Synopsis: A searing, postapocalyptic 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 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 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 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 McCarthyCopyright © M-71, Ltd. 2006
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 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 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 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.The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A
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 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 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 in a long time.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 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 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 so. It's made out of concrete. It will probably be there for hundreds of
But I do. Dont say it. It's a bad thing to say. I cant help it. I know. But you have to. How do I do it? I dont know. We're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp. Survivors? she said. Yes. What in God's name are you talking We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film. I'm begging you. I dont care. I dont care if you cry. It doesnt mean anything to me. Please. Stop it. I am begging you. I'll do anything. Such as what? I should have done it a long time ago. When were three bullets in the gun instead of two. I was stupid. We've been over all of this. I didnt bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I'm done. I thought about not even telling you. That would probably have been best. You have two bullets and then what? You cant protect us. You say you would die for us but what good is that? I'd take him with me if it werent for you. You know I would. It's the right thing to do. You're talking crazy.No, I'm speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant. She sat
It's okay Papa. It's okay? They're already there. I dont want you to look. They'll be there. He stopped and leaned on the cart. He looked down the road and he looked at the boy. So strangely untroubled. Why dont we just go on, the boy said. Yes. Okay. They were trying to get away werent they Papa? Yes. They were. Why didnt they leave the road? They couldnt. Everything was on fire. They picked their way among the mummied figures. The black skin stretched upon the bones and their faces split and shrunken on their skulls. Like victims of some ghastly envacuuming. Passing them in silence down that silent corridor through the drifting ash they struggled forever in the road's cold coagulate. They passed through the site of a roadside hamlet burned to nothing. Some metalstorage tanks, a few standing flues of blackened brick. There were gray slagpools of melted in the ditches and the raw lightwires lay in rusting skeins for miles along the edge of the roadway. He was coughing step of it. He saw the boy watching him. He was what the boy thought about. Well should he. They sat in the road and ate leftover skilletbread hard as biscuit and their last can of tunafish. He opened a can of prunes and they passed it between them. The boy held the tin up and drained the last of the juice and then sat with the tin in his lap and passed his forefinger around the inside of it and put his finger in his mouth.
on for the better part of an hour they emerged from the grass and seaoats and stood again on the dry sand of the upper beach. The wind was colder. He'd brought the boy around on the lee side of him when suddenly the beach before them appearedshuddering out of the blackness and vanished again. What was that, Papa? It's okay. It's lightning. Come on. He slung the tarp of goods up over his shoulder and took the boy's hand and they went on, tramping in the sand like parade horses against tripping over some piece of driftwood or seawrack. The gray light broke over the beach again. Far away a faint rumble of thunder muffled in the murk. I think I saw our tracks, he said. So we're going the right way. Yes. The right way. I'm really cold, Papa. I know. Pray for lightning. They went on. When the light broke over the beach again he saw that the boy was bent over and was whispering to himself. He looked for their tracks going up the beach but he could not see them. The wind had picked up even more and he was waiting for the first spits of rain. If they got caught out on the beach in a rainstorm in the night they would be in trouble. They turned their faces away from the wind, holding on to the hoods of their parkas. The sand rattling against their legs and racing away in the dark and the thunder cracking just offshore. The rain came in off the sea hard and slant and stung their faces and he pulled the boy against him. They stood in the downpour. How far had they come? He waited for the lightning but it was tailing off and when the next one came and then the next he knew that the had taken out their tracks. They trudged on through the sand at the upper edge of the hoping to see the shape of the log where they'd camped. Soon the