into the adjoining ballroom where a number of ladies who had been sent for sat already about the walls on benches and fanned themselves without apparent alarm.
• The citizenry made address to the governor but he was much like the sorcerer’s apprentice who could indeed provoke the imp to do his will but could in no way make him cease again.
• In the morning they rode out to the south. Little was said, nor were they quarrelsome among themselves. In three days they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul.
• They entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. The scalps of the slain villagers were strung from the windows of the governor’s house and the partisans were paid out of the all but exhausted coffers and the Sociedad was disbanded and the bounty rescinded. Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton’s head. They rode out on the north road as would parties bound for El Paso but before they were even quite out of sight of the city they had turned their tragic mounts to the west and they rode infatuate and half fond toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.

Chapter XIV

• A fiddler appeared and crouched on a stone doorsill and began to saw out some Moorish folktune and none who passed on their morning errands could take their eyes from those pale and rancid giants.
• By dark the streets were filled with besotted bedlamites lurching and cursing and ringing the churchbells with pistolballs in a godless charivari until the priest emerged bearing before him the crucified Christ and exhorting them with fragments of latin in a singsong chant. This man was drubbed in the street and prodded obscenely and they flung gold coins at him as he lay clutching his image. When he rose he disdained to take up the coins until some small boys ran out to gather them and then he ordered them brought to him while the barbarians whooped and drank him a toast.
• The dogvendor took this for a bargaining device and studied the dogs anew to better determine their worth, but the judge had dredged from his polluted clothes a small gold coin worth a bushel of suchpriced dogs. He laid the coin in the palm of his hand and held it out and with the other hand took the pups from their keeper, holding them in one fist like a pair of socks. He gestured with the gold. ¶ Andale, he said. ¶ The boy stared at the coin. ¶ The judge made a fist and opened it. The coin was gone. He wove his fingers in the empty air and reached behind the boy’s ear and took the coin and handed it to him. The boy held the coin in both hands before him like a small ciborium and he looked up at the judge. But the judge had set forth, dogs dangling. He crossed upon the stone bridge and he looked down into the swollen waters and raised the dogs and pitched them in.
• Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

Chapter XV

• He sat on the ground with the quiver upright between his knees while the company filed past. When the kid selected among the shafts to draw one he saw the judge watching him and he paused. He looked at Glanton. He let go the arrow he’d chosen and sorted out another and drew that one. It carried the red tassel. He looked at the judge again and the judge was not watching and he moved on and took his place with Tate and Webster. They were joined finally by a man named Harlan from Texas who had drawn the last arrow and the four of them stood together while the rest saddled their horses and led them out.
• It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.
• The judge called again from the dark beyond the fire and the expriest placed a cautionary hand upon the kid’s arm. But the kid rose and spat into the fire. He turned and eyed the expriest. ¶ You think I’m afraid of him? ¶ The expriest didnt answer and the kid turned and went out into the darkness where the judge waited. ¶ He stood holding the horse. Just his teeth glistened in the firelight. Together they led the animal off a little ways and the kid held the woven reata while the judge took up a round rock weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and crushed the horse’s skull with a single blow. Blood shot out of its ears and it slammed to the ground so hard that one of its forelegs broke under it with a dull snap.

Chapter XVII

• That night Glanton stared long into the embers of the fire. All about him his men were sleeping but much was changed. So many gone, defected or dead. The Delawares all slain. He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He’d long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men’s destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he’d drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he’d ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
• The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. ¶ The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
• The mountains to the north lay sunwise in corrugated folds and the days were cool and the nights were cold and they sat about the fire each in his round of darkness in that round of dark while the idiot watched from his cage at the edge of the light. The judge cracked with the back of an axe the shinbone on an antelope and the hot marrow dripped smoking on the stones. They watched him. The subject was war. ¶ The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black. ¶ The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said. ¶ The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there’s many a bloody tale of war inside it. ¶ It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. ¶ He turned to Brown, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each. ¶ My trade? ¶ Certainly. ¶ What is my trade? ¶ War. War is your trade. Is it not? ¶ And it aint yours? ¶ Mine too. Very much so. ¶ What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff? ¶ All other trades are contained in that of war. ¶ Is that why war endures? ¶ No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not. ¶ That’s your notion. ¶ The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

Chapter XX

• Aye, you’re a cool one, he whispered. But it’s cunning work all the same and wouldnt it take the heart out of ye.
  • TB: The expriest, talking to the kid.
• You’ll get no second chance lad. Do it. He is naked. He is unarmed. God’s blood, do you think you’ll best him any other way? Do it, lad. Do it for the love of God. Do it or I swear your life is forfeit. ¶ The judge smiled, he tapped his temple. The priest, he said. The priest has been too long in the sun. Seven-fifty and that’s my best offer. It’s a seller’s market. ¶ The kid put the pistol in his belt. Then with the expriest at his elbow importunate he circled the crater and they set out west across the pan. Toadvine climbed up and watched them. After a while there was nothing to see.
• The kid watched him. Will it not stop? he said. ¶ It will not.
  • TB: The kid and the expriest, hiding from the Judge.

Chapter XXI

• The priest has led you to this, boy. I know you would not hide. I know too that you’ve not the heart of a common assassin. I’ve passed before your gunsights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself? ¶ No assassin, called the judge. And no partisan either. There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.

Chapter XXII

• They wanted to know from me if you were always crazy, said the judge. They said it was the country. The country turned them out.
• Told them the truth. That you were the person responsible. Not that we have all the details. But they understand that it was you and none other who shaped events along such a calamitous course. Eventuating in the massacre at the ford by the savages with whom you conspired. Means and ends are of little moment here. Idle speculations. But even though you carry the draft of your murderous plan with you to the grave it will nonetheless be known in all its infamy to your Maker and as that is so so shall it be made known to the least of men. All in the fullness of time. ¶ You’re the one that’s crazy, said the kid. ¶ The judge smiled. No, he said. It was never me. But why lurk there in the shadows? Come here where we can talk, you and me. ¶ The kid stood against the far wall. Hardly more than a shadow himself. ¶ Come up, said the judge. Come up, for I’ve yet more to tell you. ¶ He looked down the hallway. Dont be afraid, he said. I’ll speak softly. It’s not for the world’s ears but for yours only. Let me see you. Dont you know that I’d have loved you like a son? ¶ He reached through the bars. Come here, he said. Let me touch you. ¶ The kid stood with his back to the wall. ¶ Come here if you’re not afraid, whispered the judge. ¶ I aint afraid of you. ¶ The judge smiled. He spoke softly into the dim mud cubicle. You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise. Hear me, man. I spoke in the desert for you and you only and you turned a deaf ear to me. If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay. Even the cretin acted in good faith according to his parts. For it was required of no man to give more than he possessed nor was any man’s share compared to another’s. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common and one did not. Can you tell me who that one was? ¶ It was you, whispered the kid. You were the one. ¶ The judge watched him through the bars, he shook his head. What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies. But if I was your enemy with whom would you have shared me? With whom? The priest? Where is he now? Look at me. Our animosities were formed and waiting before ever we two met. Yet even so you could have changed it all. ¶ You, said the kid. It was you. ¶ It was never me, said the judge. Listen to me. Do you think Glanton was a fool? Dont you know he’d have killed you? ¶ Lies, said the kid. Lies, by god lies. ¶ Think again, said the judge. ¶ He never took part in your craziness. ¶ The judge smiled. He took his watch from his waistcoat and opened it and held it to the failing light. ¶ For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it? ¶ He looked up. He pressed the case shut and restored the instrument to his person. Time to be going, he said. I have errands. ¶ The kid closed his eyes. When he opened them the judge was gone.
• In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.
• In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.

Chapter XXIII

• The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.
• He looked at them from one to the other. He reached and took up a stick and roused the fire with it and put the stick in the flames. You all like meanness? he said.
• Out on the prairie to the north a train of yoked wagons was passing and the oxen were pale and silent in the starlight and the wagons creaked faintly in the distance and a lantern with a red glass followed them out like an alien eye. This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war. His companions had started back to fetch him and perhaps this emboldened him the more and perhaps he said other things to the man for when they got to the fire the man had risen to his feet. You keep him away from me, he said. I see him back here I’ll kill him.
• Watching him across the layered smoke in the yellow light was the judge. ¶ He was sitting at one of the tables. He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years.
• The judge watched him. Was it always your idea, he said, that if you did not speak you would not be recognized? ¶ You seen me. ¶ The judge ignored this. I recognized you when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me. Then and now. Even so at the last I find you here with me.
• A ceremony then. One could well argue that there are not categories of no ceremony but only ceremonies of greater or lesser degree and deferring to this argument we will say that this is a ceremony of a certain magnitude perhaps more commonly called a ritual. A ritual includes the letting of blood. Rituals which fail in this requirement are but mock rituals. Here every man knows the false at once. Never doubt it. That feeling in the breast that evokes a child’s memory of loneliness such as when the others have gone and only the game is left with its solitary participant. A solitary game, without opponent. Where only the rules are at hazard. Dont look away. We are not speaking in mysteries. You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds? The judge leaned closer. What do you think death is, man? Of whom do we speak when we speak of a man who was and is not? Are these blind riddles or are they not some part of every man’s jurisdiction? What is death if not an agency? And whom does he intend toward? Look at me.
• And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

Epilogue

• In the down there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again.