The Crossing(115)

Billy listened to all this and when she was done he said that the manco had fallen from his horse and broken his back and that he himself had seen it happen.

He waited. After a while she looked up.

Quieres algo más? she said.

No. Gracias.

She began to pack up the remains of their picnic. He watched her but he made no move to help. He rose and she folded the serape and rolled the remainder of the provisions in it and retied it with the cords.

No Babes nada de mi hermano, he said.

Quizás, she said.

She stood with the rolled serape over her shoulder.

Por qué no me contesta? he said.

She looked up at him. She said that she had answered him. She said that in every family there is one who is different and the others believe that they know that person but they do not know that person. She said that she herself was such a one and knew whereof she spoke. Then she turned and walked out to where the horses were grazing in the dusty roadside weeds and tied the serape on behind the cantle and tightened the cinch and stood up into the saddle.

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. Every small thing. Any time that he was sick as a child or the day he was bitten by a scorpion and thought he was going to die or any of his life in another part of the country that even Boyd remembered little of or none at all including his grandmother and his twin sister dead and buried in that long ago in a place he’d likely never see again.

Sabías que él tenía una gemela? he said. Que murió cuando tenía cinco años?

She said that she did not know that Boyd had once had a twin sister or that she died but that it was not important for now he had another. Then she put the horse forward and went past him and into the road.

An hour later they overtook three young girls afoot. Two of them carried a basket between them with a cloth over it. They were on their way to the pueblo of Soto Maynez and they had yet a ways to go. They looked back when they heard the riders on the road behind them and they huddled together laughing and when the riders passed they pushed one another to the verge of the road and looked up with their quick dark eyes and laughed behind their hands. Billy touched his hat and rode on but the girl stopped and walked the horse beside them and when he looked back she was talking to them. They were little younger than she but she was calling them to task in that same low flat voice. Finally they stopped and stood back against the roadside chaparral but here she halted the horse entirely and continued until she was done. Then she turned and put the horse forward and did not look back.

They rode all day. It was dark when they entered La Boquilla and he rode through the town as he had come with the shotgun upright before him. When they passed the spot where the manco had fallen she made the sign of the cross and kissed her fingers. Then they rode on. The sparse trunks of the painted alameda trees stood pale as bone in the light from the windows. Some windows of glass but mostly oiled butcherpaper tacked up in frames and behind them neither movement nor shadow but only those sallow squares like parchments or old barren maps long weathered of any trace of their terrains or routes upon them. On the outskirts of the settlement there was a fire burning just off the roadside and they slowed and rode past cautiously but the fire appeared to be only a trashfire and there was no one about and they rode on into the dark country to the west.

That night they camped in a swale at the edge of the lake and shared the last of the provisions she’d brought. When he asked her would she not have been afraid to ride through this country by herself at night she said that there was no remedy for it and that one must put oneself in the care of God.

He asked if God always looked after her and she studied the heart of the fire for a long time where the coals breathed bright and dull and bright again in the wind from the lake. At last she said that God looked after everything and that one could no more evade his care than evade his judgment. She said that even the wicked could not escape his love. He watched her. He said that he himself had no such idea of God and that he’d pretty much given up praying to Him and she nodded without taking her eyes from the fire and said that she knew that.

She took her blanket and went off down by the lake. He watched her go and then shucked off his boots and rolled his serape about him and fell into a troubled sleep. He woke sometime in the night or in the early morning and turned and looked at the fire to see how long he’d slept but the fire was all but cold on the ground. He looked to the east to see if there were any trace of dawn graying over the country but there was only the darkness and the stars. He prodded the ashes with a stick. The few red coals that turned up in the fire’s black heart seemed secret and improbable. Like the eyes of things disturbed that had best been left alone. He rose and walked down to the lake with the serape about his shoulders and he looked at the stars in the lake. The wind had died and the water lay black and still. It lay like a hole in that high desert world down into which the stars were drowning. Something had woke him and he thought perhaps he’d heard riders on the road and that they’d seen his fire but there was no fire to see and then he thought perhaps the girl had risen and come to the fire and stood over him where he slept and he remembered tasting rain on his face but there was no rain nor had there been and then he remembered his dream. In the dream he was in another country that was not this country and the girl who knelt by him was not this girl. They knelt in the rain in a darkened city and he held his dying brother in his arms but he could not see his face and he could not say his name. Somewhere among the black and dripping streets a dog howled. That was all. He looked out at the lake where there was no wind but only the dark stillness and the stars and yet he felt a cold wind pass. He crouched in the sedge by the lake and he knew he feared the world to come for in it were already written certainties no man would wish for. He saw pass as in a slow tapestry unrolled images of things seen and unseen. He saw the shewolf dead in the mountains and the hawk’s blood on the stone and he saw a glass hearse with black drapes pass in a street carried on poles by mozos. He saw the castaway bow floating on the cold waters of the Bavispe like a dead serpent and the solitary sexton in the ruins of the town where the terremoto had passed and the hermit in the broken transept of the church at Caborca. He saw rainwater dripping from a lightbulb screwed into the sheetiron wall of a warehouse. He saw a goat with golden horns tethered in a field of mud.