Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

Era mi hermano, she whispered.

Lo siento, said the blind man.

They lifted the dead man from the box and lowered him into the arms of two men who had scrambled down into the grave. There they laid him out on the raw dirt and composed his arms again upon his chest where they had fallen free and they laid a cloth across his face. Then these rude provisional sextons reached up and took the hands of their waiting friends and were helped up from the grave and the men shoveled each a spadeful of dirt down upon the dead man in his poor clothes, the gray caliche rattling dully and the women sobbing, and shouldered up the empty box and the lid to carry back to the village for the conveying of yet another body. The blind man could hear new people arriving in the little cemetery and soon he was led away a short distance through the shouldering crowd to stand again and hear yet another simple country oration.

Quien es', he hissed.

The girl clutched his hand. Otto hermano, she whispered.

As they stood for the third burial the blind man leaned and asked how many of her family were to be buried but she said that this was the last.

Otro hermano?

Mi padre.

The clods rattled, the women wailed anew. The blind man put on his hat.

Returning they passed in the road another cortege bound out for the cemetery and the blind man heard yet other weeping and other feet shuffling along under the dire weight of the dead they bore. No one spoke. When they had passed the girl led him forth into the road again and they went on as before.

He asked the girl if there were any left alive of her household but she said there were none save only she for her mother was dead years since.

It had rained in the night past and rained in the dead fire left by the assassins and the blind man could smell the wet ashes. They passed the clay granja where the wall that had been dark with blood was all washed clean again by women of the town as if no blood had ever been there. The girl told him of the executions and named each man who died and told who he was and how he stood and how he fell. The women were held back until the last man was shot and then the captain had stood aside and they rushed forward to try to hold the men in their arms as they died.

Y tu? said the blind man.

She'd gone first to her father but he was already dead. Then to each of her brothers in turn, the elder first. But they also were dead. She walked among the women where they squatted on the ground and held the dead bodies to themselves and rocked and wept. The soldiers went away. A dogfight broke out in the street. After a while some men came with carretas. She walked about carrying her father's hat. She didnt know what to do with it.

She was still holding the hat in her lap at midnight sitting in the church when the sepulturero stopped to speak to her. He told her that she should go home but she said that her father and her brothers were dead in her house on their mats and a candle burned in the floor and that she had nowhere to sleep. She said that all her house was taken up with the dead and so she had come to the church. The sepulturero listened. Then he sat beside her on the raw wood bench. The hour was late, the church empty. They sat side by side holding their hats, she the sombrero of woven straw, he the dusty black fedora. She was crying. He sighed and seemed himself weary and cast down. He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it 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? It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that 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.

The girl respoke these words to the blind man where they stood before the granja wall. She said that the young girls had come and dipped their panuelos in the blood of the slain where it pooled in the dirt or torn off strips from the hems of their pettiskirts. There was a great coming and going in this commerce as of some band of witless nurses wrenched from all memory of their right function. The blood soon soaked into the earth and with fall of dark before the rain began packs of dogs arrived and gouged up mouthfuls of the bloodsoaked mud and ate it down and snapped and quarreled and Blank away again and in the day once more there was no sign remaining of death and blood and murder.

They stood in silence and then the blind man touched the girl, her face and cheek and lips. He did not ask to do so. She stood very still. He touched her eyes each in turn. She asked if he had been a soldier and he said that he had been and she asked if he had killed many men and he said none. She asked that he lean down so that she could close her eyes and touch his own face to see what could be known in that way and he did so. He did not say that it would not be the same for her. When she came to the eyes she hesitated.

Andale, he said. Esta bien.

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.

In the street people were shuffling past. Persinese, the girl whispered. The blind man would not turn loose her hand but leaned his staff against his waist and blessed himself clumsily with hisleft hand. The cortege passed. The girl gripped his hand anew and they went on.

Among her father's clothes she found him coat and shirt and trousers. She put what few other clothes were in the house into a muslin sack and tied it shut and she took the kitchen knife and molcajete and some spoons together with what food there was and tied them up in an old Saltillo serape. The house was cool and smelled of the earth. Outside among the cloistered walls and warrens he could hear yardfowl, a goat, a child. She brought water in a bucket for him to wash himself and he did so with a rag and then put on the clothes. He stood in the one small room that was the house entire and waited for her to return. The door stood open to the road and people going past in the street on their way to the cemetery could see him standing there. When she came back she took his hand again and she said that he was guapo in his new clothes and she gave him an apple of those she had bought and they stood in the room eating the apples and then shouldered up the bundles and set out together.

The woman leaned back. The boy thought that she would continue but she did not. They sat in silence.

Era la muchacha, he said.

Si.

He looked at the blind man. The blind man sat with his drawn face half enshadowed in the light of the oil lamp. He must have sensed the boy studying him. Es una carantona, no? he said.