Cormac McMonthly: The Crossing (1994)

Movement itself is a form of property

Cormac McCarthy was one of the greatest American writers of fiction. He passed away on June 13, 2023, at the age of 89. During his life, he published 12 novels. Over the course of this year, I have been reading one McCarthy novel each month, in publishing order, and reflecting on the experience here. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.

Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay.

The Crossing makes me want to become fluent in Spanish. That’s not a claim I make lightly, either. The only other time I was inspired by literature to get serious about learning a language, it was when Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo made me want to learn Japanese. And that changed the course of my life.

I don’t want to learn Spanish so that I can better understand large swaths of The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses, and, I suspect, Cities of the Plain. Although that surely would be fun, and I’ll surely reread at least those first two at some point.

Learning a new language is the surest method for onboarding an entirely new view of the world and its inhabitants. It just so happens that, with his Spanish-speaking characters wandering in and out of Mexico, McCarthy hints at a way of existing – and thinking about existing – that soothes my troubled mind. And yes, I do believe peace of mind is worth learning an entire language for.

It was the work of Japanese authors (translated into English) that made me want to study Japanese. Here, we have Mexican-inflected Spanish written by a white American man. I don’t know if that matters, ultimately, but it’s something to think about. Ol’ Cormie himself would probably find some grim amusement in it. But I really don’t even know how accurate his Spanish is. From my limited level of comprehension, it reads as both flawless and haunting.

It also reads as an invitation, not so much to a different country or even a different world, but to a different plane of existence. One where death is not the end of anything, but merely a different stage of life, and one we are all always coexisting with.

McCarthy doesn’t only rely on Spanish to test the opacity of the veil separating the dead and the living. Plenty of his English (sorry, english) is devoted to this topic as well. It’s a large part of what The Crossing is about. And that’s one form of crossing.

Like Pretty Horses before it, The Crossing revolves around the traipsing across and around the Mexico-Texas border of an itinerant sullen american english-speaking youth. This one’s named Billy Parham. His comings and goings, of course, are another form of crossing.

What fascinated me about Billy was that, while reading about his exploits, and his encounters with long-winded holders of wisdom, I kept feeling tempted to ascribe a desire for meaning to him. But I’m not sure he ever really expressed one. He simply drifted, from place to place and from self-assigned mission to self-assigned mission, for the length of the book. It was my desire, as reader, for him to search for meaning, that I thought was keeping him going. It wasn’t. He kept going because he hadn’t died yet. That was all.

Yes, Billy expresses desires in the novel. But they are short-term and perfunctory, based mainly on a code of ethics Billy himself couldn’t describe in detail if asked to do so. Perhaps that’s just a fancy way of describing a man’s instincts.

He goes hunting for a wolf, in the beginning, because his father told him it was important to do so. When eventually he catches the pregnant wolf, Billy decides to guide her home to Mexico rather than kill her, despite being warned of the insanity of his actions. Perhaps he wants to prove his independence to his father, but teenaged boys don’t need much of a reason at all when presented with an opportunity to stick it to the man.

When the wolf is murdered inanely, Billy is taught the senselessness of all life on this earth. There can be no universal justice when there are men, and those men have guns. Or, as McCarthy states with such heartbreaking accuracy, “Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now.”

Crossings.

Lines drawn arbitrarily in the sand.

You’re either with us or you’re against us.

Well, who’s “us”? Who decides?

Eventually Billy makes his way home to find that while he was out on his failed wolf-saving mission, his parents were murdered in their home. Presumably by the associates of the Indigenous man to whom Billy and his brother Boyd were kind in the book’s first few pages. So now the farm is gone. His father is gone. Billy’s whole reason for trapping the wolf in the first place, gone.

But Boyd is alive. Boyd remains. He’d been waiting for big brother Billy to return, and Billy did. Well, what now, now that they’re reunited?

Get the hell out here. Because here, we know, there is nothing for us. So let us at least attempt there. It could be worse, but it might not be.

Billy knows Boyd is the smarter brother, and knows that his father knew it too. I think Boyd is aware of this dynamic as well. He doesn’t demand much of Billy in the way of explanation or guidance, but the big brother-little brother dynamic – and the fact that for each of them, the other’s all they’ve got – compels Boyd to cling to a sense of awe about Billy.

Yet, Boyd is stubborn. He survives rifle wounds and the ensuing harrowing surgery, then takes off with some girl he met on the trail somewhere. Once again, Billy is left to drift, alone and without purpose, until he learns of Boyd’s death.

This is an unflinching novel. Even Billy’s exhumation and eventual reburial elsewhere of Boyd’s bones is met with hardship, violence and implied legal action. A guy can’t catch a break.

On the novel’s last two pages, a rangy old yellow dog appears, attempting to take shelter from the rain. It is described as having a “strange” and “misshapen head,” and “horribly crippled in its hindquarters.”

Despite all he has been through, however, or perhaps because of it, Billy cannot bring himself to share his shelter with this dog. He chases the dog down the road and throws a length of pipe after it. Then, finally, he breaks down weeping. Only then does Billy show emotion, when he’s been reduced to scrapping for territory with an old, abandoned dog.

And then, the sun rises, and the The Crossing ends.

I can feel the skin on my upper arms rippling as I relive those last few paragraphs.

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The more time I spend with McCarthy’s novels, the more I come to favour viewing them as months in a calendar year.

July feels right to represent The Crossing, one of McCarthy’s longer books. Where I live, July feels endlessly oppressive. It begins with heavy and consistent rain, the last few days of the rainy season. And when that ends, so begins a weekslong drudge back and forth between baked concrete sunstroke avoidance and sweat-soaked clothes turned frozen and sticky by overworked air conditioning units, cicadas screaming at you incessantly all the while.

That’s the kind of crossing I know.

Like Billy Parham, I spent this month in a stupor, just trying to survive. Ten years ago, I would’ve sworn to you I couldn’t do this ten more times. But each year, even though I know the planet’s heating up, it somehow gets easier to accept. This too shall pass. This thing I think of as “I” will be in the ground some day.

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I’ve got this silly pet theory that Larry McMurtry’s all-encompassing masterpiece Lonesome Dove is at least in part what inspired Cormac McCarthy to turn to writing westerns. Or post-westerns, or anti-westerns, or whatever they are.

Beautifully, a famous line from Lonesome Dove that I re-encountered a night or two before finishing The Crossing is one that I think summarizes a big theme of this middle part of the so-called “Border Trilogy.”

“It’s like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.”

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Cormac McMonthly

• January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)

• February: Outer Dark (1968)

• March: Child of God (1973)

• April: Suttree (1979)

• May: Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985)

• June: All the Pretty Horses (1992)