The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

Great trouble. You should listen to your brother. He is older. So are you. The ganadero leaned back in the chair again. He looked at Billy. Your brother is young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy. Perhaps you believe this also? I dont have a opinion. I’m just down here about some horses. What remedy can there be? What remedy can there be for what is not? You see? And where is the remedy that has no unforeseen consequence? What act does not assume a future that is itself unknown?

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.

There was no applause. The crowd sat quietly on the ground. Some of the women were crying. After a while the majordomo who had spoken to them prior to the performance stepped out through the curtain and thanked them for their attendance and stepped to one side and bowed as the boys carried the curtains open again. The actors stood before them hand in hand and bowed and curtseyed and there was a smattering of applause and then the curtain closed for good.

When he rode in she stood and came over and took the bridlereins and she asked him if she could go with them. He stepped down and took off his hat and clawed his fingers through his sweaty hair and put his hat back on again and looked at her. No, he said. She stood holding the horse. She looked away. Her dark eyes swimming. He asked her why she wanted to go with them but she only shook her head. He asked her if she was afraid, if there was something here of which she was afraid. She didnt answer. He

asked how old she was and she said fourteen. He nodded. He punched a crescent in the dirt underfoot with the heel of his boot. He looked at her. Alguien le busca, he said. She didnt answer. No se puede quedar aquí? She shook her head. She said she could not stay. She said she had no place to go.

He looked out across the compound in the tranquil evening light. He said that he had no place to go either so what help could he be to her but she only shook her head and said tha...

When they rode out of the compound the girl was riding behind Boyd on the bareback horse with her arms around his waist.

The old man said that the ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought. He looked up. He smiled. He said that in any case the ox knew enough to work so as to keep from being killed and eaten and that was a useful thing to know.

Get the ropes off of em, Billy called. We’re goin to have to make a run for it. Boyd turned. He put up one hand as if to reach for the first of the horses as they came up out of the trees and then his shirt belled out behind him redly and he fell down on the ground. Billy knew afterward that he had seen the actual riflebullet. That the suck and whiff at

his ear had been the bullet passing and that he had seen it for one frozen moment before his eyes with the sun on the side of the small revolving core of metal, the lead wiped bright by the rifling of the bore, slowed from having passed through his brother’s body but still moving faster than sound and passing his left ear with the suck of the air like a whisper from the void and the small jar of the shockwave and then the bullet caroming off of a treebranch and singing away over the desert behind him that by a hairsbreadth had not carried his life away with it and then the sound of the shot come lagging after.

When he looked for the light it was gone and he fixed his position by the stars and after a while the light appeared again out of the dark cape of desert headland that had obscured it. He’d quit singing and he tried to think how to pray. Finally he just prayed to Boyd. Dont be dead, he prayed. You’re all I got.

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.

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.

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.

Está despierto, el joven? said the blind man. The boy sat upright. Sí, the woman said. Está despierto. Hay luz? Sí. 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. Continuá, 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 quién es el tercero? Un niño? Un niño. Exactamente. Pero es verídica, esta historia?

I need to learn Spanish.

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.

Thinking Cormac's entire being is in writing what's true.

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.

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?

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.

A gift to Billy the understanding of justice lacking -something to grasp and to expect.

She touched the wrinkled lids caved into the sockets. She touched them gently with the tips of her fingers and she asked if there were any pain there but he said there was only the pain of memory and that sometimes in the night he would dream that this darkness were itself a dream and he would wake and he would touch those eyes that were not there. He said such dreams were a torment to him and yet he would not wish them away. He said that as the memory of the world must fade so must it fade in his dreams until soon or late he feared that he would have darkness absolute and

no shadow of the world that was. He said that he feared what that darkness held for he believed that the world hid more than it revealed.

Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case. He said that in his opinion no one could speak for the origins of such men nor where they might appear but only of their existence. He said that who steals one’s eyes steals a world and himself remains thereby forever hidden.

his first years of darkness his dreams had been vivid beyond all expectation and that he had come to thirst for them but that dreams and memories alike had faded one by one until they were no more. Of all that once had been no trace remained. The look of the world. The faces of loved ones. Finally even his own person was lost to him. Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again.

men with eyes may select what they wish to see but for the blind the world appears of its own will. He said that for the blind everything was abruptly at hand, that nothing ever announced its approach. Origins and destinations became but rumors. To move is to abut against the world. Sit quietly and it vanishes.

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.

In the morning when he walked out to saddle his horse the woman was scattering grain from a bota to the birds in the yard. Wild blackbirds flew down from the trees

and stalked and fed among the poultry but she fed all without discrimination. The boy watched her. He thought she was very beautiful. He saddled the horse and left it standing and said his goodbyes and then mounted up and rode out. When he looked back she raised her hand. The birds were all about her. Vaya con Dios, she called.

Dont drink too fast, Billy said. He tilted the cup. You looked like one of these dirtfarmers in that rig. Boyd drank deeply through the straw and then turned away coughing. Dont drink so fast. He lay getting his breath. He drank again. Billy took the cup away and waited and then offered it again. The glass pipe rattled and sucked. He tilted the cup. When Boyd had drunk all the water he lay getting his breath and he looked up at Billy. There’s worse things to look like, he said.

Billy set the cup on the chair. I didnt take much care of you did I? he said. Boyd didnt answer.

Together they turned Boyd on his side. Boyd gasped and clutched about in the air with one hand. He seized Billy’s shoulder. Easy pardner, Billy said. I know it hurts. No you dont, wheezed Boyd.

She blessed herself and bent and reached and took hold of the rag that bound the poultice and lifted it and slid her thumb

beneath the poultice and pulled it away. It was of matted weeds and dark with blood and it came away unwillingly. Like something that had been feeding there. She stepped back and folded it from sight in the dirty sheeting.

She leaned and freed the poultice from Boyd’s back with her thumb and lifted it away. Larger, blacker, uglier. Beneath it was a ragged hole that yawned redly. About it the flesh was crusted with scale and blackened blood.

What? You got to go to Namiquipa. I aint goin nowheres. She’ll think we just ditched her. I caint leave you. I’ll be all right. I caint go off down there and leave you. Yeah you can. You need somebody to look after you. Listen, Boyd said. I’ve done got over all that. Go on like I asked you. You was worried about the horse anyways.

She shrugged. She said that life was dangerous. She said that for a man of the people there was no choice. He smiled. Mi hermano es un hombre del pueblo? Sí, she said. Claro.

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.

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 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 Torreón 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.

That is one hell of a sentence. Hope to hell Goodreads doesn't truncate it...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Por qué 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.

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.

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.

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