All the Pretty Horses (38 page)

They sent dead people, she said.

Mam?

They sent dead people. Crated em up and shipped em railway express. It got out of hand. You cant do nothin with a dead person. Only Jesus could do that.

Yes mam.

Did you want some more buttermilk?

Yes please mam. This is awful good.

Well I’m glad you’re enjoyin it.

She poured his glass and sat again.

He works so hard for his ministry. People have no idea. Did you know his voice reaches all over the world?

Is that right?

We’ve got letters from China. It’s hard to imagine. Them little old people settin around their radios over there. Listenin to Jimmy.

I wouldnt think they’d know what he was sayin.

Letters from France. Letters from Spain. The whole world. His voice is like a instrument, you see. When he has the layin on of the hands? They could be in Timbuctoo. They could be on the south pole. It dont make no difference. His voice is there. There’s not anyplace you can go he aint there. In the air. All the time. You just turn on your radio.

Of course they tried to close the station down, but it’s over in Mexico. That’s why Dr Brinkley come here. To found that radio station. Did you know that they can hear it on Mars?

No mam.

Well they can. When I think about them up there hearin the words of Jesus for the very first time it just makes me want to cry. It does. And Jimmy Blevins done it. He was the one.

From inside the house there sounded a long rattling snore. She smiled. Poor darlin, she said. He’s just wore out. People have no idea.

He never found the owner of the horse. Along toward the end of February he drifted north again, trailing the horses in the bar ditches along the edge of the blacktop roads, the big semi’s blowing them up against the fences. The first week of March he was back in San Angelo and he cut across the country so familiar to him and reached the Rawlins pasture fence just a little past dark on the first warm night of the year and no wind and everything dead still and clear on the west Texas plains. He rode up to the barn and dismounted and walked up to the house. There was a light on in Rawlins’ room and he put two fingers to his teeth and whistled.

Rawlins came to the window and looked out. In a few minutes he came from the kitchen and around the side of the house.

Bud is that you?

Yeah.

Sum buck, he said. Sum buck.

He walked around him to get him in the light and he looked at him as if he were something rare.

I figured you might want your old horse back, said John Grady.

I caint believe it. You got Junior with you?

He’s standin down yonder at the barn.

Sum buck, said Rawlins. I caint believe it. Sum buck.

They rode out on the prairie and sat on the ground and let the animals drift with the reins down and he told Rawlins all that had happened. They sat very quietly. The dead moon hung in the west and the long flat shapes of the nightclouds passed before it like a phantom fleet.

Have you been to see your mama? said Rawlins.

No.

You knew your daddy died.

Yeah. I guess I knew that.

She tried to get word to you in Mexico.

Yeah.

Luisa’s mother is real sick.

Abuela?

Yeah.

How are they makin it?

I guess all right. I seen Arturo over in town. Thatcher Cole got him a job at the school. Cleanin up and stuff like that.

Is she goin to make it?

I dont know. She’s pretty old.

Yeah.

What are you goin to do?

Head out.

Where to?

I dont know.

You could get on out on the rigs. Pays awful good.

Yeah. I know.

You could stay here at the house.

I think I’m goin to move on.

This is still good country.

Yeah. I know it is. But it aint my country.

He rose and turned and looked off toward the north where the lights of the city hung over the desert. Then he walked out and picked up the reins and mounted his horse and rode up and caught the Blevins horse by its halter.

Catch your horse, he said. Or else he’ll follow me.

Rawlins walked out and caught the horse and stood holding it.

Where is your country? he said.

I dont know, said John Grady. I dont know where it is. I dont know what happens to country.

Rawlins didnt answer.

I’ll see you old pardner, said John Grady.

All right. I’ll see you.

He stood holding his horse while the rider turned and rode out and dropped slowly down the skyline. He squatted on his heels so as to watch him a little while longer but after a while he was gone.

T
HE DAY
of the burial out at Knickerbocker it was cool and windy. He’d turned the horses into the pasture on the far side of the road and he sat for a long time watching down the road to the north where the weather was building and the sky was gray and after a while the funeral cortege appeared. An old Packard hearse with a varied assortment of dusty cars and trucks behind. They pulled up along the road in front of the little Mexican cemetery and people got out into the road and the pallbearers in their suits of faded black stood at the rear of the hearse and they carried Abuela’s casket up through the gate into the cemetery. He stood across the road holding his hat. No one looked at him. They carried her up into the cemetery followed by a priest and a boy in a white gown ringing a bell and they buried her and they prayed and they wept and they wailed and then they came back down out of the cemetery into the road helping each other along and weeping and got into the cars and turned one by one on the narrow blacktop and went back the way they’d come.

The hearse had already gone. There was a pickup truck parked further down the road and he put on his hat and sat there on the slope of the bar ditch and in a little while two men came down the path out of the cemetery with shovels over their shoulders and they walked down the road and put the shovels in the bed of the truck and got in and turned around and drove away.

He stood and crossed the road and walked up into the cemetery past the old stonework crypt and past the little headstones and their small remembrances, the sunfaded paper flowers, a china vase, a broken celluloid Virgin. The names he knew or had known. Villareal, Sosa, Reyes. Jesusita Holguín. Nació.

Falleció. A china crane. A chipped milkglass vase. The rolling parklands beyond, wind in the cedars. Armendares. Órnelos. Tiodosa Tarín, Salomer Jáquez. Epitacio Villareal Cuéllar.

He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother’s uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.

I
N FOUR DAYS’
riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been. At that time there were still indians camped on the western plains and late in the day he passed in his riding a scattered group of their wickiups propped upon that scoured and trembling waste. They were perhaps a quarter mile to the north, just huts made from poles and brush with a few goathides draped across them. The indians stood watching him. He could see that none of them spoke among themselves or commented on his riding there nor did they raise a hand in greeting or call out to him. They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.

The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.

Reader’s Guide

1.
All the Pretty Horses
opens with one death—that of John Grady’s grandfather—and ends with the death of the family servant called Abuela,”grandmother.” (At the novel’s end, John Grady also learns that his father has died.) How do these deaths impel the novel’s plot? What larger meanings do they suggest?

2. What other events in this novel occur more than once? How does McCarthy use repetition as a structuring device?

3. How does the author establish John Grady’s character? How has he changed by the novel’s end? At what points in the book do we see him change?

4. What attributes does McCarthy seem to value in his characters, and how can you tell he does so? Do these traits always serve them well, or are the boys in
All the Pretty Horses
victims of their own virtues?

5. On the hacienda an old man named Luis tells the boys that “the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal…that if a person understood the soul of a horse then he would understand all the horses that ever were” (p. 111). “Among men,” Luis continues, “there was no such communion as among horses and the notion that men could be understood at all was probably an illusion.” How are these statements borne out or contradicted within the novel? To what extent does the author allow us to “understand” his horses, while keeping his human characters psychologically opaque? What sort of contrasts does McCarthy draw between the communal soul of horses (see especially pages 103-107) and the profound solitude of men? What role, generally, do horses play in this book?

6. On page 89 Rawlins says: “A goodlookin horse is like a good-lookin woman . . . They’re always more trouble than what they’re worth.” How does this statement foreshadow events to come? Where else in the novel do casual statements serve as portents?

7. How does the author establish the differences between the United States and Mexico? How do their respective inhabitants seem to view each other?

8. Alejandra’s aunt offers two alternative metaphors for the workings of destiny, comparing it both to a coiner in the moment he places a slug in the die and to a puppet show in which the strings are always held by other puppets (pages 230-231). Which of these metaphors seems more apt to the narrative as a whole? Is what happens to the boys in the course of the novel the result of character or fate?

9. Do the boys’ journey and subsequent ordeals ever seem foolish, futile, or anachronistic? If so, how does McCarthy suggest this?

10. All the Pretty Horses is spare in exposition (note the economy with which McCarthy establishes John Grady’s situation at the book’s beginning) yet lavish in the attention it devotes to scenes and details whose significance is not immediately clear (note the description of the cantina on page 49 and the scene in which John Grady and Rawlins buy new clothes on pages 117-121). Why do you think the author has chosen to weight his narrative in this way?

11. Although John Grady and Rawlins are innocent of stealing horses, McCarthy suggests that they are culpable of other crimes. At different points in the book he compares them to “young thieves in a glowing orchard” (p. 31) and “a party of marauders” (p. 45). When John Grady makes love to Alejandra, we are told that it is “sweeter for the larceny of time and flesh” (p. 141). What kinds of theft might McCarthy be writing about? Might the boys’ suffering be seen as warranted by earlier transgressions? What sort of moral system applies within the universe of this book?

12. Is
All the Pretty Horses
a violent book? How do the novel’s characters feel about the deaths they cause? At a time when graphic and gratuitous descriptions of mayhem are standard in much popular fiction for purposes of mere shock and titillation, does McCarthy succeed in restoring to violence its ancient qualities of pity and terror? How does he accomplish this?

13. What role does history play in McCarthy’s narrative? To what extent are his characters products of a particular era?

14. Although the occurrences in
All the Pretty Horses
are, strictly speaking, plausible and its human voices, in particular, are nothing if not realistic, the book also contains a strong mythic component. How, and where, does McCarthy introduce this? What specific myths and fairy tales does the book suggest

Books by Cormac McCarthy

The Road
The Sunset Limited (
a novel in dramatic form
)
No Country for Old Men
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