The Crossing(141)

Vámonos, called the rider. He turned his horse

The man with the pistol looked at them. Tengo que encontrar mi cuchillo, he called.

He uncocked the pistol and went to shove it in his belt but he had no belt. He turned and looked upriver where the day was coming beyond the brambly river breaks. The breath of the standing horses plumed and vanished. The leader told him to get his horse. He said that he did not need his knife and that he had killed a good horse for no reason.

Then they were gone. Billy stood holding the crushed and bloodsogged hat and he heard the horses crossing the river upstream and then he just heard the river and the first birds that were waking in that country and his own breath and the labored breathing of the horse. He put his arm around the horse’s neck and held it and he could feel it trembling and feel it lean against him and he was afraid that it would die and he could feel in the horse’s breast a despair much like his own.

He wrung the blood from the hat and wiped his hand on his trousers and unbuckled and pulled down the saddle and left it lying where it fell in the track along with the other wreckage there and he led the horse slowly out through the trees and across a gravel bar and into the river. The water was cold running into his boots and he talked to the horse and bent and lifted a hatful of water and poured it over the animal’s chest. The horse steamed in the cold and its breathing had begun to suck and rattle and it sounded all wrong. He put the palm of his hand over the hole but the blood ran between his fingers. He stripped off his shirt and folded it and pushed it against the animal’s chest but the shirt soon filled with blood and still the blood ran.

He’d let the reins trail in the river and he patted the horse and spoke to it and left it standing there while he waded to the river bank and clawed up a handful of wet clay from under the roots of the willows. He came back and plastered the clay over the wound and troweled it down with the flat of his hand. He rinsed out the shirt and wrung the water from it and folded it over the plaster of mud and waited in the gray light with the steam rising off the river. He didnt know if the blood would ever stop running but it did and in the first pale reach of sunlight across the eastern plain the gray landscape seemed to hush and the birds to hush and in the new sun the peaks of the distant mountains to the west beyond the wild Bavispe country rose out of the dawn like a dream of the world. The horse turned and laid its long bony face upon his shoulder.

He led the animal ashore and up into the track and turned it to face the light. He looked in its mouth for blood but there was none that he could see. Old Niño, he said. Old Niño. He left the saddle and the saddlebags where they’d fallen. The trampled bedrolls. The body of his brother awry in its wrappings with one yellow forearm outflung. He walked the horse slowly at his elbow and held the mudstained shirt against its chest. His boots sloshed with river water and he was very cold. They walked up the track and into a grove of wild mahogany where he’d be partly hid from sight of any parties passing along the river and then he went back and got the saddle and the saddlebags and the bedroll. Lastly he went to fetch the remains of his brother.

The bones seemed held together only by the dry outer covering of hide and by their integuments but they were of a piece and nothing scattered. He knelt in the road and refolded the weightless arms and wrapped the soogan about and sorted the ropes and tied the ends to make the severed pieces do. By the time he had all this done the sun was well up and he gathered the bones in his arms and carried them up into the trees and laid them on the ground. Lastly he walked back out to the river and washed and wrung out his hat and filled it with river water and carried it back to the horse to see if it would drink. The horse would not. It was lying in the leaves and the shirt was lying in the leaves and the clay compress had begun to break away and blood was running from the wound again and pooling darkly in the little jagged cups of the dry mahogany leaves and the horse would not raise its head.

He walked out and looked for the packhorse but he couldnt see it. He went to the river and squatted and rinsed out the shirt and put it on and he got a fresh handful of clay from under the willows and carried it back and caked the new mud over the old and sat shivering in the leaves watching the horse. After a while he went back out and down the track to hunt for the other horse.

He couldnt find it. When he came back up the river he picked up the waterbottle where it lay by the side of the trail and he picked up his cup and his razor and walked back up to the trees. The horse was shivering in the leaves and he pulled one of the blankets from the bedroll and spread it over the horse and sat with his hand on the horse’s shoulder and after a while he fell asleep.