Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

DOOMED ENTERPRISES divide lives forever into the then and the now. He'd carried the wolf up into the mountains in the bow of the saddle and buried her in a high pass under a cairn of scree. The little wolves in her belly felt the cold draw all about them and they cried out mutely in the dark and he buried them all and piled the rocks over them and led the horse away. He wandered on into the mountains. He whittled a bow from a holly limb, made arrows from cane. He thought to become again the child he never was.

They rode the high country for weeks and they grew thin and gaunted man and horse and the horse grazed on the sparse winter grass in the mountains and gnawed the lichens from the rock and the boy shot trout with his arrows where they stood above their shadows on the cold stone floors of the pools and he ate them and ate green nopal and then on a windy day traversing a high saddle in the mountains a hawk passed before the sun and its shadow ran so quick in the grass before them that it caused the horse to shy and the boy looked up where the bird turned high above them and he took the bow from his shoulder and nocked and loosed an arrow and watched it rise with the wind rattling the fletching slotted into the cane and watched it turning and arcing and the hawk wheeling and then flaring suddenly with the arrow locked in its pale breast.

The hawk turned and skated off down the wind and vanished beyond the cape of the mountain, a single feather fell. He rode out to look for it but he never found it. He found a single drop of blood that had dried on the rocks and darkened in the wind and nothing more. He dismounted and sat on the ground beside the horse where the wind blew and he made a cut in the heel of his hand with his knife and watched the slow blood dropping on the stone. Two days later he sat the horse on a promontory overlooking the Bavispe River and the river was running backwards. That or the sun was setting in the east behind him. He made his rough camp in a windbreak of juniper and waited out the night to see what the sun would do or what the river and in the morning when day broke over the distant mountains and across the broad plain before him he realized that he had crossed back through the mountains to where the river ran north again along the eastern side of the Sierras.

He rode deeper into the mountains. He sat on a windfall tree in a high forest of madrono and ash and with his knife cut to length a piece of rope while the horse watched. He stood and strung the rope through the beltloops of his jeans where they hung from his hips and folded away the knife. It aint nothin to eat, he told the horse.

In that wild high country he'd lie in the cold and the dark and listen to the wind and watch the last few embers of his fire at their dying and the red crazings in the woodcoals where they broke along their unguessed gridlines. As if in the trying of the wood were elicited hidden geometries and their orders which could only stand fully revealed, such is the way of the world, in darkness and ashes. He heard no wolves. Ragged and half starving and his horse dismayed he rode a week later into the mining town of El Tigre.

A dozen houses sited senselessly along a slope overlooking a small mountain valley. There was no one about. He sat the horse in the middle of the mud street and the horse stared bleakly at the town, at the rude jacales of mud and sticks with their cowhide doors. He put the horse forward and a woman came out into the street and approached him and stood at his stirrup and looked up into the child's face under the hat and asked if he were sick. He said that he was not. That he was only hungry. She told him to get down and he did so and slid the bow from his shoulder and hung it over the horn of the saddle and followed her down to her house while the horse walked behind.

He sat in a kitchen that was all but dark so sheltered was it from the sun and he ate frijoles from a clay bowl with a huge spoon of enameled tin. The sole light fell from a smokehole in the ceiling and the woman knelt there at a low clay brasero and turned tortillas on a cracked and ancient clay corral while the thin smoke rose up the blackened wall and vanished overhead. He could hear chickens clucking outside and in a room darker yet beyond a curtain of pieced sacking some sleeper was sleeping. The house smelled of smoke and rancid grease and the smoke bore the faintly antiseptic odor of pinon wood. She turned the tortillas with her bare fingers and put them on a clay plate and brought them to him. He thanked her and folded one of the tortillas and dipped it into the beans and ate.

De donde viene? she said.

De los Estados Unidos.

De Tejas?

Nuevo Mexico.

Que undo, she said.

Lo conoce?

No.

She watched him eat.

Es minero, she said.

Vaquero.

Ay, vaquero.

When he'd finished and wiped the bowl clean with the last piece of tortilla she took the dishes and carried them across the room and put them in a bucket. When she came back she sat down on the slabaEU'board bench across the table from him and studied him. Adonde va? she said.

He didnt know. He looked vaguely around the room. Pinned to the bare mud wall with a wooden peg was a calendar with a color print of a 1927 Buick. A woman in a fur coat and a turban stood beside it. He said that he did not know where he was going. They sat. He nodded toward the curtained doorway. Es su marido? he said.

She said that it was not. She said that it was her sister.

He nodded. He looked about the room again which his first look had in any case exhausted and then he reached over his shoulder and took his hat from the stile of the chair at his back and pushed the chair back on the clay floor and stood.

Muchisimas gracias, he said.

Clarita, called the woman.

She hadnt taken her eyes from him and it occurred to him that she might be a little bit crazy. She called again. She turned and looked toward the darkened room beyond the curtain, she held up one finger. Momentito, she said. She rose and went into the other room. In a few minutes she appeared again. She held aside the sacking against the doorjamb in a faintly theatrical gesture. The woman who had been asleep stepped through and stood before him in a wrapper of stained pink rayon. She looked at him and turned and looked back at her sister. She was perhaps the younger but they looked much alike. She looked again at the boy. He stood with his hat in his hands. The sister stood behind her in the doorway with the frayed and dusty sacking pulled against her in a way to suggest perhaps that the emergence of the sleeper was a rare and transitory thing. She herself no more than a herald of coming good. The sleeping sister pulled her wrap about herself and reached and touched the boy's face with one hand. Then she turned and passed back through the doorway to be seen no more. The boy thanked his hostess and put on his hat and pushed open the clattery hide door and walked outside into the sunlight where the horse stood waiting.

Riding out the road wherein were neither ruts nor hoofprints nor any sign of commerce at all he passed two men standing in a doorway who called out and made signs to him. He'd hung the bow again across his shoulder and he thought that riding so armed in his blackened rags atop the bony horse he must cut a sad or foolish figure but when he regarded his hecklers more closely he reckoned he could scarce look worse than they and he rode on.

He crossed the small valley and rode west into the mountains. He'd no way to know how long he'd been in that country but for all he'd seen of it good or ill which he pondered as he rode he knew that he no longer feared whatever he might find there. Days to come he would encounter wild Indians deep in the Sierras living in the chozas and wickiups of their squalid rancherias and Indians wilder yet who lived in caves and all of whom may well have thought him mad for the regard with which they treated him. They fed him and the women washed his clothes and mended them and sewed his boots with a homemade awl and ligaments from a hawk's foot. They spoke among themselves in their own tongue or with him in their broken Spanish. They said that most of their young people had gone to work in the mines or in the cities or on the haciendas of the Mexicans but that they did not trust the Mexicans. They traded with them in the small villages along the river and sometimes they would stand in the outer ring of light and watch them at their festivals but otherwise they kept to themselves. They said that it was the way of the Mexicans to blame them for the crimes they committed among themselves and that the Mexicans would get drunk and kill each other and then send soldiers into the mountains to seek them out. 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 huerfano 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. He said that while the huerfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. Then he removed his hands from the boy's saddle and stepped away and stood. The boy thanked him for his words but he said that he was in fact not an orphan and then he thanked the women standing there and turned the horse and rode out. They stood watching him go. As he passed the last of the brush wickiups he turned and looked back and as he did so the old man called out to him. Eres, he said. Eres huerfano. But the boy only raised one hand and touched his hat and rode on.