No mam.
Well they can. When I think about them up there hearin the words of Jesus for the very first time it just makes me want to cry. It does. And Jimmy Blevins done it. He was the one.
From inside the house there sounded a long rattling snore. She smiled. Poor darlin, she said. He's just wore out. People have no idea.
He never found the owner of the horse. Along toward the end of February he drifted north again, trailing the horses in the bar ditches along the edge of the blacktop roads, the big semi's blowing them up against the fences. The first week of March he was back in San Angelo and he cut across the country so familiar to him and reached the Rawlins pasture fence just a little past dark on the first warm night of the year and no wind and everything dead still and clear on the west Texas plains. He rode up to the barn and dismounted and walked up to the house. There was a light on in Rawlins' room and he put two fingers to his teeth and whistled.
Rawlins came to the window and looked out. In a few minutes he came from the kitchen and around the side of the house.
Bud is that you?
Yeah.
Sum buck, he said. Sum buck.
He walked around him to get him in the light and he looked at him as if he were something rare.
I figured you might want your old horse back, said John Grady.
I caint believe it. You got Junior with you?
He's standin down yonder at the barn.
Sum buck, said Rawlins. I caint believe it. Sum buck.
They rode out on the prairie and sat on the ground and let the animals drift with the reins down and he told Rawlins all that had happened. They sat very quietly. The dead moon hung in the west and the long flat shapes of the nightclouds passed before it like a phantom fleet.
Have you been to see your mama? said Rawlins.
No.
You knew your daddy died.
Yeah. I guess I knew that.
She tried to get word to you in Mexico.
Yeah.
Luisa's mother is real sick.
Abuela?
Yeah.
How are they makin it?
I guess all right. I seen Arturo over in town. Thatcher Cole got him a job at the school. Cleanin up and stuff like that.
Is she goin to make it?
I dont know. She's pretty old.
Yeah.
What are you goin to do?
Head out.
Where to?
I dont know.
You could get on out on the rigs. Pays awful good.
Yeah. I know.
You could stay here at the house.
I think I'm goin to move on.
This is still good country.
Yeah. I know it is. But it aint my country.
He rose and turned and looked off toward the north where the lights of the city hung over the desert. Then he walked out and picked up the reins and mounted his horse and rode up and caught the Blevins horse by its halter.
Catch your horse, he said. Or else he'll follow me.
Rawlins walked out and caught the horse and stood holding it.
Where is your country? he said.
I dont know, said John Grady. I dont know where it is. I dont know what happens to country.
Rawlins didnt answer.
I'll see you old pardner, said John Grady.
All right. I'll see you.
He stood holding his horse while the rider turned and rode out and dropped slowly down the skyline. He squatted on his heels so as to watch him a little while longer but after a while he was gone.
THE DAY of the burial out at Knickerbocker it was cool and windy. He'd turned the horses into the pasture on the far side of the road and he sat for a long time watching down the road to the north where the weather was building and the sky was gray and after a while the funeral cortege appeared. An old Packard hearse with a varied assortment of dusty cars and trucks behind. They pulled up along the road in front of the little Mexican cemetery and people got out into the road and the pallbearers in their suits of faded black stood at the rear of the hearse and they carried Abuela's casket up through the gate into the cemetery. He stood across the road holding his hat. No one looked at him. They carried her up into the cemetery followed by a priest and a boy in a white gown ringing a bell and they buried her and they prayed and they wept and they wailed and then they came back down out of the cemetery into the road helping each other along and weeping and got into the cars and turned one by one on the narrow blacktop and went back the way they'd come.
The hearse had already gone. There was a pickup truck parked further down the road and he put on his hat and sat there on the slope of the bar ditch and in a little while two men came down the path out of the cemetery with shovels over their shoulders and they walked down the road and put the shovels in the bed of the truck and got in and turned around and drove away.
He stood and crossed the road and walked up into the cemetery past the old stonework crypt and past the little headstones and their small remembrances, the sunfaded paper flowers, a china vase, a broken celluloid Virgin. The names he knew or had known. Villareal, Sosa, Reyes. Jesusita Holguin. Nació. Falleció. A china crane. A chipped milkglass vase. The rolling parklands beyond, wind in the cedars. Armendares. Ornelos. Tiodosa Tarín, Salomer Jáquez. Epitacio Villareal Cuéllar.
He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.
IN FOUR DAYS' riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been. At that time there were still Indians camped on the western plains and late in the day he passed in his riding a scattered group of their wickiups propped upon that scoured and trembling waste. They were perhaps a quarter mile to the north, just huts made from poles and brush with a few goathides draped across them. The Indians stood watching him. He could see that none of them spoke among themselves or commented on his riding there nor did they raise a hand in greeting or call out to him. They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.
The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.
The End