Blood Meridian: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The kid begins to live by begging and theft. He rides across a barren prairie, where the wind makes the weeds rattle like gnashing teeth. At night, the kid sleeps outside under a sky full of falling stars while wolves cry. The sun is the color of steel when it rises. The kid wears a hat made from leaves.

One day, the kid sees smoke rising from among the hills and rides toward it. He finds a hut where a hermit lives, half mad and filthy. The kid requests water; the two enter the hermit’s gloomy hut, where the hermit points to a bucket of salty water. The kid drinks. He then goes out to a nearby well and draws up water in a rawhide bucket for his mule to drink.

The kid thanks the hermit, but the hermit predicts that a storm is coming and tells the kid that he ought to stay in the hut for the night. The kid reluctantly agrees. He leaves his leather saddle outside, but the hermit tells the kid to bring it in lest something eat it.

Inside, the hermit asks the kid if he lost his way, and the kid responds in the affirmative. The two begin talking, and the kid learns that the hermit was once a slaver in Mississippi. The hermit rummages through his belongings and produces a dried and blackened human heart. He says that four things can destroy the world: women, whiskey, money, and black people. He goes on to say that he paid $200 for the human heart, or rather for the black slave the heart “hung inside of.” The hermit says again that the kid has lost his way in the dark.

The hermit begins speaking of religious matters: how it is difficult and painful to live in sin, how the world God made doesn’t suit everybody. He claims that we cannot know what we ourselves think and that we don’t want to know what we feel in our hearts. This is so, he concludes, because, though we have the capacity to do anything, we are fundamentally evil, and so use our power to make evil machines, and machines that make those machines. This amounts, in the hermit’s view, to evil “that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

The kid and the hermit eat together while thunder booms overhead. Eventually the kid makes his bed and falls asleep, only to wake in the night to find the hermit looking over him, almost in the kid’s bed with him. The kid asks what the hermit wants, but the hermit only crawls away into the darkness.

In the morning, the kid gathers his things and leaves, riding out through a forest at first, and a day later the prairie again. He meets a party of cattle drovers, or cowboys, whom he camps and eats with as they tell stories. The drovers tell him about two of their party who have parted ways and gone to the town of Bexar for a spree of drinking and sleeping with prostitutes, with the ultimate intention of going to Mexico. The kid expresses interest in going that way himself.

In the morning, the kid breakfasts with the cattle drovers before saddling up his skinny, sore, and balding mule. The drovers have tied a bag containing food and a knife to the mule’s neck, a gift for the kid. Once again, the kid and his mule ride out across the endless prairie.

Four days later, the kid arrives in Bexar, a town of adobe houses and a wagon-filled plaza. The sun is setting on the town, and swallows fly about “like fugitives from some great fire at the earth’s end.” As the kid rides into town, he sees a cart heading out, loaded with human corpses. The kid finds a well and draws up water for his mule to drink. He hears horns and guitars, and sees people dancing in the street gaudily dressed and speaking Spanish.

The kid ties up his mule and enters a cafe. He tells the bartender that he would like a drink though he has no money, but the bartender doesn’t understand and asks an old man, seated nearby playing dominoes, to translate. The kid asks if the old man speaks American and tells him that he’ll work in exchange for a drink. The old man translates this, and the men in the bar begin to laugh. The kid offers to sweep; the bartender says in Spanish that the floor isn’t dirty, but gives the kid a broom anyway. The kid proceeds to sweep the floor.

After sweeping, the kid re-approaches the bartender for his drink. The bartender ignores the kid, then shoos him away. The kid becomes aggressive, only for the bartender to calmly draw and cock a pistol. The old man stands up, says something in Spanish, and leaves the bar. The bartender’s face turns pale. He sets down his pistol and grabs instead a bungstarter, a club-like tool used to open barrels. He and the kid proceed to fight. The kid deftly breaks two bottles over the bartender’s head before stabbing his eye with a glass shard. He then steals another full bottle and leaves the cafe, taking his mule with him.

The kid wakes up the next morning in a ruined church, the floor filthy with animal feces and bones. He is tormented and parched from his night of heavy drinking, but drinks more liquor immediately upon waking. He can’t find his mule, however, and goes out searching for it, coming across buzzards, domed buildings, and, in the sacristy of the church, decayed human corpses. While searching, he finishes the rest of his liquor and outside the church sees statues of saints as well as the baby Jesus, all shot to pieces by American soldiers.

Very faintly in the dust, the kid discerns the tracks of his mule and follows them down to a ford. There, several black people are washing a carriage, and the kid asks one of them if they’ve seen his mule. The black person responds that he saw something with long ears come down the road toward the nearby river a while ago; and, at the river, the kid does indeed find his mule, grazing among lush grass. The kid ties up the animal and kicks it halfheartedly, but it only shifts away and continues to graze. After realizing that he’s lost his hat made from leaves, the kid wades out into the river “like some wholly wretched baptismal candidate.”