The Crossing(122)

She’s a good cook, the old man said. I hope she dont decide to get married and quit me. If I had to cook for myself the cats’d leave.

Oh Grandaddy, the girl said.

They wanted to put Miller four‑F too, the old man said. On account of his leg. They took him up at Albuquerque. They run em through up there I reckon in wholesale lots.

They didnt me. Are they goin to put him in the cavalry?

I dont think so. I dont think they’re even goin to have one. He looked out across the table, chewing slowly. In the yellow light of the pressed glass chandelier the old photographs and portraits above the sideboard seemed like artifacts salvaged from some ancient removal. Even the old man seemed distant from them. From the sepia‑tinted buildings, the old shake roofs. The people on horseback. Men sitting among cardboard cactus in a photographer’s studio in suits and ties with the legs of their breeches stogged into their boottops and rifles standing upright before them. The antique dresses of the women. The wary or haunted cast to their eyes. Like people photographed at gunpoint.

That’s John Slaughter in that picture at the end yonder.

Which one?

That last one on the top right under Miller’s certificate. That was took in front of his house.

Who’s the Indian girl?

That’s Apache May. They brought her back from a Indian camp they raided, bunch of Apaches been stealin cattle. Eighteen ninety‑five or six, somewheres in there. He may have killed some of em. He come back with her, she was just a little thing. She was wearin a dress made from an election poster and he took her and raised her as his own. He was just crazy about her. She died in a fire not long after that picture was took.

Did you know him?

I did. I worked for him at one time.

Did you ever kill a Indian?

No. I come near it a time or two. Some that worked for me. Who is that on the mule?

That’s James Autry. He didnt care what he rode.

Who’s that with the lion on the packhorse?

The old man shook his head. I know his name, he said. But I cant say it.

He drained his coffee and rose and got his cigarettes and an ashtray from the sideboard. The ashtray was from the Chicago World’s Fair and it was cast from potmetal and it said 1833‑1933. It said A Century of Progress. Let’s go in here, he said.

They went in the parlor. There was a paneled oak pumporgan against the wall where they passed through from the diningroom. A lace throw on top of it. A framed handtinted portrait of the old man’s wife as a young woman.

That thing dont play, the old man said. Aint nobody to play it noway.

My grandmama used to play one, Billy said. In the church.

Women used to play music. Anymore you just turn on a victrola.

He bent and opened the stove door with the poker and poked the fire up and put another split log in and shut the door.

They sat and the old man told him stories about rawhiding cattle in Mexico as a young man and about Villa’s raid on Columbus New Mexico in nineteen sixteen and about sheriffs posses tracking badmen down into the bootheel as they fled toward the border and about the drought and die‑up of eightysix and trailing north the corriente cattle that they’d bought for next to nothing up out of that stricken ground across the high parched plains. Cattle so poor the old man said that at evening crossing before the sun where it burned upon the western desert shore you could all but see through them.

What do you aim to do? he said.

I dont know. Try and hire on somewheres I reckon.

We’re about shut down here altogether.

Yessir. I wasnt askin.

This war, the old man said. There’s no way to calculate what’s to come.

No sir. I dont reckon there is.

The old man tried to get him to stay the night but he would not. They stood on the porch. It was cold and the prairie all about lay in a deep silence. The horse nickered at them from the gate.

You’d do just as well to start fresh in the mornin, the old man said.

I know it. I just need to get on.

Well.

I like ridin of a night anyways.

Yes, the old man said. I always did. You take care, son.

Yessir. I will. Thank you.

HE CAMPED THAT NIGHT on the broad Animas Plain and the wind blew in the grass and he slept on the ground wrapped in the serape and in the wool blanket the old man had given him. He built a small fire but he had little wood and the fire died in the night and he woke and watched the winter stars slip their hold and race to their deaths in the darkness. He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse’s mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and he saw far to the south beyond she Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it. Not just the coming of war. Anything at all.