Episode VII: You Must Sleep But I Must Dance

What Happens to the Kid

1. They Ain’t Nobody Done It Yet

In Chapter XXIII, the Kid is a forty-five-year old man, adrift on the plains of north Texas.

The year is 1878 and like the land he travels through, our protagonist has seen better, brighter (and bloodier) days. The Great Plains were once home to gargantuan herds of bison: now, only bones remain. In this skeleton land, the Kid (the narrator refers to him in this final chapter as “the Man”) encounters a group of orphaned boys, scavenging the bones¹.

These “bone-pickers” approach the Kid and question him about his life and travels. They want to know if he’s headed to the brothels of Fort Griffin. They want to know about his past. They want to know about the necklace he wears—the scapular of Apache ears he took off the hanged body of David Brown. One of these boys, a surly fifteen-year-old named Elrod, becomes hostile. He insults the Kid several times, makes racist jokes, seems to be trying to goad the Kid into a fight.

The Kid tells Elrod he used to be like him; he tells Elrod he’s trying to keep from shooting him.

This enrages the fifteen-year-old.

"Set there and talk about shooting somebody,” says Elrod. “They ain't nobody done it yet.” (335)

They ain’t nobody done it yet. This line stops us in our tracks. We've read that before, haven’t we?

In Chapter I, the Kid is hanging around the East Texas town of Nacogdoches. The year is 1849. The Kid is (you guessed it) fifteen. He meets Toadvine for the first time and the two of them gets into a knife fight.

Fortunately, for both of them, Toadvine and the Kid are knocked unconscious by a shillelagh-wielding passerby (only in Blood Meridian are you fortune to be KO'd) and they wake up the next morning in much more amiable moods. Toadvine asks how the Kid's doing.

The Kid says he thinks Toadvine broke his neck. Toadvine says he never meant to break his neck: "I meant to kill ye."

The Kid responds, "They ain't nobody done it yet." (10)

When this line is repeated by Elrod in the novel's final chapter, we suspect Cormac's up to something. Elrod stalks back into the Kid's camp later that night and, of course, the Kid shoots the fifteen-year-old, killing him.

"You wouldn't of lived anyway," he says. (336)

2. Who Is This Child?

In Blood Meridian, much of the violence against children comes from the Judge. In fact, Judge Holden’s interactions with children are a theme in McCarthy’s novel.

We first encounter the Judge’s interest in children in Chapter IX when the Gang rides into a presidio where copper miners are forted up against the Apache. Among the inhabitants of the adobe fortress is a twelve-year-old Mexican boy. This immediately piques the Judge’s interest:

“Who is this child?” he says.

A thunderstorm rolls in that night and the men seek shelter in a common room around a fire.

The next morning, Toadvine walks out into the courtyard to find the Judge standing in the sunshine, “picking his teeth with a thorn as if he had just eaten.”

The scene continues:

Morning, said the Judge.

Morning, said Toadvine.

Looks fair to clear.

It done has cleared, said Toadvine.

So it has, said the Judge. So it has.

An ominous interaction if there ever was once, but it is only preamble. A paragraph later, the narrator tells us that, “In the meantime, someone had found the boy. He was lying facedown naked in one of the cubicles. Scattered about on the clay were great numbers of old bones. As if he like others before him had stumbled upon a place where something inimical lived.” (125, emphasis mine)

Neither the narrator nor the characters say it, but the reader knows that the name of that inimical something is Holden.

In Chapter XII, Glanton’s Gang slaughters a tribe of peaceful Apaches and takes a small boy with them, in a perverse travesty of adoption:

“The Judge sat with the Apache boy before the fire and it watched everything with its dark berry eyes and some of the men played with it and made it laugh and they gave it jerky and it sat chewing and watching gravely the figures that passed above it. They covered it with a blanket and in the morning the Judge was dandling it on one knee while the men saddled their horses. Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed with the saddle but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the Judge had scalped it.” (170, emphasis mine)

The Gang’s de-personing of this poor child is total and the narrator’s use of the pronoun it keeps the score. This is far too much to bear, even for Toadvine who draws his pistol and presses its muzzle to the Judge’s head.

Sadly, he doesn’t fire.

Two chapters later, in the old town of Jesus Maria, the Judge finds a cantina to spend the rainy day in while the other members of the Gang pursue their various vices:

“The Judge sat alone in the cantina. He also watched the rain, his eyes small in his naked face. He’d filled his pockets with little candy deathsheads and he sat by the door and offered these to children passing on the walk under the eaves but they shied away like little horses.” (199)

For a third time, McCarthy dramatizes the Judge’s diabolical interest in children. The narrator never shows us the Judge harming a child: instead, we are given the aftermath. The violence against children is rendered obscene: literally, “off-stage.” In ancient Greek drama, acts of violence were performed ob skene. The audience never sees Oedipus blind himself with his brooch, nor do we see Jocasta commit suicide; these obscene matters are reported by the Chorus.

How interesting that McCarthy—whose method in this novel has been to portray all manner of depraved violence in the most excruciating detail—chooses not to dramatize these particular depredations.

It’s almost if the author makes these choices because he is setting the reader up for the greatest ob skene moment in Western Literature.

3. The Jakes and What Was Encountered There

Back to that final chapter on the plains of North Texas…

The Kid rides on to Fort Griffin as he discussed doing with the bone-picking orphans, and in the saloon, runs into Judge Holden for the next to last time. The Judge tells him that he "didn't empty his heart into the common lot." Meaning, he didn't participate in the Glanton Gang's slaughter of various Native people, and we are reminded that the Kid is strangely absent during the novel’s most catastrophically violent moments. During the slaughter of the Gilenos, for instance, we don't see the Kid until the battle is over. After the poor villagers have been massacred, we see the Kid "wad[ing] out of the waters" of a lake (163).

When teaching Blood Meridian in my classes, my students and I will sometimes try to determine exactly who the Kid kills. After the Yuma virtually annihilate Glanton's Gang, the Kid flees with Tobin and shoots several of the Yuma warriors during their escape: the precise number is unclear.

Those killings and Elrod's are the only ones we can definitively lay at the Kid's doorstep. If we get technical, one could also blame the death of the Kid's mother on him since she dies in childbirth.

There's the palpable sense that in killing Elrod (an act of self-defense), the Kid is killing a younger version of himself. In early drafts, Cormac had the Kid traveling the plains in this final chapter with an eight-word letter he can't read.

In this early draft, he Kid will walk up to various men and hand them the letter. The men read it, pass it quickly back and then carefully walk away. If you look at the drafts of Blood Meridian in the McCarthy archive at the Witliff Collection in San Marcos, you will find a note in Cormac's handwriting in the margins of the manuscript: "8 words? The bearer of this note will kill you." [Box 35, Folder 9]²

So, in Cormac's conception, at the novel's end our illiterate hero is walking around, trying to connect with folks, then handing them a letter that insures he will make no connection at all. This is gimmicky and, thankfully, Cormac cut it and in the published version, gives the Kid a Bible instead.

The Kid exits the saloon after the Judge’s last lecture and stands alone looking at stars as they fall across the night sky. He hears men calling for “the little girl whose bear was dead for she was lost”—yet another child gone missing when the Judge comes to town.

He makes his way down to the outhouse, takes a last look at the sky, then opens “the rough board door of the jakes” and steps inside:

“The Judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden bar latch home behind him.” (347)

This is the last we see of the Kid. Other men approach the outhouse and are warned away by a man relieving himself outside in the mud. One passerby is foolish enough to ignore these warnings and opens the door to look inside: “Good God almighty, he said.”

What, exactly, has happened?

I recall distinctly finishing this novel one night in the fall of 1999. I immediately called my friend Todd Petersen, a fellow graduate student and McCarthy scholar.

“I just finished Blood Meridian,” I said, breathlessly. “What happens to the Kid? In the outhouse at the end? What’s the Judge do to him?”

“Sodomizes him to death,” said Todd.

Which, strangely, was what I felt had happened to the Kid, though I wouldn’t have been able to say precisely why I thought this.

Of course, I can say so now.

As I’ve discussed above, McCarthy establishes the Judge as a pedophile and child-murderer. Holden’s proven obsession with the Kid (and kids), combined with the fact that he is naked when he gathers the Kid against his immense and terribly flesh, make matters clear. Further combine these facts with hundreds of years of bawdy (and sometimes, homophobic) jokes about what men do in outhouses, and I think it becomes obvious that the Judge rapes the Kid to death.

It is also clear that had McCarthy attempted to describe or dramatize this (rather than rendering it obscene), the passage would not contain a tenth of the horror that it does. Scattering the necessary pieces across his novel, McCarthy allows readers to assemble them at this (literal) moment of climax and construct the terrible picture in our mind.

1. Rich in nitrogen, these bones were sold to Eastern markets, ground up and used as fertilizer.

2. Stephanie Reents writes about making this discovery in her book on Blood Meridian, I Meant to Kill Ye.