Saturday, September 10, 2011

"to live like a gamecock"

In this chapter, the world view represented by the "shadow of the crow" becomes overwhelming.

The title comes from Veasey's drunken ecstatic declaration -- "To live like a gamecock, that is my target." In the course of the chapter he is killed. His last statement is: "It is not too late to put away this meanness."  He is shot anyway, but his death saves Inman: "The ball that hit Inman had already passed through Veasey's shoulder and as a result did not strike with full briskness."

The situation is brutally simple: Inman and Veasey have been turned over to the Federal Guard and are being marched along with a whole group of men in chains for the reward.  In the course of the trek, the undisclosed leaders of the Guard decide the trouble of transporting the men is not worth the reward, so in the "deep of the night" the guards wake the men up and start killing them. They then "bury" them in a shoddy mass grave, "strewing the men in and covering them over with dirt about to the depth that one would plant potatoes."

When Inman regains consciousness -- to find himself "uprooted, staring eye to eye, forlorn and hostile and baffled, into the long face of a great tusked boar" -- he looks up at the night sky and finds "it did not look right."
There were stars in it, but he could not reason out even one known constellation in the moonless sky. It looked as if someone had taken a stick and stirred it up so that no sense remained, just a smattering of light cast patternless on the general dark.
He is still tied to Veasey and all the other dead around him, but he is numb to it:
He had grown so used to seeing death, walking among the dead, sleeping among them, numbering himself calmly as among the near-dead, that it seemed no longer dark and mysterious. He feared his heart had been touched by the fire so often he might never make a civilian again.
But there is still something left in Inman of the kinder side of humanity: "Inman wished to commit some kind gesture toward him, but lacking even a shovel for burial, all he could think to do was roll Veasey over, facedown."

But this small gesture is contrasted to Inman's killing, near the end of the chapter, of the man who turned  him over to the Federal Guard.
Inman stepped to Junior and struck him across the ear with the barrel of the LeMat's and then clubbed at him with the butt until he lay flat on his back. . . . He held the light to Junior's face. What lay before him was indeed a horrid thing, and yet Inman feared that the minds of all men share the same nature with little true variance.
As the chapter draws to its conclusion, a kindly slave shelters Inman and later gives him a map to "the mountains" where, the slave warns,  "they say it's cold and rough."

"That's where I'm from," Inman says.

At the end of the chapter, Inman is being kept company by a group of crows who "were harrying a rat snake they had discovered up in the tree."  Here is how the chapter ends:
The crows stayed on through much of the afternoon, celebrating their victory. Inman watched them anytime his eyes were open, observing closely their deportment and method of expression. And when his eyes were closed, he dreamed he lived in a kind of world where if a man wished it he could think himself  into crow form, so that, though filled with dark error, he still had power to either fly from enemies or laugh them away. Then, after awhile of passing time in such wise, Inman watched the night fall, and it seemed to him as if the crows had swelled out to blacken everything.
Veasey had imagined himself a fighting gamecock, "a big dominicker that lived for nothing but to fight and tread hens."  Inman wishes he were a crow with the "power to either fly from enemies or laugh them away." These seem to be the only options -- though both are incomplete and delusional, being products of the minds of men -- in a self-created world of war.

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