All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

A cowboy’s odyssey into a vanished world was a poignant companion in Scotland’s Hebrides, where the bleak and beautiful coexist, and family ties are woven from ancient, comforting cloth

I was raised in an itinerant military family: four of us, 10 months here, a year there. Dad on tour, mum, my sister and I in another impersonal quarter. If Mum wasn’t packing the MFO folding wooden crates, she was unpacking them. When people ask me where I’m from, I say Scotland or Edinburgh, that answer hollow, inauthentic, actually I’m not from anywhere, I’m an “army brat”.

My father was uprooted too, adopted as a baby by a good man, a labourer for Scottish and Newcastle breweries in Edinburgh and his wife, housekeeper to a garrulous old tea planter. His birth certificate had been signed by his mother in a hospital for unmarried mothers. She was from a tiny hamlet on the Isle of Lewis at the northernmost tip of the Outer Hebrides.

My father waited almost 20 years after his adopted mother died before deciding this year, at 70, to seek his birth family. He asks me if I’ll go with him. I pack a bag for a week, the longest I’ve spent with him in 30 years.

As I’m leaving the house, I pick up a book I read while living in Spain in my early 20s. I’d imagined I bore a flattering likeness to the young protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Two decades later I hear the book on its own terms.

In John Grady Cole, McCarthy writes every father’s secretly wished-for son: a gentle, principled and courageous man, who does right by his own conscience even though it may lead to destruction. It’s a western archetype, seen everywhere from the old heroes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove to Elmore Leonard’s recontextualised Raylan Givens in Justified.

But Cole is no flat white hat and this no horse opera: it’s a rite of passage story which does not lead toward the light.

Turned out from his dead grandfather’s cattle ranch at the end of the 40s, Cole’s certainty of a life lived like his forefathers meets implacable obstruction. His actress mother has been waiting for the old man to die to sell up. As the family lawyer puts it: “Son, not everybody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven.”

He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride down to Mexico to seek the vanishing world to which they belong. Along the road they meet Jimmy Blevins, a chaotic, criminally unpredictable child travelling under the alias of a popular radio preacher. Blevins rides a big bay horse, which is probably stolen and is then stolen from him along with his pistol. Like a medieval fool he’s a harbinger of life’s vicissitudes – of chance, damage and danger.

My father and I lift our pints at the Glasgow hotel and wait for the family we’ve never known. There have been hard years between my father and I, we didn’t talk much for a few of them. But I’m not the arrogant idealist I was and he’s gentled with years. We conceal ourselves with beer, as men do.

The Glasgow cousins welcome us warmly over the early evening bistro set menu, speaking as if we’d only been on a long posting, as if there weren’t the gulf of generations between us all. The next day we fly out in a twin-engined jet, skirting the peaks up the grand, glacier-sculpted glens of the North Western Highlands and across the Minch to the Hebrides.

On the flight, I follow Cole and Rawlins out of the desert and into a promised land of unbroken wild ponies and lush grazing for cattle on a Coahuila cattle ranch. Their first impressions carry their hopes into the landscape:

The grasslands lay in a deep violet haze and to the west thin flights of waterfowl were moving north before the sunset in the deep red galleries under the cloudbanks like schoolfish in a burning sea and on the foreland plain they saw vaqueros driving cattle before them in a gauze of golden dust.

Within moments of riding the road toward the Hacienda, Cole sees Alejandra, the 17-year-old daughter of the wealthy Mexico City owner, riding a black Arabian saddlehorse. “She wore a flatcrowned hat of black felt with a wide brim and her black hair was loose under it and fell halfway to her waist and as she rode past, she turned and smiled and touched the brim of the hat...”

I copy the paragraph into my notebook, that masterpiece of understatement, of looking so intensely while afraid to look. I remember the old drama of my own Spanish girl and smile at how gravely I’d taken myself, taken everything.

We drive a hire car along the coast road, past the cemeteries, always built with views to the sea. We have the address but overshoot, an old lady comes out of her door and I jump out to ask directions. She’s excited. “Oh it’s you, we’ve all been waiting for you, so looking forward to meeting you, I’m an old friend of the family. I remember your grandmother so well.”

Dad’s cousin takes us up to the tip of the island, where my grandmother and her husband are buried. There’s the stone, the names seem illuminated, filled with portent but delivering nothing in the wind on the headland looking out to the wild North Atlantic. A dark squall shadows the sea a few miles out, it’s heading straight for us, we get back in the car and drive back in silence to the little B&B in Stornoway.

That night by the B&B reading lamp, terrible events have driven Alejandra from Cole, and he shoulders the guilt of having been forced to kill to survive and he rides across the mesa.

He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.

In the morning we drive out, down the West Side to Arnol and the old blackhouses, thatched dry-stone long houses, the old dwellings of the islands, where the crofters lived next to their sheep and cattle in the byre alongside and burned the smoky peat, cut from the moorland. The last house was only vacated in 1966.

Some of our Lewis family’s parents were raised in the blackhouses, only a generation back. In time measured by standing stones of 3 billion-year-old Lewisian gneiss we all of us lived on the land, with our animals, a mere flicker of an eyelid ago. McCarthy laments that life and the unconscious nobility of animals and of that way of life of young people who shared that nobility, before they were broken to progress, to industrialisation. He writes of horses and of those people with a close observation born of unsentimental love and experience.

That same day we visit Callanish, Lewis’s astonishing 5,000-year-old stone circle, altar and avenue. The ancient, lichen-wreathed stones witness the mountains of Harris and the sun and were the site of rites and ceremony for 1,500 years. In the islands, those little crusts between sea and sky, the sun rules everything. Today the wind drives the freezing rain into our hoods, frozen hands plunged deep in our clinging pockets. The stones, singular, in small groups or great assemblages like Callanish announce the immanence of time.

We find a seaman’s bar in the backstreet at the port and drink cold “heavy”, Scottish 70-shilling ale, the same stuff his adopted dad used to make in the Edinburgh of the 1950s. That night I stay up again, devouring the book. I thought I knew it well but it seems completely new to me, not the plot but the voice.

The floor of the cafe was packed mud newly swept and he was the only customer. He stood the rifle against the wall and ordered huevos revueltos and a cup of chocolate and he sat and waited for it to come and then he ate very slowly. The food was rich to his taste and the chocolate was made with canela and he drank it and ordered another and folded a tortilla and ate and watched the horses standing in the square across the street and watched the girls … He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.

We drive on again in the following days, across the rust-leached, peaty moorland and sky-mirrors of lochs in the south-east, down to the peaks of Harris, snow-dusted still in May. We stop at little craft places and buy gifts, seek out the good seafood places by the shore to eat langoustines and scallops off the boats and talk, trying to comprehend what’s happening.

The night before we leave, the whole Lewis family gather at the hotel in Stornoway. There are 32 people in the room, all of them our relations, their partners, children. We struggle to remember everyone’s names.

We’ve seen everyone only three times over the week but it feels like a picture restored, as if we’ve just walked back into a room we’d stepped away from for a minute. Two people say to us “When you come home again” and “When you come back home next time...” I’m told it’s an expression but I feel it keenly. I don’t want to ask but I could hear them say it over and over.

By the lamp that night I finish John Grady Cole’s terrible scourging at the hands of life and come to McCarthy ruminating harshly on existence in this startling passage:

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Our futures drifted away from this family, this island life like fine pencil lines diverging on a paper, and now we return to the design a generation later. That filigree sketch one of millions of stories of adoption, divorce, illness, clearances, migration … with the perspective of those standing stones, all but invisible.

Cole’s way of life is over and he rides into the future, the pumpjacks and oil derricks of the Texan fields. He rides past a group of Indians, corporeal hallucinations of pre-history.

They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.

Dad and I drop off the hire car, drink coffee and eat shortbread in the Stornoway airport lounge. Too much has happened too quickly for either of us to form it, make a story of it we can understand.

We know this is very good. We’ll build on these relationships, find our place here among the people, among the stones.

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