The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

  He scanned their faces. What he saw in those eyes was very moving to him. The driver and the two other men in the cab of the truck had got down and were standing along the bed of the truck at the rear. All waited to see what he would say. In the end he told them that the accounts of the conflict were greatly exaggerated and that his brother was only fifteen years and that he himself was to blame for he should have cared better for his brother. He should not have carried him off to a strange country to be shot down in the street like a dog. They only shook their heads and repeated among themselves Boyd's age. Quince anos, they said. Que guapo. Que joven tan esforzado. In the end he thanked them for their care of his brother and touched the brim of his hat at which they all crowded again with their hands outstretched and he shook their hands again and the hands of the driver and the other two men standing in the road and then reined the horse around and rode past the truck and out along the road south. He heard the truckdoors slam behind him and heard the driver put the truck in gear and they rumbled slowly past him in the augmenting dust. The workers on the bed of the truck waved and some took off their hats and then one of them stood and steadied himself by one hand on the shoulder of his companion and raised one fist in the air and shouted to him. Hay justicia en el mundo, he called. Then they all rode on.

  He woke that night with the ground trembling beneath him and he sat up and looked for the horse. The horse stood with its head raised against the desert nightsky looking toward the west. A train was going downcountry, the pale yellow cone of the headlight boring slowly and sedately down the desert and the distant clatter of the wheeltrucks outlandish and mechanical in that dark waste of silence. Finally the small square windowlight of the caboose trailing after. It passed and left only the faint pale track of boilersmoke hanging over the desert and then came the long lonesome whistle echoing across the country where it called for the crossing at Las Varas.

  He rode into Boquilla at noon with the shotgun across the pommel of the saddle. There was no one about. He took the road south to Santa Ana de Babicora. Towards dark he began to come upon riders riding north toward Boquilla, young men and boys with their black hair slicked down on their skulls and their boots polished and the cheap cotton shirts they wore that had been pressed with hot bricks. It was Saturday night and they were going to a dance. They nodded gravely, mounted on burros or on the little distaff mules from the mines. He nodded back, his eyes watching every movement, the shotgun upright against him with the buttstock cradled against his inner thigh. The good horse he rode flaring its nostrils at them. When he rode through La Pinta on the high juniper plain above the Santa Maria River Valley the moon was up and when he rode into Santa Ana de Babicora it was midnight and the town was dark and empty. He watered the horse in the alameda and took the road west to Namiquipa. An hour's ride he came to a small stream that was part of the headwaters of the Santa Maria and turned the horse off down out of the road and hobbled him in the river grass and rolled himself into his serape and slept in dreamless exhaustion.

  When he woke the sun was hours high. He walked down to the creek carrying his boots and stood in the water and bent and washed his face. When he raised up and looked for the horse the horse was standing looking toward the road. In a few minutes a rider came along. Coming down the road on the horse his mother used to ride was the girl wearing a new dress of blue cotton and a small straw hat with a green ribbon that hung down her back. Billy watched her pass and when she was out of sight he sat in the grass and studied his boots standing there and the slow passing of the small river and the tops of the grass that bent and recovered constantly in the morning breeze. Then he reached for the boots and pulled them on and stood and walked up and bridled and saddled the horse and mounted up and rode out into the road and set out behind her.

  When she heard the horse on the road she put her hand on top of her hat and turned and looked back. Then she stopped. He slowed the horse and rode up to her. She fixed him with her dark eyes.

  Esta muerto? she said. Esta muerto?

  No.

  No me mienta.

  Le juro por Dios.

  Gracias a Dios. Gracias a Dios. She slid from the horse and dropped the reins and knelt in her new clothes in the dry rutted clay of the road and blessed herself and closed her eyes and folded her hands to pray.

  An hour later when they rode back through Santa Ana de Babicora she'd still hardly spoken. It was almost noon and they rode up the one mud street past the lowslung rows of slumped mud buildings and the half dozen painted trees that composed the alameda and on across the upland desert plain again. He saw nothing that looked like a tienda in the town and he'd nothing with which to buy anything if there had been one. She rode a sedate dozen paces behind him and he looked back at her once or twice but she did not smile nor acknowledge him in any way and after a while he didn't look anymore. He knew she'd not left her house without provisions but she didnt mention it and neither did he. A little ways north of the town she spoke behind him and he stopped and turned the horse in the road.

  Tienes hambre? she said.

  He thumbed his hat back and looked at her. I could eat the runnin gears of a bull moose, he said.

  Mande?

  They ate in a grove of acacia by the roadside. She spread her serape and laid out tortillas in a cloth and tamales in their corded wraps of cornhusk and a small jar of frijoles from which she unscrewed the lid and in which she stood a wooden spoon. She opened a cloth containing four empanadas. Two ears of cold corn dusted with red chile powder. The quarter part of a small wheel of goatcheese.

  She sat with her legs tucked under her, her head turned for the brim of the hat to shade her face. They ate. When he asked her didnt she want to know about Boyd she said she already knew. He watched her. She seemed fragilely wrapped in her clothing. On her left wrist there was a blue discoloration. Other than that her skin was so perfect it appeared oddly false. As if it had been painted on.

  Tienes miedo de los hombres, he said.

  Cuales hombres?

  Todos los hombres.

  She turned and looked at him. She looked down. He thought that she was reflecting upon the question but she only brushed an escarabajo from the serape and reached and took up one of the empanadas and bit delicately into it.

  Y quizas tienes razon, he said.

  Quizas.

  She looked off to where the horses stood in the roadside grass, their tails whisking. He thought she would say no more but she began to talk about her family. She said that her grandmother had been widowed by the revolution and married again and was widowed again within the year and married a third time and was a third time widowed and wed no more although there were opportunities enough for her to do so as she was a great beauty and not yet twenty years of age when the last husband fell as detailed by his own uncle at Torreon with one hand over his breast in a gesture of fidelity sworn, clutching the rifleball to him like a gift, the sword and pistol he carried falling away behind him useless in the palmettos, in the sand, the riderless horse stepping about in the melee of shot and shell and the cries of men, trotting off with the stirrups flapping, coming back, wandering in silhouette with others of its kind among the bodies of the dead on that senseless plain while the dark drew down around them all about and small birds driven from their arbors in the thorns returned and flitted about and chittered and the moon rose blind and white in the east and the little jackal wolves came trotting that would eat the dead from out of their clothes.

  She said that her grandmother was skeptical of many things in this world and of none more than men. She said that in every trade save war men of talent and vigor prosper. In war they die. Her grandmother spoke to her often of men and she spoke with great earnestness and she said that rash men were a great temptation to women and this was simply a misfortune like others and there was little that could be done to remedy it. She said that to be a woman was to live a life of difficulty and heartbreak and those who said otherwise simply had no wish to face the facts. And sh
e said that since this was so nor could it be altered one was better to follow one's heart in joy and in misery than simply to seek comfort for there was none. To seek it was only to welcome in the misery and to know little else. She said that these were things all women knew yet seldom spoke of. Lastly she said that if women were drawn to rash men it was only that in their secret hearts they knew that a man who would not kill for them was of no use at all.

  She had finished eating. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and the things she'd said sorted oddly with her composure. The road was empty, the country silent. He asked her if she thought that Boyd would kill a man. She turned and studied him. As if he were someone for whom words must be weighed so as to accommodate their understanding. Finally she said that the word was abroad in the country. That all the world knew that the guerito had killed the gerente from Las Varitas. The man who had betrayed Socorro Rivera and sold out his own people to the Guardia Blanca of La Babicora.

  Billy listened to all this and when she was done he said that the manco had fallen from his horse and broken his back and that he himself had seen it happen.

  He waited. After a while she looked up.

  Quieres algo mas? she said.

  No. Gracias.

  She began to pack up the remains of their picnic. He watched her but he made no move to help. He rose and she folded the serape and rolled the remainder of the provisions in it and retied it with the cords.

  No sabes nada de mi hermano, he said.

  Quizas, she said.

  She stood with the rolled serape over her shoulder.

  Por que no me contesta? he said.

  She looked up at him. She said that she had answered him. She said that in every family there is one who is different and the others believe that they know that person but they do not know that person. She said that she herself was such a one and knew whereof she spoke. Then she turned and walked out to where the horses were grazing in the dusty roadside weeds and tied the serape on behind the cantle and tightened the cinch and stood up into the saddle.

  He mounted up and rode the horse past her into the road. Then he stopped and looked back. He said that there were things about his brother that only his family could know and that as his family was dead there was no one who knew save he. Every small thing. Any time that he was sick as a child or the day he was bitten by a scorpion and thought he was going to die or any of his life in another part of the country that even Boyd remembered little of or none at all including his grandmother and his twin sister dead and buried in that long ago in a place he'd likely never see again.

  Sabias que el tenia una gemela? he said. Que murio cuando tenia cinco anos?

  She said that she did not know that Boyd had once had a twin sister or that she died but that it was not important for now he had another. Then she put the horse forward and went past him and into the road.

  An hour later they overtook three young girls afoot. Two of them carried a basket between them with a cloth over it. They were on their way to the pueblo of Soto Maynez and they had yet a ways to go. They looked back when they heard the riders on the road behind them and they huddled together laughing and when the riders passed they pushed one another to the verge of the road and looked up with their quick dark eyes and laughed behind their hands. Billy touched his hat and rode on but the girl stopped and walked the horse beside them and when he looked back she was talking to them. They were little younger than she but she was calling them to task in that same low flat voice. Finally they stopped and stood back against the roadside chaparral but here she halted the horse entirely and continued until she was done. Then she turned and put the horse forward and did not look back.

  They rode all day. It was dark when they entered La Boquilla and he rode through the town as he had come with the shotgun upright before him. When they passed the spot where the manco had fallen she made the sign of the cross and kissed her fingers. Then they rode on. The sparse trunks of the painted alameda trees stood pale as bone in the light from the windows. Some windows of glass but mostly oiled butcherpaper tacked up in frames and behind them neither movement nor shadow but only those sallow squares like parchments or old barren maps long weathered of any trace of their terrains or routes upon them. On the outskirts of the settlement there was a fire burning just off the roadside and they slowed and rode past cautiously but the fire appeared to be only a trashfire and there was no one about and they rode on into the dark country to the west.

  That night they camped in a swale at the edge of the lake and shared the last of the provisions she'd brought. When he asked her would she not have been afraid to ride through this country by herself at night she said that there was no remedy for it and that one must put oneself in the care of God.

  He asked if God always looked after her and she studied the heart of the fire for a long time where the coals breathed bright and dull and bright again in the wind from the lake. At last she said that God looked after everything and that one could no more evade his care than evade his judgment. She said that even the wicked could not escape his love. He watched her. He said that he himself had no such idea of God and that he'd pretty much given up praying to Him and she nodded without taking her eyes from the fire and said that she knew that.

  She took her blanket and went off down by the lake. He watched her go and then shucked off his boots and rolled his serape about him and fell into a troubled sleep. He woke sometime in the night or in the early morning and turned and looked at the fire to see how long he'd slept but the fire was all but cold on the ground. He looked to the east to see if there were any trace of dawn graying over the country but there was only the darkness and the stars. He prodded the ashes with a stick. The few red coals that turned up in the fire's black heart seemed secret and improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best been left alone. He rose and walked down to the lake with the serape about his shoulders and he looked at the stars in the lake. The wind had died and the water lay black and still. It lay like a hole in that high desert world down into which the stars were drowning. Something had woke him and he thought perhaps he'd heard riders on the road and that they'd seen his fire but there was no fire to see and then he thought perhaps the girl had risen and come to the fire and stood over him where he slept and he remembered tasting rain on his face but there was no rain nor had there been and then he remembered his dream. In the dream he was in another country that was not this country and the girl who knelt by him was not this girl. They knelt in the rain in a darkened city and he held his dying brother in his arms but he could not see his face and he could not say his name. Somewhere among the black and dripping streets a dog howled. That was all. He looked out at the lake where there was no wind but only the dark stillness and the stars and yet he felt a cold wind pass. He crouched in the sedge by the lake and he knew he feared the world to come for in it were already written certainties no man would wish for. He saw pass as in a slow tapestry unrolled images of things seen and unseen. He saw the shewolf dead in the mountains and the hawk's blood on the stone and he saw a glass hearse with black drapes pass in a street carried on poles by mozos. He saw the castaway bow floating on the cold waters of the Bavispe like a dead serpent and the solitary sexton in the ruins of the town where the terremoto had passed and the hermit in the broken transept of the church at Caborca. He saw rainwater dripping from a lightbulb screwed into the sheetiron wall of a warehouse. He saw a goat with golden horns tethered in a field of mud.

  Lastly he saw his brother standing in a place where he could not reach him, windowed away in some world where he could never go. When he saw him there he knew that he had seen him so in dreams before and he knew that his brother would smile at him and he waited for him to do so, a smile which he had evoked and to which he could find no meaning to ascribe and he wondered if what at last he'd come to was that he could no longer tell that which had passed from all that was but a seeming. He must have knelt there a long time because the sky in the east did grow gray with daw
n and the stars sank at last to ash in the paling lake and birds began to call from the far shore and the world to appear again once more.

  They rode out early with nothing to eat save the last few tortillas dried and hardening at the edges. She rode behind him and they did not speak and in this manner they rode at noon across the wooden river bridge and into Las Varas.

  There were few people about. They bought beans and tortillas at a small tienda and they bought four tamales from an old woman who sold them in the street out of a steel oildrum sashed up in a wooden frame with castiron wheels from off an orecart. The girl paid the woman and they sat in a stack of pinon firewood behind a store and ate in silence. The tamales smelled and tasted of charcoal. While they were eating a man approached them and smiled and nodded. Billy looked at the girl, she looked at him. He looked at the horse and at the stock of the shotgun jutting from the boot under the saddle.

  No me recuerdas, the man said.

  Billy looked at him again. He looked at his boots. It was the arriero last seen on the steps of the opera caravan in the roadside grove south of San Diego.

  Le conozco, Billy said. Como le va?

  Bien. He looked at the girl. Donde esta su hermano?

  Ya esta en San Diego.

  The arriero nodded sagely. As if he understood some situation.

  Donde esta la caravana? said Billy.

  He said he did not know. He said that they had waited by the side of the road but that no one had ever returned.

  Como no?

  The arriero shrugged. He made a chopping motion with the heel of his hand out through the air. Se fue, he said.

  Con el dinero.

  Claro.

  He said that they'd been left without resources or any means to travel. At the time of his own departure the duena had sold all the mules save one and bickering had broken out. When Billy asked what she would do he shrugged again. He looked away down the street. He looked at Billy. He asked him if he could spare him a few pesos so that he could get something to eat.

  Billy said that he had no money but the girl had already risen and walked out to the horse and when she returned she gave the arriero some coins and he thanked her a number of times and bowed and touched his hat and put the coins in his pocket and wished them a good voyage and turned and went off down the street and disappeared into the sole cantina in that upland pueblo.