Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Which should have been the moment, roughly in 1889 or ‘90, when the Anasazi knew he was going to disperse and (through a method only he then knew, though as Margaret guessed her grandson might hit upon it himself sometime) recompound his ancient veins, vacancies, and breath in cloudform, glad not to speak any more but await some inevitable precipitation. Yet when his death and chemical promotion coincided with the poor Navajo Prince’s exit in pursuit of his beloved, the Anasazi never thought his own new (un-precedentedly low-altitude) nimbic noctilucence would last so long eastward to be consummated in a trip to the Northeast to seek those foam volcanoes despite the Hermit’s guarantees that he would not find any. The Hermit had by then named certain cumulus sky-chains "cloud streets" and was on the way to the fulfillment of his personal frustrations on two fronts, one of them the "front" itself, which in their quiet way a team of Norwegian meteorologists would claim as their contribution near the end of the First World War. The fact was that the Hermit had put two separate pictures together from the work decades earlier of his own Hermit-Uncle who possessed an unmatched sense of smell: one was the picture of vast shelves of underground rock sliding laterally to push other, weaker shelves of underground rock angularly upward— or vice versa, the upper flowing across the lower — this giant motion resulting from the ingrained shadow of the sea’s memory within those ancient solids waking them to periodic waves not unlike the circulatory dreams in the lower levels of mountains; the second was the picture of his tall, sinewy uncle-manifestation on a field trip to the extreme and odd Northeast straddling a branch of the highest oak upon a mountain covered with holly bush and sniffing from the West an odor he knew from but one place on the continent, the cell of an aged Anasazi med’ciner, the faintly acrid oxide sear splashed on the barrel of a revolver lying beside an earthenware winnowing tray brought to the Anasazi once weekly by his long-time regular maiden with his ration of legume and cereals — upon which the high-perched uncle, oblivious till later of a clan or club of Abnaki Indians encamped on the slope beneath him on their way to try vainly to volunteer on the Union side, conceived of an east-bound wind in the form of minute parcels of experience — here, a point in the West, possibly not the ultimate origin of the wind itself particularly if, as all the Hermit-Inventors of New York have concluded independently, winds may be global belts or sashes that have no actual beginning as true as their ongoing motion. All of which led the Hermit-nephew to see, through additionally observing differences both between his moods on inclement days and those of children or midgets at a lower level, and between his own intensified sense of smell in warm weather and that of the neighborhood dogs responding to many of the same odors in his native city in winter, that if temperature affects what is carried by wind, it must affect the progress of wind, and so when the seared-pistol scent came coolly through the branches of his eyrie oak, the Hermit saw a particle-tinted wall of warmth nearing his oak perch only to veer off upward above him as if it had always been a rampart of another system, then fork to either side of him while two other events occurred: one, he realized that the odor from the west southwest, mixed of metal-sear and of the nutriments maiden-conveyed to the famed medicine man had just kept coming as if the source of the odor were unending — a stream thousands of miles long from a source but a few inches in size; two, as he told his nephew deliriously on his deathbed, the land of the sky (to use the term of their friend the Anasazi) was an inverted presence of the Earth, and the animal man that lived in both but walked on but one must find the way to defact ("defract"?) and parsipate ("precipitate"?) in both. But the Hermit-nephew, putting all this together in the late eighties, very early nineties, concluded that, though he did not know the word "baroclinity" (which the Anasazi, who could not have cared less, could have predicted would not cover all cases), one mass of parcels had met another and, discovering their different temperatures, hence densities, neither obstacle had penetrated the other but made a wedge or "front" of agitated, void-jumping weather locally discontinuous, but that quite apart from the old Indian healer’s marine geology of desert Earth, the crucial, maybe confluent odor from the West (which made the perched uncle thirty-odd years ago sweat so that the Abnaki group camped on the slope below got wind of him and took him captive as a Confederate spy scouting Indian volunteer movements in the Northeast) proved to be unconscious word from the Anasazi med’ciner that these quests to the heart of atmosphere, even if cyclonic rotation be a fuller emblem of it than rivers of the sky that meandered and overcame their banks and even paused and halted to test the patience of sailboat crews and rafters while all in all striping that Earthen world like latitudes, were arrived at through what seemed mutual interruption and blockage that were really a promise not just that some work would come of it but that work had.

At which, when the Hermit tried to voice all this to the Anasazi at their next summer meetings in traditional meteorological language, the Anasazi who never owned up to any faults laughed more humbly than ever — and then answered in suitably weatherly words that when airs heated from human breath seek higher coalescence ("Ko-an I ci-quoia") they get bigger till, rising, they get let into the upper landscape his very friend the Hermit was talking about but too smart—’cause it was not an inverted landscape rehashing our own though it was asking us to be in it as if it were our own and protect ("protract"?) it as it protected ours — unless, however, this now very expanded hot air can’t gain entry into the smoke hole of the Sky’s grand hogan and is returned as sheaves of storm blade and sleet lightnings or fiery rain gods that have forgotten they are one, that would wipe out all the cacti except those in process of turning into birds or transhumans or vice versa, except that over Navajo country this deluge’s downcoming often gets halted as an awful ceiling of smoke for which there is no explanation except that horses sniff it and hark back to when the land was ocean and they swam and flew.

The grandmother’s grandson dimly recalled territorial versus shared weathers, and colored weathers which were beautiful but in the mind felt threatening; and that the earlier Hermit had smelled the Anasazi’s pistol two kilo-miles away, and much else. But in i960 or 1965 Jim had to believe his fragile, clear-voiced, steady-talking, uninflectedly slow-talking granddad Alexander, whose ankles, as always raised from time to time of recrossed knees, were now like pretzels in their blood-red socks snap-gartered and silver-clocked above the perennial cordovans, and though he might forget the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia Alexander did recall Margaret’s heartfelt arguments over of all things weather in ‘45 and ‘46 with her grandson because often she would tell them to her husband who calmed her—"down," as the phrase still has it, not as in "put" (though why the grandson even in later years let himself find in outlying parts of another’s body functions of thinking perhaps, or perception, or half-assed recall, we almost do not know, though hands and forearms and tongues seem more plausible than ankles if we are faithful to the grammar above, not to mention knees and necks).

"Well, it was a tradition longer than Margaret knew, of those two chaps that when they met they talked about weather or did until the old Indian died about the time Margie came back home through all that unemployment agitation. And during the bad period after your mother passed away and you had differences with Margie — which were beyond me, for I never saw her like that before or after (though the death of the older Hermit, her particular friend, threw her for a loop) — and in the middle of that protracted wrangle she said to me one night, ‘And I taught that boy to whistle and told him all the stories he knows,’ but whatever she was talking about when she said you were scaring her with your strange disagreements over what were after all just her tales as if you knew things in all this stuff that she didn’t, you’ll agree grandmothers have their uses. And your dad, who was one for detail as the newspaper demonstrated and so did his somewhat limited conversation though not his obit for your mother, would phone us at six and say Braddie had baked some macaroni and cheese in that big old glass casserole your grandmother would insist on steelwooling the burnt crust off of at least twice a year, and there was likely to be strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for dessert (‘likely to be’ was your dad’s humor), and where were you? your grandmother would say she didn’t know — better try that girl’s house — Vandevere. But after Christmas you came back to her, I think, and you would get her to talk about the western adventures and how she broke her back harvesting dry country corn, butnow you were bickering over half of what she told you, until she berated me her best friend one night as if it was my fault and I recall she said sometimes you made bad jokes about your mother being picked up by a fugitive German submarine cruising the Jersey shore and going to Argentina or Chile instead of dying like a respectable tragedy — and you didn’t talk that way! and I told her once I didn’t believe you did talk that way and she said, ‘Ask him, he told me he gets transmissions because of that eardrum of his that was infected once from swimming and he isn’t sure if the transmissions are from himself or from south of the border or both but they say go away where you belong’ (‘He persecutes me,’ she said)" (and Mayn: "/ was like that?") " — but nutty things like as if you took your grandmother too literally and took it from there until I guess it all stopped and by the next summer you two were both sort of grown-up again, I mean the way you normally always were, and friendly and a little sharp with each other, that sort of thing, Jim":