Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Author:Cormac McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307762481
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-11T10:00:00+00:00

HE WOKE IN THE NIGHT with some premonition of ill fate. He sat up. The fire had diminished to a single tongue of flame that stood near motionless from the ashes. He lit the lamp and turned up the wick. A shifting mantle of smoke overhung the room. Thick ribbons of white smoke were seeping down between the boards in the ceiling and he could hear a light crackling noise overhead like something feeding. Oh shit, he said.

He got up, the blanket shawled about his thin and angry shoulders. Through the rives in the boards above him he could see a hellish glow of hot orange. He was pulling on his jacket and shoes. With the rifle in hand he went out into the snow. There in the trampled weedlot he stood looking up at the roof. A crazy-looking gaggle of flames shot up alongside the chimney and subsided again. A rabid crackling from the loft. Clouds of steam were coming off the wet roof and hot pins of light drifted downwind in the blowing snow.

Kiss my goddamned ass, said Ballard. He stood the rifle against a tree and hurried back inside and gathered up his bedding and hauled it out into the snow and dove back in again. He collected his cookware and his little pantry and brought them out and he got the axe and the few tools he owned and what other odds and ends of gear he had stowed in the empty room and flung them into the yard and raced back in and got the ladder and stood it up into the hole and looked up. Huge orange boils of fire were pulsing in the loft. He climbed up the ladder and poked his head through the hole in the ceiling. Instantly he felt his hair singe and crackle. He ducked and patted at his head. Already his eyes were red and weeping from the smoke. He squatted there at the top of the ladder for a few minutes squinting up at the fire and then he climbed back down again.

When he went back outside he had the bears and the tiger in his arms. The roof was now afire. Above the steady roar of it you could hear the old riven oak shakes exploding into flame row on row at the far end of the house with a kind of popping noise. The heat was marvelous.

Ballard stood there in the snow with his jaw hanging. The flames ran down the batboards and up again like burning squirrels. Through the flames of the roof you could see the pinned framing in a row of burning A shapes. Within minutes the cabin was a solid wall of fire. The few panes of glass crackled and fell from their sash in a myriad rupture and the roof dropped with a whooshing noise down into the house. Ballard had to step back, so great the heat was. The snow about the house had begun to draw back leaving a ring of damp ground.

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