Child of God

“They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.”

This opening scene establishes the hostility of Lester’s world: His neighbors come to celebrate the violent dispossession of his family farm. The carnival analogy establishes this incongruous festivity. The breathless opening sentence, stretched by Cormac McCarthy’s signature use of polysyndeton, evokes a sense of relentlessness—as if the events unfolding are inexorable.

“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.