Good Writin’ Episode 1: ""I dont know what to make of that."

September 27th, 2006

Ladies and gentlemens, welcome to a brandnew feature here on Pegritz(.com)!: Good Writin’ - a weekly showcase of excerpts from amazing works of literature. Hopefully, these little hors d’oeuvres of wonderful prose - and, occasionally, poetry - will serve as appetizers to stir up in you the same hunger for exceptional wordplay that they’ve stirred in me. Let them serve as bite-sized samples to give you a taste of the works as a whole, or as tasty little treats for your own imagination!

But just remember…my taste in literature is as variable and chaotic as my taste in music, so be prepared to taste-test everything from Gabriel Garcia-Marques to Stephen King, Caitlin R. Kiernan to Abraham Lincoln, Robert Frost to Robert Heinlein, the Upanishads to Gregory Corso. After all, no true gourmand can ever, in good conscience, limit him- or herself to any one particular cuisine at the expense of all others.

This initial installment presents to you the opening paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s chilling, and terribly sad, tale of drug money and sunbaked lives, No Country For Old Men (2005). The speaker is Sheriff Bell, the aged Texan lawman whose weary shadow lies heavy on the land and the story itself:

I sent one boy to the gaschamber in Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He’d killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. He’d been datin this girl, young as she was. he was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind. I watched them strap him into the seat and shut the door. He might of looked a bit nervous about it but that was about all. I really believe that he knew he was goin to be in hell in fifteen minutes. I believe that. And I’ve thought about that a lot. He was not hard to talk to. Called me Sheriff. But I didnt know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasn’t nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.

Positively chilling, isn’t it? I’ve certainly read my fair share of horror novels over the year, but never in all those tales of demon possession, zombie plagues, bioengineered monstrosities, curses, hauntings, and Ancient Gods from Beyond the Stars have I ever read anything that literally sucked the body heat right out of my blood more than that passage. Not even the many terrible and expressively quotable moments in McCarthy’s acknowledged masterpiece, Blood Meridian, managed to salt my blood with the pure, gritty despair of that opening paragraph. In short, gentle, colloquial sentences (you can practically see the old sheriff shaking his head in defeated bewilderment as he speaks), Cormac McCarthy has shown us just how perverse and horrific the scarred underbelly of America can be. No demon, no alien god, no cartoonish psychokiller in a mask can ever be as chilling as an average, everyday human being who can kill a fourteen-year-old girl just for pleasure.

Incidentally, this first installment of Good Writin’ is, naturally, dedicated to the memory of my mentor Ron Forsythe - Ahab! - who first introduced me to Cormac McCarthy with the words, “None of your monster tales can prepare you for this stuff, brother.” How could I possible resist the temptation to discover just what words like that must mean?! So this Bud’s for you, Ahab! I’ll be sure to somehow get to you a copy of McCarthy’s forthcoming novel, The Road, even if it involves necromancy.

By Derek C. F. Pegritz on September 27th, 2006 | Scategory: Good Writin', Literaria |