Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

In the evening they reached the hacienda of San Diego sited on a hill overlooking the tilled lands that ran on to the Casas Grandes River and to the Piedras Verdes. A windmill turned on the plain below them like a Chinese toy and dogs barked in the distance. In the long steep light the raw umber mountains stood deeply shadowed in their folds and in the sky to the south a dozen buzzards turned in a slow crepe carousel.

IT WAS ALL BUT DARK when they rode past the main house and along the drive, past the porticoes with their slender carved iron posts, past the white plaster walls quoined with red sandstone blocks and the terracotta filigree along the upper parapets. The front of the house was faced with three stone arches and above them were carved the words Hacienda de San Diego in letters arched over the initials L. T. The tall Palladian windows were shuttered and the shutters were weathered and broken and paint and plaster were flaking from the walls and the portico ceiling was no more than bare wood lath all waterstained and buckled. They went on across the yard toward what looked to be the domicilios where smoke was rising against the evening sky and rode through the standing wooden gates into the courtyard and sat the horses side by side.

In one corner of the enclosure stood the carcass of an antique Dodge touring car long stripped of wheels and axles, of glass and seats. At the far end of the compound a cookfire burned on the ground and by its light they could see two gaudy caravan wagons with wash hung between them and passing back and forth before the fire both men and women in robes and kimonos who appeared to belong to a circus.

Que clase de lugar es este? Billy said.

Es ejido, said the girl.

Que clase de gente?

No to se.

He swung down and the girl slid from the back of Boyd's horse and came and took the reins.

What are them? said Boyd.

I dont know.

They entered the compound, Billy and the girl afoot, the girl leading the horse. Boyd rode behind them. The figures at the far end paid them no mind at all. Two boys were lighting lamps from a burning split of wood at the fire and passing the lit lamps by their bails on a forked pole to a boy on the azotea who moved against the deepening sky hanging the lamps from the parapet. The ground in the compound became more illuminated as he went and soon a rooster began to call. Other boys were stacking haybales against a wall and under the farther portal men were unrolling a painted canvas drop much cracked and weathered from its travels.

Two of the costumed figures seemed engaged in a controversy and one of them stepped back and flung his arms wide. As if to demonstrate the measure of something outsized. Then he burst into song in some alien tongue. All movement ceased until he had done. Then all began again.

Donde estan los domicilios? said Billy.

The girl nodded toward the dark beyond the walls. Afuera, she said.

Let's go.

I'd like to see it, Boyd said.

You dont even know what it is.

It's somethin.

Billy took the bridlereins from the girl. He looked back at the fire, at the figures there. We can come back, he said. They're just gettin set up.

They rode out to where the three long adobe buildings stood that housed the workers and they rode up the passageway between the first two paced the way by a gauntlet of bristling and snarling curdogs. The evening was warm and there were cookfires burning out of doors and in the soft light a muted clink of utensils and the delicate slapping of hands shaping out tortillas. People drifted from fire to fire and their voices carried on the darkness and more distantly yet the sound of a guitar on the sweetness of the summer night.

They were given rooms at the far end of the row and the girl unsaddled Billy's horse and led both animals off to water them. Billy fished a wooden match from his shirtpocket and struck it alight with his thumbnail. The two rooms had a single door and a single window and high ceilings of vigas with latillas of sticks. A low door connected them and in the corner of the second room was a fireplace and a small altar with a Virgin of painted wood. A jar that held dead weeds. A drinking glass in the bottom of which lay a medallion of blackened wax. Against the wall stood a contrivance of poles lashed together into a frame and webbed with strips of rawhide with the hair on. It had the look of some rude agrarian implement but was in fact a bed. He blew out the match and walked out and stood in the door. Boyd was sitting on the stoop watching the girl. She was at the watering trough at the far end of the compound holding the horses while they drank. She and the two horses and the dog were surrounded by a semicircle of sitting dogs of every stripe and color but she paid them no mind. She stood very patiently with the horses while they drank. While they raised their dripping mouths and looked about and while they drank again. She did not touch the horses nor talk to them. She just waited while they drank and they drank for a long time.

They ate with a family named Mufioz. They must have looked hard used by the road for the woman kept urging food upon them and the man made little lifting motions with his outheld hands that they take more. He asked Billy where it was that they had come from and received the news with a certain sadness or resignation. As of things that could not be helped. They ate squatting on the ground with spoons and clay plates. The girl offered nothing in the way of her own origins and no one asked. While they were eating a strong tenor voice came floating on the night over the roofs of the domicilios. It ran up the scales and down twice in succession. Silence fell over the camp. A dog began to howl. Only after it seemed there would be nothing more forthcoming did the ejiditarios commence to talk again. A little later a bell tolled from somewhere off in the compound and in the long afterclang they began to rise and call out to one another.

The woman had carried her corral and her pots to the house and she now stood in the lamplit doorway with a small child on one arm. She saw Billy still sitting on the ground and she motioned him up. Vamonos, she called. He looked up at her. He said that he had no money but she only stared at him as if she did not understand. Then she said that everyone was going and that those who had money would pay for those who did not. She said that everyone must go. There could be no thought of people being left behind. Who would permit such a thing?

He rose and stood. He looked for Boyd but he could not see him or the girl. Stragglers were hurrying through the smoke of the dying cookfires. The woman had shifted the child to her other hip and come forward and took him by the hand as if he were himself a child. Vamonos, she said. Esta bien.

They followed the others up the hill, the crowd moving slowly for the old people and the old people urging them to pass and go on. None would. The empty house on the crest of the rise above them stood bleak and lightless but music was coming from the long walled compound where the shops and establos were once sited, the domiciles of the overseers. Light fell out through the tall bay doors and cressets of oil or pitch fashioned out of buckets burned at either side of the stone archway at the entrance and here the ejiditarios were queued and they shuffled forward with their centavos and their pesos clutched in their hands to offer them up to the doorman where he stood in his polished black suit. Two young men carrying a litter passed through the crowd. The litter was made from poles and sheeting and the old man lying on it was dressed in coat and tie and he clutched a wooden rosary and stared grimly at the arch of sky above him. Billy looked at the child the woman was carrying but the child was asleep. When they reached the gates the woman paid and the gatekeeper thanked her and rattled the coppers into a bucket on the ground beside him and they passed through into the courtyard.