Women and Men (165 page)

And the grandson snapped shut his French book and ran off the porch at a bound hearing his angry grandmother call to him, "They don’t
know
for sure how lightning comes!," thinking nothing but these irrelevant thoughts out of his energies that not even his girlfriend Marie
(really
a friend) could contain (with or without precautions): Where, When, Who, What, How— wasn’t How contained in Where, When, and Who? but go easy on the Why because maybe we don’ gong know that ever—and flung him outward past impediment after impediment he was no doubt responsible for providing himself with so’s he’s have somethink in front of us as the Anasazi’s "created-weather" watch had concluded into a larger life of fact that wouldn’t go away even when you couldn’t prove
post partem
gloom might, in the humid late August of a young woman’s mind, be literally feeding on the most freshly electric of charges, those mythic ions, a weather inside out and as violent as an opera in which people stand for walls, or a lonely crime whose victims (who are victims only of the life that’s left them) do not know after all
what
the crime of this departed’s departure was, although they feel endlessly how it works in them, a person who was one of them now gone into a gap each survivor would fill if he could with stuff of himself or even, God help us, from others.

Yet, years later, when his own wife said she had a totally real picture of his grandmother Margaret from only the little he had said and so she didn’t fit this tale stuff he only alluded to into the picture of Margaret, he knew his grandmother had of course talked also facts. Facts about the Prince’s aunt, named Tall Salt, a promising widow who made the visiting East Far Eastern Princess laugh and inquired with a discretion that was even more intimate than its opposite about her state of health, as if she were blood kin to Margaret who, one early-winter day to interest her fifteen-year-old widower-grandson, told Jim that Tall Salt had expected her to marry into the clan—"And stay forever, Gramma?"—and had rope-burn welts where her own uncle a generation before had practically lynched T.S. as she rode rudely through his cornfield—he’d run wildly after her to lasso her and her horse rebelled at her familiar heel and started going round and round in little elegant circles she had taught him but not for emergency getaways, but her uncle he gave her two sheep one day when she had herded his flock for a year. She herself taught Margaret how to coil and weave baskets in the shape of bottles and stick them all over with pitch so they held water, and she never would say her sister the Prince’s mother was crazy or possessed or even a witch when to not quite everyone’s amusement that Navajo matron slung a coyote pelt on her back and ran away on all fours for a day or two followed by her horse and then came back and got up on the hogan and blew magic pollen down the smoke hole until it rained, but Tall Salt explained to Margaret that the nail parings and the small portion of dry shit her sister kept about her were her own, not from someone else who was thus to be bewitched and made sick as when a witch shoots a shard of mica into a person; and Tall Salt, who was very fond of the Hermit-Inventor’s ways, always cited her sister’s predictions such as that basketmaking was on the way out because the proper grasses were harder and harder to find.

Tall Salt also took part—rare for a woman—in the Night Sing aimed at ridding the Prince’s mother’s head of certain all-too-familiar demons her hospitality toward whom did not interfere with her (well) actually Christian hospitality toward Margaret whom her son obviously loved and to whom she gave an amulet asking the by-now-not-so-pale-faced visiting Eastern Princess if she would come into the isolation ti-pi "and bring the bird with you"—the giant bird in fact larger than five or six hogans dovetailed securely together by the best woodworkers—though a bird with proportionally small eyes oddly diamond-within-diamond-shaped, the type of eye the Anasazi medicine man should have had, to represent wisdom and watchfulness, though while he had the first he could not bother to have the second, for he left watchfulness to others which, even without diamond eyes (squinting or not—whereas he had normal gray-gold liquid eyes), was a mark of the reincarnality their beings secretly yearned to get over with in order then to watch out during a succeeding lifetime for the next life after that—though, as the Anasazi believed with a smile from his slow-beating, all but immortally slow, heart, one did not know this was what one watched for: and when Jim, like his daughter (though not his sleeping son), told grandmother Margaret
he
didn’t believe any of that reincarnation stuff (and found himself momentarily off guard to hear her cheerfully concur, "No more do I"), he wanted her to add something else and he heard the long-at-large memory find her in a catch of her breath: "But do you know," she said, "he told the Navajo Prince once toward the end that a young person would someday find a new form of reincarnation like a unique green butterfly—seen luminous-night-herring-fashion from the shores of both oceans uniting them for it was the same perfectly sane butterfly in two separate places and there would come, in the future, a way to verify the fact by instant communication over that full distance—this a prophecy without question for when the Anasazi, himself close to death and (not, of course, reincarnation but) that cloudhood that proved to be his own lofty noctilucent burial, saw the aforementioned new mode of communication in future as possibly a kind of ear whorled inward to a tiny pool of air dense as the cactus juice, strong as a rattlesnake’s jaw, clever as the percussion cap of a firearm from the East (tested or not in Mexico) that might receive at will messages from so far away only oceans could express this distance, he obviously knew nothing of the telephones from the mid-seventies of his own century that already connected fort to fort, Fort Keogh to Fort Bowie, to some deep bank of Black Hill treasure plundered without interest, to the sacred lava lake where Kiowas exited to the Pacific Coast told their Modoc hosts of grandparents killed at Fort Defiance and of Anglo warmen listening with their bare ear to the rail to hear seventeen miles off, say, or exactly eleven and a quarter, the iron blackbird of fortune grinding closer and closer bearing unconscious in its mineral genes the coming concept of Wide Load cross-continental haulage, but the Anasazi’s prophecy of death for the young person who found this new species of reincarnation was not less true than it was unnecessarily harsh.

Now Jacob Coxey, who marched an army of unemployed on Washington in 1894 and who had tea with Margaret who interviewed him in Ohio on her way home from the West, believed in his cohort-populist-financial-theological windbag Carl Browne’s theory of reincarnation. At death the soul returned to a reservoir like a caldron which contained all previous souls and this reservoir was where you got your soul and its special mix when you were born (as, from the Earth, your bodily chemicals), and Christ’s soul was in that caldron too, and therefore, in the fractional reincarnation which soulhood was, you had some Christ in you, but Browne discovered he and Jacob Coxey had an exceptionally large ration of Christ’s soul (presumably not embezzled in those panic months of defalcations by the dozen) which explained why the two men had been brought together for good works and for the march on Washington commencing at Easter of ‘94 (by which time Margaret and Alexander were reunited in New Jersey and making their own plans) and Browne called Coxey the cerebrum of Christ and himself the cerebellum. But the Hermit-Inventor had nothing to do with religious or social questions.

But . . . but . . . (the boy who at fifteen felt like a man asked his grandfather Alexander, who raised his palm in the peace gesture and laughed, Don’t ask
me,
don’t ask
me),
but didn’t the Hermit-Inventor of New York say the Navajo Prince’s mother would come back to life if the East Far Eastern Princess let herself be turned into a mist and spirited into the great Statue in the aging harbor?—Don’t ask
me,
laughed the grandfather, I thought you were through with all that stuff, so that Jim saw Alexander with meaty hands and bloody festoons reflected in his eyeglasses, because the awesomely pale-faced butcher with his Panama hat downtown had a sign behind him saying,
DON
’
T ASK
ME
.
I DON
’
T
KNOW
AND
I DON
’
T
WANT
TO
KNOW
.
But did that mean the Hermit knew the Prince’s mother would recover? But how long was it before she actually did come back to life? Wasn’t it that very night that they left? Or did the Princess’s
promise
to let herself be turned into a mist later on make the mother well again? Did the Hermit actually make it happen or only know that it would?

Oh, said Alexander, I think most of their ceremonials are against disease (can’t blame ‘em) whereas down among the Zuhis most of the palaver and singing is aimed at making rain, I think—your musical mother wasn’t the slightest bit interested in all that—but don’t ask me, ask your grandmother:
Think
what stems from not asking a given question ("given"? who gave it?). Think what would have happened if Jackson had asked the Indians what
they
wanted. The Civil War might have been averted and U. S. Grant would never have had the chance as President to fill the Indian Agency with Quakers who often actually did find out what the Indians wanted.
(How
could the Civil War have been averted? the boy started to ask, but his elder was perhaps way ahead of him.) For one thing, Indians westward might not have been so bad off and Margaret might not have been so curious to see what we had done to the Indians, and how—because you know she met a nasty little chap, part-Sioux I guess, at the Chicago Fair who told her the Indians deserved the Long March and had a perfect right to their poverty with their dumb ways of farming and if the magic was so all-fired powerful why did they not make rain? A man named Wentzel or Hintz or Lenz, the name doesn’t matter—and that’s why she got mad and disobeyed her father whom she was sending news dispatches back to, and went on out to Indian territory, still sent her dispatches mind you, wore her hat clear to Colorado, courageous girl, Margaret, but . . . but . . .

What? asked the grandson, who had once asked Margaret how she had gotten back to New Jersey from the West and she said she had had enough money to get to St. Louis where a collateral, thoroughly disreputable cousin of the Eads family whom she had met months before at the New Jersey exposition at the Chicago Fair helped her out—he drank too much and had been a friend of Gustave ("Le Tour") Eiffel in the French countryside where they had studied trees and computed bridges—and this man had gotten Margaret onto a train east, he was owed a favor by a railroad man, a German immigrant who had supplemented the meager pay of two Democratic coun-cilmen but made more money faster across the river in the East St. Louis mule market just before the famed windy flood of ‘85, and both men were now obsessed with putting together a World’s Fair for St. Louis within ten years to top Chicago’s, one already writing a book about it; but Margaret fell out with the conductor of the train somewhere past Cincinnati and made the rest of the trip under her own steam.

Ran out of money in the dead of winter, wound up in Massillon, Ohio, taken into his home in nearby village of Millport for the night by Jacob Coxey who was then planning his Easter march of the unemployed on Washington and whom she liked up to but not including his adopted theory of reincarnation; and much later at home in Jersey she wrote two humorous accounts of the Great Unknown:

the day before Palm Sunday a mysterious stranger appeared near Massillon to participate in Coxey’s "Commonweal" march, one "Louis Smith," a big well-dressed man who seemed the best-informed man there. He disciplined the "Commonweal" marchers and taught them to drill and salute officers. A Secret Service man on the march was also unable to find out who the Great Unknown was.

When Coxey’s March reached East Palestine, Pennsylvania, it received a chilly welcome. But it was at East Palestine that the Unknown proposed a system of publicly owned farms on which the unemployed might work under military discipline for the benefit of the State.

At Columbiana, a boy recognized the Great Unknown (or, Unknown Smith) as the ringmaster of a circus that had visited the town three years before.

Jim asked what Margaret recalled his mother saying and she said, "Oh, some severe thing about Chopin being better than Schumann, though she loved his wife." But his grandfather, who never went anyplace, had always until now seemed a source of certain knowledge. This day on the porch, the boy thought: They’re married. And it was not the marriage of his own, now halved, parents.

Anyway, Alexander went on, it was an accident that she went out there to start with, and if she hadn’t gone out there, she wouldn’t have had to come
back.
(He chuckled.)

Was Gramma in love with someone out there? asked Jim, who was a man already and a romantic who could take at some moments of softened and recompounded time a year stroking Anne-Marie Vandevere’s fingers in the treed darkness of the cemetery driveway at one in the morning (in the borrowed pickup truck, of course) and never wonder that she let him—

Oh it was back here too, said Alexander abruptly. And after a minute or two he retired from the porch, half as if for the bathroom, half as if for the "radio room," and Jim wondered if it was true what he had heard Alexander once say to Jim’s mother, that all too often one knew a woman through a man, through her husband or her brother or her father; for he now heard Margaret on the long-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock at news about—as he had already heard downtown—three piner babes living or dead out by Lake Rompanemus swamps. (Oh, the Indians took all the best names before we got here, she had told him. Well, they was here first, the boy had heard himself say.)