Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But the Anasazi, nearing term, was glad the power did not extend to his eyes and ofttimes painful touch. Yet when the Hermit, his annual sojourn done, said Keep in touch, the aged savant had to wonder if he had powers he didn’t know about, if so he must learn them lest before the right time they accidentally de-leave the woods of the East or dry-freeze an adjacent volcano in full cry. He used such words as "adjacent" and "Keep in touch" to show his feeling for the Hermit-Sojourner, and in their anger over the question of shared and territorial weathers he showed words and ideas that convinced the Hermit the Anasazi was so far ahead of his time as to be — not crazy but so bony of mind, so humorous about a violent future, that the Hermit all but asked if it was weather he ought to been discussing or some other — what? — obstacle?

It must have been at this point in his later skeptical discussions with his grandmother, the winter and early spring after his mother’s permanent vacation from this world, that the grandson apparently forgot or deposited at a distance from his life a pile of rather rich data. His grandfather reminded him of these at thirty-five, as if for the grandfather, who was on his last legs then, recalling territorial versus shared weather was the most natural thing. "Oh, you got mad as hops didn’t you just. Because she told me you did. And it was some dadblamed stuff about a mountain of flesh and tainted hailstones—"

— when the Hermit took the East Far Eastern Princess away from—

— For God’s sake, Gramma, it wasn’t you, was it?

Well, sometimes it was and sometimes it wasn’t (for Margaret had decided not to put up with his anger all the time, only some of the time)—

— when the Hermit took her away from the maiden weavers to urge her to get out of there fast, he conveyed to her such a condensed mountain of information (for he had his troubles too) that one might spend a life digesting it all, so that that afternoon of the interminable sunset resembled a year of such light, and later when she galloped not at all like the wind away from village and mountain and the hauntingly local, turning storm she had been thrown outward by the beginnings of, the Hermit’s anxiety seemed to her to have precious little to do with his talk of upcoming or rising weather, which would be territorial, and downgoing weather, which would be shared. If this debate with the Anasazi coupled with regret, anger, prophecy, and (she felt) his curious relief to be talking to her at all had taken up the space they seemed to need, why she would have been listening all night, for a year of nights, and not have escaped that night and might never have left—

— but why not? — she could have left later—

Escape is always possible even if you think you are free, according to the Anasazi, who so maddened the Hermit with impatience and inspiration that he vowed he would never again tell him anything. This after the Hermit described those purely mythical three- or four-foot-high towers of frozen froth called in the East-North-East "foam volcanoes" which of course no one including the Hermit had ever seen — only to have his fanciful instance of upgoing weather, which stayed rooted to the place it rose from, taken so seriously by the Anasazi that the Hermit was moved by his friend’s explanation of the so-called Ship Rock as being no ship at all but a piece of the very seas on which the supposed ship had come to this ancient terrain, which had been in process of turning from seawater into dry land, a process more than completed upon the arrival of this "Ship Rock" tower: moved, then, to anger was the Hermit, for the Anasazi had already taken the Hermit’s vision of a future of vertical building as a promise of destruction not only from people of the East dropping dangerous objects from such heights but employing a new, visible air to make the tallest possible bubbles which would be in the midst of their unthinkably hot creation in imitation of the Sun, frozen dry and hard with the people of the future embedded here and there like windows, doors, or sculpture or fading away or going to pieces as in Tall Salt’s pictorial rugs, while the Hermit (who had seen in Ship Rock’s bare steep lift off the desert floor an assurance that mountains thought but did not dream) would stop his ancient friend with "But those foam volcanoes I told you about, they’re not true, I never saw one of them in my life; you’re saying they rise up from bubbles in the wintertime—"

" —the late winter in the north of Choor," laughed the Anasazi, who had spoken at a distance reportedly to the Princess’s giant bird to ask if it missed the moisture of its faraway climate and had heard the bird’s retreating words curving down into distance even as the bird flew higher so that in the decoded words of the bird identifying the frequency of thawing days and frosty nights, the Anasazi had both a verbal equivalent of an unknown music and a weather report from another territory, though not then a resolution of the Hermit’s painful differences from him: for while the two agreed that some weathers actually belonged to the people living in the given territory such as the hailstorms of the western summer, and that other weathers were no one section’s right but shared — even sea-to-sea, such as the thunder-without-light-ning that came with the dampness of a late-summer gibbous moon observed by the Navajo Prince two hundred miles from here, while he was studying the compacted potentialities of the bison tongue, and verified by the Anasazi and subsequently by others as having taken place elsewhere at roughly the same time — still the Hermit maintained that the hailstones of northern New Mexico were both downcoming and upgoing weather since the stones fell and rose several times before hitting the ground, for one heard them whistle different scales, whereas the Anasazi, who doubted this, was convinced on close but necessarily swift inspection that hailstones were in reality trees, leastways their trunks, compacted violently to spheres showing those internal rings to mark the spiral layering by those always present winds which the Hermit contended were either arriving or leaving, while the Anasazi, who, on nights of Double Moon, could project onto his floor or wall photograms cross-sectioning practically anything, even the four winds (which especially interested the Hermit) though not the extraterrestrial voids charted like wide rather than long tunes inside the Prince’s mother’s head that, for the many holes that the one large seemed to explode into, might be a young singer’s wild ceiling of as yet unreached high notes, yet here in the Prince’s mother a head charted if at all by her terrestrial demons who sometimes knew when they were licked yet sometimes were themselves possessed of a versatility due to the several possible causes of their presence not least the rare wind joining substances of some far northern landscape with local mountains reputed to have human flesh (or being) in their actual circulation, yet also not least the sometimes visible breath of her husband the Prince’s father when he speculated as to these causes but never consulted the Anasazi, so old he didn’t know the difference between Anglo and Indian, white man and red man, hermits of the East and seers of the People, and was known to have hardly troubled to argue, in his longstanding discussions with the Hermit, that there was (in the matter of winds) only leaving — if that — never arriving: for that which is already present need not arrive. The Anasazi found delightfully funny the Hermit-Inventor’s generous vision that terrestrial weathers might become shared weathers but not the other way around. The Anasazi, who would express his love for the Hermit through ridicule such as "We are going to have war between us even if we don’t have to fight for it," argued that the winged water wheels of five hundred years back had passed from the world of the Indians into the concave sky, and to call these gray illusions from which came a century of real irrigation water for Indian peoples "shared" when they had passed away was like claiming that Marcus Jones’s silver-bristled pussytoes was a western July twin of those clustered tresses of hair-frost the Hermit claimed on hearsay grew in Choor from wet soil in months of gloomiest cold. Possibly more than a twin, the Anasazi observed, since at that distance there was no way to check (except by his own rare powers of hearing, which would not help) whether or not the hair-frost somehow translated itself westward to be, for a time, the pussytoes in bloom.