The Crossing(132)

No one answered. He looked out down the narrow street. He looked in through the top of the door. Against the far wall of the hovel a candle burned in a dish and lying on a trestle with wildflowers from the mountains about him lay an old man dressed in his burial suit.

He got down and dropped the reins and stepped through the low door and doffed his hat. The old man had his hands composed upon his chest and he had no shoes on and his bare feet had been tied together at the toes with twine so that they would not lie asplay. Billy called softly into the darkness of the house but that room was all the house there was. Four empty chairs stood against one wall. A fine dust lay over everything. High in the rear wall was one small window and he crossed the room and looked out into the patio behind the house. An old horsedrawn hearse stood with the wagonshafts tilted back against the box. In an open shed at the far side of the enclosure stood a raw wood coffin on sawhorses made from pine poles. The lid of the coffin leaned against the wall of the shed. The coffin and the lid had been blacked on the outside but the inside of the box was raw new wood and no cloth or any lining to it.

He turned and looked at the old man on his coolingboard. The old man had a moustache and his moustache and his hair were silver gray. The hands crossed at his chest were broad and sturdy. His nails had not been cleaned. His skin was dark and dusty, his bare feet square and knotty. The suit he wore seemed small for him and was of a cut no longer seen even in that country and the old man had most likely had it all his life.

He picked up a small yellow flower in shape like a daisy and which he’d seen grow by the roadside and he looked at the flower and at the old man. In the room the smell of wax, a faint hint of rot. A frail afterscent of burnt copal. Qué novedades ahora viejo? he said. He put the flower in the buttonhole of his shirtpocket and went out and pulled the door shut behind him.

NONE IN THAT TOWN knew what had become of the girl. Her mother had moved away. Her sister had gone to Mexico years since, who knew what happened to such girls In the afternoon the wedding party came up the street with the bride and groom sitting on the box of the covered carreta. They passed slowly, accompanied by drum and cornet, the cart creaking, the bride in her veil of white, the groom in black. Their smiles like grimaces, terror in their eyes. In appearance they were like certain folk figures of that country who dance together with their own pale bones painted on their costumes. The cart in its slow creaking like that which fords the dreams of the paisano in his weary sleep, passing slowly from left to right through the irrestorable night for which alone he labors, dying away toward the dawn in a faint rattle, a tenuous dread.

In the evening they carried the old man up from the deadhouse and interred him in the cemetery among the tilted weathered boards that passed for tombstones in that austere upland country. No one questioned the right of the güero to be among the mourners and he nodded silently to them and entered the low house where a table had been laid with much of the best that the country had to offer. While he was standing against the wall eating tamales a woman came up to him and said to him that the girl would not be so easy to find as she was a notorious bandida and that many people were looking for her. She said it was rumored that at La Babícora they had put a price on her head. She said that some believed that the girl made gifts of silver and jewels to the poor and others believed that she was a witch or demon. It was also possible that the girl was dead although it was certainly not true that she had been killed at Ignacio Zaragosa.

He studied her. She was just a young woman of the campo.

Dressed in a poor black shift of cotton imperfectly mordant, imperfectly dyed. The blacking of it had left dark rings at her wrists.

Y Por qué me dice esto pues? he said.

She stood with her upper lip in her lower teeth. Finally she said that it was because she knew who he was.

Y quién soy? he said.

She said that he was the brother of the güerito.

He lowered his foot from the wall behind him and looked at her and he looked beyond her at the dark mourners who filed past and foraged from the board like those same figures of death at the feast and he looked at her again. He asked her if she knew where he could find his brother.

She didnt answer. The movement of figures in the room slowed, the low mutterings of the condolent died to a whisper. The mourners wished one another that they profit from their meal and then all of it ground away in the history of its own repetition and he could hear those antecedent ceremonies dropping somewhere like wooden blocks into their slots. Like tumblers in a lock or like the wooden gearteeth in old machinery slipping one by one into the mortices cut in the cogwheel rolling up to meet them. No Babe? she said.