Sevier County
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. They passed under flowering appletrees and passed a log crib chinked with orange mud and forded a branch and came in sight of an aged clapboard house that stood in blue shade under the wall of the mountain.1
On the western flank of the Appalachian mountains on the Tennessee–North Carolina border, separated by a hundred miles of broadleaf forest from Nashville to the west, and by a wall of mountains and ridges from the cities of Georgia to the south and North Carolina to the east, Sevier County is a forgotten corner of America.
In the years to come, Gatlinburg and Dollywood and the national park would drag this rural exclave out of its isolation, but for now, in the decades after the Second World War, it is a world apart.
And it is peopled, in McCarthy's imagination, by a cast of grotesque characters – the "caravan of carnival folk" from the opening scene usher in a procession of drunks, bootleggers, petty criminals, moral degenerates, and all manner of human refuse.
At the center of it is Lester Ballard, a half-mad vagrant, the progeny of "a race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it."2
Lester Ballard
I'll say one thing about Lester though. You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if he didn't outstrip em all.3
Evicted by the authorities, he skulks around the valleys and hills of the county and shelters in abandoned homes. If not book-smart, he is cunning and resourceful. He consorts with a dumpkeeper whose daughters are named from the pages of a medical dictionary. He is a crack shot with a rifle. We learn that his mother abandoned him young, and he was the one to discover his father committed suicide.
After he burns down the house he is staying in, he moves into a cave system beneath the mountains, and emerges from the ground – "a gothic doll in illfit clothes"4 – to spook young couples on a hillside lover's lane and stalk the man who bought his foreclosed house at auction. By this time he has completely severed himself from human society .
Child of god
In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.5
Lester Ballard is introduced early in the novel as "a child of God much like yourself perhaps."6 An improbable candidate, no doubt, but there is little hint of irony in McCarthy's choice of title. Ballard of course has nothing in common with the "congregation at Six-Mile Church," whose disdain he reciprocates. He is about as far from a moral saint as can be imagined.
What McCarthy seems to want us to believe is that Ballard is not an aberration – not merely a product of a broken home – but a manifestation of an essential part of human nature. "Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them," McCarthy writes – indeed.7
Near the end of the novel, in the aftermath of a near-biblical flood, a sheriff's deputy asks one of the oldest men in the county, "You think people was meaner then than they are now?" The old man replies, "No, I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one."8
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. Originally published in 1973. Quotations and page numbers from the 1993 Vintage International edition.
p. 3
p. 156
p. 81
p. 140
p. 188–189
p. 4
p. 23
p. 168