The Crossing

“Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be turning some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.”

This description of Billy’s father raises one of the central tensions of the novel: humanity’s relationship to the elemental, natural forces that it thinks it has risen above. Throughout the narrative, different characters alternately argue that man is connected to the primordial through an unbroken history of existence and that the only thing that truly exists is the present, as all will crumble into dust. Billy’s viewpoint remains connected to the physical, historical world of the former.

“The ranchers said [wolves] brutalized the cattle in a way they did not 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.”

This quote represents one of the frequent philosophies that Billy encounters on his journey: that the civilizing force of humankind is in some way a violation of the natural world. The high desert of the Animas Valley is a liminal space between civilization and the wilderness, and the community’s perception of it as a settled, safe place is revealed to be an illusion over the course of the novel. This description of wolves’ brutality can also be applied to men who are eager to commit brutal violence against the weak.

“The wolf is like the copo de nieve.

Snowflake.

Snowflake. You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you dont have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. It you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back.”

Don Arnulfo tries to metaphorically explain to Billy why his quest to capture the wolf is a doomed one: A wolf’s very existence is incompatible with humanity. Whether Arnulfo means that catching the wolf inevitably leads to its death or that any interaction with humans will begin the process of domesticating the animal, thereby changing its spirt, is unclear. In either case, Arnulfo’s statement turns out to be prophetic: Billy is forced to kill the wolf, and the wolf is forced into a role defined by humankind rather than its own instinct.

“He was at Robertson’s crossfence. Ahead an hour’s ride lay Cloverdale and the road north. South lay the open country. The yellow grass heeled under the blowing wind and sunlight was running over the country before the moving clouds. The horse shook its head and stamped and stood. Damn all of it, the boy said. Just damn all of it.

He turned the horse and crossed through the ditch and rode up onto the broad plain that stretched away before him south toward the mountains of Mexico.”

When Billy deliberately chooses to cross the border for the first time in the novel and take the wolf to Mexico, it is both a literal and symbolic rejection of what is expected of him. McCarthy opposes “the road north” with the more descriptive image of “open country,” indicating Billy’s emotional state and ultimate decision to choose his own imagined—and ill-fated—future for the wolf over a return to civilization and the death he knows awaits the wolf there. Billy’s exclamation “damn all of it” foreshadows his eventual disillusionment with constructed systems of meaning, which will begin with this first journey south.

“We was just passin through, the boy said. We wasnt botherin nobody. Quieríamos pasar, no más.

Pasar o traspasar?”

The hacendado’s son puts a fine point on the sociopolitical issue undergirding Billy’s quest to return the wolf to Mexico when he asks “Passing or trespassing?” In this moment, Billy must confront the fact that he’s violating the law and the way of life of the Mexican people. Though he still disagrees with the cruelty inflicted on the wolf, he is forced to admit his own failure to recognize that the men who confiscated his wolf are not purely the villains he took them to be. Instead, he has entered into a complicated conflict of cultures for which he is unprepared.

“Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and now.”

The opening line of Part 2 shortens the psychological distance between the third person objective point of view and Billy’s own thoughts on the matter, providing a rare glimpse into the fatalistic drive that pushes Billy through the rest of the novel. Now living in the wake of tragedy, Billy’s former worldview—that there was a clear impetus to do what’s right—is replaced with a muted nihilism that he struggles to overcome. Even he and Boyd’s quest to recover their family’s horses rarely sparks real feeling in Billy, who goes through the motions of revenge for the sake of his brother.

“He told the boy that though 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.”

Once again, a passing stranger provides Billy with a warning against living in solitude and urges him to reconnect to the people around him. Billy tries to take the man’s advice, but the tragedy at the core of this novel is that Billy’s repeated experience of grief and loss drives him further from the people around him. Billy and Boyd never develop the ability to express themselves in a way that would be healing or bring them closer together.

“What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic, Huisiachepic of Caborca? They are different worlds, you must agree. Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid form us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”

The caretaker of the ruined church that Billy encounters tells him a long story, with this passage serving as the central lesson: In order to reckon with the world, you must take it holistically and be willing to accept it as it is. He further says that the only meaning to be found in the world is in telling it as a story to each other, suggesting that the act of meaning-making itself is all that matters. The caretaker has arrived at a theory for The Nature of Meaning in an Indifferent Universe: it exists in how people connect to each other (and, for him, how a person connects to God).

“What the priest saw at last was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only.”

The caretaker puts an even finer point on his philosophy, saying that it’s only in the context of others that the individual has purpose and meaning. Immediately after hearing this story, Billy decides to go home, and much of Parts 2 and 3 of the novel are concerned with him trying and failing to stay connected to Boyd. It’s clear that Billy wants to believe in what the caretaker told him, but the losses he experiences are more powerful than the lesson.

“Who’s Margarita Evelyn Parham? the sheriff said.

My sister.

Where is she at?

She’s dead.

How come her to have a Mexican name?

She was named after my grandmother.”

This passage contains the telling implication that Billy has Mexican heritage, a fact that is otherwise ignored by the characters. Throughout the novel, there’s a clear distinction between Americans and Mexicans—with Indigenous people living apart from both nations’ cultures—but in this and other places, that distinction is revealed to be a false dichotomy. Mexicans and Americans engaged in broad cultural exchange and trade across the border, Billy speaks relatively fluent Spanish, and his father’s horse, Niño, came from Mexico. The reality is far messier than the belief that both cultures cling to.

“Where’s the rifle at?

I traded it.

What did you trade it for?

I don’t think I could say.

You mean you wont say.

No sir. I mean I aint sure I could put a name to it.”

Billy traded his rifle away for the wolf’s body, and even with weeks of wandering to process his feelings, he’s still not sure why he’s done it. Throughout the novel, Billy remains opaque to the reader and sometimes to himself; he’s a young man of action but not of thoughtful intention. Billy’s inability to articulate his motives and feelings contributes to his inability to construct a narrative out of his own life in order to combat the meaninglessness he fears.

“The Tarahumara had watered here a thousand years and a good deal of what could be seen in the world had passed this way. Armored Spaniards and hunters and trappers and grandees and their women and slaves and fugitives and armies and revolutions and the dead and the dying. And all that was seen was told and all that was told was remembered. Two pale and wasted orphans from the north in outsized hats were easily accommodated.”

This passage is another of many that emphasizes the sheer scope of history that has taken place on the American frontier, most of which is obscured from the ruling governments and the present-minded. The Tarahumara tribe exists on a much longer timeline and brings perspective to the drama of the Parhams. While Billy and Boyd’s losses are significant to them, they are meaningless on the long scale of human history.

“When he looked at Boyd Boyd was still sitting there.

What is it now? he said.

Boyd got up slowly. It aint nothin now, he said. It aint nothing from what it was before.

He looked at Billy. You know what I mean?

Yeah, said Billy. I know what you mean”

This is one of few moments where Billy and Boyd speak to each other about their emotions after their parents’ death, and even this exchange is couched in the performative stoicism that causes them to grow further apart from each other. Billy is trying to be strong for his younger brother, and Boyd doesn’t want to disappoint Billy. In their forced stoicism, neither is able to offer the comfort that the other needs, even while expressing surface-level understanding.

“Tomelo, he called to them. Tomelo. The horse stamped and rolled its eyes and a man reached and took the reins and halfhitched them about one of the stakes in the truckbed and other hands reached for the boy and some clambered down into the road to help lift him up. Blood was a condition of their life and none asked what had befallen him or why. They called him el güerito and passed him up into the truck and wiped the blood from their hands on the front of their shirts.”

Though the Mexico of The Crossing is often a cruel place, it’s also one with a strong sense of communal spirit and generosity. Here, the workers who save Boyd’s life do it without regard for the danger they’re putting themselves in, going a step further than the people who have been housing and feeding the Parham’s throughout their journey, often without a word. The men recognize that Boyd’s injury is likely the result of injustice, which is an everyday reality in their lives.

“He’d quit singing and he tried to think how to pray. Finally he just prayed to Boyd. Dont be dead, he prayed. You’re all I got.”

Billy begins the novel as part of a religious family—a belief system that seems to be largely held together by his mother. By this point in the novel, Billy has come unmoored from any sense of moral goodness in the world or belief in God. The only thing he has left to believe in is saving his brother, and even that will be revealed to be impossible.

“En este viaje el mundo visible es no más que un distraimiento. Para los ciegos y para todos los hombres. Ultimamente sabemos que no podemos ver el buen Dios. Vamos escuchando. Me entiendes, joven? Debemos escuchar.”

This passage, spoken by the blind storyteller, roughly translates to, “In this journey, the visible world is nothing more than a distraction. For the blind and for all men. We know that we cannot see God’s goodness. Let’s listen. Do you understand me, young man? We must listen.” Like others before him, the blind man tries to teach Billy his philosophy, arguing that his sight was an illusion that kept him from understanding the true nature of the world. The blind man offers Billy a strategy for re-contextualizing the violence he has experienced, though Billy is unable to put it into practice. 

“He mounted up and rode the horse past her into the road. Then he stopped and looked back. He said that there were things about his brother that only his family could know and that as his family was dead there was no one who knew save he.”

Billy says this to the girl as they ride back to Boyd during his recovery. Billy feels an intense jealousy toward the girl because he knows she gives Boyd something Billy cannot: a sense of belonging and a future. Billy’s quest to recover the stolen horses was a sublimation of his grief—a desire to undo what’s been lost that is focused on the past. The journey has strained his relationship with Boyd, and he feels him slipping away. Tragically, his attempts to hold on to his brother only widen the gulf between them, as his brother chafes against Billy’s presumed authority throughout their journey.

“I thought you said you were from somethingdale. Where was it?

Cloverdale.

Cloverdale.

I was but I aint no more. I dont have anyplace to go. I think I need to be in the army. If I’m goin to die anyways why not use me? I aint afraid.”

Billy’s immediate reaction on learning about World War II is to attempt to enlist, despite no previous significant displays of patriotism or connection to his American identity, beyond recognizing the difference between Mexican and American culture. What’s revealed here is a deep, fatalistic depression about his future and his place in the world. He sees the war as a chance to give his life purpose after everything has been taken from him.

“He asked the corridero who was this joven of which he sang but he only said that it was a youth who sought justice as the song told and that he had been dead many years. The corridero held the fretted neck of his instrument with one hand and raised his glass from the table and toasted silently his inquisitor and toasted aloud the memory of all just men in the world for as it was sung in the corrido theirs was a bloodfilled road and the deeds of their lives were writ in that blood which was the world’s heart’s blood and he said that serious men sang their song and their song only.”

Though Billy is asking the corridero about his brother, the corridero recognizes that his art form takes place outside of the fact and history it draws from. The corridos contain poetic truth about the way the world should be in the same way that epic poetry or fairy tales reiterate cultural values of their culture of origin. By looking at corridoes from an archaeological perspective, trying to piece together the facts, Billy misunderstands their purpose.

“The soul of Mexico is very old, said Quijada. Whoever claims to know it is either a liar or a fool. Or both. Now that the yankees have again betrayed them the Mexicans are eager to reclaim their indian blood. But we do not want them. Most particularly the Yaqui. The Yaqui have long memories.”

Though Quijada works for Hearst, he remains neutral to the modern conflicts between he people and powerful landowners, and he does not see Billy or Boyd as an enemy. As a Yaqui, he observes the history of Mexico, its relations with America, and Mexicans’ hypocritical desire for connection to their Indigenous heritage from the outside. His words emphasize The Tension Between Cultures on the Borderlands and clue the reader in to a complicated sociopolitical landscape that Billy does not understand.

“In the night as he slept Boyd came to him and squatted by the deep embers of the fire as he’d done times by the hundred and smiled his soft smile that was not quite cynical and he took off his hat and held it before him and looked down into it. In the dream he knew that Boyd was dead and that the subject of his being so must be approached with a certain caution for that which was circumspect in life must be doubly so in death and he’d no way to know what word or gesture might subtract him back again into that nothingness out of which he’d come. When finally he did ask him what it was like to be dead Boyd only smiled and looked away and would not answer. They spoke of other things and he tried not to wake from the dream but the ghost dimmed and faded and he woke and lay looking up at the stars through the bramblework of the treelimbs and he tried to think of what that place could be where Boyd was but Boyd was dead and wasted in his bones wrapped in the soogan upriver in the trees and he turned his face to the ground and wept.”

The novel’s point of view rarely deviates from third person objective, but it does so whenever Billy dreams or thinks of the dead. This rare glimpse into Billy’s mind allows the reader to empathize with his internal struggle between his desire for a narrative that provides purpose to the tragedy he’s faced and his inability to reconcile that with the grief and pain he feels. Through his journey, he has become similar to the heretic from the caretaker’s story who could not see the existence of God in a cruel universe, but it’s clear that he wants to find some form of belief.

“La tercera historia, said the gypsy, es ésta. Él existe en la historia de las historias. Es que ultimadamente la verdad no puede quedar en ningún otro lugar sino en el habla.”

The wanderer’s exhortation to Billy translates to “The third story is this. It exists in the history of stories. It is that ultimately the truth cannot be anywhere but in the telling.” It’s important to note that the Spanish word for story and history are the same, implying that the narratives, whether they are fictional or historical, are more important than the actual facts. This echoes lessons Billy has been given by each person who has told him a story: Narrative is an act of making meaning for one another and an act of staying connected to the world.

“He woke in the white light of the desert noon and sat up in the ranksmelling blankets. The shadow of the bare wood windowsash stenciled onto the opposite wall began to pale and fade as he watched. As if a cloud were passing over the sun. […] The road was a pale gray in the light and the light was drawing away along the edges of the world. Small birds had wakened in the roadside desert bracken and begun to chitter and to flit about and out on the blacktop bands of tarantulas that had been crossing the road in the dark like landcrabs stood frozen at their articulations, arch as marionettes, testing with their measured octave tread the sudden jointed shadows of themselves beneath them”

In typical fashion, McCarthy describes the Trinity nuclear test in an elliptical, dreamlike style as a supernatural daylight that disrupts the natural order of the world. Of course, that’s what it is: The development of the atomic bomb ushered in a whole new era of history and, along with World War II, signaled The End of Frontier Life as America entered the global stage as a nuclear superpower. Billy’s way of life is hurtling apocalyptically into the past.