Women and Men (113 page)

—
What
stories? sighed or gasped the central griever on the floor near the kneeling grandmother’s hand.

I hardly knew those stories till after you were born, Jim, she said.

Where’d you get them? Did the Princess’s bird have Paiute blood to eat horses?

Oh most of them are true enough, said Alexander, Jim’s one-time Paiute "source," who rose from the piano, stood looking at his grandson Brad’s faintly rising and falling form before ushering himself from the room saying a word or two under his breath that included "wheelbarrow" and "leaves," and after he shut the music-room door, a word or two in the hall.

How could you not know these stories till then?

Your mother was in the hospital with you for two weeks and they were talking about an operation, and one day I went to the cemetery to see if Eukie Yard had died because he hadn’t bought a pint of applejack in ten days according to your father who had heard it at the store when
he
bought a bottle of rum and a bottle of sherry to celebrate your arrival with us—and when I got to the graveyard looking for our notorious caretaker and heard the pounding of the trotters down at the track like game birds, I forgot about Eukie Yard and maybe I was thinking I might tell my grandson a thing or two more than

Jonathan Jo

Has a mouth like an "O"

And a wheelbarrow full of surprises.

And while I was looking at the green grass between my dark father’s long life and my poor blond brother’s short one, I remembered the Navajo Prince’s mother’s hole in the head that wasn’t big enough for the giant bird of Choor to do more than fly over, leaving the landing to the spirits who buzzed in and out without asking.

Demons was what they were.

Demons, you’re right.

The front door was heard to open during the ensuing silence. Brad breathed normally. His carrying-on only seemed to be ending. But as the glinting brass door handle spun loud and hard against itself and the door swung in, Jim knew his grandfather was out carting leaves, and, as if to ignore the unfortunate man who stood half-noticed in the doorway of his wife’s music room and sanctum, Jim said, "Gramma, was that before or after the Navajo Prince left to follow that stupid Princess of the East? because—"

"Both," came the word.

"—because if it was after ..."

But the man, more like an uninvited guest than a father, asked what was going on here. But not as if the boy on the Persian rug was in the wrong: Mel Mayn’s readiness was in his arms and hands; and his square, absent face had been waiting fourteen years and more for his giftedly ironic wife to ask something possible of it. Now she was dead—"his late espoused saint," Byron Kennett her music friend had put it, though who was "his"?—and the open palm of Mel’s extended hand, moving across the room and down to the boy on the floor, seemed to leave the sphere of his face to give it room to be alone and find all its dumbness of feelings.

(What’s that? asks the interrogator, whose machine didn’t pick up such vagueness except as danger.)

But Mel reached halfway across this mildly contemptuous space where his wife had succeeded in being alone when she wished and he had felt about the room all the cruel force of hoping mistakenly to love what one does not understand.

Or
care
to understand, muses the interrogator, who hardly knows what he does, when caressing the fresh-juice button momentarily liquefying our ever-serviceable bone system, ‘cause he’s got
his
living to hack and his cash flow to keep massaged—but he’s lately so alive to the fineries of feeling that these rooms discriminate that he doesn’t know what to do except receive the ensuing information that held its warmth—yet the wind (as this woman Margaret testily answered her husband as if prophesying) was cold, and the third adult to enter, coming as he did from a nerve center of the town, reported that a sudden cooling of the air in motion off the Jersey shore had created a dangerous pressure belt and there was a chance of that rare phenomenon a hurricane that originates along the mid-Atlantic coast—air, he said, touching Brad on the back of the head and speaking softly, travels like that—from high to low pressure areas and when it does that, it—

"Mel, for heaven sake!" said Margaret.

But Jim recalled his father’s very face noting once that a giant thunderhead had funneled a waterspout down the day of Sarah’s departure; so "it" came to Jim that not only had things happened to Margaret like the stories he’d about outgrown; the
stories
had; and if the giant bird’s fly-over was "after," then the Indian son’s leaving (albeit in pursuit of his white girlfriend) could have brought his Indian mother back to life.

Oh crap, and more crap, then oh memory, then mere memory, his voice changed, though to itself for years and later years when he came to make his
living
arriving at facts. Yet at that moment of Brad’s Day, the task of refiguring some of those pieces of stories was too great; that is, at the moment when the father who had been at the newspaper office in which Jim had declined a summer job in favor of the Quirks’ farm, which was mostly horse corn and where he stayed the night when he could go riding after supper, or when two skinny, sassy girls he knew came to dances at the Grange (which Margaret would ask about) when, that is, the father knelt near Margaret with the boy between them and Jim immobile after an hour or more near the door, and when the father sort of ducked his head round toward his son Jim and shook his head and began to speak to Brad even before turning back to him to contemplate the boy’s head and neck, and his dark blue T-shirt, and his arm in the sleeping position (so Jim thought, painfully,
Has
that little shit-ass gone to sleep?).

But no—for, in answer to Mel’s reassuring words "She’s not coming back, boy, she’s gone," "Yes," said the boy; and the man said, "But
we’re
not, we’re not gone, you and me and Jimmy." And Brad, with a veteran huskiness from tears and a hysteria of breathing that had become its own measure, answered the man who’d been a father to him, "/ know that."

Mel put his hand on the small of Brad’s back, one of the few if any opportunities we who are relations have taken to say Mel touched other humans—and all Jim saw was that hand, till Margaret stood up and went out of the room to the kitchen. "I know it too," said the man.

"So do . . . ," said Brad, sobbing again, . . . "so do . . . I," heaving his lung half through his shoulders, but not with the soft screams or noises Jim had heard half an hour ago, noises Jim had never heard before from his little brat brother.

And so it went. Margaret brought thick sandwiches in. This time they didn’t move
to
the sandwiches as on the day a month ago of the memorial, from living room to dining room, and she surprised even Jim by putting the plate of cake-rich home-baked crusty white-bread sandwiches beside Brad and Mel on the floor—

—who were related only by marriage, breaks in the daydreaming interrogator, if we have got the facts right—

Some are liverwurst, some are egg salad, and some are American cheese, Margaret said and—

—was there time to hardboil the eggs?—

—and stood up and looked at the boy on the floor, and was gone again to the kitchen.

Mel actually stroked Brad’s back—and said (but really to Jim, as if Brad were elsewhere, staring into the Earth, say), "It was something missing in the equation—/ knew it—she had her music and she had Jeanette Many who was fine as long as she was playing the viola, and she had Byron and Byron had Sarah when his mother didn’t have her dancing shoes on, and she had the others she talked to who appreciated her. Sometimes she had her way of narrowing her eyes at you as if she couldn’t see right, and running her hand down the side of her face like she was looking for a bite. And besides the friends, she had this town which she might have left at the time she and I met, and she had nothing much from me except she knew I’d always be here, be here longer than the
Democrat
—which wasn’t enough for her but what did she ever do about it?"

The results are before us, murmurs the interrogator idiomatically.

"It’s all right, Dad," said Jim.

"Is it?" said the father.

Margaret sang briefly in the kitchen as a drawer opened and slid shut and the refrigerator door made a noise. The front door came open, with voices, and here were Alexander, having transferred a pile of leaves from one place to another, and Bob Yard, who didn’t know what to do except say, "Havin’ a rest, Braddie?" And Brad raised up as if for air, or thinking about Bob’s voice. And the violin case lay shrined at the head of this ceremonial length, which had gotten longer, yes Brad had gotten almost longer, imperceptibly stretched by a motion contained in him. "Yeah, guess so," the boy whispered.

Mel said, "Any more news about the storm? It’s the pressure belt." "Yes, that’s so," said Alexander memorably; "air travels out of your high pressure area into a low pressure area, they say"—or words to that effect, and years later Jim told his colleague Ted so it came out funnier. Brad was groaning again, he rolled abruptly onto his back—God, first time in all these two hours—and cried in a creepy, embarrassing, slow cadence as if he were seeing something, and Jim heard the old stairs—which could have been Margaret, but she sang again in the kitchen and Jim knew she would be bringing in a black-and-gold wooden tray of chocolate milk in the tall tumblers of cloudy-blue, rough-rippled glass his poetry-quoting mother would make iced tea in. (What poetry? He didn’t really know; he had never asked. She would not ever tell stories about when she was young; she flipped it all away with her hand.) Jim listened to his grandmother bring in the chocolate milk—he loved her thoughts but did not understand her storytelling any more, for now he thought the stories had been true, though certainly some weren’t. But some were.

the finger tips of the Navajo Prince made a sound that the Princess taught to the Prince, but the sound flashed waves of danger through the hills and brought the gigantic bird-thing to hover hopefully above the moving bodies of the tribe until the cries of the Prince’s mother had their effect. His grandmother read him
The Last of the Mohicans,
which was
this
side of the continent north of here with woods and rivers for canoes, not the dry land of the Navajo Prince and his mother and brother and family and People that the East Far Eastern Princess visited by chance, until the piteous cries of the mother roused the lazing demons who got out of her cavity and molded themselves round the elder seers who claimed that the music of the interracial fingerprints fitting so subtly during dawn song and noon song were the real reason for the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head, the two sets went together into audible whorls, never mind that the Prince’s mother had had the hole in her head for years before the Anglo girl arrived, and these elders spoke of the famous long afternoon when the sun did not go down past the mountains of the sky but held firm at ten paces above the horizon and the specks of spirit awash around the famous matron’s head were briefly her ancestors telling us that the white Princess was related to the Prince so long as she did not return to her father’s nation of Choor but stayed here where three old Spanish ewes who had long forgotten the lambs birthed in the silent blizzards prospered in the Princess’s presence as she learned to weave but so slowly (with three spindles of lightning and one of rain) regaling the women with tales of swimming—so that they were reminded of the slower ways of weaving and the hard-won desert dyes they had once used and in the East Far Eastern Princess’s slow, clumsy learning relearned their own old slower ways before trading with strangers had pushed them to work faster:

until the Hermit-Inventor of the East, returning from further south, gave her not even the time of day but let her know, in the long-range glint cut by his eye, that he would meet her where her bird nested, she had better be there:

and the Prince’s mother with the demons still sucked terribly upward and downward complained that the alien girl had so befriended the ewes that they had not been butchered in their natural time, and the alien girl must stop writing her language-messages upon paper every morning and evening and must not wear her quillwork-decorated antelope shirt from the Cheyenne Germans if she expected the demons to vacate "her mother’s" head—for so the Navajo Prince’s mother related herself to the young girl for the first time—
mother
—so that the Princess, seeing the teeth and tongue of her adoptive Indian mother, recalled with a shock her own mother sitting up straight in a black-and-gold sulky-bare carriage breezing to church with her cousin the highly pleased banker-tenor who possessed a trotter as glossy and eager in its motion as any the race track would see—and sang in the Methodist choir—

—but this wasn’t the queen mother of the rational mountains of Choor, broke in the interrogator, sounding ye faint self-echo as if he hadn’t been tuned for a while. In New Jersey eider dey allow horses into the Methodist choir or dey breed singing horses!—

—until, having completed her day’s apprentice weaving too fast with her whorl-ended spindles three of zigzag, flash, and sheet lightning, one of rain streamer whirled with white shell and hearing the maidens whisking stone-ground corn flour, singing to their unborn children, she walked away like the visiting Princess she was, to her pony, and rode away to meet the Hermit-Inventor, who told her she was in danger, a hollow statue could hide her if she could reach it in time and let herself be changed to another form but it was a long journey but today was a once-in-six-hundred-years Window, open like a reverse volcana (as the hermit always pronounced it) from the sky if she might only be conscious of it: and though he, not the first nor the last of the Hermit-Inventors to be dismissed for unwarranted observations, gave credit to the Anasazi healer for supplementing his information with Owl Woman’s remembered songs and serving to confirm the Hermit-Inventor’s pilot construct of
several layers
of atmosphere—exactly two-sevenths as many years ahead of Teisserene de Bort, the discoverer of the stratosphere, as the man who claimed to have discovered jojoba was ahead of his time prior to being killed in early Salt Lake City.