Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

Las grullas Megan, she said.

He watched them. The cranes were moving south and he watched their thin echelons trail along those unseen corridors writ in their blood a hundred thousand years. He watched them until they were gone and the last thin fluted cry like a child's horn floated away on the night's onset and then she rose and took her serape and walked off down the gravel bar and vanished among the cottonwoods.

They rode across the plankwood bridge and up to the old hacienda at noon the day following. People stood all along in the doorways of the domicilios who should have been in the fields and he realized that it was some feastday of the calendar. He rode past her and pulled the horse up in front of the Munoz door and dismounted and dropped the reins and pulled off his hat and ducked and entered the low doorway.

Boyd was sitting on the pallet with his back against the wall. The flame of the votive candle heeled about in the glass above his head and swathed as he was in his wraps of sheeting he looked like someone sat suddenly upright at his own vigil. The mute dog had been lying down and it stood and moved against him. Donde estabas? Boyd said. He wasnt talking to his brother.

He was talking to the girl who came smiling through the doorway behind him.

THE NEXT DAY he rode out down the river and he was gone all day. High thin skeins of wildfowl were moving downcountry and leaves were falling in the river, willow and cottonwood, coiling and turning in the current. Their shadows where they skated over the river stones looked like writing. It was dark when he returned, riding the horse up through the smoke of the cookfires from pool to pool of light like a mounted sentry posted to patrol the watchfires of a camp. In the days to follow he worked with the herders, driving sheep down from the hills and through the high vaulted gate of the compound where the animals milled and climbed against each other and the esquiladores stood at the ready with their shears. They drove the sheep half a dozen at a time into the highceilinged and ruinous storeroom and the esquiladores stood them between their knees and clipped them by hand and young boys gathered the wool up from off the raincupped boards of the floor and stamped it into the long cotton bags with their feet.

It was cool in the evening and he would sit by the fire and drink coffee with the ejiditarios while the dogs of the compound moved from fire to fire scavenging for scraps. By now Boyd was riding out in the evening, sitting the horse stiffly and riding at a walk with the girl riding Nino close beside him. He'd lost his hat in the fray on the river and he wore an old straw hat they'd found for him and a shirt made from striped ticking. After they'd come back Billy would walk out to where the horses were hobbled below the domicilios and ride Nino bareback down to the river and wade the horse out into the darkening shallows where he'd seen the naked duena at her bath and the horse would drink and raise its dripping muzzle and they would listen together to the river passing and to the sound of ducks somewhere on the water and sometimes the high thin cranking of the flights of cranes still passing south a mile above the river. He rode down the far bank in the twilight and he could see in the river loam among the cottonwoods the tracks of the horses where Boyd had passed and he followed the tracks to see where they had gone and he tried to guess the thoughts of the rider who had made them. When he walked back up to the compound it was late and he entered the low door and sat on the pallet where his brother lay sleeping.

Boyd, he said.

His brother woke and turned and lay in the pale candlelight and looked up at him. It was warm in the room from the day's heat seeping back out of the mud walls and Boyd was naked to the waist. He'd taken the wrapping from about his chest and he was paler than his brother could ever remember and so thin with the rack of his ribs stark against the pale skin and when he turned in the reddish light Billy could see the hole in his chest for just a moment and he turned his eyes away like a man unwittingly made privy to some secret thing to which he was in no way entitled, for which he was in no way prepared. Boyd pulled the muslin cover up and lay back and looked at him. His long pale uncut hair all about him and his face so thin. What is it? he said.

Talk to me.

Go to bed.

I need for you to talk to me.

It's okay. Everthing's okay.

No it aint.

You just worry about stuff. I'm all right.

I know you are, said Billy. But I aint.

THREE DAYS LATER when he woke in the morning and walked out they were gone. He walked out to the end of the row and looked down toward the river. His father's horse standing in the field raisedits head and looked at him and looked out down the road toward the river and the river bridge and the road beyond.

He got his things from the house and saddled the horse and rode out. He said goodbye to no one. He sat the horse in the road beyond the river cottonwoods and he looked off downcountry at the mountains and he looked to the west where thunderheads were standing sheared off from the thin dark horizon and he looked at the deep cyanic sky taut and vaulted over the whole of Mexico where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of men. He turned the horse and set out along the road south, shadowless in the gray day, riding with the shotgun unscabbarded across the bow of the saddle. For the enmity of the world was newly plain to him that day and cold and inameliorate as it must be to all who have no longer cause except themselves to stand against it.

He looked for them for weeks but he found only shadow and rumor. He found the little heartshaped milagro in the watchpocket of his jeans and he hooked it out with his forefinger and held it in the palm of his hand and he studied it long and long. He rode as far south as Cuauhtemoc. He rode north again to Namiquipa but could find no one who owned to know the girl and he rode as far west as La Nortena and the watershed and he grew thin and gaunted in his travels and pale with the dust of the road but he never saw them again. He sat the horse at dawn in the crossroads at Buenaventura and watched waterfowl trailing over the river and the lonely lagunas, the dark liquid movement of their wings against the red sunrise. He passed back north through the small mud hamlets of the mesa, through Alamo and Galeana, settlements through which he'd passed before and where his return was remarked upon by the poblanos so that his own journeying began to take upon itself the shape of a tale. It was cold at night on the high plains in these early days of December and he had little to keep him warm. When he rode once more into Casas Grandes he'd not eaten in two days and it was past midnight and a cold rain falling.

He rapped long at the zaguan gates. Toward the rear of the house a dog barked. Finally a light came on.

When the mozo opened the gate and looked out to see him standing there in the rain holding the horse he did not seem surprised. He asked after his brother and Billy said that his brother had recovered from his wounds but that he had disappeared and he apologized for the hour but wished to know if he might see the doctor. The mozo said that the hour was of no consequence for the doctor was dead.

He didnt ask the mozo when had the doctor died or of what cause. He stood with his hat and held it in both hands before him. Lo siento, he said.

The mozo nodded. They stood there in silence and then the boy put on his hat and turned and put one foot into the stirrup and stood up into the saddle and sat the dark wet horse and looked down at the mozo. He said that the doctor had been a good man and he looked off down the street toward the lights of the town and he looked again at the mozo.