The unsheltering sky

Cormac McCarthy completes his trilogy of man's fate in the borderlands

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, May 10, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

The milieu is rapturous but not very promising. What makes McCarthy's fiction bearable is the sometimes stunning language and the mythic underground stream that runs throughout. ``Cities of the Plain,'' the final volume of the Border Trilogy, has elements of both these assets, and has the further emotional allure of connecting the principal characters of the first two novels: the beloved young horseman, John Grady Cole, of ``All the Pretty Horses,'' and Billy Parham of ``The Crossing,'' who rescued a female wolf and then followed his kid brother to his fate. Now both men are working cowboys on a ranch in southern New Mexico; it is the early 1950s, the ranch is slowly dying an old-timer's death in postwar America, and yet that McCarthy ``godmade'' sunrise still looks the same -- witness to a thousand tragedies and a hundred journeys out.

``Cities of the Plain'' is part of the same piece of music as its two predecessors -- an elegant lamentation to a West that is uniquely McCarthy's -- but in several ways this is a smaller novel. It lacks the breathtaking inner dimensions of the first two volumes and the wrenching deliverance of ``The Crossing,'' at least in its first half; at times its trademark prophecies and oratory seem less illuminative than tacked on as rhetorical dressing. What the novel does beautifully is capture a way of life so unspoken and deep that most people never knew it existed: the essence of a man's life lived on a horse on the plains, where legend is the way truth gets told and friendship never gets talked about at all. And where -- old-fashioned notion, this -- honor is worth more than anything but love, and both tend to have doom written all over them.

For all his fierce naturalism, McCarthy can be a cloistered romantic, and ``Cities of the Plain'' exhibits this trait through its central story. John Grady is 19 now, so magically good with horses he can tell by the way a mare holds her ear that she's gone lame in her left foreleg. He'll spend days working with a horse that won't take a rider, even bearing a sprained ankle for his trouble, and at the end of it the animal will be his. ``A good horse has justice in his heart,'' he tells another ranch hand. ``I've seen it.''

What this compassionate insight reflects is a young man whose depth of feeling is mostly silent and against the rules. It's no surprise, then, when John Grady falls in love with a young prostitute he spots in a whorehouse across the Mexican border in Juarez. Magdalena is a beautiful, half-broken girl of 16 who suffers from epilepsy; she has been put to work on her back by a horrid man named Eduardo, and John Grady resolves to free her and bring her home to marry. This is not a hopeful prospect: We know without McCarthy telling us that ``beauty and loss are one'' -- that, as Billy says to John Grady, at some point life is about ``just tryin to minimize the pain.'' Neither of those dark instructions keeps us from believing in the biblically cursed Magdalena and John Grady's adoration of her, and neither does an old blind prophet -- one of McCarthy's mystical congregants -- succeed in driving John Grady away.

As with the first two volumes of the trilogy, the dialogue of ``Cities of the Plain'' is terse and seamlessly constructed; it is also rendered without attribution or quotation marks, and a good deal of the speeches that take place south of the border are in Spanish. A Spanish-English dictionary will widen the view. While it's contextually clear what is happening, the urgent exchanges between Magdalena and John Grady are worth understanding in full.

Even as ``Cities of the Plain'' heads toward its inevitable black horizon, there are nonetheless stars overhead, enhanced by the passion and yearning of a young man's dreams. This is a world not of incongruities but of dualities, where a couple of cowboys can spend all day hunting and destroying a pack of calf-killing feral dogs, then return the next morning and risk their own lives to save the litter of orphaned pups. It's a society made real by the company of men and their dreams about women: the ones who died, the ones who left them, the ones they could never have. Violence is ordinary to such men, redemption a mere promise on the wind -- carried by myth and legend, uttered by humble bystanders before they fall. One of the governing principles of McCarthy's universe is that desire has to be its own reward; as the evil Eduardo puts it, the dreamer's job is to learn ``that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all.''

The last third of the novel has a white-water momentum reminiscent of its predecessors; however difficult it may be to take, McCarthy can write about the shadowlands of violence with a solemnity that is simply stunning. And there are other beautifully rendered, less dramatic rewards along the way: the subtle workings of a horse auction, the tales told by an aging rancher that deliver history as though it were a midnight traveler at the kitchen door. Such moments make up for the novel's occasional excesses. McCarthy, who can go places in prose as remote as a mountain pass in high wind, is also prone to grandiloquence, particularly when he's waxing mystical. This happens with a stranger on the road whom Billy encounters near the end of his travels, a man whose revelatory message, meaningful though it is, is nearly buried by its ponderous rendition. Billy himself can be just as eloquent: ``Daybreak to backbreak for a godgiven dollar,'' he tells John Grady. ``I love this life. You do love this life dont you? Cause by god I love it.''

What matters, of course, is the way we honor those shards of memory, whether the stranger's warnings or Billy's testament to the path he has chosen. In his exaltation of narrative itself -- his belief in story as the ultimate witness to humanity's plight -- Cormac McCarthy has bestowed his trilogy with the terrible grace it requires.

Yessir. They will.

You live long enough you'll see it.

Yessir. I have.

Mr Johnson didnt answer. He flipped the butt of his cigarette out across the yard in a slow red arc.

Aint nothin to burn out there. I remember when you could have grassfires in this country.

I didnt mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said.

I know you didnt.

I just meant I'd seen things I'd as soon not of.

I know it. There's hard lessons in this world.

What's the hardest?

I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back.

Yessir.

They sat. After a while the old man said: The day after my fiftieth birthday in March of nineteen and seventeen I rode into the old headquarters at the Wilde well and there was six dead wolves hangin on the fence. I rode along the fence and ran my hand along em. I looked at their eyes. A government trapper had brought em in the night before. They'd been killed with poison baits. Strychnine. Whatever. Up in the Sacramentos. A week later he brought in four more. I aint heard a wolf in this country since. I suppose that's a good thing. They can be hell on stock. But I guess I was always what you might call superstitious. I know I damn sure wasnt religious. And it had always seemed to me that somethin can live and die but that the kind of thing that they were was always there. I didnt know you could poison that. I aint heard a wolf howl in thirty odd years. I dont know where you'd go to hear one. There may not be any such a place.

CORMAC McCARTHY

From ``Cities on the Plain''