Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But he had lost the boy or the boy him, for Jim had heard his grandmother and she was on the tall-necked phone in the front hall expressing shock, and he had had to wonder, on that day-night in ‘93 or ‘94 when the sun would not and would not go down and all the slits in the onion layers of atmosphere clear up to the spheres of most and least change lined up and cosms of the sun descended more suddenly than two eyes together could have seen, to deform or translate, depending on how you saw them, if the quick-winded timber wolf into which the egg-sucking mountain lion turned just as the Princess’s giant bird stopped to snap had been there perhaps already, and did the lion vanish into the underbrush atop that volcanic neck rather than turning into an alternative choice on the bird’s farewell menu? — so that he heard and didn’t hear like classroom code words "kinetic" equals "motion," got it? "K" equals "M," some words of his grandfather’s to do with "fool" and "wise" and one day fifteen or more years later, when his own age had doubled, recalled some weird consolation of reversal in that word "fool" and in his grandmother’s news that three small babies had been found abandoned near a piner cottage at Lake Rompanemus but strangely or like sacred aliens nestled up in two old trees as if to keep the babes safe from flood (though they woke drenched in themselves), which saved Jim from being asked how he’d done on his French test, she had been tutoring him mainly by famous sayings, famous to her, like "Keep quiet, people will think you’re smart," or words to that effect which sometimes took effect later, as when he learned the French for a thought he had already heard his grandfather casually say without laboring the fact or even acknowledging that it was a French thought. In the middle of such tutoring as Jim and Margaret indulged in the following Friday, namely some dumb verbs (about seventy or a hundred!) in a special tense of the past he never got straight, he got her into downcoming and upgoing weathers and knew definitely that she was telling the truth though, albeit amidst science, he’d let her get back into these rotten old stories or margins thereof he vowed after {post mortem!) his mother’s death he was through with: the Anasazi healer held (and apparently had demonstrated) that thunder was the upgoing burst of undreamt dream mined in a flash from mountains by downcoming knives of lightning—"But the Anasazi believed mountains didn’t dream, Gramma" — True enough, but they arose from dreams slanted out of the Earth (its quality of being layered) and because of this origin never after were able much to dream though they thought and thought and were admirable if left alone and alive which incidentally proved to the Anasazi that true feeling must follow thought, even at a slant, not the other way round, because mountains did not feel in that human way. Yet they had all this stuff and bone and drama of dreams that never came to view and like some horsepower that didn’t know what to do with itself could get blown up by the right lightning coming down the right line at the right time—’ ‘that would heat the air and make rain, right?" the boy added— Right you are! whereas the Hermit-Inventor who remembered late humid-dark afternoons in early August in New Yorkono as it had once been called differed with the medicine man in that the so-called upgoing of the thunder was really ongoing, like a flooding of the banks or later much as the Heaven of Space-Thought grew to be an owf-concept more than an up-. But Jim, this being the weekend before another French test, swept all this away like love and all but stunned his grandmother telling her that Bob Yard had told him that thunder was gas expanding within the channel made by the lightning short-circuit and Bob had added that was it, that’s absolutely all he knew: but when Margaret retorted, "What do you expect of a man like Bob?" (who was an electrician), Jim, who with Bob’s illegal permission had borrowed Bob’s pickup truck the weekend before on condition that he and Anne-Marie ("Marie") stay clear of town, could reach inside himself for words but only so far as a ball of raging love to hurt his grandmother so that, for a silence that was large enough only for him to know that the French she had just recited to him thrice very slowly of a poet named Alfred he didn’t know was the very thing her husband grandfather Alexander had said in English on the porch a few days ago and for him to recall Alexander’s words and knew he could at once give a smooth translation, he could not bring out this intolerable question until he gave up trying and then heard all the voices inside him, his mother’s included, audibly then voice the question: "Gramma, why did she do it?" (the "she" at once felt as a lapse in his possession of his mother and of sonship, for he ought to have said "my mother"), the "Gramma" at the last gram of moment thrown in to tell her all he supposed his cool interrogation in its clipped outrage did not tell her: which at once let go in his own head, like a thought which, with Margaret beside him trying to recall for him things Sarah had said, could not contain a parallel question so hard to control that it became "Who does she think she is, to commit suicide" (as they with such natural syllables say com-mit-su-i-cide) "when she’s got a husband and two sons?" (hey, and a mother and a father and a sister in Massachusetts); a thought that became a year later offensive inquiries into the full circumstances of Sarah’s sandy, watery leavetaking by Jim’s statuesque journalism-English teacher Pearl W. Myles who had by then lost her job yet she had at least imprinted the basic interrogatives upon the majority of her pupils such as Where? Who? When? Why? (or was Why? not one?) for Margaret, whose one-time self (if she was the same person) bending to taste a limb of imported copper, had refreshed in the Hermit why he had gone back to the West again and again — to wit, the seed pod given him by the Anasazi to chew on for the good of his grinders — could say to Jim, "That much we will probably never know."

And the grandson snapped shut his French book and ran off the porch at a bound hearing his angry grandmother call to him, "They don’t know for sure how lightning comes!" thinking nothing but these irrelevant thoughts out of his energies that not even his girlfriend Marie (really a friend) could contain (with or without precautions): Where, When, Who, What, How— wasn’t How contained in Where, When, and Who? but go easy on the Why because maybe we don’ gong know that ever — and flung him outward past impediment after impediment he was no doubt responsible for providing himself with so’s he’s have somethink in front of us as the Anasazi’s "created-weather" watch had concluded into a larger life of fact that wouldn’t go away even when you couldn’t prove post partem gloom might, in the humid late August of a young woman’s mind, be literally feeding on the most freshly electric of charges, those mythic ions, a weather inside out and as violent as an opera in which people stand for walls, or a lonely crime whose victims (who are victims only of the life that’s left them) do not know after all what the crime of this departed’s departure was, although they feel endlessly how it works in them, a person who was one of them now gone into a gap each survivor would fill if he could with stuff of himself or even, God help us, from others.

Yet, years later, when his own wife said she had a totally real picture of his grandmother Margaret from only the little he had said and so she didn’t fit this tale stuff he only alluded to into the picture of Margaret, he knew his grandmother had of course talked also facts. Facts about the Prince’s aunt, named Tall Salt, a promising widow who made the visiting East Far Eastern Princess laugh and inquired with a discretion that was even more intimate than its opposite about her state of health, as if she were blood kin to Margaret who, one early-winter day to interest her fifteen-year-old widower-grandson, told Jim that Tall Salt had expected her to marry into the clan—"And stay forever, Gramma?" — and had rope-burn welts where her own uncle a generation before had practically lynched T.S. as she rode rudely through his cornfield — he’d run wildly after her to lasso her and her horse rebelled at her familiar heel and started going round and round in little elegant circles she had taught him but not for emergency getaways, but her uncle he gave her two sheep one day when she had herded his flock for a year. She herself taught Margaret how to coil and weave baskets in the shape of bottles and stick them all over with pitch so they held water, and she never would say her sister the Prince’s mother was crazy or possessed or even a witch when to not quite everyone’s amusement that Navajo matron slung a coyote pelt on her back and ran away on all fours for a day or two followed by her horse and then came back and got up on the hogan and blew magic pollen down the smoke hole until it rained, but Tall Salt explained to Margaret that the nail parings and the small portion of dry shit her sister kept about her were her own, not from someone else who was thus to be bewitched and made sick as when a witch shoots a shard of mica into a person; and Tall Salt, who was very fond of the Hermit-Inventor’s ways, always cited her sister’s predictions such as that basketmaking was on the way out because the proper grasses were harder and harder to find.