Running Toward a Reckoning

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it.

A cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles toward a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history.

–Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing, 5.

J. Frank Dobie and Cormac McCarthy

Sometime in 1987, a courtly, middle-aged gentleman approached the front desk at the Special Collections library at the University of Texas at El Paso. The man was well known by this time to those who worked at the library. He'd been coming in regularly over the past decade, doing research on Texas and Mexico and the Southwest. Some people knew that he was a writer, knew that he'd even won a MacArthur "genius" grant for his work—although few readers had heard of him and he toiled in obscurity.

At the help desk, speaking in his a soft Tennessee accent, the man asked for a slender volume kept in the reserve stacks, housed inside a red pamphlet box. The item is a reprint from an article originally published in the American Hereford Journal in 1954. Its title is, simply, "Babi'cora," and its author is the great folklorist of the Southwest, J. Frank Dobie of Texas. . . .

The researcher at UTEP in 1987, Cormac McCarthy, paid very close attention to Dobie's Babicora article. McCarthy arranged to have the story photocopied, and he made exacting pencil marks in the margins of particularly interesting passages. McCarthy went on to make substantial use of Dobie's work as he fashioned his novel in progress--a book that would be published seven years later as The Crossing.

–Steven L. Davis, "Mining Dobie: Cormac McCarthy's Debt to J. Frank Dobie in The Crossing," Southwestern American Literature 38.2 (Spring 2013): 52.

Boyd's Death in The Crossing, "A Simple Transposition of Letters"

Late in The Crossing, McCarthy narrates a dream where Billy speaks to his brother Boyd who had just awoken from a nightmare (a dream within a dream). Billy tells him to speak quieter, and then we are told "But in the dream Boyd only said softly that they would not wake" (296).

Edwin Arnold comments that Boyd's whisper is "a sad reminder of both the wolf's and his parents' fates, and a premonition of Boyd's forthcoming abandonment of his brother and of his own death." He makes a further textual observation on this important sequence:

It also reflects Billy's later determination to recover Boyd's body and bring it home (such a simple transposition of letters--body/Boyd--marks Boyd's passage from life to death and memory).

—Edwin T. Arnold, "Go to sleep: Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy," in A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (GBks, 61).