Episode VIII: The Fire Which God Has Put There

The Meaning of Blood Meridian's Epilogue

1. They All Move On Again

After the novel proper has ended, McCarthy appends a short, one-paragraph epilogue¹ to Blood Meridian. Here it is:

Presumably, the year is 1878 and the bone-pickers that the Kid encounters in the final chapter are still at work, gathering bison bones to sell to the eastern markets: these will be ground up and used as fertilizer.

A man is walking among them, moving over this north Texas plain, making holes in the ground with an implement. McCarthy’s language here is downright mystical (he even capitalizes God), and this epilogue has confused a number of readers, the esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom among them. Here is Mr. Bloom’s take on this mysterious passage from his introduction to the Modern Library² edition of Blood Meridian:

“The strangest passage in Blood Meridian […] is set at dawn, where a nameless man progresses over a plain by means of holes that he makes in the rocky ground. Employing a two-handled implement, the man strikes ‘the fire out of the rock which God has put there.’ Around the man are wanderers searching for bones, and he continues to strike fire in the holes, and then they move on. And that is all. […] Perhaps all that the reader can surmise with some certainty is that the man striking fire in the rock at dawn is an opposing figure in regard to the evening redness in the West. The Judge never sleeps, and perhaps he will never die, but a new Prometheus may be rising to go up against him.” (xii-xiii)

Unlike Mr. Bloom, I don’t have an Ivy League education, but I did grow up on a cattle ranch in rural Oklahoma where I got a schooling that gave me greater insight into Blood Meridian’s Epilogue than two graduate degrees from Yale seem to have given the famed author of The Anxiety of Influence.

The man progressing the plain is digging holes for fence posts with a tool called a post-hole digger. It looks like this.

Growing up on my grandparents’ ranch, I had the dubious honor of helping my grandfather build fences: I’ve helped dig post holes, drive posts in the ground, string barbed wire. This is tedious, back-breaking labor and contrary to what ranchers will tell you, it doesn’t build character: the only things it builds are callouses and calcium deposits.

If, unlike Mr. Bloom, you’ve done farm work, you know instantly what the nameless man in Blood Meridian’s epilogue is doing with his implement: it’s about as “strange” to you as a bale of hay.

But if this character is simply building a fence, why is this action significant enough to warrant a coda? And what does it have to do with the carnage and chaos the reader has experienced in the 350 preceding pages?

2. Age of Wire & String

Barbed wire was invented in 1867 by Lucien B. Smith and then reinvented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874—the barbed wire that ranchers use today is based on Glidden’s patent:

The history of barbed wire and barbed wire fences is the history of the end of the American West.

The Old West.

The Wild West.

Whatever you want to call that decade after the Civil War ended in April of 1865 to the discovery of gold in the Black Hills by the Custer Expedition. 1874 was also the year of Glidden’s barbed wire patent. Before this, fences were expensive to build and as cows required thousands and thousands off acres of grass to feed on, most cattle ranches weren’t fenced.

The lack of fences enabled both free-grazing and those famed cattle drives where cowboys slow-walked hundreds of thousands of cattle up from Texas—if you walked them too quickly and didn’t let them graze, the cows would be too skinny to bring a decent price by the time you reached the markets in Abilene, Kansas and the other rail heads on the Great Plains. Here, in these cowtowns, cattle could be loaded onto cars and shipped East to feed America’s booming post-war population. The cowtowns were notoriously violent; violent men like Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok made a living and achieved great notoriety keeping the peace as marshals or sheriffs.

It’s worthwhile to recall that in Blood Meridian, Glanton and his men never strike a single fence. The hyper-violent gang moves just as freely as the bands of Apache they hunt, as unrestricted as the Comanche, Lords of the Plains. An unfenced West is a inconceivably violent place, but it’s also a zone of extraordinary freedom, open to migrations of both the Plains Tribes and the animals they depended on for their way of life: the buffalo.

With the invention and patenting of modern barbed wire, the West could be fenced off inexpensively, and it was fenced off almost overnight. By 1876, Custer was dead; Deadwood became a boomtown and Wild Bill was murdered there. The Comanches had been forced onto the reservation at Fort Sill; the Lakota chieftains, Red Cloud and Spotted Tail, led their people into the agency, surrendering. The braves who had killed Custer and decimated the Seventh Cavalry, would fight no more forever.

The Wild West—that mythic period in American history that spawned countless films, and novels, and television series—had lasted barely ten years.

Bloom’s lack of practical farmhand knowledge causes him to miss the entire point to Blood Meridian’s epilogue: the way of life practiced by Glanton’s murderous gang has ended forever. The Judge might say he’ll never die, but the unrestricted, violent world we saw him move through is disappearing in real time under his nimble feet.

Holden ends the novel dancing, making declarations of immortality; is it possible we are witnessing his final dance? ³

1. He chooses to do this in the last volume of The Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, as well.

2. This introduction first appeared as a chapter in Bloom’s condescendingly-titled book, How to Read and Why (2000).

3. The chief counterargument to such a reading is the beginning of Chapter XXII where the Judge comes to visit the Kid in a San Diego jail and Holden is wearing “a suit of gray linen and […] new polished boots. His coat was unbuttoned and in his waistcoat he carried a watchchain and a stickpin and in his belt a leathercovered clip that held a small silvermounted derringer” (317). Perhaps McCarthy wishes to show us that the Judge prospers in a city just as he does in the wilderness—in which case, barbed wire fences and urbanization will affect him not at all.