The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

    Another heavy book by Corman McCarthy. When I set out to read more literature this year, I specifically wanted to avoid heavy books like this, but he is so damn good at writing. I definitely didn't think I would want to read Westerns, but my friend Frank kept mentioning how good Cormac McCarthy is, so I gave All the Pretty Horses a try and now I'm hooked. The Crossing is the sequel to that book, and the second book of The Border Trilogy, but follows a completely different character. But like the protagonist in All the Pretty Horses, Billy Parham makes multiple trips down to Mexico, fails to achieve his goals there, and finds death instead, but also the wisdom and kindness of strangers. Now that I've read two McCarthy books, I notice some trends. The obvious one is not much punctuation. Another one is that the characters in these books inhabit our world, but it's not our world. People in these books are wiser, and kinder, but they're also capable of more cruelty. Most characters that we meet are strangers on the road or in small towns or haciendas, who usually show kindness either by sharing food or a story or wisdom. Some others we meet are pure evil, who commit cruelty for cruelty's sake. And a very small number are benign, usually working for some cruel overlord, but willing to be merciful; or they are a person with no reason to harm out characters, but admit to their indifference to human suffering. Spoilers ahead. McCarthy also uses his books to draw big contrasts between the United States and Mexico, and to use Mexico as almost a time warp, where we hear stories going back to the Mexican Revolution and see poverty that would suggest the Stone Age. And then the characters return north of the border and confront modernity in the form of cars, war, and diners.

    The book, I would say, is dominated by three big stories in each part. The first is Billy Parham's search for the she-wolf terrorizing the cattle of the land, finding her, and trying to bring her back to Mexico. The second is Billy and his brother Boyd as they try to find the men who killed their parents and stole their horses. And the third is Billy returning to Mexico to find his brother Boyd. All of the stories deal with cruelty, and all these missions end in failure. When Billy tries to join the Army for World War Two its a failure. Failure is just an all-pervading theme of this book. Another one is truth. Throughout the book, we hear people saying things that are false, and we hear stories emerge out of nothing, or take a kernel of truth and turn it into something else entirely.

    McCarthy loves a sensitive cowboy. He loves how they love their horses, and he loves to think about the thoughts they think while they sit alone on the range at night, or atop a horse in the morning. He loves to write about them crying over horses they've lost, and in this book, he writes about an inverted scene, a pregnant wolf that Billy Parham loses. One other thing he likes to write about is a wound that lasts. In this book, the dog's throat gets cut, rendering it mute, the boys cause the death of a one-armed man, and Billy meets a blind man who tells him his story. I think surviving with wounds or with disabilities is important to McCarthy.

    I love McCarthy's writing and I've really never read anything else like it, so I wanted to just throw a few examples in here that stood out to me while I was reading. This first one is long, but I really didn't expect him to jump into the mind and the whole backstory of a wolf:

THE WOLF had crossed the international boundary line at about the point where it intersected the thirtieth minute of the one hundred and eighth meridian and she had crossed the old Nations road a mile north of the boundary and followed Whitewater Creek west up into the San Luis Mountains and crossed through the gap north to the Animas range and then crossed the Animas Valley and on into the Peloncillos as told. She carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He’d bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She’d flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.

She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.

She crossed the Bavispe River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and she had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she’d found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under a wire fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.

She ranged west into Cochise County in the state of Arizona, across the south fork of Skeleton Creek and west to the head of Starvation Canyon and south to Hog Canyon Springs. Then east again to the high country between Clanton and Foster draws. At night she would go down onto the Animas Plains and drive the wild antelope, watching them flow and turn in the dust of their own passage where it rose like smoke off the basin floor, watching the precisely indexed articulation of their limbs and the rocking movements of their heads and the slow bunching and the slow extension of their running, looking for anything at all among them that would name to her her quarry.

At this season the does were already carrying calves and as they commonly aborted long before term the one least favored so twice she found these pale unborn still warm and gawking on the ground, milkblue and near translucent in the dawn like beings miscarried from another world entire. She ate even their bones where they lay blind and dying in the snow. Before sunrise she was off the plain and she would raise her muzzle where she stood on some low promontory or rock overlooking the valley and howl and howl again into that terrible silence. She might have left the country altogether if she had not come upon the scent of a wolf just below the high pass west of Black Point. She stopped as if she’d walked into a wall.

She circled the set for the better part of an hour sorting and indexing the varied scents and ordering their sequences in an effort to reconstruct the events that had taken place here. When she left she went down through the pass south following the tracks of the horses now thirty-six hours old.

By evening she’d found all eight of the sets and she was back at the gap of the mountain again where she circled the trap whining. Then she began to dig. She dug a hole alongside the trap until the caving dirt fell away to reveal the trap’s jaw. She stood looking at it. She dug again. When she left the set the trap was sitting naked on the ground with only a handful of dirt over the waxed paper covering the pan and when the boy and his father rode through the gap the following morning that was what they found.

Just a good quote that illustrates the type of words McCarthy puts into unnamed strangers' mouths:

    The boy didnt know if he understood or not. The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different thing than men supposed. He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

More wisdom from strangers, who predict the future or understand what has happened far away, which is that Billy's parents have been murdered.

He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. Then he removed his hands from the boy’s saddle and stepped away and stood. The boy thanked him for his words but he said that he was in fact not an orphan and then he thanked the women standing there and turned the horse and rode out. They stood watching him go. As he passed the last of the brush wickiups he turned and looked back and as he did so the old man called out to him. Eres, he said. Eres huérfano. But the boy only raised one hand and touched his hat and rode on.

Sometimes, you can't be sure who exactly is talking, thanks to the lack of punctuation. The result is to be unsure if we are hearing narration or Billy Parham's thoughts. This is one such example of that, which also serves as an example of the theme of simple kindness of strangers:

He went back to the kitchen and looked for something with which to write. In the end he dusted flour from the bowl on the sideboard over the wooden table and wrote his thanks in that and went out and got his horse and led it afoot down the zaguán and out through the portal. Behind in the patio the little mule turned the pugmill tirelessly. He mounted up and rode out down the little dusty street nodding to those he passed on his way. Riding like a young squire for all his rags. Carrying in his belly the gift of the meal he’d received which both sustained him and laid claim upon him. For the sharing of bread is not such a simple thing nor is its acknowledgement. Whatever thanks be given, however spoke or written down.

And this is just a bizarre example of the needless cruelty that is so common in McCarthy's writing. It makes you wonder what happened to him. And by the way, I looked it up, and this is not humanly possible:

The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man’s spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive’s head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man’s eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.

And here is another example of the types of conversations people have in these books. Just one of many:

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Qué piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he’d given. He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men’s thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he’d already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.