(1994) The Crossing

The past, he said, is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How to make a world of this? How to live in that world once made?

Plot Summary

The second in The Border Trilogy, The Crossing, chronicles the coming-of-age of Billy Parham, who is 16 at the novel’s opening. Billy lives with his parents and younger brother in New Mexico until one innocuous winter morning, when he comes across a trapped pregnant she-wolf that has been killing local cattle. ,. Seemingly without thought or care for his family, he rescues the wolf and begins the trek to Mexico, where he plans to release her to the wild. The round trip he makes is the first of three, each centering around a single poignant goal: the wolf’s rescue, Billy and his brother Boyd’s mission to take back their family’s horses, and Billy’s plan to return Boyd’s bones to his home country. Each attempt ends in evitable heartbreak and loss. While he crosses borders literally and metaphorically, Billy meets a series of men who tell him their stories that mirror Billy’s own encounters with the nature of existence and faith, the strength of compassion, and the soul of the land itself. Most of all, these stories explore the survival of stories and the witnessing of the world.

Critical Analysis

The Crossing speaks its greatest messages through the “prophets” whom Billy meets on his travels, one of whom is a self-described ex-Mormon who lives in a rundown church. The man tells him a long story about an anonymous man of faith who loses both his family and his faith. The speaker himself enters the story as a priest who argues incessantly with the faithless man about the “nature of God and of the spirit and the will and of the meaning of grace in men’s lives” (Crossing 151), and in the end, the faithless man dies un-absolved, and the priest himself loses his faith in that which validated it before. This tale is the first overarching declaration on the nature of stories that the novel puts forth: “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” (158). , The novel’s reflections on storytelling also establishes a hypothesis on the nature of God and how He has no one to bear Him witness, effectively rendering Him powerless. In the words of critic Trenton Hickman, McCarthy writes the “God-as-watchmaker trope to bleak effect, hinting that his God-as-weaver-and-unweaver’s intricate management of the world traps His divine self in a nexus of making and unmaking that frames the borderlands’ existence” (21).

The ramifications of the novel’s portrayal of God here are vast and immediate. The land of The Crossing is a place morally off-kilter, where Billy often embodies an alien sense of responsibility and righteousness, as is evident in each of his border crossings, where the mission for each is done with a great sense of justice. Billy attempts to structure his morality in the face of bloodthirstiness greeting him at every turn. Kenneth Hada claims Billy has “a sense of ought-ness” that is nowhere else in the novel’s scope. Even though Billy asserts his personal integrity, the consequences are consistently disastrous (59).

The faith in The Crossing is not institutional or orthodox, but born of deeper trust in the land and its ability to give or take life. This sort of earth-religion begins with the descriptions of the she-wolf’s lifeblood. McCarthy writes that the she-wolf’s world is  “construed out of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it” (73-74), and Billy notes that the wolf’s blood is indistinguishable from his own (125). The use of blood as a symbol frames the novel within a ritualistic space, where the narrative of the land resonates with the very act of spilling blood and is structured with that same blood at its roots (Hickman 19).

The blood mythos of The Crossing is also present in the idea of the “matrix” that persists throughout the novel. The word as it is used in the novel is the Spanish word matríz rather than the English matrix, which carries with it a new meaning; instead of the structure of the “matrix,” the “matríz” means also a womb or an original draft of a text and, above all, the principle form of an object. The matríz first appears in discourse before Billy leaves for the first time, when he and his father are attempting to trap the she-wolf. They come across an old hunter’s equipment, one of which is labeled as a “matrix,” identified later as musk from a male wolf, used as a lure on the trap. Billy later asks a local old man about it. The old man endorses the idea of the wolf as a sacred creature: 

...Men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. (45)

His words evoke transubstantiation and, more explicitly, the words of Jesus on the cross: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Most importantly, the blood that creates the order of the land is again a sacred instrument, but unlike Christ’s blood, it no longer implies redemption or hope (Hickman 24-25).

The Crossing’s blood matrix imbues the land with a sense of true creation. The novel’s sense of God manifests itself in the land: in its blood, and in its savage creations like the wolf. The violence of the borderlands creates its own religion by establishing what Hickman calls “centers of a non-national spatial ideology” (25). This strange religion is exemplified by Billy’s ritualistic actions after the wolf’s death,: “[He] hung the sheet on a trestlepole where it steamed in the firelight like a burning scrim standing in a wilderness where celebrants of some sacred passion had been carried off by rival sects or perhaps had simply fled in the night at the fear of their own doing” (126). Such actions toward the wolf parallel Billy’s treatment of Boyd’s death. Boyd inhabits the same mythic teenage space as John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses: a certain breed of young man who possesses an almost magical intuition about everything. Billy admits after Boyd’s death that “my bud was better at it than me” (420), with “it” standing in for life’s demands. Boyd first attains hero status with his battle wound, when the men who pick him upon wipe his blood reverently on their shirts (272), but he then ascends to the level of saint upon his bloody death, evident by the corrído that springs up around the story of his death (381).

That the past is not dead is an important theme within The Crossing, whose most dense passagesdeal with the ex-Mormon’s dilemma of the witness and his account of the world and of God. The last “prophets” that Billy meets are a group of gypsies, towing an airplane along the road. By this scene, adult Billy is returning to the United States on his last crossing, carrying Boyd’s bones home to be buried in his own country. When the gypsies meet him, Billy has been terrorized by bandits who desecrated Boyd’s bones and stabbed Billy’s horse in an act of pointless savagery. They heal Billy’s horse and explain to him the story of the airplane.

According to the gypsy leader, there are three sides to a narrative. The first and second are dependent upon the points of view of those involved. But his explanation of the third is the crux of the novel: “The third history, said the gypsy, is this. It exists in the history of the stories. It is that ultimately the truth cannot remain in any other place but in the speaking” (411, italics translation from Spanish by Lt. Jim Campbell). Here is the ex-Mormon’s quest for truth and the witnessing thereof, and the assertation that the truth of a witness lies in his identity as such.

by Caroline Dougherty