Good morning, friends. Our first posted article from the Winter 2008 issue comes from Christopher Badeaux. Enjoy!

When I was a kid, I went creekwalking across what is now the President George [H.W.] Bush Expressway, and was then a mix of woods, streams, sewer runoffs, and railroad lines. Because I was a teenage boy, I knew I was actually invulnerable to mere physical harm, and so decided to cross one particular chasm by marching across a fallen tree.

Above, a beautiful, cold, North Texas February sky. Below, cascading water. Between, one fourteen year-old idiot using a bamboo staff to balance himself like some brain-damaged trapeze artist.

It was the water that did me in. A thing boys know that men forget is that streams, viewed in bright morning sunlight from just the right angle, look crystalline and explosive at the same time. One instant, it’s as if you’re staring at a ribbon of diamond; the next, it’s an explosion of light and fractal wonder. It’s an incredible thing to behold from a safe vantage, and a stupid thing to behold when balanced across a thin tree with just a fresh-cut staff of bamboo from twenty feet above.

As I sat, freezing, wet, and knowing that my rear would soon be hurting as much as my lungs, I realized two important things: First, that it is stupid to walk across a fallen tree supported only by one’s own questionable balance and a bamboo staff when there is near-freezing water twenty feet beneath you; and, second, that disorder can be beautiful, but it can hurt, too.

As you get older, you come to realize that the beauty of disorder is an illusion. Disorder is a bad thing, spreading pain and misery in concentric ripples from the source of the disorder. But you never forget how breathtaking disorder can be.

With all of that in mind, I think it’s fair to say that Cormac McCarthy’s novels increasingly reflect a deeply disordered universe.

That requires some elaboration, and a brief excursion into natural law. A full exposition on that topic is beyond the scope of this essay, and frankly beyond my abilities, but in brief: The Lord made the Universe according to a set of hidden but largely discernable rules, and those rules produce specific, predictable outcomes once the rules and variables are known. Furthermore, all things are made ordered—oriented, if you prefer—to not only the Lord, but also to decent and right outcomes.

This is reflected in little things, like two plus two always yielding four; and in such obvious things that we’ve lost the ability to rationalize them, such as a man and a woman together yield life, where a man and a man together are sterile. In other words, there is not only the obvious physical event, but good things come of the act because it satisfies the underlying order God instilled in things. This order lies not merely in individual acts, but in an interconnected web that binds all things together in ways immediately detectable, often predictable, and usually inexplicable. (For those of a certain age and a certain background, think the Force, without a Dark Side.) All things are created toward an end envisioned by God, and when rightly ordered, flow and move and act in ways pleasing to Him. Even Men—especially Men—have this etched in their beings, though we alone of all Creation have the free will to place ourselves in disorder.

Again, this is extremely simplistic, but it will do for the purposes of this essay. (Anyone interested in a more thorough, yet succinct, Catholic view of this can consult the Catholic Encyclopedia; a classical one in Lord Coke’s rulings; a more eccentric, secular take can be found in the works of Lysander Spooner; and a more modern one can be found in Clarence Manion’s writings, God rest his soul.) But, as God’s greatest gift after life and Salvation, it is given to Man alone to choose disorder, to make a freely elected choice to embrace things that run contrary to God. We are, so to speak, balanced on that log above the freezing creek, with a straight path before us, and a freezing, beautiful stream below. We are ordered toward God, but the acts we choose may run against not only him, but the rhythm of everything else. Electing disorder damages everything around us.

Our consciences and our natural inclinations are manifestations of this intrinsic order; disregarding them gives rise to disorder. Indeed, even doing things that are right and good can be taken to extremes that place one outside of that natural order. When we step outside of that order, as anyone who has lived with someone suffering through, say, anorexia or alcohol addiction can tell you, the disorder radiates outward in a spiderweb-crack pattern of pain. Sin itself is definitionally an intrinsically disordered act, because it puts one apart from, and against, God. In a sense, Original Sin is the greatest intrinsically disordered act of all, and we deal with its ripples to this day.

It is this view of the universe that animates McCarthy’s most recent works, No Country for Old Men and The Road. It is clearly a theme with which he has grappled for decades—for contrast, I worked my way through Blood Meridian—but I believe it’s fair to say that he has only hit a perfect pitch with his last two works. McCarthy is essentially grappling with two, interrelated questions: What is original sin? And: what effect does original sin have on the universe?

To see where McCarthy is now, it is useful to see, briefly, where he’s been. Blood Meridian is actually a story that, in terms of the plot and sequencing, you really can get from the blurbs on the back of the book: A young man with a tendency to violence enjoys a brief stint in the United States Army, then hooks up with a group of human scum travelling across the Southwest in the 1850s, where they proceed to kill an extraordinary number of Indians and Mexicans. The gang breaks up in violence and chaos, and, decades later, the protagonist is (probably) killed by the gang’s spiritual leader, who may or may not be human, but who at any rate is a murdering pederast with pronounced psychoses, who apparently goes on to live a happy life thereafter.

Blood Meridian has been accurately described as “Faulkneresque.” The novel, a story of men engaged in the lowest of human acts—mass murder, hunting humans, and sequences of blood and gore to make anyone with a soul blanche—is written almost elegaically, and certainly invokes Faulkner’s sense of the elevation of the squalid through flowing prose.

More than a few have attempted to find religious overtones and undertones in it, and, if Wikipedia is to be believed, someone has actually tried to make it out as a case for natural law by rabidly portraying its opposite (or at least, antinomianism). With this, I disagree. The novel is not nearly so didactic as that: There is no redemption and, really, there is no consequence. The main character is not as disordered as those around him, though he partakes in the same acts as they. Insofar as he apparently suffers the same end as the others—a violent death in a dark, grimy hole—one could make the argument that the disorder he has set loose in himself and others through his acts leads him to his end.

Unfortunately, that’s karma, not Christian, let alone synonymous with natural law. The theory of natural law is an attempt to come to grips with the universe as it is, not as we wish it would be. Bad men, men who perform acts so foul as to curdle the mind—or protect those who perform such acts from legal sanction—live well, rise to high office, and frequently die comfortably. Men who do good things frequently suffer well beyond what ordinary men do. More importantly, it seems an insult to a novel to suggest that a work conveys a message by having its readers experience revulsion at the message’s opposite; it’s like suggesting that to hit a target, you should just fire a shotgun over your shoulder, somewhere in its general direction.

Blood Meridian is actually a story of sin from beginning to end, a tale of tumult and blood and dysfunction. In a sense, it’s a world in the grip of chaos, and, given the raging inhumanity within it, a testament to the effects of a society accepting intrinsic disorder. It’s not an examination of the intrinsically disordered act itself, or the web of pain it creates.

Blood Meridian, for all of its beautiful diction, is basically a fairly simple story. You won’t find deep meaning there unless you’re looking for it, which is fine as far as upper-level English courses go; but there is really nothing special about it in terms of the subject matter with which it deals. That is because it is simply a story of a world at odds with the natural law, where there is no real connection between the sins throughout the novel and the characters that inhabit it. It is very ordinary because it simply takes sin and other kinds of disorder as a given part of the universe.

It is not a profound insight to say that disorder lies at the core of every modern novel: Things falling apart drive action. The truth of most literature since well before the Romantic era, however, is that disorder is made right at the end of almost every book. The villain is defeated, the damsel is rescued, the world is saved, and, in literature from the 1960s on, socially appropriate noises are made and coffee is had. Even with that, novels are a window into a safer world, one in which everything more or less turns out right in the end—where the awful consequences of life are put on hold in favor of the pleasant ones.

Put differently, only the Russians want to be depressed at the end of a good book.

This is actually slightly maddening, because a novel is a self-contained utopia in which disorder has no extrinsic effects, carries no ripples of destruction and disintegration, and in fact, suggests to the reader that an original sin is always entirely containable and repairable. One never feels the connection between the people who inhabit the bubble of the novel. They live lives as strutting, separate parts of some beautiful machine that runs precisely and predictably outside of the suspension of disbelief.

In the real world, sin is a pebble in a pond: It touches so much more than the sinner and, when there is one, the victim. It disorders lives and relationships in ways foreseeable and incredible. This is a profoundly Christian (and specifically, though hardly exclusively, Catholic) insight. It is also an insight that blessedly underlies No Country and The Road. In both of those novels, men act inhumanly, and the universe shatters around them, wounding or destroying loved ones and innocents who pay a blood price for the original sin at the core of those novels. Humans exist organically within their universe, and the damage of sin infects lives beyond that of the sinner.

The downside, of course, is that the heroes don’t live happily ever after.

No Country for Old Men is the story of a man named Llewelyn Moss, who, out hunting one West Texas day in the early 1980s, happens on the remains of a shootout of a drug run. The critical moment in this story is at this very moment, less than twenty pages in: While trying to figure out where the money is (because there must be some money there), he comes across a dying man, begging for water in Spanish. Moss leaves him to track down the money, then races home to hide it. Only many hours later does his conscience send him back to the man, who of course is dead.

The rest of the story facially appears to follow from getting the money (and attempting to keep it from the unhappy people to whom it nominally belongs). In fact, the story is really about the consequences of that one decision—to seek out the money and let a man die of his wounds and thirst. Every death—and there are many—that occurs around or because of Moss, every disturbance of a quiet evening or morning, every round of burning and exploding buildings, can all be traced to this one intrinsically disordered act. While men of good faith can argue about whether we are our brothers’ keepers, or whether we must all be Good Samaritans, I think all men of good faith can safely agree that letting a man die in agonizing pain so that one can steal a few million dollars crosses the “Love your neighbor as yourself” injunction with room to spare.

It is a testament to McCarthy that he doesn’t let the sin end there. When Moss finally returns to the (now dead) man, he arrives just as the gentlemen who first illegally procured the money arrive. After a cat-and-mouse game that ends with a minor bullet wound, Moss escapes, leaving behind his truck with all of its identifying information still onboard. Moss may be a repeat sinner—more on that shortly—but an idiot, he is not. He makes it home and tells his wife, Carla Jean, that she needs to go to her mother in Odessa, as he himself sets out on the run with the money.

All of that is well and good, and logically internally consistent. But Moss refuses to tell his wife where he got the money before he sends her packing, and that sin—the purposeless violation of the sacred bond of marriage—magnifies and internalizes the disorder Moss has set loose. There is no immediately apparent reason not to tell the woman he loves, “Honey, I stole this money from some Mexican drug dealers. By the way, given the body count where I got this from, I think they’re fine with killing people. Hop to now, they’re probably going to try to kill both of us.” The deliberate choice to physically and emotionally sunder his marriage over ill-gotten cash is yet another sin that will come home to roost over the course of the novel.

From there, the story becomes one of Moss running from Anton Chigurh, a sociopath obsessed with order and rules (and who may or may not be human), who has been hired to find him and return the money, and from the nice Mexican fellows to whom the money nominally belongs. Every encounter with these men—especially Chigurh—leads to more disorder spiderwebbing across the countryside, more physical injury to Moss, and, eventually, dead innocents (including a woman sitting in her apartment minding her own business). Even in West Texas in the early 1980s, running gun battles across the countryside were a relatively rare phenomenon, and yet everywhere Moss goes, blood, death, property damage, and destroyed environmental serenity follow. We use St. Paul’s phrase “the wages of sin is death” without realizing all of its implications: there is no way to accuse McCarthy of that shortcoming. Moss is not merely damning himself, he is killing everyone around him just to prolong his sin. I lost track of the death toll after the shootout on the way into Piedras Negas, but there’s no denying the extraordinary disorder Moss spreads everywhere he goes.

Chigurh himself is bound up in all of this. He kills remorselessly (but not joyously). He can be wounded, but, at least that we see, never killed. He hunts the money and Moss with an incredible singularity of purpose. The good, the bad, and the innocent die by his hands. Property is ravaged and destroyed just to further his ends. He kills Carla Jean three quarters of the way through the novel, the last in a series of coldblooded executions, while offering her a brief exegesis on the nature of the universe.

It is easy to see Moss as the hero, and Chigurh as the villain—it is also wrong. Chigurh is a manifestation of the natural law. Through his sins, Moss has set the whole world around him into disorder. Chigurh is simply a manifestation of Moss’s wrongs and a tangible reminder of their impact on the world. The deaths he causes seeking Moss are themselves traceable to the dysfunction Moss has set loose on the universe by his first sin, and by his determination to continue it at any cost. This is nowhere clearer than when Chigurh forces Moss to choose between the money and Carla Jean’s life, in a phone conversation as Moss is recovering from the running gun battle in which the two had engaged some time before:

You know how this is going to turn out, don’t you?

No. Do you?

Yes. I do. I think you do, too. You just haven’t accepted it yet. So this is what I’ll do. You bring me the money and I’ll let her walk. Otherwise she’s accountable. The same as you. I dont know if you care about that. But that’s the best deal you’re going to get. I wont tell you can save yourself because you cant.

I’m going to bring you something all right, Moss said. I’ve decided to make you a special project of mine. You aint goin to have to look for me at all.

This is fine heroic bluster. It is also selfish, stupid, and sinful. The sundering of the marriage that took place half a book ago in appearance has become significantly more real in fact, because Moss just gambled his wife’s life for an attempt to keep money he stole. Whose conscience, rightly ordered, would tell him, He probably won’t kill her, keep the money and take your chances? At this point, Chigurh has already proven himself a relentless killer, and has nearly left Moss dead in a Texas border town. Only someone deeply steeped in his own sin, or stupid beyond reason (which Moss is not), would take this risk.

Moss has, by this point, given himself over to despair—by which I mean the theological concept, not the mood—and his acts simply further his contraposition to the natural law. Those acts end in blood and emotional ruin for everyone with whom he is connected, including a hitchhiking teenage girl with whom Moss meets up, Carla Jean, her grandmother, and of course, himself. (Somewhat ironically, Moss dies at the hands of a Mexican drug dealer whom he severely wounds or kills.) Moss’s emotional separation from his wife leads her to conclude that he had been having an affair with the teenage runaway with whom he is killed, a conclusion all the more heartbreaking because he repeatedly refuses to do anything of the sort. Moss’s decision to gamble Carla Jean’s life leads to her, and her mother’s, deaths at Chigurh’s hands. That is arguably the hardest part of the novel, but the most faithful depiction of the effect of sin on the world of the one sinning.

When Carla Jean is suddenly faced with Chigurh, he explains that he is bound to kill her because of her husband’s decision. While she is grappling with this, he offers her a coin toss to save her life, as he has offered another earlier in the novel. She loses. She is marked for death, but even though it is Chigurh who shoots her, it was her husband who killed her. The rules were clearly before him, in his heart and in his ear, and he chose to set himself against them of his own will. For that, he and all he loved suffered and died.

Much of the Christian analysis of No Country, especially in its Oscar-winning theatrical version, centers on parallels to Ecclesiastes. Bad Catholic that I am, this would not have occurred to me sua sponte; having had the association made for me, I can see it clearly. There is no contradiction between the concept of natural law and the verse of Ecclesiastes, not least because the Catholics who devised the concept were more familiar with it than I. For example:

I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him.

That which is has been already and that which will be has already been, for God seeks what has passed by.

Furthermore, I have seen under the sun that in the place of justice there is wickedness and in the place of righteousness there is wickedness.

I said to myself, “God will judge both the righteous man and the wicked man,” for a time for every matter and for every deed is there.

I said to myself concerning the sons of men, “God has surely tested them in order for them to see that they are but beasts.”

For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity.
All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust.

Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?

I have seen that nothing is better than that man should be happy in his activities, for that is his lot;
For who will bring him to see what will occur after him?

The only one happy in his works, for that is his lot, is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the counterpoint in this entire menagerie of death and destruction. The local sheriff in Moss’s home town, he resembles nothing so much as the hobbits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels.

While his position calls upon him to take on the role of Aragorn—defending and insulating the simple, honest people of the world from the evil and danger on the outside—Bell is instead a man who lives for his simple pleasures of hearth and home, does his duty, and tries to patch over the damage Moss, the drug dealers, Chigurh, and countless others have done. While courageous at heart, Bell is always trailing the damage done, never in front of or with it. His first-person interludes give us insight into a man of certain fixed moral certainties who nevertheless struggles with the enormity and smallness of his job.

Bell is not, however, some cardboard cutout. He is a real man with a real disorder in his past: during the Battle of the Bulge, he left his unit—most if not all of whom were probably dead from an artillery bombardment—under cover of night, because he rationally feared death. He faced a dilemma very like Moss’s, though with a bit less moral certainty: to save his life, or to try to save men who were quite possibly already dead.

His choice haunts him for the three and a half decades between the event and the opening of the novel, but the critical difference is that he treats his decision to save his own life as a mistake. He asks not to be given a medal for surviving, and is denied. He spends his adult life in many ways atoning for this act, not least taking on the dangerous job of law enforcement in West Texas. Those with no idea of the history of the Texas-Mexico border, and who have only seen a flatland of oil derricks and tornados, cannot easily appreciate how many men died on those quiet plains between 1960 and 1980.

Where Moss cannot bring himself to shed his sin—to accept the consequences of his actions and put his faith in some kind of justice, divine or real—Bell spends his life trying to put himself right with God’s hidden law, or, if you prefer, with his conscience. The two are one: Moss’s inability to comprehend drives the work, Bell’s inherent understanding of it heals the rough edges.

If No Country for Old Men is the story of an original sin and its immediate aftermath, then The Road is the story of a planet completely disordered by Original Sin. The Road is a more intimate story, told, ironically, on a grander scale.

The story of The Road, in brief, is of a father and son making their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape, trudging desperately for the shore and the South through an America that is only a shell of this once-proud land, with a slate sky and ash and rain and ice all around. Humanity is largely dead, wiped out in the self-inflicted calamity that left the world a ruin, and with them dogs, cats, horses, cows, fish, and plants—almost everything. The few animals that survived likely met stewpots soon after. Children are used as catamites and food. Women are used as slaves and as breeding farms (for catamites and food). The man, the corpse of his wife’s suicide behind him and a death rattle growing in his exhausted body, pushes himself beyond endurance to bring his child to a place where the boy might live. The Road may very well be the most exhausting exploration of the consequences of Original Sin and despair that I’ve ever read, without lapsing into the senseless sterility of absurdist literature like Waiting for Godot. The reason for that is its emptiness.

We tend to think of disorder and chaos interchangeably, equating a malfunction of nature with bedlam. It is to McCarthy’s credit that he does not: In fact, he gives us a vision of almost perfect disorder in which everything is still. There is no life. There is little movement. In fact, it is empty.

This is not a world rightly ordered. The first book of Genesis speaks of God filling the world with all sorts of teeming, bustling, breathing life. Even in our fallen vale of tears, in the harshest climates in the world, there is still life that we can see: insects and reptiles and small, hardy mammals and birds in the blasted deserts; and blubbery mammals and fish and birds in the wretched cold of our poles, are testaments to the sweep of God’s love for all things at Creation.

In The Road, all is absence. Original Sin wiped them out. Humans stand in stark isolation from their environment. In their despair—their internalized belief that there is no grace, no salvation, merely survival under a blank-slate sky—men have reduced themselves to primitives. Everyone in The Road except for the boy is either on the edge of despair, has abandoned himself to it, or worse, has embraced it. A world wracked by an original sin yields an even larger cascade of sin, which feeds on itself again. Because of men’s despair, everything everywhere has been placed in opposition to God, and the world suffers for it.

The man is undeniably the hero of the story, because he perseveres exactly as we’d hope we would, and more grippingly, as we expect we would. Long before the story picks up, his wife is dead by her own hand, unable to grapple with a world in which her husband is walking food, and she and her son are rape-and-consumption targets. From the very start of the book, with winter descending hard upon them, the man is clearly sick, with the illness (or one of a chain of illnesses) that will eventually kill him. He has toyed with despair—there’s a great part of the book where he remembers enjoying a book on a rainy day, then flashes forward to raging in near-despair in a waterlogged library at “the lies arranged in their thousands row after row”—and yet he carries on.

He feels death in his own bones from early on, and all he sees is gray and darkness and death, but he keeps going to keep his child alive. He teaches his son to pray to a God in whom apparently no one else left alive believes.

The man is no saint. He plans to kill his boy rather than let him become a catamite or a meal. He plans to kill himself if it comes to the point where he must kill the boy. He snaps at his son for completely understandable, human reactions. He has largely abandoned that sense of wonder that makes us human, and the despair he comes so close to feeling is always just at bay.

But the only killing he does is, if we believe St. Augustine and the Christian tradition, excusable, and indeed, reasonable. He kills only for his son. One of the men he kills he offers to spare, and only kills when his son’s life is directly threatened—with a single exception, explored below. Everything he does is to give his son a chance at life beyond what the cold North offers.

In other words, in the face of his own doubt and pain, he follows his conscience more often than not. His life is ordered, and by extension, his son—the last love of his life—is a perfectly ordered child, very nearly an innocent in a world utterly consumed with and by sin. He and his son are, for a while, the last humans alive who live by the natural law, and that is their salvation.

The natural law by which we live and breathe is not merely harsh punishments that appear to come from nowhere, and rewards for bad deeds done. We feel the effects of the law in our hearts and on our bodies, but that is because we exist in this universe and are subject to the rules put in place. Comporting oneself with God—with, if you prefer, the order laid down for us in our consciences, our molecules, what have you—makes it possible to experience mercy. Mercy is relief from the rules. The Road is the story of how perseverance of internal order in the face of a world intrinsically disordered may invoke mercy.

This is nowhere more evident than in the fact that the man succeeds, at the cost of his own life. Through pain and hardship, whenever he and the boy are near death or starvation, there is food, or shelter, or both, or, in the end, kind strangers who take in the boy and save his life after his father has laid down his last breath. It is manna in the desert to the starving Israelites. It is Christ protecting his disciples from the Sanhedrin.

None of this would be possible without the boy, who serves as a lodestar to his father for what a conscience should be. Sometimes this is ineffective, as when the son sees another boy (who may or may not exist), and, worrying for the other child and desperate for other human company, wants to go after him. Sometimes it works, as when the boy convinces his father to give food to a starving old man.

There is a wonderful sequence when the boy’s innocence is on the edge of shattering, that captures the dynamic of these two refugees who still hold hope when all seems lost. The two have stopped by the side of the road and eaten their last food, some apples. It bears noting that this is a world virtually without food—with all of the animals and most of the plants gone, the surviving humans have scavenged everything and anything that they could to eat, and small stores of supplies are few and far between. The father notices his son’s silence:

Look at me, the man said.
He turned and looked. He looked like he’d been crying.
Just tell me.
We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving?
We’re starving now.
You said we werent.
I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving.
But we wouldnt.
No. We wouldnt.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.
Okay.

One could spend weeks looking for a more perfect encapsulation of hope from despair, of love and justice, in modern literature, and fail. The fire they carry is hope. It is a belief that there is a God, and that there is some chance that he will have mercy on them. Absent that, they have no reason to continue. Every time the boy seems on the edge of believing that, his father, frightened nearly beyond reason, works to keep that fire alive. It is not coincidental that only a short while later they happen on a bomb shelter stocked with food and warmth and remnants of a dead civilization.

The most impressive aspect of the story is that The Road is actually a road that drives deeper and deeper into human depravity and despair, a world where disorder piles on disorder, and yet as the man and his son travel along it, they somehow keep the fire. The road they travel is a path to Hell, yet they continue. From a band of wandering barbarians with women and catamites in tow; to men and women chained as food in a surprisingly well-maintained house; to, most disturbingly, a sequence that begins with three men and a pregnant woman passing by and ends with a headless, roasted infant on a spit, the man and the boy are wounded in their spirits, broken in their bodies, but somehow hold on and keep going.

Every time the boy seems as if he will never return from the horrors he has experienced, he returns, either on his own or because his father prompts him out. They don’t eat the dead baby, though they are terribly hungry. They don’t yield to despair. And the intrinsic order of their lives is rewarded with mercy, as they shortly thereafter find a house stocked with jarred vegetables, just as they are about to collapse from hunger.

But the hearts of men are capable of choosing disorder, and toward the end, the man does precisely this. While he and his son are recovering from the latter’s terrible illness, their cart of supplies is stolen. They race to recover it, and find a starving man making off with it. The father forces him to strip naked at gunpoint, to face the cold, wet winter air defenseless.

He justifies this to his sobbing child as necessary, but it is not. He has sentenced another man, no longer in a position to harm his boy, to a painful, terrible death, and this is not lost on his boy.
Much as with Moss, he is driven by his conscience (or his son, for again, the two are basically identical) to return and undo the wrong he has done, but again as with Moss, he is too late.

For this sin, there is death. Not long after, he succumbs to an infected arrow in the thigh, and the fever that takes him is his last. But he lives along enough to accomplish two important tasks, the only two tasks he has held to all of these years, and the reason he is allowed to live this long: He keeps the boy alive and delivers him into safe hands; and as importantly, he keeps the fire of hope alive:

Do you remember that little boy, papa?
Yes. I remember him.
Do you think that he’s all right that little boy?
Oh yes. I think he’s all right.
Do you think he was lost?
No. I dont think he was lost.
I’m scared that he was lost.
I think he’s all right.
But who will find him if he’s lost? Who will find the little boy?
Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.

For his sin, the man must die. For his pain, and for his sacrifice, his boy not only lives, but experiences the kind of life the man set out to find for him, with a man and a woman and their boy and girl, who also keep the fire.

The end of The Road concludes with a repetition of a memory the man held throughout, of a mountain stream with brook trout, on whose muscular backs one can see “Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glen where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

McCarthy is fond of these little post-narrative choral epilogues—Blood Meridian has a neat sequence with men “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there.” No Country concludes with Bell’s dream sequence of his father carrying a horn filled with fire. But the one-paragraph sequence at the end of The Road is in many ways the capstone of an entire line of thought: That all of the order men create can be destroyed, but the older things, the things beyond immediate human understanding, are always there, and they carry their own pattern, their own law, which we cannot break for all of our trying.

Only by living in that mystery can we experience it. The everpresence of that mystery is God’s gift to a fallen world, and it never disappears. It is the mystery that begins in the beginning, and ends with the knowledge that God so loved the world.

Christopher Badeaux is an attorney and a writer, educated at Rice University, the University of Arizona, and Georgetown Law. He lives with his family in Georgia.