Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Jim’s grandmother was avidly reading a love-story book about a whaler one day he came back from football practice. She hadn’t seen him in a week, and he asked why she had never returned to the West. "I had responsibilities here," she said. She went on reading but stopped, and she looked right at him in her way. But he left her and went over to Marie’s house where for some reason she was neither peeling carrots and turnips for her mother nor reading Sinclair Lewis upstairs, she was sitting on the porch staring ahead irritated, and some absence of halo round her up there on the porch where he joined her made him think upon a strange potential fact, and this was hard so he thought instead of her breathing body and the friendly scent of her under her sweater like a whole air even more than a smell and coming from her when she breathed in as well. He sat down next to her and was glad to think a thing or two through, which was the last time on this score, which might have seemed unsettled between him and his grandma, while he now made a discovery. But when, in the midst of it, the familiar girl in her plaid skirt and short-sleeved angora and bobby sox testily rocking said, "Looks like rain," he knew it wasn’t really him she was mad at, if him at all. Anyway he had seen that between the steamily upgoing weathers and the resolute downcoming weathers, between that observed and that created, between the weathers of presence and of absence, and of leaving and arriving and most strangely of inside and outside, and all these always divided up so you could practically see them out of that time when people really cared why a luminous night cloud came widely low to the continent in subtle motion each day as if the continent were turning westward and the cloud hung waiting for places to come under it, the grandmother had always been out to entertain him at a fairly high level but had been led into history she herself cared to keep if not create; likewise she had told some pretty fair horse and cactus tales to pass their time as if there would have been nothing otherwise, but in doing so she had covered up things that had happened so the coverings became queer to the eye approaching, say, that mother with a hole in the head or a tornado that rumbled off like the made-up pterodactyl bird it really was, that is when Margaret turned into a Princess, which was really another person in her that he didn’t ask about, but she was two persons, both the young woman who saw slaughterhouses in Nebraska and dry farming among the Indians—

— what’s dry farming?

— It’s get-right-out-there-while-you-can farming just during the brief period of the rains—

— who read the 1892 commissioner’s report and knew that medicine men were adjudged to be barbarous conjurers and got ten to thirty days in jail for a first offense; she had studied provisions for "field matrons" who would help Indian women learn hygiene, crafts, and in the "Lend a Hand" clubs proper observance of the Sabbath, and she had looked forward to visiting the Indian exhibit at the Chicago World’s Fair which was confined for lack of funds to an industrial boarding school, thus demonstrating Washington’s commitment to educational progress for the Indians who were not to be called Red Men but the People, not Injuns but the Five Civilized Tribes — Cherokee, Seminoles, Creeks — we’ve got a couple of Creeks right here, your teammate Ira’s half Creek—

— he’s crazy, Gramma—

— which Indians was she referring to? — the industrial Indians, the boarding Indians—

— they would go home for the weekend testing themselves with often a round trip on foot of eight hundred miles between Friday night and Sunday night—

— the Five Civilized Tribes recognized by treaties of 1866 and later—

— and on the other hand, the Princess who sought nothing by experience and felt in her wrists and heart, amidst the smoke of the Night Chants which her host the Prince demanded she be allowed to watch, the high juggling of live objects by ritual clowns who ran so exactly out of step that they were simultaneous reincarnate priests branding the night with its own outlines shifted into question — but when she grew sick she could go on sitting on the floor of a still unbewitched hogan in a beam of light from the hole in the roof, upon a beautiful blanket whose design she knew had no more urgent meaning than the designs on other blankets (or the way the light from above siphoned her into some space of the future in which she would remain here forever) and be glad that the practicing medicine men would not come to heal her — for she did not miss doctors, the doctors of Choor, the more gentle island healers hidden among the lakes of the Long White Mountain.

Grandfather Alexander, whom the boy talked to more since his mother had died, and who must have been one of those responsibilities that had kept Margaret from returning to the West, said Margaret was going to Muskogee for the Sequoyan Convention in 1905 but she had a couple of small children by then. The boy asked what that was, and Alexander told him they had had the idea of a state of the union drawn from the Indian territories and organized by the Five Civilized Tribes. Quite a big thing at the time. Creeks, Cherokees, forget the others; became Christians, owned slaves, real civilized. Made a dictionary, started a newspaper; built regular houses — not those six-sided hogans of the Navajos or underground houses like the Salish out near the Pacific (because it don’t get very cold below ground level).

Only one state? said Jim, and his grandfather laughed, which put into the boy’s secure memory his own remark.

That was what got him into the newspaper business, a reasonable memory for and a respect for fact, y’know — plus a way of removing some facts from his head to an ink imprint on paper, and it came to cupric sulfide and pen-taerythritol, supercooled cloud-seeding agents that proved to be much less convenient than lead iodide or dry ice (though Nature wasn’t to be sniffed at even when it evaporates a cauliflower cumulus and disappoints a farmer): how to remove intact from his mind a fact so that it might never lose its authoritative meaninglessness, even (he bet) for chemists who nodded with matter-of-fact intensity at names of yet other cloud-seeding agents phloroglucinol and me-taldehyde: and throw in the more earthly meteorologist contacts Jim ran into, who had a trick of telling you how the gas law explains a good half of weather — that is, that a gas adjusts its state moving from one environment to another — and in a trim surveillance craft gliding not at all silently (because of the density of conversation) just below a growing cumulus at its flat, football-field-long base, where the cooling air turns rainy, he could be shown one afternoon how the base’s center was higher than the surrounding edges; yet confronted with a restless atmosphere — the air rising; the pressure on it hence decreasing so that the air answers by expanding, which in turn takes effort on the part of our "only human" air which as a result must spend some of its energy which is measured (we are reminded by a child or young person in the next room) in temperature (check it out) the air gets cooler ten degrees Centigrade for each kilometer upward — Mayn’s contacts (friendly as relations he phoned once a year) could also speak to him of this rate as the "dry adiabatic lapse rate" (it will never desert you and in a pinch will tell you how high or low a cloud will form). And these clouds were what you put into them too, it came to him years after he had committed to some memory morgue the sometimes furiously, yes, furiously made-up spiral winds, whose attempt to return only to their source in the breathing of certain vegetarian reptiles and the needle-shooting cactus those reptiles woke up once a month to feed on, the Hermit-Inventor would explain to the Anasazi as an effect of a shearing or squall line between the reptile’s moist breath moving to meet its nutriment and the cactus’s oppositely targeted dry —thus stirring at widespread joint-feed times spiral breaths that on rare days joined energies and went away, uniquely dustless but of a discernible green hue due, the Hermit said, not only to the cactal skin but to the fall sun’s blueness elusive to the naked eye mixed with yellow, bile-like blood which these vegetarian reptiles tried to purify each day from their prior carnal form of the minute Pressure Snake of the South that preyed on mountaineers who one moment would see a sky-blue worm accost a boot toe and the next would be sucked all but their bones into this (we almost felt "human") compacter, which, to those few who had lived to see it, then proved to have rooted itself to the mountain and while maintaining its wormful size digested what it needed of the object-human whose flesh it had separated all but instantly from the bone cage, and shot the rest into the mountain. This caused a general tremor since the mountain understood that the flesh so dazzlingly compacted into that blue snake could hold, in some riddle of energy, this reduction only for a moment, which buttressed the Hermit’s theory that mountains dreamt. But the Anasazi would not be drawn back into this issue; he explained spiral winds his way.