Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

and the Prince’s mother with the demons still sucked terribly upward and downward complained that the alien girl had so befriended the ewes that they had not been butchered in their natural time, and the alien girl must stop writing her language-messages upon paper every morning and evening and must not wear her quillwork-decorated antelope shirt from the Cheyenne Germans if she expected the demons to vacate "her mother’s" head — for so the Navajo Prince’s mother related herself to the young girl for the first time— mother —so that the Princess, seeing the teeth and tongue of her adoptive Indian mother, recalled with a shock her own mother sitting up straight in a black-and-gold sulky-bare carriage breezing to church with her cousin the highly pleased banker-tenor who possessed a trotter as glossy and eager in its motion as any the race track would see — and sang in the Methodist choir—

— but this wasn’t the queen mother of the rational mountains of Choor, broke in the interrogator, sounding ye faint self-echo as if he hadn’t been tuned for a while. In New Jersey eider dey allow horses into the Methodist choir or dey breed singing horses!—

— until, having completed her day’s apprentice weaving too fast with her whorl-ended spindles three of zigzag, flash, and sheet lightning, one of rain streamer whirled with white shell and hearing the maidens whisking stone-ground corn flour, singing to their unborn children, she walked away like the visiting Princess she was, to her pony, and rode away to meet the Hermit-Inventor, who told her she was in danger, a hollow statue could hide her if she could reach it in time and let herself be changed to another form but it was a long journey but today was a once-in-six-hundred-years Window, open like a reverse volcana (as the hermit always pronounced it) from the sky if she might only be conscious of it: and though he, not the first nor the last of the Hermit-Inventors to be dismissed for unwarranted observations, gave credit to the Anasazi healer for supplementing his information with Owl Woman’s remembered songs and serving to confirm the Hermit-Inventor’s pilot construct of several layers of atmosphere — exactly two-sevenths as many years ahead of Teisserene de Bort, the discoverer of the stratosphere, as the man who claimed to have discovered jojoba was ahead of his time prior to being killed in early Salt Lake City.

And on this day under the enormous breathing of the bird, he told the Princess in the Anasazi’s language rather than his own more technoloon that she must act upon the future that afternoon:

Meanwhile, Jim felt on Brad’s Day that it was only like yesterday that his grandmother had told him how the Navajo Prince’s mother had died brimming with demons who had become more numerous and flowed together like crowds in future until those knowing elders staring down into the hole in her head saw less hole and more surface of teeming flume and a surface they would incredulously check by darting their heads around to see her face, for the fluid surface where had been the reverse fountain of her head top and where Owl Woman’s namesake the woman Manuel had applied oil of the jojoba bean to encourage reseeding of hair came to resemble the kindly storms that were her eyes’ insight and the large, nicely shameless cheeks like muscles to welcome you and reflect all you knew you could do. Which encompassed even marriage to a girl as alien to the Navajo mother as Harflex, that young noble of faraway eastern Choor, seemed far and familiar to the still not homesick Princess; until, while the demons talked louder and louder and the lady herself said nothing but wept, the impending union of the foreign, much-traveled girl and the Navajo son seemed to herald her thoroughly convincing death at the hands of demons who carried out their impulses suing for her energy more than her. Which they grasped no more than the medicine women who would not touch her or share out the clothes she wasn’t wearing during her curious period of death. And then her dying ended like a season when the noisy winds go away and the birds, if any, wing back reincarnating these same winds:

But the night the Princess left, thinking herself the cause of the Prince’s mother’s death, and the Prince left in pursuit, the demons returned to the wonderfully preserved head of the lady, and once more she suffered, lived, and, upon ceremonial occasions, including one remembering her son, whose much-sung trek around the core of Earth never came full circle, she made long noises unmistakably music to Indians and authentic to a Mexican spy openly out of work and a dark-spectacled German gun-and-honey importer from Chile who smiled as if it were his show and who, though tone-deaf, knew by heart her country’s eminence in music and by sight a Chilean lady whose daughter had become a zoologist and run away.

Why did Margaret’s account of this feel like it had been given only yesterday, when this was months ago in a dark night’s backyard? Doubtless because Jim put it in its place with the long afternoon when the sun did not go down because the rough lip of the Earth didn’t let it, as because, too, rifts in all these once speculative layers lined up by convergent pang of all or most of the gods flexing, for a second, one universe, to remind themselves of time.

— Did you have a mother-in-law like that?

— The Princess almost did.

— What about you?

— Not quite.

— What about your mother? (whose uncle in earlier New Jersey made. her a table every other year and her friend the banker designed a slick racing sulky double-size well a sort of little open carriage to show her off in).

— I was my own mother then, Jimmy.

Out West? The favored grandson, remembering on Brad’s Day, the day when the sun did not go down on time, and thinking what he’s missing today at school because this is only the second week and he hates to ask for even some beautiful girl’s history notes, finds in himself a thought as deep as two parallel thoughts — one, that he never did more than hear and appreciate Margaret’s "fish stories" yet knew they demanded questions, and from him, that he never asked; and two, that Brad, without knowing, has taught him they are brothers — no matter that here they all come, Alexander Granddad (eyes alive and taking aim on what needs to be done) and Margaret rubbing her damp hands on her apron, and Pearl W. Myles of all people, the high school teacher, a stranger, who, when she phoned the Democrat for advice and support, heard from Mrs. Many that the younger boy was having a fit on the rug and who had come at once, though a stranger.

What were the parallel thoughts? The interrogator, who has more than enough to do with his button, is thinking no less cheerfully, "Enough of this, it is of course deeply affecting."

He meant (for everyone has perhaps had a brother), do you mean "breather" asks the interrogator — Jim feeling brother to Brad for once: he could look right at him, anyway, without vomiting or wanting to liven up his pallid bony puss (mayhap seen snoring, of a night, when Jim, scorning the stairwell where no one was likely to be found to catch him, took to the roof, toeing the balsa-light slant of each personally known shingle as slow as but fast as one jump from window to grass).

(. . to Earthward, murmurs incorrectly the interrogator, moved, his hand dreaming of that putative U-boat conning postwar haven from the Jersey shore 252-foot-length by 252-foot-length clear around to the long nation-coast of Chile, dreaming the more because he’s convinced it was created not to wait for the woman who owned a black towel who vanished into the sea, its surface, its clefts, its cells, its temperature, so that the interrogator’s hand slides relaxed over a button (don’t you know) momentarily juicing the grime off a suspect in the next room. .)