The Crossing(57)

The old man was buried in the churchyard at Caborca among those of his own blood. Such was the working out of God’s arrangement with this man. Such was his colindancia and such perhaps is every man’s. At his dying he had told the priest that he’d been wrong in his every reckoning of God and yet had come at last to an understanding of Him anyway. He saw that his demands upon God resided intact and unspoken also in even the simplest heart. His contention. His argument. They had their being in the humblest history. For the path of the world also is one and not many and there is no alter course in any least part of it for that course is fixed by God and contains all consequence in the way of its going and outside of that going there is neither path nor consequence nor anything at all. There never was. In the end what the priest came to believe was that the truth may often be carried about by those who themselves remain all unaware of it. They bear that which has weight and substance and yet for them has no name whereby it may be evoked or called forth. They go about ignorant of the true nature of their condition, such are the wiles of truth and such its stratagems. Then one day in that casual gesture, that subtle movement of divestiture, they wreak all unknown upon some ancillary soul a havoc such that that soul is forever changed, forever wrenched about in the road it was intended upon and set instead upon a road heretofore unknown to it. This new man will hardly know the hour of his turning nor the source of it. He will himself have done nothing that such great good befall him. Yet he will have the very thing, you see. Unsought for and undeserved. He will have in his possession that elusive freedom which men seek with such unending desperation.

What the priest saw at last was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only. The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save his grace.

WHEN HE HAD mounted up the man stood at his stirrup and squinted up at him in the midmorning sun. You ride to America? he said.

Yessir.

To return to your family. Yes.

How long since you have seen them? I dont know.

He looked out down the street. Lost in weeds between the rows of fallen buildings. The mudbrick rubble slumped by the episodic rains of the region into shapes suggesting the work of enormous insect colonies. There was no sound anywhere. He looked down at the man. I dont even know what month it is, he said.

Yes. Of course. Spring’s comin. Go home.

Yessir. I aim to.

The man stepped back. The boy touched his hat. I thank you for the breakfast.

Vaya con Dios, joven.

Gracias. Adiós.



He turned the horse and rode out down the street. At the end of the town he reined the horse toward the river and he looked back a last time but the man was gone.

HE WOULD CROSS and recross the river countless times in the days following where the road went ford by ford or along those alluvial fans stepped into the base of the hills where the river shoaled and bended and ran. He passed through the town of Tamichopa which was leveled and burned by the Apaches on the day before Palm Sunday in the year seventeen fifty‑eight and in the early afternoon he entered the town of Bacerac which was the old town of Santa Maria founded in the year sixteen forty‑two and where a child came out unbidden and took his horse by the headstall and led him through the street.

They passed through a portal where he was obliged to bend low over the horse’s neck and they went on through a whitewashed zaguán into a patio where a burro tethered to a pole turned a stone wheatmill. He dismounted and was given a cloth with which to wash and then he was taken into the house and given his supper.

He sat at a scrubbed wooden table with two other young men and they ate very well on baked squash and onion soup and tortillas and beans. The boys were even younger than he and they eyed him furtively and waited for him to speak as the oldest but he did not and so they ate in silence. They fed his horse and at nightfall he was put to bed on an iron cot with a shuck tick at the rear of the house. He’d spoken to no one other than to say thank you. He thought he’d been mistaken for someone else. He woke once at some unknown hour and started up to see a figure watching him from the doorway but it was only the clay olla hanging there in the half darkness to cool the water in the night and not some other kind of figure of some other kind of clay. The next sound he heard was the slapping of hands making the tortillas for breakfast at daylight.