The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2)

by Cormac McCarthy

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 kn...

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 longe...

the sky in the east did grow gray with dawn and the stars sank at last to ash in the paling lake and birds began to call from the far shore a...

Boyd was sitting on the pallet with his back against the wall. The flame of the votive candle heeled about in the glass above his head and swathed as he was in his wraps of sheeting he looked like someone sat suddenly upright at his own vigil. The mute dog had been lying down and it stood and moved against him. Dónde estabas? Boyd said. He wasnt talking to his brother. He was talking to the girl who came smiling through the doorway behind him.

What is it? he said. Talk to me. Go to bed. I need for you to talk to me. It’s okay. Everthing’s okay. No it aint. You just worry about stuff. I’m all right. I know you are, said Billy. But I aint. THREE DAYS LATER when he woke in the morning and walked out they were gone.

He looked for them for weeks but he found only shadow and rumor. He found the little heartshaped milagro in the watch-pocket of his jeans and he hooked it out with his forefinger and held it in the palm of his hand and he studied it long and long.

When the mozo opened the gate and looked out to see him standing there in the rain holding the horse he did not seem surprised. He asked after his brother and Billy said that his brother had recovered from his wounds but that he had disappeared and he apologized for the hour but wished to know if he might see the doctor. The mozo said that the hour was of no consequence for the doctor was dead.

HE CROSSED THE BORDER at Columbus New Mexico.

I’m an American, he said, if I dont look like it.

You look like you might of left some bacon down there, the guard said. I aint come back rich, that’s for sure. I guess you come back to sign up. I reckon. If I can find a outfit that’ll have me. You neednt to worry about that. You aint got flat feet have you? Flat feet? Yeah. You got flat feet they wont take you. What the hell are you talkin about? Talkin about the army. Army? Yeah. The army. How long you been gone anyways?

After a while she came from the grill and set a plate of eggs and bacon in front of him and a plate of toast. Dont tell nobody where you got it, she said. The recruiting office was closed when he got there and he was waiting on the steps with two boys from Deming and a third from an outlying ranch when the sergeant arrived and unlocked the door.

I aint but seventeen, Billy said. The sergeant nodded. Well, he said. You’ll have to get your mama to sign for you. I dont have no mama. She’s dead. What about your daddy? He’s dead too. Well you’ll have to get your next of kin. Uncle or whatever. He’ll need to get a notarized statement. I dont have no next of kin. I just got a brother and he’s youngern me. Where do you work at? I dont work nowheres.

That’s a parental consent form. If you want to join this man’s army you better bring it back with your

mama’s signature on it. If she has to come down from heaven to do it I dont have a problem in the world with that. You understand what I’m tellin you? Yessir. I guess you want me to sign my dead mama’s name on that piece of paper. I didnt say that. Did you hear me say that? No sir. Go on then. I’ll see you back here after dinner. Yessir.

When the waitress came he started to order the plate lunch but she said that lunch didnt start till eleven oclock. She said he could get breakfast. I’ve done eat one breakfast today. Well we dont have no city ordinance about how many breakfasts you can eat. How big of a breakfast can I get? How big of a one can you eat? I’ve got a mealticket from the recruitin office. I know it. I see it layin yonder. Can I get four eggs? You just tell me how you want em. She brought the breakfast on an oblong crockery platter with the four eggs over medium and a slice of fried ham and grits with butter and she brought a plate of biscuits and a small bowl of gravy. You want anything else you let me know, she said. All right. You want a sweetroll? Yes mam. You need some more coffee? Yes mam. He looked up at her. She was about forty years old and she had black hair and bad teeth. She grinned at him. I like to see a man eat, she said. Well, he said. You’re lookin at one I believe ought to meet your requirements. When he was done eating he sat drinking coffee and studying the form his mother

He told him to unbutton his shirt. You came here horseback, he said. Yessir. Where did you come from. Mexico. I see. Have you got any history of disease in your family? No sir. They’re all dead. I see, the doctor said.

You’ve got a heartmurmur, he said. What does that mean? It means you wont be joining the army.

Where are you from, the doctor said. Cloverdale New Mexico. How many different recruiting offices have you tried to enlist at? This makes the third one.

They ate in the diningroom. The girl served them and then sat down. They ate roast beef and potatoes and beans and the girl passed him a bread dish covered with a linen cloth and he took a piece of cornbread and buttered it. This is awful good, he said. She’s a good cook, the old man said. I hope she dont decide to get married and quit me. If I had to cook for myself the cats’d leave. Oh Grandaddy, the girl said.

They sat and the old man told him stories about rawhiding cattle in Mexico as a young man and about Villa’s raid on Columbus New Mexico in nineteen sixteen and about sheriff’s posses tracking badmen down into the bootheel as they fled toward the border and about the drought and die-up of eighty-six and trailing north the corriente cattle that they’d bought for next to nothing up out of that stricken ground across the high parched plains. Cattle so poor the old man said that at evening crossing before the sun where it burned upon the western desert shore you could all but see through them. What do you aim to do? he said. I dont know. Try and hire on somewheres I reckon. We’re about shut down here altogether.

You aint got married on us have you? the old man said. No sir. People hate to see a man single. I dont know what there is about it. They used to pester me about gettin married again and I was near sixty when my wife died. My sister in law primarily. I’d done already had the best woman ever was. Aint nobody goin to be that lucky twice runnin. No sir. Most likely not. I remember old Uncle Bud Langford used to tell people, said: It would take one hell of a wife to beat no wife at all. Course then he was never married, neither. So I dont know how he would know. I guess I’ve got to say that I dont understand the first thing about em. What’s that. Women. Well, said the old man. At least you aint took to lyin. There wouldnt be no use in it.

I remember that horse, the old man said. That was your daddy’s horse. Yessir. He bought it off a Mexican. He claimed the horse when he bought it didnt know a word of english. The old man pushed himself up from his rocker and clutched the bible under his arm. Even gettin up out of a chair gets to be work. You wouldnt believe that, would you? Do you think horses understand what people say? I aint sure most people do. Let’s go in. She’s done hollered twice. He was

SIGNED the horses through the Mexican customs at Berendo and folded the stamped entry papers into his saddlebag and gave the aduanero a silver dollar. The aduanero saluted him gravely and addressed him as caballero and he rode south into old Mexico, State of Chihuahua. He’d last passed through this port of entry seven years ago when he was thirteen and his father rode the horse he now rode and they had taken delivery of eight hundred head of cattle from two Americans rawhiding the back acres of an abandoned ranch in the mountains to the west of Ascensión.

He said that he was in their country to find his brother. He said that his brother was a little crazy and he should not have abandoned him but he did.

She put her hand forefinger first against her mouth. Almost in such a gesture as to admonish one to silence. She held her hand out as if she might touch him. She said that his brother’s bones lay in the cemetery at San Buenaventura. It was dark when he went out and untied the horse and mounted

The fire ticked. Outside in the world all was silence. Is my brother dead? he said. Yes. He was killed in Ignacio Zaragosa? No. In San Lorenzo. The girl too? No. When they took her away she was covered in blood and she was falling down and so it was natural that people thought that she had been shot but it was not so. What became of her? I dont know. Perhaps she went back to her family. She was very young. I asked about her in Namiquipa. They didnt know what had become of her. They would not tell you in Namiquipa. Where is my brother buried? He is buried at Buenaventura. Is there a stone? There is a board. He was very popular with the people. He was a popular figure. He didnt kill the manco in La Boquilla. I know. I was there. Yes. He killed two men in Galeana. No one knows why. They did not even work for the latifundio. But the brother of one was a friend to Pedro Lopéz. The alguacil.

The soul of Mexico is very old, said Quijada. Whoever claims to know it is either a liar or a fool. Or both. Now that the yankees have again betrayed them the Mexicans are eager to reclaim their indian blood. But we do not want them. Most particularly the Yaqui. The Yaqui have long memories. I believe you. Did you ever see my brother again after we left with the horses? No. How do you know about him? He was a hunted man. Where would you go? Inevitably he was taken in by Casares. You go to the enemy of your enemies. He was only fifteen. Sixteen, I guess. All the better.

Finally Quijada leaned forward and studied his cup. He should have gone home, he said. Yes. Why didnt he? I dont know. Maybe the girl. The girl would not have gone with him? I suppose she would have. He didnt rightly have a home to go to. Maybe you are the one who should have cared for him better. He wasnt easy to care for. You said it yourself. Yes. What does the corrido say? Quijada shook his head. The corrido tells all and it tells nothing. I heard the tale of the güerito years ago. Before your brother was even born. You dont think it tells about him? Yes, it tells about him. It tells what it wishes to tell. It tells what makes the story run. The corrido is the poor man’s history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men. It believes that where two men meet one of two things can occur and nothing else. In the one case a lie is born and in the other death. That sounds like death is the truth.

Yes. It sounds like death is the truth. He looked at Billy. Even if the güerito in the song is your brother he is no longer your brother. He cannot be reclaimed. I aim to take him back with me. It will not be permitted. Who would I go to? There is no one to go to. Who would I go to if there was someone? You could apply to God. Otherwise there is no one. Billy shook his head. He sat regarding his own dark visage where it yawed in the white ring of the cup. After a while he looked up. He looked into the fire. Do you believe in God? he said. Quijada shrugged. On godly days, he said. No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It’s never like what you expected.

Billy slow learner, like the wolf to Mexico, returning Boyd to New Mexico?

We come down here to get our horses. Me and my brother. I dont think he even cared about the horses, but I was too dumb to see it. I didnt know nothin about him. I thought I did. I think he knew a lot more about me. I’d like to take him back and bury him in his own country.

You think he belongs where he’s at. I think the dead have no nationality. No. But their kin do.

turned the white porcelain bowl up and held it in the palm of his hand and regarded it. The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again. Your brother is in that place which the world has chosen for him. He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised.

In the middle distance a red stone pillar in the shape of a pollarded treetrunk. His brother was buried against the southmost wall under a board cross in which had been burned with a hot nail the words Fall el 24 de febrero 1943 sus hermanos en armas dedican este recuerdo D E P. A ring of rusted wire that once had been a wreath leaned against the board. There was no name. He squatted and took off his hat. Off to the south a pile of trash was smoldering in the damp and a black smoke rose into the dark overcast. The desolation of that place was a thing exquisite.

When he reached the gravesite he stood down and chucked the spade in the ground and took his gloves from the saddlebag and looked at the gray skies and finally he unsaddled the horse and hobbled it and left it to graze among the stones. Then he turned and squatted and rocked the fragile wooden cross loose in its clutch of rocks and lifted it away. The spade was a primitive thing helved in a long paloverde pole and the tang bore the marks where it had been beaten out over a pritchel and the seam rudely welded shut at the forge. He hefted it in his hand and looked again at the sky and bent and began to shovel away the cairn of loose rock over his brother’s grave. He was a long time at his work. He’d taken off his hat and after a while he

By the time he had the top of the box dug clear there was little left of the day. He dug down along the side and felt along the wood for handles but he couldnt find any. He dug on until he had one end of the box clear and by then it was growing dark. He stood the spade in the loose dirt and went to get Niño. He saddled the horse and led him back to the grave and took down the catchrope and doubled and dallied it and then worked the free end around the box, forcing it along the wood with the blade of the shovel. Then he pitched the shovel to one side and climbed out and untracted the horse and led him slowly forward. The rope grew taut. He looked back. Then he eased the horse forward again. There was a muffled explosion of wood in the hole and the rope went slack. The horse stopped. He walked back. The box had collapsed and he could see Boyd’s bones in their burial clothes through the broken boards. He sat down in the dirt. The sun had set and it was growing dark. The horse stood at the end of the rope waiting. He felt suddenly cold and he got up and walked over to the wall and got his shirt and pulled it on and came back and stood. You could just shovel the dirt back in, he said. It wouldnt take a hour.

took up the spade and with the blade of it he split away a long sliver of wood from one of the broken boards and knocked the dirt loose from it against the box and struck a match and got it lit and stood it slantwise in the ground. Finally he climbed down into the grave and by that pale and fluttering light he began to pry apart the boards with the spade and cast them out until the remains of his brother lay wholly to sight, composed on a pallet of rotting rags, lost in his clothes as always.

It was a windless night and his cryptboard taper was still burning at the side of the grave. He climbed down into the excavation and gathered his brother up in his arms and lifted him out. He weighed nothing. He composed the bones upon the soogan and folded them away and tied the bundle shut at the ends with lengths of pigginstring while the horse stood watching. Over on the gravel highway he could hear the whine of a truck on the grade and the lights came up and swept slowly across the desert and over the bleak headlands and then the truck passed on in its pale wake of dust and ground on toward the east.

He lifted Boyd and laid him across the wooden packframe and he rolled up the blankets from his bedroll and laid them across the horse’s haunches and tied everything down. Then he walked over and picked up his hat and put it on and picked up the waterbottle and hung it by its strap over the saddlehorn and mounted up and turned the horse. He sat there for a minute taking a last look around. Then he got down again. He walked over to the grave and pulled the wooden cross loose from the cobbles and carried it back to the packhorse and tied it down on the leftside forks of the packtree and then mounted up again and leading the packhorse rode out through the cemetery and through the gate and down the road. When he reached the highway he crossed it and struck out crosscountry toward the watershed of the Santa María, keeping the polestar to his right, looking back from time to time to see how rode the canvas that held his brother’s remains. The little desert foxes barking. The old gods of that country tracing his progress over the darkened ground. Perhaps logging his name into their ancient daybook of vanities.

in the gray dawn four horsemen sallied forth from a grove of trees and halted their mounts in the track before him.

Billy dropped down from the offside of his horse. The bandolero caught up the packhorse’s leadrope but the packhorse balked and squatted on its haunches and the man booted his horse forward and made a pass at the hitchropes with his knife while the packhorse sawed about on the end of the lead. Some among his companions laughed and the man swore and he hauled the packhorse forward and dallied the leadrope to his saddlehorn again and reached and cut the ropes and pulled the soogan of bones to the ground.

The man bent above the shrouded form on the ground and unseamed with a single long pass of the knife ropes and soogan all from end to end and kicked aside the coverings to reveal in the graying light Boyd’s poor form in the loosely fitting coat with his hands crossed at his chest, the withered hands with the bones imprinted in the leather skin, lying there with his caven face turned up and clutching himself like some fragile being fraught with cold in that indifferent dawn. You son of a bitch, said Billy. You son of a bitch.

The bandolero cut open the bedroll under his feet and kicked it apart and trod in it with his boots and turned and then reached and seized Niño’s bridlereins. But the horse must have begun to see the loosening of some demoniac among them for he reared and backed and in his backing trod among the bones and he reared again and pawed and the bandolero was snatched off balance and one forehoof caught his belt and ripped it from him and tore open the front of his trousers. He scrambled from under the horse and swore wildly and made a grab again for the swinging reins and the men behind him laughed and before anyone would have thought of such a thing occurring he plunged his knife into the horse’s chest.

Vámonos, called the rider. He turned his horse The man with the pistol looked at them. Tengo que encontrar mi cuchillo, he called. He uncocked the pistol and went to shove it in his belt but he had no belt. He turned and looked upriver where the day was coming beyond the brambly river breaks. The breath of the standing horses plumed and vanished. The leader told him to get his horse. He said that he did not need his knife and that he had killed a good horse for no reason.

The horse turned and laid its long bony face upon his shoulder. He led the animal ashore and up into the track and turned it to face the light. He looked in its mouth for blood but there was none that he could see. Old Niño, he said. Old Niño. He left the saddle and the saddlebags where they’d fallen. The trampled bedrolls. The body of his brother awry in its wrappings with one yellow forearm outflung. He walked the horse slowly at his elbow and held the mudstained shirt against its chest. His boots sloshed with river water and he was very cold. They walked up the track and into a grove of wild mahogany where he’d be partly hid from sight of any parties passing along the river and then he went back and got the saddle and the saddlebags and the bedroll. Lastly he went to fetch the remains of his brother.

Then he walked out to where he’d left Boyd. A column of red ants had found the bones and he squatted in the leaves and studied them and then rose and trod them into the dirt and picked up the soogan and carried it out and lodged it in the fork of one of the trees and walked back and sat beside the horse.

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

one might even hazard to say that the great trouble with the world was that that which survived was held in hard evidence as to past events. A false authority clung to what persisted, as if those artifacts of the past which had endured had done so by some act of their own will. Yet the witness could not survive the witnessing. In the world that came to be that which prevailed could never speak for that which perished but could only parade its own arrogance. It pretended symbol and summation of the vanished world but was neither. He said that in any case the past was little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated. For the world was made new each day and it was only men’s clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.

The past, he said, is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?

IN THE EVENING the horse rose and stood on trembling legs. He did not halter it but only walked alongside the animal out to the river where it stepped very carefully into the water and drank endlessly. In the evening while he was fixing his supper from the tortillas and goatcheese the gypsies had left him a rider came along the road. Solitary. Whistling. He stopped among the trees. Then he came on more slowly. Billy stood and walked out to the road and the rider halted and sat his horse. He pushed his hat back slightly, the better to see, the better to be seen. He looked at Billy and at the fire and at the horse lying in the woods beyond. Buenas tardes, said Billy.