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Child of God(3)

By:Cormac McCarthy


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