Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

In the morning when he walked out to saddle his horse the woman was scattering grain from a bota to the birds in the yard. Wild blackbirds flew down from the trees and stalked and fed among the poultry but she fed all without discrimination. The boy watched her. He thought she was very beautiful. He saddled the horse and left it standing and said his goodbyes and then mounted up and rode out. When he looked back she raised her hand. The birds were all about her. Vaya con Dios, she called.

He turned the horse into the road. He'd not gone far when the dog came out of the chaparral and fell in beside the horse. He had been in a fight and he was cut and bloody and held one paw to his chest. Billy halted the horse and looked down at him. The dog limped forward a few steps and stood.

Where's Boyd? Billy said.

The dog pricked its ears and looked about.

You dumbaEU'ass.

The dog looked toward the house.

He was in the truck. He aint here.

He put the horse forward and the dog fell in behind and they set out north along the road.

Before noon they struck the main road north to Casas Grandes and he sat in that empty desert crossroads and looked off upcountry and back to the south but there was nothing to be seen save sky and road and desert. The sun stood almost overhead. He slid the shotgun out of the dusty leather scabbard and unbreeched it and took out the shell and looked at the wad end to see what size shot it held. It was number five and he thought about putting in the buckshot load but in the end he put the number five shell back in the chamber and breeched the gun shut and put it back in the scabbard and set out north along the road to San Diego, the dog limping at the horse's heels. Where's Boyd? he said. Where's Boyd?

That night he slept in a field wrapped in the blanket the woman had given him. The breaks of a river lay across the plain perhaps a mile distant and that was the way the horse would have gone. He lay on the cooling earth and watched the stars. The dark shape of the horse off to his left where he'd staked it.

The horse raising its head above the skyline to listen among the constellations and then bending to graze again. He studied those worlds sprawled in their pale ignitions upon the nameless night and he tried to speak to God about his brother and after a while he slept. He slept and woke from a troubling dream and could not sleep again.

He'd trudged in his dream through a deep snow along a ridge toward a darkened house and the wolves had followed him as far as the fence. They ran their lean mouths against each other's flanks and they flowed about his knees and furrowed the snow with their noses and tossed their heads and in the cold their pooled breath made a cauldron about him and the snow lay so blue in the moonlight and those eyes were palest topaz where they crouched and whined and tucked their tails and they fawned and shuddered as they drew close to the house and their teeth shone that were so white and their red tongues lolled. At the gate they would go no further. They looked back toward the dark shapes of the mountains. He knelt in the snow and reached out his arms to them and they touched his face with their wild muzzles and drew away again and their breath was warm and it smelled of the earth and the heart of the earth.

When the last of them had come forward they stood in a crescent before him and their eyes were like footlights to the ordinate world and then they turned and wheeled away and loped off through the snow and vanished smoking into the winter night. In the house his parents slept and when he crawled into his bed Boyd turned to him and whispered that he'd had a dream and in the dream Billy had run away from home and when he woke from the dream and seen his empty bed he'd thought that it was true.

Go to sleep, Billy said.

You wont run off and leave me will you Billy?

No.

You promise?

Yes. I promise.

No matter what?

Yes. No matter what.

Billy?

Go to sleep.

Billy.

Hush. You'll wake them.

But in the dream Boyd only said softly that they would not wake.

The dawn was long in coming. He rose and walked out on the desert prairie and scanned the east for light. In the gray beginnings of the day the calls of doves from the acacias. A wind coming down from the north. He rolled the blanket and ate the last of the tortillas and the boiled eggs she'd given him and he saddled the horse and rode out as the sun came up out of the ground to the east.

Within the hour it was raining. He untied the blanket from behind him and pulled it over his shoulders. He could see the rain coming across the country in a gray wall and soon it was pounding the flat gray clay of the bajada through which he rode. The horse plodded on. The dog walked beside. They looked like what they were, outcasts in an alien land. Homeless, hunted, weary.

He rode all day the broad barrial between the breaks of the river and the long straight bight of the roadway to the west The rain slacked but it did not stop. It rained all day. Twice he saw riders ahead on the plain and he halted the horse but the riders rode on. In the evening he crossed the railroad tracks and entered the pueblo of Mata Ortiz.

He halted before the door of a small blue tienda and got down and halfhitched the reins to a post and entered and stood in the partial darkness. A woman's voice spoke to him. He asked her if there was a doctor in this place.

Medico? she said. Medico?

She was sitting in a chair at the end of the counter with what looked like a flvwhisk cradled in her arms.

En este pueblo, he said.

She studied him. As if trying to ascertain the nature of his illness. Or his wounds. She said that there was no doctor nearer than Casas Grandes. Then she half rose out of the chair and began to hiss and to make shooing gestures at him with the whisk.

Mam? he said.

She fell back laughing. She shook her head and put her hand to her mouth. No, she said. No. El perro. El perm. Dispensame.

He turned and saw the dog standing in the doorway behind him. The woman rose heavily still laughing and came forward tugging at a pair of old wirerimmed spectacles. She set them on the bridge of her nose and took him by the arm and turned him to the light.

Guero, she said. Busca el herido, no?

Es mi hermano.

They stood in silence. She had not turned loose of his arm. He tried to see into her eyes but the light played off the glass of her spectacles and one of the panes was half opaque with dirt as if perhaps she had no vision in that eye and saw no need to clean it.

El vivia? he said.

She said that he was living when he passed by her door and that people had followed the truck to the end of the town and that he was alive to the limits of Mata Ortiz and beyond that who could say?

He thanked her and turned to go.

Es su perm? she said.

He said that it was his brother's dog. She said that she'd guessed as much for the dog wore a worried look. She looked out into the street where the horse stood.

Es su caballo, she said.

Si.

She nodded. Bueno, she said. Monte, caballero. Monte y vaya con Dios.

He thanked her and walked out to the horse and untied it and mounted up. He turned and touched the brim of his hat to the old woman where she stood in the door.

Momento, she called.

He waited. In a moment a young girl came out and eased past the woman and came to the stirrup of his horse and looked up at him. She was very pretty and very shy. She held up one hand, her fist closed.

Que tiene? he said.

Tomelo.

He held out his hand and she dropped into it a small silver heart. He turned it to the light and looked at it. He asked her what it was.

Un milagro, she said.

Milagro?

Si. Para el guero. El guero herido.