Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  oh he wanted to die and passed on to the dancing Thunder Dreamer perhaps a prayer coded in that Hartford-hewn shape of a Colt pistol, but the dying words of the strange old-young settler who gave the pistol (the same pistol? a double of the other?) to the Thunder Dreamer who gave it one day to the Anasazi healer in his cliff far away were more interesting than prophetic, for he was said to have murmured at the end (though already as dead as the grasses sang and breathed) that his father had taken his mother for a boy and never forgot the moment he came upon her in Chapultepec dressed like a young correspondent on a bench in the zocalo surrounded by flowers and the old-fashioned disaster of "the Mexican business" like our backfirings of a later age, and by the less-clear hubbub of an unjust war writing out of a bottle of brown ink memoirs of President Jackson in New York and Washington; and knew that they spoke the same language, though not that this boy-creature was a woman, much less that at the age of whatever she was at the time of the Battle of Chapultepec she had miraculously never menstruated—and was never to.

  And so, later, when the six-hundred-year-old medicine man, his personal insight beams divided by the truly double moon conveyed along the rising presence of the Chilean zoologist Mena on her antique Apache scaling ladder, heard her recite Owl Woman’s remedy for an unpregnant woman who had stopped menstruating, he recalled the Thunder Dreamer with the large eye sockets and small, receding eyes leaving the pistol with him to remove from it a curse that made it hold heat as if constantly being fired when in reality it was the tongue of the sun that cut through clouds and clothes to the very breechclout and through time itself, to "fire" that Colt near to melting point. But it did so by a wind of the sun known only to one person beyond the Anasazi healer living in his receding cliff which was the high stage for his audiences while he himself was audience for stages of a longer, greater event. On this he and his counter-seer the Hermit-Inventor of the East didn’t quite agree—that is, beyond knowing that the direction the wind came-from and went-toward proved at some hours of the day to hold the very same force, as if the breathtaking leverage in the swing of the bird’s wings powering the East Far Eastern Princess away from her father the King’s long white-lit mountain ten years later were not only bone-and-ball-joint dynamics but even the very urge behind that mechanics of flying, and to find food that that bird had never known, if dreamed of, and devour it right down to the still-cantering hoof, with gracious abandon savoring that first close whiff of terrified muscle under fleetest Navajo horsehide though not the sight itself—the sight of itself, the descending bird, some fine-nesting hugeness at the moment that it reached the frantic stallion.

  That sight belonged to the Hermit-Inventor who, unknown to the crag-high Navajo Prince mounted upon his blue Mexican mare observing only an alien wing (and not its Princess passenger) impinge in the plane of men and animals, had from his own cliff-horizon above the running bulge of that world witnessed proof-possible of his colleague Anasazi’s claim that the wind took an elastic body or that time found sudden chances out here in continental space to spirit itself forth from its own further reaches. Yet the visiting bird, even with a flash of human hand and long, dark hair near the root of its vast wing, resembled a giant king eider, that heavy, short-necked sea duck seen along northern coasts (though here on a scale of its own) if not bred in Other space so it hardly evoked a prior evolutionary stage, though still some "unevolved past," yet thought the Hermit-Inventor, and was pleased with the scientific prospect of a past of cloud coasts that had not met the erosion of winds, or a past of winds that, whether or not velocity mattered, had found no work to do at the times slotted for them and had run on indefinitely loosed like beautiful child-villains without a home: but, like the window of his finest theory, he had seen the flash of other flesh over the huge bird-steed’s bright limb—drake or past-gender, less pied than our diving eider spreading its wings like an underwater plane—and the Hermit wondered if these periodic westward vacations in time that he took from his often meteorological work and meditations in the East were not catching up with him dividing him through some rough-hewn shape beyond power or its prospect—like advice he remembered giving a young girl, say, in the presence of a huge, dismembered statue in, what was it?, 1885 or so.

  But where, when, who—and also what statue? wakes the interrogator after an unsound nap, his finger never having left his juice button.

  The answer comes, but he will have to settle for pure information because the person liable is absent, and the words "Bedloe’s Island, 1885" mean plenty—the late Margaret Mayne hearing at the daughterly age of twelve or thirteen a voice behind her mutter that they would never put this thing—this Statue—together, plus it was facing the wrong way, and "Go west, young girl"—and "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will"—where by "what" we meant the more uncrated parts of the Statue of Liberty standing (Seeing is Believing and/or Belief) (shipped B.O.D.) lying in raw grass between the winds of New York harbor.

  Yet purest of all information is your future fact, predicted yet unconfirmed: for instance, soon after the U-2 cover story the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction (and this is a later manifestation of the Hermit whom Grace Kimball and James Mayn separately and half-knowingly encountered one bright day in Manhattan in 1977) that a weatherman on Formosa would at some time in the near future guarantee that a storm with a feminine, often religious, name and eye, would not hit Formosa; moreover, that this Formosan meteorologue would be so wrong that the very next day (so went the Hermit-Inventor’s prediction) upwards of two hundred and fifty people not exclusively Formosans would die by the hand of that hurricano, and between seventy and ninety would (by the Hermit-Inventor’s calculations) end up missing; and that this unwary weatherman with his feet on the ground would stand trial for negligence with years of his life at stake.

  But who are we getting at? or to? Was it our parents? (But) we are our parents by now, and in a miracle of memory now see they were angels of ordinariness helping us toward helping ourselves, we trust.

  Well, not the child next door, maybe. That child next door multiplies slowly with a fresher, less-obsessed sexuality. And will never become the beautiful diva, who once in the embrace of her Chilean naval intelligencer felt virtually contained by the thought of the weight-loss tapeworm inside her. Opera singers are said to survive revolutions, we have reminded the interrogator more than once. But she was not there when the revolution came off, no? And it isn’t revolution much less fast food that brings her infamous South American amor to New York, but counter-revolution—if not music itself.

  We come there from all over, always (as once Grace Kimball) ready to start out. We come there from the perimeters like we were Owl Woman’s words instead of people, words that come by the zoologist-woman Mena and her curiously historical gentlefriend Marcus Jones and the Anasazi healer and the Navajo Prince’s mother with a hole in her head who was said to have tried this very healer. Upon which the Anasazi told the Hermit-Inventor that he on the contrary had consulted her as if she were a healer in need of being healed. This was power and modesty, as Owl Woman, when she was visible and when she was not, exemplified to the Anasazi. Witness her reminder that her songs had been taught her by spirits of the departed in the form of "spirit-tufts of downy white feathers" . . . "owl feathers." The Princess of the East, parking her great eider-shaped bird—and she at once understood as a bolt from the blue that in this day and age whatever songs intermingled back home, she’s gon’ see the land. The Navajo Prince’s mother whose visiting demons only others (all others) could see junketing in and out, in and out of the capital cavity, took time out to welcome her. The Princess felt this as a fresh start. Yet this thought brought back the face of Harflex, a youngish noble back among her father’s loyal mountains who’s waiting for her hand. Yet on the way there, she had encountered premonition outside herself from high up like a break-in through the atmosphere as if the well-known breaks one in each of every layer of different breath sphering our world had for an instant sync�
��d together into one deep cleft letting in whatever was to be let in, oh cost and benefit both. But meanwhile it was the light of welcome brimming all over the face of the Navajo Prince’s mother that the East Far Eastern Princess noted, when she came to sense that out here in the West was for her a fresh start. Yet this brought to mind part of the face of Harflex, the bookish, great-footed noble back home to whom she was tacitly ‘trothed. So she didn’t quite see the known demons going in and out of the roof- or smoke-hole of that Navajo lady’s head observed by one and all, by all except the lady herself and the visiting Princess. Fresh start? Yet on the way to the ceremonial sing that honored the demons as much as tried to drive ‘em out, she had encountered from high up like a break in the atmosphere the Hermit-Inventor’s eye. Which conveyed, in addition to "Nice to see you again, we hardly had time to talk when you passed through New York" and "I may have told you I was going to be out here where I often vacation"—also, "You must decide one way or the other."

  Or so she imagined he said, and she was right. Men meant what they said, and he meant she couldn’t have it both ways, maybe she was the Princess, but she was also Margaret on leave from home and from the mission her father had sent her on, to wit Chicago’s famed World’s Fair. Not, of course, only the New Jersey exhibition, which Jim generations later told a date was a pretty modest house (how gotten there? wide-loaded by wagon?), New Jersey’s temporary home away from home in 1893—and Margaret had drawn into the orbit of her open-ended trip the pampas of Dakota, the loco weed rocks of Col and a territory of Indians (as one used to measure them, supplying directional axes by vectoring God’s winds to get our aim), while He was essentially Elsewhere, it being a trait of Him to like being away yet always know His people were there back home keeping a place for His manifestations.

  It is the late rediscovered ideal of putting something or someone on hold, that is, in order to know they’re there, a form of love if you think too deeply about it. As possibly the interstate computers knew on the night of a "held" Moon launch at least that the system was still there, which included the People, who in their turn, each at his post, knew that others waited there like latter-day angels for their wait to be dissolved and the curtain to go up on a new age in the form of a Saturn rocket until some among these journalists, economists, and seekers could find their own detour around time lost and say hello to the minutes of their being.

  Easy to say, hard to manage, said the naked woman on Grace K’s workshop carpet in ‘76-’77 because I have had so many reasons to move fast, to fill a day with a dozen other days to come—

  Right on, baby!

  Say that again, Clara?

  —until you can lose that presence that is yourself helping yourself first to what there is, reaching a place at which you hear each moment pass through you in order then to forget the time and these desperate demands on you— (As if you were being followed, said Grace—) (. . . Exactly.)

  (and Lincoln the saffron (dis-)robed correspondent added, "Just what I was going to say"—while she registered that Clara’s "Exactly" in response to Grace was held back a second: a curiously long and short second full of apprehension, yet Clara’s "Exactly" seemed full of simple acknowledgment and Lincoln knew that Clara was being followed.)

  Which is, for the followee and follower, a similar though not "same-as" form to putting on hold, going on ahead whilst knowing They are situated behind and won’t go away.

  So Jim Mayn fell ahead, not exactly not thinking of his imaginary news assignment for Pearl W. Myles who had healthy, chesty breasts like those of the great all-style swimmer at the World’s Fair in New York long before synchronized swimming approached Olympic status while at the moment there was no Olympics at all except what his non-combatant editor-father called target practice going on over there. Yet Jim wasn’t really thinking ‘bout the imaginary news assignment either; and he looked at some ripped-out notebook pages that still had sand in one crease, having made a very quiet research trip to where (clue) there were gulls above and sandpipers below—the beach where his mother had left her departing note—and no one but the driver who had picked him up going and returning knew he had gone—much less to investigate—or so he thought, and all he knew when he came home was that he could not resort to this mystery material for Miss Myles’s assignment— because, he then saw, he had gone only to see—and later it came upon him again when he was putting behind him his little brother Brad and Brad’s own inimitable (as it was called) "falling-apart." "It" confined itself seemingly to one day—a long day yet a day of days as they might say who follow us with further measures meant to yield true weight, as in a territory of Indians, a hold of absences, a smile of tarantulas or javelinas, and a smell of troubles, necessary because of interruptions (as on Brad’s Day) which we really need to see as part of the whole parcel rather than breaks between breathing in and breathing out—I mean . . . you know? . . .

  Because there were minutes end to end when Brad who must have been ten did not breathe and in those wartime days, pre-Now, they didn’t tell you to breathe. Except in the form of an iron lung visible to Jim and his friends in Life magazine—and to Gordon and engineering-minded Bill Bussing after school on the top floor where experimental rubbers were tried on if not out —and so the open-ended Windrow, New Jersey, group that came and went in the music room of the Throckmorton Street house might but obscure the scrawny boy’s sobbing, pat him sometimes, bring him a sandwich that seemed to madden him with its alien and scented caring. Brad’s Day began in the morning exactly a month after the tragedy and a week or two—strangely hard for Jim to recall—after Margaret, impatient at the carver’s delay, had imposed a brief stone upon that otherwise untrammeled point of the family burial place, a grave "empty of all but earth," Alexander had suggested for the inscription but Margaret would not have it.

  On this morning of Brad’s first and last "statement" of this endless loss and grief, Margaret did not come down the street to make breakfast for the three widowers Mel, Jim, and Brad because she was in that rare condition of being sorry for herself having fought with her husband Alexander about his venturing downtown on a wet day when he had a bad cold, and then the rain had stopped after he left. She had gone out into the field-like wet of the grass of the backyard, staring at her dark flower beds, no doubt thinking about her daughter (hearing the notes of a strong violin chord or a piano run repeated as Sarah when speaking never did, for she always heard what she had just said), should Margaret phone the boy Ira Lee to tell him not to come this afternoon? She was confused, perhaps. Her son-in-law went early to the newspaper office today, and she pictured two bright cartons of cereal left on the kitchen table for the boys, and the milk left out.

  Jim wondered if she would come, and felt it was a beginning, if she did not. And then Brad was first heard fisting the piano in the music room. The same clutch of bombed keys again and again until Jim yelled to his brother to shut up and went downstairs to the music-room door, which held just as many memories as the room, hearing then the moment when it was obviously not going to go on—and Jim stopped in mid-air, he felt, as if he were, well not the music, but like it. Jim knew it all so well it was beyond fact, maybe like those dreams he did not have (but his own mother had said he just did not recall), and surely (no, no, not surely) it was like someone else knowing it—the start of Brad’s awful performance—(so, heck, forget it, someone else will remember it), some elder who didn’t have anything better to do; still it stayed with him, and when he was older he told it three, maybe four times, years later in his life: to his wife, who, so uncannily, had never been told the Indian stories and was kept out of (or free of?) the mere tangle of ideas he guessed he had about his mother (tangled by truly not knowing, by not tracking her down living or dead because you didn’t do that, if she wasn’t there)— throw in his father, too; to Mayga and colleague Ted at a Washington bar; yet also at once to his grandmother who was part of Brad’s Day itself, though coming in late.

  No easy thing to tell her,
as she became a part.

  No small thing Brad. Alone in the house, Jim stood above his brother and did not remember the distance from threshold to piano. Brad was nuts, sick or something. Brad’s back was straight with the most arching-in curve as if he’s being good. What’re you doing? he said to Brad. Little Brad was crying, gasping; he shook his head kind of slowly, half-fake, or helpless. Jim looked down into the scalp of the unknown kid, the flecks of live skin in his very short crew cut entirely different from the boy underneath, who was—