The Crossing

Billy Parham is the protagonist of The Crossing. At the beginning of the novel, Billy, 16, is eager to prove himself to his father and has adopted many of his father’s traits: stoicism, a dogged work ethic, and a methodical approach to problem solving. As the novel is rendered largely in a third-person objective point of view, and because Billy is a boy of few words, he is often opaque as a character, and the reader must make inferences from his behavior and interiority.

Billy’s decision to return the wolf to Mexico is a turning point in his life. By making this independent choice, Billy attempts to take agency over the world and, in some ways, from his father. His journey is motivated by the desire to rectify what he sees as an injustice in the world: The wolf is where she does not belong, which does not warrant her death. Over the course of his travels with the wolf, he bonds with her through caring for her, though, importantly, the wolf is still depicted as a wild animal who perceives Billy as a threat. The naïveté of his rationale is revealed to him when the constables confiscate his wolf, teaching Billy that he cannot enforce his own notion of justice on the existing structures. When the hacendado’s son confronts him, reframing Billy’s quest as a trespass on their homeland with a dangerous animal, the consequences of his lack of knowledge about the wider sociocultural world are made clear to him. Billy’s mercy killing of the wolf and its burial symbolize the loss of his innocence and the beginning of a long journey toward embittered adulthood.

When Billy learns his parents are dead, he does not take time to grieve; rather, he immediately sets himself on an undefined path to righteous vengeance and the recovery of the family horses. He also tries to stay connected to Boyd, though their relationship is strained by Billy’s absence and Boyd’s own trauma. Billy acts as the typical older brother, trying to step into his father’s role around Boyd, which leads to growing resentment between them. Billy is quietly devastated at losing his connection to his brother, dreaming frequently of the rift between them.

When Boyd abandons him, Billy sees his life as purposeless and makes several attempts to join the army between stints of labor on ranches. He accepts his fate as a person without place or purpose in the world, which is only amplified by learning that his brother died in Mexico and the further violence he encounters trying to retrieve his brother’s remains. At the close of the novel, Billy has abandoned his already-shaky belief in a morally-constant or sensible universe; his final act in the novel is to chase away a hungry dog with threats of violence, a bitter reversal of his desire to see a wolf safely returned home. Confronted by evidence of a shifting world in the Trinity test, Billy is distraught at his own transformation.