And high
Up the birds rose into sights against the darkening
Clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
Landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
Abandonment to the summons their blood knew.
Like the birds in Wendell Berry’s poem, “September 2,” we hear a summons our blood knows. It is a summons to belonging. Aristotle tells us we are political animals, and scripture says “it is not good for man to be alone.” We reject the summons at our peril. Fortunately, something inside us strongly inclines us to respond. We want to belong. And yet this desire is as dangerous as it is necessary. Sometimes, we accept the summons even when it means walking into the Devil’s arms and letting him violate our body and soul.
This is the theme of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Set in Mexico and the American Southwest of 1849, the novel offers a fictionalized account of real crimes credited to a sadistic group of scalp-hunters known as the Glanton gang. The gang includes the Kid, the novel’s protagonist, and Judge Holden, the antagonist. The original account of Holden comes from a book by Samuel Chamberlain called My Confession. According to Chamberlain, Holden lusted after “blood and women” and was suspected of raping and murding a ten-year-old girl. McCarthy’s Holden is much worse, and his sexual appetites include children of both sexes. The Kid initially keeps his distance from Holden, though they ride in the same company of scalp-hunters, and on several occasions Holden makes explicit his desire for the Kid. But in the end, after watching the Judge destroy so many others, the Kid chooses to give himself to Holden’s depredations. It’s a disturbing conclusion to one of the most disturbing novels ever written, and readers are left wondering why. I think it’s simple: the Kid chose the Judge because he was lonely.
The Kid is lonely from the beginning. His birth causes his mother’s death, and his father succumbs to drunkenness. Alone at home, the Kid heads out, never to return to his birthplace. He possesses “a taste for mindless violence.” He moves from town to town, alone, and freely indulges that taste for violence.
Nevertheless, the Kid experiences kindness among all the cruelty. He suffers gunshots to his back and chest, but a “tavernkeeper’s wife attends him…brings him his meals…carries out his slops.” She cares for the Kid until he mends. And what does the Kid do to her in return? “He has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night.” The first explicit charity given to him, and the Kid turns from it. This will become his pattern.
Later, in Texas, he continues as he began: alone and violent. Yet now he is also prideful. He lives in a fantasy of freedom in which nothing seems too much for him to bear; he even believes he can take on all of creation. “His origins are become as remote to him as his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains as wild and barbarous as to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.” The Kid has become a Cain-like figure, refusing to bend his will to Divine authority. God admonished Cain: do right and find acceptance; do wrong, and sin lies at the door. But Cain rejected God, which left him exposed to sin’s violation. “Starting with absolute freedom,” says Ralph E. Matlaw, “one necessarily reaches a position of absolute subjugation.” This will be the Kid’s fate.
As for Divine admonition, other characters sometimes act to prevent the Kid from encountering it. During a downpour the Kid slips into a large tent, to get out of the rain, and catches part of a sermon by the Reverend Green, who tells his congregation about a man for whom sin lay at the door. “Neighbors…he couldn’t stay out of these here hell, hell, hellholes right here in Nagodoches. I said to him: You goin to take the son of God in there with ye? And he said: Oh no. No I ain’t. And I said: Don’t you know that he said I will foller ye always even unto the ends of the road.” Green’s sermon gets cut off when Judge Holden makes his debut. Holden enters the tent and slanders the Reverend, causing an uproar, literally bringing down the tent, forcing the preacher to leave. The besmirching of a gospel preacher marks the first of many such mockeries of religion and Divine authority. Anyone who speaks for God is either belittled, ignored, or killed. Divine authority has little purchase in this novel’s world or in the Kid’s heart.
The only bulwark for the Kid is the company he keeps. It seems he thinks he’s better off being part of a vicious scalp-hunting gang, even if that means he remains in proximity to Judge Holden, than he would be on his own. The world of the novel is often a nightmare. The heavens and the earth and some of its human inhabitants all seem to conspire against the Kid’s survival. Sometimes it seems as if the Kid and his companions have traveled through a portal where natural and supernatural terrors threaten the gang at every step. Heaven and earth behave like predatory creatures:
They rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire….[T]he mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.
Shortly after crossing through that portal, the Kid and the men riding with him are descended upon by people who appear like demons:
A legion of horribles, hundreds in number…all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more terrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
The Kid survives these horrors. He endures because he belongs to a group. He has a strong will, a strong sense of independence, and if he refuses to submit to Divine authority, he certainly refuses to submit to any human authority who would encroach on his freedom. The Kid doesn’t broadcast his refusal; he maintains a quiet disposition, a seemingly neutral posture, especially towards Judge Holden. Where Glanton seems too preoccupied to notice the Kid, Holden, who really leads the group, cannot abide the Kid’s independence. He desires complete control of the Kid, for Judge Holden desires complete control of literally everything:
Whatever exists…. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent…. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth…. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers.
The Kid’s neutral disposition towards Holden works as long they have the rest of the gang between them. When most of the gang gets butchered and scattered by Yuma Indians, however, the distance between Holden and the Kid collapses. Though physically the two men separate, psychologically Holden seizes the Kid. Even after a decade or more of living alone, moving from place to place, taking work as he needs it, and growing into a Man, he still can’t free himself from Holden, whose presence seems to infuse the very air itself.
At age twenty-eight, which is an accomplishment considering what all he sustained, the Kid is nearly halfway through his life, life expectancy being around forty at that time. He joins five other hired men to escort a group of pilgrims “through the wilderness to their homes halfway across the continent.” A week into the journey and the Kid quits his post. Later, however, he finds them all lying “hacked and butchered among the stones in every attitude.” The dead had huddled beneath a cross, but, like so many such moments, the cross and the God it implies did not (or could not) stop its penitents from being assaulted. The scene stirs something within the Kid. He discovers “alone and upright in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes cast down.” The Kid approaches the woman and speaks more to her than he does at any other time in the novel. “He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place…for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.” But when the Kid touches the woman, he discovers that she “has been dead in that place for years.” This seals the Kid’s fate. Even when he finally tries to confess his sins and show charity to another person, he is rejected.
Like Cain, the Kid rebels against Divine authority only to find himself in need of Divine protection against evil. Holden’s grip tightens and seems to draw the Kid toward the final encounter, where the Judge, like the sin crouching at Cain’s door, will overtake the Kid.
Noting a “little detail,” Amy Hungerford says the Kid is neither a hero nor a moral character. Near the end of the novel, when the Kid is a twenty-eight year old man, he carries around a Bible, but he cannot read it. For Hungerford, this is a sign that the Kid has “maturation without morality,” and any merciful acts he performs “are not mercy because [they] go to the violent men who perpetuate violence.” Her reading implies that when Holden destroys the Kid, he is simply destroying yet another bad man.
However, the fact that the Kid keeps his distance from Holden for nearly the entire narrative, that the Kid at least makes a confession and a promise of charity to a woman in need, and that the Kid puts up an argument during his last conversation with Holden, are evidence of what Harold Bloom calls “moral maturation.” Bloom reads the Kid as a moral figure and a hero. “McCarthy subtly shows us the long, slow development of the Kid from another mindless scalper of Indians to the courageous confronter of the Judge in the final debate in a saloon…. The Kid’s moral maturation is heartening.”
And yet, the Kid in the end doesn’t so much confront Holden as submit to him. The Kid wants to heed the summons his blood knows. He wants company; he wants to belong. Stopping his ears against God’s counter-summons, the Kid’s loneliness compounds, and with Holden as the only remaining summoner, the Kid makes the tragic decision to abandon himself, like a rag tossed in the wind, to Holden’s awful embrace. The Kid becomes a tragic anti-hero.
If a resilient, gutsy cowboy like the Kid finds loneliness to be more than he can bear, we would do well to see the same possibility in ourselves. We cannot separate ourselves from human relationships. At the same time, we must not reject the call of Divine authority in our lives. Both are a summons our blood knows.
Arguably, the Kid simply spent too much time alone. In addition to solitude, he lived his life with no regard for Divine authority, though Divine authority made itself known to him. Rod Dreher says that God doesn’t always do what we ask of him, while the demons will reliably answer our requests. They will promise us what we want.This is how Judge Holden operates throughout Blood Meridian. This is what the Kid gave himself over to when he submitted to Holden. Evil claims to be interested in us, but it will not and cannot satisfy our need for belonging; rather, it envelops us in absolute loneliness. And in that loneliness, it gathers us to our destruction.
Image Credit: Ernest Haskell, “Apple Trees” (1923) via Wikimedia.
