I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. The novel is about a 14-year old boy from Tennessee who heads west in the 1850s and winds up in the company of a band of mercenaries who are paid to slaughter and scalp Indians. The book is based on real events which took place along the Mexican border. It is a profound inversion of the typical “western” in that westward expansion is portrayed not as some glorious thing, but rather as a violent lawless hellscape—something more like Dante’s Inferno than How The West Was Won. At the same time, the language of the writing is often so lyrical and intense, that I decided to create a poem out of fragments I found there.
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.
They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives.
Men from lands so far and queer
That standing over them where
They lie bleeding in the mud
He feels mankind itself vindicated.
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.
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 don’t want to.
Rightly so.
Best not to look in there.
It ain’t 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
For a thousand years,
No need to tend it.
You believe that?
I don’t know.
Believe that.
Hell fire, come on out.
I’m white and christian.
Hell fire, son,
You won’t need no wages.
You get to keep ever-thing you can raise.
We goin to Mexico.
Spoils of war.
Ain’t a man in the company
Won’t come out a big landowner.
How much land you own now?
There is no government in Mexico.
Hell, there’s no God in Mexico.
Never will be.
We are dealing with a people manifestly
Incapable of governing themselves.
And do you know what happens
With people who cannot govern themselves?
That’s right.
Others come in to govern for them.
We are to be instruments of liberation
In a dark and troubled land.
The wrath of God lies sleeping.
It was hid a million years before men were
And only men have power to wake it.
Hell ain’t half full.
Hear me.
Ye carry war of a madman’s making
Onto a foreign land.
Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.
This looks like the high road to hell to me,
Said a man from the ranks.
The white noon saw them through the waste
Like a ghost army.
These elect, shabby and white with dust
Like a company of armed and mounted
Millers wandering in dementia.
A legion of horribles,
One in the armor of a
Spanish conquistador.
Like a company of mounted clowns,
Death hilarious, all howling
Like a horde from a hell
More horrible yet than the
Brimstone land of christian reckoning.
The mountains on the sudden skyline
Stark and black and livid
Like a land of some other order
Out there whose true geology
Was not stone but fear.
And death seemed the most prevalent
Feature of the landscape.
Dust staunched the wet and naked
Heads of the scalped
Who with the fringe of hair
Below their wounds
And tonsured to the bone
Now lay like maimed and naked monks
In the bloodslaked dust
And everywhere the dying
Groaned and gibbered
And horses lay screaming.
And they were very small
And they moved very slowly
In the immensity of that landscape.
By and by they came to a bush
That was hung with dead babies.
And a dead Christ in a glass bier
Lay broken on the chancel floor.
Flies walked on their shrunken eyeballs.
Nothing moved in that purgatorial waste
Save carnivorous birds.
And folding its wings over him
It began to drink his blood.
A howl of such outrage
As to stitch a caesura
In the pulsebeat of the world.
I know your kind, he said.
What’s wrong with you
Is wrong all the way through you.
His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh
And it was garishly discolored and
Small worms worked in the open wound.
Blinking and bearded and filthy in their rags.
They looked like God’s profoundest peons.
And past the governor’s palace
And past the cathedral where vultures
Squatted along the dusty entablatures
And among the niches in the carved façade
Hard by the figures of Christ and the apostles
The birds holding out their own dark vestments
In postures of strange benevolence
While about them flapped on the wind
The dried scalps of slaughtered Indians
Strung on cords, the long dull hair
Swinging like the filaments of certain seaforms
And the dry hides clapping against the stones.
All wild things from the country round
Hanging head downward from hooks.
He told how they’d taken the city of Chihuahua,
An army of irregulars that fought in rags and underwear.
Goldseekers.
Itenerant degenerates bleeding westward
Like some heliotropic plague.
And the trappings of their horses
Fashioned out of human skin
And their bridles woven up from human hair
And decorated with human teeth
And the riders wearing scapulars
Or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears,
The whole like a visitation
From some heathen land
Where they and others like them
Fed on human flesh.
Todo va bien.
Bien?
The sergeant was looking
At the dead birds, the goat.
He adduced for their consideration
References to the children of Ham,
The lost tribes of Israelites,
Certain passages from the Greek poets,
Anthropological speculations
As to the propagation of the races
In their dispersion and isolation
Through the agency of a geological cataclysm
And an assortment of racial traits
With respect to climatic and geographical influences.
The sergeant listened to this and more
With great attention.
The necklace of human ears he wore
Looked like a string of dried black figs.
Ye’ve not hunted the aborigines afore,
Said Bathcat.
I think she means to say that
In your fortune lies our fortunes all.
Perdida, perdida.
She was in a meatcamp
About eight miles up the river, said Webster.
She caint walk.
He took a skinning knife from his belt
And stepped to where the old woman lay
And took up her hair and twisted it about his wrist
And passed the blade of the knife about her skull
And ripped away the scalp.
What have you got that a man could drink
With just a minimum risk of blindness and death.
You are Texas? He said.
I was Texas three year.
He held up his hand.
The forefinger was gone and the first joint
And perhaps he was showing them
What happened in Texas
Or perhaps he merely meant
To count the years.
I pray to God for this country.
I say that to you. I pray.
I don’t go in the church.
What I need to talk to them dolls there?
I talk here.
He pointed to his chest.
When he turned to the American
His voice softened again.
You are fine caballeros.
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 don’t wake up forever.
Here beyond men’s judgments
All covenants were brittle.
You don’t get your black ass
Away from this fire I’ll kill you
Graveyard dead.
The white man looked up drunkenly
And the black stepped forward
And with a single stroke
Swapt off his head.
No one spoke.
When they set out in the dawn
The headless man was sitting
Like a murdered anchorite
In ashes and sark.
Like the cries of souls broke through
Some misweave in the weft of things
Into the world below.
Out of that whirlwind
No voice spoke
And the pilgrim lying in his broken bones
May cry out and in his anguish
He may rage, but rage at what?
And if the dried and blackened shell
Of him is found among the sands
By travelers to come yet
Who can discover the engine of his ruin?
Glanton gave the door a kick.
Come out if you’re white, he called.
God don’t lie.
No, said the judge.
He does not.
And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees,
The bones of things.
Soon they were conversing senselessly
About the merits and virtues of the dead boy.
The man who’d been shot
Sang church hymns
And cursed God alternately.
The Americans might have traded
For some of the meat
But they carried no tantamount goods
And the disposition to exchange
Was foreign to them.
And so these parties divided
Upon that midnight plain,
Each passing back the way
The other had come,
Pursuing as all travelers must
Inversions without end
Upon other men’s journeys.
It may well be that
The voice of the Almighty
Speaks most profoundly in such beings
As lives in silence themselves.
For let it go how it will, he said,
God speaks in the least of creatures.
I aint’ heard no voice, he said.
When it stops, you’ll know
You’ve heard it all your life.
The bear had carried off their kinsman
Like some fabled storybook beast
And the land had swallowed them up
Beyond all ransom or reprieve.
They were men of another time
They’d learnt war by warring,
Onto the prairies and across the outlet
To the bloodlands of the west.
It was without measure or bound
And there were contained within it
Creatures more horrible yet
And beings which no man has looked upon
And yet not alien none of it more
Than were their own hearts alien
In them, whatever wilderness
Contained there and whatever beasts.
The slant black shapes of the mounted men
Stenciled across the stone with a definition
Austere and implacable like shapes
Capable of violating their covenant with
the flesh that authored them
and continuing anonymous across
the naked rock without reference
to sun or man or god.
A Tennessean named Webster
Had been watching him and he asked the judge
What he aimed to do with those notes
And sketches and the judge smiled and said
That it was his intention to expunge
Them from the memory of man.
But no man can put all the world in a book.
No more than everything drawed in a book is so.
The judge smiled.
Whether in my book or not,
Every man is tabernacled in every other
And he in exchange and so on
In an endless complexity of being
And witness to the uttermost
Edge of the world.
The traveler concluded by
Telling the old man that he was a loss
To God and man alike
And would remain so until he took
His brother into his heart
As he would take himself in
And he came upon his own person
In want in some desert place in the world.
He is broken before a frozen god
And he will never find his way.
All progressions from a higher to a lower order
Are marked by ruins and mystery
And a residue of nameless rage.
So what is the way of raising a child?
At a young age, said the judge,
They should be put in a pit with wild dogs.
They should be set to puzzle out
From their proper clues the one
Of three doors that does not harbor wild lions.
They should be made to run naked in the desert until…
His meridian is at once his darkening
And the evening of his day.
Five wagons smoldered on the desert floor
And the riders dismounted and moved
Among the bodies of the dead argonauts in silence,
Those right pilgrims nameless
Among the stones with their terrible wounds,
The viscera spilled from their sides
And the naked torsos bristling with arrowshafts.
Some by their beards were men
But yet wore strange menstrual wounds
Between their legs and no man’s parts
For these had been cut away and
Hung dark and strange from out
Their grinning mouths.
One of the Delawares emerged
From the smoke with a naked infant
Dangling in each hand
And squatted at a ring of midden stones
And swung them by the heels each in turn
And bashed their heads against the stones
So that the brains burst forth
Through the fontanel
In a bloody spew
And humans on fire
Came shrieking forth like berserkers.
They moved among the dead
Harvesting the long black locks
With their knives and leaving their victims
Rawskulled and strange
In their bloody cauls.
The men were stringing up
Scalps on strips of leather whang
And some of the dead lay
With broad slices of hide
Cut from their backs
To be used for the making
Of belts and harness.
The judge rode at the head of the column
Bearing on the saddle before him
A strange dark child
Covered with ash.
Toadvine saw him
With the child
As he passed with his saddle
But when he came back
Ten minutes later leading his horse
The child was dead
And the judge had scalped it.
In the smoking dawn
The party riding ragged and bloody
With their baled peltries
Looked less like victors
Than the harried afterguard
Of some ruined army
Retreating across the meridians
Of chaos and old night,
The horses stumbling,
The men tottering asleep
In their saddles.
On the twenty-first of July
In the year eighteen forty-nine
They rode into the city of Chihuahua
To a hero’s welcome,
Driving the harlequin horses before them
Through the dust of the streets
In a pandemonium of teeth and whited eyes.
Small boys ran among the hooves
And the victors in their gory rags
Smiled through the filth
And the dust and the caked blood
As they bore on poles
The desiccated heads of the enemy
Through that fantasy of music and flowers.
The scalps were being strung
About the iron fretwork
Of the gazebo like decorations
For some barbaric celebration.
The severed heads
Had been raised on poles
Above the lampstandards
Where they now contemplated
With their caved and pagan eyes
The dry hides of their kinsmen
And forebears strung across the stone façade
Of the cathedral and clacking
Lightly in the wind.
Later when the lamps were lit
The heads in the soft glare
Assumed the look of tragic masks
And within a few days
They would become mottled white
And altogether leprous
With the droppings of the birds
That roosted upon them.
Patriotic toasts were drunk,
The governor’s aides
Raising their glasses to
Washington and Franklin
And the Americans responding
With yet more of their own country’s heroes,
Ignorant alike of diplomacy
And any name at all from the pantheon
Of their sister republic.
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 scalphunters stood grinning at the dames,
Churlishlooking in their shrunken clothes,
Sucking their teeth,
Armed with knives and pistols
And mad about the eyes.
Jackson, pistols drawn, lurched into the street
Vowing to Shoot the ass off Jesus Christ,
The longlegged white son of a bitch.
Deployed upon that plain
They moved in a constant elision,
Ordained agents of the actual dividing
Out the world which they encountered
And leaving what had been and what would never be
Alike extinguished on the ground behind them.
Like beings provoked out of their own loomings
To wander ravenous and doomed and mute
As gorgons shambling the brutal wastes
Of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature
Was and each was all.
Then he rose
And with a piece of broken chert
He scrappled away
One of the designs,
Leaving no trace of it
Only a raw place on the stone
Where it had been.
Then he put up his book
And returned to the camp.
In three days
They would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas
Camped on the river
And slaughter them every soul.
He looked at the livid letters
Tattooed on his forehead
And at the lank greasy hair
That hung from his earless skull.
He looked at the necklace of gold teeth at his chest.
They rode on.
The riders were all through the village
Trampling down the grass wickiups
And bludgeoning the shrieking householders.
Long past dark that night
When the moon was already up
A party of women
That had been upriver drying fish
Returned to the village
And wandered howling through the ruins.
All about her the dead lay
With their peeled skulls
Like polyps bluely wet
Or luminescent melons cooling
On some mesa of the moon.
The Americans entered the town of Carrizal
Late in the afternoon of the second day following,
Their horses festooned with
The reeking scalps of the Tiguas.
They watched the passing
Of that bloodstained argosy
Through their streets
With dark and solemn eyes.
And nothing else was there
Save random polished bones.
They passed through small villages
Doffing their hats to folk
Whom they would murder
Before the month was out.
They had scalped the entire
Body of the dead, sliding about
In a floor that had been packed clay
And was now a wine-colored mud.
Many of the people had been running toward the church
Where they knelt clutching the altar
And from this refuge
They were dragged howling
One by one
And one by one
They were slain and scalped
On the chancel floor.
They entered the city
Haggard and filthy and reeking
With the blood of the citizenry
For whose protection hey had contracted.
In the morning the rain had stopped
And they appeared in the streets
Tattered, stinking, ornamented
With human parts like cannibals.
And none who passed on their morning errands
Could take their eyes from
Those pale and rancid giants.
He cut down the Mexican flag with his knife
And tied it to the tail of a mule.
The animals dropping silently as martyrs,
Turning sedately in the empty air
And exploding on the rocks below
In startling bursts of blood and silver.
Whatever exists, he said.
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge
Exists without my consent.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me.
I’d have them all in zoos.
Bueno. Andale.
Hay caballeros en la casa.
On the fifth of December
They rode out north
In the cold darkness before daybreak
Carrying with them a contract
Signed by the governor
Of the state of Sonora
For the furnishing of Apache scalps.
Glanton’s eyes in their dark sockets
were burning centroids of murder.
The idiot was small and misshapen
And his face was smeared with feces
And he say peering at them
With dull hostility
Silently chewing a turd.
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 were 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’s drive the remorseless sun
On to its final endarkment
As if he’d ordered it all ages since,
Before there were paths anywhere,
Before there were men or suns to go upon them.
They watched the fire
Which does contain within it
Something of men themselves
Inasmuch as they are less without it
And are divided from their origins
And are exiles.
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 before 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.
As if in the transit of those riders
Were a thing so profoundly terrible
As to register to even the
Uttermost granulation of reality.
On a rise at the western edge of the playa
They passed a crude wooden cross where
Maricopas had crucified an Apache.
The horses trudged sullenly
The alien ground and the round earth
Rolled beneath them
Silently milling the greater void
Wherein they were contained.
In the neuter austerity of that terrain
All phenomena were bequeathed
A strange equality
And no one thing
Nor spider
Nor stone
Nor blade of grass
Could put forth claim to precedence.
The very clarity of these articles
Belied their familiarity,
For the eye predicates the whole
On some feature or part
And here was nothing more luminous
That another and nothing more unshadowed
And in the optical democracy of such landscapes
All preference is made whimsical
And a man and a rock become
Endowed with unguessed kinships.
It makes no difference what men think of war,
Said the judge.
War endures.
As well as men what they think of stone.
War was always here.
Before man was, war waited for him.
The ultimate trade waiting
Its ultimate practitioner.
That is the way it was and will be.
That and not some other way.
What is my trade?
War. War is your trade. Is it not?
And it ain’t yours?
Mine too. Very much so.
Is that why war endures?
No. It endures because young men love it
And old men love it in them.
Here that which is wagered
Swallows up game, player, all.
Your heart’s desire is to be told some mystery.
The mystery is that there is no mystery.
There is hardly in the world a waste so barren
But some creature will not cry out at night,
Yet here one was
And they listened to their breathing
In the dark and the cold
And they listened to the systole
Of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them.
They lumbered on,
The judge a pale pink beneath
His talc of dust like something newly born,
The imbecile much the darker,
Lurching together across the pan
At the very extremes of exile
Like some scurrilous king
Stripped of his vestiture
And driven together with his fool
into the wilderness to die.
You wouldn’t think that a man
Would run plumb out of country
Out here, would ye?
Do you think there’ll be no day again?
The kid watched him.
Will it not stop? he said.
It will not.
He seemed like some degenerate entrepreneur
Fleeing from a medicine show and
The outrage of the citizens who’s sacked it.
The colt stood against the horse
With its head down
And the horse was watching,
Out there past men’s knowing,
Where the stars are drowning
And whales ferry their vast souls
Through the black and seamless sea.