The Crossing

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1994

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Pages 3-64

Part 1, Pages 64-127

Part 2

Part 3, Pages 215-274

Part 3, Pages 274-332

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Part 3, Pages 274-332Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3, Pages 274-294 Summary

Content Warning: This summary section mentions self-harm and death by suicide.

Billy stops at a house owned by a woman and her blind husband. While they eat, the woman tells Billy their story: Her husband lost his eyes in 1913 during the Mexican Revolution serving under rebel Maclovio Herrera. The husband was captured in Durango, and while he waited for execution a German Huertista mocked him. The husband spit in his face, and in retaliation the Huertista grabbed him and sucked his eyes from their sockets. In this way, the husband was saved from execution, though his fellow captives did not know if his fate was worse. The wife says that 28 years later things are still the same, but the man says “The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less” (278).

The wife continues her story: When the rebels took Durango back, none present knew who the blind man was, so they sent him to Parral with nothing but a stave. People took care of him on his journey, but he was filled with despair, afraid for his new sense of being trapped inside of himself. A woman took him in and fed him, and when she asked if he had always been blind, he said yes.

Later, he encountered a bridge and entered the river below, hoping it might carry him away. When he discovered it was only knee deep, he attempted to drown himself, but could not. A man found him and led him out of the river, and they smoked cigarettes and talked. When asked why he wanted to kill himself, the blind man said he could not experience the world anymore. The other man encouraged the blind man to touch his face to prove that the world remained the same. The blind man was unmoved, saying “the light of the world was in men’s eyes only for the world itself moved in eternal darkness” (283). The two men parted as friends going in opposite directions.

Billy is nodding off, but the blind man asks his wife to continue. She says that in stories the hero meets three people, and the blind man has already met two. The blind man interjects to insist the story is a true one, and Billy pushes back, asking how a true story could follow such strict storytelling convention. The man says he met more than three people, but he only spoke to three of his blindness so “they must therefore be the principals in a cuento whose hero was a blind man, whose subject was sight” (285).

The story continues: the blind man traveled, and as he did, people helped him and confided their secrets to him. In the town of Rodeo, the military executed rebel sympathizers. He accidentally entered a funeral procession, where a girl held his hand. The funeral was for her two brothers and her father. The girl told him that on the night of the executions she went to the church, as her house held only death. The gravedigger sat with her and exhorted her to remember the sorrow of death. She told this to the blind man, and he touched her face. Then she touched his in the same way, and he let her touch his eye socket. The girl dressed the blind man in her father’s clothes, and together they left town.

The story ends. Billy asks if anyone else lost their eyes in the same way the blind man did. The blind man says that he heard stories and asserts that monsters like the Huertista “Ellos no han desaparecido del mundo. Y nunca lo haran” (They have not disappeared from the world. And they never will, 290). Billy asks him about his despair at being blind, and the man says that he has realized that sight is an illusion and that to understand the world “Debemos escuchar” (We must listen, 292). Before going to sleep, the blind man urges Billy to understand that evil seeks to impose order on the world, but the world’s impermanence is a blessing against that imposition.

Part 3, Pages 294-332 Summary

In the morning, Billy rides out toward San Diego and the family dog appears on the road, wounded but alive. That night while camping out, Billy dreams of a pack of wolves and then his brother telling him of his own dream of Billy running away. In the town of Mata Ortiz, Billy asks a woman about her brother, and she tells him that he was alive when he passed through on the way to San Diego. The woman’s child gives Billy a small silver heart, a miracle for his brother.

In San Diego, Billy finds Boyd unconscious at the Muñoz house, surrounded by gifts from the workers and the ejido. Boyd wakes and tells Billy it’s his birthday—he’s 15. He’s been treated by a bruja, or a practitioner of traditional witchcraft, who believes he will die. Billy rides on to Casas Grandes, where there’s a doctor.

The doctor agrees to go to Boyd, and Billy leaves Niño there and rides with the doctor in an old Dodge coupe. While the doctor examines Boyd, he tells Billy that he doesn’t have to stay. “I aint goin nowheres,” Billy says (305).

The doctor has Billy fetch water while he prepares to treat Boyd. In a long, painful process, the doctor cleans the entrance and exit wounds with iodine and cauterizes them with silver nitrate. He assures the boys that the injury is serious but not fatal and that Boyd is lucky the bullet missed his major organs and arteries. Billy offers Niño as payment, but the doctor refuses, saying he will send the horse to him in the morning.

Billy stays by Boyd’s side to care for him, but Boyd wants him to go to Namiquipa to meet the girl. He agrees to go, and the ejido agree to watch over Boyd, who they say is “un hombre del pueblo” (a man of the people, 317). On the road, Billy meets the workers who carried Boyd. They believe Boyd is a folk hero who killed the one-armed man in a gunfight. Billy tries to dissuade them, but as they drive off, one of them shouts “Hay justicia en elm undo” (There is justice in the world, 318).

Billy rides through towns he’s visited before on the road to Namiquipa. He camps at night, exhausted. When he wakes, the girl rides toward him on his mother’s old horse. She believed Boyd dead. They ride back to San Diego, but she is wary with Billy. Billy asks her if she’s afraid of men. She doesn’t answer, but he decides that she’d be right to be. She thinks Boyd is a hero, too, and reveals that the man who died betrayed his people to the Guardia Blanca during the Mexican Revolution—a counterinsurgency group aligned against the rebels. Billy tells her she knows nothing of Boyd, but she says Boyd is not who Billy thinks. He argues with her, revealing Boyd had a twin sister who died. That night, they speak of God, and Billy admits he no longer believes in God. Later, Billy wakes from a prophetic dream in which he saw his brother in a place he couldn’t reach.

When they arrive at San Diego, Boyd is happy to see the girl but largely ignores Billy over the next few days as he recovers. Billy questions him, and he says he’s okay. “I know you are,” Billy says, “But I aint” (331).

The next morning, Boyd and the girl are gone. Billy rides out looking for them for weeks, wandering from town to town for any sign of them. Finally, he rides back to Casas Grandes to visit the doctor, but the doctor has died. Billy tells a servant that the doctor was a good man and rides off.

Part 3, Pages 274-332 Analysis

This part of the novel begins with another long, digressive story that is told to impart a philosophical lesson to Billy. The blind man’s horrific encounter with the Huertista echoes McCarthy’s earlier novel Blood Meridian (1985), which rendered the Old West as a place where unthinkable brutality was an everyday action. At first, the blind man believes his new reality cut off from the world of sight is ruinous—the world as he knew it is gone, and the new world of sound and touch is both too remote and too inescapable for his existing sense of self. Once again, it’s only through connection with others that he’s able to find new meaning, and it’s significant that the story is told in collaboration between the blind man and his wife: The story is meaningful because it belongs to both of them.

The blind man’s story also bears deliberate storytelling structures that Billy calls in to question. He notes the artifice of the blind man encountering three people on his journey, and the blind man rejects this criticism. Not only is it an intentional flattening of the trials he faced on the way, he’s also aware that the story has been composed for Billy’s sake, which for the blind man is a mark in its favor. These digressions are part of the novel’s exploration of the connectedness of all meaning-making, and McCarthy subtly argues for the power of his own medium. The blind man believes in the purpose and inherent meaning of storytelling itself as a counter to the evil in the world. Billy misses this point and wants to know if the Huertista continued to blind men in a similar fashion, lingering on the violence instead of the comfort and healing. The blind man’s reply represents a resolved philosophy: The impermanence of all things is a comfort, not a burden, because it has power over evil men and implies an eventual end to all suffering.

Billy’s resistance to stories continues as he searches for Boyd. The people he encounters give the boys’ quest purpose beyond what they intended and have made Boyd into a figure of folklore. Billy tries to tell the literal truth, but for the people, the symbolic truth transcends fact. Meanwhile, Billy and Boyd must live through the harsher reality, and for Billy, the doctor who saved Boyd is the real hero. Billy is more interested in the power of science and the practical efforts to save his brother’s life than the symbolic quest to recover the horses, which has failed. Billy is even willing to give away Niño in payment, suggesting that he is similarly willing to give away the last of what he has—and the last of his connection to his parents—to save his brother.

At the same time, Billy recognizes that he’s already lost Boyd. His arguments with the girl are inconclusive, and his dreams indicate that he knows Boyd has moved beyond his reach. The strain of the brothers’ mutual loss has gone unexplored throughout the novel, and Billy’s attempts to address it after Boyd is healed are too little, too late. When Boyd disappears, it’s tragic because the reader knows that Billy has done everything in Parts 2 and 3 for his brother. Still, Billy hasn’t been able to convey his motivations to the one person he’s been trying to reach. After failing to find Boyd, he goes back to the doctor to find him dead, another sign that all hope has gone out of Billy’s world. Billy has tried to live a life with purpose, but the lesson he’s learned is that the cruelty of the world is absolute.