But answer the first question: who we bespeaking of? And then: what’s meant by our adopted language? is it ours thrown quoit by quoit on the wing at moving necks and reaching hands—is it our tongue transplanted by the interrogator? or a language adopted by us on getting up first thing in the morning?
He saw it two ways, and turned back and forth. (Wait—who is this He you are implicating? inquires the interrogator with patience in some deadly proportion or, we almost remember, inverse width to whatever he is doing behind us—and breathes in our direction, from all over the room we could swear though even he knows he could never be all things to us, though from his kind we hope and know it couldn’t be one of the eight sacred genres of breathing the no longer dusty correspondent-woman, we already recall, will study long after she tape-recorded a load of slow-burning Buddhist monk and we now know came from that scene in Southeast Asia direct to Grace Kimball’s loosely structured workshop in New York, but the one kind of breathing that they say can be felt everywhere in the room—because by this cool specialist it couldn’t be—although we have only heard, or heard of, these eight special breathings and can we prorate them over, say, five earning years?, we’ve now got the hardware to do it with)—as we sit literally riveted to a chair brass-anchored to a deck, while on twin screens, miles separate from each other but overlapping, we can conceive of the cosm our brass anchors float in.
He saw it two ways, and later these were enough apart that if he had gone to a tennis stadium instead of an opera he’d have been like a fan following the ball during a women’s match, the court-length ground strokes woven for a minute at a time (read woven gracefully) (read artfully) cat’s cradle where if you look down from above each wondrous taut drive threads baseline to baseline (walloped nurturingly, nurturing the moment’s nature, read) to fade like a radar blip not instantly, across a tropical storm’s heavens that seem possible. Yes, two ways he saw it, looking there, then back to here, and so on, following; but now was different; he stayed at his grandmother Margaret’s down the street. Years, a few short years passed in the night; and he woke and soon reported to her some fully illustrated idea he had in his head but now he was too old to go into the next room and jump into her bed where he had once learned to whistle, so he listened to the gray doves until, still one-third asleep, it came to him that they were the doves he always listened to, and listened if it was a Sunday to red-round-faced Mr. Barcalow’s trotter pass down the wide street, the sandy roll of the high wheels of the sulky and no doubt a flash of a white carnation in the brown velvet tab of his checked sport jacket’s lapel; and Jim didn’t know how he leaned into his future, certainly that he (as we who contain him by being held inside him hardly know) one day might stand outdoors among thousands (he never minded crowds, didn’t have to stand out among them) and listen to the black man King who had a dream he called out into the amplified air of the nation’s capital, that he had a dream, hear the noise, quick, it went right through you: similarly with Margaret’s senior grandson, as, inclining through a dream that made the talk of liquid doves bubbling under the roof at dawn and within his body seem to have borne his daydream across the whole of the night when he’d in reality started "doing" it (as we later came to say) as he woke up—in this waking dream he’d seen into the narrow barrel of a Colt revolver, early Colt (early as Hartford but not Paterson), held and looked at so long he could identify the spiraling dark inside the barrel, that belonged "by inheritance" to his grandmother ("But it’s not really mine") down the wrong end of which, we greedily conceive (yet is it the wrong end?), to a capsuled space thirty years later than this boyhood dream beyond Alaska over the Straits if you want to go that route where many men looked down at the papers and numbers before them, acknowledging that the numbers were on the papers and thus the two could be held in the mind together, and, whatever their legs independently arrived at under the table, these men were able above the table, sometimes fulminating but on paper, to agree on some Upper Limits—boundaries as credible as the bound our Rotating, home working, testable child knew to be that Earthly halo the tropopause where the temperature stops falling, jet winds hollo by at 200 MPH, and the new Everests that have cast off from Earth and have grown like the aftermath of explosion reach their limits which are not your mountain-type peaks but broad mesas in the sky, and, upwards of eight miles from Earth one may pass, masked and well, into these mesas downward like a force aimed at discharging from these cumulo-nimbus clouds mountainous rainstorms which Earth takes in return and not personally.
And finding himself inside the blued barrel’s bore spiraled by its rifling, the boy had rather look at the Colt outside—this is the pistol he knows—that works effectively for God’s sake mside but is a magic weight built of metal like rock and, lying personal in the open palm, was so made for the living hand it seems a growth evolved by the evolved choice of the armed hand in which it has appeared not down a sleeve but from necessities of war— that’s it!
And this "growth" in the hand is, in the mood of some foresight that threatens memory, never absolutely unloaded (his memory told him, as it went beyond his grandfather and grandmother’s warning about loaded guns thrill-ingly to see that between your last look at the chamber and now, a minute or a second later, it might have got loaded again) while at the same time he recalled checking out each chamber, never (a voice in the daydream said) for sure empty as soon as the cylinder had turned that next chamber up into firing alignment. How many guns did his grandfather Alexander mean? This one? Two guns? All guns?
Did he dream one night? He’s sleeping downstreet at his grandmother and grandfather’s and his dream doesn’t matter, might’s well be the Saturday afternoon, as it soon will be, the screen of the Walter Reade theater downtown, a good Indian saying with craft at the corners of the eyes, "Me Jim"—don’t matter partly because he always had this core feeling that he didn’t dream— that is, asleep at night—and his grandmother said it was all right not to— though she had never known an Indian who didn’t and it did help you to know what you wanted to do, but if Jim didn’t, he didn’t—and it’s what the dream leads to in the morning first thing that matters.
Yet before his grandmother Margaret, her gray hair down her back in a loose plait, her eyes soft and aged with sleep, takes inspiration for a story she tells him while they get breakfast on the table that he never thinks of as, you know, competition on top of the dream (early-day dream likely, or daybreak but non-sleep), there was once upon a time in the lighted dark his (whatever it was) dream that provides the inspiration for her story he guesses was made up and thirty years later as late as 1970 and later that old dream came back maintained by the one of her stories it apparently inspired. In the long barrel of the night the boy Jim was ahead of the horse he gripped, a horse sort of made headless by the dark heavens and the mesa of the western night though unquestionably there with him, like a wild friend sharing in no language but that of intense speed some aim of the boy’s to get away to another place which was a place of rescue without losing the place between which he and the heart-lunging horse were leaving miles that no one knew about and you would never prove in the grandfather’s travel books, which were South American anyhow {Tschijfely’s Ride skimmed from half-finished chapter to chapter, from up here clear down to the big turtles with backs like original blank face masks facing down the sky’s blank fiesta, the dust jacket picturing Mr. Tschiffely atop his horse), and miles unprovable principally because you couldn’t isolate where you’d started from—until he and the stolen pony (it was always stolen) were running with their own speed yet, too, of light from the fires glittering all around them smelting the desert mesa with unheard talk where an internecine conference was in progress, and awaited them in a shore of campfires he had to take one by one, wouldn’t he?, except he was being held where he was so all he could see was all of them around him, a great circle, see?, or horseshoe, what they would do, but being the center he and the pony wouldn’t know where to go among these lights and had the impre
ssion that they need not run run run because by now the ground under them and the sky over them were their wings and they were the hinge. But the hinge, then, for a circling voice—he had words for it later but not then at thirteen that came at him from the campfires, in Indian that he knew he understood, but what were the American words that said the same thing?, he had heard them often at home but knew them only by memory, as he did in later years when memory told him he never dreamt.
His grandmother, who no longer read to him, knew how to appreciate what happened next, all that was going on, she really saw it. "Why, that’s almost what happened to the Far East Princess"—Margaret looked up from the steaming frying pan into the ventilator over the range and gave a laugh as if she couldn’t help it till it began to come out: and in those days, she said— as if Jim’s maybe just waking daydream was of that time too—it got dark faster than the bird with its lunchtime horse tasty and warm under its wing could fly, though urged on by the Eastern Princess whom the bird would not land until they had reached the flower-shaped mountain which her father the king of the Long White Country thousands of air miles away (since his daughter was determined to travel anyway) had asked them to make an inspection tour of in order to learn all there was to know about the Indian way of doing things. So the great bird went without the lunch held captive under its wing and partly because it already held in its beak another horse, the white-and-black pony the Navajo Prince from a cliff, a crag, far ahead had called out to the Eastern Princess up in the sky on her bird was hers as a gift from all the fast ponies in the pack of wild, royal, and vanishing horses that traveled with him this day that a great sing was to be held, the ceremonial Night Way to heal a hole in the head of the Prince’s mother who sang her own song saying she would let the hole in her head be while, visible to others, spirits of many shapes flew in and out of this demon den in the upper middle of her forehead and her son the Prince had gone away to consult a Sioux cousin in the Northeast, get his thinking on the subject since he had twenty daughters and the Prince had been coming back over the plains and among the sheer canyons when he had seen the giant bird and the Eastern Princess, and, seeing the bird dive and take one horse under its wing and aim at another that was swinging wildly off back to the pack, the fastest and most beautiful, had called out over the miles from his lonely crag that that horse was hers, upon which the bird, swooping again, perhaps concerned that its mistress would find a new steed and desert the bird of the Long White Country, took the gift horse in its beak and flew on: which is all background to the twilight arrival at the flower-shaped mountain as preparations went on for the Night Sing to heal the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head where as night came you could see some of the demons settling down in there, not moving around any more, they liked it there. So when the Eastern Princess flew in on her giant pale-colored bird she was accepted as a harbinger of some change the Night Way chants might bring. And when asked if she saw the demons with winged heads and fat cheeks passing in and out of the Prince’s mother’s hole-in-the-head said only that she did not—but that she did find herself seeing into the thoughts of the young, handsome Indian Prince whom she had met on the way and who pointed to her now as an event he had brought to his people.
But as Jim—having spent the night down the street at his grandparents’ and having understood he was probably not alone—sat at the kitchen table that he had laid with plates and silver for three, and doodled drawings that weren’t drawings really but parts of drawings on a pad of his grandfather’s lined paper, he needed to know more before he could tell if his grandmother was correct that the woman in the mirror of his vision was almost the same as the Eastern Princess. For there were some differences, out there in that western territory. Here he was, now arrived in the center of the glittering internecine fires, they were telling him a thing in Indian he knew he understood and had more than once heard in American words but did not, there among the fires, recollect—
—because it was all one single language, said his grandmother, that’s what you forgot—but who was the person? she asked, if you know who, then you’ll know what . . .
—but he understood that the council fires had other fish to fry—heard a guffaw from the distant living room and the crackle of a newspaper—and the circling talk had told him and his stolen pony that he had to go back where he came from and tell his people their peace offer was not enough and they would have to send a hostage. But desiring to stay there in the burning dark of the ring of glittering campfires, he called to them. And it came out in their language. Which if he tried to understand, then he didn’t, but when he stopped trying he got the main idea that he could be the one to stay, he was volunteering because he was already there, why go back, he’d make the decision there and then and be the hostage.
But at that instant the fires were banked and seemed to retreat and he was left down the barrel of the family Colt revolver knowing that now behind him lay all that land and the other way, which was the only direction he could go because he was cramped, was a pale, nocturnal woman seeing him and he didn’t know if she was in a mirror or he was looking down the barrel at her until the American words of the Indian directive came silently from her to him and he knew she was a decision, a future decision, and he woke with the familiar words, words his mother down the street had spoken more than once but as he woke he heard only the bubbling doves, heard them until he knew that it was them.
"That woman was the Eastern Princess, probably," his grandmother had said, "or at least she reminds me of her," going on to the next step which was the familiar story of the Princess’s arrival among the Navajo the night of the Night Sing.
Jim’s grandfather came into the kitchen with last night’s Newark paper. "At it again," he said, admiring the strips of rationed bacon being lifted on a spatula out of a smoking pan onto a torn-open brown paper bag.
"At what again?" said Jim, who’d heard it before so it must mean this first-thing-in-the-morning get-together between an enthralled vision reporter and a true tale teller.
"Your grandfather’s mind is like a perfectly clear pool," said Margaret.
"Or you see to the bottom of it because it isn’t very deep," said Alexander.
"The Navajo Prince s grandfather," said Margaret—and Jim knew she said it to him—"when he taught him to spear fish showed him it was the clear waters of the stream that were always deeper than they looked."
"But for sheer sharpness," returned Jim’s grandfather, "few could match the East Far Eastern Princess who at a turning point in her life disarmed the Navajo Prince, acquired a Colt revolver, and with amazing foresight changed the course of history."
Jim wanted a canoe though he’d been in a canoe only once. He would never ask his grandparents for it. His mother in her way of seeming not to make noise when she spoke had said that if Jim could earn half she would dig up the rest—what later were known as matching funds. Was there only one Colt pistol out there, for God’s sake?
"You can’t imagine how poor they were," said Margaret of the Navajo. "It’s common knowledge and it’s getting worse."
Oh Alexander recalled her dispatches to the Windrow Democrat, it was 1893 because that’s why she went to Chicago, the World’s Fair, the New Jersey exposition, the crystal labyrinths. But then she went further west and her dad, then editor of the Democrat, was fit to be tied, but she sent back good copy, from Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico. How did she do it? she was nineteen, a sensible girl in a long skirt and high neck, a hat with a brim you didn’t argue with though she changed her costume at some Dakotan point west-northwest of Chicago-Omaha, Jim Mayn for years never looked those articles up in the Democrat archives in the basement of the red brick Revolutionary home that housed the Historical Association (capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units).
"I was a tourist; that’s all I was."
"You were much more than that, Margaret," her husband said with a strength of accent that made the grandson stop chewing and look at t
hese people he spent quite a lot of time with—well, much more than that—his grandmother had taught him to whistle when he was a small child coming into bed with her in the morning when he stayed over.
You know they gave the new Santa Fe Railroad the right of way forty miles either side of the tracks but they broke it into one-mile squares and the railroad got the odd-numbered squares like the grandfather’s checkerboard and some of those odd squares the People, the Navajo Nation, had been running their sheep on for the twenty years since they were allowed out of that mass internment-tomb Fort Sumner during the Civil War, and long before that, before that country through which they walked three hundred miles to captivity (people do that) beside the screak and shimmy of their wagon wheels had even conceived of the Santa Fe trackbed.
Jim heard some cowboys in a movie render the song "Wagon Wheels," he looked forward to Saturday matinee at one of the two movie houses, and his younger brother Brad, who occasionally cooked at home and wasn’t much of an athlete and come to think of it wasn’t very smart either though sensitive, was the one in the family who played checkers now and then with the grandfather who talked while playing, and Brad didn’t mind being beaten.
Well, they grew corn, those Indians, they had their fried bread, they had to go a ways to find water; seed mush they made; we saw squash, we saw melons, and the end-to-end pestles of a pony’s bones, and long after Margaret’s day we see pihon nuts like wampum growing on trees except salted and in jars and hear a goat chomping on a succulent fruit of some cactus in the middle of nowhere, which is a large loose place accommodating on a map a host of small-scale possibilities.
Women and Men Page 28
