And McCarthy doesn’t make understanding it easy.
First, there’s his aversion to using quotation marks.
Dont pay no attention to him, John Grady. She looks like her face caught fire and they beat it out with a rake. I’m goin to say that blond on the end is more your style.
Billy shook his head and reached for his whiskey. They aint no reasonin with the man. He just aint got no taste in women and that’s a mathematical fact.
You stick with your old dad, said Troy. He’ll get you onto somethin with some substance to it. Parham yonder actually claimed that a man ought not to date anything he couldnt lift. Said what if the house caught fire.
There are no quotation marks anywhere in this book (and many of his other books). As a result, it is sometimes impossible to tell who is speaking, or if certain words are part of a character’s speech or part of the narrative voice.
And what about apostrophes? They mostly don’t appear as well, but every once and a while they will surprise you. They certainly aren’t at the end of dialectical truncations, like goin instead of going and reasonin instead of reasoning. And they mostly don’t appear in contractions, like dont instead of don’t and aint instead of ain’t. But what about the I’m in the selection chosen above? Why I’m instead of Im?
They drove on to Van Horn and stopped for gas and coffee and by then the country that Troy’d grown up in and that he thought he might go back to and where his dead brother was buried was all behind them and it was two oclock in the morning.
Seriously. oclock instead of o’clock but Troy’d instead of Troyd?Are Im and Troyd too hard for us to understand? And why bother at all? Why am I even focused on this? Is that what McCarthy wants from his reader?
I’d much rather focus on things like this -- and sorry, McCarthy, but I’m goin to put in the correct punctuation.
“I think you can train a rooster to do what you want. But you won’t have him. There’s a way to train a horse where when you get done you’ve got the horse. On his own ground. A good horse will figure things out on his own. You can see what’s in his heart. He won’t do one thing while you’re watchin’ him and another when you ain’t. He’s all of a piece. When you’ve got a horse to that place you can’t hardly get him to do somethin’ he knows is wrong. He’ll fight you over it. And if you mistreat him it just about kills him. A good horse has justice in his heart. I’ve seen it.”
Like All the Pretty Horses, the novel that started this Border Trilogy, horses in Cities of the Plain are very much something to pay attention to.
“You got a lot higher opinion of horses than I got,” Oren said.
“I really don’t have all that much in the way of opinions where horses are concerned. When I was a kid I thought I knew all there was to know about a horse. Where horses are concerned I’ve just got dumber and dumber.”
Oren smiled.
“If a man really understood horses,” John Grady said. “If a man really understood horses he could just about train one by lookin’ at it. There wouldn’t be nothin’ to it. My way is a long way from workin’ one over with a tracechain, But it’s a long way from what’s possible, too.”
John Grady is talking about more than horses in this section -- he’s talking about men, too, and that mystical place where men and horses are one, one spirit that abides with the same unknowable source.
He stretched his legs out. He crossed the sprained foot over his boot.
“You’re right about one thing,” he said. “They’re mostly ruint before they ever bring ‘em out here. They’re ruined at the first saddle. Before that, even. The best horses are the ones been around kids. Or maybe even just a wild horse in off the range that’s never even seen a man. He’s got nothin’ to unlearn.”
“You might have a hard time gettin’ anyone to agree with you on that last one.”
“I know it.”
“You ever break a wild horse?”
“Yeah. You hardly ever train one though.”
“Why not?”
“People don’t want ‘em trained. They just want ‘em broke. You got to train the owner.”
Oren leaned and stubbed out his cigarette. “I hear you,” he said.
John Grady sat studying the smoke rising into the lampshade over the table. “That probably ain’t true what I said about the one that ain’t never seen a man. They need to see people. They need to just see ‘em around. Maybe what they need is to just think people are trees until the trainer comes along.”
There’s a lot of this in the novel -- talk about horses, their wild nature and ways to tame them that can be read in multiple ways. It’s one of the things that makes McCarthy’s writing so compelling in this trilogy. But horses serve more purposes than that.
Here the parallel is between how one treats horses and how one treats men -- how men make their way in the world:
“Oren tells me that squirrel-headed horse you think so much of is eatin’ out of your hand.”
“That might be a bit of an exaggeration.”
“What do you tell ‘em?”
“Who?”
“Horses.”
“I don’t know. The truth.”
“I guess it’s a trade secret.”
“No.”
“How can you lie to a horse?”
He turned and looked at John Grady. “I don’t know,” the boy said. “Do you mean how do you go about it or how can you bring yourself to do it?”
“Go about it.”
“I don’t know. I think it’s just what’s in your heart.”
“You think a horse knows what’s in your heart?”
“Yeah. Don’t you?”
Billy didn’t answer. After a while he said: “Yeah. I do.”
“I ain’t a very good liar.”
“You just ain’t had enough practice at it.”
And here we have horses as a repository of some secret knowledge, of something that is true but which men can’t always see:
“I used to love to ride of a night.”
“I did, too.”
“You’ll see things on the desert at night that you can’t understand. Your horse will see things. He’ll see things that will spook him, of course, but then he’ll see things that don’t spook him, but still you know he seen somethin’.”
“What sort of things?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean like ghosts or somethin’?”
“No. I don’t know what. You just knows he sees ‘em. They’re out there.”
“Not just some class of varmint?”
“No.”
“Not somethin’ that will booger him?”
“No. It’s more like somethin’ he knows about.”
“But you don’t.”
“But you don’t. Yes.”
The old man smoked. He watched the moon. No further birds flew. After a while he said: “I ain’t talkin’ about spooks. It’s more like just the way things are. If only you knew it.”
So there is a lot about horses in this novel, in this whole trilogy, but at its core, I don’t think it is a story about horses. I think it is a story about men. Men and the lives that they lead and how difficult they can be.
Far out on the plain below the lights of the cities lay shimmering in their grids with the dark serpentine of the river dividing them.
“I thought you had other business to attend to,” Billy said.
“I do.”
“You think it can wait.”
“I hope it can wait. I ain’t sure this can.”
“Well, I’m glad you ain’t forgot all of your raising.”
“I ain’t forgot anything.”
“You’re tired of me gettin’ on your ass though.”
“You’re entitled.”
They sipped their coffee. The wind blew. They pulled their blankets about their shoulders.
“I ain’t jealous you know.”
“I never said you were.”
“I know. You might of thought it. Truth is, I wouldn’t pull your boots on at gunpoint.”
“I know.”
Billy lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire and laid the brand back. He smoked. “It looks a lot better from up here than it does down there, don’t it.”
“Yes, it does.”
“There’s a lot of things look better at a distance.”
“Yeah?”
“I think so.”
“I guess there are. That life you’ve lived, for one.”
“Yeah. Maybe what of it you ain’t lived yet, too.”
The mention of the lights of the cities out on the plain was the tip off for me. He comes something important, and it was this, this idea that life, a man’s life, your life, always looks better from a distance. Down on the plain and up against it, it can be downright brutish and short, but up there on the bluff, looking at it from a great distance, it has a sublime beauty that can always be appreciated.
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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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