Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —going to pieces, Mayn told his wife one day . . .

  —who was a brother in Jim’s mind always, but never before what he was now: a relative who would not move from where he was. Braddie farted silently and Jim didn’t breathe, he had gone up to this brother and had nothing much to say and couldn’t name what it was and would just as soon not live through what was going to happen, which threw everything out the window including himself carrying all the traces—a billion, but only traces—of the ancient fate sprawled in the room’s dumb things.

  "What the hell, Brad," he said, and reached behind the bony little insect of a kid and shut the cover over the keys in case Brad was thinking about hitting them some more. The brother instead kept on in a language, a language was what it was, and Brad’s ghost-sort-of was crawling through something, without his body much moving. Jim kept saying words. Such as, "Gramma’s probably comin’ over. You got to go to school. She’s going to tell you you got to." Saying over again, like he hadn’t heard himself say.

  They both heard someone coming downstairs, but no one was up there. Then they remembered, without either of them needing to say it. The stairs creaked because that’s what they did. And years later Jim found what he wanted to connect the habit to—the movements or motions you felt overall, in an apartment house, that were less from people doing things than from what was left of them after they went out to work or away on business or vacation, although it might be the elevator or the edifice responding to the wake of a truck passing in the street.

  Jim knew at this moment with his brother that his brother was doing something with their mother that Jim wasn’t. Jim thinking of a girl. He’d been on his way, but now he had to stay with this person who left him still no place to stand. But it was Jim’s house. But it wasn’t, and hadn’t been for a while, because his grandmother’s place was up the street and his mother had let him come and go, though he didn’t have to. But maybe he did. He wanted to have Brad look him in the face.

  Brad stood up from the piano bench and Jim actually touched his shoulder. Brad went to the dark, inlaid drop-leaf table that a great-grandrelative had made and grasped the violin case and slid it into his arms like he was carrying wood. Pretty morbid, Jim told his wife some twenty years later, and she did not agree, but did not look away from him as his brother had done. It wasn’t as if Brad was Sarah’s only son, except Jim knew at this long, long moment that he had been thinking of himself as her only son. Later he figured it was because he felt really like the only grandson, Margaret’s favorite, although Alexander would have politely objected. "Whatcha doin’ with that violin?" Jim said. "That’s Mom’s violin." Brad went down on his knees and put the violin case out in front of him. He lay down with his face on the floor and put his arms up above his head so his hands were touching the violin case and at that instant the case moved, as Jim told his grandmother seriously when she came in and she said, He must have pushed it with his hand. Yet Jim hadn’t had that impression. Had Brad’s hands been on the case? And Jim thought of every talk he had had with his dead mother. His sense that she thought he was "all right" and thriving. Not especially musical, yet enjoyed singing.

  And who would remind Jim, too late, yet not too late, that he had never definitely agreed not to harm or not to protect his brother? Brad had been alive in another room from Jim’s in a house in Windrow, New Jersey; and Jim had joined him; no agreement had been come to on what either boy would do, and nothing could ever be just or unjust. These are words Jim did not say then, though, like your certain type of senile person whose problem is pointing via language when the tongue may have been cast off by its brain hinge (which means, we relations add, in mild pain, directing our explanation to the interrogator, who with his button has been feeling left out, that the linguistic blockage is due to calcium deficiency, upon which the interrogator writes something down, never failing to believe that if history-in-the-making is not made-up, it must be, to those who are alert, not dull).

  Jim knew everything, that morning and day, except one thing. That he had stopped caring about that room where his mother had strung her violin and where she had given lessons to kids who came and went and where she had stood above a friendly devoted cellist nodding her viol now to him, now to the pianist who sometimes in the midst of a month-long sonata changed to another person.

  The sounds rose again, Brad seemed to be kind of laughing and groaning, his body starting to rock and buck a little there on the floor. It was embarrassing. Did Jim’s mother remember that sometimes her sons hadn’t loved her?, though Jim could only speak and think for himself. Excuse him for living, one afternoon when as he entered she held her black-and-red-flowered china cup at her lips as if it was magical and he was still outside.

  But now Brad looked for all the world like a fucking tantrum, there on the floor, on the worn Oriental carpet. The skinny arms, weak arms, came around and down to the sides and suddenly the front door came unstuck out in the hall and Jim felt that he and his brother owned this house for the first time—which made little sense, because they didn’t and their mother didn’t either, yet had occupied it.

  Footsteps hardly audible there, though granted the music-room door had been shut by Jim when he came in to inspect his weeping brother, his grieving embarrassing brother. Brad’s hand worked itself into a pocket and as the music-room door slowly—Jim knew it was slow—opened behind them, Brad in a terrible condemned way slowly flung his hand out of his pocket and a thing or two from his hand. One was a wild stone—why wild?—which struck the glass front of a bookcase, the moans turned into several screams, Jim could not believe it; the person in the doorway behind, whom neither boy had looked at, spoke, as Brad threw stuff outward blindly out of his other pocket and some of it was shredded paper, pink paper, that’s what Jim told the South American woman Mayga in a Washington bar, who credited so much of what he said. The person behind the boys in the doorway who had not spoken said, He’s coming apart—which didn’t sound right or like it was addressed to Jim. Jim looked at Brad’s body then and he thought it might actually, if only slightly, go to pieces, the way it was shaking. Not imagined it doing it, though. Jim had once daydreamed the Earth slid to a stop in its own slow axial rotation, while Pearl Myles explained what to put in a lead. But here the arms grew longer reaching up for the violin case which stayed silent; a leg kicked up as if to throw off a sneaker; the strange screams rhythmically told something that Jim now turned away from: to see, of all people, his grandfather Alexander, tall and polite, it was he who had opened the front door—not about to clean up vomit or kiss someone but gentle and more understanding than Jim ever saw him again, although ever after this strange morning and day Jim would see Alexander with this distinguished look on his face telling his grandson, That’s all right, fella, and telling the other brother, Jim, as if—as if it didn’t apply to him (which it didn’t), that "it" was "pent up."

  Some sound in Brad was getting out. It was like being sick. Yet it was Jim who felt that this all meant that he was the one who would go. Which meant maybe his mother was here. Yes.

  Maybe that is what little brother Brad was (suffering and) carrying on about: that she was really here, but you couldn’t reach for her. A dream Brad couldn’t tell any other way.

  Jim knew that here in the room were three males. He included his little brother and didn’t probably think the word "males" but it was there. He thought that his mother’s father hadn’t expected her to do what she had done and was at a loss to understand anything about it. Yet Jim didn’t really think that. He thought Alexander knew why it had happened but didn’t think it was worth discussing.

  "Did you boys get some breakfast?" Alexander asked. Later Jim heard Granddad Alexander tell Margaret he had phoned her to argue some more with her and had hung up but thought, She’s there, she’s home, so he’d come here to check on the boys himself.

  And she was still not here, even after the length of time it had taken him to first stand and think and then look for a thing h
e could not find as if it were stuck to his forehead, then walk up from his shop downtown, not once stopping to pass the time of day at the firehouse.

  Jim looks at his grandfather, and waits, beyond distrust. Alexander steps into the music room of his vanished daughter. He picks a book up, another, another. "Here’s my Densmore book I couldn’t find years ago . . ." Dens-more collected Indian poetry. Time marches on. "Now you can have it back," said Brad, without the bitterness of the words and in a break between the heaves of energy that brought them all to this room on this day. "Well, you’re right," said the grandfather to the grandson, and he read some words out of the book, as Brad began again softly to groan, which Jim must have kept in his memory without trying because in the mid-1960s Jim’s wife read him some lines from the end of a book one night and those that Alexander read that day cropped up, you might say, "... my heart will go out . . ." something, something ... "In the great night my heart will go out." Was Sarah interested in the Indians? You’d never know it.

  Jim tried to recall when; but his wife said it wasn’t the "when" that mattered, it was the "What"; and he didn’t mention it to her but even years before in 1945 at the moment when four principal people who mattered to Brad plus a couple three more who were less worried about his interests, hearing there was something going on, visited in sequence this house to witness the boy’s grief that had waited a whole month to put on this show, this noise, Jim had even then been able to wonder when those words had been said in his presence that were now being read by his grandfather Alexander in the music room, this shrine without a body except Braddie’s spread-eagled and groaning and noising his loss or grief on the way to take all who came there past embarrassment. But then the "when" came to Jim, and it had been his grandmother Margaret, the very one who told Jim a scary tale one night when she caught him out in the backyard "sleepwalking" (she almost believed) and he’s over by the asparagus stalks—and as soon as Margaret’s said, What’re you doing out here this time of night?, she can’t get him indoors without remembering (like an outdoor bedtime tale with wet toes in the chill grass of the leaf-sweetened dark yard) how the Navajo Prince told the East Far Eastern Princess that when she would leave mattered less than what she’s doing here now and what she would do when she got back to where she was going— which he did not call her home. Because he held, against the elders and his mother—though not the Anasazi or the visiting Hermit-Inventor—that he did not have a home, his home came to him; came constantly where he was, and his mother when she once had wandered upon a dangerous mountain before he was born, and might have been killed by a scared hunter or that tiny snake that could suck you (dry) right into the mountain of flesh or of metals that were like flesh if they could ever be mined, had told those who criticized her for walking in the wilds far from home when she was with child that she had her home with her if they would only keep quiet. The Navajo Prince believed her and said so. Which stamped the Prince, in that bare, sometimes dusty realm as either wrong-headed or a leader, and he was plainly a leader, but in what direction they did not yet know—and even when the Princess appeared in that land didn’t know and everyone but the Princess herself guessed that he would follow her, and even follow her if she did not go home to her country; but she did. Margaret’s midnight story included how the Prince’s mother seemed to die, that is during the Princess’s stay. The girl would kindly talk to the Prince’s mother while the demons circulated like streams of song bees in and out of her head; and she told the lady how in the days before the Princess’s own great transport bird evolved (that ate Navajo ponies upon arrival in this territory) her father, the King of the National Mountains of Choor, had been through a taxing experience. He had personally seen to the dry stacking of no less than five of his children in the family gravehouse and, hearing a cousin priest pray that light like dew must come from the dark cloud of sorrow, had said he was in fact "entertained" by the renewed sight of his family dead, their coffins that is, bunked four to a stack and had felt like a builder there ordering his most recent daughter laid so her head was to her great-grandmother’s (one) foot; and the humor and sadness of the Princess’s kind guest-tale suddenly vacated the demons from the Prince’s mother’s head-font whereby they circulated, and she actually died, demonless, but that was not the end of it.

  Yet on that clement midnight when he was staying with her and Alexander, and out walking in his pyjama bottoms—in the garden—and she told him he was sleepwalking and should get back to bed, he answered How ‘bout you? ‘s if she’d asked him what he was doing there and—the Princess found that for the Prince’s people—the People, as they were self-called—there’s a season for every event that comes from God’s hand like a touch from one counter-whorled finger of the five, in its own time; but the history of the People was much more like the steadfast land than it was like a Started and a Finished. The land, that is, at any one time—the red cuts of the great cliffs holding the afternoon sun and turning it toward the eyes of Zuni faces as they came back to the village from a field, a trail, a structure containing work; walking (we say) through the fences hungry.

  The Navajo land spread out from the original volcano that contained the ship ever bound spaceward out of time, until one day the magma receded like the wakefulness of a continental tilt until they crowded up against that cooling mountain and would not wash around this obstacle until at last they grudged their way onward scraping it clean of all its stone save that core that had then always been bound toward that place, always a Ship in the mind of the People, as the night that must have spelled to the grandson and his grandmother a snake or two, coiled sleepy-headed in the grass of the backyard, was also itself a snake.

  A snake-like beauty was what the night had, Margaret thought—and remembered to write her favorite grandson this in her terminal letter some years later after his mother’s departure. He liked Margaret more even than the information always up her sleeve. The "what" was what the People centered attention on, not the sequence of "whens": witness the difference between whenever the exact moment was versus the fact of the event, that is, when, according to both Hermit-Inventor and Anasazi medicine man, cosms of the Sun ran suddenly down through that rare cleft in the atmosphere occurring when all its layers line up for an instant the single slit or crevi-chink in each of said layers (when God cannot delay his one-shot deal, he must act): for the mountain of grandfather space leans down down upon all the volcan’ mounts of our not-after-all-so-visible topograph, each answering each upon time frames so diff’rent that the People knew that the "when" mattered less.

  And so the People did not stress the exact time when the Princess’s fond histories de-demon’d her prospective mother-in-law’s head leaving that lady at last by herself—but dead! They stressed instead the disappearance of life from her coupled with her relations’ inability to touch her to make her ready for the groove of Earth-Sky, there to rest; and stressed as well what so struck the pyjama-bottomed grandson the night the Allies crossed the Channel and, landed upon the French littoral, invaded Europe, namely that the Princess’s huge bird, as neglected at the far edge of the ceremonial community as it had been successful at burying in its own body its urge to eat Navajo ponies, had produced from its own bright, pale feathers a diamond-shaped nest high atop what the Hermit-Inventor identified as a volcanic plug though so perfectly wooded up to a secret tonsure at the top as to seem a true mountain; and had produced a brace of eggs while being in our terms predominantly male, nor had it received species-specific connubial visits; and from far off on a night of the double Moon it had been seen by the Prince’s people to stretch its neck and lift its chin as an old exile Indian who had lived once upon the far north coast identified as the way of some brilliant sea hen when ip the company of her husband and approached by an alter male.

  But this time we find an ordinary mountain lion whose scent of its natural prey the western deer, still plentiful then, had been deeply turned and turned upward toward the rough summit of this volcanic plug above
the plateau to the odor of the future, as it was later explained.

  An odor from the eggs, and so telling that ... we already remember the fawn-colored cat five-foot-lean, its small-scale head over its big cub-like paws . . . never snarled or spoke as it came out of the last scrub pinon pine, the last starved spruce . . . branches wind-grown round harsh little trunks . . . root systems grappling down upon the grain of volcanic memory . . . and the lion moved so low along the ground that the bird as great as the summit itself and almost without personality, but beyond it, rose upon the downy muscles of its legs and at the last instant rose upon the night air to dive at the lion which by then had found the essence of the eggs’ light already within itself and with one lunge buckled and sucked one egg of its matter and vanished, before the bird—watched by a dozen sentinels miles off in the settlement— could either lurch back to the other egg, stained by the luminous rain of albumen from its counterpart, or swoop elsewhere at the lion that had so literally vanished it might have embarked itself like any other four-legged plant life into the large, still being of a timber wolf paused nearby smelling the lion’s hide with a twinge of turned stomach.

  And the bird’s alien fire which to the wolf smelled like a mass of raunchy eyes and gums and oil grasses in the stomach of a fresh-killed pony mixed with winds bearing from the heights of Choor the pigs and rock chucks and lichens that can see with eyes but do not remember they were once lover-snakes and fruit-colored bears. Until, abandoning the trees and scrub for the upper clearing at the instant the Princess’s bird abandoned the diamond nest with its remaining egg splashed with entrails, the enormous wolf found himself whooshed by talon and bill and raised higher and higher, torn part by part, borne then tossed, then tossed again while, with each drop into mid-air, the bird’s bill like a sky made by a giant planet encroaching ate off a rib, a leg, a foot, a glinting gland, a face: till less and less of the still-living wolf fell back down the gravity of the bird’s personal sky, and watchers saw only a demon-stomach, the wolf’s, lying its strings and anchors all in the dark sky —blood-lit warm nerve and goot gut (to cite a German infiltrator’s aside to his fellow Cheyenne Contrary)—swallowed like swan song by the bird as if it promised to become that timber wolf as we would become others by making them us, when instead the bird was leaving the land that night.