Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So he chose to be friends with his grandmother — but friends instead of relations or something else unknown to him — having never told her he wasn’t friends with her. Which maybe he never had not been. It wasn’t her fault his mother had taken herself away; and his grandma had been there all along regardless of any view of his; and he even fell thoughtfully in love with his grandmother again, but was more aware of time now, so in knowing his feeling like a man was O.K. but a little early and tough though it didn’t feel tough, he did all over again feel a man. And the day dreamt radius of one school morning faded into his life countersinking there some power he wouldn’t take, particularly because it went on thinking itself into the future unless he reined it back a little like beeg thoughts that if shortened find their true area, as closely real as it is troublesome — that is, to survey such facts without taking the speed, juice, and directed path out of such moving bodies the better to see them.

So he found his grandmother again and they were talking about the weather. They went that much back into her old yarns, when people cared to know why weather happened as it did. The two weathers of the Anasazi Medicine Man and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, who in one of his successive incarnations, just one year before meeting an editor’s daughter on an island that belonged to Bedloe among the littered limbs and deep-mined uncratings of a Statue he called a French gift for comic art, had witnessed a tornado so symmetrical it sustained itself for two hours, while the Anasazi Healer, who said if you reject the Yuma preventive of an ounce of mesquite wood ashes and purest brook water and must choose the pound of cure as my old friend the Hermit-Inventor of the East has taught me, go ahead and beat your belly with rocks (knock knock), but if the wind turns to hail or even rain you may wind up having the baby anyway — thus the alte Anasazi who would ever be six hundred and more years of age but whose death without-reincar-nation was real and important, having precipitated an eastbound cloud un-precedentedly noctilucent and low that was to be contemplated as weather and not for its long, slow trip in the lee of a young Indian man (the boy flickeringly, and the man less and less, recalled) tracking during 1894 (a hundred years or so before the end of the world) a young Anglo woman one day to be herself turned into a mist and temporarily secreted if not inhaled by a statue large as a giant rising from the waters of an aging harbor.

The two weathers of downcoming and upgoing were not quite the same as observed ("just seen") and created ("suddenly made, y’know"), or the weathers of presence ("there") and absence ("not there") in turn not the same as the two weathers of leaving and arriving; nor were these pairs to be parceled or paralleled equally between the Anasazi Healer and the Hermit-Inventor. For the Indian and the Anglo agreed as well as disagreed regardless of their relative distances from each other; they were near each other sometimes even to the point of meeting, and yet they were oftener far remote, while the Hermit in his Net-Space-Traversed seemed less a hermit than the Anasazi who dwelt in a high rock cell but in order perhaps to be visited by those wishing to be away from where they were and get a glimpse of the more than old man; and he was visited by images, winds, and creatures of everlasting hues and waters including his friend the Hermit and the alleged Mena (woman-zoologist, Chilean, specialist in the javelina and its hind-mounted scent glands, also in horse-bone meal) and the troubled young Navajo Prince, who for the love of a strange girl visitor had abandoned his principal pursuits, his studies of the northern bison tongue’s energy potential, the improvement of corn crops, the messages of Earth told in the apparent motions of storm mass and dry cloud from mountain to mountain or the transparency of an aborted fetus.

The grandmother’s grandson thought a minute, as if like an avalanche of warm air the events during that awful summer, which was always the year of his father’s age, had not happened; he said he didn’t remember if the East Far Eastern Princess had ever gone to see the Anasazi Medicine Man; then he caught himself — It doesn’t matter, Gramma.

Doesn’t it? she asked, piqued, at odds with him and ruffled but not flummoxed; No, she supposed it didn’t.

For what would she have gone to the Anasazi Healer for? He wasn’t your general practitioner, nor much interested in disease (his own people having all died out hundreds of years ago), though you don’t always go to a medicine man to get rid of some old Eurasiatic disease, and the lady in question, bearing upon her person an aura as real as the turbulence a person may conveniently release from his or her heart system in order to externalize it so others may enjoy it, may have trusted the phenomenal specialist she consulted who was himself so old he was about ready to become a more or less fragrant crumble of herb fossils to be read on the concave floor of his retreat, if she knew how to read such herbs, for she knew next to nothing of the lore, only that the fern leaf of the reddish-lavender-bloomed redstem storksbill showing in early spring in open areas where the soil has been disturbed may cause upheavals in the womb that are heard as if from afar until they come closer like a dream and may be woken from but whose releasing magic may be overvalued by some women who imagine they seek swift solutions when in truth they seek knowledge —until, with his gentle wisdom, unaccompanied by what went without saying (that he would respect her privacy), her aged host the Anasazi Medicine Man said that in a few days she would know what to do and then the how would follow naturally; and she went away feeling at once that she had arrived and was all of a piece, which when she told her future husband many weeks later at the other end of the world he took to mean "all in one piece," which he echoed gratefully. But by then the intermission in her life was over, and he was a good man and it didn’t matter what he said—

— because the two weathers of leaving and arriving went on regardless, observed the grandson (and we who were his Choor relations often so far from the country he inhabited as to be beyond body though bound in many bodies saw that her smile at being told this seemed pensive and neutral, not an elder being told a bedtime fancy by a child though charmed by how he said "regardless" at the age of fifteen and even sadly dubious at the soft corners of her infinitesimally downturned mouth, though she was the one who had thought up a long time ago leaving and arriving, to express what she recalled).

Where did he recall a tornado? — I’m getting old, Gramma, losing my memory. Let’s see, she said, fifteen is only the first prime you’ve passed. But he did recall a tornado, and there’d been a division of opinion. The Hermit-Inventor of New York looking upward described it according to his lights and claimed to have seen the whole flotsam-jetsam the tornado snapped up and took away to its grand crocodile nest (the Hermit humorist), and chewed up, bag and baggage, animals, people, some possibly both, and some so ruined as to turn into each other, all in the rotational storm that toured the area like an early Geiger-sucker and that went away across a mesa and could be heard but in the uproar not seen, then suddenly came back (But but but but, didn’t he see?) —because (he said) the only thing it had done was leave, after having been in the Earth there to begin with and would never in any sense have arrived —for it had only left.

The Hermit knew with his own eyes, however, that the winter wind when it leaves New York precipitates the arrival from an equal and other area of spring air: and this must be exactly as real as those consequently materializing birds which the Anasazi on the other hand knew had in fact never left as birds or anything else, but became the winds, whose many-voiced, potentially screaming speeds were but streaming cloaks for their absolutely unchanging spirits: and he, on this other hand, from his acquaintance with the steeps of Taos’s holy Blue Lake where the ponderosas hold the upwind and keep it from getting away, and from his acquaintance with the heated, standing-still breezes of the desert to west and to south, knew that wind only appears to move in or move on, but really waits at rest in invisible skins of breath and when the sky speeds up, to come even with the Earth it hardly knew was as entranced by it —say, a slippage or molding shrug or searching readjustment by the sky frictioning the Earth possibly in memory-for-future of those rare times when all the layers of light hiding us from death but each with its cleft may shift into line leaving one great wheeling spoke-like, aisle-like cleft — those invisible skins of breath at rest in all the places of the country are stirred to make their breath blow outward from their fierce stores of force so that few of the People if any know certainly that a wind blowing from Nevada land or from northwest isn’t a wind blowing in truth to New Texas or to southeast, or "aimed," as the Anasazi understood the habit of the breath winds when let out of the skins — or cells, said the Hermit, because according to the grandmother he was always remembering the cells that hermits of other times lived in in Yay (or Yea, Ti, or Ye) which was a dry but not thirsty site that Choor never annexed. (Guess they was both of them windbags, said Mayn years later to his son asleep and his daughter awake, but his daughter didn’t say anything, while his wife from another room called "were.") And when he said he was reminded of old General now new President Harrison’s Inaugural Address in 1841 whose deathless prose when subjected to spoken time went on over an hour and a half in the March air even after Daniel Webster had spent days pruning it and old Harrison had refused adamantly to wear his overcoat, caught his death, and departed almost at once after his arrival, the listening daughter said quietly, Get back to the night-shining cloud made of the Medicine Man’s remains that followed the Navajo Prince across the continent following the Princess east. Well, the father said, kissing her and then his son, there’s a lot of gaps in the record. Fill it in, said his daughter, how about it, Dad?