Women and Men (111 page)

Yet on that clement midnight when he was staying with her and Alexander, and out walking in his pyjama bottoms—in the garden—and she told him he was sleepwalking and should get back to bed, he answered How ‘bout
you?
‘s if she’d asked him what he was doing there and—the Princess found that for the Prince’s people—the People, as they were self-called—there’s a season for every event that comes from God’s hand like a touch from one counter-whorled finger of the five, in its own time; but the history of the People was much more like the steadfast land than it was like a Started and a Finished. The land, that is, at
any
one time—the red cuts of the great cliffs holding the afternoon sun and turning it toward the eyes of Zuni faces as they came back to the village from a field, a trail, a structure containing work; walking (we say) through the fences hungry.

The Navajo land spread out from the original volcano that contained the ship ever bound spaceward out of time, until one day the magma receded like the wakefulness of a continental tilt until they crowded up against that cooling mountain and would not wash around this obstacle until at last they grudged their way onward scraping it clean of all its stone save that core that had then always been bound toward that place, always a Ship in the mind of the People, as the night that must have spelled to the grandson and his grandmother a snake or two, coiled sleepy-headed in the grass of the backyard, was also itself a snake.

A snake-like beauty was what the night had, Margaret thought—and remembered to write her favorite grandson this in her terminal letter some years later after his mother’s departure. He liked Margaret more even than the information always up her sleeve. The "what" was what the People centered attention on, not the sequence of "whens": witness the difference between whenever the exact
moment
was versus
the fact
of the event, that is, when, according to both Hermit-Inventor and Anasazi medicine man, cosms of the Sun ran suddenly down through that rare cleft in the atmosphere occurring when all its layers line up for an instant the single slit or crevi-chink in each of said layers (when God cannot delay his one-shot deal, he must act): for the mountain of grandfather space leans down down upon all the volcan’ mounts of our not-after-all-so-visible topograph, each answering each upon time frames so diff’rent that the People knew that the "when" mattered less.

And so the People did not stress the exact time when the Princess’s fond histories de-demon’d her prospective mother-in-law’s head leaving that lady at last by herself—
but dead!
They stressed instead the disappearance of life from her coupled with her
relations’
inability to
touch
her to make her ready for the groove of Earth-Sky, there to rest; and stressed as well what so struck the pyjama-bottomed grandson the night the Allies crossed the Channel and, landed upon the French littoral, invaded Europe, namely that the Princess’s huge bird, as neglected at the far edge of the ceremonial community as it had been successful at burying in its own body its urge to eat Navajo ponies, had produced from its own bright, pale feathers a diamond-shaped nest high atop what the Hermit-Inventor identified as a volcanic plug though so perfectly wooded up to a secret tonsure at the top as to seem a true mountain; and had produced a brace of eggs while being in our terms predominantly male, nor had it received species-specific connubial visits; and from far off on a night of the double Moon it had been seen by the Prince’s people to stretch its neck and lift its chin as an old exile Indian who had lived once upon the far north coast identified as the way of some brilliant sea hen when ip the company of her husband and approached by an alter male.

But this time we find an ordinary mountain lion whose scent of its natural prey the western deer, still plentiful then, had been deeply turned and turned upward toward the rough summit of this volcanic plug above the plateau to the odor of the future, as it was later explained.

An odor from the eggs, and so telling that ... we already remember the fawn-colored cat five-foot-lean, its small-scale head over its big cub-like paws . . . never snarled or spoke as it came out of the last scrub pinon pine, the last starved spruce . . . branches wind-grown round harsh little trunks . . . root systems grappling down upon the grain of volcanic memory . . . and the lion moved so low along the ground that the bird as great as the summit itself and almost without personality, but beyond it, rose upon the downy muscles of its legs and at the last instant rose upon the night air to dive at the lion which by then had found the essence of the eggs’ light already within itself and with one lunge buckled and sucked one egg of its matter and vanished, before the bird—watched by a dozen sentinels miles off in the settlement— could either lurch back to the other egg, stained by the luminous rain of albumen from its counterpart, or swoop elsewhere at the lion that had so literally vanished it might have embarked itself like any other four-legged plant life into the large, still being of a timber wolf paused nearby smelling the lion’s hide with a twinge of turned stomach.

And the bird’s alien fire which to the wolf smelled like a mass of raunchy eyes and gums and oil grasses in the stomach of a fresh-killed pony mixed with winds bearing from the heights of Choor the pigs and rock chucks and lichens that can see with eyes but do not remember they were once lover-snakes and fruit-colored bears. Until, abandoning the trees and scrub for the upper clearing at the instant the Princess’s bird abandoned the diamond nest with its remaining egg splashed with entrails, the enormous wolf found himself whooshed by talon and bill and raised higher and higher, torn part by part, borne then tossed, then tossed again while, with each drop into mid-air, the bird’s bill like a sky made by a giant planet encroaching ate off a rib, a leg, a foot, a glinting gland, a face: till less and less of the still-living wolf fell back down the gravity of the bird’s personal sky, and watchers saw only a demon-stomach, the wolf’s, lying its strings and anchors all in the dark sky —blood-lit warm nerve and goot gut (to cite a German infiltrator’s aside to his fellow Cheyenne Contrary)—swallowed like swan song by the bird as if it promised to become that timber wolf as we would become others by making them us, when instead the bird was leaving the land that night.

As did the Princess in another direction, only to be followed by the Navajo Prince bearing a Colt revolver to protect the beloved who had left him so he forgot how much else she had really left. So that—so that ... the Prince’s mother, until now lifeless for a week and a day yet fresh as a sprig of wild bean, found that new-grown eye in the fountain-top of her head uninjured receiving her same demons in new eye-sized forms of incandescent picture: and she came to life calling out that she had been abandoned by the Princess from the East even more than by her son the Prince, yet was very much alive (three little words Margaret wrote to her anxious editor-familias from the Great Salt Lake in the summer of ‘93, for she knew he was deeply concerned about the failure of the National Cordage Company in May and the most extensive troop movements since the Civil War and the drop in the gold reserves that he professed not to understand except it threatened ‘‘paper" and had come on Shakespeare’s birthday or nearabouts)—

still very much alive in sun the like of which, dear father, I had never seen—heading south tomorrow while from the mountains twinkling with dog-tooth violets this City seems embowered in shade.—I tell you it is laid out in squares called blocks, forty rods square, the sidewalks sixteen foot wide, the streets lighted by two hundred gas lamps. Industry here includes slat-fences, mattresses, scroll-sawing, turning, type, and bone-ash, not to mention a vinegar works. The glass works employ seventy-five men—make fruit jars, demijohns, vials, soda water and appolinaris bottles—can turn out 550 dozen bottles a day. Of newspapers, we have (I catch myself speaking like a Salt Laker when I will be long gone by the time you receive this) 3 dailies, 2 semi-weeklies, 5 weeklies, 3 semi-monthlies, and 9 monthlies, and if the Territorial Library boasts 4000 volumes, many scientific, you will like to know that the Masonic claims near twice that number. And so you see, dearest father, I am very much alive, unlike the whales a California party planted here in the Great Salt Lake—never suspecting (because Californians prefer quick magic to slow)—

Margaret hastened to inform her father, whose anxiety conveyed itself to her not only by telegraph but in the caress of her own quill’s brown-welling point across the watermark-graced page ruled only by her oblong green and ink-stained blotter lowered line by line faster and faster down until we lost track and must remember what we didn’t know we knew—never suspecting that, as an English financier and furniture maker whose house up in Brigham Street had a sublime view down upon the city and steeply up behind along the slope of the mountains told Margaret, a man here has found in the desert through an Indian woman named Manuel—who shampoos with it regularly and with it fixed a sore of his that’s virtually inside his body—an oil, or wax, contained by the pods of a hardy bush, such that said oil if one could grow sufficient of said plant will light a lamp as brightly as any whale, while what has happened to th’ willing though transplanted
whales
is unknown. Yet no man here, where clarity belies distance in the mountains of the land and hence anon on water too, has seen leviathan blow, who may by now be all fish if not thoroughly salted (if not to taste, to travel well—a trip more total not to say saltier than any old ocean can imagine rivers to bleed our rocks salt-free): so, as we already remember, those whales, those rather tragic power-pusses, took a wrong turn and got totaled, if one still says that of whales at this late date.

And so you see, Margaret said, on her way further west, I am very much alive—which was what in the dark of early June half a century later Jim’s grandma called to his granddad, who had called into the night yard through the bedroom screen he’d installed the afternoon before, "Margie?" (as if it might be only her voice) "... you all right?"—not, "Margaret, who’s out there?" when a pickup truck its trademark audible in a tailgate’s loose hinge passed, headed downtown.

But very much alive was what the Navajo Prince’s mother had become, and Jim felt this more curiously and sadly on Brad’s Day (which came more than a year after the June night-yard pyjama-bottom scene, for school had started anew by the time of Brad’s Day and the atomic bombs had got themselves dropped, no connection)—Brad lay on the floor of the music room learning to sink or swim.

"Very much alive" (Margaret called back at the distant second-floor bedroom screen behind which was her concerned husband Alexander, who now began to lightly sneeze as if it were animal dawn, and the boy in pyjama botts and his grandmother with her hair way down
le
back of her nightgown snickered out there in the night yard; snickered at the sound, until she like a girl took his hand (but he gently escaped) and told him, "Come on," then stopped short and Jim could swear he heard Alexander’s bedsprings depressed—and she informed him that, having perhaps come to life
because
the two young lovers had flown (first one, then the other), the Navajo Prince’s mother said she heard the bird as the thick cloth of Darkness itself, and knew the foreign princess was not aboard the bird on its way back to the national mountains of Choor. And it was not known there except to the Anasazi healer and two or three others that somehow the lady now alive but with her demons back used the song-like voice of Owl Woman, "In the great night my heart will go out, / Toward me the darkness comes rattling ..."

But on Brad’s Day, with Alexander reading out of a book and bending to pat poor Brad on his heaving shoulder blade, but now seating himself at the piano and playing lightly and sketchily "Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet"! when the boys had never seen him even try to play a piano or any other instrument so that Brad rolled onto his side and stared at Alexander’s back with wretched face—Jim tasted that damned egg essence! And he would have sprung upon his shitty little bastard of a brother who was taking up everybody’s time, for crying out loud, except Jim knew that in the dark yard a year and a month and more ago he had slipped his hand out of his grandmother’s as they both heard one more screened sneeze—a last little irritation—Jim had been moved—and went toward the palely glimmering white trim of the back porch quicker than Margaret who suddenly lagged, elderly or measuredly female; and Jim was moved to feel a big something so he nearly ran down the street to his own house—father, brother Brad, mother: moved by the Navajo lady coming back to life alone with her buzzing bonnetful of shifting demons and others.

So that on Brad’s Day while the grandfather played well enough for Brad to tell him to please not touch that piano—then Brad went back face down on the floor sobbing but not moving—Jim would have asked his grandfather if all that Navajo story-stuff predicted the future: for they were now without the mother Sarah, who had told Jim to go away and not be afraid: which was not a fact like what Alexander Big-Shoe Granddad asked Brad, for he got along with little Brad, What was Dizzy Dean’s middle name? and a few years later, What was the name of Bernhardt’s dog? when Brad was in high school.

Jim
was no walking encyclopedia but he could ask his grandfather what was Harry Truman’s middle name and have his elder wait for a whole minute with his lips drawn back above his teeth before giving up. Only, a moment later, to ask what general (clue: he’s Mexican) had part of his body buried with full military honors while he was still alive and kicking?

They now heard Margaret taking off her brown raincoat in the hall—
brown?
intones the interrogator (but in the interest of further information suspends punishment)—America may be second to none in acoustics and/or sound, but what is the sound of brown?

—taking her time before they saw her at the threshold of the music loom surveying her husband become musician (who had introduced Jim once to the words "She’s always been a giver, not a taker"). Alexander turned round toward her on the piano stool as if he had been practicing; and Brad was on the floor snuffling and groaning, making noise in his
sleep
almost(!) or might have been about to receive a kick from Jimmy. Who was ready to kick him when he was down where he belonged, wriggling and heaving there on the shallow lake of his mother’s music-room floor, shades of a Sarasate tune they used in the movies to make you pity a sad scene (though no one can
make
you feel anything, it’s what you
want
to feel . . .). "The sun’s getting ready to come out," she said; "how’re you feeling?" she asked Alexander and she knelt beside Brad who did not stop sobbing or moaning. She laid her hand on his moving shoulder blade. She listened not for his pulse but, Jim was clear, for what she herself thought.