The road by Cormac McCarthy

and headed south along the road hurrying against
the dark. The boy was stumbling he was so tired and the man picked him up and
swung him onto his shoulders and they went on. By the time they got to the
bridge there was scarcely light at all. He put the boy down and they felt their
way down the embankment. Under the bridge he got out his lighter and lit it and
swept the ground with the flickering light. Sand and gravel washed up from the
creek. He set down the knapsack and put away the lighter and took hold of the
boy by the shoulders. He could just make him out in the darkness. I want you to
wait here, he said. I'm going for wood. We have to have a fire. I'm scared. I
know. But I'll just be a little ways and I'll be able to hear you so if you get
scared you call me and I'll come right away. I'm really scared. The sooner I go
the sooner I'll be back and we'll have a fire and then you wont be scared
anymore. Dont lie down. If you lie down you'll fall asleep and then if I call
you you wont answer and I wont be able to find you. Do you understand? The boy
didnt answer. He was close to losing his temper with him and then he realized
that he was shaking his head in the dark. Okay, he said. Okay.
     
    He scrambled up the bank and into the woods,
holding his hands out in front of him. There was wood everywhere, dead limbs
and branches scattered over the ground. He shuffled along kicking them into a
pile and when he had an armful he stooped and gathered them up and called the
boy and the boy answered and talked him back to the bridge. They sat in the darkness
while he shaved sticks into a pile with his knife and broke up the small
branches with his hands. He took the lighter from his pocket and struck the
wheel with his thumb. He used gasoline in the lighter and it burned with a
frail blue flame and he bent and set the tinder alight and watched the fire
climb upward through the wicker of limbs. He piled on more wood and bent and
blew gently at the base of the little blaze and arranged the wood with his
hands, shaping the fire just so.
     
    He made two more trips into the woods, dragging
armloads of brush and limbs to the bridge and pushing them over the side. He
could see the glow of the fire from some distance but he didnt think it could
be seen from the other road. Below the bridge he could make out a dark pool of
standing water among the rocks. A rim of shelving ice. He stood on the bridge
and shoved the last pile of wood over, his breath white in the glow of the
firelight.
     
    He sat in the sand and inventoried the contents of
the knapsack. The binoculars. A half pint bottle of gasoline almost full. The
bottle of water. A pair of pliers. Two spoons. He set everything out in a row.
There were five small tins of food and he chose a can of sausages and one of
corn and he opened these with the little army can opener and set them at the
edge of the fire and they sat watching the labels char and curl. When the corn
began to steam he took the cans from the fire with the pliers and they sat bent
over them with their spoons, eating slowly. The boy was nodding with sleep.
     
    When they'd eaten he took the boy out on the
gravelbar below the bridge and he pushed away the thin shore ice with a stick
and they knelt there while he washed the boy's face and his hair. The water was
so cold the boy was crying. They moved down the gravel to find fresh water and
he washed his hair again as well as he could and finally stopped because the
boy was moaning with the cold of it. He dried him with the blanket, kneeling
there in the glow of the light with the shadow of the bridge's understructure
broken across the palisade of treetrunks beyond the creek. This is my child, he
said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he
wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire.
     
    The boy sat tottering. The man watched him that he
not topple into the flames. He kicked holes in the