This document (Blood Meridian 1) by Cormac McCarthy delves into a haunting narrative set against the backdrop of the American West. Through the eyes of a young runaway, themes of violence, survival, and the relentless pursuit of identity unfold within the first 20 pages. The protagonist’s journey from Tennessee to Texas is marked by encounters with diverse characters and profound introspection. McCarthy’s evocative prose paints a vivid picture of a harsh yet mesmerizing landscape, where darkness and brutality intertwine with moments of humanity. Dive into this epic tale that explores the depths of human nature and the unforgiving realities of the frontier.
BLOOD MERIDIAN
OR THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST
CORMAC McCARTHY
Cormac McCarthy is the author of The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God,
Suttree, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award
and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The author wishes to thank the Lyndhurst Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He also
wishes to express his appreciation to Albert Erskine, his editor of twenty years.
Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are
춖absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irre istible. Finally, you fear blood
more and more. Blood and time.
paul?valery
춏It is not to be thought that the life of dark ess is sunk in misery and lost as if in
춊sorrow ng. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death,
and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.
젨JACOB ?BOEHME
Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC
Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 3OO,ooo-year-old
fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped.
THE?YUMA?DAILY?SUN
June 13,1982
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.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes
the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods
beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and
drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he
quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches
him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did
fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who
would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He
has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed.
He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.
All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the
predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a
solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and
stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the
garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper
skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown
bottomland toward night.
A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat.
Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the
black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and
he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. 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. He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His
shoulders are set close. The child's face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the
eyes oddly innocent. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all
breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes. Men from lands so far and
queer that standing over them where they lie bleeding in the mud he feels mankind
itself vindicated.
On a certain night a Maltese boatswain shoots him in the back with a small pistol.
Swinging to deal with the man he is shot again just below the heart. The man flees and
he leans against the bar with the blood running out of his shirt. The others look away.
After a while he sits in the floor.
He lies in a cot in the room upstairs for two weeks while the tavernkeeper's wife
attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with
a wiry body like a man's. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and
he leaves in the night and sleeps on the riverbank until he can find a boat that will
take him on. The boat is going to Texas.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become
remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains
so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will
or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. The passengers are a diffident lot.
They cage their eyes and no man asks another what it is that brings him here. He
sleeps on the deck, a pilgrim among others. He watches the dim shore rise and fall.
Gray seabirds gawking. Flights of pelicans coastwise above the gray swells.
They disembark aboard a lighter, settlers with their chattels, all studying the low
coastline, the thin bight of sand and scrub pine swimming in the haze.
He walks through the narrow streets of the port. The air smells of salt and newsawn
lumber. At night whores call to him from the dark like souls in want. A week and he is
on the move again, a few dollars in his purse that he's earned, walking the sand roads
of the southern night alone, his hands balled in the cotton pockets of his cheap coat.
춍Earthen causeways across the marsh and. Egrets in their rookeries white as candles
among the moss. The wind has a raw edge to it and leaves lope by the roadside and
skelter on in the night fields. He moves north through small settlements and farms,
working for day wages and found. He sees a parricide hanged in a crossroads hamlet
and the man's friends run forward and pull his legs and he hangs dead from his rope
while urine darkens his trousers.
He works in a sawmill, he works in a diptheria pesthouse. He takes as pay from a
farmer an aged mule and aback this animal in the spring of the year eighteen and
forty-nine he rides up through the latterday republic of Fredonia into the town of
Nacogdoches.
The Reverend Green had been playing to a full house daily as long as the rain had
