Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy Page A

It’s a likely place for varmints such a place as this, ain’t it? she said.
    The woman looked about them. Likely enough, she said.
    The husband tottered on the box, sleeping. The grandmother sat leaning forward with elbows on her knees, her face visible to no one. They rode through the mounting heat of the summer morning in silence save for the periodic spat of the old woman’s snuff and the constant wooden trundling of the wagon, a sound so labored and remorseless as should have spoken something more than mere progress upon the earth’s surface.
    There was a spring halfway to town where they stopped, the man halting the wagon in the road and the mule leaning his long nose into the water that crossed here and baring beneath the silt small bright stones, mauve and yellow, drinking and blowing peacefully in this jeweled ford. They got down stiffly from the wagon and entered the wood along a footpath until they came to a place where water issued straight up out of a piece of swampy ground and poured off through lush grass. The woman took with her the lunch pail, wetting the rag with which it was covered and replacing it with care, taking her turn to drink from the tin cup that was kept here upended on a nubbed pole.
    That’s fine water, the man said. Fine a water as they is in this county.
    She took the cup from him and dipped it into the dark pool, raised it clear and drank. It was sweet and very cold. She passed it on to the old woman who adjusted the snuff pouched in her lip and turned the cup to drink from the back side of it. When they had all drunk the man put the cup back on the pole and they started back down the path, the old woman dabbing at her mouth with a handful of skirt.
    She had fallen in last behind the two girls and she was surprised to hear footsteps behind her. When she turned the boy was coming along jauntily.
    I thought you’d gone on, she said.
    I was up in the woods. Hot ain’t it?
    It is right warm, she said, going on now along the narrow black path and him at her elbow awkwardly.
    Grammaw I reckon looks right funny to you don’t she?
    I don’t know, she said.
    Still I bet she does. I’m used to her.
    They went on.
    Know how she done it?
    Done what?
    Lost her beak.
    No, she said. I never studied it.
    You’ll swear I’m a-lyin to ye but a stovepipe done it she was puttin up. Fell and sliced her off slick as a frog’s … as a frog’s belly.
    I declare, she said.
    They were coming out on the road now and he hushed and there was still the mule with his muzzle in the ford, untethered full in the road, his ears dipping and folding.
    I’d think that old mule’d founder, she said.
    Shoot, he said. That old mule’s got more sense than a … Shoot, he’s got all kinds of sense.
    At the wagon she waited while they helped the old woman aboard and then climbed up after her.
    Don’t a cool drink just set ye up though, the woman said.
    There was a commotion to the front of the wagon. Goddamn it to hell, the boy howled. They could see him curled in the road holding his knee in both hands but there had been no one looking to see him swing up to the high seat with one leap as the drivers did or to see him miss his handhold and crack his knee on the metal step in falling.
    Lord God he’s kilt hisself, the woman said.
    He needs that mouth attended to, the old woman muttered from beneath her hood.
    The man got down from the wagon wearing a look of martyred patience. He bent over the boy and forcibly removed his hands from his knee. The trousers were ripped in a small tricorner going dark with blood.
    He’s stove a hole in his kneecap, the man said. The boy was lying on his side grimacing in histrionic anguish, suffering the man to slide the breechleg tight up on his thigh in chance ligature and poke a dirty finger at the laceration.
    Tain’t bleedin much, he said. Just let me bind him—reaching to his hip and drawing forth in garish foliation a scarlet and blue bandana.
    Don’t use that, the woman