The Crossing(147)

He looked toward the pail. The steam had ceased rising and he nodded and stood. Rafael rose and took up the musette bag and slung it over one shoulder and picked up the pail and all followed the gypsy up through the river woods to where the horse lay and there one of the men knelt and raised up the horse’s head from the ground while Rafael took from the bag a leather funnel and a length of rubber hose and they gripped the horse’s mouth and opened up its jaws while he greased the hose and ran it down the horse’s gullet and twisted the funnel over the end and then they poured with no ceremony the contents of the pail into the horse.

When they had done the gypsy washed again the dried blood from the horse’s chest and examined the wound and then dredged up a double handful of the cooked leaves from the floor of the bucket and packed them against the wound in a poultice which he bound up with burlap sacking and tied with cord over the horse’s neck and behind its forelegs. When he was done he rose and stepped back and stood looking down at the animal with long contemplation. The horse looked very strange indeed. It half raised its head and blinked at them and then wheezed and stretched its neck in the leaves and lay there. Bueno, said the gypsy. He looked at Billy and smiled.

They stood in the road and the guano pulled the brim of his hat down level and slid the scrimshawed length of birdbone which he used for a drawtie up under his chin and looked at the oxen and at the float and the airplane. He looked out through the trees to where the rolled soogan that held Boyd’s body was wedged in the low branches of the tascate tree. He looked at Billy.

Estoy regresándole a mi país, Billy said.

The gypsy smiled again and looked north along the road. Otros huesos, he said. Otros hermanos. He said that as a child he had traveled a good deal in the land of the gavacho. He said he’d followed his father through the streets of western cities and they collected odds of junk from the houses there and sold them. He said that sometimes in trunks and boxes they would come upon old photographs and tintypes. These likenesses had value only to the living who had known them and with the passage of years of such there were none. But his father was a gypsy and had a gypsy mind and he would hang these cracked and fading likenesses by clothespins from the crosswires above the cart. There they remained. No one ever asked about them. No one wished to buy them. After a while the boy took them for a cautionary tale and he would search those sepia faces for some secret thing they might divulge to him from the days of their mortality. The faces became very familiar to him. By their antique clothing they were long dead and he pondered them where they sat posed on porchsteps, seated in chairs in a yard. All past and all future and all stillborn dreams cauterized in that brief encapture of light within the camera’s closet. He searched those faces. Looks of vague discontent. Looks of rue. Perhaps some burgeoning bitterness at things in fact not yet come to be which yet were now forever past.

His father said that the gorgios were an inscrutable lot and so he found them to be. In and out of all depicting. The photographs that hung from the wire became for him a form of query to the world. He sensed in them a certain power and he guessed that the gorgios considered them bad luck for they would scarcely look at them but the truth was darker yet as truth is wont to be.

What he came to see was that as the kinfolk in their fading stills could have no value save in another’s heart so it was with that heart also in another’s in a terrible and endless attrition and of any other value there was none. Every representation was an idol. Every likeness a heresy. In their images they had thought to find some small immortality but oblivion cannot be appeased. This was what his father meant to tell him and this was why they were men of the road. This was the why of the yellowing daguerreotypes swinging by their clothespegs from the crosswise of his father’s cart.

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied. He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least. He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men’s hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. In those faces that shall now be forever nameless among their outworn chattels there is writ a message that can never be spoken because time would always slay the messenger before he could ever arrive.

He smiled. Pensamos, he said, que somos las víctimas del tiempo. En realidad la vía del mundo no es fijada en ningún lugar. Cómo sería posible? Nosotros mismos somos nuestra propia jornada. Y por eso somos el tiempo también. Somos to mismo. Fugitivo. Inescrutable. Desapíadado.