p. 1

synopsis a searing postapocalyptic novel destined to become cormac mccarthy s masterpiece a father and his son walk alone through burned america nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind it is cold enough to crack stones and when the snow falls it is gray they sky is dark their destination is the coast although they don t know what if anything awaits them there they have nothing just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road the clothes they are wearing a cart of scavenged food and each other the road is the profoundly moving story of a journey it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains but in which the father and his son each the other s world entire are sustained by love awesome in the totality of its vision it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of ultimate destructiveness desperate tenacity and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation the prose is quintessentially mccarthy spare desolate unemotional reserved of both unnecessary vocabulary and punctuation he recognized the necessary evil of periods denoting the end of a sentence some contractions are so designated with an apostrophe some not exclamation points are avoided with the same vigilance as would be shown to beanies with propellers although most english teachers i ve been a captive audience to would consider him satan incarnate he still can turn a phrase of almost unbearable beauty the road by cormac mccarthy

[close]

p. 2

copyright © m-71 ltd 2006 this book is dedicated to john francis mccarthy when he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world his hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath he pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none in the dream from which he d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand their light playing over the wet flowstone walls like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake and on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders it swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see crouching there pale and naked and translucent its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it its bowels its beating heart the brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell it swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark with the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south barren silent godless he thought the month was october but he wasnt sure he hadnt kept a calendar for years they were moving south there d be no surviving another winter here when it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below everything paling away into the murk the soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop he studied what he could see the segments of road down there among the dead trees looking for anything of color any movement any trace of standing smoke he lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again then he

[close]

p. 3

just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land he knew only that the child was his warrant he said if he is not the word of god god never spoke when he got back the boy was still asleep he pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup he spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep he d pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets he watched the boy and he looked out through the trees toward the road this was not a safe place they could be seen from the road now it was day the boy turned in the blankets then he opened his eyes hi papa he said i m right here i know an hour later they were on the road he pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried knapsacks in the knapsacks were essential things in case they had to abandon the cart and make a run for it clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them he shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country the road was empty below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river motionless and precise along the shore a burden of dead reeds are you okay he said the boy nodded then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light shuffling through the ash each the other s world entire they crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a roadside gas station they stood in the road and studied it i think we should check it out the man said take a look the weeds they forded fell to dust about them they crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps the cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor faint and stale he stood and looked over the building the pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place the windows intact the door to the service bay was open and he went in a standing metal toolbox against one wall he went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use good half-inch drive sockets a ratchet he stood looking around the garage a metal barrel full of trash he went into the office dust and ash everywhere the boy stood in the door a metal desk a cashregister some old automotive manuals,

[close]

p. 4

swollen and sodden the linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof he crossed to the desk and stood there then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father s house in that long ago the boy watched him what are you doing he said a quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back we re not thinking he said we have to go back he pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it could not be seen and they left their packs and went back to the station in the service bay he dragged out the steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all the quart plastic oilbottles then they sat in the floor decanting them of their dregs one by one leaving the bottles to stand upside down draining into a pan until at the end they had almost a half quart of motor oil he screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks the long gray dawns you can read me a story the boy said cant you papa yes he said i can on the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind a burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadow-lands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned farther along were billboards advertising motels everything as it once had been save faded and weathered at the top of the hill they stood in the cold and the wind getting their breath he looked at the boy i m all right the boy said the man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country below them he got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste nothing to see no smoke can i see the boy said yes of course you can the boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel what do you see the man said nothing he lowered the glasses it s raining yes the man said i know they left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope through the dark poles of the standing trees to where he d seen a running ledge of rock and they sat under the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across the valley it was very cold they sat huddled together wrapped each in a blanket over their coats and after a while the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the woods.

[close]

p. 5

when it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got their blankets and the things they would need for the night they went back up the hill and made their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him wrapped in the blankets watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them the gray shape of the city vanished in the night s onset like an apparition and he lit the little lamp and set it back out of the wind then they walked out to the road and he took the boy s hand and they went to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out over the darkening country to the south standing there in the wind wrapped in their blankets watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp there was nothing the lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back everything too wet to make a fire they ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their bedding with the lamp between them he d brought the boy s book but the boy was too tired for reading can we leave the lamp on till i m asleep he said yes of course we can he was a long time going to sleep after a while he turned and looked at the man his face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian can i ask you something he said yes of course are we going to die sometime not now and we re still going south yes so we ll be warm yes okay okay what nothing just okay go to sleep okay i m going to blow out the lamp is that okay yes that s okay and then later in the darkness can i ask you something yes of course you can what would you do if i died if you died i would want to die too.

[close]

p. 6

so you could be with me yes so i could be with you okay he lay listening to the water drip in the woods bedrock this the cold and the silence the ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void carried forth and scattered and carried forth again everything uncoupled from its shoring unsupported in the ashen air sustained by a breath trembling and brief if only my heart were stone he woke before dawn and watched the gray day break slow and half opaque he rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees he descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time then he just knelt in the ashes he raised his face to the paling day are you there he whispered will i see you at the last have you a neck by which to throttle you have you a heart damn you eternally have you a soul oh god he whispered oh god they passed through the city at noon of the day following he kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart he kept the boy close to his side the city was mostly burned no sign of life cars in the street caked with ash everything covered with ash and dust fossil tracks in the dried sludge a corpse in a doorway dried to leather grimacing at the day he pulled the boy closer just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever he said you might want to think about that you forget some things dont you yes you forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget there was a lake a mile from his uncle s farm where he and his uncle used to go in the fall for firewood he sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold wake while his uncle bent to the oars the old man s feet in their black kid shoes braced against the uprights his straw hat his cob pipe in his teeth and a thin drool swinging from the pipebowl he turned to take a sight on the far shore cradling the oarhandles taking the pipe from his mouth to wipe his chin with the back of his hand the shore was lined with birchtrees that stood bone pale against the dark of the evergreens beyond the edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps gray and

[close]

p. 7

weathered the windfall trees of a hurricane years past the trees themselves had long been sawed for firewood and carried away his uncle turned the boat and shipped the oars and they drifted over the sandy shallows until the transom grated in the sand a dead perch lolling belly up in the clear water yellow leaves they left their shoes on the warm painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and set out the anchor at the end of its rope a lardcan poured with concrete with an eyebolt in the center they walked along the shore while his uncle studied the treestumps puffing at his pipe a manila rope coiled over his shoulder he picked one out and they turned it over using the roots for leverage until they got it half floating in the water trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet they tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake jerking the stump slowly behind them by then it was already evening just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks the lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore a radio somewhere neither of them had spoken a word this was the perfect day of his childhood this the day to shape the days upon they bore on south in the days and weeks to follow solitary and dogged a raw hill country aluminum houses at times they could see stretches of the interstate highway below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber cold and growing colder just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste the track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk they were days fording that cauterized terrain the boy had found some crayons and painted his facemask with fangs and he trudged on uncomplaining one of the front wheels of the cart had gone wonky what to do about it nothing where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they d yet encountered cold to crack the stones to take your life he held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in the blackness he woke to the sound of distant thunder and sat up the faint light all about quivering and sourceless refracted in the rain of drifting soot he pulled the tarp about them and he lay awake a long time listening if they got wet there d be no fires to dry by if they got wet they would probably die.

[close]

p. 8

the blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable a blackness to hurt your ears with listening often he had to get up no sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees he rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings an old chronicle to seek out the upright no fall but preceded by a declination he took great marching steps into the nothingness counting them against his return eyes closed arms oaring upright to what something nameless in the night lode or matrix to which he and the stars were common satellite like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must it took two days to cross that ashen scabland the road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side it s snowing the boy said he looked at the sky a single gray flake sifting down he caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom they pushed on together with the tarp pulled over them the wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing gray slush by the roadside black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash no more balefires on the distant ridges he thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another no one traveled this road no road-agents no marauders after a while they came to a roadside garage and they stood within the open door and looked out at the gray sleet gusting down out of the high country they collected some old boxes and built a fire in the floor and he found some tools and emptied out the cart and sat working on the wheel he pulled the bolt and bored out the collet with a hand drill and resleeved it with a section of pipe he d cut to length with a hacksaw then he bolted it all back together and stood the cart upright and wheeled it around the floor it ran fairly true the boy sat watching everything in the morning they went on desolate country a boar-hide nailed to a barndoor ratty wisp of a tail inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters dried and dusty among the wan slats of light there could be something here the boy said there could be some corn or something let s go the man said.

[close]

p. 9

mostly he worried about their shoes that and food always food in an old batboard smokehouse they found a ham gambreled up in a high corner it looked like something fetched from a tomb so dried and drawn he cut into it with his knife deep red and salty meat inside rich and good they fried it that night over their fire thick slices of it and put the slices to simmer with a tin of beans later he woke in the dark and he thought that he d heard bulldrums beating somewhere in the low dark hills then the wind shifted and there was just the silence in dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white she wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory combs of shell her smile her downturned eyes in the morning it was snowing again beads of small gray ice strung along the light-wires overhead he mistrusted all of that he said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death he slept little and he slept poorly he dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth he thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost like the dying world the newly blind inhabit all of it slowly fading from memory from daydreams on the road there was no waking he plodded on he could remember everything of her save her scent seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage she held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress freeze this frame now call down your dark and your cold and be damned he fashioned sweeps from two old brooms he d found and wired them to the cart to clear the limbs from the road in front of the wheels and he put the boy in the basket and stood on the rear rail like a dogmusher and they set off down the hills guiding the cart on the curves with their bodies in the manner of bobsledders it was the first that he d seen the boy smile in a long time.

[close]

p. 10

at the crest of the hill was a curve and a pullout in the road an old trail that led off through the woods they walked out and sat on a bench and looked out over the valley where the land rolled away into the gritty fog a lake down there cold and gray and heavy in the scavenged bowl of the countryside what is that papa it s a dam what s it for it made the lake before they built the dam that was just a river down there the dam used the water that ran through it to turn big fans called turbines that would generate electricity to make lights yes to make lights can we go down there and see it i think it s too far will the dam be there for a long time i think so it s made out of concrete it will probably be there for hundreds of years thousands even do you think there could be fish in the lake no there s nothing in the lake in that long ago somewhere very near this place he d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air the grainy air the taste of it never left your mouth they stood in the rain like farm animals then they went on holding the tarp over them in the dull drizzle their feet were wet and cold and their shoes were being ruined on the hillsides old crops dead and flattened the barren ridgeline trees raw and black in the rain and the dreams so rich in color how else would death call you waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day the weather lifted and the cold and they came at last into the broad lowland river

[close]

p. 11

valley the pieced farmland still visible everything dead to the root along the barren bottomlands they trucked on along the blacktop tall clapboard houses machinerolled metal roofs a log barn in a field with an advertisement in faded ten-foot letters across the roofslope see rock city the roadside hedges were gone to rows of black and twisted brambles no sign of life he left the boy standing in the road holding the pistol while he climbed an old set of limestone steps and walked down the porch of the farmhouse shading his eyes and peering in the windows he let himself in through the kitchen trash in the floor old newsprint china in a breakfront cups hanging from their hooks he went down the hallway and stood in the door to the parlor there was an antique pumporgan in the corner a television set cheap stuffed furniture together with an old handmade cherrywood chifforobe he climbed the stairs and walked through the bedrooms everything covered with ash a child s room with a stuffed dog on the windowsill looking out at the garden he went through the closets he stripped back the beds and came away with two good woolen blankets and went back down the stairs in the pantry were three jars of homecanned tomatoes he blew the dust from the lids and studied them someone before him had not trusted them and in the end neither did he and he walked out with the blankets over his shoulder and they set off along the road again on the outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket a few old cars in the trashstrewn parking lot they left the cart in the lot and walked the littered aisles in the produce section in the bottom of the bins they found a few ancient runner beans and what looked to have once been apricots long dried to wrinkled effigies of themselves the boy followed behind they pushed out through the rear door in the alleyway behind the store a few shopping carts all badly rusted they went back through the store again looking for another cart but there were none by the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar coins everywhere in the ash he sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder he withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a coca cola what is it papa it s a treat for you what is it here sit down he slipped the boy s knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it he leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy go ahead he said.

[close]

p. 12

the boy took the can it s bubbly he said go ahead he looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank he sat there thinking about it it s really good he said yes it is you have some papa i want you to drink it you have some he took the can and sipped it and handed it back you drink it he said let s just sit here it s because i wont ever get to drink another one isnt it ever s a long time okay the boy said by dusk of the day following they were at the city the long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk he carried the revolver in his belt at the front and wore his parka unzipped the mummied dead everywhere the flesh cloven along the bones the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk their faces of boiled sheeting the yellowed palings of their teeth they were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen they went on he kept constant watch behind him in the mirror the only thing that moved in the streets was the blowing ash they crossed the high concrete bridge over the river a dock below small pleasureboats half sunken in the gray water tall stacks downriver dim in the soot the day following some few miles south of the city at a bend in the road and half lost in the dead brambles they came upon an old frame house with chimneys and gables and a stone wall the man stopped then he pushed the cart up the drive what is this place papa it s the house where i grew up the boy stood looking at it the peeling wooden clapboards were largely gone from the lower walls for firewood leaving the studs and the insulation exposed the rotted screening from the back porch lay on the concrete terrace are we going in?

[close]

p. 13

why not i m scared dont you want to see where i used to live no it ll be okay there could be somebody here i dont think so but suppose there is he stood looking up at the gable to his old room he looked at the boy do you want to wait here no you always say that i m sorry i know but you do they slipped out of their backpacks and left them on the terrace and kicked their way through the trash on the porch and pushed into the kitchen the boy held on to his hand all much as he d remembered it the rooms empty in the small room off the diningroom there was a bare iron cot a metal foldingtable the same castiron coalgrate in the small fireplace the pine paneling was gone from the walls leaving just the furring strips he stood there he felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago this is where we used to have christmas when i was a boy he turned and looked out at the waste of the yard a tangle of dead lilac the shape of a hedge on cold winter nights when the electricity was out in a storm we would sit at the fire here me and my sisters doing our homework the boy watched him watched shapes claiming him he could not see we should go papa he said yes the man said but he didnt they walked through the diningroom where the firebrick in the hearth was as yellow as the day it was laid because his mother could not bear to see it blackened the floor buckled from the rainwater in the livingroom the bones of a small animal dismembered and placed in a pile possibly a cat a glass tumbler by the door the boy gripped his hand they went up the stairs and turned and went down the hallway small cones of damp plaster standing in the floor the wooden lathes of the ceiling exposed he stood in the doorway to his room a small space under the eaves this is where i used to sleep my cot was against this wall in the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child s imaginings worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be he pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things raw cold daylight fell through from the roof gray as his heart.

[close]

p. 14

we should go papa can we go yes we can go i m scared i know i m sorry i m really scared it s all right we shouldnt have come three nights later in the foothills of the eastern mountains he woke in the darkness to hear something coming he lay with his hands at either side of him the ground was trembling it was coming toward them papa the boy said papa shh it s okay what is it papa it neared growing louder everything trembling then it passed beneath them like an underground train and drew away into the night and was gone the boy clung to him crying his head buried against his chest shh it s all right i m so scared i know it s all right it s gone what was it papa it was an earthquake it s gone now we re all right shh in those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing wearing masks and goggles sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators their barrows heaped with shoddy towing wagons or carts their eyes bright in their skulls creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland the frailty of everything revealed at last old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night the last instance of a thing takes the class with it turns out the light and is gone look around you ever is a long time but the boy knew what he knew that ever is no time at all he sat by a gray window in the gray light in an abandoned house in the late afternoon and read old newspapers while the boy slept the curious news the quaint concerns at eight the primrose closes he watched the boy sleeping can you do it when the time comes can you?

[close]

p. 15

they squatted in the road and ate cold rice and cold beans that they d cooked days ago already beginning to ferment no place to make a fire that would not be seen they slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold he held the boy close to him so thin my heart he said my heart but he knew that if he were a good father still it might well be as she had said that the boy was all that stood between him and death late in the year he hardly knew the month he thought they had enough food to get through the mountains but there was no way to tell the pass at the watershed was five thousand feet and it was going to be very cold he said that everything depended on reaching the coast yet waking in the night he knew that all of this was empty and no substance to it there was a good chance they would die in the mountains and that would be that they passed through the ruins of a resort town and took the road south burnt forests for miles along the slopes and snow sooner than he would have thought no tracks in the road nothing living anywhere the fireblackened boulders like the shapes of bears on the starkly wooded slopes he stood on a stone bridge where the waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in a gray foam where once he d watched trout swaying in the current tracking their perfect shadows on the stones beneath they went on the boy trudging in his track leaning into the cart winding slowly upward through the switchbacks there were fires still burning high in the mountains and at night they could see the light from them deep orange in the soot-fall it was getting colder but they had campfires all night and left them burning behind them when they set out again in the morning he d wrapped their feet in sacking tied with cord and so far the snow was only a few inches deep but he knew that if it got much deeper they would have to leave the cart already it was hard going and he stopped often to rest slogging to the edge of the road with his back to the child where he stood bent with his hands on his knees coughing he raised up and stood with weeping eyes on the gray snow a fine mist of blood they camped against a boulder and he made a shelter of poles with the tarp he got a fire going and they set about dragging up a great brushpile of wood to see them through the night they d piled a mat of dead hemlock boughs over the snow and they sat wrapped in their blankets watching the fire and drinking the last of the cocoa scavenged weeks before it was snowing again soft flakes drifting down out of the blackness he dozed in the wonderful warmth the boy s shadow crossed over him carrying an armload of wood he watched him stoke the flames god s own firedrake the sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.

[close]