Butcher's Crossing

Review

In my re-read of Stoner recently, several people suggested that I try his other books, especially this one and Augustus. I picked both of them up.

Butcher’s Crossing did not start well for me. The opening with the young man coming to the edge of the wilderness, this felt familiar but fine. We have to get the plot going, sure. In the opening chapters when our protagonist Andrews lays eyes on a working woman named Francine, we enter the world of tropes and I felt frustration and quickly. Andrews of course falls for Francine within a few moments, but the frustration comes with Schneider, the skinner, invoking a sense of jealousy and anger. Believe me, I know what jealousy and anger feel like. I don’t necessarily feel interested in reading the thousandth book to feature a young man getting jealous and angry over someone they’ve just lain eyes on. This story mounts in the closing pages of Part I and I nearly put the book down, such was my irritation and boredom.

Part II features the main plot and the buffalo hunt. I felt a sense of dread as we approached:

They walked closer. In the short prairie grass, the bones gleamed whitely, half-submerged in the blue-green grass, which had grown up around them. Andrews walked among the bones, careful not to disturb the, peering cautiously as he passed. ¶ “Small kill,” Miller said. “Must not have been more than thirty of forty. Fairly recent, too. Look here.”

(page 80.)

Not knowing this book’s reputation or history as a revisionist western, I felt concerned that it would ask me to enjoy the eventual buffalo slaughter. Imagining this field of bones, I also wondered if there would be any buffalo left to slaughter, especially with the lead Miller’s apparent navigational failures.

The book does not ask that. The slaughter stretches on for a good portion, and at no point are we asked to enjoy any part of it. When we arrive in the valley, we are met almost with Eden:

Andrews walked up to him, and stood looking where he pointed. For perhaps three hundred yards, the trail cut down between the pines; but at that point, abruptly, the land leveled. A long narrow valley, flat as the top of a table, wound among the mountains. Lush grass grew on the bed of the valley, and waved gently in the breeze as far as the eye could see. A quietness seemed to rise from the valley; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a land where no human foot had touched. Andrews found that despite his exhaustion he was holding his breath; he expelled the air from his lungs as gently as he could, so as not to disturb the silence.

(page 117.)

I’m not going to detail the rest of the book closely. It is safe to say that by the time they leave the valley, this Eden has been threshed and turned into something nightmarish. While it never rises to the almost apocalyptic heights of Cormac’s Blood Meridian (thinking especially about the shootout around the volcanic lands), it is gruesome.

Part II is gripping. Part III gets a little back towards Part I, especially at the inevitable reunion with Francine (we all knew it had to happen). This device, Williams’ transparent tool to show Andrews before and after his experiences in the valley, just bores me to death. Particularly when I do not find Andrews much changed. Multiple passages in the book detail his near-rebirth into a new body and his dissociations. And yet, at the end of the book there is no clear break or change in him, merely the reduction of him to something merely functional. Perhaps this is the point, that he came out to the West to find himself and in the doing killed himself. Yes, I think that is part of it. But the final pages seem to want something else for Andrews, and I don’t know what that is supposed to be.

A better review would probably spend a lot more time talking about Miller. Miller’s greed and hunger are near fanatical, but it seems less interesting to me than it should. He is uncomplicated, and as a result uninteresting. In the beginning it is about money. In the midst, it is about his conquest of nature. In the end, it is about money again. The final pages find Miller and McDonald, the furbroker, arguing about a deal and who has ruined who. No one sheds a tear for the destructed valley and the eradication of the buffalo. It is all about money and profit and possessions and domination.

It is very well written, and I think it is good. But it doesn’t inspire anything in me aside from a sense of frustration, and I struggle to write anything more about it right now.

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Notes

• p60 - He spoke to her, but he hardly knew what he said; for as he spoke, his heart went out to her in an excess of pity. He saw her as a poor, ignorant victim of her time and place, betrayed by certain artificialities of conduct, thrust from a great mechanical world upon this bare plateau of existence that fronted the wilderness. . . . A revulsion against the world rose up within him, and he could taste it in his throat.
  • TB: This is by far my least favorite segment of the book. Everything happening with Francine in here is so annoying. Williams cannot write an interesting or realistic woman to save his life, and this trope of the downtrodden prostitute is out of his depth.
• p78 - The horse beneath him took him from hollow to crest, yet it seemed to him that the land rather than the horse moved beneath him like a great treadmill, revealing in its movement only another part of itself.
  • TB: Flagged for use of the word ‘treadmill,’ one of two such uses in the text. The book takes place in the 1870s, so I went to see when the word treadmill would have come into use. Apparently it was coined in 1820, relating to millworking and the prison punishment (think of how Conan got all buff in John Milius’ 1982 film). The exercise device that we now think of as the word ‘treadmill’ was developed in the late 60’s by someone called William Staub, who got the idea after reading a 1968 book called Aerobics. So, I wondered if this use of the word was anachronistic, when in actuality the book itself predates the machine.
• p80 - They walked closer. In the short prairie grass, the bones gleamed whitely, half-submerged in the blue-green grass, which had grown up around them. Andrews walked among the bones, careful not to disturb the, peering cautiously as he passed. ¶ “Small kill,” Miller said. “Must not have been more than thirty of forty. Fairly recent, too. Look here.”
• p84 - “Where we’re going,” Miller said, “you’ll see them like we used to in the old days.”
  • TB: I’ve made a note in the text: ‘There’s no chance of a herd, right? It will be a few and they will wipe them out.’
• p86 - The passing of time showed itself in the faces of the three men who rode with him and in the changes her perceived within himself. Day by day he felt the skin of his face hardening in the weather; the stubble of hair on the lower part of his face became smooth as his skin roughened, and the backs of his hands reddened and then browned and darkened in the sun. He felt a leanness and a hardness creep upon his body; he thought at times that he was moving into a new body, or into a real body that had lain hidden beneath layers of unreal softness and whiteness and smoothness.
• p117 - Andrews walked up to him, and stood looking where he pointed. For perhaps three hundred yards, the trail cut down between the pines; but at that point, abruptly, the land leveled. A long narrow valley, flat as the top of a table, wound among the mountains. Lush grass grew on the bed of the valley, and waved gently in the breeze as far as the eye could see. A quietness seemed to rise from the valley; it was the quietness, the stillness, the absolute calm of a land where nu human foot had touched. Andrews found that despite his exhaustion he was holding his breath; he expelled the air from his lungs as gently as he could, so as not to disturb the silence.
• p151 - In the moment before sleep came upon him, he made a tenuous connection between his turning away from Francine that night in Butcher’s Crossing, and his turning away from the gutted buffalo earlier in the day, here in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his hock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.
• p248 - “Me ruin you?” McDonald laughed. “You ruin yourself, you and your kind. Every day of your life, everything you do. Nobody can tell you what to do. No. You go your own way, stinking the land up with what you kill. You flood the market with hides and ruin the market, and then you come crying to me that I’ve ruined you.”
• p250 - “Well, there’s nothing,” McDonald said. “You get born and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could of had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”
• p273 - He looked once more at Francine, and wished to reach out gently and touch her young, aging face. But he did not do so, for fear that he would awaken her. Very quietly he went to the corner of the room and took his bedroll up. From the money belt that lay upon it, he took out two bills, and stuffed them in his pocket; the rest of the bills he neatly piled on the table beside the couch. Wherever Francine went, she would need the money; she would need it to buy a new rug, and curtains for her windows. Once again he looked at her; across the room, in the large bed, she seemed very small. He went quietly across to the door, and did not look back.