The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

  No one passed the day long. In the afternoon he went once more to look for the other horse. He thought maybe it had gone upriver or that the highwaymen had taken it but in any case he never saw it again. By dark the matches had dried and he built a fire and put some beans to boil and sat by the fire and listened to the river passing in the dark. The cottoncolored moon that had stood in the daysky to the east rose overhead and he lay in his blankets and watched to see if any birds might cross before it on their way upriver north but if they did he did not see them and after a while he slept.

  In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he'd done times by the hundreds and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he'd no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he'd come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.

  He was asleep in the morning when he heard the shouts of arrieros and the crack of whips and a wild singing in the woods downriver. He pulled on his boots and walked out to where the horse lay in the leaves. Its side rose and fell beneath the blanket that he had feared would be stiff and cold and it turned up one eye to him as he knelt over it. An eye in which lay cupped the sky and arching trees and his own nearing face. He placed one hand over the animal's chest where the mud had caked and dried and broken. The hair was stiff and bristly with dried blood. He stroked the muscled shoulder and spoke to the horse and the horse exhaled slowly through its nose.

  He fetched water again in his hat but the horse could not drink without rising. He sat and wet its mouth with his hand and listened to the arrieros on the track drawing nearer and after a while he rose and walked out and stood waiting for them.

  They appeared out of the trees driving a team of six yoked oxen and they wore costumes such as he'd never seen before. Indians or gypsies perhaps by the bright colors of the shirts and the sashes that they wore. They drove the oxen with jerkline and jockeystick and the oxen labored and swayed in the traces and their breath steamed in the morning cold. Behind them on a handmade float built from green lumber and carried on old truckaxles was an airplane. It was of some ancient vintage and it was disassembled and the wings tied down with ropes alongside the fuselage. The rudder in the vertical stabilizer swung back and forth in small erratic movements with the jostling of the float as if to make corrections in their course and the oxen swayed heavily in their harness and the mismatched rubber tires rumpled softly over the stones and through the weeds on either side of the narrow track.

  The drovers when they saw him raised their hands in greeting and cried out. Almost as if they'd been expecting to come upon him soon or late. They wore necklaces and silver bracelets and some wore hooplets of gold in their ears and they called out to him and pointed along the narrow road upstream in the river's bend to a grassy flat where they would stop and rendezvous. The airplane was little more than a skeleton with sunbleached shreds of linen the color of stewed rhubarb clinging to the steambent ashwood ribs and stays and inside you could see the wires and cables that ran aft to the rudder and elevators and the cracked and curled and sunblacked leather of the seats and in their tarnished nickel bezels the glass of instrument dials glaucous and clouded from the pumicing of the desert sands. The wingstruts were tied in bundles alongside and the blades of the propellor were bent back along the cowling and the landingstruts were bent beneath the fuselage.

  They passed on and halted in the flat and they left the youngest among them to tend the animals and then they came back down the track rolling cigarettes and passing among them an esclarajo made from a 50 caliber shellcasing in which burned a bit of tow. They were gypsies from Durango and the first thing that they asked him was what was the matter with the horse.

  He told them that the horse was wounded and that he thought its condition was serious. One of them asked him when this had occurred and he said that it was the day before. He sent one of the younger men back to the float and in a few minutes he returned with an old canvas musette bag. Then they all walked up through the trees to look at the horse.

  They gypsy knelt in the leaves and looked first into the animal's eyes. Then he pinched away the cracked mud from its chest and looked at the wound. He looked up at Billy.

  Herida de cuchillo, said Billy.

  The gypsy's expression did not change and he did not take his eyes from Billy. Billy looked at the other men. They were squatting on their haunches about the horse. He thought that if the horse died they might eat it. He said that the horse had been attacked by a lunatic one of four among a band of robbers. The man nodded. He passed his hand across the underside of his chin. He did not look at the horse again. He asked Billy if he wanted to sell the horse and Billy knew for the first time that the horse would live.

  They squatted there, all watching him. He looked at the drover. He said that the horse had belonged to his father and that he could not part with him and the man nodded and opened the bag.

  Porfirio, he said. Traigame agua.

  He looked down through the trees toward Billy's camp where a thin wisp of smoke stood in the morning air motionless as rope. He called after the man to put the water to boil and then looked at Billy again. Con su permiso, he said.

  Por supuesto.

  Ladrones.

  Si. Ladrones.

  The drover looked down at the horse. He gestured with his chin out toward the tree where Boyd's bones were lodged in their trussings.

  Que tiene alla? he said.

  Los huesos de mi hermano.

  Huesos, said the gypsy. He turned and looked toward the river where his man had gone with the bucket. The other three men crouched waiting. Rafael, he said. Lena. He turned to Billy and smiled. He looked about at the little grove of trees and he put the flat of his hand to his cheek in a curious gesture such as a man might make who remembers he has forgotten something. He wore on one forefinger an ornate ring of gold and jewels and he wore a golden rope about his throat. He smiled again and gestured toward the fire that they proceed there.

  They collected wood and built back the fire and they fetched rocks to make a trivet and there they set the bucket to boil. Soaking in the pail were several handfuls of small green leaves and the waterbearer had covered the bucket with what looked to be an old brass cymbal and all sat about the fire and watched the bucket and after a while it began to steam among the flames.

  The one called Rafael lifted the cover with a stick and laid the cover by and stirred the green froth within and then put the cover back again. A pale green tea ran down the sides of the bucket and hissed in the fire. The chief of the drovers sat rolling a cigarette. He passed the cloth pouch on to the man beside him and he leaned and took a burning branch from the fire and with his head cocked to one side lit the cigarette and then put the branch back in the fire. Billy asked him if he himself was not afraid of robbers in that country but the man only said that the robbers were loath to molest the gitanos for they also were men of the road.

  Y adonde van con el aeroplano? said Billy.

  The gypsy gestured with his chin. Al norte, he said.

  They smoked. The bucket steamed. The gypsy smiled.

  Con respecto al aeroplano, he said, hay tres historias. Cual quiere oir?

  Billy smiled. He said that he wished to hear the true history.

  The gypsy pursed his lips. He seemed to be considering t
he plausibility of this. Finally he said that it was necessary to state that there were two such airplanes, both of them flown by young Americans, both lost in the mountains in the calamitous summer of nineteen fifteen.

  He drew deeply upon the cigarette and blew the smoke toward the fire. Certain facts were known, he said. There was common ground and there one could begin. This airplane had sat in the high desert mountains of Sonora and the wind and the blowing sand had flayed it of its fabric and passing indians had pried away and carried off the brass inspection plate from the instrument panel for amulet and there it had languished on in that wild upcountry lost and unclaimed and indeed unclaimable for nearly thirty years. Thus far all was a single history. Whether there be two planes or one. Whichever plane was spoken of it was the same.

  He drew carefully at the stub of the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, one dark eye asquint against the smoke rising past his nose in the motionless air. Finally Billy asked him whether it made any difference which plane it was since there was no difference to be spoken of. The gypsy nodded. He seemed to approve of the question although he did not answer it. He said that the father of the dead pilot had contracted for the removal of the airplane to a place on the border just east of Palomas. He had sent his agent to the town of Madera--pueblo que conoce--and this agent was himself such a man as might ask just such a question.

  He smiled. He smoked the last of the cigarette to an ash and let the ash fall into the fire and blew the smoke slowly after. He licked his thumb and wiped it on the knee of his trousers. He said that for men of the road the reality of things was always of consequence. He said that the strategist did not confuse his devices with the reality of the world for then what would become of him? El mentiroso debe primero saber la verdad, he said. De acuerdo?

  He nodded toward the fire. The watercarrier rose and jostled the coals with a stick and fed more wood under the pail and returned to his place again. The gypsy waited till he was done. Then he continued. He spoke of the identity of the little canvas biplane as having no meaning except in its history and he said that since this tattered artifact was known to have a sister in the same condition the question of identity had indeed been raised. He said that men assume the truth of a thing to reside in that thing without regard to the opinions of those beholding it while that which is fraudulent is held to be so no matter how closely it might duplicate the required appearance. If the airplane which their client has paid to be freighted out of the wilderness and brought to the border were in fact not the machine in which the son has died then its close resemblance to that machine is hardly a thing in its favor but is rather one more twist in the warp of the world for the deceiving of men. Where then is the truth of this? The reverence attached to the artifacts of history is a thing men feel. One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie?

  The gypsy looked away upriver to where the airplane sat beyond the trees. He seemed to ponder its shape there. As if were contained in that primitive construction some yet uncoded clue to the campaigns of the revolution, the strategies of Angeles, the tactics of Villa. Y por que lo quiere el cliente? he said. Que despues de todo no es nada mas que el ataud de su hijo?

  No one answered. After a while the gypsy continued. He said that he'd thought at one time that the client wished simply to have the aircraft as a memento. He whose son's bones were themselves long scattered on the sierra. Now his thought was different. He said that as long as the airplane remained in the mountains then its history was of a piece. Suspended in time. Its presence on the mountain was its whole story frozen in a single image for all to contemplate. The client thought and he thought rightly that could he remove that wreckage from where it lay year after year in rain and snow and sun then and then only could he bleed it of its power to commandeer his dreams. The gypsy gestured with one hand in a slow suave gesture. La historia del hijo termina en las montanas, he said. Y por alla queda la realidad de el.

  He shook his head. He said that simple tasks often prove most difficult. He said that in any case this gift from the mountains had no real power to quiet an old man's heart because once more its journey would be stayed and nothing would be changed. And the identity of the airplane would be brought into question which in the mountains was no question at all. It was forcing a decision. It was a difficult matter. And as is so often the case God had finally taken a hand and decided things himself. For ultimately both airplanes were carried down from the mountain and one was in the Rio Papigochic and the other was before them. Como lo ve.

  They waited. Rafael rose again and prodded the fire and he lifted the lid from the pail and stirred the steaming soup within and recovered it. The gypsy in the meantime had rolled another cigarette and lit it. He considered how to continue.

  Town of Madera. A stained and whimsical map printed on poor paper already severing at the folds. A canvas bankbag full of silver pesos. Two men met almost by chance neither of whom would ever trust the other. The gypsy thinned his lips in what would not quite pass for a smile. He said that where expectations are few disappointments are rare. They had gone into the mountains in the fall two years ago and they had built a sled from the limbs of trees and by this conveyance had brought the wreckage to the rim of the great gorge of the Papigochic River. There with rope and windlass they would lower the thing to the river and there build a raft by which to ferry it carcass and wings and struts all down to the bridge on the Mesa Tres Rios road and from there overland to the border west of Palomas. Snow drove them from the high country before they ever reached the river.

  The other men about that pale dayfire seemed to attend his words closely. As if they themselves were only recent conscriptees to this enterprise. The gypsy spoke slowly. He described to them the nature of the country where the airplane had gone down. The wildness of it and the high grassy vegas and the deep barrancas where the days were polar in their brevity, barrancas in the floor of which great rivers looked no more than bits of string. They quit the country and returned again in the spring. They had no money left. A seeress tried to warn them back. One of their own. He had weighed the woman's words, but he knew what she did not. That if a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream? He paused that all might contemplate this. That he might contemplate it himself. Then he continued. He spoke of the cold in the mountains at that season. He populated the terrain for them with certain birds and animals. Parrots. Tigers. Men of another time living in the caves of that country so remote that the world had overlooked to kill them. The Tarahumara standing half naked along the sheer rock wall of the void while the fuselage and the wingstructure of the broken plane dangled in the blue and grew small and turned slowly in the deepening gulf of the barranca silent and chimeless and far below them the shapes of vultures in slow spirals like bits of ash in an updraft.

  He spoke of the rapids in the river and the great rocks that stood in the gorge and the rain in the mountains in the night and the way the river went howling through the narrows like a train and at night the rain which had fallen for miles into that ultimate sundering of the earth's rind hissed in their driftwood fires and the solid rock about them through which the water roared would shudder like a woman and if they spoke to one another no words formed in the air for the awful noise in that nether world.

  They passed nine days in the gorge while the rain fell and the river rose until at last they were socketed high in a rocky crevice like refugent woodmice seven of them without food or fire and the whole gorge trembling as if the world itself were like
to cleave beneath them and swallow up all and they posted watches in the night until he himself asked what it was they watched for? What do if it came?

  The brass cymbal over the bucket rose slightly along one edge and a green froth belched forth and ran down the side of the bucket and the cymbal fell again soundlessly. The gitano reached and tipped the end of ash from his cigarette thoughtfully into the coals.

  Nueve dias. Nueve noches. Sin comida. Sin fuego. Sin nada. The river rose and they tied the raft with the windlass ropes and then with vines and the river rose and ate away the raft by pole and by plank and nothing to be done for it and the rain fell. First the wings were swept away. They hung he and his men from the rocks in the howling darkness like beleaguered apes and screamed mutely to one another in the maelstrom and his primo Macio descended to secure the fuselage although what use it could be without the wings none knew and Macio himself was nearly swept away and lost. On the morning of the tenth day the rain ceased. They made their way along the rocks in the wet gray dawn but all sign of their enterprise had vanished in the flood as if it had never been at all. The river continued to rise and on the morning of the day following while they sat staring at the hypnotic flume below them a drowned man shot out of the cataract upriver like a pale enormous fish and circled once facedown in the froth of the eddy water beneath them as if he were looking for something on the river's floor and then he was sucked away downriver to continue his journey. He'd come already a long way in his travels by the look of him for his clothes were gone and much of his skin and all but the faintest nap of hair upon his skull all scrubbed away by his passage over the river rocks. In his circling in the froth he moved all loosely and disjointed as if there were nd bones to him. Some incubus or mannequin. But when he passed beneath them they could see revealed in him that of which men were made that had better been kept from them. They could see bones and ligaments and they could see the tables of his smallribs and through the leached and abraded skin the darker shapes of organs within. He circled and gathered speed and then exited in the roaring flume as if he had pressing work downriver.