Rough Stone Rolling

On the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850’s, a company of men pursued a rampaging pack of Apaches. The mission was two-fold: To stop their murderous campaign and to obtain their scalps for which the market was thriving.

By fires of highland driftwood pale as bone, they crouched in silence while the flames yawed in the nightwinds ascending those stony draws. The kid (age 14) sat with his legs crossed, mending a strap with an awl he borrowed from Tobin, and Tobin looked on as he worked.

Tobin said:

“The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to Himself. It’s no fair accountin’ and I don’t doubt but what He’d be the first to admit it and you put the query to Him boldface.

It may be the Lord’s way of showin’ how little store he sets by the learned. Whatever could it mean to One who knows all? He’s an uncommon love for the common man and godly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it may well be that so the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as lives in silence themselves. For let it go how it will, God speaks in the least of creatures. No man is give leave of that voice.”

The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work. He said:

“I ain’t heard no voice.”

“When it stops,” said Tobin, “you’ll know you’ve heard it all your life. At night, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears the grazing?”

“Don’t nobody hear them if they’re asleep,” said the kid.

“Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes?”

“Every man,” said the kid.

“Aye,” replied Tobin. “Every man.”

“Blood Meridian (Or the Evening Redness in the West)” - Cormac McCarthy