The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

You married? No sir. I aint but sixteen. Dont get married. Women are crazy. Yessir. You’ll think you’ve found one that aint but guess what? What? She will be too. Yessir.

You hear about the Texas lion and the New Mexico lion? the old man said. No sir. I dont believe so. There was this Texas lion and this New Mexico lion. They split up on the divide and went off to hunt. Agreed to meet up in the spring and see how they’d done and all and whenever they done it why the old lion been over in Texas looked just awful. Lion from New Mexico he looked at him and he said Lord son you look awful. Said what’s happened to you. Lion been over in Texas said I dont know. Said I’m about starved out. Other old lion said well, said tell me what all you been doin. Said you might be doin somethin wrong. Well the Texas lion said I just been usin the old tried and true methods. Said I get up on a limb overlookin the trail and then whenever one of the Texans rides underneath it why I holler real big and then I jump out on top of him. And that’s what I been a doin. Well, the old New Mexico lion looked at him and he said it’s a wonder you aint dead. Said that’s all wrong for your Texans and I dont see how you got through the winter atall. Said look here. First of all when you holler thataway it scares the shit out of em. Then when you jump on top of em thataway it knocks the wind out of em. Hell, son. You aint got nothin left but buckles and boots.

El señor Sanders me dice que el señor Echols es medio lobo el mismo. Me dice que él conoce lo que sabe el lobo antes de que lo sepa el lobo.

El lobo es una cosa incognoscible, he said. Lo que se tiene en la trampa no es mas que dientes y forro. El lobo propio no se puede conocer. Lobo o lo que sabe el lobo. Tan como preguntar lo que saben las piedras. Los arboles. El mundo.

Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

The old man lay quietly in the dark. The boy waited. Escúchame, joven, he said. Yo no sé nada. Esto es la verdad.

The woman was leaning against the kitchen door. She was silhouetted against the yellow light and he could see her figure through the thin dress she wore. She did not seem troubled that the old man lay alone in the dark at the rear of the house. She asked the boy if the old man had told him how to catch the wolf and he said that he had not. She touched her temple. He dont remember so good sometimes, she said. He is old. Yes mam. No one comes to see him. That’s too bad, hey? Yes mam. Not even the priest. He came one time maybe two but he dont come no more. How come? She shrugged. People say he is brujo. You know what is brujo? Yes mam. They say he is brujo. They say God has abandoned this man. He has the sin of Satanás. The sin of orgullo. You know what is orgullo? Yes mam. He thinks he knows better than the priest. He thinks he knows better than God. He told me he didnt know nothin. Ha, she said. Ha. You believe that? You see this old man? You know what a terrible thing it is to die without God? To be the one that God has cast aside? Think it over. Yes mam. I got to go. He touched the brim of his hat and stepped past her to the door and walked out into the evening dark.

When he looked back at the house she was standing in the doorway. Thank you mam, he said. He is nothing to me, she called. No hay parentesco. You know what is parentesco? Yes mam. There is no parentesco. He was tío of the dead wife of my dead husband. What is that? You see? And yet I have him here. Who else would take this man? You see? No one cares. Yes mam. Think it over. He unlooped the bridlereins from the post and untied them. All right, he said. I will. It could happen to you. Yes mam.

La fe, she called. La fe es todo.

It was two hours past dark when he walked into the kitchen His mother was at the stove. His father was still sitting at the table drinking coffee. The worn blue ledgerbook in which they kept accounts lay on the table to one side. Where you been? his father said. He sat down and his father heard him out and when he was done he nodded. All my life, he said, I been witness to people showin up where they was supposed to be at various times after they’d said they’d be there. I never heard one yet that didnt have a reason for it. Yessir. But there aint but one reason. Yessir. You know what it is? No sir. It’s that their word’s no good. That’s the only reason there ever was or ever will be. Yessir.

They rode up off the plain in the final dying light man and wolf and horse over a terraceland of low hills much eroded by the wind and they crossed through a fenceline or crossed where a fenceline once had been, the wires long down and rolled and carried off and the little naked mesquite posts wandering singlefile away into the night like an enfilade of bent and twisted pensioners.

Soldadera. Los que no pueden recordar la sangre de la guerra son siempre los más ardientes para la lucha.

Sabemos lo que sabemos, the old woman said. Sí, said the girl. Lo que es nada.

Todos que vengan de alrededor,

He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.

When he told them where he came from he was surprised to find that they knew that country also but of it they would not speak. No one tried to trade horses with him. No one asked him why he had come. They cautioned him only to lay clear of the Yaqui country to the west because the Yaqui would kill him. Then the women packed for him a dinner of some dried and leathern meat or machaca and parched corn and sootstained tortillas and an old man came forward and addressed him in a Spanish he could scarcely understand, speaking with great earnestness into the boy’s eyes and holding his saddle fore and aft so that the boy sat almost in his arms. He was dressed in odd and garish fashion and his clothes were embroidered with signs that had about them the geometric look of instructions, perhaps a game. He wore jewelry of jade and silver and his hair was long and blacker than his age would seem to warrant. He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. ...

Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of Him.

They sent for the priest. The priest came and spoke with the man. The priest outside the church. The solitary parishioner within. Beneath the shadow of the perilous vault. The priest spoke to this misguided man of the nature of God and of the spirit and the will and of the meaning of grace in men’s lives and the old man heard him out and nodded his head at certain salient points and when the priest was done this old man raised his book aloft and shouted at the priest. You know nothing. That is what he shouted. You know nothing. The people looked at the priest. To see how he would respond. The priest studied the man and then went away again. The conviction with which the old man spoke had jarred his heart and he weighed the old man’s words and was troubled because of course the old man’s words were true ones.

To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere. We go from day to day, one day much like the next, and then on a certain day all unannounced we come upon a man or we see this man who is perhaps already known to us and is a man like all men but who makes a certain gesture of himself that is like the piling of one’s goods upon an altar and in this gesture we recognize that which is buried in our hearts and is never truly lost to us nor ever can be and it is this moment, you see. This same moment. It is this which we long for and are afraid to seek and which alone can save us.

The task of the narrator is not an easy one, he said. He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one. Always the teller must be at pains to devise against his listener’s claim—perhaps spoken, perhaps not—that he has heard the tale before. He sets forth the categories into which the listener will wish to fit the narrative as he hears it. But he understands that the narrative is itself in fact no category but is rather the category of all categories for there is nothing which falls outside its purview. All is telling. Do not doubt it.

In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.

It is what it is.

You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such a value.

Qué clase de lugar es éste? Billy said. Es ejido, said the girl. Qué clase de gente? No lo sé.

Díganos, Gaspar. Por qué me mata el punchinello? He looked up at her. He looked at the riders. Te mata, he said, porque él sabe tu secreto. Paff, said the primadonna. No es porque yo sé el de él?

No. A pesar de lo que piensa la gente? A pesar de cualquier. Y qué es este secreto?

El secreto, he said, es que en este mundo la máscara es la que es verdadera.

Es inútil, said Billy. Se quebró el espinazo.

Nos rendimos.

Es una cara, he said. Pues qué?

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.

Es una carantoña, no? he said.

Entienda que ya existe este ogro. Este chupador de ojos. Él y otros como él. Ellos no han desaparecido del mundo. Y nunca lo harán.

Y sus sueños, said the boy. Se han hecho más pálidos?

No puedo recordar el mundo de luz, he said. Hace muchos años. Ese mundo es un mundo frágil. Ultimamente lo que vine a ver era más durable. Más verdadero.

En mis primeros años de la oscuridad pensé que la ceguera fué una forma de la muerte. Estuve equivocado. Al perder la vista es como un sueño de caída. Se piensa que no hay ningún fondo en este abismo. Se cae y cae. La luz retrocede. La memoria de la luz. La memoria del mundo. De su propia cara. De la carantoña.

En este viaje el mundo visible es no más que un distraimiento. Para los ciegos y para todos los hombres. Ultimamente sabemos que no podemos ver el buen Dios. Vamos escuchando. Me entiendes, joven? Debemos escuchar.

He said that most men were in their lives like the carpenter whose work went so slowly for the dullness of his tools that he had not time to sharpen them.

Y las palabras del sepulturero acerca de la justicia? the boy said. Qué opina?

Lo que debemos entender, said the blind man, es que ultimamente todo es polvo. Todo lo que podemos tocar. Todo lo que podemos ver. En esto tenemos la evidencia más profunda de la justicia, de la misericordia. En esto vemos la bendición más grande de Dios.

Que no se le han punzando los pulmones. Que no se le ha quebrado la gran arteria cual era muy cerca de la dirección de la bala. Pero sobre todo que no hay ni gran infección. Muy afortunado.

Era demasiado fuerte para él, he said. Demasiado fuerte.

Me llama embustero?

He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny.

He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out.

He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and lif...

He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it.

Es un engaño? said the man. Es un engaño?

Dónde está el dinero? Las alforjas,