The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

First published: 1999; includes All the Pretty Horses, 1992; The Crossing, 1994; Cities of the Plain, 1998

Type of work: Novels

Type of plot: Western

Time of plot: 1949-2002

Locale: Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas; Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Sonora, Mexico

Principal characters

• John Grady Cole, an accomplished horseman
• Lacey Rawlins, his friend
• Jimmy Blevins, a waif
• Don Hector Rocha y Villarreal, a ranch owner
• Alejandra, the don’s beautiful daughter
• Dueña Alfonsa, grandaunt and godmother to Alejandra
• Billy Parham, a sixteen-year-old
• Boyd Parham, Billy’s younger brother
• The Girl, a waif
• Mac McGovern, a ranch owner
• Magdalena, a young Mexican prostitute

The Story:

It is 1949, outside San Angelo, Texas, and the death of John Grady Cole’s grandfather causes his absentee mother to sell the family ranch. John Grady’s poor, ill, vagabond father, who is also a gambler, cannot help the family.

John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, his friend, head for Mexico. The boys enjoy the old cowboy life without the cattle. They are followed by a skinny younger boy who calls himself Jimmy Blevins and claims ownership of the magnificent bay, or red-colored horse, he is riding. Although John Grady and Lacey doubt his story, they allow him to ride along anyway.

Jimmy exhibits his shooting skills and regales them with his stories. One day a norther, or strong storm with north winds, threatens, and Jimmy insists on trying to outride the storm; he hides in an arroyo wearing only his dirty underwear because he fears the fastenings of his clothes will draw lightning. The next day, John Grady and Lacey find Jimmy with only one boot and no horse. His clothes have washed away in the flood of the storm. John Grady consults the reluctant Lacey and then lends Jimmy a shirt. He and Jimmy ride double.

In Encantada, they spot Jimmy’s pistol in a man’s hip pocket and his horse in an old mud building. Rawlins argues that they should ride away before it is too late, but John Grady realizes that he cannot abandon Blevins, and Rawlins agrees to stay. Blevins says that he will not leave without his horse, saddle, and gun. The boys ride into town at daybreak but cannot locate the horse. Blevins vanishes into an open window of the stable and suddenly bursts through the fence on the galloping bay. They are hotly pursued until Blevins says that because his horse is faster, he should stay on the road and John Grady and Lacey should head cross country. With that, he is gone.

John Grady and Rawlins ride until they come to a huge ranch, La Purísima, and hire on as ranch hands. John Grady has exceptional skills with horses, and he makes a deal with Don Rocha to break and train his range stock. Rocha is impressed with John Grady and promotes him.

The boys also notice Rocha’s beautiful equestrienne daughter, Alejandra. John Grady is invited by Alejandra’s grandaunt, Dueña Alfonsa, to visit the house and play chess. Some days later, John Grady and Alejandra become lovers. The next day, officers appear at the house, but they soon leave. Don Rocha finds out about his daughter’s activities and considers killing John Grady. Soon, however, John Grady is wakened and arrested by two officers tipped off by Rocha. He and Rawlins are handcuffed, returned to Encantada, and put into a small jail cell where Blevins is already incarcerated, his feet crippled from beatings. Two months after parting, Blevins had returned to the town to retrieve his pistol and ended up shooting three men, one of whom died. Though he likely acted in self-defense, Blevins is charged with murder. The boys are interrogated, brutalized, and taken away in a truck. At a stop, Blevins is removed from the truck and then shot. The boys end up in an old Saltillo prison, where the captain admits that, to save face, he fulfilled a contract on Blevins by the brother of Blevins’s victim.

After much suffering in prison, John Grady secretly purchases a knife from inmates and kills a young would-be assassin. Wounded and scarred, he is set free along with Rawlins, paid out of prison by Alejandra’s grandaunt. Rawlins promptly returns to San Angelo and John Grady returns to La Purísima, where Dueña Alfonsa tells him that because he is unlucky he will never be with Alejandra. He is given Rawlins’s grullo horse. John Grady telephones Alejandra, who sneaks out to meet him in Zacatecas. They spend a glorious day together but, devastated because her father is so angry at her, she cannot stay with him. They sadly part.

John Grady returns to Encantada, where he retrieves his, Rawlins’s, and Blevins’s horses and kidnaps the captain. In the mountains one night, he is awakened by three mysterious men who give him a serape, remove the captain’s handcuffs, and take the captain away.

In early 1951, John Grady returns to Texas and searches vainly for the owner of Blevins’s horse and identity. Finding neither, he is awarded the horse by a judge. He returns to San Angelo, delivers Rawlins’s horse, and learns his own father has died. From a distance, he watches the funeral of the Mexican abuela who raised him, and he then rides west into a wild, fading world.

The Crossing opens in 1941, with sixteen-year-old Billy Parham observing the wolves running on the plain near his family’s ranch, close by the Animas Peaks. One day, he and his brother, Boyd, meet an Indian boy who demands food. Billy complies, but though they agree to bring him coffee, they do not return from the house.

A wolf is killing calves on their range, so the boys and their father borrow traps and try to catch it. The wolf, a female who came up from Mexico after hunters had killed her mate, outsmarts them at every turn. However, she is more interested in finding other wolves than new hunting grounds. Billy asks an old man for help, and the old man tells him he must recognize the place where God sits and plans to destroy Creation, where fire is still in the earth. Billy sets a trap inside the dying embers of a vaquero campfire and catches the wolf. Upon finding her, treating her injured leg, and suffering much travail, he decides to lead her back to Mexico. He leaves, telling no one.

In Mexico, Billy is stopped by armed men who confiscate the wolf. She is taken to a festival, where she becomes the feature attraction. She is chained and forced to fight vicious dogs. Billy grasps her collar and demands her return, but guns are drawn in the crowd, so he steps away. With fresh dogs being readied for the fight, Billy shoots the wolf to spare her any more pain, and he exchanges his rifle for her corpse. He buries her and her unborn pups in the mountains.

Billy rides in the mountains for many weeks, then returns home to find the house splattered with blood, and empty. His parents had been murdered by a band of Indians, and six of their horses had been stolen. Billy takes Boyd away from his guardians, and they head to Mexico. In Bacerac, they find one of their family’s horses and begin following leads on the others. They encounter a crying adolescent girl and take her along. Boyd becomes more and more protective of her. After encounters with a lapsed Mormon and an itinerant opera company, they lend the girl a horse so she can visit her family in Namiquipa.

During one struggle to find and keep the stolen horses, Boyd is shot during a chase and Billy races away with him on their dead father’s horse. With the pursuers closing in, Billy spots a truck loaded with farm workers, who save Boyd by taking him along. Later, upon locating his brother, Billy gets a doctor and Boyd miraculously survives. Boyd is becoming a local legend and people are calling him man of the people.

Billy fetches the girl, whom Boyd is delighted to see, and a few days later the couple vanishes. They did not tell Billy they were leaving, so he begins his search for them, which lasts for weeks. He then returns to New Mexico to find the United States embroiled in World War II. He tries to enlist in the armed forces, but he is denied enlistment because he has a heart murmur. He drifts for some time before returning to Mexico.

Stories begin to surface that the girl is a notorious, beloved, and perhaps dead bandit, and that Billy’s brother is an outlaw folk hero, also dead. Billy finds Boyd’s grave, disinters him, takes him home, and buries him there. In the later years of World War II, Billy roams the Southwest.

It is 1952 as Cities of the Plains begins, and John Grady, Billy Parham, and Troy are working as cowboys on Mac McGovern’s New Mexico ranch. The ranch is facing a takeover by the U.S. government. Returning from a trip, Billy and Troy see a truck with Mexican workers beside the road. Billy insists on helping the workers because he remembers such a group of workers had helped his late brother, Boyd. They are all vaqueros, or cowboys. Troy sleeps while Billy aids the workers, and then the two men drive on. Soon after, their windshield is destroyed when their car hits an enormous owl.

At a bordello in Juarez, John Grady glimpses a sixteen-year-old prostitute named Magdalena, and he cannot get her out of his mind. A spirited horse injures his foot, so he returns to the bordello but finds the girl gone.

Wolfenbarger, a wealthy ranch owner with an expensive filly, a gift for his daughter, sends the horse off to be trained at Mac’s ranch. John Grady, though, can see right away that the filly is lame. He refuses to allow her to remain at the ranch. Wolfenbarger unsuccessfully tries to hire him away from Mac.

Returning again and again to Juarez to find Magdalena, John Grady pays to learn that she now works at a fancier brothel called White Lake. He finds her there, and they spend the night together. An old one-eyed woman takes care of the working girls and women, and Tiburcio serves as the brothel’s manager. The owner, a pimp named Eduardo, notices John Grady’s interest in Magdalena; Eduardo also is in love with her.

Though they rarely meet, John Grady and Magdalena soon fall in love. A blind musician tells John Grady that Magdalena does not belong among the human race. She fails to appear at a secret meeting planned with John Grady. When he goes to see her again, a waiter conveys a message from her, asking John Grady not to forget her.

Using dogs, the cowboys hunt a wild cat in the mountains. John Grady pawns his gun and returns to the bordello. Magdalena tells him that because of Eduardo, it is far too dangerous for them to meet. Mac and John Grady go to a horse auction and Mac tricks Wolfenbarger into buying an overpriced horse. At a bar, John Grady asks for Billy’s assistance in taking Magdalena away from Mexico, and he admits that he loves and wants to marry her. Stunned, Billy says that John Grady is crazy, and flatly refuses to help.

Nevertheless, soon after, Billy bribes a bartender at the White Lake to see Eduardo, and Tiburcio the manager takes Billy to meet the pimp. When Billy tries to buy Magdalena, Eduardo says that the prostitutes do not want to leave and that Billy’s friend, John Grady, has a skewed worldview. Both Eduardo and Billy acknowledge that John Grady is in danger, and Billy reports Eduardo’s refusal to John Grady.

John Grady and Magdalena meet near the river, and he weeps as she tells him her life story. She agrees to marry him. He plans to fix an old, ruined adobe shelter to be their home. He sells his prized stallion to friends of Mac. He tells Mac everything, except that Magdalena is a prostitute, and Mac wants to meet her.

The cowboys realize that recent calf killings are the work of wild dogs, and they go after the pack with their own hunting dogs. A bloody battle ensues in the mountains, and the wild dogs are savagely killed. John Grady convinces Billy to help him search for pups of the pack, and they find them after tumbling a boulder; John Grady chooses one pup for himself.

John Grady’s work has turned the ramshackle adobe hut into a welcoming home. The other cowboys begin to believe that he will indeed bring Magdalena across the border and marry her. The blind musician, however, refuses his request to be the girl’s padrino because he believes Eduardo will kill her, and he does not want such responsibility.

John Grady and Magdalena meet once more and lay plans to sneak her into the United States. They part, and in the cab ride back to the White Lake, she has an epileptic seizure and is hospitalized. She escapes the hospital to return to the brothel, and as she walks through Juarez barefoot and wearing little clothing, a woman offers her sanctuary, which she refuses. She reaches the brothel and leaves bloody footprints on its floor.

John Grady and Billy ride out and discuss the future of the cowboy life, the West, and the mystery that is Mexico. On Sunday, Magdalena carefully dresses with the help of the old one-eyed criada, Tiburcio’s mother, who next tries to prevent her from leaving. The girl escapes and finds the cab arranged for her. However, the driver takes her to a lonely spot on the river where Tiburcio is waiting. He slits her throat, and she is later found in the river by weed cutters.

John Grady’s search leads to Magdalena’s body in the morgue. He returns to the little adobe house, then to the ranch house, and gets a knife. Billy, meanwhile, looks for John Grady in Juarez and finds Eduardo instead. Billy talks to the police but gets no help. John Grady returns to Mexico and provokes Eduardo into a knife fight. He kills Eduardo but is badly injured himself. He pays a young boy to contact the ranch for help, but the boy instead leads him to a crate on the street. He wakes to Billy’s voice, asking him if he wants water. Billy leaves to get the water, and returns to find John Grady dead.

Bibliography

Arnold, Edwin T., and Dianne C. Luce, eds. A Cormac McCarthy Companion: “The Border Trilogy.” Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Includes nine essays covering such topics as dreams and visions, allegory, warfare, gender, and the ethics and disappearance of the American West.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Seminal criticism that contains three essays on the trilogy, one on each novel, examining themes, structure, and interpretation. Also discusses All the Pretty Horses as a screenplay. Extensive bibliographies.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Cormac McCarthy. 2001. New ed. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009. Essays examine several of McCarthy’s works. The trilogy is featured in three essays that focus on interior spaces and violence.

Guillemin, Georg. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Provides a context for McCarthy’s vision that counterbalances critics who tend to see it only as violent, dark, and morbid. A scholarly work, yet accessible to all readers.

Hall, Wade, and Rick Wallach, eds. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Rev. ed. 2 vols. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Selected works from a 1993 McCarthy conference. Features essays on linguistics and language in the trilogy, John Grady Cole as hero, and other topics.

Jay, Ellis. No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. New York: Routledge, 2006. Analyzes the reasons so many of McCarthy’s characters are restless, fleeing, wandering, on the road, or in quest of something.

Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. An accessible and informative work with connective chapters on myths and motifs in the trilogy and McCarthy’s other Western novels.

Sanborn, Wallis R., III. Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. A thorough, detailed, and thoughtful work that examines the roles of wolves, horses, and hunting in McCarthy’s trilogy.