52 pages • 1 hour read
Cormac McCarthyChild of God
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Pages 47-88Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Pages 47-63 Summary
Fall arrives. Lester is now more solitary and more bitter than before; some in the county say he’s gone “insane.” He spends his days patrolling Frog Mountain, cursing the hunters with their dogs and whiskey who churn up dust as they pass him in their trucks.
On a cold morning, Lester finds an unconscious woman in a sheer nightgown at the Frog Mountain lookout. He tosses rocks at her to see if she’s alive then touches her. She awakes furious and smelling of whiskey. Lester asks if she’s cold; she backs away and throws a rock at him. Lester hits her, and she says, “I knowed you’d do me thisaway” (49). He tears off her nightgown and, clutching it under his arm, leaves the cursing woman naked on the ground.
In the next chapter, another first-person narrator identified as John recalls riding with Sheriff Turner to the Frog Mountain lookout. The Sheriff surprised a couple having sex and asked the man to step out of the car. The man looked crazy with his pants on inside-out. The Sheriff let the couple go. To John, this showed that the sheriff is a reasonable man.
A toothless man named Darfuzzle goes to Lester’s cabin to warn him that the Sheriff wants him in connection with the woman at the lookout. Lester responds, “That’s your all’s lookout. I didn’t have nothin to do with her” (53). In the following chapter Sheriff Turner descends the courthouse steps. He wears pressed, tailored clothes and has a practiced squint to his eyes. To his deputy Cotton, who had planned to go bird hunting with his friend Bill Parsons, the Sheriff remarks that Bill’s hunting dogs aren’t as good as Cotton thinks. On a past hunting trip, the Sheriff easily discerned something Bill himself overlooked: His dog Suzie was chronically sick and bad at hunting. Cotton and the Sheriff leave to arrest Lester.
Lester watches Sheriff Turner become increasingly angry as he bushwhacks through the briars to Lester’s cabin. When the Sheriff orders Lester to come with him, Lester spits and retorts, “You got it all” (39). The Sheriff responds that a jobless man like Lester should have the time to help a workingman like himself. Lester leads the Sheriff back into town on a hidden path through the briars.
At the police station, Lester sits in a varnished oak chair. A deputy arrives with the woman from the lookout, who laughs when she sees Lester. She says that while Lester was there, she wants another two men arrested. Nevertheless, she wants Lester charged with rape. Lester insults her, and she slaps him. The two fight. The deputy struggles to separate them as the woman kicks Lester in the head. The Sheriff does nothing.
Lester spends nine nights in the county jail. The food is better than he’s used to. Jailed across from Lester is a Black man named John who philosophizes, “I’m a fugitive from the ways of this world” (59). John—who used a pocketknife to decapitate a man—sings a lot.
After nine days, Lester appears in front of a judge, who orders him released. It’s implied that because the woman wasn’t from Sevier County, the judge doesn’t care to try Lester. Outside the courthouse, a dirty, drooling man asks Lester for money. The Sheriff accosts Lester and asks if he has a murder planned for his next crime. Lester says the Sheriff has it out for him, and, as Lester leaves, he mentions that the Sheriff visits brothels himself.
Part 1, Pages 64-88 Summary
Another anonymous narrator recalls that as a boy Lester worked tirelessly for the money to buy his rifle and quit the second he had enough. A natural dead shot, Lester was once expelled from a state fair shooting game for his accuracy. The narrator recalls that at another fair a man claiming bet anyone he could shoot a flying pigeon with a rifle before they could shoot it with a shotgun. He scammed many bird hunters, including the narrator, out of their money before they realized the man was loading the pigeons with firecrackers and shooting in their direction the moment they exploded. At another fair, the narrator’s friends cajoled him into boxing an ape to win $50. After he hit the ape a few times and thought he had won, it jumped on him and almost ripped off his jaw.
At night Lester goes to the state fair. Overhead nighthawks fly, “shuttled among the upflung strobes of light with gape mouths and weird cries” (67). While another man tries to cheat at a fishing game, Lester cheats in a more sophisticated way. A woman alerts the attendant, who orders Lester—but not the other cheater—to leave.
At a rifle game Lester confidently shoots five bullseyes, winning a giant stuffed animal. However, the pitchman refuses to give it to Lester, pointing to a fleck of red bullseye remaining on one target. Indignant, Lester pays another 30¢ and shoots all trace of red from the new targets. He wins two more stuffed animals before the pitchman, fuming, bans Lester. Walking away through the crowd, Lester turns heads with his giant stuffed tiger and two bears. People gather to watch a fireworks show. Lester leers at a young girl in the crowd who, noticing him, clutches her friend.
At some later date when snow has fallen, Lester makes a fire from scavenged brush in the fireplace of the abandoned cabin. He dries and oils his rifle, then eats a tasteless meal of cornbread. The three stuffed animals watch him with their tongues out. On another snowy day, Lester watches a bloody fight between a pack of hunting dogs and a wild boar. Lester slinks away when the hunters appear.
Lester takes a scavenged, rusty axe head to a blacksmith for sharpening. The blacksmith says it can’t be sharpened, so Lester agrees to have it reforged for $2. As he works, the blacksmith details to Lester the steps of the process and the mistakes many smiths make. When finished, he asks Lester if he thinks he could do it. Without inflection, Lester responds, “Do what” (81).
Spring arrives. Lester frolics through the forest and catches a live robin. He brings the bird as a present to a boy with an intellectual disability, Billy Lane, who lives with his two sisters and his father, Ralph, an acquaintance of Lester. After waiting for Ralph, Lester declines a second cup of coffee from the elder Lane girl and stands to leave. On his way out he finds that Billy has chewed the legs off the robin. Quickly putting down the disfigured bird, Lester stammers that Billy didn’t want the bird to run away. The younger sister says that if she had a disability like Billy she would die by suicide.
In the final chapter of Part I, another anonymous narrator tells of Lester’s grandfather, Leland. Like almost every man in Sevier County during the Civil War, Leland joined the Union Army. However, Leland ducked battle and lied to get a military pension. After the war, Leland joined the White Caps, a vigilante group active in the 1890s that was hated by most in the county. Leland’s brother, also a White Cap, was hanged for his vigilantism in Mississippi. To the narrator this shows that Lester’s family isn’t a product of their environment but is inherently bad: “You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if [Lester] didn’t outstrip em all” (88).
Part 1, Pages 47-88 Analysis
The second half of Part I introduces the history of vigilantism in Sevier County, further characterizes Lester and Sheriff Turner, and develops an undercurrent of danger that portends the macabre violence to come.
These pages introduce the theme of Fate in a World Without Grace. McCarthy builds dramatic irony into the picture he paints of fate: Divine or supernatural forces don’t play nearly as big a role as characters think they do. Instead, McCarthy hints, societal forces and powerful individuals largely shape the fate of the individual. Ancestry and kin are two such forces influencing fate. In his telling of Lester’s family history, an anonymous first-person narrator expresses the opinion that a family can be inherently evil. They allude to the Christian idea of original sin when they say of the Ballards: “You can trace em back to Adam if you want and goddamn if [Lester] didn’t outstrip em all” (88). As the narrator’s disdain for the Ballards makes clear, this isn’t the identification of an honorable connection to the Biblical first man but of a poisoned ancestry. In the narrator’s insult is the implication that Lester’s ancestry traces back to Adam—the original sinner—not through his son Abel (who makes an offering God accepts) but through his son Cain—whose offering God rejects, prompting Cain to commit fratricide. This characterization also alludes to one of the many similarities between Lester and the humanoid monster Grendel from the Old English epic poem Beowulf. Like Lester, Grendel is characterized as a descendant of the race of Cain.
McCarthy also explores the theme of fate in the development of Lester and Sheriff Fate Turner’s characters. As Lester deteriorates, McCarthy intimates that the sheriff plays a role: As his name suggests, he has the power to alter fate. The sheriff’s “proprietary squint” and his story about Bill’s dog Suzie illustrate that the Sheriff is a discerning man in control of his surroundings (54). However, the sheriff’s arrival at Lester’s cabin complicates this authoritative characterization: Out of his element, the Sheriff thrashes through a snarl of briars, mussing his tailored, pressed clothes and bruising his self-assurance. His ignorance of the landscape contrasts with Lester’s knowledge of the nearby path through the briars, foreshadowing the significance Lester’s fine-grained knowledge of the territory will play in evading capture.
In contrast to Sheriff Turner in his authority stands Lester in his destitution. As Lester spends more time alone, he becomes more embittered and more resentful of others. This manifests in him cursing the hunters who pass him on Frog Mountain. The hunters raise his ire for a number of reasons. With cars, dogs, whiskey, and friends, the hunters are better set for pleasure than the destitute, solitary Lester. Their presence on the mountain—particularly the “coiling dust” their cars churn up (48)—is an affront to Lester’s misery; they indulge in hobbies while Lester tries to survive.
The sheriff’s persecution of Lester raises the question of motive. Since Lester has yet to commit any heinous crime, the sheriff’s treatment of him appears unjust. The confrontation between the two after Lester is inexplicably released from jail is illuminating. Accosting Lester, the sheriff accuses him of planning future crimes: “Let’s see: failure to comply with a court order, public disturbance, assault and battery, public drunk, rape. I guess murder is next on the list ain’t it?” (63). This accusation has the connotation of a police officer trying to pin serious crimes on the town scapegoat (despite his later crimes, Lester didn’t rape the unconscious woman at the lookout). Arresting Lester is an expedient solution to a problem, not a faithful execution of the law. As Lester’s parting jab at the sheriff intimates—“[y]ou kindly got henhouse ways yourself, Sheriff” (64)—the sheriff victimizes Lester for embodying his own disreputable qualities, such as his visitation of brothels.
The first appearance of nighthawks—symbols of primeval violence—at the county fair develops the ominous mood that pervades the rest of the novel. The nighthawks appear overhead as omens of violence: “[They] shuttled among the upflung strobes of light with gape mouths and weird cries” (67). The imagery conjures the primeval nature violence, establishing an undercurrent of dread that pulls the scene taut. In this atmosphere, Lester’s cursing at the woman who calls out his cheating and his confrontation with the attendant at the shooting game appear not as isolated incidents of annoyance but as tremors warning of the eruption of violence to come. The scene culminates with Lester leering at a young girl: A foreboding manifestation of the lust and loneliness that drives his crimes in the following two parts.
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