The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

  I come down here cause I'd knocked up a girl in McAllen Texas and her daddy wanted to shoot me.

  Billy stared into the fire.

  You talk about runnin into the arms of that which you have fled from, the man said. You ever been shot?

  No.

  I have twice. The last time was in downtown Cuauhtemoc broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon. Everbody run. There was two Mennonite women picked me up out of the street and loaded me into a wagon or I'd still be layin there.

  Where'd they shoot you at?

  Right here, he said. He turned and pushed the hair back above his right temple. See there? You can see it.

  He leaned and spat into the fire and looked at the cigar and put it back in his mouth. He smoked. I aint crazy, he said.

  I never said you was.

  No. You might of thought it though.

  You might of thought it about me.

  Might.

  Did that happen or did you just say it?

  No. It happened.

  My brother was shot and killed down here. I'd come down to take him home. He was shot and killed south of here. Town called San Lorenzo.

  You can get killed down here about as quick as anything else you might decide to do.

  My daddy was shot and killed in New Mexico. That's his horse layin over yonder.

  It's a cruel world, the man said.

  He come out of Texas in nineteen and nineteen. He was about the age I am now. He was not born there. He was born in Missouri.

  I had a uncle was born in Missouri. His daddy fell off a wagon drunk in the mud one night goin through there and that's how it come about that he was born in Missouri.

  My mama was from off a ranch up in De Baca County. Her mother was a fullblooded Mexican didnt speak no english. She lived with us up until she died. I had a younger sister died when I was seven but I remember her just as plain. I went to Fort Sumner to try and find her grave but I couldnt find it. Her name was Margaret. I always liked that name for a girl. If I ever had a girl that's what I'd name her.

  I better get on.

  Well.

  Mind what I said about your fire.

  Well.

  You sound like you've had your share of troubles in this world.

  I just got to jabberin. I been more fortunate than most. There aint but one life worth livin and I was born to it. That's worth all the rest. My bud was better at it than me. He was a born natural. He was smarter than me too. Not just about horses. About everthing. Daddy knew it too. He knew it and he knew I knew it and that's all there was to say about it.

  I better get on.

  You take care.

  I will do it.

  He rose, he adjusted his hat. The moon was high and the sky had cleared. The river where it lay behind the trees looked like poured metal.

  This world will never be the same, the rider said. Did you know that?

  I know it. It aint now.

  FOUR DAYS LATER he set out north along the river with the remains of his brother trestled up in a travois he'd made from sapling poles dragging behind the horse. They were three days reaching the border. He rode past the first of the white obelisks marking the international boundary line west of Dog Springs and he crossed the ancient dry reservoir there. The old earthworks were broken out in places and he rode across the cracked clay floor of the reservoir with the travois poles rasping behind him. There were prints in the clay of cattle and antelope and of coyotes that had crossed after some recent rain and he came upon a place that was runed over all about with the random trident of cranetracks where the birds had glided in and stalked about upon that barren mud. He slept that night in his own country and he had a dream wherein he saw God's pilgrims laboring upon a darkened verge in the last of the twilight of that day and they seemed to be returning from some deep enterprise that was not of war nor were they yet in flight but rather seemed coming from some labor to which perhaps these and all other things stood subjugate. A dark arroyo separated him from the place where they were going and he looked to see if he could tell by the nature of their implements what it was that they had been about but they carried none and they toiled on in silence against a sky that was darkening all around and then they were gone. When he woke in the round darkness about he thought that something had indeed passed in the desert night and he was awake a long time but he had no sense that it would ever return again.

  The day following he rode through Hermanas and out along the dusty road west and that evening he sat the horse in the crossroads in front of the store in Hatchita and he looked away toward the southwest where the late sun was on the Animas Peaks and he knew that he would not be going there again. He crossed the Animas Valley slowly dragging the travois and he was all day in the doing of it. When he entered the town of Animas the morning of the following day it was Ash Wednesday by the calendar and the first folk he saw were Mexicans with sootmarks on their foreheads, five children and a woman walking singlefile along the dusty edge of the road out from the town. He wished them a good day but they only blessed themselves on seeing the body in the travois and passed on. He bought a spade at the hardware store and set out south from the town till he came to the little cemetery and he hobbled the horse and left it to graze outside the gates while he worked at digging the grave.

  He was down to his waist in the dry dirt and caliche when the sheriff pulled up and got out and walked down through the gate.

  I suspicioned it was you, he said.

  Billy paused and leaned on the spade and squinted up at him. He'd taken off his rag of a shirt and he reached and picked it up off the ground and wiped the sweat from his forehead with it and stood waiting.

  That's your brother lay in yonder I take it, the sheriff said.

  Yessir.

  The sheriff shook his head. He looked off out over the country. As if there was something about it that you just couldnt quite lay your hand on. He looked down at Billy.

  There aint much to say, is there?

  No sir. Not much.

  Well. You caint just travel around the country buryin people. Let me go see the judge and see if I can get him to issue a death certificate. I aint even sure whose property that is you're diggin in.

  Yessir.

  You come see me in Lordsburg tomorrow.

  All right.

  The sheriff pulled his hat down and shook his head again and turned and walked back out through the gate toward his car.

  Days to come he rode north to Silver City and west to Duncan Arizona and north again through the mountains to Glenwood, to Reserve. He worked for the Carrizozos and for the GS's and he left for no reason he could name and in July of that year he drifted south again to Silver City and took the old road east past the Santa Rita mines and on through San Lorenzo and the Black Range. A wind was coming off the mountains to the north and the prairie before him had darkened under the moving clouds. The horse shuffled along with its head down and the rider rode very erect with his hat pulled low across his eyes. The country was all catclaw and creosote on a gravel plain and there were no fences and little grass. A few miles on and he struck the blacktop road and sat the horse. A truck whined past and drew away into the distance. Eighty miles away the raw rock ranges of the Organ Mountains shining under the clouds in the paneled light of the late sun. As he watched they faded into shadow. The wind coming off the desert had spits of rain in it. He crossed through the bar ditch and rode up onto the blacktop and slowed the horse and looked back. The panicgrass volunteered along the selvedge of the road heeled and twisted in the wind. He turned back along the highway toward some buildings he'd seen. The castoff tirecasings from the overland trucks lay coiled and corrugated by the highwayside like the sloughed and sunblacked hides of old dryland saurians shed along the tarmac roadway there. The wind blew down from the north and then the rain blew down and went gusting in sheets across the road before him.

  They were three building of adobe set just off the road that had at one time been a waystation in that coun
try and the roofs were all but gone and most of the vigas carried off. There was an old rusty orange gaspump out front with the glass broken out of the top of it. He led the horse into the largest of the buildings and unsaddled it and stood the saddle in the floor. In one corner was a pile of hay and he kicked at it to loosen it up or perhaps just to see what it might contain. It was dry and dusty and held a depression where something had been sleeping. He went out and walked around behind the building and came back with an old hubcap and poured water in it from the canvas waterbag and held it for the horse to drink. Out through the wrecked wood sash of the windowframe he could see the road shining blackly in the rain.

  He got his blankets and spread them in the hay and he was sitting eating sardines out of a tin and watching the rain when a yellow dog rounded the side of the building and entered through the open door and stopped. It looked first at the horse. Then it swung its head and looked at him. It was an old dog gone gray about the muzzle and it was horribly crippled in its hindquarters and its head was askew someway on its body and it moved grotesquely. An arthritic and illjoined thing that crabbed sideways and sniffed at the floor to pick up the man's scent and then raised its head and nudged the air with its nose and tried to sort him from the shadows with its milky half blind eyes.

  Billy set the sardines carefully beside him. He could smell the thing in the damp. It stood there inside the door with the rain falling in the weeds and gravel behind it and it was wet and wretched and so scarred and broken that it might have been patched up out of parts of dogs by demented vivisectionists. It stood and then it shook itself in its grotesque fashion and hobbled moaning to the far corner of the room where it looked back and then turned three times and lay down.

  He wiped the blade of the knife on his breeches leg and laid the knife across the tin and looked about. He pried a loose clod of mud from the wall and threw it. The dog made a strange moaning sound but it did not move.

  Git, he shouted.

  The dog moaned, it lay as before.

  He swore softly and rose to his feet and cast about for a weapon. The horse looked at him and it looked at the dog. He crossed the room and went out in the rain and walked around the side of the building. When he came back he had in his fist a threefoot length of waterpipe and with it he advanced upon the dog. Go on, he shouted. Git.

  The dog rose moaning and slouched away down the wall and limped out into the yard. When he turned to go back to his blankets it slank past him into the building again. He turned and ran at it with the pipe and it scrabbled away.

  He followed it. Outside it had stopped at the edge of the road and it stood in the rain looking back. It had perhaps once been a hunting dog, perhaps left for dead in the mountains or by some highwayside. Repository of ten thousand indignities and the harbinger of God knew what. He bent and clawed up a handful of small rocks from the gravel apron and slung them. The dog raised its misshapen head and howled weirdly. He advanced upon it and it set off up the road. He ran after it and threw more rocks and shouted at it and he slung the length of pipe. It went clanging and skittering up the road behind the dog and the dog howled again and began to run, hobbling brokenly on its twisted legs with the strange head agoggle on its neck. As it went it raised its mouth sideways and howled again with a terrible sound. Something not of this earth. As if some awful composite of grief had broke through from the preterite world It tottered away up the road in the rain on its stricken legs and as it went it howled again and again in its heart's despair until it was gone from all sight and all sound in the night's onset.

  HE WOKE in the white light of the desert noon and sat up in the ranksmelling blankets. The shadow of the bare wood windowsash stenciled onto the opposite wall began to pale and fade as he watched. As if a cloud were passing over the sun. He kicked out of the blankets and pulled on his boots and his hat and rose and walked out. The road was a pale gray in the light and the light was drawing away along the edges of the world. Small birds had wakened in the roadside desert bracken and begun to chitter and to flit about and out on the blacktop bands of tarantulas that had been crossing the road in the dark like landcrabs stood frozen at their articulations, arch as marionettes, testing with their measured octave tread the sudden jointed shadows of themselves beneath them.

  He looked out down the road and he looked toward the fading light. Darkening shapes of cloud all along the northern rim. It had ceased raining in the night and a broken rainbow or water-gall stood out on the desert in a dim neon bow and he looked again at the road which lay as before yet more dark and darkening still where it ran on to the east and where there was no sun and there was no dawn and when he looked again toward the north the light was drawing away faster and that noon in which he'd woke was now become an alien dusk and now an alien dark and the birds that flew had lighted and all had hushed once again in the bracken by the road.

  He walked out. A cold wind was coming down off the mountains. It was shearing off the western slopes of the continent where the summer snow lay above the timberline and it was crossing through the high fir forests and among the poles of the aspens and it was sweeping over the desert plain below. It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.

  Reader's Guide

  1. What is the significance of the book's title?

  2. Discuss the meaning of the observation: "The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before" [p. 278]. How are these words applicable to the novel's action?

  3. Early in the book Boyd Parham is struck by the sight of his reflection in the eyes of an Indian who asks them for food. What he sees is not so much himself as a "cognate child . . . windowed away in another world where the red sun sank eternally" [p. 6]. What themes do this moment of mirroring and self-estrangement suggest?

  4. How would you characterize Billy's relationship with Boyd? Why does he return to Mexico to find out what happened to his brother? What else is he looking for?

  5. Who do you think murdered the Parhams? Why didn't Boyd try to escape when he had the chance?

  6. The people in The Crossing are characterized by a kind of psychological opaqueness. Since we rarely know their direct thoughts, we must infer their motives from their words and actions, which often seem cryptic or irrational. How do we come to know these characters? What vision of human nature does their opaqueness suggest?

  7. What role do animals play in this book? Why, for example, does Billy endure such great danger and hardship for the sake of a wolf? Do any of the characters he meets in Mexico share his feelings about animals?

  8. The Crossing is a book of dreams and auguries. Early in the novel Boyd has a dream of people burning on a dry lake [p. 35]; Billy dreams he sees his father wandering lost in the desert and being swallowed by darkness [p. 112]. Later in his journey, Billy is taken in by Indians whose elder calls him "huerfano"--orphan [p. 134]--thus predicting the murder of his parents. What is the role of portents--both accurate and inaccurate--in this book?

  9. The Crossing is an account of three journeys. The book is also divided into four sections. Why do you think McCarthy has divided The Crossing in this asymmetrical fashion? Does he employ a similar structure elsewhere in this book? Is its overall structure similar to that of All the Pretty Horses?

  10. What role does hospitality play in this book? Is there any relation between the novel's scenes of hospitality and its moments of violence?

  11. Is The Crossing a violent book? Why do you think the author has chosen to recount some of the worst instances of bloodshed (the slaughter of the opera company
's mule, the blinding of the rebel soldier) secondhand? At a time when graphic and gratuitous descriptions of mayhem are standard in much popular fiction for purposes of mere shock and titillation, has McCarthy succeeded in restoring to violence its ancient qualities of pity and terror? How has he managed this?

  12. What things does Billy lose in the course of this novel? Which of these losses is voluntary?

  13. The Crossing is a book about human beings and their relationship with God and, in particular, about their attempt to decipher divine justice. McCarthy explores this theme with Dostoyevskian eloquence in Billy's conversations with the sexton of a ruined church [pp. 140-59] and a blind veteran of the Revolution [pp. 274-93]. What kind of God have these men come to understand? Is that God the same one that Billy and Boyd encounter?

  14. In what ways does The Crossing resemble classic myths and fairy tales? How do Billy and Boyd Parham compare to the figures that Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces?

  Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

  Books by Cormac McCarthy

  The Road

  The Sunset Limited (a novel in dramatic form)

  No Country for Old Men

  Cities of the Plain

  The Crossing

  All the Pretty Horses

  The Stonemason (a play)

  The Gardener's Son (a screenplay)

  Blood Meridian

  Suttree

  Child of God

  Outer Dark

  The Orchard Keeper

  BOOKS BY CORMAC MCCARTHY

  "McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame."

  --The New York Times Book Review

  THE ORCHARD KEEPER

  Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee between the two world wars, this novel tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself.