Outer Dark

Culla reaches a ferry crossing on a river engorged by rain. A man on horseback appears, prompting the ferryman to start across the river. After the ferryman is halfway across the rider leaves. When the ferryman lands, he’s furious—for two years, the rider has been tricking him into coming across for a horse fare over an argument they had. Culla will have to wait for someone on horseback before the ferryman will cross again. As night falls, the river continues rising.

The ferryman proudly explains how his late father rigged the ferry on two fixed lines to run entirely on the current; it doesn’t cost anything to operate. When the ferryman’s father operated the boat, a cable snapped, smacking a horse into the river but leaving its rider standing on the bank. Culla agrees that the rigging is ingenious.

After dark, a rider appears. The ferryman prepares to leave despite knowing the conditions are dangerous. Culla, the rider and his horse, and the ferryman embark: “The river was dark and oily and it tended away into nothing, no shoreline, the sky grading into a black wash little lighter than the water about them” (165).

Soon the metal rings on the cables begin screaming, and water breaks over the boat. Swearing, the ferryman darts around adjusting the rigging. Suddenly, one of the cables explodes above Culla’s head. Total silence follows as the ferry starts down the river, no longer fighting against the current. Culla calls out, but there’s no answer. Suddenly the horse barrels past him along the deck. In the total dark Culla tries desperately to dodge the horse until his yell spooks it into the water.

Culla floats on the ferry for most of the cold, foggy night. Eventually, the boat catches in an eddy, and Culla spots a light through the trees. He calls out, and the trio appears on the bank, silhouetted against their fire. Culla throws them a line, and they drag the boat ashore.

Culla asks to warm up by the fire while the trio eyes him. One of them is named Harmon. Another, a nameless, nonspeaking man toting a rifle, drools and grins at Culla. The leader, a gigantic, bearded man in the black suit, interrogates Culla and pressures him into eating some of the charred meat on the fire (which is implied to be human flesh). The leader ceaselessly torments Culla, accusing him of being too cowardly to get the spooked horse under control. The leader refuses to give his name, stating that “[s]ome things is best not named” (176), as Culla struggles to swallow the dry, acrid meat.

The leader explains that the evil force personified by the nonspeaking man is what snapped the cable and set Culla adrift, adding that they lit the fire knowing that Culla would see it from the river.

The leader browbeats Culla into giving him his boots. Harmon gets the leader’s boots, the nameless man gets Harmon’s, and Culla gets the nameless man’s rotting ones. The leader explains that he takes care of his own and that Culla may wish for worse boots sometime soon. Continuing to mock Culla, the trio leaves, tipping the charred meat into the fire.

In the middle of autumn, Rinthy finally finds the tinker on the road. She demands he return her child. He says he doesn’t have the baby and that if Rinthy wants him, she’d have to pay eight months of nursing fees. Rinthy agrees, and the tinker leads her to a dilapidated cabin atop a hill. Contrary to his promise, there’s no one there. The tinker lectures Rinthy that she’s an unfit mother and doubts she really wants the child back. Rinthy learns that the tinker found the baby in the woods and didn’t trade for him with Culla as she thought. The tinker starts a fire and prepares dinner for the two of them.

The tinker insinuates that he’d trade the baby for sex; however, when Rinthy offers to do whatever it takes, he sneers that nothing can compensate for the lifetime of scorn he’s suffered as a despised tinker. Rinthy explains that it was her brother, not her, who left the baby to die. Seizing Rinthy by the arm, the tinker demands to know if the baby is Culla’s; she admits he is. He shouts that she’s lying, that the child can’t be the product of incest. Cursing her, the tinker leaves, threatening to kill her if she follows. The sound of her sobbing follows the tinker down the road: “He could hear it far over the cold and smoking fields of autumn, his pans knelling in the night like buoys on some dim and barren coast” (197).

On the eve of winter, Culla finds a dilapidated cabin. After removing a mattress with a decaying cat on it, he shelters there for the night. The next morning, he awakes to a man named John pointing a shotgun at him. John escorts Culla barefoot across the frosty fields to the house of the local squire.

John accuses Culla of breaking into his father’s old cabin, and the squire tells Culla that if he doesn’t plead guilty, he’ll have to detain him in the nearby town until the next court day in three weeks. To avoid detention, Culla pleads guilty. The squire’s wife records Culla’s full name in a register, guessing at the spelling because Culla doesn’t know it. The squire levies a $5 fine, which Culla can settle with 10 days of work for him. Against John’s protests, the squire argues it would be illegal to have Culla work for John instead of him. Indignant, John leaves.

The squire asks Culla if he’s an outlaw on the run for murdering someone; he responds, “No sir. I don’t reckon” (210). The squire doesn’t think Culla is a bad man, just an unlucky one. The squire’s father believed a person made their own luck; Culla’s father thought he was the unluckiest man alive. When asked, Culla says that he doesn’t have any other family. Culla asks if he can continue working after his sentence in exchange for food, but the squire has no use for him beyond the 10 days.