“A Drowning Incident”
by Cormac McCarthy
AS SOON AS THE SCREEN DOOR SLAMMED he rounded the corner of the house so as
to be out of sight, then ran for the woodshed and put it between himself and the house. The
baby was taking its nap. He was not to go far away. Standing there in the shade of the locust tree
he looked about.
Some wasps were lilting to and fro in the shade under the eaves. Crossing behind the
shed and through the gate that divided the huge untended hedges he came through the lot to the
old outhouse. He swung the rotted door back carefully; the planks were warped and soft and
velveted with a pale green patina. One board was gone from the rear and a thin shaft of light
leaned in.
On the floor was still the old coat that he had carried down here to Suzy, after he had
followed her, the first day she turned up looking thin and wagging her tail, her dugs no longer
dragging to the ground. The coat was matted with a crosshatching of white hairs and the faint
sourmilk odor of the pups still lingered. They had gone to a new home last week. He stepped in
and peered down into the hole and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom below he could see faintly
the two tiny red triangles touching at their vertices.
In the corner at his heel there was a cricket resting in the mold, its antennae swaying in
random arcs. He saw it and reached for it, but it sprang, bumping against the facing of the seat
and falling to the floor again. He stepped on it quickly, then picked it up. It was still kicking one
leg in slow lethargic rhythm; a thick white liquid was oozing from it. He dropped it down the
hole and bent to watch. He could see it swaying gently in the elastic web. The black widow
came threading her way toward it, and when she reached it she began a weaving motion over it
with her legs as if performing some last rite. Soon the cricket’s leg stopped. Then he leaned
forward slightly, shot from his tongue a huge drop of spittle; it passed the fronds below,
receding from white to gray in the graduated darkness. The spider froze. He corrected his aim,
and the second ball of spittle fell true, engulfing the figures. The spider fled her victim to the
dark recesses of the musty shaft trailing a thin string of spittle which hung in mucous loops
among the strands of the web.
He went out then, and carefully pushed the ruined door to. The sun was well up in the
oaks on the far side of the house. Some blue jays flashed among the leaves. He hesitated for a
moment, then turned down the path toward the corner of the lot. Here he crossed a sag in the
honeysuckled fence and started off through the woods. Shortly he came to an old wagon road
winding dappled and serene in the morning light through the dripping trees. He took the road
downhill, shuffling through the leaves, turning up their damp undersides. He stopped once,
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stripped off a handful of rabbit tobacco, stuffed it in his mouth and shuffled down the road,
spitting, his thin shoulders rolling jauntily.
The road angled and switchbacked down the hill until it came to the edge of the woods
where it straightened briefly before losing itself in the humming field beyond which stretched
the line of willows and cottonwoods that marked the course of the creek. He could still feel the
ruts beneath his feet as he waded through the knee high grasses or threaded among the sporadic
blackberry brambles. Then he was parting the screen of willows, lime and golden as they turned
in the sun with his passage. He could hear the faint liquid purling even then, even before he
emerged from the willows where the bridge crosses, glimpsed through the green lacework the
fan of water beyond where the sun broke and danced on the stippled surface like silver bees.
He walked out onto the little bridge, stepping carefully. The curling planks were
cracked and weathered, bleached an almost metallic grey. The whole affair bellied dangerously
in the middle like a well used mule. He sat down on the warm boards, then stretched out on his
stomach and peered over the edge into the water below. The creek was shallow and clear. The
floor of the pool was mottled brown and gold as a leopard’s hide where the sun seeped through
the leaves and branches overhead. Minnows drifted obliquely across the slow current. Through
the water-glass he watched the tiny shadows traverse the leopard’s back silent and undulant as
a bird’s flight. He found some small white pebbles at his elbows and dropped them to the
minnows; they twisted and shimmered slowly to the bottom trailing miniscule bubbles that
stood in brief tendrils before rising and disappearing. The minnows rushed to inspect. He folded
his arms beneath his chin. The sun was warm and good on his back through the flannel shirt.
Then with the gentle current drifted from beneath the bridge a small puppy, rolling and
bumping along the bottom of the creek, turning weightlessly in the slow water. He watched
uncomprehendingly. It spun slowly to stare at him with sightless eyes, turning its white belly to
the softly diffused sunlight, its legs stiff and straight in an attitude of perpetual resistance. It
drifted on, hid momentarily in a band of shadow, emerged, then slid beneath the hammered
silver of the water surface and was gone.
He sat up quickly, shook his head and stared into the water. Minnows drifted in the
current like suspended projectiles; a water-spider skated.
They were black and white, they were black and…except for the one black all over. He
crossed the bridge and started after it, then stopped. When he turned his eyes were wide and
white. He came back and started up the creek along the path that curved above the low
cutbanks. He studied the water as he went. Small riffles ran through aisles of watercress awash
and flowing in the stream, along rocks where periwinkles crowded. A crawfish shot beneath the
looped bole of a cottonwood. In one pool an inexplicable shoe sat solemnly.
At the bend in the creek just below where it passed beneath the pike bridge the current
swirled faster and the following pool was deep. Because of the turn the creek made, the sun was
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now in his eyes and he could not see into the water. He hurried to the pike, crossed the small
concrete bridge, and worked his way down the other side, through a stand of cane. When he
reached the creek he was on a high bank; below him the current rocked in a swift flume, the
water curling and fluted. Below this, in the amber depths of the pool, he could make out a dark
burlap sack. He sat down slowly, numb and stricken. As he stared, a small head appeared
through a rent in the bag. It ebbed, softly for a moment, then, tugged by a corner of the current, a
small black and white figure, curled fetally, emerged. It was like witnessing the underwater
birth of some fantastic subaqueous organism. It swayed hesitantly for a moment before turning
to slide from sight in the faster water.
He had no tears, only a great hollow feeling which even as he sat there gave way to a
slow mounting sense of outrage. He stood up then, and pulled down a long willow limb and
worked it back and forth across his knee trying to worry it in two, but it was tough and resilient
and after a while he gave it up. He made his way back through the canes to the road and to the
other side where there was a fence. He followed it until he found a loose strand in the wire. This
he pulled out, and with a few bendings the rusty latter end came free. He went back to the creek
and with the wire hooked at the end tried to fish up the sack from the bottom of the creek. The
wire was too long to control, and the current would sweep it away; it was nearly half an hour
before he hooked the sack. He twisted the wire in his hand, and when he pulled it the sack
followed, heavy and sluggish. He worked it to the bank and lifted it gingerly to shore. It was
rotten and foul. When he opened it there was only one puppy inside, the black one, curled
between two bricks with a large crawfish tunneled half through the soft wet belly. He hooked
his wire into the crawfish and pulled it out, stringing behind it a tube of putrid green entrails.
He tried to push them back inside with the toe of his shoe. He went to the road again and
scouted the ditches alongside until he found a paper bag, which he brought back and into which
with squeamish fingers he deposited the tiny corpse. Then he pushed through the heavy brush
until he came to the field, crossed at a diagonal, and entered the woods just a few yards short of
the wagon road. He turned up the road swinging the dirty little bag alongside. His steps were
trance-like and mechanical, his eyes barren.
When he reached the house Suzy came trotting across the yard to meet him. He avoided
her and went in by the back door, closing it carefully behind him. In the kitchen he stopped and
listened. The house was silent; he could hear his heart thumping. A warmthless light filled the
panes of glass above the sink. Then he heard her cough—she was always coughing—and
listened closer. She was in the bedroom. He listened at the door, then quietly eased it open. The
shades were drawn, and where the sun beat against them they were suffused with a pale orange
glow which permeated the air, air infested with the faint urinous odor of the baby, the odor of
the blankets, sensuously fetid and intimate.
He stood in the doorway for an intenuinable minute. What prompted his next action
was the culmination of all the schemes half formed not only walking from the creek but from the
moment the baby arrived. Countless rejected, revised, or denied thoughts moiling somewhere in
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the inner recesses of his mind struggled and merged. He lifted the stinking bag and looked at it.
It was soggy and through a feathered split in the bottom little black hairs protruded like
spiderfeet. Afterward, thinking about it, it did not seem him that crossed the room to the crib in
the corner, lifted back the soft blue blanket, and alongside the sleeping figure, small and
wrinkled, dumped the puppy and then folded the blanket over them. He remembered vaguely
seeing the green entrails oozing onto the sheet as the blanket fell.
He is waiting for him to come home now; it is almost dinner time. He is sitting on his
bed, his mind a dimensionless wall against which only a grey pattern, whorled as a huge
thumbprint, oscillates slowly. His mother went once to the room quietly, but the baby did not
wake. He is waiting for him to come home.
(1960)
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