Joseph Ritchie’s Reviews > Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West > Status Update

An old woman knelt at the blackened stones before her door and poked brush into the coals and blew back a flame from the ashes and began to right the overturned pots. All about her the dead lay with their peeled skulls like polyps bluely wet or luminescent melons cooling on some mesa of the moon.

The judge sat with the Apache boy before the fire and it watched everything with dark berry eyes and some of the men played with it and made it laugh
———
in the morning the judge was dandling it on one knee while the men saddled their horses.
Toadvine saw him with the child as he passed with his saddle but when he came back ten minutes later leading his horse the child was dead and the judge had scalped it.

The kid looked up. And the judge? Does the voice speak to him?
The judge, said Tobin. He didn't answer.

let it go how it will, he said, God speaks in the least of creatures.
The kid thought him to mean birds or things that crawl but the expriest, watching, his head slightly cocked, said: No man is give leave of that voice.
The kid spat into the fire and bent to his work.
I aint heard no voice, he said.
When it stops, said Tobin, you'll know you've heard it all your life.

Books lie, he said.
God dont lie.
No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.
He held up a chunk of rock.
He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

When the lamb is lost in the mountain , he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

4th read through.

Flies clambered over the peeled and wigless skulls of the dead