What you're missing is some context to McCarthy's writing which is the specific voice he uses in a book like Orchard Keeper (in addition to the plot of course).

What you're missing is some context to McCarthy's writing which is the specific voice he uses in a book like Orchard Keeper (in addition to the plot of course). It's a southern style famously associated with Faulkner and meant to mimic the spoken word of regional Southern areas in many ways. It helps to read it out loud. You called it "ambiguous", but McCarthy's writing is often extremely verbose, an avalanche of specificity, painting extremely evocative landscapes and imagery. Here for instance is his famous description of a Comanche sneak attack: > A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.