Child of God by Cormac McCarthy Page B

spun broadside to him and it came on with something of animate ill will. Git, he screamed at it, a hoarse croak in the roar of the water. It came on bobbing and bearing in its perimeter a meniscus of pale brown froth in which floated walnuts, twigs, a slender bottle neck erect and tilting like a metronome.
    Git, goddamn it. Ballard shoved at the log with the barrel of the rifle. It swung down upon him in a rush and he hooked his rifle arm over it. The crate capsized and floated off. Ballard and the log bore on into the rapids below the ford and Ballard was lost in a pandemonium of noises, the rifle aloft in one arm now like some demented hero or bedraggled parody of a patriotic poster come aswamp and his mouth wide for the howling of oaths until the log swept into a deeper pool and rolled and the waters closed over him.
    He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?
    When he reached the willows he pulled himself up and found that he stood in scarcely a foot of water. There he turned and shook the rifle alternately at the flooded creek and at the gray sky out of which the rain still fell grayly and without relent and the curses that hailed up above the thunder of the water carried to the mountain and back like echoes from the clefts of bedlam.
    He splashed his way to high ground and began to unload and disassemble the rifle, putting the shells in his shirtpocket and wiping the water from the gun with his forefinger and blowing through the barrel, muttering to himself the while. He took out the shells and dried them the best he could and reloaded the rifle and levered a shell into the chamber. Then he started downstream at a trot.
    The only thing that he recovered was the crate and it was empty. Once far downstream he thought he saw toy bears bobbing on the spate but they were lost from sight beyond a stand of trees and he was already nearer the highway than he wished and so turned back.
    Ultimately he crossed higher in the mountains. A steep and black ravine in which a wild torrent sang. Ballard on a mossbacked footlog bent beneath his sodden mudstained mattress went with care, holding the rifle before him. How white the water was, how constant its form in the speeding flumes below. How black the rocks.
    When he reached the sinkhole on the mountain the mattress was so heavy with rainwater that it staggeredhim. He crawled through a hole in the stone wall of the sink and pulled the mattress in after him.
    All that night he hauled his possessions and all night long it rained. When he dragged the last rancid mold-crept corpse through the wall of the sinkhole and down the dark and dripping corridor daylight had already broached a pale gray band in the weeping sky eastward. His track through the black leaves of the forest with the drag marks of heels looked like a small wagon had passed there. In the night it had frozen and he came up through a field of grass webbed with little panes of ice and into a wood where the trees were seized in ice each twig like small black bones in glass that cried or shattered in the wind. Ballard’s trousercuffs had frozen into two drums that clattered at his ankles and in the shoes he wore his toes lay cold and bloodless. He walked out from the sinkhole to see the day, nearly sobbing with exhaustion. Nothing moved in that dead and fabled waste, the woods garlanded with