Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Come to think of it, that young Indian must have been in Pennsylvania right about the time young Alexander was, because that was his one stint for the family newspaper the Democrat, the early preparations for Jacob Coxey’s Easter march on Washington (Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, But Death to Interest on Bonds!) and he met Chris Columbus Jones near Rockville who believed in some recompounding of the soul’s chemicals, called it reincarnation (industrial reincarnation!) and believed in Coxey’s road bill and his non-interest-bearing-bond bills for municipal improvement loans that came in a dream to this self-made sandstone-quarry tycoon who did not believe in prayer but in action but against the deep-laid plan of monopolists to plough the poor under, crush them to the Earth, whose sin was not the begetting of children whom Parson Malthus declines to economically christen but only that they have come to the dinner table after others have already fallen to. Coxey’s child was named Legal Tender, and that was Massillon, Ohio, and somewhere in there Margaret had had tea with Coxey on her trip home from the West.

How about it, Dad? Fill it in. But Mayn had finished with so much of that at age fifteen when he took up with his grandmother again, who could help him with French, that he would ask how high it snowed out there and hear his grandmother regret she had not seen excessive amounts of snow while among the Indians, but… but.. (but what? he thought, imagining that she didn’t want to talk about the trip back) while he himself had this sight that didn’t leave him as if it saw him of the Statue of Liberty being drifted with snow higher and higher — no kidding, with snow from the West — cripes, some kind of record, that’s for sure, or when the old stuff hit him later in life he would check out for instance that avalanche of warm air he knew she had said rushed down a mountain slope for a week before one awful night of lightning and hailstones, hailstones like trees made of luminous bole-ring timber that wrecked a horse and practically annihilated a woman, and wonder if, well, you could honestly get that type of weather after a sort of maddening Washoe Zephyr running down mountain or in the Urals the wind White Russians (or so told an interrogand) call the Ilya that jams luckless landsmen with restless ions running down Urals as down the grandmotherly eminences of the West or what she described with a good deal of invention inevitably — which all wasn’t what his daughter wanted to hear but she was young and even at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen would not, like her father before her, ask Gramma how the Indians had broken their horses, or if there had been any fighting against white people she’d told him about who were also poor — all this rather than complete any more that dubious record arising from his grandmother’s strange sources and occasionally supplemented by the boy’s young inventions such as (inspired by listening to a dog that had just survived being "snow-ploughed" by a car at a moment when a child in the car unaware of the skidding dog looked out the closed window of the back seat and silently with eyes closed sneezed and the dog had trotted away putting the experience behind him though first sounding that high metallic wheeze that’s as nearly beyond our hearing as our Kultur’s sound vibes that will pain a dog) that the Hermit-Inventor, who knew his friend had never written a word, not a colon, not a comma, not a Sequoya point, heard the Anasazi healer’s last-breathed words over an incredible distance not just of space (one mile horizontal, sixty-five feet vertical) but of the real time (estimated by the Hermit on arrival as "a while") that brother Anasazi had been dead, heard said sounds (said last words of the already-awhile-dead hence now-ageless Anasazi) by means of a slow-carrier pre-sound like what the boy many years previous had made with pursed lips to his grandmother when in bed together in the early morning, auditing the generalized soft snores of the grandfather in the adjoining room, because his grandmother had been showing him how to whistle, "learning" him because you can be taught only what you know already. And if at sixteen when this was all about over, but earlier at fifteen when his mother had vanished from life — yet in prior years as well — he went on feeling something like his very self-like body literally beyond his wish to get hold of it or drop it, something he had to be or do — a thing as real as a thing — he left it to those growing relations inside him and the world to store leaving and arriving along with hints of dawning hailstorms sifting the wake of a great bird (that had a not so great disposition) whose terminal activities might have no more navigational bearing on a story-book tornado around 1894 than the muscle of a frantic horse reflected the mind of the tense eastbound rider or some risk blowing its shadow over that rider’s shoulder. Yet if the conjunction of the Navajo Prince’s instinctive (while doomed) departure in pursuit of a person he thought he loved with the precipitate recovery of his demon-tenanted mother to actual life brought the boy to the hour when the Hermit-Sojourner (sensitive to an overall convergence flow-pattern) tore the East Far Eastern Princess from the company of the local maidens who sang of their as yet unborn children while grinding and whisking the corn flour as she their precocious visitor wove at the measurable Anglo speed of beginner’s luck upon spindles three of forked, sheet, and streak lightning according to the old saw, and one spindle the white-shelled rain-streamer, but she had just that moment finished and could go calmly, whatever the alarmed inner voice of her would-be guardian who told her when she came to where he was that she must leave at once and ride eastward, her bird was not going in her right direction, she must let it go its way back to her childhood haunts in the foothills of Choor: but, arriving at this moment, the boy, having to speak, asked questions other than what moved him to break in — hadn’t it been flash lightning before? and the Hermit-Inventor of New York had not done any tearing of the Princess, for she had left her work as if nothing was the matter and walked simply to her pony (a gift she’s going to take home with huh) and ridden someplace to rendezvous with her hermit who advised her that if she could let herself be altered to a mist and spirited into the Statue assembled that had been only semi-uncrated pieces when they’d met in ‘85 ("the year after that skinny old geezer," interjected the boy, "saw the two-hour-long tornado according to him") then the Navajo Prince’s mother would live again—

I never, you know, said that, said his grandmother, I couldn’t have— but she did ride east or southeast (fast and quite carefree, considering) to the dry orange valley of the Zuni who were learning beautiful silverwork and turquoise then (not centuries before, in case you wondered, it was an employment project — late nineteenth century) and when she came to a house a woman was piling clothes and a pipe and what looked like a naturally grown toothbrush outside her door and the East Far Eastern Princess (—come on, Gramma!) — the Princess asked a man the way who loitered outside and he said he would go with her to show her and when, alive to the niceties of reciprocation, she said, But don’t you live here, he said, Up until five minutes ago. And he picked up the pile of ejected belongings on the doorstep — but anyway, who ever wove with lightning? it’s too hard to handle, said the boy—

What is lightning anyway? said his own daughter Flick years later, and by then he knew, or anyway could say) — couldn’t you, said the boy, carry lightning around in you and when you opened your mouth—