Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

He'd leaned back and closed the bible shut. That rain is comin this way, he said.

Yessir. I believe it is.

Can you smell it?

Yessir.

I always loved that smell.

They sat. After a while Billy said: Can you smell it?

No.

They sat.

What do you hear from that Boyd', the old man said.

I aint heard nothin. He never come back from Mexico. Or if he did I never heard it.

The old man didnt speak for a long time. He watched the darkening country to the south.

I seen it rain on a blacktop road in Arizona one time, he said. It rained on one side of the white line for a good half mile and the other side bone dry. Right down the centerline.

I can believe that, Billy said. I've seen it rain thataway.

It was a peculiar thing to see.

I seen it thunder in a snowstorm one time, Billy said. Thunder and lightnin. You couldnt see the lightnin. Just everthing would light up all around you, white as cotton.

I had a Mexican one time to tell me that, the old man said. I didnt know whether to believe him or not.

It was in Mexico was where I seen it.

Maybe they dont have it in this country.

Billy smiled. He crossed his boots on the boards of the porch in front of him and watched the country.

I like them boots, the old man said.

I bought em in Albuquerque.

They look to be good'ns.

I hope they are. I give enough for em.

Everthing's higher than a cat's back with the war and all. What all you can even find to buy.

Doves were coming in and crossing tie pasture toward the stockpond west of the house.

You aint got married on us have you? the old man said.

No sir.

People hate to see a man single. I dont know what there is about it. They used to pester me about gettin married again and I was near sixty when my wife died. My sister in law primarily. I'd done already had the best woman ever was. Aint nobody goin to be that lucky twice runnin.

No sir. Most likely not.

I remember old Uncle Bud Langford used to tell people, said: It would take one hell of a wife to beat no wife at all. Course then he was never married, neither. So I dont know how he would know.

I guess I've got to say that I dont understand the first thing about em.

What's that.

Women.

Well, said the old man. At least you aint took to lyin.

There wouldnt be no use in it.

Why dont you put your horses up fore your plunder gets wet out yonder.

I reckon I'd best be gettin on.

You aint goin to ride off in the rain. We're fixin to eat supper here in just a few minutes. I got a Mexican woman cooks for me.

Well. I probably need to move while the spirit's on me.

Just stay and take supper. Hell, you just got here.

When he came back from the barn the wind was blowing harder but it still had not begun to rain.

I remember that horse, the old man said. That was your daddy's horse.

Yessir.

He bought it off a Mexican. He claimed the horse when he bought it didnt know a word of english.

The old man pushed himself up from his rocker and clutched the bible under his arm. Even gettin up out of a chair gets to be work. You wouldnt believe that, would you?

Do you think horses understand what people say?

I aint sure most people do. Let's go in. She's done hollered twice.

He was up in the morning before daybreak and he went through the dark house to the kitchen where there was a light. The woman was sitting at the kitchen table listening to an old wooden radio shaped like a bishop's hat. She was listening to a station out of Ciudad Juarez and when he stood in the door she turned it off and looked at him.

Esta bien, he said. No tiene que apagarlo.

She shrugged and rose. She said that it was over anyway. She asked him if he would like his breakfast and he said that he would.

While she was fixing it he walked out to the barn and brushed the horses and cleaned their hooves and then saddled Nino and left the latigo loose and he strapped the old visalia packframe onto his bedhorse and tied on his soogan and went back to the house. She got his breakfast out of the oven and set it on the table. She'd cooked eggs and ham and flour tortillas and beans and she set it in front of him and poured his coffee.

Quiere crema, she said.

No gracias. Hay salsa?

She set the salsa at his elbow in a small lavastone molcajete.

Gracias.

He thought that she would leave but she didnt. She stood watching him eat.

Es pariente del senor Sanders? she said.

No. El era amigo de mi padre.

He looked up at her. Sientate, he said. Puede sentarse.

She made a little motion with her hand. He didnt know what it meant. She stood as before.

Su salud no es buena, he said.

She said that it was not. She said that he had had trouble with his eyes and that he was very sad over his nephew who was killed in the war. Conoc16 a su sobrino? she said.

Si. Y usted?

She said that she had not known the nephew. She said that when she came to work here the nephew was already dead. She said that she had seen his picture and that he was very handsome.

He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her.

Tiene que hacer un viaje largo? she said.

He rose and put the napkin on the table and took his hat up from the other chair and put it on. He said that he did indeed have a long journey. He said he did not know what the end of his journey would look like or whether he would know it when he got there and he asked her in Spanish to pray for him but she said she had already decided to do so before he even asked.

* * *

HE SIGNED the horses through the Mexican customs at Berendo and folded the stamped entry papers into his saddlebag and gave the aduanero a silver dollar. The aduanero saluted him gravely and addressed him as caballero and he rode south into old Mexico, State of Chihuahua. He'd last passed through this port of entry seven years ago when he was thirteen and his father rode the horse he now rode and they had taken delivery of eight hundred head of cattle from two Americans rawhiding the back acres of an abandoned ranch in the mountains to the west of Ascension. At that time there had been a cafe here but now there was none. He rode down the little mud street and bought three tacos from a woman sitting beside a charcoal brazier in the dust of the roadside and ate them as he went.

Two days' riding brought him at evening to the town of Janos, or to the lights thereof sited on the darkening plain below him. He sat the horse in the old rutted wagonroad and looked off toward the western Sierras black against the bloodred drop of the sky. Beyond lay the Bavispe River country and the high Pilares with the snow still clinging in the northern rincons and the nights still cold up there on the alto piano where he had ridden another horse in another time long ago.

He approached from the east in the dark, riding past one of the crumbling mud towers of the ancient walled town and riding slowly through a settlement composed wholly of mud and in ruins a hundred years. He rode past the tall mud church and past the old green Spanish bells hung from their trestlepole in the yard and past the open doors of the houses where men sat smoking quietly. Behind them in the yellow light of the oil lamps the women moved at their tasks. Over the town hung a haze of charcoal smoke and from somewhere in those dusky warrens music was playing.

He followed the sound down the narrow mud corridors and hove up at last before a door nailed up out of raw pine boards crusted with dried rosin and hung on bullhide hinges. The room he entered was but one more in the row of cribs inhabited or abandoned that lined either side of the little street. When he entered the music ceased and the musicians turned and looked at him. There were several tables in the room and all had ornately turned legs that were stained with mud as if they'd stood outside in the rain. At one of the tables sat four men with glasses and a bottle. Along the back wall was an ornate Brunswick bar brought here from God knew where and on the shelves of the carved and dusty backbar there were half a dozen bottles, some with labels, some without.