📔 Blood Meridian

Quotes from this book

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind. Wheels began to break up. They were drunk on tiswin they'd brewed and there had been shooting in the night two nights running and an incessant clamor for whiskey. A thin man in a leather weskit […]. The boots had pointed toes like buskins and they had parfleche soles and high tops that were rolled down about the knees and tied. In the afternoon black Jackson caught them up, his mount surbated and all but blown. When he came around the end of the bar he laid down the pistol and he was carrying a bungstarter in one hand. He turned to the man who spoke. He wore long moustaches after the fashion of teamsters and he wore a widebrim hat with a low round crown. Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove. The seep lay high up among the ledges, vadose water dripping down the slick black rock and monkeyflower and deathcamas hanging in a small 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 crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burn phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawnbroached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses' legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below. The huaraches he wore looked like dried and blackened fish lashed to the floors of his feet. There rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. […] and they rode through strange forests of maguey—the aloe or century plant—with immense flowering stalks that rose forty feet into the desert air. The mission occupied eight or ten ares of land, a barren purlieu that held a few goats and burros. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies. To the south lay broken shapes of scoria in a lava bed as far as the eye could see. Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat. He moves north through small settlements and farms, working for day wages and found. The terrain was thick with cholla and clumps of it clung to the horses with spikes that would drive through a bootsole to the bones within […] Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming. Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. The seargent […] screwing a bipod into the threaded boss on the underside of the barrel would kill these animals […] Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. The rifle carried a vernier sight on the tang […] [T]he old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.