Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

XVIII

When they rode out of the Yuma camp it was in the dark of early morning. Cancer, Virgo, Leo raced the ecliptic down the southern night and to the north the constellation of Cassiopeia burned like a witch’s signature on the black face of the firmament. In the nightlong parley they’d come to terms with the Yumas in conspiring to seize the ferry. They rode upriver among the floodstained trees talking quietly among themselves like men returning late from a social, from a wedding or a death.

By daylight the women at the crossing had discovered the idiot in his cage. They gathered about him, apparently unappalled by the nakedness and filth. They crooned to him and they consulted among themselves and a woman named Sarah Borginnis led them to seek out the brother. She was a huge woman with a great red face and she read him riot.

What’s your name anyways? she said.

Cloyce Bell mam.

What’s his.

His name’s James Robert but there dont anybody call him it.

If your mother was to see him what do you reckon she’d say.

I dont know. She’s dead.

Aint you ashamed?

No mam.

Dont you sass me.

I’m not trying to. You want him just take him. I’ll give him to you. I cant do any more than what I’ve done.

Damn if you aint a sorry specimen. She turned to the other women.

You all help me. We need to bathe him and get some clothes on him. Somebody run get some soap.

Mam, said the keeper.

You all just take him on to the river.

Toadvine and the kid passed them as they were dragging the cart along. They stepped off the path and watched them go by. The idiot was clutching the bars and hooting at the water and some of the women had started up a hymn.

Where are they takin it? said Toadvine.

The kid didnt know. They were backing the cart through the loose sand toward the edge of the river and they let it down and opened the cage. The Borginnis woman stood before the imbecile.

James Robert come out of there.

She reached in and took him by the hand. He peered past her at the water, then he reached for her.

A sigh went up from the women, several of whom had hiked their skirts and tucked them at the waist and now stood in the river to receive him.

She handed him down, him clinging to her neck. When his feet touched the ground he turned to the water. She was smeared with feces but she seemed not to notice. She looked back at those on the riverbank.

Burn that thing, she said.

Someone ran to the fire for a brand and while they led James Robert into the waters the cage was torched and began to burn.

He clutched at their skirts, he reached with a clawed hand, gibbering, drooling.

He sees hisself in it, they said.

Shoo. Imagine having this child penned up like a wild animal.

The flames from the burning cart crackled in the dry air and the noise must have caught the idiot’s attention for he turned his dead black eyes upon it. He knows, they said. All agreed. The Borginnis woman waded out with her dress ballooning about her and took him deeper and swirled him about grown man that he was in her great stout arms. She held him up, she crooned to him. Her pale hair floated on the water.

His old companions saw him that night before the migrants’ fires in a coarse woven wool suit. His thin neck turned warily in the collar of his outsized shirt. They’d greased his hair and combed it flat upon his skull so that it looked painted on. They brought him sweets and he sat drooling and watched the fire, greatly to their admiration. In the dark the river ran on and a fishcolored moon rose over the desert east and set their shadows by their sides in the barren light. The fires drew down and the smoke stood gray and chambered in the night. The little jackal wolves cried from across the river and the camp dogs stirred and muttered. The Borginnis took the idiot to his pallet under a wagonsheet and stripped him to his new underwear and she tucked him into his blanket and kissed him goodnight and the camp grew quiet. When the idiot crossed that blue and smoky amphitheatre he was naked once again, shambling past the fires like a balden groundsloth. He paused and tested the air and he shuffled on. He went wide of the landing and stumbled through the shore willows, whimpering and pushing with his thin arms at things in the night. Then he was standing alone on the shore. He hooted softly and his voice passed from him like a gift that was also needed so that no sound of it echoed back. He entered the water. Before the river reached much past his waist he’d lost his footing and sunk from sight.

Now the judge on his midnight rounds was passing along at just this place stark naked himself—such encounters being commoner than men suppose or who would survive any crossing by night—and he stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows.