Outer Dark: 14. Pages 131-146 Summary & Analysis

Culla Holme keeps walking down the road in the dark long after sunset. Afraid of encountering a snake, he carries a stick which he pokes into the shadows. But he’s the only living thing on the road. He walks through a town called Preston Flats, which is as still and silent as if every living thing there had died. He sleeps for a few hours in a field a little farther down the road, rising and resuming his journey before sunrise. To stave off his hunger, he crews ruminatively on handfuls of dried corn.

At midday, Holme comes across a site where workers are tapping pine trees to make turpentine. The Black laborers are eating their lunches while a White foreman looks on impatiently. The harried foreman has no work to offer Holme but says his employer—a man by the name of Clark—might if Holme goes into town and asks. Holme ask which way town is. The exasperated foreman asks if Holme came through a town. Holme says no. In that case, the foreman sarcastically replies, the town sure isn’t in the direction from which Holme came.

Before he reaches the town, Holme finds a little pool, where he carefully washes his face, arms, and chest, using a tiny slip of soap he has tucked away in his pocket. He strops his razor against the calf of his boot and shaves, using his reflection in the water as a mirror. But by the time he’s reached the town, he’s all sweaty and dusty from the road again.

Holme finds a teamster refitting a wagon wheel and asks where he can find the Clark who runs the turpentine camp. That would be “the old man,” the teamster says. Holme turns to go, but he sways as he walks, and the teamster calls after him, worried that he might be drunk or sick. No, Holme says, just exhausted. The teamster insists that he doesn’t want to pry into Holme’s business, that he was simply worried about his wellbeing. He tells Holme to ask for Clark at Clark’s general store.

The store clerk doesn’t know when Clark will be back but invites Holme to wait there. Holme returns to the porch, where he starts gnawing on his dry corn again. It tastes awful, and he spits it out just as a man (later identified as Bud and previously introduced to readers as the turnip farmer) comes around the corner. The man, thinking that Holme is vomiting, is horrified; his entire family (except his shrewish wife, by implication, the butter maker) died of cholera, and he’s terrified of another outbreak. Holme assures the man it was just spit, but that doesn’t seem to  set the irascible Bud at ease. Bud demands to know where Holme is from and what his business is. Holme says he’s from Johnson County and he’s waiting to ask Clark for work.

Eventually, Clark, a giant of a man in a “filthy white suit,” comes riding up to the store in a donkey-drawn wagon emblazoned with “Clark Auction Company” on the side. Greeting Bud, he offers some observations about the extremely hot weather. Bud impatiently interrupts to demand that Clark do something about “them people” hanging from the tree on his property. Clark says he didn’t put them there, and although he’s an agent of the county government he doesn’t have a budget for removing “dead stock.” A stream of invective erupts from Bud in answer to which Clark says he’ll see what he can do but it might take a few more days.

Holme follows Clark inside, where Clark starts rifling through papers behind the counter. After a few minutes, Holme asks if he has any work. Clark needs someone to pass out flyers for his upcoming auction, but since Holme is on foot, he won’t be able to cover enough ground. Then, sizing Holme up, Clark offers to pay him one dollar to dig two graves in the indigent’s section of the local cemetery. The store clerk gives Holme a pickaxe and shovel, warning him that the handle on the axe is loose.

Holme heads for the church, where he finds two Black men already digging a grave. For a minute, he’s worried that they’ve scooped his job, but he quickly ascertains that they’re digging one for someone else—a man called Salter. Holme finds a spot in the corner of the cemetery where graves are marked with wooden planks instead of headstones and begins to dig. It’s quite late when he finishes the job; darkness has fallen and everyone seems to be asleep. After stashing the shovel and pickaxe under the porch of Clark’s store, Holme beds down for the night in a field on the outskirts of town.

Something ominous passes by in the night, and Holme wakes to an eerie, unnatural silence. No birds sing to greet the sunrise in the morning, no dogs bark. As he walks back into town, he passes a tree from which three dead bodies hang. One is Clark. In town, no one is stirring. Holme takes to the road, walking quickly and then breaking into a run.