Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

He sat at a scrubbed wooden table with two other young men and they ate very well on baked squash and onion soup and tortillas and beans. The boys were even younger than he and they eyed him furtively and waited for him to speak as the oldest but he did not and so they ate in silence. They fed his horse and at nightfall he was put to bed on an iron cot with a shuck tick at the rear of the house. He'd spoken to no one other than to say thank you. He thought he'd been mistaken for someone else. He woke once at some unknown hour and started up to see a figure watching him from the doorway but it was only the clay olla hanging there in the half darkness to cool the water in the night and not some other kind of figure of some other kind of clay. The next sound he heard was the slapping of hands making the tortillas for breakfast at daylight.

One of the boys brought him coffee in a bowl on a tray. He walked out into the patio drinking it. He could hear women talking somewhere in another part of the house and he stood in the sun drinking the coffee and watching the hummingbirds that tilted and darted and stood among the flowers hanging down over the wall. After a while a woman came to the door and called him to his breakfast. He turned holding the cup and turning saw his father's horse pass in the street.

He walked out through the zaguan and stood in the street but it was empty. He walked up to the corner and looked east and west and he walked up to the square and looked out along the main road north but horse or rider there was none. He turned and started back to the house. He listened as he went for the sound of a horse anywhere behind the walls or the portals that he passed. He stood in front of the house for a long time and then he went in to get his breakfast.

He ate alone in the kitchen. There seemed no one about. He finished and rose and went out to see about his horse and then returned to the house to thank the women but he could not find them. He called but no one answered. He stood in the doorway to a room with high ceilings sheathed in cane and furnished with an old dark wood armoire from another country and two wooden beds painted blue. On the far wall in a niche a painted tin retablo of the Virgin with a slender daycandle burning before it. In the corner a child's cradle and in the cradle a small dog with clouded eyes that raised its head and listened for his presence. He went back to the kitchen and looked for something with which to write. In the end he dusted flour from the bowl on the sideboard over the wooden table and wrote his thanks in that and went out and got his horse and led it afoot down the zaguan and out through the portal. Behind in the patio the little mule turned the pugmill tirelessly. He mounted up and rode out down the little dusty street nodding to those he passed on his way. Riding like a young squire for all his rags. Carrying in his belly the gift of the meal he'd received which both sustained him and laid claim upon him. For the sharing of bread is not such a simple thing nor is its acknowledgement. Whatever thanks be given, however spoke or written down.

Midmorning he rode through the town of Bavispe. He did not stop. A meatvendor's cart stood in the plaza before the church and old women in black muslin wraps were at lifting the dull red strips that hung from the racks and looking underneath with a strange prurience. He rode on. By noon he was in Colonia de Oaxaca and he halted his horse in the road before the alguacil's house and then spat quietly in the dust and rode on. Noon of the day following he passed again through the town of Morelos and took the road north toward Ojito. All day black thunderclouds were making up to the north. He crossed the river a final time and rode up through the low broken hills where the storm overtook him in a hail of ice. He and the horse took shelter in a compound of old abandoned buildings by the roadside. The hail passed and a steady rain set in. Water ran everywhere down through the clay roof overhead and the horse was restless and stood uneasily. Some scent of old troubles or perhaps just the closeness of the walls. It grew dark and he pulled the saddle from the horse and made a bed in the corner out of the loose straw he kicked up. The horse walked out into the rain and he lay under his blanket where he could see out through the broken walls the shape of the horse standing by the side of the road and the shape of the horse in the mute erratic glare of the lightning where the storm moved off to the west. He slept. Late in the night he woke but what had woke him was only the rain's ceasing. He rose and walked out. The moon was in the east over the dark escarpment of the mountains. Sheetwater standing in the flats beyond the narrow road. There was no wind and yet the dead flat of the water shimmered in the bonecolored light as if something had passed over it and the galled moon in the water shivered and yawed and righted itself again and then all lay as before.

In the morning he rode the horse through the border crossing at Douglas Arizona. The guard nodded to him and he nodded back.

You look like maybe you stayed a little longer than what you intended, the guard said.

The boy sat the horse, his hands resting on the pommel of the saddle. He looked down at the guard. You wouldnt loan a man a half dollar to eat on would you? he said.

The guard stood a minute. Then he reached into his pocket.

I live over towards Cloverdale, the boy said. You tell me your name and I'll see that you get it back.

Here you go.

The boy cupped the spinning coin out of the air and nodded and dropped it into his shirtpocket. What's your name?

John Gilchrist.

You aint from around here.

No.

I'm Billy Parham.

Well I'm pleased to meet you.

I'll send you that half dollar soon as I catch somebody comin back this way. You neednt to worry about it.

I aint worried about it.

The boy sat holding the reins loosely. He looked out up the broad street lying before him and at the barren hills about. He looked at Gilchrist again.

How do you like this country? he said.

I like it fine.

The boy nodded. I do too, he said. He touched the brim of his hat. Thanks, he said. I appreciate it. Then he touched the wildlooking horse with his heels and rode off up the street into America.

H E WAS ALL DAY on the old road from Douglas to Cloverdale. By evening he was high in the Guadalupes and it was cold and cold in the pass with the early dark coming and the wind that shunted through the gap. He rode slouched loosely in the saddle with his elbows at his side. He read names and dates where they'd been written in the rock by men long dead who'd passed the same as he. Below him in the long enshadowed twilight lay the beautiful Animas Plain. Coming down the eastern side of the pass the horse suddenly knew where it was and it raised its nose and nickered and quickened its step.

It was past midnight when he reached the house. There were no lights. He went to the barn to put the horse up and there were no horses in the barn and there was no dog and before he'd even traversed half the length of the barn bay he knew that something was bad wrong. He pulled the saddle off the horse and hung it up and pulled down some hay and shut the stall door and walked down to the house and opened the kitchen door and walked in.

The house was empty. He walked through all the rooms.

Most of the furniture was gone. His own small iron bed stood alone in the room off the kitchen, bare save for the tick. In the closet a few wire hangers. He went into the pantry and found some canned peaches and he stood in the dark at the sink eating them out of the glass jar with a cookingspoon and looking out through the window at the pastureland to the south blue and silent under the rising moon and the fence running out into the darkness under the mountains and the shadow of the fence crossing the land in the moonlight like a suture. He turned on the tap at the sink but it gave only a dry gasp and then nothing. He finished the peaches and went to his parents' room and stood in the doorway looking at the empty bedstead, the few rags of clothes in the floor. He went to the front door and opened it and walked out onto the porch. He walked down to the creek and stood listening. After a while he went back to the house and went to his room and lay down on his bed and after a while he slept.