The Night Does Not End: Episode III

I Promise you Nothing: Blood Meridian & the Tarot

In Chapter VII of Blood Meridian, four Mexican performers¹ join Glanton’s Gang in the little town of Corralitos and accompany the scalp hunters across the desert.

Seated around the campfire the first night of their journey, en route to Janos, Glanton addresses the father of this family and asks him if he “tells fortunes.”

The answer is yes. The showman (as Glanton calls him) collects a deck of Tarot cards from his belongings, beckons his wife forward, and a curious scene unfolds. The man leads his wife to the edge of the firelight, seats her facing the darkness, then blindfolds her.

The juggler asks the woman if she can see and she assures him she cannot. Readers sense that a performance is in the offing—whether it will contain tricks or magic, we don’t yet know.

The juggler fans his cards and approaches Glanton, but Glanton waves him away. The juggler turns his attention to Black John Jackson who selects a card from the deck.

Jackson looks at the card, then passes it back to the juggler who urges the men of Glanton’s Gang to be quiet, then holds the card aloft and announces it is The Fool.

The juggler’s wife, still blindfolded at the end of the firelight, repeats the name of the card, then begins to chant. After a time, she says, “El negro”—identifying John Jackson as the man who’s selected this card.

Members of Glanton’s Gang—and the reader—now understand the nature of this performance: a man will select a card from the juggler, the juggler will name the card, then the juggler’s wife will divine which of Glanton’s men chose it.

It’s an impressive trick, and if the scene offered no more than this, a trick is all it would be.

Of course, Glanton’s Gang is a tough audience and none of them are amused by this performance—except the Judge who is seemingly entertained at how unsettled John Jackson is by all this “idolatry.” When Jackson, who doesn’t speak Spanish, asks Holden what the woman is saying, the Judge tells him, “I think she means to say that in your fortune lie our fortunes all” (97).

In Notes on Blood Meridian, McCarthy scholar John Sepich has the following to say about The Fool and John Jackson: “El tonto, the Fool, is the most powerful of all the Tarot Trumps. The Fool can indicate lost wits, divine wisdom, Juggler, magician, Coyote, Raven, or simply Trickster, Dwarf, or circus clown” (Sepich, 109).

Sepich astutely points out that Black John Jackson is the first of the scalp hunters to be killed in the raid on the Yuma ferry toward the end of Blood Meridian—I’ll say more about this below. It’s important that readers see Jackson’s card as foretelling the fate of the entire Glanton Gang.

Continuing his act, the juggler seeks out his next mark. When he stops in front of the Judge, Holden redirects him to the Kid, telling him to try, “Young Blasarius yonder” (98).

“Blasarius” is an antiquated term for arsonist—it calls back to the first chapter of the novel where the Kid and Toadvine burned down a hotel in Nacogdoches, an act the Judge witnessed—but this term and its significance flies over the heads of everyone present: surely, Toadvine and the illiterate Kid can’t know it and none of the other scalp hunters were present for that Nacogdoches’ burning.

In his Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian, Shane Schimpf points out that Blasarius has another connotation: “one who excites factions, quarrels, or sedition” (176). As we read the final chapters of the book where Judge Holden tells the Kid that he “alone was mutinous” (312), that he “broke with the body of which [he] was pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise” (319), we’d do well to remember the Judge’s earlier comment and Schimpf’s excellent annotation.

And so, the juggler moves on to the Kid and bids him select a card. Our protagonist obliges: “He took one. He’d not seen such cards before, yet the one he held seemed familiar to him. He turned it upside down and regarded it and he turned it back” (98).

This card is the Four of Cups and the Kid actually has seen it before. In Chapter V, after surviving the Comanche attack on Captain White’s war party, the Kid and Sproule stagger into a Mexican village where every resident has been slaughtered (presumably by the same Comanche horseman who annihilated White’s filibusters). The Kid wanders from house to house, looking for food and water, and in one of the homes sees, “a gypsy card that was the four of cups” (63).

According to Schimpf, the Four of Cups signifies “apathy, boredom, and weariness with life” (177). Perhaps the Kid is apathetic, but compared to whom? When he joins Glanton’s Gang, he quickly distinguishes himself as its least apathetic and most merciful member: i.e. not even Tobin will remove the Apache arrow from Davy Brown’s leg.

John Sepich locates a meaning that makes a more sense with regards to McCarthy’s protagonist: “The Four of Cups is designated, in kabbalistic interpretations of the Tarot, by the Hebrew word ‘chesed,’ which is translated as ‘mercy.’ One answer to ‘Why does the Judge want to destroy the Kid?’ is that McCarthy has twice associated the Kid with a card whose symbolism suggests a divided heart and has generally associated him with the quality of mercy” (106).

We are back to the passage I referenced above—late in the novel, the Judge reads out his indictment against the Kid: “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (311-12).

Of course, the Kid understands nothing about the juggler’s performance and, like Jackson, doesn’t speak Spanish. When the blindfolded woman begins to chant, identifying the drawer of the card as the youngest member of the gang, the Kid is not amused.

“Get the hell away from me,” he tells the juggler.

The Judge, however, is thoroughly delighted by this exchange and begins “laughing silently.” He then directs the juggler to his next (and final) client: “El jefe.”

Meaning Glanton, naturally. The leader. The boss.

The juggler moves on to the captain and Glanton selects a card. But in passing it back to the juggler, a gust of wind sucks the card off into the night: the narrator never identifies it for the reader.

But the blindfolded woman begins to chant regardless, a monologue rendered entirely in Spanish. Here’s a translation of what she says: “The chariot, the chariot. Upside down. Card of war and revenge. I saw it wheel-less on a dark river. Lost, lost. The card is lost in the night. A curse. What an evil wind. Hearse full of bones. The boy that…”

The entire time she’s speaking, Glanton is calling for her to shut up. He draws his revolver and seems about to shoot her, but Holden intervenes: “The Judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element. He put his arms around Glanton. Someone snatched the old woman’s blindfold from her and she and the juggler were clouted away” (101).

The card that the juggler’s wife references is The Chariot. Schimpf has this to say about its significance:

“As the old woman says, this is considered a card of war when inverted. The card represents triumph over adversity as well as vengeance. Will to power, a quintessentially Nietzschean idea, is at the heart of this card. The Chariot stands for harnessing one’s will to overcome obstacles in one’s path. When inverted, it represents failure and destruction. It seems clear that McCarthy is foreshadowing the ultimate demise of the Glanton Gang at the Yuma crossing” (181).

At the beginning of Chapter XIX—the chapter wherein Glanton and (most members of) his gang are murdered—McCarthy provides a headnote that hearkens back to the old prophetess and her chariot: “Cart without wheels.”

At the Yuma crossing where the Gang takes up residence toward the end of the book, Glanton and his men have been using an overturned wagon as a ferryboat: literally, an inverted cart, without wheels, on a dark river. When Black John Jackson walks out to urinate in this river on the morning of the Yuma attack, he stands on the wheelless cart, then sees a gold coin lodged in the boards. He reaches down to retrieve it. When he stands up, “a long cane arrow passed through his upper abdomen and […] two more struck and lodged fast in his chest and in his groin. They were a full four feet in length and they lofted slightly with his movements like ceremonial wands and he seized his thigh where the dark arterial blood was spurting along the shaft and took a step toward the shore and fell sideways into the river (285).

A page later, (nearly all of)² the scalp hunters are dead and the Glanton Gang is no more.

1. These bufones, as they call themselves—a word that can be translated as either “jugglers” or “clowns”—are a family: husband, wife, grown son and daughter. The narrator never provides their names.

2. The surviving members are: the Kid, Tobin, Toadvine, the Idiot, David Brown, and, of course, the Judge.