The Crossing(124)

He looked out at the street. There aint no stores open, he said.

It’s Christmas day, the clerk said. Aint no stores open on Christmas day.

He drifted into the north Texas panhandle and he worked out most of the following year for the Matadors and he worked for the T Diamond. He drifted south and he worked small spreads some no more than a week. By the spring of the third year of the war there was hardly a ranch house in all of that country that did not have a gold star in the window. He worked until March on a small ranch out of Magdalena New Mexico and then one day he got his pay and saddled his horse and tied his bedroll onto the packhorse and rode south again. He crossed the last blacktop highway just east of Steins and two days later rode up to the SK Bar gate. It was a cool spring day and the old man was sitting on the porch in his rocker with his hat on and a bible in his lap. He’d bent forward to see if he could tell who it was. As if the extra foot of proximity might bring the rider into focus. He looked older and more frail, much reduced from his former self in the two years since he’d seen him. Billy called his name and the old man said for him to get down and he did. When he got to the foot of the steps he stopped with one hand on the paintflaked baluster and looked up at the old man. The old man sat with the bible closed over one finger to mark its place. Is that you, Parham? he said.

Yessir. Billy.

He walked up the steps and took off his hat and shook hands with the old man. The old man’s eyes had faded to a paler blue. He held Billy’s hand a long time. Bless your heart, he said. I’ve thought about you a thousand times. Set down here where we can visit.

He pulled up one of the old canebottomed chairs and sat and put his hat over his knee and looked out over the pasturelands toward the mountains and he looked at the old man.

I reckon you knew about Miller, the old man said.

No sir. I’ve not had much news.

He was killed on Kwajalein Atoll.

I’m awful sorry to hear that.

We’ve had it pretty rough here. Pretty rough.

They sat. There was a breeze coming up the country. A pot of asparagus fern hanging from the porch eaves at the corner swung gently and its shadow oscillated over the boards of the porch slow and random and uncentered.

Are you doin all right? Billy said.

Oh I’m all right. I had a operation for cataracts back in the fall but I’m makin it. Leona went off and got married on me. Now her husband’s shipped out and she’s livin in Roswell I dont know what for. Got a job. I tried to reason with her but you know how that goes.

Yessir.

By rights I got no business bein here atall.



I hope you live forever.

Dont wish that on me.

He’d leaned back and closed the bible shut. That rain is comin this way, he said.

Yessir. I believe it is.

Can you smell it?

Yessir.

I always loved that smell.

They sat. After a while Billy said: Can you smell it?

No.

They sat.

What do you hear from that Boyd’, the old man said.

I aint heard nothin. He never come back from Mexico. Or if he did I never heard it.

The old man didnt speak for a long time. He watched the darkening country to the south.

I seen it rain on a blacktop road in Arizona one time, he said. It rained on one side of the white line for a good half mile and the other side bone dry. Right down the centerline.

I can believe that, Billy said. I’ve seen it rain thataway.

It was a peculiar thing to see.

I seen it thunder in a snowstorm one time, Billy said. Thunder and lightnin. You couldnt see the lightnin. Just everthing would light up all around you, white as cotton.

I had a Mexican one time to tell me that, the old man said. I didnt know whether to believe him or not.

It was in Mexico was where I seen it.

Maybe they dont have it in this country.

Billy smiled. He crossed his boots on the boards of the porch in front of him and watched the country.

I like them boots, the old man said.

I bought em in Albuquerque.

They look to be good’ns.

I hope they are. I give enough for em.

Everthing’s higher than a cat’s back with the war and all. What all you can even find to buy.

Doves were coming in and crossing tie pasture toward the stockpond west of the house.

You aint got married on us have you? the old man said.

No sir.

People hate to see a man single. I dont know what there is about it. They used to pester me about gettin married again and I was near sixty when my wife died. My sister in law primarily. I’d done already had the best woman ever was. Aint nobody goin to be that lucky twice runnin.

No sir. Most likely not.

I remember old Uncle Bud Langford used to tell people, said: It would take one hell of a wife to beat no wife at all. Course then he was never married, neither. So I dont know how he would know.