The Road by Cormac McCarthy

From Barnes & Noble

Ask any literary critic -- and most discerning readers -- to name the greatest living American novelist, and Cormac McCarthy is sure to surface as a major contender. Best known for his powerful regional fiction (Sutree, the Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian, et al), this dazzling prose stylist crafts tragic, unforgettable stories suffused with violence, alienation, and an undeniably apocalyptic vision. Now, in what we consider McCarthy's best novel to date, the apocalypse itself becomes a set piece. Unfolding in a terrifying future where Armageddon has been waged and lost, The Road traces the odyssey of a father and his young son through a desolate landscape of devastation and danger. Powerful, moving, and extraordinary by any standard, this is McCarthy at his greatest and gravest.

From the Publisher

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist

A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post

The 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. The 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 Washington Post - Ron Charles

In Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, the bloodbath is finally complete. The violence that animated his great Western novels has been superseded by a flash of nuclear annihilation, which also blasts away some of what we expect from the reclusive author's work. With this apocalyptic tale, McCarthy has moved into the allegorical realm of Samuel Beckett and José Saramago -- and, weirdly, George Romero.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

This is an exquisitely bleak incantation -- pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.

The San Francisco Chronicle

His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightning, and, ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the best book of the year, period.

The New York Times Book Review - William Kennedy

The Road is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy's signature, but this time in restrained doses—short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long…the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization—"the frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night."

Chicago Tribune

A dark book that glows with the intensity of [McCarthy's] huge gift for language. . . . Why read this? . . . Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over nothingness.

Los Angeles Times

One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal.

Bookforum

There is an urgency to each page, and a raw emotional pull . . . making [The Road] easily one of the most harrowing books you'll ever encounter. . . . Once opened, [it is] nearly impossible to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive. . . . The Road is a deeply imagined work and harrowing no matter what your politics.

Publishers Weekly

McCarthy's latest novel, a frightening apocalyptic vision, is narrated by a nameless man, one of the few survivors of an unspecified civilization-ending catastrophe. He and his young son are trekking along a treacherous highway, starving and freezing, trying to avoid roving cannibal armies. The tale, and their lives, are saved from teetering over the edge of bleakness thanks to the man's fierce belief that they are "the good guys" who are preserving the light of humanity. In this stark, effective production, Stechschulte gives the father an appropriately harsh, weary voice that sways little from its numbed register except to urge on the weakening boy or soothe his fears after an encounter with barbarians. When they uncover some vestige of the former world, the man recalls its vanished wonder with an aching nostalgia that makes the listener's heart swell. Stechschulte portrays the son with a mournful, slightly breathy tone that emphasizes the child's whininess, making him much less sympathetic than his resourceful father. With no music or effects interrupting Stechschulte's carefully measured pace and gruff, straightforward delivery, McCarthy's darkly poetic prose comes alive in a way that will transfix listeners. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, July 24). (Oct.)

KLIATT

To quote from the review of the audiobook in KLIATT, May 2007: The Man and the Boy are wandering the countryside, trying to find food and simply to survive. The Boy was born a short time after a manmade disaster, probably an atomic bomb, destroyed the world as we know it. Years have passed and the Boy is now somewhere in mid-childhood. His mother has long since left them, choosing death over hopelessness. He and his father trudge along the road, pushing an old shopping cart with their meager belongings, following an old map, avoiding "the bad guys," looking for food and heading for the coast. Their inventiveness, their love for each other, and their sheer endurance are symbols of hope. They encounter many a horrific situation, but always they have each other—until they don't. (Editor's note: The Road has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, reflecting the importance of the author in modern American literature.)

Library Journal

Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses) here offers a prescient account of a man and his son trying to survive in a devastated country where food is scarce and everyone has become a scavenger. The term survival of the fittest rings true here-very few people remain, and friends are extinct. Essentially, this is a story about nature vs. nurture, commitment and promises, and though there aren't many characters, there is abundant life in the prose. We are reminded how McCarthy has mastered the world outside of our domestic and social circles, with each description reading as if he had pulled a scene from the landscape and pasted it in the book. He uses metaphors the way some writers use punctuation, sprinkling them about with an artist's eye, showing us that literature from the heart still exists. Recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/06.]-Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Even within the author's extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread. McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy's fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father "Papa"). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened-apocalypse? holocaust?-and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the "good guys," carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are "bad guys," cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel's moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that's good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival-through which those who wish they'd never been born struggle to persevere-there are glimmers of comedy in an encounterwith an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy's recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry. A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth. First printing of 250,000

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Interviews & Essays

Q: You must have thought that was pretty lucky- being a fan of the author and everything then having this unpublished manuscript come your way-
J: He knew that in some ways with The Proposition, in terms of it being creating a world of- where the landscape and the conditions are very harsh in this brutal sort of world and it was all location driven - it would appeal to me as well as the actual material. When I first read it, it had such a powerful, emotional impact, and I just couldn't get it out of my head, and I knew it had to be done and that I had to make it somehow.

Q: And had you always thought of Viggo to play the man or how did that come about?
J: Yeah. That was way back when - even writing the script - it was really tricky - there was a small group of about three actors that I was thinking about. And it became clear that Viggo had the qualities of someone that could be an everyman but also could have the intensity that that role demands and the kind of physicalness of the role as well. And just the versatility 'cause it's a range of emotions that that character goes through. I had in my mind people like Gregory Peck and actors just from another time that had this kind of strength to them and yet also a vulnerability. It's very hard to find people that have a kind of a rawness, and Viggo's very intense and very wound up, and that is what the father is all about 'cause he's so wound up and so haunted by the suicide of his loved one - his wife and partner - and yet the incredible ongoing relationship with his son and being so protective. It is a love story, and it's being sensitive and vulnerable and yet it's such a challenging and extreme survival world that he has to do things that have to be credible - where certain actors it might be a stretch that they're so tender and sensitive to a child and yet can physically do what he has to do.

Q: I think it was you who said if anyone could survive in a post-apocalyptic world it would probably be Viggo.
J: Yes, and Guy Pearce, who's the veteran. They're the survivors and 'cause the film's all about survivor and there is something that Viggo has about him that is credible that he could survive extreme circumstances. And sure enough you've seen him dive into an absolutely treacherous, freezing ocean that no one is supposed to go near and endure all sorts of stuff. So, he's clearly capable of that.

Q: You've also assembled an amazing cast in the supporting roles. Do you want to talk a little about the casting? Did you immediately think of Guy for the veteran?
J: My problem was I couldn't think of anyone but Guy as the veteran and we were just very fortunate (he was in the middle of another film) that we were able to get him. I'm really thrilled with the cast that we managed to get and the variety of different characters. I was very specific about what we were trying to find in the different characters but also to get the variety of say Michael K. Williams brought a great kind of more urban, street thing, whereas Dillahunt - Garrett Dillahunt - we deliberately got a more country, hick, backwater type going on cause we wanted to get that feeling that there are all these people wandering around this new world fighting for survival and get that mixture of personalities and Guy certainly - like Viggo - has some similar qualities in that you can imagine him surviving. And Molly Parker was just great for the ending - a very difficult role to pull off 'cause she ends the film really with Kodi. Really for them the challenge was - in a fairly short time screen time - to give you a sense of where they've come from and the kind of emotional damage that they've all endured. Of course, Robert Duvall for the old man was extraordinary as well. He knows Cormac McCarthy, he's so familiar with that world - that was really helpful - and he did something that was quite extraordinary under extreme pressure because our first day we were plagued by weather problems and the weather problem was simply a day like this where the sun's out and the sun was our enemy. That's been a running joke throughout the whole film that when it's actually beautiful weather that most people love we all get depressed, and when it's miserable we all get excited and run out into it. That happened with Robert, we had this bright, sunny day that just was just a disaster for the landscape we were in where there's a huge coal ash pile of remnants of mining debris and scarred kind of landscape. We ended up really being pressurized for time, but he, within a couple of takes - we talked about trying something where he would bring an extra bit of history to the character in terms of that pain and damage because this guy's old - everyone's wondering how the hell did he survive and where did he come from, and he's very enigmatic sort of character. Really reminded me of a sort of Samuel Beckett type character. And he came up with the most extraordinary sort of bit of improvisation in the middle of the scene that was just heartbreaking and helped shape the scene in a very quick time. That was great. It was hard to work under those sort of conditions and when you have actors with that kind of wealth of experience, you kind of wish you had more time to do stuff. But he rose to challenge and beyond.

Q: How did you work with Cormac? Do you want to talk a little bit about working with Cormac? It was a log on the fire wasn't it when you actually-
J: I deliberately didn't really have conversations with him until Joe and I were happy with the script, and Nick. And those conversations came after. We wanted to feel comfortable and crack it ourselves and then see what comes out of- and he is just an amazing man and very sharp and understands that they're totally different mediums, so he has no problem with the fact- I'd mention some things that we did change and he was saying, "It's your film. You know, it's film. It's something else," and "Don't worry about it," and he ended up being very happy with what we were doing and our approach and very interested in what we were doing. But at the same time he was never over anything saying, "Oh, don't know about that," so I think he just sees it very much as separate mediums, which they are.

Q: Did you speak to him during the shoot?
J: I spoke to him in pre-production and during the shoot, updating him, and I kept trying to get certain things out of - there were certain things that he wouldn't really reveal because he thought they're best to be left interpreted how you want to interpret them. Some things he got specific about and then a lot of other things that were left very open in the book - open to interpretation, he wanted left that way because he didn't want to lead us in that sense. We were very fortunate that he came up for a while with his son, just seeing them together it all kind of made sense. And his son was calling him "Papa" just like in the book and, as he said, his son John wrote half the book, as in they share- that's where half of it comes from. It was really great to see that.

Q: Was that the first time you've met him?
J: Yes. But I just kind of knew from the first long conversation that we had back in pre-production that he was very smart and actually quite open, very polite and respectful, and a gentleman - a Southern gentleman.

Q: What was his reaction when you saw him - to the film and to what he was seeing?
J: He seemed to love what he was seeing. I think he got quite emotional when we showed him some of the meatier emotional scenes between Kodi (the boy) and Viggo, when the father dies. That material. He seemed very pleased, very moved, and that was lovely. I think he was very pleased that we went the location - like finding dramatic, interesting, extreme locations as opposed to just a kind of CGI film.

Q: Do you want to talk a little bit about the casting of Charlize for the role of the woman?
J: Well that was the other thing about the woman in the book- we wanted to really try and enrich that character and present her argument for making that choice as very sound because in the book it's very abrasive and harsh. And it is, and we still will do that, but what is great about Charlize is we wanted to try to find someone that had a real kind of gravitas, emotional kind of depth to again showing that transition of life from the world that we're all, well some of us, the privileged few in fact are accustomed to and take for granted, and then having that all stripped away and the emotional damage and her refusal to accept the new world is a huge emotional shift. She's someone that has already shown incredible range, and her transformation in Monster was pretty astounding. She seems to be one of those actresses that really is able to transform and go to real emotional depths.

Q: And do you just want to talk a bit about Michael, the thief?
J: Oh yes, Michael K. Williams- 'cause I love The Wire. That's one of my favorite TV shows. He was great in that, and again, it was great, like with Robert Duvall, to have him do something in a very different context and this world that they're in and these characters that they're playing and the situation is so extreme that he's in and he was so fearless about it - what he has to do in that scene. And just very truthful in what he does, and I think he's one of those actors that just gonna keep surprising people. And that scene was incredible - what he did. He really thought carefully about the voice, the whole, again he's very detailed and fearless and that was just great, and he really trusted me which was really great too- for him to go into a role like that, that is literally and metaphorically totally, again, goes from having something and losing absolutely everything in a very short time. To see that all play out was just great, and he was just great to work with.

Q: And just finally- just again, what was the main part of the story of The Road that really drew you in or wanted you to make this film?
J: Firstly, it was the power of the center of the story, of the father and son, and the emotional impact that that made on me and seems to have on many people, and then also that world being so immediate and refreshing. What I love about Cormac McCarthy is the sort of depths of humanity he's so unflinching in exploring and not shying away from, just how scary we really are and how we're our own and the entire planet's worst enemy and always have been and always will be. And yet - what is extraordinary about the book that isn't in the other books is that incredible emotional richness and tenderness. And the world, the challenge of trying to- what I loved about the book as well was there was no discussion or build up of actually what happened. You don't even know what happened, and I just loved that about the book. There was so much that was left unsaid in the way it should be left unsaid because if a disaster of that scale, whether it's nuclear or a comet or whichever way it goes, any disaster on that scale would immediately from that day on it would be irrelevant about exactly what happened and what caused it. You're purely from that day on fighting to cope with the radical change, and the way he kept that on a knife I thought was original and quite haunting and disturbing 'cause it felt real and it felt particularly relevant and particularly real for these times.

Reading Group Guide

The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are designed to stimulate your group's discussion of The Road, the tender, harrowing new novel of unfailing hope amid epic devastation by acclaimed writer Cormac McCarthy.

Set in the smoking ashes of a postapocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy's The Road tells the story of a man and his son's journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched countryside and blasted cities "held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell" [p. 181]. It is a starved world, all plant and animal life dead or dying, some of the few human survivors even eating each other alive.

The father and son move through the ruins searching for food and shelter, trying to keep safe from murderous, roving bands. They have only a pistol to defend themselves, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.

Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road 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.

For discussion

1. Cormac McCarthy has an unmistakable prose style. What do you see as the most distinctive features of that style? How is the writing in The Road in some ways more like poetry than narrative prose?

2. Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of "the man" and "the boy" affect the way in which readers relate to them?

3. How is McCarthy able to make the postapocalyptic world of The Road seem so real and utterly terrifying? Which descriptive passages are especially vivid and visceral in their depiction of this blasted landscape? What do you find to be the most horrifying features of this world and the survivors who inhabit it?

4. McCarthy doesn't make explicit what kind of catastrophe has ruined the earth and destroyed human civilization, but what might be suggested by the many descriptions of a scorched landscape covered in ash? What is implied by the father's statement that "On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world" [p. 32]?

5. As the father is dying, he tells his son he must go on in order to "carry the fire." When the boy asks if the fire is real, the father says, "It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it" [p. 279]. What is this fire? Why is it so crucial that they not let it die?

6. McCarthy envisions a postapocalyptic world in which "murder was everywhere upon the land" and the earth would soon be "largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes" [p. 181]. How difficult or easy is it to imagine McCarthy's nightmare vision actually happening? Do you think people would likely behave as they do in the novel, under the same circumstances? Does it now seem that human civilization is headed toward such an end?

7. The man and the boy think of themselves as the "good guys." In what ways are they like and unlike the "bad guys" they encounter? What do you think McCarthy is suggesting in the scenes in which the boy begs his father to be merciful to the strangers they encounter on the road? How is the boy able to retain his compassion--to be, as one reviewer put it, "compassion incarnate"?

8. The sardonic blind man named Ely who the man and boy encounter on the road tells the father that "There is no God and we are his prophets" [p. 170]. What does he mean by this? Why does the father say about his son, later in the same conversation, "What if I said that he's a god?" [p. 172] Are we meant to see the son as a savior?

9. The Road takes the form of a classic journey story, a form that dates back to Homer's Odyssey. To what destination are the man and the boy journeying? In what sense are they "pilgrims"? What, if any, is the symbolic significance of their journey?

10. McCarthy's work often dramatizes the opposition between good and evil, with evil sometimes emerging triumphant. What does The Road ultimately suggest about good and evil? Which force seems to have greater power in the novel?

11. What makes the relationship between the boy and his father so powerful and poignant? What do they feel for each other? How do they maintain their affection for and faith in each other in such brutal conditions?

12. Why do you think McCarthy ends the novel with the image of trout in mountain streams before the end of the world: "In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery" [p. 287]. What is surprising about this ending? Does it provide closure, or does it prompt a rethinking of all that has come before? What does it suggest about what lies ahead?

Suggestions for further reading

Robert Adams, Horseclans; Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake; David Brin, The Postman; Philip K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence; P.D. James, The Children of Men; Louise Laurence, Children of the Dust.

About the author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper.

The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark.

In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press.

In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985.

After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.

McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was also published by Knopf in 2006.

Forewords & Introductions

Read an Excerpt

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 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 gunmetal 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, 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 meadowlands 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.

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.

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 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.

Excerpted from The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Copyright © 2006 by M-71, Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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