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He wore a shapeless and dusty suit of black linen that was small on him and his beard and hair were long and black and tangled. He wore neither shirt nor collar and his bare feet were out at the toes of a pair of handmade brogans. He said nothing. They gave before him until he reached the wagon and stood looking down at the man in the bed of it. They waited, a mass of grave faces. He turned slowly and looked about him. It’s old man Salter, one said. Dead. Stobbed and murdered. He nodded. All right, he said. Let’s be for findin the man that done it. And in the glare of the torches nothing of his face visible but the eyes like black agates, nothing of his beard or the suit he wore gloss enough to catch the light and nothing about his hulking dusty figure other than its size to offer why these townsmen should follow him along the road this night.
In the cool and smoking dawn there hung from a blackhaw tree in a field on the edge of the village the bodies of two itinerant millhands. They spun slowly in turn from left to right and back again. As if charged with some watch. That and the slight flutter of their hair in the morning wind was all the movement there was about them.
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>>25064380
>https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stob#English
So it means "stabbed" in Northern England, Scotland, and... Appalachia
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/File:De-stob.ogg
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Once in the night she heard a horse coming along over the country road, a burning horse beneath the dead moonlight that trailed a wake of pale and drifting dust. She could hear the labored breath and harness creak and the clink of its iron caparisons and then the hoofs exploded over the planking of the bridge. Dust and fine gravel sifted down upon her and hissed in the water. The pounding faded down the road to the faintest sound of heartbeat and the heartbeat was in her own thin chest. She pulled the stained bundle of clothing closer beneath her face and slept again.
She slept through the first wan auguries of dawn, gently washed with river fog while martins came and went among the arches. Slept into the first heat of the day and woke to see toy birds with sesame eyes regarding her from their clay nests overhead. She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road again. Emaciate and blinking and with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child’s song from an old dead time.
In half a mile she began to come upon houses and barns, fields in which crude implements lay idled. She went more slowly. She could smell food cooking. The house she chose was a painted frame house that stood in a well-tended yard. She approached, wary of dogs, up a walkway past rank growths of beebalm and phlox terraced with fieldstone, past latticed morning glories strung against the blinding white clapboards. Bonneted and bent to the black earth a woman with a trowel, a small cairn of stones and a paper of plants beside her.
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>>25064397
>Once in the night she heard a horse coming along over the country road, a burning horse beneath the dead moonlight that trailed a wake of pale and drifting dust. She could hear the labored breath and harness creak and the clink of its iron caparisons and then the hoofs exploded over the planking of the bridge. Dust and fine gravel sifted down upon her and hissed in the water. The pounding faded down the road to the faintest sound of heartbeat and the heartbeat was in her own thin chest. She pulled the stained bundle of clothing closer beneath her face and slept again.
How does he do it bros? Illuminate the delicate feeling of being alive and scared in small paragraph about nothing.
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>>25064435
It was early morning when the tinker appeared upon the bridge, coming from the woods with a sprightly hop like a stage dwarf after the main company has departed. He peered both up and down the road. Satisfied, he left the bridge and took the path along the river, going bowbacked among the rushes with his curious magelike agility. The sun was well up and the bracken along the shore steamed in the rising warmth. The tinker hummed a little air to himself as he went.
When he came to the branch where it joined the river he cast about for a crossing, coming finally to a narrows a short distance upstream. When he came back into the river path on the far side the tracks he followed had ceased.
Whoa now, he said. Which way we a-goin here?
He recrossed the creek and picked up the man’s trace in a furrow of crushed ferns that led into the woods. Ah, he said. We a-takin to the deep pineys.
He lost the tracks more than once going up the branch but he paid that no mind. He was watching for tracks coming from the other way and he could find none. After he had gone a mile or so he ran out of any kind of track at all. He circled and returned, finding nothing. Finally he crossed the branch and went down the far side and very soon he came upon the tracks again. He followed them into a small clearing and here they ceased. He looked about him. It appeared to be the same place in which the tracks coming up the near side had vanished. As if their maker had met in this forest some dark other self in chemistry with whom he had been fused traceless from the earth.
Than he heard the child cry. He turned, small grin among his wire whiskers. He found it at the far end of the clearing in a cup of moss, naked and crying no louder than a kitten.
Well well, he said, kneeling, you a mouthy chap if ye are a poor’n. He poked a finger at it as one might a tomato or a melon. Little woodsy colt ain’t ye? Looks like somebody meant for ye to stay in the woods.
He folded the towel about it and picked it up and holding it against the bib of his overalls with one arm began his way down the creek again.
When he reached the bridge and the road he had not been gone two hours. The child blinked mindlessly at the high sun. The tinker entered the woods on the other side of the road where he had hidden the cart and searched among his goods until he came up with some cheap gingham in which to wrap the child. It drooped into sleep against his thin chest, its face mauve and wrinkled as though beset already with some anguish or worry. He placed it between some sacks in the floor of the cart and regarded it.
Well, he said, you alive if ye ain’t kickin. He stooped and took up the tongues of the cart and set off through the woods, into the road, the wending trackless corridor down which echoed the clatter of his wagon and the endless tympanic collision of his wares.
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He crossed the clearing in the windy sunlight, unmindful of her hobbling behind him, stopping at the edge of the woods where the path went until she should catch up, not even turning to watch this child’s figure that struggled toward him like a crippled marionette. He pointed out the way to her. To the footlog, he said. Then you want to go right. They’s a clearin, a clump of blackhaws. You’ll see it.
She went happily, flushed, shuffling through the woods and plucking the shy wildflowers that sat upon the sun-patched earth and half shrouded under old leaves glared back a small violence of color upon the bland March skies. With her bouquet clutched in both hands before her she stepped finally into the clearing, a swatch of grass, sunlight, birdcalls, crossing with quiet and guileless rectitude to stand before a patch of black and cloven earth.
Some willingness to disbelief must have made her see and reflect. Certainly it could have held a grown man, this piece of ground gutted and strewn with mulch, slugwhite roots upturned to the disastrous light. She bent slowly and with pain and laid the flowers down. She knelt so for some time, and then she leaned forward and placed one palm on the cool earth. And then she began to scoop away the dirt with her hands.
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I am fairly amazed I made it through this book, terrible writing. It is interesting seeing the beginnings of his style buried in this stylistic mess and pulp tier dialogue. I remember almost nothing from this or The Orchard Keeper other than having read them.
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>>25064975
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He went out and Holme was left facing the negro. The negro had yet to speak. He went past with a great display of effort, one hand to his kidney, shuffling. He fumbled in a corner of the shed for some time and came forth with the axe from the clutter of tools in a broken barrel. The man watched him take it up with endless patience out of a shapeless bloom of staves skewed all awry as if this container had been uncoopered violently in some old explosion, take it up and hand it to him without comment and shuffle on to the stone which he now began to crank. Holme watched him. The wheel trundled woodenly. He laid the rusted bit against it and pressed out a sheaf of sparks which furled in a bright orbit there and raced and faded across the negro’s glistening face, a mute black skull immune to fire, the eyes closed, a dark wood carving provoked again and again out of the gloom until the steel was properly sharp.
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>>25064975
Orchard Keeper is the only early work worth bothering until Suttree (which also falls off the rails with the clam shucker family and gambling-- or in this case, the Swineherds). Outer Dark almost sustains the fairy tale. But it's Child of God that's really the extent of his endurance/focus.
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>>25065860
I completely forgot about Child of God, read that as well. Suttree is on shaky ground from fairly early on, watermelon fucking? The clam shucking mostly worked for me but it really lacks focus and spends a lot of time in the weeds, should have just been a transistional bit and stuck with a narration of the work and its tedium. For most people I would say BM and All the Pretty Horses is all that is worth reading, unless you really like McCarthy you are not going to get much out of the rest.
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>>25065860
>>25065899
You guys sound like enormous midwits
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She heard the woman on the steps, treading upward into the sound of the child’s crying until both ceased, and she rose and left for them the empty room with table and stove and cooking pots, holding her own things to her breast where thin blue milk welled from the rotting cloth, going down the path to the road again.
She went on through the town past houses and yard gardens with tomatoes and beans yellowed with road dust and poles rising skewed into the hot air, past rows of new corn putting up handhigh through the gray loam, along old fences of wormy rail, the spurs of dust from her naked heels drifting arcwise in pale feathers to the road again. If crows had not risen from a field she might never have looked that way to see two hanged men in a tree like gross chimes.
She stood for a moment watching them, clutching the bundle of clothes, wondering at such dark work in the noon of day while all about sang summer birds. She went on, walking softly. Once she looked back. Nothing moved in that bleak tree.
Further along she spied a planting of turnips. She crossed a fence and made her way toward them over the turned black earth. They were already seeding and she could smell the musty hemlock odor of them sweet in the air. They were small, bitter, slightly soft. She pulled half a dozen and cleaned away the dirt with the gathered hem of her dress. While she was chewing the first of them a voice hallooed across the field. She could see a house and a barn beyond the curve in the road and now in the barn-lot she made out a man there watching her.