Blood Meridian - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Three epigraphs open the book: quotations from French writer Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic Jacob Boehme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old seemed to have been scalped.

The novel tells the story of an adolescent runaway from home with a proclivity for violence, known only as "the kid," who was born in Tennessee during the famous Leonids meteor shower of 1833. He first meets an enormous and completely hairless character, Judge Holden, at a religious revival in Nacogdoches, Texas. There, Holden accuses a preacher of raping both an eleven-year-old girl and a goat, inciting those attending the revival to attack and kill the preacher. (The Judge later indicates that he fabricated this story merely for sadistic personal pleasure.)

Carrying on his journey alone on his mule through the plains of eastern Texas, the kid spends a night in the shelter of a recluse before arriving in "Bexar" (modern-day San Antonio). After a violent encounter with a bartender which establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party of ill-armed U.S. Army irregulars on a filibustering mission led by a Captain White. Shortly after entering Mexico, they are attacked, and many killed, by a band of Comanche warriors. Arrested as a filibuster in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his cell neighbor, the earless Toadvine, tells the authorities that the two of them would make useful recruits for the state's newly hired scalphunting operation, led by the strategic Glanton.

Toadvine and the kid consequently join Glanton's gang. The bulk of the novel is devoted to the detailing of their depraved activities and conversations. The gang encounters a travelling carnival, and, in untranslated Spanish, each of their fortunes is told with Tarot cards. The gang originally contracts with various regional leaders to exterminate Apaches and are given a bounty for each scalp they recover. Before long, however, they murder any in their path, including peaceful agrarian Indians, unprotected Mexican villagers, and even Mexican national guardsmen.

Judge Holden, who re-enters the story as a fellow scalphunter, is presented as a profoundly mysterious and awe-inspiring figure; the others seem to regard him as not quite human. He (like the historical Holden of Chamberlain's autobiography) is a child-killer, though almost no one in the gang expresses much distress about this. According to the kid's new companion, an ex-priest named Ben Tobin, the Glanton gang first met the judge while fleeing from the onslaught of a much larger group of Apaches. In the middle of the desert, the gang found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting for them all. He took them to an extinct volcano and improvised gunpowder from natural materials, enough to give them the advantage against their Apache pursuers. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin explains that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge at some point before joining Glanton's gang—though he ends his tale by stating that he first met with the judge in the desert with the others. This suggests a potentially disingenuous quality to the refrain "the priest doesn't lie" uttered by several characters throughout the course of the novel, particularly when spoken by the judge.

After months of marauding, the gang crosses into U.S. territory, where they set up a systematic and brutal robbery operation at a ferry on the Colorado River near Yuma, Arizona. Local Yuma (Quechan) Indians are approached to help the gang wrest control of the ferry from its original owner, but Glanton's gang betrays the natives, using their presence and previously coordinated attack on the ferry as an excuse to seize the ferry's munitions and slaughter the Yuma. Because of the new operators' brutal ways, a group of U.S. Army soldiers sets up a second ferry at a ford upriver to cross—which the Yuma briefly appropriate until their ferryman Callahan is decapitated and thrown in the river. Eventually, after the gang had amassed a fortune by robbing the settlers using the ferry, the Yumas suddenly attack and kill most of them, including Glanton.

The kid, Toadvine, and Tobin are among the survivors who flee into the desert, though the kid takes an arrow in the leg. Heading west together, the kid and Tobin again encounter Judge Holden, who first negotiates, then threatens them for their weaponry and possessions. Holden fires a non-lethal shot to Tobin's neck and Tobin and the kid hide among bones near a desert creek. The judge delivers a speech advising the kid to reveal himself. Tobin and the kid continue their travels independently, passing each other along the way. Although the kid has several opportunities to shoot the judge, as advised by Tobin, he only attempts so once and fails.

Both parties end up in San Diego, but the kid gets separated from Tobin when he is caught by local authorities and imprisoned. Holden visits him in jail, stating that he told the jailers "the truth": that the kid alone was responsible for the end of the Glanton gang. The kid declares that the judge was responsible for the gang's evils, but the judge denies it. After reaching through the cell bars to try to grab the kid, Holden leaves the kid alone, stating that he "has errands." After the kid tells the authorities where the Glanton gang's fortune can be found, he is released and seeks a doctor to treat his wound. Under the influence of medicinal ether, he hallucinates that the judge is visiting him, along with a curious man who forges coins. The kid recovers and seeks out Tobin, with no luck. He makes his way to Los Angeles, where he witnesses Toadvine and another surviving member of the Glanton gang, David Brown, being hanged for unspecified crimes.

The kid again wanders across the American West, and decades are compressed into a few pages. In 1878 he makes his way to Fort Griffin, Texas, and is now referred to by the author as "the man." The lawless city is a center for processing the remains of the American bison, which have been hunted nearly to extinction. At a saloon the man yet again meets the judge. Holden calls the man "the last of the true," and the pair talk on equal terms. Holden describes the man as a disappointment, stating that he held in his heart "clemency for the heathen." Holden declares prophetically that the man has arrived at the saloon for "the dance"—in other words, the dance of violence, war, and bloodshed that the judge so often praised. The man seems to deny all of these ideas, telling the judge, "You aint nothin" and, noting a trained bear at the saloon that is performing a dance, states, "even a dumb animal can dance."

The man hires a prostitute, then afterwards goes to an outhouse under another meteor shower. In the outhouse, he is surprised by the judge, naked, who "gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh." This is the last mention of the man, though in the next scene, two men come from the saloon and encounter a third man urinating near the outhouse. The third man advises the pair not to go into the outhouse. They ignore his suggestion, open the door, and can only gaze in awed horror at what they see, stating only, "Good God almighty." The last paragraph finds the judge back in the saloon, dancing in the nude and playing fiddle wildly among the drunkards and whores, claiming that he will never die.

The end of the narrative is followed by a brief epilogue, featuring an unspecified person auguring a line of holes across the prairie, apparently in the construction of an extended fence. This cordoning off of territories into plots of land suggests the domestication of the "Old West" and the end of the frontier that came shortly after the events of the novel. The worker sparks a fire in each of the holes while an assortment of wanderers lingers in the distance. These travelers are bizarrely described as moving with passionless, clockwork-like motions and "cross in their progress one by one that track of holes" which seems representative of "a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie." The images of the epilogue seem to serve as a harbinger of the more ordered and settled civilization which will soon replace the war-torn chaos of the West, with its own rituals and codes very unlike those portrayed in the novel's setting.