But this cliched plot is not, of course, what one reads a McCarthy novel for. Grady falls in love with the owner's beautiful daughter-a disaster that leads in succession to arrest and Mexican jail and murder in self-defense. Along the way, they pick up an urchin named Blevins and arrive finally at a hacienda, where they're hired to break horses. Here, John Cole Grady is a 1930's East Texas teenager, abandoned by his parents' troubles, who sets out with his pal Rawlins to ride across the border to Mexico.
More recently, ever since McCarthy turned into a high-class cowboy novelist, the fatality is, understandably, more spread out-punctured by boredom and ennui and long, lonesome plains. In his more gothic early works, this fatality had a hanging-moss quality that seemed to brush your face invisibly but chillingly as you worked your way through his books. It comes from the Traveler-Ronda line of horses of Sheeran’s that was sold in Mexico, he says.McCarthy's work (Blood Meridian, 1985, etc.) is essentially about fatality: grotesque human acts that lack self-direction, that seem to be playing out a design otherwise established. He points out one of the horses, who, like the others, comes from a horse called José Chiquito. John Grady says that the hacendado apparently has four hundred horses all over the mountain, having started a breeding program for quarterhorses. Rawlins doubts whether four days is enough, and says John Grady will surely be worn out, if he ever manages. John Grady wonders if they could break all sixteen in four days-train them enough to stop and stand to be saddled.
But John Grady says that some of them have potential-he points out two that he claims are good horses, though Rawlins is skeptical, suggesting that John Grady has lost his touch.
As they open the gate the animals get spooked and climb over one another frantically. That evening Rawlins and John Grady look them over. On the third day the vaqueros bring a herd of wild colts into the pen. For two days, John Grady and Rawlins brand, castrate, dehorn and inoculate the cattle in the holding pens.
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