C R C S MT

BLOOD AND TIMECormac McCarthy and the twilight of the West

By Roger D. Hodge

That is no country for old men. The youngInane another's arms, birds in the trees-Those dying generations--at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten, bom, and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect.

-William Butler Yeats,

C "Sailing to Byzantium"

ormac McCarthy's novels aremessages from lost worlds, artifacts ofvanished histories to which his read-ers by some necromancy are madeprivy. His characters are solitaries,fugitivesfrom the present who go forthinto the rotten holdings of the van-quished in search of something theycannot name. McCarthy's narrativevoice bespeaks a master of the trade,a strange traveler from a distant landwho has taken it upon himself to keepa drowsy emperor awake by singing ofwhat is past, passing, or to come.

Who is that traveler and what does hewant? The horseman approaches but dearfriend do not attempt to call out his name ,for to do so is to ask him in. Rest contentwith the telling. Read the news of civi-lizarions old and new. Read those recordsof blood and violence, conjugations ofjoy and sorrow. As it was then, is nowand ever shall be. Curious the small andlesser fates that lead a man to his end, thesmall enigmas of time and space and

Roger D. Hodge is the Deputy Editor ofHarper's Magazine.

death. What do you believe? He said hebelieved the last and the first suffer equal-

ly. That a curtain is falling

Man the western world.

cCarthy's ninth novel, NoCountry for Old Men, unfolds alongthe Texas-Mexico border, in the1980s, when the drug war was just.beginning to change the character of

.all the communities along the RioGrande and beyond. The book canbe seen as a coda to the enormouslyambitious and successful Border Tril-ogy (which comprises All the PrettyHorses, The Crossing, and Cities ofthe Plain) and as such it is a moremodest effort. Like many of Me-Carthy's novels, it plays with theconventions of genre, but unlike thelast four, the genre in question is not 'the western but the thriller. Criticshave made much of this formal shift.James Wood, writing in The New

Mystic Shelter (detail), by Carolyn E. Boyd, from Rock Art of the LowerPecos © TexasA & M University Press. Courtesy the artist and Shumla School, Comstock, Tex.

Yorker, declared the book "an unim-portant, stripped-down thriller" that"gestures not toward any recogniz-able reality but merely toward thenarrative codes already establishedby pulp thrillers and action films."Joyce Carol Oates, writing in TheNew York Review of Books, dismissedthe novel as being little better thana "meretricious thriller." It is, shesaid, "increasingly confused" and"ineffectual" and yet somehow per-fectly suited to the movie screen.Thus does critical acclaim, a ficklecreature, withdraw its favors.

Perhaps it is not so unusual for ma-jor writers to receive bad reviews forgood books, but there is somethingabout the rough treatment this novelhas received that is symptomatic ofthe shallowness and haste that char-acterizesso much of our literaryculture.It's hard to miss the malice that creepsinto these essaysbut not so easy to ex-plain it. William Deresiewicz, whowrote an intemperate review in TheNation, and Joyce Carol Oates bothobjected to the novel's alleged poli-tics; Deresiewiczwent so far as to claimthat McCarthy has enlisted his fictionin the culture wars and is "rubbing ourtender little modem liberal noses indeath's horror by making uswatch it inslow motion." Wood, the author of anovel called The Book Against God,admitted that McCarthy is good, butnot that good, and insinuated thatthere's something morally suspect, of-fensive even, about his books. "Me-Carthy stifles the question of theodicy

CRITICISM 65

before it can really speak. His myth ofeternal violence ... asserts, in effect,that rebellion is pointless because this .is how it will always be." The thriller,Wood concluded, "is the perfect ve-hicle for McCarthy's deterministicmythmaking, matching his metaphys-ical cheapness with a slickness untodeath all its own."

How interesting that Cormac Me-Carthy should fail so spectacularly atwriting a theodicy, which is to say, aJames Wood novel. But it might be

world that in large part is already ex-tinct, but they are not figments of amerely literary imagination. Me-Carthy's novels are the works of an

artist who has excavated the

I tailings of that dying world.

f the efforts of our higher criticshave failed to yield a comprehensibleaccount of McCarthy's latest novel, itis nonetheless true that the book pre-sents the reader, especially one whohas followedhis previous writings, with

criticism or political broadsides or es-says of any kind. He is evidently un-interested in publicity or celebrities orbook parties. He does not teach. Cor-mac McCarthy is thus an artist of anincreasingly rare kind, one who prefersto let his work speak for itself His in-transigence makes things difficult forbook reviewers, who must read thebooks, and read them carefully, if theyhope to understand them.

In the yearsbetween 1965and 1979,McCarthy published four Appalachian

even more interesting, at least whenone is confronted with an author ofMcCarthy's undeniable skill, to figureout what he was trying to do, and toevaluate the book on its own terms in-stead of trying to plug it into a prefab-ricated receptacle. To claim, as Wooddoes, that the events and charactersand landscape of No Country for OldMen correspond to no recognizable re-ality is to confuse the limits of realitywith those of suburban domesticity. Asit happens, I was born and raised inthat harsh country along the Mexicanborder, as was my father and my fa-ther's father. My great-great-grandpar-ents came into that region in the nine-teenth century, built homes and barnsand fences, raised livestock and fami-lies, and carved a way of life out of thestone. The stories I have heard of In-dians and outlaws and Mexican revo-lutionaries, cattle drives and gunfights,droughts and floods and other frontierhardships, may be the products of a

66 HARPER'S ~AGAZ[NE / FEBRUARY 2006

a question. Why would a novelist whohas proven again and again over thecourse of eight novels that he can doanything he chooses, one who has stub-bornly followed his own path withoutregard to critical or commercial fashion, ,choose to narrow his focus so radical-ly?No Country for Old Men is hugelyenjoyable (no one has denied that),but it is also.puzzling. It exploits theconventions of the thriller but ulti-mately withholds the narcotic satis-faction of that genre's purest avatars. Isit possible that Cormac McCarthymight have something larger in mindthan meretricious entertainment?

Ifhe were a normal writer, one couldsimplyaskhim. Indeed, a normal writermight even write an article explaininghimself. But McCarthy has consis-tently refused to interpret his ownwork. He has given only two inter-views (and those reportedly underduress) in thirteen years and has shownno interest in publishing memoirs or

novels. His method, so far as one cantell, was as rigorous as it was unusual.He lived among the people aboutwhom he wrote. Like them, he workedin almost complete obscurity,and in ab-solute poverty. McCarthy's second ex-wife, Annie Delisle, reports that sheand her husband lived for almost eightyears in an old dairy bam and used anearby lake for baths. McCarthy spentmuch of his time 'with old woodsmenand moonshiners. His work was be-ginning to attract the attention of pro-fessors, but he firmly rejected the se-ductions of the lecture and workshopcircuit. "Someone would call up andoffer him $2,000 to come speak at auniversity about his books," Delisletold a reporter, "and he would tell themthat everything he had to saywas thereon the page." Throughout these years,as he published The Orchard Keeper,Outer Dark, and Child of God, Me-Carthy washusbanding his experiences,working on Suttree, his great comic

novel of Knoxville in the Fifties, andthat book did not appear until fiveyearsafter he moved to Texas in 1974. Me-Carthy's habit of holding on to hismanuscripts (Cities of the Plain appar-ently existed as a screenplay for morethan ten years prior to the publicationof AU the Pretty Horses) beggars at-tempts to divide his career into dis-tinct periods.'

McCarthy's singular vision was al-ready fully formed in his first novel.His insistence on time, on the rhythm

sures before and after, the shape ofthe story so defined is always tragic. InThe Orchard Keeper, the motions ofthe drama are as old as Antigone: a fa-ther killed, the son befriended by thekiller, who becomes a surrogate fa-ther. An old man hounded out of hishome by the law, because he followsan older law.

In the interplay of such primevaloppositions, McCarthy obsessivelyex-plores the borderline between the hu-man and the animal, especiallyin those

it were a higher calling and conscious-ness, the purest and most scientific ex-pression of civilization. They are ra-tionalists, technicians of amorality. Wefirstglimpsesuch a killer in Outer Dark,a smiling, bearded and black-suitedhighwayman who travels with two bru-tal companions and buildshis fireshigh,because you never know who might bepassing by. "We ain't hard to find.Oncet you've found us." He gives noname because "some things is best not

. named," though he admits that "they's

of the seasons, the phases of the moon,and most of all the evening redness inthe West, manifests itself in almost

. the first image of The Orchard Keeper,and in the last, and rises to its most ex-treme pitch in Blood Meridian. In Sur-tree, McCarthy exchanges solar timewith animal metabolism, and his tem-poral markers become urination, defe-cation, and vomiting. His TennesseeRiver is a slow-moving septic mass, acolossal intestinal tract, beside whichthe damned and forgotten give them-selves over to drink and debauchery,their "lives running out like somethingfoul, nightsoil from a cesspipe, a mea-sured dripping in the dark."

Bywhatever means McCarthy mea-

I In 1985 McCarthy published his first Texasnovel, Blood Meridian, and the Border Tril-ogy began to appear in 1992. Critics tend todraw a line between the Appa1Jlchian and theSouthwestern novels, but Suttree and BloodMeridian resemble each other more than theydo the other books whose landscapes they share.

instinctual rites by which some hu-mans maintain their ancient allegianceto the predator. Wolves and coyotes,panthers and house cats, hawks, owls,minks, and other varmints populatehis novels, as do those human hunters,trappers, and fishermenwho are animalin their innocence and love of blood.They hunt because they live, and theyfeel the blood rise with the moon andmust run their bluetick hounds or settheir traps. (A reference work,TrappingNorth American Furbearers, a rare writ-ten testament of a dying craft, appearsboth in The Orchard Keeper and in TheCrossing.) Other men, damaged by vi-olence or some nameless perversion,lose the pure sense of the hunt and de-scend into a subhuman realm of mur-der and treachery. True hunters smellthe murder on the skins of such menand recoil from them instantly.

But these perverted hunters are notthe worst of the killers in McCarthy.His true villains arrive at murder as if

RattlesnakeCanyon, by Carolyn E. Boyd, from Rock Arc of the Lower Pecos © Texas A & MUniversity Press. Courtesy rhe artist and Shumla School, Comstock, Tex.

lots would like to know that." A darkrider bound, he declares, "by nothin,"this figurewill follow the western roadto Texas.

McCarthy's plots are austeretragedies interwoven with astonish-ing comic set pieces. Gene Harrogatefucking watermelons or chasing pigs orpoisoning bats in $uttree; the stam-pede scene in Outer Dark, which turnsinto a near lynching after a band of pigherders attempts, with the help of acompliant preacher, to blame CullaHolme for the death of their fellowherder, who was swept off a cliff by

. the panicked hogs. And everywherethe magnificent imagery of onrushingdoom. Small gray, nameless birdsstruggle and cry out, having beenblown by the wind of a desert cloud- .burst onto the sharp daggers of a chol-la cactus; drinkers on a saloon's backporch, poised over a hollow, fall intothe abyss when the old boards andnails give way; a ferry breaks free and

CRITICISM 67

shoots down a swollen river, as acrazed horse rushes back and forth onthe deck until it finally goes over therail; a hawk so intent on its prey that

it fails to notice an ap-'I proaching automobile.

1'; cCarthy's youths all set outto recapture something lost and elu-sive. One, the nameless kid of BloodMeridian (born in '33, like his au-thor, though in a different century),is so ignorant and damaged that heknows not for what he searches oreven that he searches at all. He sim-ply drifts and in drifting finds his vo-cation as a hunter of men, an Indiankiller and a trader in scalps. Even ashe participates in the slaughter ofmen and women and children bothIndian and Mexican, he seems some-how other than his compatriots andespecially other than Judge Holden,one of the most vivid and demoniccharacters in American literature.The judge accuses the kid of a tacittreachery, an unwillingness to givehimself over completely to the taskof war, war not only on the Indianbut against all autonomous life. Thefreedom of the birds is an insult toman, says the judge, who would havethem all in zoos.

Driven by a merciless causality,McCarthy's characters wanderthrough nightmare landscapes, horse-borne witnesses to a tree adornedwith the pale larva-like corpses ofdead babies, a shallow desert pondsurrounded by the bones of a thou-sand sheep, a mummified Apachehanging from a wooden cross. A lonetree burning at night in the midst ofan empty plane. A prairie coveredwith the gleaming white skeletons ofa million buffalo. Men hung upsidedown, scalped, strange menstrualwounds between their legs and geni-tals protruding from their mouths.Horsemen rope wild dogs atop a mesaand drag them to death. A boyanhorseback with a muzzled shewolf intow crosses the low border scrublandstoward Mexico. Gypsies carry a tat-

. tered airplane through the desert andtell enchanting lies about its prove-nance. And everywhere the ruins ofthose ancient and not so ancientpeoples who were slaughtered inthose places and whose lives left no

68 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2006

articulate testament to bear witness. to the joys and hopes and dreams andsorrows that they shared before paleriders the color of dust swoopeddown and spilled their blood ontothe thirsty ground.

The voices of hermits, anchorites,priests and ex-priests, herdsmen andgypsiesand trappers, old men on theirdeathbeds and old women educated inEurope and horse traders and youngpeasant girls cry out their propheciesin these bloodlands of the West. Thesethings are known to all the world. ThewarM.is construed out of blood and noth-ingelse but blood. Death is the conditionofexistenceand lifeisbut an emanationthere-of. What isconstantin history isgreedandfoolishnessand a looe of blood. Before manwas, war waited for him. The idea thatman can be understood is an illusion. Allhorses possess one soul. What the wolfknows man cannot know.

The course of history for McGarthyis one of never-ending destruction.He will give no solace to those whodream of an end to suffering, and yetoffers some of the most delicate andsensitive representations of SOtrowthat I know. The sorrow of an oldwoman who lost five children and fillsher days with milking and churningand cursing her sorry husband: "Sorrylaid the hearth here. Sorry ways andsorry people and heavensent griefand heartache to make you pine foryour death." The sorrow of RinthyHolme, in Outer Dark, her incestuousoffspring stolen from her at birth,wandering barefoot and ragged, herrotten cotton dress soiled with, twotear-shaped milk stains, searching fora tinker she has never met, hoping toretrieve a baby she has never seen. Astonemason's sorrow for his grandfa-ther, his father, his sister, and the lifethey all once shared. The stoicmourning of John Grady Cole, LaceyRawlins, and Billy Parham, youngcowboys born into a world that hasno use for them or the high lonesomemorality of honor and work that de-fines their way of life.

What sweeps away these charactersand all that they love iswar-and notonly the kind of war that announcesitself as such. War is also the namefor what civilization does to wildness,to autonomous life, whether it be hu-man or nor. The freedom of the birds is

an insult. There is room on the stage forone beast and one alone. The AmericanWest, for McCarthy, is a place wherethe truth of history declares itself withunambiguous and ferocious candor.Men kill men for gold and glory.Women and children will be killed ifthere's money to be made or goodsport to be had. And yet, within thebroad current of such slaughter, frag-ile eddies of safety form and sustainthemselves briefly, before the flood-waters, touched here and there with

pink foam, rise again and

J wash them downstream.

ust as McCarthy's change of land-scape from Appalachia to West Texasand beyond reflects the historical pathof American continental expansion,so does the trajectory of his Texas nov-els follow that of history. Blood Merid-ian depicts the savagery of conquestand genocide, and out of that south-western holocaust emerged a societythat began to disappear almost as soonas it was formed. Scarcely two gener-ations enjoyed its prime. Horsemenand cattlemen and sheepherders, im-perfect and often crude, dismissive ofthe Mexicans, with whom they hadso much in common, became in theend tragic creatures of the West, morelike the Indians than unlike. The Bor-der Trilogy traces the arc of that ranch-ing society's decline, with old Mexicostanding as witness.

The broad swt;epof the interlockingstories that make up All the Pretty Hors-es, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plainis historical, but the phantasmagoriaof Blood Meridian has been replacedwith an economy of scale more properto a love story. The nostalgia for theWild West that sends John Grady Coleand Billy Parham into Mexico, a nos-talgia that superficial readers might betempted to attribute to McCarthy him-self,should be understood asone amongthe many forces that drive these char-acters to their unhappy fates. In theirheadlong pursuit of a wayof life that inthe larger temporal scale of this land-scape can.hardly be said to have exist-ed at all, Cole and Parham, whose sep-arate stories in the first two books of theBorderTrilogybecome one in the third,manage to destroy much more thantheir own lives. Parham makes a deci-sion that ultimately leads to the death

of both his parents and his little broth-er. Cole's doomed love for a Mexicanwhore leads inexorably to lifeless bod-ies, drained of blood, staring at the bluevault of the sky. These individual sto-ries, love affairs and knife fights, theloss of siblings and parents and friendsand ranches, all take place within amatrix of converging histories, the en-croachment of military bases, overseaswars, and national economic policiesthat render family-scale agriculture vir-tually impossible.

With No Country for Ola Men, thesun has set decisively upon the dreamof the West, and the eternal law ofMcCarthy's bloodthirsty landscape hasreasserted itself absolutely. But with adifference, it seems. This novel is spare,shorn of the high rhetoric and gor-geous descriptive passages that Me-Carthy's readers have come to expect.The absence is painful, and thereinlies a clue to the writer's intentions. Allthe enchantment seems to have goneout of the world. Or nearly all. Here isa passage that comes just after Ed TomBell, the sheriff of Terrell County.?has moved a dead redtail hawk fromthe blacktop, where, "lost in the con-centration of the hunter," it closed inon its prey, oblivious to fate hurtlingtoward it at seventy-five miles per hour:

He stood there looking out across thedesert. So quiet. Lowhurn ofwind in thewires.High bloodweeds along the road.Wiregrassand sacahuista. Beyond in thestone arroyosthe tracks of dragons. Therawrock mountains shadowedin the latesun and to the east the shimmering ab-scissa of the desert plains under a skywhere raincurtains hung dark as soot allalong the quadrant. That god lives in si-lence who has scouredthe followinglandwith salt and ash. He walkedback to thecruiser and got in and pulled away.

Perhaps it is no accident that this smallglimpse of McCarthy's grander elo-quence appears in the vicinity of a no-ble predator whose life has been snuffedout by our civilization's bane and glo-ry. Sheriff Bell, a contemporary of JohnGrady Cole and Billy Parham nowgrown old, can barely imagine theworld that came before his own. He

2 Far some reason, Jtce Carol Oares believesthat Bell is the sheri of C011]llTlCheCounty,which is mare than 0 miles to the nartheast.This errar explains the otherwise inexpbcable ti-tle of her New York Review essay, "TheTreasure of Comanche County. "

CRITICISM 69

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SOLUTION TO THEJANUARY PUZZLE N E G N E D

T D R I S E B E R ED E T E M M K a T I S I DN I I N N A B a N S T D E T A

S H A B C A K E R C 0 E N D E MS T N A L S K S E T R F I S T I

H E L K G P P E E Y I T Y N C EH S L A N G A A M E N I N A S RS I F 0 K N I L G T M E D U H K N

H T U S C L A U A T N E M A C IG B L U F F E T E R T 0 T I N L

R I F L C E F E C S T S I N C UE L E Y A R R E H E R S H 0 L AV A S y D E N C C L Y a p u S

T E R D a K A B H N R E TA G 0 L L A R a F E

; E K I S A M

NOTES FOR"DRESSED TO THENINES":Puzzle editing by DanAsimou. Anagramsare indicated withan asterisk (*).

ANSWERS:1. deter-gent;2. be(toke-NE)d;3. rntanneris'tjm;4. interests";5. inhabited (pun);6. bookmaker(two mngs.),7. d(isposition)-istended*; 8. cannibals*(pun); 9. cons-or-tertm)10. estimated": 11. thlanklesls:12. keep-sakes (pun);13. for-tfechnologly-nitrev.)- E; 14. gang-p-lank; 15. Yemenites*; 16. canisters*;17. she'll-fish; 18. appealing*; 19. indemnity"; 20. out-flan-K-S(uperrnarket);21. Guatemala (hidden in reverse); 22. Ll-nlashlamed; 23. cuff-links; 24. treatment(two mngs): 25. c(ha-in)link; 26. bullfight (pun); 27. effectual*; 28. (appjointments;29. car-efult-l-v; 31. continual*; 32. lifesaver*; 33. (p)reference; 34. Slolp-histtolrv;35. ves-terdat-Y: 36. c(heck)able; 37. up-holster; 38. c\ra(goon)ed*;39. ho(norab[rev.])ly; 40.lookalike*; 41. Freemason*.

knows something of that country's his-tory but not enough. He knows that achange has come over the land, thoughhe cannot fathom its depths. "Some-where out there is a true and livingprophet of destruction and I dont wantto confront him. I know he's real. Ihave seen his work." Blood Meridian'sscalpers have returned to the border-lands, and Judge Holden has been rein-carnated as Anton Chigurh, a drugsmuggler whose philosophical disqui-sitions on the subject of murder are aschilling as anything in McCarthy'sbody of work.

Near the beginning of the book,Llewelyn Moss, poaching antelope onthe land of someone McCarthy callsHarkle, just west of LozierCanyon, inTerrell County, Texas, happens uponthe remains of a shootout among drugsmugglers. Moss finds a suitcase full ofmoney and takes it, and from this de-cision all else in the novel follows.An-ton Chigurh searches for the money,leaving a trail of bodies-sheriff'sdeputies, random drivers,hotel clerks-in his wake. The chase takes us west toSanderson, then east to Del Rio andCiudad Acuna, south to EaglePassandPiedras Negras. McCarthy's stark de-scriptions are often limited to the meremotion of these characters as they movethrough space arid time, a narrative be-haviorism that corresponds well withthe flattened perspective of a world inwhich the only significant scale ofmeaning and value ismonetary. Where-as in McCarthy's previous works bloodwas the measure of all things, in NoCountry for Old Men the yardstick ofall thought and action, both physicaland metaphysical, isan abstraction thathis characters can scarcelycomprehend.

"We're bein bought with our ownmoney," Sheriff Bell worries late in.the novel, shortly after he asks a coun-ty prosecutor if he knows who Mam-monis.

And it aint just the drugs.There is for-tunesbein accumulatedthere that theydont nobody even know about. Whatdowethink isgaintocomeofthat mon-ey?Moneythat canbuywholecountries.It donehas.... The otherthingistheoldpeople,and Ikeepcominbackto them.They lookat me it's alwaysa question.YearsbackIdont rememberthat. I dontrememberit when Iwassheriffback inthe fifties.You see em and thev don'tevenlookconfused.Theyjustlookcrazy.

70 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2006

It is not only the old people in thisnovel who have lost their way. Mosstakes the money he finds in the desertwith the full knowledge that in doingso he will forfeit all that he loves. Andyet he cannot leave it. Leaving it wouldbe unthinkable; the world in which hefindshimself has foreclosed that possi-bility. That world, of course, is pre-cisely the world of the thriller, and itcould very well be that the impover-ished world of the thriller is the one in

which we find ourselves

Laswell.

ozier Canyon lies about 20 mileswest of Langtry, along a lonely stretchof road that McCarthy's readers haveencountered more than once in theBorder Trilogy. And just west of Lozi-er Canyon lies my family's easternfence. McCarthy presumably took thename Harkle, whose land he says thisis, from Harkel Canyon, which liessome miles to the northeast and opensonto the Pecos River. Shortly afterreading No Country for Old Men forthe first time, I got my father on thetelephone. McCarthy several timesrefers to Harkle's cattle guard (a gatethat incorporates metal bars over ashallow pit to deter the passageof live-stock), and as far as I remembered theonly cattle guard along the highwayanywhere near Lozierwas ours. My fa-ther agreed that, based on the land-marks mentioned in the text, it didappear that Bell and his deputies, Moss,.Chigurh, and several anonymouscorpseswere all trespassingon our Cin-co de Mayo ranch.

I thought I should see for myself,and so in October I flew from NewYork to San Antonio, and then drove150 miles to Del Rio, where I spentthe night with my grandmother. Thenext day, my father, my stepmother,and I drove out to the Cinco, tracingin reverse Moss's path across LakeAmistad (a reservoir created out of thewaters of the Rio Grande, the Pecos,and the Devils River) and through thetown of Comstock. The road to Pan-dale, where in All tile Pretty Horses Jim-my Blevins first picks up the trail ofJohn Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins,forks off to the right. Low hills spreadoff in all directions, covered in the pur-ple blossoms of cinezo. Mesquite andblackbrush thrive in this landscape, as

does the creosote bush, an aggressivecomperitor for water that can live morethan ten thousand years. Vicious,thorny plants such asdog cactus, prick-ly pear, ocotillo.catclaw, lechuguilla,and Spanish dagger lie in wait for un-protected limbs.

We crossed the high bridge over thePecos River, green and salty in its deepcanyon, big black crows perched ondead trees near its confluence with theRio Grande. We passed by Langtry,the legendaryhome of]udge Roy Bean,and Eagle's Nest canyon, across from amassive nest on the Mexican side thathas remained in a cross-shaped cliffhollow for more than a hundred years.After we passed through Lozierwe be-gan to slow down. When we reachedthe cattle guard we pulled off the high-way. In No Country for Old Men, An-ton Chigurh did the same, then "hedrove across the bars of the cattleguardand got out and closed the gate againand stood there listening. Then he gotin and drove down the rutted track."We roo drove down that primitive

road, heading south to-

M ward Mexico)

cCarthy imagines pickupscrisscrossing this jagged canyon coun-try, off-road, all the way down to theRio Grande. He describes volcanicgravel, lava scree, the caldera of some

3 As a child, I hunted all over this ranch withmy father and his friends. Ishot my first muledeer here when Iwas ten years old, and Ire-member camping and fishing down by the RioGrande when Iwas much younger, trying tocatch the enormous catfish that lurk along itsmuddy bottom. One afternoon my brotherand Iwere prowling around the house withour pelletguns, looking for something to shoot.We discovered that dozens of smaIlbirds, somebrightly colored and others dull and tan but allof them lively and chattering, had become cap-tives of an old wire shed that might once havebeen a chicken coop. We killed everyone ofthem. When we were finished with our game,their little carcasses littered the floor of theshed; others hung upside down by their feetfrom wires and perches. On this ranch andothers like it I grew used to the sight of blood.Blood from.the lambs whose ears we marked,whose severed tailsshowered us with gore. Kidgoatswere marked and calveswere brandedand .castrated.A colt's earswould be sparedbut nothis testicles.Varmints were hunted down with-out mercy, for they were our competitors. Thefaxes and the coyotes and the bobcats and themountain lions. The coons and the ringtails.Rabbits perished by the hundreds. They eatthe grass, which is precious to the rancher.

long-extinct volcano. He populates itwith antelope. All of these details arefalse. The geology here is upper andlower Cretaceous limestone, Del Rioclay, the Devils River and Buda andEagleFordformations. Volcanoes lie farto the west, near Marfa and Alpine, ordown in the Big Bend. This is canyoncountry, the geologic record of water'sinexorable erosion of the westernrea~hes of the Edwards Plateau as itseeks the Rio Grande. Although fromthe highway it might seem that a stur-dy pickup could make its wayover whatlooks to be a gently rolling greasewoodflat, countless ravines, arroyos, draws,and canyons cut through the land, carv-ing bluffs that appear without warn-ing, and eventually one approaches thegreat cliffs of Palma draw and LozierCanyon after it meanders toward theriver. Passage to the river is extraordi-narily difficult, and the cliffsalong theRio Grande, which here makes a broadhorseshoe-shaped arc, are 300 feet inplaces. Mule and white-tailed deer, notantelope, populate the area.

But McCarthy's liberties with land-scape are in the service of story. Heprefers the volcanic subtext because itis violent, and its violence gives hisstory a geological narrative to go withits historical one. Why, then, did henot set his novel farther south andwest, in the Big Bend, where vulcan-ism and mountain building producedthe most graphically violent land-scape in the state? Perhaps becausethe area near Langtry remained wilderlonger than any other part of the state.Because it was, and is, a place of out-laws and smugglers and rustlers. It isalso the site of a lost culture whosetraces are still visible in the ancient

rock shelters along its

I canyon walls.

n No Country far Old Men, as inevery other novel he has written, Me-Carthy insists on the r~licsof ancient,vanished peoples in his landscapes.And he makes no secret of his viewthat those whose lives he describes areno less ephemeral. Indeed, what thelandscape of West Texas suggests isthat the ranchers who have peopledthe last four novels are a good dealmore likely to vanish without a tracethan were the Indians, whose art, ex-posed to the elements for thousands

of years, still bears witness to their life-ways. The metal implements used bythe ranchers to make horseshoes andaxes and elaborate irrigation systemshave rusted and are crumbling intodust, together with concrete watertroughs and cedar picket stock pens.Some of these artifacts may survive tobe puzzled over by future generations,though perhaps it will be the opiumtins and pipes and iron woks of theChinese workers who populated rail-road camps for a year or two along theRio Grande in the 1880s. Or othernameless implements that were used tochisel passagesand tunnels for the rail-road. Or the clever wire swivelsused byMexican goat herders to stake kids un-der rock lean-tos in kidding camps.This landscape, which appears almostempty today, is a palimpsest of cul-tures. All of them lost, undone.

The Pecos canyon had made pas-sage through this land difficultand dan-gerous, and the stagecoach had to crossthe river far to the north at HorseheadCrossing. It was still Indian countrylong after most of the state had beensettled. In historic times, the LipanApaches and the [umanos were knownto hunt the area; the Comanches andthe Kiowa traveled all the way fromOklahoma to gather peyote. Humansfirst settled the Pecos region abouttwelve thousand yearsago, when piiionpine forests covered the hills and pre-historic horses, camels, bison, andmammoths ranged through it. Smallbands of nomadic hunter-gatherersmade homes in the shallowcaves;whenthe climate changed and the desert ad-vanced, they remained, made do withwhat the landscapeprovided, and even-tually began to record their experiencesin vivid colors along the limestonewalls of their dwellings. By the timeCabeza de Vaca journeyed through thetrans-Pecos in 1535the people whoinhabited these caves for so many thou-sands of years had vanished.

On a warm October afternoon, JackSkiles, a local historian and the authorof Judge Roy Bean Country, took usinto an ancient Indian shelter, in Ea-gle's Nest canyon, not far from hishome along the edge of the caprock.From the mouth of the east-facingshel-ter one can see Highway 90 as it cross-es the gorge, providing drivers with abrief glimpse of the steep limestone

CRITICISM 71

cliffs.A nearby spring explains the In-dians' choice of this spot, and on the farrim of the canyon the remains ~f awindmill built by Guy Skiles, Jack's fa- .ther, testify to more recent attemptsto exploit that precious resource.

A talus slope of burned rocks spillingdown from Eagle Cave immediatelyannounces that humans once madetheir dwelling here. We see a deeprnetate ground into the limestonebedrock by generations of hands.Scrambling up the talus, we enter theshelter, and Jack explains that humanslived here almost continuously for tenthousand years. Weare standing on amidden composed of more than tenfeet of ash and garbage and burnedstone. Bits of sotol cud, a fibrouscactuschewed for its high sugar content, liehere and there all over the floor, as dogrindstones and bits of chipped andworked rock, a charred jawbone ofsome small critter, thousands uponthousands of empty snail shells. Exca-vation and archaeological analysishaverevealed countless grasshopper man-dibles, minnow bones, dart and arrowpoints, a dead child.

Four-thousand-year-old pictographsin the Pecos River style adorn thewalls: a faded shaman, circles andbeasts and hunting symbols in whatappears to be a ritual narrative. [acktells us that the shelter had been usednear the turn of the century as ashearing bam, which explains all thesheep dung that litters the floor today.As a consequence, many of the pic-tographs were lost, rubbed off by thesheep as they milled about in theirtimeless, mindless anxiety.

Not far up the canyon is BonfireShelter, a kill site where 10,300 yearsago Folsom hunters drove herds ofbuffalo off a cliff.

In a small building adjacent to hishome in Langtry, Jack was kindenough to show us his private collec-tion of local artifacts. First amongthem is a 1,Zoo-year-old mummythat his father dug up in a cave alongthe Pecos. The man died a horribledeath: his bowels, which look likehuge petrified cow patties, were com-pacted as a result of Chagas' disease,an infection carried by the blood-sucking conenose bug. He lieswrapped in a finely woven mat madefrom sotol; around his midsection,

72 HARPER'S MAGAZINE! FEBRUARY2006

presumably to help support hispainfully swollen gut, were long stripsof deer hide, tanned and dyed redwith local ochre. The leather, a pieceof which I held in my hand, was stillsoft and supple. Binding this burialpackage together was a hundred-footlength of rope, made of human hair.

All along the walls of Jack's muse-um was further evidence of the inge-nuity of the Pecos River people: deli-cate drawstring bags, and sandalswoven from lechuguilla and embell-ished with rabbit fur; fire sticks andstone tools for grinding meal and bas-kets so finely woven they were used tocarry water; other baskets used forcooking; a variety of arrow points, andatlatls used to propel them; paintedpebbles, some dating back six thou-sand years, in enigmatic patterns.

And there was another sort of evi-dence as well. In a glass case, careful-ly displayed, were two heads: a moth-er and child. Lithified brains, nowreleased from their containers, lay sideby side. Just below the skulls was themother's hipbone, an arrow still pro-

truding from it. Both skulls

I had been crushed.

n places where life is harsh andcruel, in barren lands where humanhabitation finds only precarious pur-chase, McCarthy follows a causalitystrict and inevitable. As Guy Daven-port wrote in a 1968 essay, everysentence in McCarthy's fiction con-veys swift and significant action. "Hedoes not waste a single word on hischaracter's thoughts." Such austeritymay offend the self-appointedguardians of bourgeois consciousness,but book reviews leave little trace inthe strata of literary history. Whatlasts are those monuments, like thepictographs and painted pebbles ofthe Pecos River people, like thestone water trough whose imagecloses No Country for Old Men, thatare made to last ten thousand years:

Youcould see the chisel marks in thestone. It was hewed out of solid rockand it was about six foot long andmaybe a foot and a half wide andabout that deep. Just chiseled out ofthe rock. And I got to thinkin aboutthe man that done that. That countryhad not had a time of peace much ofany length at all that I knew of. I've

read a little of the history of it sinceand I aint sure it ever had one. Butthis man had set downwith a hammerand chisel and carved out a stone wa-ter trough to last ten thousand years.Why was that? What was it that hehad faith in? It wasnt that nothinwould change. Which is what youmight think, I suppose. He had toknow bettem that.... And I have tosay that the only thing I can think isthat there wassomesort of promisein .his heart, And I dent have no inten-tions of carvin a stone water trough.But I would like to be able to makethat kind of promise.

McCarthy takes the long view, andany reading of his work that fails tounderstand that, any reading thatsuggests that this most-disciplinedand rigorous novelist had any ob-ject in mind other than making anovel that will outlast our cities ofthe plains, has failed to reckonwith his art.

Not all art will comfort us as weage, and McCarthy's least of all. Hisfiction, like so much of our oldest lit-erature, is tragic, and as such is heldtogether by the very warp of theworld. Sometimes his subject is thetragedy of history, in which two lawsequally just and true come into un-avoidable and violent conflict.Sometimes it is that of transgression,as when a brother and sister cometogether in the darkness and out ofthat furtive grappling are undone.Most often it is the simple naturaldrama of predator and prey, of hawksand wolves, trappers and hunters andsnake catchers and those who rundogs under the moon; the drama ofmuskrats and field mice and catfish,wild house cats aloft in the claws ofowls, all of which fall prey to man,who hunts all things. In NoCountry for Old Men, we witness thedrama of householders and peacefulfolk who wish only to be left alone,but who are drawn into inevitablestrife with the world's hidden pow- .ers. At its root, McCarthy's fictionarises from the tragedy of all wildcreatures, of whatever is begotten,born, and dies, the tragedy of au-tonomous life in a world increasinglycircumscribed by a rage for order andcaptivity. More than merely human.It is the tragedy of warm blood itself,of blood and time. _