Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Mena, at all events, was a remarkable person who had told Marcus this and more that he passed on to the Hermit-Inventor of New York who, unbeknownst to Marcus, recognized at once the Indian he was talking about, and Marcus in his happenstance encounters with Mena on the great nocturnal plateau from time to time found support for a view that came to him more than he to it as when one day near a river leaning against the bright, birchlike shadow of an aspen trunk musing upon the snow that would fall here in three months he had been accosted by a man who with his young son who presently arrived set about persuading Marcus by commercial means, later the violent means then commercially available, to divulge what was not Marcus’s to divulge, to wit some doubtless mythical mode he for one had not heard of of dry-steaming the flesh of the sometimes almost animally attentive saguaro cactus while it was still alive high above the desert floor, betimes adding a seasoning of one of the northern Navajo locoweeds Marcus was supposed to have named for the benefit of the New World, the end result a winter mash marketable for horses (that could be dried, stored, and shipped East) as well as a porridge to attract passing Indian refugees who because of their ovally-whorled tastebuds would never recognize the ingredients, perhaps also because of their kinship to the vegetable world. But the treacherous habit of the saguaro plus the mystery of which locoweed to use had led the exploiter and son to seek out Marcus Jones and, as he reported to the Hermit, thus inspired Marcus at the cost of "but one joint of the right little finger of a left-handed botanist" (he would grin) to reflect again on such mobile kinships between animal and vegetable as had tempted his contented mind upon seeing and touching Mena’s lips that had acquired a petal-patina silver-white in sympathy with the javelinas she had tracked so long observing their hind-situated scent glands — but still more from hearing Mena report Owl Woman’s retreat, like a fugitive hallucination, into a cactus in order that the cactus grow an owl or owl eye: so that Marcus blamed his renown for the violent brush with the saguaro exploiter not to mention the minor amputation (to prove a humorous if not evolutionary bereavement) but had found in the self-created obstacle of his professional reputation and his unwillingness to make up some story to get rid of the saguaro exploiter a none too costly spark of inspiration he then understood he had often dreamed in the form of ships sailing the desert stirring eddies as if the ships were wind, and humans exploiting their animal or vegetable souls at need so some pains could not reach us, like pistol shot or lonely lust, until the renewed use of our coupled natures might lead to some similar union of our male and female selves.

Now the Hermit-Inventor of the East at once recognized in the prior words about created and observed weathers and the direction in which the world’s corners were envisioned his colleague the many-hundred-year-old Anasazi plus the old healer’s strict habit of never peddling the same conversational tidbits twice, for the Hermit was hearing these "created" versus 4 ‘observed" weathers for the first time though at once remembering the Anasazi healer’s suggestion to him that he not always see opposites as being necessarily "versus" or opposed. The Hermit told Marcus what he never had told a soul — that a girl he had seen but once at that time and told to go west, had in herself shown him why he had been drawn to the West for decades.

She was a fine girl, beyond subtlety at that moment in 1885, her hands at rest at her sides, her dress full of lilac flowers and the minute fire of red loco, and upon being spoken to by the Hermit she advanced to one limb of the dismembered Statue of Liberty and ran her hand along the molded metal and tasted it: and both her fresh directing of interest, which was a humble appetite for what lay ahead, and her actual ingestion of some far-flung grain of the copper sheets recalled to the man how when he had first known the Anasazi among the high caves of those western zones touched more and more by the perilous magic of Anglo law, the old mediciner would give him a pod to chew as being for the side teeth, the pulverizing teeth (not the front ones), and this then-nameless pod or bean would dissolve ultimately in his mouth but soon reappear in spirit, a whole minute vessel passing everywhere inside him until, accepting it, he found he could use it, and, using it, found it curiously navigational like a lode that lives in what of our active selves we let rest, until, decades after, as he in fresh form (his own) saw the girl, who could not have yet seen more than thirteen or fourteen summers, turn away from a grand haunch eyeing him and smiling as if the pale flush of her neck (for she had just been bending warily over that piece of statue) betokened a wise smile the whole of her young body gave to the irritable, disheveled, impatiently alert man who had said thoughtlessly Go west, and she said Oh she planned to do all that by hook or crook before she settled down to marriage and a family and she would pay her way, what’s more, and was meanwhile happy to be here in New York where she didn’t visit often. To which the Hermit-Inventor dumbfounded could only blurt out a dumb fact that hardly began to tell how he felt, to wit that according to his geography she wasn’t in New York right now, but in New Jersey.

Which was how Jim often felt in Windrow when he needed to go away both on his own hook or because his late mother (now departed herself) had told him to and yet how he felt in New York itself whose immigrant men and women in their transparently individualized transporter capsules seemed often more understandable than such minor mysteries as the Navajo Prince’s mother’s revival and how it left an imprint upon downcoming and upgoing weather in those parts, ‘mselves so blue and constant of sky that the Navajo Prince’s envious brother in mild shock (because he was still envious now even in the absence of his envy’s cause) the morning after the Prince left couldn’t see why the Hermit-Inventor bothered to explain the blue, especially when he said it was really black but dissolved to blue by the Sky’s incompetence to use, yea wake, its full force — a most funny (Anglo) wrinkling of the Obvious (the Navajo brother who was skilled at dressing buckskin and making whips and hobbles could feel with a neutral, silent wisdom of contemplation displacing for several minutes his inveterate envy of his more gifted brother), yet, as this remaining brother did not suspect, a needed detour for the scientific New-Yorkono round possible interrogations that the Hermit-Inventor found risky since, by a rich defect of language in that world, to describe, say, the buildings of his native city of the East as being anvil-shaped like clouds was the same as having invented those buildings, likewise his city’s streets tall as the treacherous Cleft Pass between the Anasazi’s remembered border and the cliff pastures of the Indian sea isles when Ship Rock was scarcely a thought — to describe meant to have invented: which meant that the Hermit’s actual inventions such as a rooftop gauge to predict differences between light and heavy air masses (possibly inspired by his thoughts on pistol design during the Mexican War) or an underground railway (which was never to be built perhaps because it had been conceived as soundless and to be cooperatively maintained) might suffer unforeseen unimportance, but mainly that he might be credited with the Prince and Princess’s elopement were he to describe it, if only the atmospheric phenomena that attended it (doubtless recalling, said the grandfather Alexander on a spacious white-painted porch in Windrow, New Jersey, in late ‘45, that expiring French wolf who remarks at the end, "When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, / Only silence is strong, — all the rest is but lies").