Young Rattner finished his cigarette and went back out to the road. An aged Negro passed high on the seat of a wagon, dozing to the chop of the half-shod mule-hooves on the buckled asphalt. About him the tall wheels veered and dished in the erratic parabolas of spun coins unspinning as if not attached to the wagon at all but merely rolling there in that quadratic symmetry by pure chance. He crossed the road to give them leeway and they swung by slowly, laboriously, as if under the weight of some singular and unreasonable gravity. The ruined and ragged mule, the wagon, the man … up the road they wobbled, rattle and squeak of the fellies climbing loose over the spokes … shimmered in waves of heat rising from the road, dissolved in a pale and broken image.
He followed along behind, going toward the forks. Once at the top of the hill he paused and looked back and he could see the roof of the house deep-green with moss, or gaping black where patches had caved through. But it was never his house anyway.
Evening. The dead sheathed in the earth’s crust and turning the slow diurnal of the earth’s wheel, at peace with eclipse, asteroid, the dusty novae, their bones brindled with mold and the celled marrow going to frail stone, turning, their fingers laced with roots, at one with Tut and Agamemnon, with the seed and the unborn.
It was like having your name in the paper, he thought, reading the inscription:
MILDRED YEARWOOD RATTNER
1906–1945
If thou afflict them in any wise,
And they cry at all unto me,
I will surely hear their cry.
Exod.
the stone arrogating to itself in these three short years already a gray and timeless aspect, glazed with lichens and nets of small brown runners, the ring of rusted wire leaning awry against it with its stained and crumpled rags of foliage. He reached out and patted the stone softly, a gesture, as if perhaps to conjure up some image, evoke again some allegiance with a name, a place, hallucinated recollections in which faces merged inextricably, and yet true and fixed; touched it, a carved stone less real than the smell of woodsmoke or the taste of an old man’s wine. And he no longer cared to tell which were things done and which dreamt.
His trouser legs were wet and clammy against his ankles. Sitting on the small square of marble he removed one shoe, testing the sock for dampness, resting as any traveler might. From across the tall grass and beyond the ruins of the spiked iron fence came the click of the lightbox at the intersection. A car emerged from the trees at his right and rolled to a stop. There were a man and a woman. She looked at him across the man’s shoulder, then turned to the man. They both looked. The box clicked. He waved to them and the man turned, saw the green light and pulled away, the white oval of the woman’s face still watching him. So he waved again to her just as the car slid from sight behind a hedgerow, the wheels whisking up a fine spray from the road.
He sat there for a while, rubbing his foot abstractedly, whistling softly to himself. To the west a solid sheet of overcast sped the evening on. Already fireflies were about. He put on his shoe and rose and began moving toward the fence, through the wet grass. The workers had gone, leaving behind their wood-dust and chips, the white face of the stump pooling the last light out of the gathering dusk. The sun broke through the final shelf of clouds and bathed for a moment the dripping trees with blood, tinted the stones a diaphanous wash of color, as if the very air had gone to wine. He passed through the gap in the fence, past the torn iron palings and out to the western road, the rain still mizzling softly and the darkening headlands drawing off the day, heraldic, pennoned in flame, the fleeing minions scattering their shadows in the wake of the sun.
They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.