Outer Dark

Suspicious of Culla’s story about a sickness, the tinker returns secretly the following morning. He follows Culla’s track through the woods until he finds the baby crying on the pad of moss. The tinker swaddles the baby, who falls asleep with an anguished expression on his face. The tinker travels until midnight, when, outside of a town, he knocks on the door of a brothel and asks about a wet nurse. He and the madam walk down the moonlit road to the house of a wet nurse.

In the woods, Culla uses an ax to make it look as if he dug a grave; back at the cabin, he tells Rinthy that the baby died.

After a week of recuperating, Rinthy leaves her bed to find Culla repairing their father’s shotgun. Culla notices that she’s lactating. Rinthy wants to name the child and lay flowers on his grave, but Culla responds, “You don’t name things dead” (32). Eventually, Culla directs Rinthy to the fake grave but still forbids her from naming the child. Gathering some wildflowers, she approaches the sunlit patch of earth; suspicion makes her dig down, where she finds nothing but packed clay. Culla suddenly appears behind her: “She screamed and fell back, stumbled to the ground crushing the flowers” (33). Culla shouts at her with his fist raised and then flees.

In the second italicized vignette, the trio jogs through a farm, startling a sow and some hens. They arm themselves with a brush hook and spade from the barn.

Taking their money and the shotgun, Culla sets out on the road through a storm. The following day, he arrives in a town mired in mud. He sells the gun and buys a meal from the general store. A wagon driver tells Culla he can find work with the local squire, the primary landowner in the area. Culla walks to the squire’s large house outside of town. The squire—a big man with black eyes who is later identified as Salter—is suspicious of Culla. However, after questioning him about his background, Salter offers him work chopping up a fallen tree.

Working only with an ax (Salter denies him a saw), Culla takes until dark to finish the work. Again, Squire Salter interrogates Culla, accusing him of being a criminal on the run. Culla denies the accusations, claiming he’s just a poor man in need of work. As they talk, something surprises the hens and the sow in the nearby barn, but Salter doesn’t notice. Salter underpays and doesn’t feed Culla. He lectures him on the sin of laziness and the sacredness of family; it’s implied that the Black man who works for Salter is enslaved and that Salter has no family. Throughout the lecture, Culla stands with his head bowed; however, his shadow does not: “Their shadows canted upon the whitewashed brick of the kitchen shed in a pantomime of static violence in which the squire reeled backward and [Culla] leaned upon him in headlong assault” (30).

Early the next morning, Culla flees with Salter’s expensive boots. Learning of the theft, Salter sets out in a wagon with a shotgun; he thinks Culla also stole tools from his barn. In fact, the trio stole the tools—the barn in the second vignette belongs to Salter. Furthermore, it’s implied that the trio stole the tools within earshot of Culla and Salter as they talked the previous night.

On the road the trio ambushes Salter, and this is described in both the main narrative and in the third italicized vignette. They kill him with the stolen brush hook.

Unaware that Culla took their money, Rinthy gathers her few possessions before setting out in search of her baby, whom she believes Culla sold to the tinker. At a crossroads, she hides until Culla passes, then retraces his steps to the town. She asks for water at the general store and learns that Culla sold the shotgun. Rinthy intimates that Culla has committed far worse misdeeds than selling a shotgun he shouldn’t have. The shopkeeper agrees not to tell Culla or the tinker that Rinthy is looking for them if he sees them.

Rinthy walks into the night and eventually finds a house in the woods. The patriarch, Luther, is initially suspicious of Rinthy and her odd story about hunting a tinker (she avoids answering why she’s hunting him); however, after some questioning, Luther invites her to stay the night. The family feeds Rinthy the most luxurious meal of her life.

After dinner, the matriarch shows Rinthy to an extra bed in the boys’ bedroom. When Rinthy goes outside to bathe, the eldest son, Bud, approaches her and awkwardly expresses his interest. She declines him and goes to bed. After a few minutes, Luther and Bud steal into the room and lie down. The three of them listen to each other’s breathing; amid the darkness, Rinthy longs for something familiar.

The following morning, Rinthy joins the family on their Sunday trip to a larger town. The women wear their church clothes while Rinthy wears her same deteriorating dress. They stop halfway at a spring to drink. Away from the others, Bud tells Rinthy the story of his grandmother having her nose severed by a falling stovepipe. When they board the wagon to continue, Bud slips and gashes his knee.

When they arrive in town, Rinthy thanks the family for their hospitality and declines their invitation to stay longer. At the store, she asks about the tinker; storekeepers are baffled that she’s hunting someone she knows almost nothing about. One storekeeper knows a tinker named Deitch, but since Rinthy doesn’t know what the tinker looks like, she doesn’t know whether they’re talking about the same person. Between stores, Bud finds Rinthy and insinuates that he’d trade money for sex, but she rejects him again. Having discovered nothing about the tinker, Rinthy eats lunch with the family and accepts their offer for a ride up the road.