Child of God

“The man stands straddlelegged, has made in the dark humus a darker pool wherein swirls a pale foam with bits of straw. Buttoning his jeans he moves along the barn wall, himself fiddlebacked with light, a petty annoyance flickering across the wallward eye.”

Juxtaposed to the festivity is Lester hidden in his quiet fury. This juxtaposition is developed by the reappearance of the word fiddle: Instead of a real fiddle, a symbol of jauntiness, the shadow of a fiddle is projected onto him like a chiaroscuro from a fiddle-backed chair. His urination is a futile marking of his territory by a man who has lost his land.

“Standing in the forebay door he blinks. Behind him there is a rope hanging from the loft. His thinly bristled jaw knots and slacks as if he were chewing but he is not chewing.”

Lester’s anger mounts as he spies the crowd come to celebrate his dispossession. The hanging rope establishes a vaguely ominous tone that is confirmed later by one of the choral voices who recounts that Lester’s father died by suicide in the barn. In retrospect, this memento mori reveals the tragedy of Lester’s past but also leads one to question why Lester hasn’t removed the rope in the decade and a half since his father’s death.

“I felt, I felt…I don’t know what it was. We just felt real bad. I never liked Lester Ballard from that day. I never liked him much before that. He never done nothin to me.”

One of the anonymous first-person narrators expresses the unplaceable feeling of dislike the choral voices, Sevier Countians, have of Lester. As this person admits, they disliked Lester before he punched the boy in the incident mentioned. The reflexive dislike of Lester before he commits his crimes evokes indignation on behalf of him, investing the reader in his character.

“Ballard, a misplaced and loveless simian shape scuttling across the turnaround as he had come, over the clay and thin gravel and the flattened beercans and papers and rotting condoms.”

Using imagery and metaphor, McCarthy characterizes the animalistic nature of Lester’s sexual urges. The simian metaphor suggests that, at least in his urges, Lester exists as an instinctual pre-human, lacking in self-consciousness. The imagery shows Lester as unrooted and abject, scurrying over the remnants of pleasures barred from him.

“[H]e wasn’t a patch on Lester Ballard for crazy.”

Another choral voice expresses the general consensus in Sevier County that Lester is “crazy.” Notably, the anonymous residents telling these stories of Lester apply this term to him even before his crimes, indicating that they had othered him before they had good reason to. The parochial residents use the word “crazy” as a catchall for everything outlandish or unusual, even a 9-year-old boy “driven crazy” by his father’s death by suicide.

“The cat looked at him without interest. It seemed to think him not too bright. Ballard spat on it and it immediately wiped the spittle from its head with a heavy forepaw and set about washing the spot.”

Injecting a bit of the humor that springs up throughout the novel, McCarthy shows how little the world cares for Lester: Even a cat is unfazed by his disrespect, erasing the sign of it (his spit) immediately. Here, the narrator expresses Lester’s perception of the cat condescending to him. This hints at Lester’s aggrieved mindset, something McCarthy never describes directly because his narration is cinematic, focusing on exteriors.

“A man much for himself. Drinkers gone to Kirby’s would see him on the road by night, slouched and solitary, the rifle hanging in his hand as if it were a thing he could not get shut of.”

Despite his fraternization with some Sevier countians in the first half of Part I, Lester soon withdraws into his bitter loneliness. His slouch signifies both his withering self-esteem and his maiming in the first chapter by Buster’s axe. The description of the rifle hints to the reason for Lester’s withdrawal: He has shackled himself to a misguided idea of pioneer self-sufficiency, of fending for himself with only his rifle as a companion.

“He’d grown lean and bitter. / Some said mad. / A malign star kept him.”

Again, the motif of “madness” appears as a catchall term for Lester’s alienation and otherness. The astrological imagery introduces an element of cosmic ill-fatedness, a suggestion of the Gothic supernatural at play in Lester’s story.

“Ballard spat and unleaned himself from the porch-post. You got it all, he said.”

While Lester often struggles to express himself, he always has a retort for his nemesis, his malign star, Sheriff Turner. Though he lacks intelligence, Lester has a preternatural ability to see through the sheriff’s self-righteous insults and accusatory nonsense.

“All the trouble I ever was in, said Ballard, was caused by whiskey or women or both. He’d often heard men say as much.”

Lester never develops a social face; he never learns how to express himself, because he lacks the ability for self-reflection. Instead, he can only parrot cliches he’s heard, as he does here to the Black man imprisoned next to him, John. In contrast to Lester, John can express himself freely, and even sings as he’s being lead away, sure to be executed for decapitating a man. That Lester is described as being a “cage” while John is only in a “cell” (59) suggests that being unable to self-reflect imprisons Lester in his mind.

“Reckon you could do it now from watchin? he said. / Do what, said Ballard.”

McCarthy injects some deadpan humor into the final lines of Lester at the blacksmith’s. Seeing Lester’s abjection and hoping to raise his self-esteem, the smith walks him through the process of reforging an axe head so that he might become interested in it. However, Lester is focused only on getting what he wants—the reforged axe head—and is comically oblivious to the smith’s attempt to establish a rapport. The protagonist refusing an alternate path offered by a stranger is a trope common to McCarthy’s novels. For example, in Outer Dark, the protagonist, Culla Holme, refuses a snake hunter’s offer to apprentice under him and instead continues his Cain-like wandering.

“You ort to be proud, Lester, that you ain’t never married. It is a grief and a heartache and they ain’t no reward in it atall. You just raise enemies in ye own house to grow up and cuss ye.”

The dump keeper Reubel’s words are ironic: He himself drives his nine daughters to hate him by beating them and raping one of them. The irony is doubled in that he doesn’t realize that Lester wants nothing more than a family, for some shelter against the hostile world. However, Lester doesn’t know how to start a real one—as he says, “I never could see it”—and consequently starts the grotesque “family” of stuffed animals and women’s corpses.

“There for a moment he flailed wildly, his hand scrabbling along the concrete, his eye to the river and the tracks there which already he was trailing to the end of his life. Then his hand closed upon the stock of the rifle. He fetched it down, cursing, his heart hammering. You’d try it, wouldn’t ye? he wailed at the tracks in the snow.”

When Lester thinks someone has stolen his rifle, he reveals both his truculence and his attachment to the gun. Lester is perpetually aggrieved, always thinking there’s someone out to get him, whether it be an imagined thief or the malevolent cosmos. His “wail” at the tracks in the snow illustrates both his paranoia and his utter isolation and despair.

“Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed. Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men’s souls.”

After being expelled from his homeland, Lester builds a new order in the mountains. However, outside of civilization, nature proves a relentless opponent, disrupting his attempts to mold it to his will. Additionally, his wish for order could be both in the souls of others and in his own, imprisoned as he is by his inability to discern what torments him.

“With the advent of this weather bats began to stir from somewhere deep in the cave. Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw them come from the dark of the tunnel and ascend through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ash and smoke like souls rising from hades. When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.”

Lester lives in a mystifying world, at once magical and foreboding—the world of the caveman. It is a world he shares with no one else, the world of a man who has fallen out of time, and who, like a shade, only emerges to drag the living back into his world.

“In the night the side of the mountain winked with lamps and torches. Late winter revelers among the trees or some like hunters calling each to each there in the dark. In the dark Ballard passed beneath them, scuttling with his ragged chattel down stone tunnels within the mountain.”

Like the monster Grendel in the epic Beowulf, who, alone in the mountains, becomes enraged by the sight of merrymaking in a mead hall below, Lester gazes with envy at the festive world from which he is barred. His subterranean existence connotes his enslavement to his id, to the urges that he feels compelled to indulge. This unconscious existence others Lester, making him Grendel-like.

“Nothing moved in that dead and fabled waste, the woods garlanded with frostflowers, weeds spiring up from white crystal fantasies like the stone lace in a cave’s floor. He had not stopped cursing. Whatever voice spoke to him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.”

McCarthy’s fantastical, poetic imagery—contributed to by the mention of a “stygian mist” lines later—conjures a mythological time outside of time. Into that world barges Lester, an ingrown snarl of emotion. Exhausted to the point of breakdown from porting the corpses across the mountain to the sinkhole, Lester’s discarded ego reemerges to stabilize him, ensuring that he can continue his pursuit of pure desire.

“Some people you cain’t do nothin with.”

Sheriff Turner’s words express a kind of fatalism about people like Lester who, as the choral voice of Sevier County expresses, was rotten from the beginning. However, Lester’s narrative reveals a more complex picture. Lester’s tragic, traumatic past and his persecution by the sheriff test the limits of what someone can endure, yet Lester still chooses to pursue the path he does, as seen in his fateful ignorance of the blacksmith’s offer.

“You reckon there are just some places the good lord didn’t intend folks to live in?”

Eustis’s musing to the sheriff raises the idea that Sevier County, with its history of calamity, is plagued by a divine curse. This motif of a cursed or haunted place is common to Gothic fiction; often, this place is a macrocosm of a deranged mind. In Child of God, Lester sometimes appears as the incarnation of or medium for the repressed anomic impulses that pervade the region itself, instead of an incursion of derangement. Sevier County is haunted not by a specter but by the primeval id.

“While he was digging, Lester Ballard in frightwig and skirts stepped from behind the pump-house and raised the rifle and cocked the hammer silently, holding back the trigger and easing it into the notch as hunters do.”

In the climax, Lester becomes the hunter that he has envied throughout the story, the ones that passed him carefree in their trucks on Frog Mountain. Lester takes decisive action, rectifying in his mind his original failure to defend his childhood from the usurper John Greer. However, his revenge goes comically awry—Lester is blown back out of John’s door by his shotgun like “some slapstick contrivance of the filmcutter’s art” (175)—and Lester’s humiliation remains.

“In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.”

Lester’s abjection reaches its nadir in his third day stuck in the cave system on Frog Mountain. To Lester, this just another example of his perennial persecution at the hands of angry gods or malevolent nature. The narrator’s equivocation suggests otherwise: Lester has landed himself in this would-be tomb.

“Everywhere across the sleeping land they called and answered each to each. As in olden times so now. As in other countries here.”

This description of roosters crowing as Lester returns to the hospital from the cave creates an atmosphere of timelessness characteristic of McCarthy’s work, including Child of God. Their calls’ universality connects distant times and places, lending a mythical quality to seemingly mundane events. This atmosphere is rendered ominous as it heralds the return of violence, emphasizing the theme The Violence Inherent to Humanity.

“Ballard saw him from time to time as they were taken out for airing but he had nothing to say to a crazy man and the crazy man had long since gone mute with the enormity of his crimes.”

The brief description of Lester in the psychiatric hospital reveals two things: that Lester isn’t an anomaly (the “crazy man” is a cannibal) and that Lester thinks he is normal. Even between two men that the chorus of Sevier countians would consider “crazy” there emerges the same distinction between normal and abnormal. This suggests that othering is inherent to human nature.