The world that Cormac McCarthy creates in The Crossing is one that we can conceive but are grateful not to inhabit. Its keynotes are death, violence, and injustice. The story of Billy Parham and his journey through Mexico, first with a wounded wolf and then with his brother, is one of such desperate bleakness that even reading it is a challenge. There is such failure that we are left asking what the point of all the suffering Billy experiences is. But McCarthy’s language lifts us and his work’s world into something mythic and timeless so that against the darkness there is also a corresponding array of powerful sources of ways to make sense of the world. The fundamental tension of the work lies between these meaning making methods and the world that they attempt to make meaning for. For this is a terrible place, and it does not let itself be redeemed lightly.
The first part of the Crossing is really a novella in itself. Billy Parham and his father attempt to track down a pregnant wolf which has crossed into their land in New Mexico. When Billy catches the wolf, though, he decides to take her back to her home in the mountains across the border rather than kill her. And so, he abandons his family and goes with the limping wolf down to the south, where she is confiscated by the local authorities as “contraband” and then put into a fair.
Billy’s reasons for saving the wolf are murky at best. He is not a talkative person. At one point he says “I’m goin to take her down there and turn her loose”; at several others the narrator reports him saying “that the wolf had been entrusted to his care but that it was not his wolf and he could not sell it”. A strange and even rather modern sense of environmental stewardship animates him, of returning some order to nature which we are responsible for damaging.
This is Billy’s meaning, in this first part of the book – to save the wolf, to set things right. But it does not work. The truth and justice he feels in his soul remain there only. He finds at the fair a stand reflecting little the reality he knows: “they’d rigged a makeshift tent of sheeting over the little tumbril of a cart and they’d put up a sign at the front that gave her history and the number of people she was known to have eaten”. Later on, she is taken to an estate and there she is set upon by dogs for the pleasure of a great mass of onlookers.
It is at this point that Billy steps into the ring to protect her, but the young man in control of the estate stops him and tells him a different story of the wolf to Billy’s own because he is powerful and Billy is not. Billy’s truth is obliterated and with it his power to save the wolf from death: “he looked like a man standing on a scaffold seeking in the crowd some likeness to his own heart.”
Billy manages to bury the wolf’s bones. But as for his mission, it is a failure. When he returns home after his doomed enterprise, he finds an empty house covered in bloodstains. His parents have been murdered, the horses stolen, perhaps in an act of revenge for Billy’s transgression south of the border, perhaps for a moment of kindness earlier in the book. In any case, he reunites with his younger brother, Boyd, who had hidden, and together they go south once more, in an attempt to set things right and recover the horses. The Crossing then follows their journey, with its failures and disappointments, to its inevitably grim conclusion.
A journey itself is a thing that gives structure to a life. It’s a narrative, clear and simple. But the structure it gives is not a thing that stabilises a life – it merely lets us understand it at a glance by seeing its shape. That is one of the truths of the novel. Billy crosses over into Mexico several times throughout The Crossing, but are we to take these as separate journeys or instead as one thing? On the way back home after the death of the wolf, Billy meets some Indians. The elder of them tells him “he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself.” And what is The Crossing if not a story of just such an estrangement, built page by dreadful page?
In the novel’s third part the two brothers encounter a prima donna gypsy they had met earlier. Her words also speak to a truth of journeys, similar to the previous one – namely that journeys are not necessarily a thing that binds people but rather a thing that leaves the distances between them unbridged:
Long voyages often lose themselves.
Mam?
You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travellers will have the same understanding of those reasons. If indeed they come to an understanding of them at all… You will see. The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears that shape but only the one. And every voyage begun upon it will be completed. Whether horses are found or not.
McCarthy’s world is a world that is not godless so much as ruled over by the shadow of a cruel god, an Old Testament God perhaps. We have people who seem truly cursed, like Job, to suffer. But there is a God here, or the potential for Him: “God [does not] whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair.” This is God, but no comforting spirit.
Near the end of the book, Billy meets a woman who is praying. He asks her whom she prays for and receives the following answer:
“She said that she only prayed. She said that she left it to God as to how the prayers should be apportioned. She prayed for all. She would pray for him.”
Having read hundreds of pages of The Crossing by this point we may find the woman slightly absurd. What use are prayers, when the world is so full of evil – proper evil, incomprehensible and earth-shattering? But the narrator turns this idea on its head. They ask instead how many tragedies the woman’s prayers might have averted. Perhaps, they suggest, we should instead be grateful to her, and others like her. Without them who knows how much worse the world would be.
This is what I like about McCarthy. He creates a distinctive image of the world, but he also leaves much about its inner nature up for debate. We cannot say whether God is absent here, or merely next-to-powerless. Justice, as with the wolf, is rare, but it does exist. Billy and Boyd have some success in retrieving their horses, no matter their subsequent failures, after all – and not just because they carry their father’s shotgun. Kindness does come, and beauty is all around us. The important thing is that in this world questions concerning its deeper nature do not seem an afterthought but are essential to our very survival.
Perhaps the most extraordinary, unforgettable scene in The Crossing involves a doctor. He comes to deal with a bullet wound and for page, after page, we are treated to his work, detail by detail. We are there in the dark, watching the operation by the light of flickering candles, like guests in a painting by Rembrandt. And yet there is barely any dialogue, no philosophy. The plot would not suffer if the section were drastically cut. Yet taken as a whole it represents a world beyond violence, of healing and of care. It is a moment of redemption in a sea of pain.
We find ourselves in a world where things matter. Death and violence leave us unable to hide behind such structures as society and its rules when constructing our own meanings. Instead, we have to sort things out for ourselves. Every man and woman in The Crossing is a philosopher. Their religions and philosophies and narratives may be false, but nobody reading the book can doubt that they come from a passionate engagement with the reality of their world. That is why, indeed, McCarthy’s philosophising never gets dull – it is always pertinent because it is never a choice for his characters. Montaigne wrote that “to philosophise is to learn how to die.” Nobody knows this more truly than do the characters of McCarthy’s world, for whom evil and death lurk around every corner.