The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

  Quien es usted, ciego? they said. He told his name but none knew him. Someone cut and gave to him a greenwood stave and with this as his sole possession he set out alone afoot on the road to Parral.

  He told the time of day by turning his face to the sightless sun like a worshipper. By the sounds of the countryside. The coolness of the night, the damp. By the calls of birds and by the first warmth of the rumored light upon his skin. People brought him water and food from the houses he passed and provisioned him for the road ahead. Dogs that came bristling into the road to challenge him slank away again. He was surprised at the authority which his blindness conferred upon him. He seemed to want for nothing.

  There had been rain in the country and wildflowers bloomed by the roadside. He made his way slowly, tracking the ruts with his greenwood stick. He'd no boots for they'd long been stolen and those first days he walked barefoot and his heart was filled with despair. More than filled. Despair was in him like a lodger. Like a parasite that had turned out his very being from its abode and taken up the shape of that space within him where it once had been. He could feel it lodged against his throat. He could not eat. He sipped water from a cup proffered anonymously out of the world's dark and handed the cup away into that dark again. His liberation from the carcel meant little to him and there were days his freedom seemed to him no more than just some further curse and in this condition he tapped his way slowly north along the road to Parral.

  In the cool dark of his first night alone in the country it had rained and he stopped and listened and he could hear the rain coming across the desert. Borne on the wind the smell of wet creosote bush. He lifted his face and stood by the roadside and his thoughts were that other than wind and rain nothing would ever come again to touch him out of that estrangement that was the world. Not in love, not in enmity. The bonds that fixed him in the world had become rigid. Where he moved the world moved also and he could never approach it and he could never escape it. He sat in the roadside weeds in the rain and wept.

  On the morning of his third day abroad he entered the town of Juan Ceballos and there he stood in the road with his cane aloft and turned, listening, squinting his terrible squint. But the dogs had already crept away and a woman spoke to him at his right side and asked that she might take his hand and he gave it.

  Y adonde va? she said.

  He said he did not know. He said that he was going where the road went. The wind. The will of God.

  La voluntad de Dios, she said. As if choosing.

  She took him to her house. He sat at a rough board table and she gave him a pozole with fruit to eat but he could not eat it for all that she urged him. She asked him to tell her from whence he'd come but he was ashamed of his condition and he would not say how his calamity had befallen him. She asked him had he always been blind and he weighed this question and after a while he said that yes he had.

  When he left he wore on his feet a pair of old patched huaraches and he carried over his shoulder a thin serape. In the pocket of his ragged breeches a few copper coins. Men talking in the street fell silent at his approach and spoke again when he had passed. As if it might be that he were some deputy of darkness sent to spy among them. As if words carried away by a blind man might thereby come to have a life unreckoned with and be met with elsewhere in the world bearing a meaning never intended by those who'd uttered them. He turned in the road and held his cane aloft. Ustedes no saben nada de mi, he shouted. They fell silent and he turned and went on and after a while he could hear them talking again.

  That night he heard the sounds of battle far distant on the plain and he stood in the dark and listened. He tested the wind for the smell of cordite and listened for sounds of men and horses but all he could hear was the faint rattle of riflefire and the periodic heavy dull report of a howitzer firing cannister shot and after a while nothing.

  The next morning early his cane clattered before him on the boards of a bridge. He stopped. He reached and tapped forward. He stepped carefully onto the boards and stood and listened. He could hear much muted beneath him the sound of water running.

  He made his way down along the small river bank and pushed through the rushes till he came to the water. He reached out and touched it with his cane. He slashed at the water and then he stopped. He raised his head to listen.

  Quien esta? he called.

  No one answered back.

  He laid aside his serape and stripped out of his rags and took up his cane again and thin and naked and filthy he waded into the river.

  He waded out wondering if the water might perhaps be deep enough to bear him away. He imagined that in his estate of eternal night he might somehow have already halved the distance to death. That the transition for him could not be so great for the world was already at some certain distance and if it were not death's terrain he encroached upon in his darkness then whose?

  The water came but to his knees. He stood in the river, he steadied himself with his staff. Then he sat. The water was cool, it moved slowly about him. He lowered his face to take its odor, to taste it. He sat for a long time. In the distance he heard a bell that tolled slowly three times and ceased. He got to his knees and then leaned forward and lay facedown in the water. He placed the staff yokewise across his neck and held it in his two hands. He held his breath. He gripped his staff and he held it for a long time. When he could hold it no longer he breathed out and then tried to breathe the water in but he could not and the next thing he was kneeling in the river gasping and coughing. He'd let go his cane and it had drifted away and he rose and floundered about coughing and sucking in air and flailing at the river surface with the flat of his hand. To the man standing on the bridge he must have seemed deranged. Must have seemed to be attempting to calm the river, or something in the river. Until he saw those barren eyecups.

  A la izquierda, he called.

  The blind man stopped. He crouched with his arms crossed before him.

  A su izquierda, called the man.

  The blind man patted the water to his left.

  A tres metros, called the man. Pronto. Se va.

  He lurched forward. He groped about. The man on the bridge called out coordinates and finally his hand closed upon his staff and he sat down in the river for modesty and clutched the cane to him.

  Que hace, ciego? the man called.

  Nada. No me molesta.

  Yo? Le molesto? Ciego, ciego.

  He said that he had thought the blind man was drowning and was on the point of coming to his rescue when he saw him raise up sputtering.

  The blind man sat with his back turned to the bridge and the road. He could smell tobacco smoke and after a while he asked the man if he could have a cigarette.

  Por supuesto.

  He rose and waded ashore. Donde esta mi ropa? he called.

  The man directed him to his clothes. When he had dressed he made his way up to the road and he and the man sat on the bridge smoking. The sun felt good on his back. The man said that there was not enough water in the river to drown oneself and the blind man nodded. He said that in any case there was not enough privacy.

  The blind man said that there was a church nearby, no? His friend told him that there was no church. That there was nothing at all anywhere in sight. The blind man said that he had heard a bell and the man said that he had had an uncle who was blind and he too often heard things which were not.

  The blind man shrugged. He said he was only newly blinded. The man asked him why he thought the sound of bells must be from a church but the blind man only shrugged again and smoked. He asked what other sound a church would make.

  The man asked him why he wished to die but the blind man said that it was not important. The man asked if it was because he could not see and he said that it was a reason among reasons. They smoked. Finally the blind man told him about his conjecture that the blind had already partly quit the world anyway. He said that he had become but a voice to speak in a darkness incommensurable with the motives of life. He sa
id that the world and all in it had become to him but a rumor. A suspicion. He shrugged. He said that he did not wish to be blind. That he had outlived his estate.

  The man heard him out, they sat in silence. The blind man heard the faint hiss of the other's cigarette in the water beneath him. Finally the man said that it was a sin to lose heart and anyway the world remained as it had always been. That much was undeniable. When the blind man did not answer he told the blind man to touch him but the blind man was loath to do so.

  Con permiso, the man said. He took the blind man's hand and placed his fingers on his lips. There the blind man's fingers lay. In the gesture of one adjuring another to silence.

  Toca, the man said. The blind man would not. He took the blind man's hand again and he moved it upon his face. Toca, he said. Si el mundo es ilusion la perdida del mundo es ilusion tambien.

  The blind man sat with his hand to the man's face. Then he began to move it. A face of no determinate age. Dark or fair. He touched the narrow nose. The coarse straight hair. He touched the balls of the man's eyes beneath the thin closed lids. No sound in the high desert morning save their breathing. He felt the eyeballs move under his fingers. Small quick movements like the movements in a tiny womb. He drew his hand away. He said that he could tell nothing. Es una cara, he said. Pues que?

  The other man sat in silence. As if contemplating how to answer. He asked the blind man could he weep. The blind man said that any man could weep but what the man wished to know was could the blind weep tears from the places where their eyes had been, how could they do this? He did not know. He took a last draw from the cigarette and let it fall into the river. He said again that the world in which he made his way was very different from what men suppose and in fact was scarcely world at all. He said that to close one's eyes told nothing. Any more than sleeping told of death. He said that it was not a matter of illusion or no illusion. He spoke of the broad dryland barrial and the river and the road and the mountains beyond and the blue sky over them as entertainments to keep the world at bay, the true and ageless world. He said that the light of the world was in men's eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that there was naught there to see. He said that the world was sentient to its core and secret and black beyond men's imagining and that its nature did not reside in what could be seen or not seen. He said that he could stare down the sun and what use was that?

  These words seemed to silence his friend. They sat side by side on the bridge. The sun shone upon them. Finally the man asked him how he had come by such views and he answered that they were things he'd long suspected and that the blind have much to contemplate.

  They rose to go. The blind man asked his friend which way he was going. The man hesitated. He asked the blind man which way he. The blind man pointed with his stave.

  Al norte, he said.

  Al sur, said the other.

  He nodded. He offered his hand into the darkness and they said their farewell.

  Hay luz en el mundo, ciego, the man said. Como antes, asi ahora. But the blind man only turned away and set out as before on the road to Parral.

  Here the woman broke off her narrative and looked at the boy. The boy's eyelids were heavy. His head jerked.

  Esta despierto, el joven? said the blind man.

  The boy sat upright.

  Si, the woman said. Esta despierto.

  Hay luz?

  Si. Hay luz.

  The blind man sat erect and formal. His hands outspread palm down on the table before him. As if to steady the world, or himself in it. Continua, he said.

  Bueno, the woman said. Como en todos los cuentos hay tres viajeros con quienes nos encontramos en el camino. Ya nos hemos encontrado la mujer y el hombre. She looked at the boy. Puede acertar quien es el tercero?

  Un nino?

  Un nino. Exactamente.

  Pero es veridica, esta historia?

  The blind man broke in to say that indeed the tale was a true one. He said that they had no desire to entertain him nor yet even to instruct him. He said that it was their whole bent only to tell what was true and that otherwise they had no purpose at all.

  Billy asked how it could be that on the long road to Parral he should meet only three people but the blind man said that he did meet other people on that road and that he received from them many kindnesses but that the three strangers at issue were those with whom he spoke of his blindness and that they must therefore be the principals in a cuento whose hero was a blind man, whose subject was sight. Verdad?

  Es heroe, este ciego?

  For a while the blind man forbore to answer. Finally he said that it was best to wait and see. That it was best to judge for oneself. Then he gestured with one hand to the woman and she continued as before.

  He'd made his way north along the road as told until in nine days' time he reached the town of Rodeo on the Rio Oro. Everywhere he attracted gifts. Women came out to him. They stopped him in the road. They pressed upon him their own possessions and they offered to attend him some part of the way along the road. Walking at his elbow they described to him the village and the fields and the condition of the crops and they named to him the names of the persons who lived in the houses they passed and confided to him details of their domestic arrangements or spoke of the illnesses of the old. They told him of the sorrows in their lives. The death of friends, the inconstancy of lovers. They spoke of the faithlessness of husbands in a way that was a trouble to him and they clutched his arm and hissed the names of whores. None swore him to secrecy, none asked his name. The world unfolded to him in a way it had not before in his life.

  On the twenty-sixth of June of that year a company of Huertistas had passed through the town of Rodeo on their way east to Torreon. They arrived late in the night many of them drunk and all of them afoot and they bivouacked in the alameda and burned the benches for firewood and in the gray dawn rounded up those they said were rebel sympathizers and stood them against the mud wall of the granja and gave them cigarettes to smoke and then shot them dead while their children watched and their wives and mothers wailed and tore out their hair. When the blind man arrived the following day he fell unwittingly into a funeral enfiled along the gray mud street and before he could properly judge the events occurring about him a young girl had taken his hand and he was led out to the dusty cemetery at the outskirts of the town. There amid the poor wooden crosses and the crockery jars and cheap glass dishes that stood for offertory the first of the three cratewood coffins imperfectly blacked with coaloil and chimneysoot was placed upon the ground while the attending trumpeter played a melancholy martial air and an elder of the village spoke in lieu of priest for there was none. The girl clutched his hand, she leaned to him.

  Era mi hermano, she whispered.

  Lo siento, said the blind man.

  They lifted the dead man from the box and lowered him into the arms of two men who had scrambled down into the grave. There they laid him out on the raw dirt and composed his arms again upon his chest where they had fallen free and they laid a cloth across his face. Then these rude provisional sextons reached up and took the hands of their waiting friends and were helped up from the grave and the men shoveled each a spadeful of dirt down upon the dead man in his poor clothes, the gray caliche rattling dully and the women sobbing, and shouldered up the empty box and the lid to carry back to the village for the conveying of yet another body. The blind man could hear new people arriving in the little cemetery and soon he was led away a short distance through the shouldering crowd to stand again and hear yet another simple country oration.

  Quien es? he hissed.

  The girl clutched his hand. Otro hermano, she whispered.

  As they stood for the third burial the blind man leaned and asked how many of her family were to be buried but she said that this was the last.

  Otro hermano?

  Mi padre.
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  The clods rattled, the women wailed anew. The blind man put on his hat.

  Returning they passed in the road another cortege bound out for the cemetery and the blind man heard yet other weeping and other feet shuffling along under the dire weight of the dead they bore. No one spoke. When they had passed the girl led him forth into the road again and they went on as before.

  He asked the girl if there were any left alive of her household but she said there were none save only she for her mother was dead years since.

  It had rained in the night past and rained in the dead fire left by the assassins and the blind man could smell the wet ashes. They passed the clay granja where the wall that had been dark with blood was all washed clean again by women of the town as if no blood had ever been there. The girl told him of the executions and named each man who died and told who he was and how he stood and how he fell. The women were held back until the last man was shot and then the captain had stood aside and they rushed forward to try to hold the men in their arms as they died.

  Y tu? said the blind man.

  She'd gone first to her father but he was already dead. Then to each of her brothers in turn, the elder first. But they also were dead. She walked among the women where they squatted on the ground and held the dead bodies to themselves and rocked and wept. The soldiers went away. A dogfight broke out in the street. After a while some men came with carretas. She walked about carrying her father's hat. She didnt know what to do with it.

  She was still holding the hat in her lap at midnight sitting in the church when the sepulturero stopped to speak to her. He told her that she should go home but she said that her father and her brothers were dead in her house on their mats and a candle burned in the floor and that she had nowhere to sleep. She said that all her house was taken up with the dead and so she had come to the church. The sepulturero listened. Then he sat beside her on the raw wood bench. The hour was late, the church empty. They sat side by side holding their hats, she the sombrero of woven straw, he the dusty black fedora. She was crying. He sighed and seemed himself weary and cast down. He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation? It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.