Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West

V

Adrift on the Bolson de Mapimi — Sproule — Tree of dead babies — Scenes from a massacre — Sopilotes — The murdered in the church — Night among the dead — Wolves — The washers at the ford — Afoot westward — A mirage — An encounter with bandits — Attacked by a vampire — Digging a well — A crossroads in the waste — The carreta — Death of Sproule — Under arrest — The captain's head — Survivors — On to Chihuahua — The city — The prison — Toadvine.

With darkness one soul rose wondrously from among the new slain dead and stole away in the moonlight. The ground where he'd lain was soaked with blood and with urine from the voided bladders of the animals and he went forth stained and stinking like some reeking issue of the incarnate dam of war herself. The savages had moved to higher ground and he could see the light from their fires and hear them singing, a strange and plaintive chanting up there where they'd gone to roast mules. He made his way among the pale and dismembered, among the sprawled and legflung horses, and he took a reckoning by the stars and set off south afoot. The night wore a thousand shapes out there in the brush and he kept his eyes to the ground ahead. Starlight and waning moon made a faint shadow of his wanderings on the dark of the desert and all along the ridges the wolves were howling and moving north toward the slaughter. He walked all night and still he could see the fires behind him.

With daylight he made his way toward some outcroppings of rock a mile across the valley floor. He was climbing among the strewn and tumbled boulders when he heard a voice calling somewhere in that vastness. He looked out over the plain but he could see no one. When the voice called again he turned and sat to rest and soon he saw something moving along the slope, a rag of a man clambering toward him over the talus slides. Pick­ing his way with care, looking behind him. The kid could see that nothing followed.

He wore a blanket over his shoulders and his shirtsleeve was ripped and dark with blood and he carried that arm against him with his other hand. His name was Sproule.

Eight of them had escaped. His horse had carried off several arrows and it caved under him in the night and the others had gone on, the captain among them.

They sat side by side among the rocks and watched the day lengthen on the plain below.

Did you not save any of your possibles? Sproule said.

The kid spat and shook his head. He looked at Sproule.

How bad is your arm?

He pulled it to him. I've seen worse, he said.

They sat looking out over those reaches of sand and rock and wind.

What kind of Indians was them?

I dont know.

Sproule coughed deeply into his fist. He pulled his bloody arm against him. Damn if they aint about a caution to the Christians, he said.

They laid up in the shade of a rock shelf until past noon, scratching out a place in the gray lava dust to sleep, and they set forth in the afternoon down the valley following the war trail and they were very small and they moved very slowly in the immensity of that landscape.

Come evening they hove toward the rimrock again and Sproule pointed out a dark stain on the face of the barren cliff. It looked like the black from old fires. The kid shielded his eyes. The scalloped canyon walls rippled in the heat like drapery folds.

It might could be a seep, said Sproule.

It's a long ways up there.

Well if you see any water closer let's make for that.

The kid looked at him and they set off.

The site lay up a draw and their way was a jumble of fallen rock and scoria and deadlylooking bayonet plants. Small black and olivecolored shrubs blasted under the sun. They stumbled up the cracked clay floor of a dry watercourse. They rested and moved on.

The seep lay high up among the ledges, vadose water dripping down the slick black rock and monkeyflower and deathcamas hanging in a small and perilous garden. The water that reached the canyon floor was no more than a trickle and they leaned by turns with pursed lips to the stone like devouts at a shrine.

They passed the night in a shallow cave above this spot, an old reliquary of flintknappings and ratchel scattered about on the stone floor with beads of shell and polished bone and the char­coal of ancient fires. They shared the blanket in the cold and Sproule coughed quietly in the dark and they rose from time to time to descend and drink at the stone. They were gone before sunrise and the dawn found them on the plain again.

They followed the trampled ground left by the warparty and in the afternoon they came upon a mule that had failed and been lanced and left dead and then they came upon another. The way narrowed through rocks and by and by they came to a bush that was hung with dead babies.

They stopped side by side, reeling in the heat. These small victims, seven, eight of them, had holes punched in their under-jaws and were hung so by their throats from the broken stobs of a mesquite to stare eyeless at the naked sky. Bald and pale and bloated, larval to some unreckonable being. The castaways hobbled past, they looked back. Nothing moved. In the after­noon they came upon a village on the plain where smoke still rose from the ruins and all were gone to death. From a distance it looked like a decaying brick kiln. They stood without the walls a long time listening to the silence before they entered.

They went slowly through the little mud streets. There were goats and sheep slain in their pens and pigs dead in the mud. They passed mud hovels where people lay murdered in all atti­tudes of death in the doorways and the floors, naked and swollen and strange. They found plates of food half eaten and a cat came out and sat in the sun and watched them without interest and flies snarled everywhere in the still hot air.

At the end of the street they came to a plaza with benches and trees where vultures huddled in foul black rookeries. A dead horse lay in the square and some chickens were pecking in a patch of spilled meal in a doorway. Charred poles lay smoldering where the roofs had fallen through and a burro was standing in the open door of the church.

They sat on a bench and Sproule held his wounded arm to his chest and rocked back and forth and blinked in the sun.

What do you want to do? said the kid.

Get a drink of water.

Other than that.

I dont know.

You want to try and head back?

To Texas?

I dont know where else.

We'd never make it.

Well you say.

I aint got no say.

He was coughing again. He held his chest with his good hand and sat as if he'd get his breath.

What have you got, a cold?

I got consumption.

Consumption?

He nodded. I come out here for my health.

The kid looked at him. He shook his head and rose and walked off across the plaza toward the church. There were buzzards squatting among the old carved wooden corbels and he picked up a stone and squailed it at them but they never moved.

The shadows had grown long in the plaza and little coils of dust were moving in the parched clay streets. The carrion birds sat about the topmost corners of the houses with their wings out­stretched in attitudes of exhortation like dark little bishops. The kid returned to the bench and propped up one foot and leaned on his knee. Sproule sat as before, still holding his arm.

Son of a bitch is dealin me misery, he said.

The kid spat and looked off down the street. We better just hold up here for tonight.

You reckon it would be all right?

Who with?

What if them Indians was to come back?

What would they come back for?

Well what if they was to?

They wont come back.

He held his arm.

I wish you had a knife on you, the kid said.