Women and Men (164 page)

reels all moons, congeals all ruins, steals all sounds—for
divorce!)
—the conclusion too thought to be true, surely, that Margaret was at once responsible in the substance of her most rare tears for her daughter’s untimely evacuation and in her storied narrative of the East Far Eastern Princess’s roughly eastward exit responsible for the also departing Navajo Prince’s mother’s recovery: because if the tales she had been telling her favorite grandson who ran like the wind and could gallop a middle-sized black pony bareback around the edges of the Quirks’ horse-corn fields at age twelve (and at age fifteen in the middle of the night in the general direction of the Grange and a house near it where two girls might have gone to bed by now) were in some godawful way
true,
didn’t that mean that Sarah Mayn, whole mother of Brad and Jim, half-wife (as they say precisely in one ancient scientific marriage-culture) of Mel, and sister of Marian who now distantly makes her home in a suburb of Boston, and daughter of Margaret and of Alexander, . . . "lives on," said Warren Winecoop (as if listing the coming week’s events) from the pulpit of a church not much frequented by Margaret or Alexander, "in the memories of those who loved her": so that, quite apart—apart—apart from the atomic question of whether he could or did love his singular mother after an action so unforgettable, he was confused enough to be derailed from responsibility, Margaret’s or for that matter his mother’s (for maybe
she
had acted responsibly), and was much taken by his grandfather’s remark, that latter-day porchside qum friendship, that the Hermit-Inventor of New York, as, strangely, Jim’s uncomplimentary grandfather went on calling the skinny old geezer’s 1945 manifestation—whatever it was he had invented—had confided in him things he had never told Margaret though adding, to Alexander, that he was another man entirely from that sensible, methodical guy who told Margaret to go west in 1885 on Bedloe’s Island amid the pre-ruin of the Statue of Liberty: yet, Alexander went on, he sure as hell had the look (though sick, now) of the man he had briefly seen when Margaret returned home from the West in ‘94, same weird bone-ridged forehead so you expected to see through it, same crappy clothes and scuffed shoes, no, he had sneakers now, same irritable and confidential manner, told Alexander of all things that the Anasazi, who knew more about the weather than he was saying, had been the only man then known—i.e., in that century or apparently in that
area
in earlier centuries—who for certain had never been reincarnated but been only himself, his long self, and who upon dying had been bound to be but a memory, which was fine by the Anasazi, as he always had said though never guaranteeing the truth of this fact about him gleaned first from the spiny-sinewed bicycling botanist Marcus Jones who had it from Mena the Chilean zoologist specializing in javelina-peccaries, their possibilities, their hind-mounted scent glands and luminous lips the hue of moon-drenched cactus flesh peeled by the eyes of an elf owl that on certain nights shares its being with a female seer much as the cactus shares its with the owl or at the least the owl’s eye: yet key here (though key to what was not yet sure) was what Marcus Jones on the locoweed-naming jaunt told the Hermit-Inventor (who upon meeting him under a red crag near where thermonuclear devices were even then latent and to be unearthed had expatiated and complained how New York had so changed just in the four or five months he’d been gone): to wit, that a certain aged Indian healer had told Marcus’s friend the woman-naturalist Mena upon her one visit to his eyrie that we create our weathers partly then to observe them, that is, so that there will be something in front of us: we make them by entering into the four-cornered creation which when we do so by conceiving it as four corners meeting back to back not as four corners facing one another at a distance we live through again the one son becoming two, namely Destroyer and Born of Water, thence multiplied to four sons, namely Reared Underground, or the Double, and Changing Grandchild, which, because he had been able while still in the womb to see the future, the Anasazi had singularly always been, that is Changing Grandchild, which was why he stayed young or, if not young, alive, and in his singularity never could gain or want reincarnation as another kind of man or as a woman, say, though he had strange interior memories, like a happy worm moving round inside him, of a time when men and women were first created and did not fuck but the woman masturbated with a quill or a sour cactus or a stone if you could find it, that in its fleshiness bore hard future knowledge that one day it would be a stone used by a woman to beat her belly with and induce an abortion.

Mena, at all events, was a remarkable person who had told Marcus this and more that he passed on to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who, unbeknownst to Marcus, recognized at once the Indian he was talking about, and Marcus in his happenstance encounters with Mena on the great nocturnal plateau from time to time found support for a view that came to him more than he to it as when one day near a river leaning against the bright, birchlike shadow of an aspen trunk musing upon the snow that would fall here in three months he had been accosted by a man who with his young son who presently arrived set about persuading Marcus by commercial means, later the violent means then commercially available, to divulge what was not Marcus’s
to
divulge, to wit some doubtless mythical mode he for one had not heard of of dry-steaming the flesh of the sometimes almost animally attentive saguaro cactus while it was still alive high above the desert floor, betimes adding a seasoning of one of the northern Navajo locoweeds Marcus was supposed to have named for the benefit of the New World, the end result a winter mash marketable for horses (that could be dried, stored, and shipped East) as well as a porridge to attract passing Indian refugees who because of their ovally-whorled tastebuds would never recognize the ingredients, perhaps also because of their kinship to the vegetable world. But the treacherous habit of the saguaro plus the mystery of which locoweed to use had led the exploiter and son to seek out Marcus Jones and, as he reported to the Hermit, thus inspired Marcus at the cost of "but one joint of the right little finger of a left-handed botanist" (he would grin) to reflect again on such mobile kinships between animal and vegetable as had tempted his contented mind upon seeing and touching Mena’s lips that had acquired a petal-patina silver-white in sympathy with the javelinas she had tracked so long observing their hind-situated scent glands—but still more from hearing Mena report Owl Woman’s retreat, like a fugitive hallucination, into a cactus in order that the cactus grow an owl or owl eye: so that Marcus blamed his renown for the violent brush with the saguaro exploiter not to mention the minor amputation (to prove a humorous if not evolutionary bereavement) but had found in the self-created obstacle of his professional reputation and his unwillingness to make up some story to get rid of the saguaro exploiter a none too costly spark of inspiration he then understood he had often dreamed in the form of ships sailing the desert stirring eddies as if the ships were wind, and humans exploiting their animal or vegetable souls at need so some pains could not reach us, like pistol shot or lonely lust, until the renewed use of our coupled natures might lead to some similar union of our male and female selves.

Now the Hermit-Inventor of the East at once recognized in the prior words about created and observed weathers and the direction in which the world’s corners were envisioned his colleague the many-hundred-year-old Anasazi plus the old healer’s strict habit of never peddling the same conversational tidbits twice, for the Hermit was hearing these "created" versus 4 ‘observed" weathers for the first time though at once remembering the Anasazi healer’s suggestion to him that he not always see opposites as being necessarily "versus" or opposed. The Hermit told Marcus what he never had told a soul—that a girl he had seen but once at that time and
told
to
go
west, had in herself shown him why
he
had been drawn to the West for decades.

She was a fine girl, beyond subtlety at that moment in 1885, her hands at rest at her sides, her dress full of lilac flowers and the minute fire of red loco, and upon being spoken to by the Hermit she advanced to one limb of the dismembered Statue of Liberty and ran her hand along the molded metal and tasted it: and both her fresh directing of interest, which was a humble appetite for what lay ahead, and her actual ingestion of some far-flung grain of the copper sheets recalled to the man how when he had first known the Anasazi among the high caves of those western zones touched more and more by the perilous magic of Anglo law, the old mediciner would give him a pod to chew as being for the side teeth, the pulverizing teeth (not the front ones), and this then-nameless pod or bean would dissolve ultimately in his mouth but soon reappear in spirit, a whole minute vessel passing everywhere inside him until, accepting it, he found he could use it, and, using it, found it curiously navigational like a lode that lives in what of our active selves we let rest, until, decades after, as he in fresh form (his own) saw the girl, who could not have yet seen more than thirteen or fourteen summers, turn away from a grand haunch eyeing him and smiling as if the pale flush of her neck (for she had just been bending warily over that piece of statue) betokened a wise smile the whole of her young body gave to the irritable, disheveled, impatiently alert man who had said thoughtlessly Go west, and she said Oh she planned to do all that by hook or crook before she settled down to marriage and a family and she would pay her way, what’s more, and was meanwhile happy to be here in New York where she didn’t visit often. To which the Hermit-Inventor dumbfounded could only blurt out a dumb fact that hardly began to tell how he felt, to wit that according to
his
geography she wasn’t in New York right now, but in New Jersey.

Which was how Jim often felt in Windrow when he needed to go away both on his own hook or because his late mother (now departed herself) had told him to and yet how he felt in New York itself whose immigrant men and women in their transparently individualized transporter capsules seemed often more understandable than such minor mysteries as the Navajo Prince’s mother’s revival and how it left an imprint upon downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts, ‘mselves so blue and constant of sky that the Navajo Prince’s envious brother in mild shock (because he was
still
envious now even in the absence of his envy’s cause) the morning after the Prince left couldn’t see why the Hermit-Inventor bothered to
explain
the blue, especially when he said it was really black but dissolved to blue by the Sky’s incompetence to use, yea wake, its full force—a most funny (Anglo) wrinkling of the Obvious (the Navajo brother who was skilled at dressing buckskin and making whips and hobbles could feel with a neutral, silent wisdom of contemplation displacing for several minutes his inveterate envy of his more gifted brother), yet, as this remaining brother did not suspect, a needed detour for the scientific New-Yorkono round possible interrogations that the Hermit-Inventor found risky since, by a rich defect of language in that world, to describe, say, the buildings of his native city of the East as being anvil-shaped like clouds was the same as having
invented
those buildings, likewise his city’s streets tall as the treacherous Cleft Pass between the Anasazi’s remembered border and the cliff pastures of the Indian sea isles when Ship Rock was scarcely a thought—to describe meant to have invented: which meant that the Hermit’s
actual
inventions such as a rooftop gauge to predict differences between light and heavy air masses (possibly inspired by his thoughts on pistol design during the Mexican War) or an underground railway (which was never to be built perhaps because it had been conceived as soundless and to be cooperatively maintained) might suffer unforeseen unimportance, but mainly that he might be
credited
with the Prince and Princess’s elopement were he to
describe
it, if only the atmospheric phenomena that attended it (doubtless recalling, said the grandfather Alexander on a spacious white-painted porch in Windrow, New Jersey, in late ‘45, that expiring French wolf who remarks at the end, "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, / Only silence is strong, —all the rest is but lies").

But he had lost the boy or the boy him, for Jim had heard his
grandmother
and she was on the tall-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock, and he had had to wonder, on that day-night in ‘93 or ‘94 when the sun would not and would not go down and all the slits in the onion layers of atmosphere clear up to the spheres of most and least change lined up and cosms of the sun descended more suddenly than two eyes together could have seen, to deform or translate, depending on how you saw them, if the quick-winded timber wolf into which the egg-sucking mountain lion turned just as the Princess’s giant bird stopped to snap had been there perhaps already, and did the lion vanish into the underbrush atop that volcanic neck rather than turning
into
an alternative choice on the bird’s farewell menu?—so that he heard and didn’t hear like classroom code words "kinetic" equals "motion," got it?, "K" equals "M," some words of his grandfather’s to do with "fool" and "wise" and one day fifteen or more years later, when his own age had doubled, recalled some weird consolation of reversal in that word "fool" and in his grandmother’s news that three small babies had been found abandoned near a piner cottage at Lake Rompanemus but strangely or like sacred aliens nestled up in two old trees as if to keep the babes safe from flood (though they woke drenched in themselves), which saved Jim from being asked how he’d done on his French test, she had been tutoring him mainly by famous sayings, famous to her, like "Keep quiet, people will think you’re smart," or words to that effect which sometimes
took
effect later, as when he learned the French for a thought he had already heard his grandfather casually say without laboring the fact or even acknowledging that it was a French thought. In the middle of such tutoring as Jim and Margaret indulged in the following Friday, namely some dumb verbs (about seventy or a hundred!) in a special tense of the past he never got straight, he got her into downcoming and upgoing weathers and knew definitely that she was telling the truth though, albeit amidst science, he’d let her get back into these rotten old stories or margins thereof he vowed after
{post mortem!)
his mother’s death he was through with: the Anasazi healer held (and apparently had demonstrated) that thunder was the upgoing burst of undreamt dream mined in a flash from mountains by downcoming knives of lightning—"But the Anasazi believed mountains didn’t
dream,
Gramma"—True enough, but they arose
from
dreams slanted out of the Earth (its quality of being layered) and because of this origin never after were able much to dream though they thought and thought and were admirable if left alone and alive which incidentally proved to the Anasazi that true feeling must follow thought, even at a slant, not the other way round, because mountains did not feel in that human way. Yet they had all this stuff and bone and drama of dreams that never came to view and like some horsepower that didn’t know what to do with itself could get blown up by the right lightning coming down the right line at the right time—’ ‘that would heat the air and make rain, right?" the boy added— Right you are! whereas the Hermit-Inventor who remembered late humid-dark afternoons in early August in New Yorkono as it had once been called differed with the medicine man in that the so-called upgoing of the thunder was really ongoing, like a flooding of the banks or later much as the Heaven of Space-Thought grew to be an owf-concept more than an
up-.
But Jim, this being the weekend before another French test, swept all this away like love and all but stunned his grandmother telling her that Bob Yard had told him that thunder was gas expanding within the channel made by the lightning short-circuit and Bob had added that was
it,
that’s absolutely all he knew: but when Margaret retorted, "What do you expect of a man like Bob?" (who was an electrician), Jim, who with Bob’s illegal permission had borrowed Bob’s pickup truck the weekend before on condition that he and Anne-Marie ("Marie") stay clear of town, could reach inside himself for words but only so far as a ball of raging love to hurt his grandmother so that, for a silence that was large enough only for him to know that the French she had just recited to him thrice very slowly of a poet named Alfred he didn’t know was the very thing her husband grandfather Alexander had said in English on the porch a few days ago and for him to recall Alexander’s words and knew he could at once give a smooth translation, he could not bring out this intolerable question until he gave up trying and then heard all the voices inside him, his mother’s included, audibly then voice the question: "Gramma, why did she do it?" (the "she" at once felt as a lapse in his possession of his mother and of sonship, for he ought to have said "my mother"), the "Gramma" at the last gram of moment thrown in to tell her all he supposed his cool interrogation in its clipped outrage did not tell her: which at once let go in his own head, like a thought which, with Margaret beside him trying to recall for him things Sarah had said, could not contain a parallel question so hard to control that it became "Who does she think she
is,
to commit suicide" (as they with such natural syllables say com-mit-su-i-cide) "when she’s got a husband and two sons?" (hey,
and
a mother
and
a father
and
a sister in Massachusetts); a thought that became a year later offensive inquiries into the full circumstances of Sarah’s sandy, watery leavetaking by Jim’s statuesque journalism-English teacher Pearl W. Myles who had by then lost her job yet she had at least imprinted the basic interrogatives upon the majority of her pupils such as Where?, Who?, When?, Why? (or was Why?
not
one?) for Margaret, whose one-time self (if she
was
the same person) bending to taste a limb of imported copper, had refreshed in the Hermit
why
he had gone back to the
West
again and again—to wit, the seed pod given him by the Anasazi to chew on for the good of his grinders—could say to Jim, "That much we will probably
never
know."