Women and Men (168 page)

But the Anasazi, nearing term, was glad the power did not extend to his eyes and ofttimes painful touch. Yet when the Hermit, his annual sojourn done, said Keep in touch, the aged savant had to wonder if he had powers he didn’t know about, if so he must learn them lest before the right time they accidentally de-leave the woods of the East or dry-freeze an adjacent volcano in full cry. He used such words as "adjacent" and "Keep in touch" to show his feeling for the Hermit-Sojourner, and in their anger over the question of shared and territorial weathers he showed words and ideas that convinced the Hermit the Anasazi was so far ahead of his time as to be—not crazy but so bony of mind, so humorous about a violent future, that the Hermit all but asked if it was weather he ought to been discussing or some other—what?— obstacle?

It must have been at this point in his later skeptical discussions with his grandmother, the winter and early spring after his mother’s permanent vacation from this world, that the grandson apparently forgot or deposited at a distance from his life a pile of rather rich data. His grandfather reminded him of these at thirty-five, as if for the grandfather, who was on his last legs then, recalling territorial versus shared weather was the most natural thing. "Oh, you got mad as hops didn’t you just. Because she told me you did. And it was some dadblamed stuff about a mountain of flesh and tainted hailstones—"

—when the Hermit took the East Far Eastern Princess away from—

—For God’s sake, Gramma, it wasn’t you, was it?

Well, sometimes it
was
and sometimes it
wasn’t
(for Margaret had decided not to put up with his anger
all
the time, only
some
of the time)—

—when the Hermit took her away from the maiden weavers to urge her to get out of there fast, he conveyed to her such a condensed mountain of information (for he had
his
troubles too) that one might spend a life digesting it all, so that that afternoon of the interminable sunset resembled a
year
of such light, and later when she galloped not at all like the wind away from village and mountain and the hauntingly local, turning storm she had been thrown outward by the beginnings of, the Hermit’s anxiety seemed to her to have precious little to do with his talk of upcoming or rising weather, which would be
territorial,
and downgoing weather, which would be
shared.
If this debate with the Anasazi coupled with regret, anger, prophecy, and (she felt) his curious relief to be
talking
to her at all had taken up the space they seemed to need, why she would have been listening all night, for a year of nights, and not have escaped that night and might never have left—

—but why not?—she could have left later—

Escape is always possible even if you think you are free, according to the Anasazi, who so maddened the Hermit with impatience
and
inspiration that he vowed he would never again tell him anything. This after the Hermit described those purely mythical three- or four-foot-high towers of frozen froth called in the East-North-East "foam volcanoes" which of course no one including the Hermit had ever seen—only to have his fanciful instance of upgoing weather, which stayed rooted to the place it rose from, taken so seriously by the Anasazi that the Hermit was moved by his friend’s explanation of the so-called Ship Rock as being no ship at all but a piece of the very seas on which the supposed ship had come to this ancient terrain, which had been in process of turning from seawater into dry land, a process more than completed upon the arrival of this "Ship Rock" tower: moved, then, to anger was the Hermit, for the Anasazi had already taken the Hermit’s vision of a future of vertical building as a promise of destruction not only from people of the East dropping dangerous objects from such heights but employing a new, visible air to make the tallest possible bubbles which would be in the midst of their unthinkably hot creation in imitation of the Sun, frozen dry and hard with the people of the future embedded here and there like windows, doors, or sculpture or fading away or going to pieces as in Tall Salt’s pictorial rugs, while the Hermit (who had seen in Ship Rock’s bare steep lift off the desert floor an assurance that mountains
thought
but did not
dream)
would stop his ancient friend with "But those foam volcanoes I told you about, they’re not true, I never saw one of them in my life; you’re saying they rise up from bubbles in the wintertime—"

"
—the late winter in the north of Choor," laughed the Anasazi, who had spoken at a distance reportedly to the Princess’s giant bird to ask if it missed the moisture of its faraway climate and had heard the bird’s retreating words curving down into distance even as the bird flew higher so that in the decoded words of the bird identifying the frequency of thawing days and frosty nights, the Anasazi had both a verbal equivalent of an unknown music and a weather report from another territory, though not then a resolution of the Hermit’s painful differences from him: for while the two agreed that some weathers actually belonged to the people living in the given territory such as the hailstorms of the western summer, and that other weathers were no
one
section’s right but shared—even sea-to-sea, such as the thunder-without-light-ning that came with the dampness of a late-summer gibbous moon observed by the Navajo Prince two hundred miles from here, while he was studying the compacted potentialities of the bison tongue, and verified by the Anasazi and subsequently by others as having taken place elsewhere at roughly the same time—still the Hermit maintained that the hailstones of northern New Mexico were both downcoming
and
upgoing weather since the stones fell and rose several times before hitting the ground, for one heard them whistle different scales, whereas the Anasazi, who doubted this, was convinced on close but necessarily swift inspection that hailstones were in reality trees, leastways their trunks, compacted violently to spheres showing those internal rings to mark the spiral layering by those always present winds which the Hermit contended were either arriving or leaving, while the Anasazi, who, on nights of Double Moon, could project onto his floor or wall photograms cross-sectioning practically anything, even the four winds (which especially interested the Hermit) though not the extraterrestrial voids charted like wide rather than long tunes inside the Prince’s mother’s head that, for the many holes that the one large seemed to explode into, might be a young singer’s wild ceiling of as yet unreached high notes, yet here in the Prince’s mother a head charted if at all by her terrestrial demons who sometimes knew when they were licked yet sometimes were themselves possessed of a versatility due to the several possible causes of their presence not least the rare wind joining substances of some far northern landscape with local mountains reputed to have human flesh (or being) in their actual circulation, yet also not least the sometimes visible breath of her husband the Prince’s father when he speculated as to these causes but never consulted the Anasazi, so old he didn’t know the difference between Anglo and Indian, white man and red man, hermits of the East and seers of the People, and was known to have hardly troubled to argue, in his longstanding discussions with the Hermit, that there was (in the matter of winds) only leaving—if that—never arriving: for that which is already present need not arrive. The Anasazi found delightfully funny the Hermit-Inventor’s generous vision that terrestrial weathers might
become
shared weathers but not the other way around. The Anasazi, who would express his love for the Hermit through ridicule such as "We are going to have war between us even if we don’t have to fight for it," argued that the winged water wheels of five hundred years back had passed from the world of the Indians into the concave sky, and to call these gray illusions from which came a century of real irrigation water for Indian peoples "shared" when they had passed away was like claiming that Marcus Jones’s silver-bristled pussytoes was a western July twin of those clustered tresses of hair-frost the Hermit claimed on hearsay grew in Choor from wet soil in months of gloomiest cold. Possibly
more
than a twin, the Anasazi observed, since at that distance there was no way to check (except by his own rare powers of hearing, which would not help) whether or not the hair-frost somehow translated itself westward to be, for a time, the pussytoes in bloom.

Which should have been the moment, roughly in 1889 or ‘90, when the Anasazi knew he was going to disperse and (through a method only he then knew, though as Margaret guessed her grandson might hit upon it himself sometime) recompound his ancient veins, vacancies, and breath in cloudform, glad not to speak any more but await some inevitable precipitation. Yet when his death and chemical promotion coincided with the poor Navajo Prince’s exit in pursuit of his beloved, the Anasazi never thought his own new (un-precedentedly low-altitude) nimbic noctilucence would last so long eastward to be consummated in a trip to the Northeast to seek those foam volcanoes despite the Hermit’s guarantees that he would not find any. The Hermit had by then named certain cumulus sky-chains "cloud streets" and was on the way to the fulfillment of his personal frustrations on two fronts, one of them the "front" itself, which in their quiet way a team of Norwegian meteorologists would claim as their contribution near the end of the First World War. The fact was that the Hermit had put two separate pictures together from the work decades earlier of his own Hermit-Uncle who possessed an unmatched sense of smell: one was the picture of vast shelves of underground rock sliding laterally to push other, weaker shelves of underground rock angularly upward—
or
vice versa, the upper flowing across the lower—this giant motion resulting from the ingrained shadow of the sea’s memory within those ancient solids waking them to periodic waves not unlike the circulatory dreams in the lower levels of mountains; the second was the picture of his tall, sinewy uncle-manifestation on a field trip to the extreme and odd Northeast straddling a branch of the highest oak upon a mountain covered with holly bush and sniffing from the West an odor he knew from but one place on the continent, the cell of an aged Anasazi med’ciner, the faintly acrid oxide sear splashed on the barrel of a revolver lying beside an earthenware winnowing tray brought to the Anasazi once weekly by his long-time regular maiden with his ration of legume and cereals—upon which the high-perched uncle, oblivious till later of a clan or club of Abnaki Indians encamped on the slope beneath him on their way to try vainly to volunteer on the Union side, conceived of an east-bound wind in the form of minute parcels of experience—here, a point in the West, possibly not the ultimate origin of the wind itself particularly if, as all the Hermit-Inventors of New York have concluded independently, winds may be global belts or sashes that have no actual beginning as true as their ongoing motion. All of which led the Hermit-nephew to see, through additionally observing differences both between his moods on inclement days and those of children or midgets at a lower level, and between his own intensified sense of smell in warm weather and that of the neighborhood dogs responding to many of the same odors in his native city in winter, that if temperature affects what is carried by wind, it must affect the progress of wind, and so when the seared-pistol scent came coolly through the branches of his eyrie oak, the Hermit saw a particle-tinted wall of warmth nearing his oak perch only to veer off upward above him as if it had always been a rampart of another system, then fork to either side of him while two other events occurred: one, he realized that the odor from the west southwest, mixed of metal-sear and of the nutriments maiden-conveyed to the famed medicine man had just kept coming as if the source of the odor were unending—a stream thousands of miles long from a source but a few inches in size; two, as he told his nephew deliriously on his deathbed, the land of the sky (to use the term of their friend the Anasazi) was an inverted presence of the Earth, and the animal man that lived in both but walked on but one must find the way to defact ("defract"?) and parsipate ("precipitate"?) in both. But the Hermit-nephew, putting all this together in the late eighties, very early nineties, concluded that, though he did not know the word "baroclinity" (which the Anasazi, who could not have cared less, could have predicted would not cover all cases), one mass of parcels had met another and, discovering their different temperatures, hence densities, neither obstacle had penetrated the other but made a wedge or "front" of agitated, void-jumping weather locally discontinuous, but that quite apart from the old Indian healer’s marine geology of desert Earth, the crucial, maybe confluent odor from the West (which made the perched uncle thirty-odd years ago sweat so that the Abnaki group camped on the slope below got wind of him and took him captive as a Confederate spy scouting Indian volunteer movements in the Northeast) proved to be unconscious word from the Anasazi med’ciner that these quests to the heart of atmosphere, even if cyclonic rotation be a fuller emblem of it than rivers of the sky that meandered and overcame their banks and even paused and halted to test the patience of sailboat crews and rafters while all in all striping that Earthen world like latitudes, were arrived at through what seemed mutual interruption and blockage that were really a promise not just that some work
would
come of it but that work
had.

At which, when the Hermit tried to voice all this to the Anasazi at their next summer meetings in traditional meteorological language, the Anasazi who never owned up to any faults laughed more humbly than ever—and then answered in suitably weatherly words that when airs heated from human breath seek higher coalescence
("Ko-an I ci-quoia")
they get bigger till, rising, they get let into the upper landscape his very friend the Hermit was talking about but too smart—’cause it was not an inverted landscape rehashing our own though it was asking us to be in it as if it were our own and protect ("protract" ?) it as it protected ours—unless, however, this now very expanded hot air can’t gain entry into the smoke hole of the Sky’s grand hogan and is returned as sheaves of storm blade and sleet lightnings or fiery rain gods that have forgotten they are one, that would wipe out all the cacti except those in process of turning into birds or transhumans or vice versa,
except
that over Navajo country this deluge’s downcoming often gets halted as an awful ceiling of smoke for which there is no explanation except that horses sniff it and hark back to when the land was ocean and they swam and flew.