No Country for Old Men (21 page)
Read No Country for Old Men Online
Authors: Cormac McCarthy
I
t was a cold blustery day when he walked out of the courthouse for the last time. Some men could put their arms around a crying woman but it never felt natural to him. He walked down the steps and out the back door and got in his truck and sat there. He couldnt name the feeling. It was sadness but it was something else besides. And the something else besides was what had him sitting there instead of starting the truck. He’d felt like this before but not in a long time and when he said that, then he knew what it was. It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death. You need to get over that, he said. Then he started the truck.
XIII
Where you went out the back door of that house there was a stone water trough in the weeds by the side of the house. A galvanized pipe come off the roof and the trough stayed pretty much full and I remember stoppin there one time and squattin down and lookin at it and I got to thinkin about it. I dont know how long it had been there. A hundred years. Two hundred. You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I’ve read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. I’ve thought about it a good deal. I thought about it after I left there with that house blown to pieces. I’m goin to say that water trough is there yet. It would of took somethin to move it, I can tell you that. So I think about him settin there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just a hour or two after supper, I dont know. And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that’s what I would like most of all.
The other thing is that I have not said much about my father and I know I have not done him justice. I’ve been older now than he ever was for almost twenty years so in a sense I’m lookin back at a younger man. He went on the road tradin horses when he was not much more than a boy. He told me the first time or two he got skinned pretty good but he learned. He said this trader one time he put his arm around him and he looked down at him and he told him, said: Son, I’m goin to trade with you like you didnt even have a horse. Point bein some people will actually tell you what it is they aim to do to you and whenever they do you might want to listen. That stuck with me. He knew about horses and he was good with em. I’ve seen him break a few and he knew what he was doin. Very easy on the horse. Talked to em a lot. He never broke nothin in me and I owe him more than I would of thought. As the world might look at it I suppose I was a better man. Bad as that sounds to say. Bad as that is to say. That has got to of been hard to live with. Let alone his daddy. He would never of made a lawman. He went to college I think two years but he never did finish. I’ve thought about him a lot less than I should of and I know that aint right neither. I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.
Cormac McCarthy
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
A
LSO BY
C
ORMAC
M
C
C
ARTHY
The Road
The Sunset Limited (a novel in dramatic form)
Cities of the Plain
The Crossing
All the Pretty Horses
The Stonemason (a play)
The Gardener’s Son (a screenplay)
Blood Meridian
Suttree
Child of God
Outer Dark
The Orchard Keeper
Acclaim for Cormac McCarthy’s
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
“A zigzagging, riveting frontier tale of fate and flight [that] carries a stripped-down, doom-soaked prose that scares you even before anybody rough shows up.”
—The Boston Globe
“Even the spare best of Elmore Leonard would have trouble beating this neo-Western in a foot race…. The book rockets forward like a bullet train…. The only demand it places on us is to keep reading.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Riveting…. A harrowing, propulsive drama, cutting from one frightening, violent set piece to another with cinematic economy and precision.”
—The New York Times
“This is a monster of a book. Cormac McCarthy achieves monumental results by a kind of drip-by-drip process of ruthless simplicity. It will leave you panting and awestruck.”
—Sam Shepard
“Perhaps not since Satan vs. God has the battle been so Manichean, so explicit, so clearly drawn as it is in Cormac McCarthy’s new novel…. This book moves like shadows over the desert…. Its surge is hot-blooded [and] the momentum of the book is such that the reader is plunged into the action.”
—The Memphis Flyer
“No plot summary will do this novel justice [and] the mystery is more than enough to keep any reader panting…. Cormac McCarthy explores questions of guilt and responsibility, love and moral ambiguity, [and] the way memory informs us.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“McCarthy’s prose [is] the most laudable, his characters the most fully inhabited, his sense of place the most bloodworthy and thoroughly felt of any living writer’s.”
—Esquire
“As tough and violent as anything he has written…. He’s a genius at building plot [and] one is swept along through the sheer mastery of form.”
—The Denver Post
“A brutally satisfying thriller at its start,
No Country for Old Men
ends as a rueful, disquieting meditation on the effects of greed and violence.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Electrifying…. [He writes] powerfully of fathers and sons, and of responsibility for oneself, one’s family and one’s community as a kind of patrimony that the very essence of modernity may have damaged beyond repair, warped beyond recognition, mutated so horrifically that a new kind of man, a soulless, wrecking angel, may not only be loose among us but may be what we are destined to become.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2006
Copyright © 2005 by M-71, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
A portion of this work previously appeared in
The Virginia Quarterly Review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
McCarthy, Cormac.
No country for old men / Cormac McCarthy.— 1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Drug traffic—Fiction. 2. Treasure-trove—Fiction. 3. Sheriffs—Fiction. 4. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.C337N6 2005
813′.54—dc22
2004064903
eISBN: 978-0-307-39053-0
v3.0