Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Oh remember the "pre-sound" of the Anasazi’s last words posthumously conveyed a mile or more to the Hermit direct by breath from the heart of the Anasazi’s materially dissolving mind which slowly peeled and delayered, in fragilest fossil-like blades or leaflets?

But do you remember adding that the Anasazi and the Hermit might have been in another life one person not two (because except for the Indian’s laughing at him and the Hermit’s getting friendly-mad, they often mingled their sciences of shared and territorial? Mind you, if a cloud stops over your country and sheds water that gets all the way to the mouth of the ground (for this had come to the boy-man descending the stairs hearing his mother suddenly break off her piano playing) — you have it, it’s on your territory unless you’ve gotten to be a state ({he grandmother laughed at her grandson’s historic wit), but so what, it might help the corn, especially right after it was planted, you don’t give that cloud away; and point number two, if a tornado comes along with a lot of people’s horses and houses and someone’s gun and a couple of half-busted chairs from another territory, who the heck wants to share a tornado? — which ain’t the same as between weather that just happens and weather that is caused, or between colored weather and black and white — or the Hermit looking into a box he had for measuring, and the Anasazi turning ninety degrees, then turning again, and so on.

Margaret was upset in the spring of ‘46. The Hermit her old friend was very ill, though she never saw him much — some friends you don’t need to see — and the day before she was going to New York to see him after he had told her not to, and he got mad and had his phone disconnected and when he hung up his lung collapsed; he died, and a nephew of his sprang out of nowhere talking fast on a pay telephone, and she went in to the city and she came back two days later—

— don’t remember that—

— well she fretted over him; we do make people into things, and she actually would rather not see that old scamp who never had a decent pair of shoes in his lifetime—

— not even in the West?—

— I bet he wore his moccasins all the way out and all the way back—

— who invented a thing around the turn of the century. .

— yessirree, it predicted weather according to the exact configuration of coastline but they needed machines they didn’t have then in order to utilize this thing, today it’s called. .

— a baroclinometer , comes back to Mayn in ‘60 or ‘65 in the presence of Alexander, but he doesn’t know from how far back, not far, did Margaret use such language? it was ahead of its time, it could predict fronts and pressure zones from the way the coastline was cut and from densities of people and flora correlations between color and rate of C02 discharge—

— sounds like a tall order—

Well, it isn’t the way a modern baroclinometer works — I don’t know where that coastline stuff came from.

Somewhere.

Perhaps. But the words were different when Margaret told it—

So sometimes Jimmy, according to his grandfather, added to what he was told (which is sometimes necessary to make sense, though Alexander opined that a doctor might need to subtract from what he was told as when women working with felt went crazy and to get to the heart of the matter which was mercury you had to discount various answers that seemed likelier) as to the Anasazi’s distinction between night clouds that are young and, near the moon, show colored rings, blue yellow red, etcetera, and night clouds that are old and have less brightly colored haloes because their old gray blood is thinner if it hasn’t in fact become air, for they take their transformations more lightly and with less fuss, Jim pointed out that the Hermit had said the same thing in another way, the color all depended on the pulverized rock out of which the water was made that produced the droplets that the light was bent into shape by, that in turn became the given cloud — and since she had never actually met the Anasazi—

— but the Princess met him one day when she rode alone away from the Navajo Prince and had a bellyache which we call stomach ague-qua and he told her to find some wwpulverized rock and stare at it until it—

— what would she want with rock?

Well, stones.

Oh.

He must have been a very gentle type of healer, the grandmother suggested, as if the boy-man might know what she did not.

You mean because he didn’t tell her to pound the stones into her?

It came back some nights when he told humorously a rather technical-type story to a daughter and a son — and didn’t know who had invented what, or why (no, how) for years he had all but forgotten this stuff especially the "hard" weather of that period apparently ‘45~’46, probably he was in shock from his mother’s suicide though why didn’t he feel so?

His friend Sam came running up to the house and, first greeting Margaret — being more polite than his older brother, the fat one who didn’t look more than flabby but drove like a racing driver and could fist you paralyzing muscle shots deep inside your arm whether you were defending or not — told Jim that Anne-Marie’s brother had probably broken his back and was stuck in the lower level of a tree in the Vandevere backyard where he’d fallen from an upper perch, and Jim jumped up and without thinking said his own mother had just plain left, hadn’t she! — and she’d told him to go away where he belonged and it was amazing what there was in people and what they were able to do, he had just said to Margaret while Sam stood surprised: upon which Margaret, feeling the boys move to go, retorted that there was no connection between his mother and the old talk about weather as given Jim in these stories because the stories started after Jim was born, and Jim, in turn not knowing what was in him, though feeling that some stories had to be started and started and started again and again, said for Sam’s benefit, Was she pregnant? like the night at the ballfield when Sam called to his father, "Out tomcatting around again, Dad?" when his father didn’t do things "like" that and absolutely wouldn’t — but something got across, some possibility? some true force expressible only against the father? and his father docked Sam two weeks’ allowance at a crucial period when there were three birthdays including one birthday party — but never "laid" a hand on his son. "What’s that got to do with the weather or the price of eggs?" retorted Margaret, but Jim said, "All that weather stuff is crazy" (taking the four porch steps at one weightless fall) only to hear his beloved grandmother say so clearly she might never have uttered the words except in his own being, "Why the Anasazi medicine man went on with it just to give that lonely Hermit some friendship, who didn’t know how to talk to him standing on that ladder high up against the cliff peering into the dark cell or for that matter sitting in there with him, sucking corn."

What a great friendship! (scornfully tossed over the shoulder running away with Sam to the stranded brother of Anne-Marie whose own neck flowered in the dark to the sounds of their breathing and palms upon cloth and all morning with gentle languorous tension within the steel frame of a borrowed pickup truck unwilling still to forget). The spectacle of the Hermit-Inventor of New York come for a summer sojourn to the West-Southwest calling at once on the narrow ancient of whose shadows in this cell he was the original shadow of watchfulness, smiling with tolerance as the Hermit’s head appeared like a greeting which then took word form: "We were talking about the weather of presence and of absence when I left: now what in your view has that to do with spiral winds?" "Possibly nothing," replied the voice from the grain-scented dark, "yet that would be strange. For presence and absence — the long sky of morning or the thunderhead of late summer afternoon — unite in containing the change that weather always is, and the tiny Pressure Snake that sucks a man’s flesh into that mountain that may someday begin to move eastward once was a creature that worked with the cactus to make spiral winds which in turn can be of use, and that snake could return to that prior shape, for what is prior? but the mountain moving toward the coasts you study might fill up the sea or make it rise." "Something must be done," said the Hermit; "there must be prayers one can perform." The Anasazi caught his breath, and the Hermit knew someone was outside looking up at the cell in the cliff. It was a white man in a sombrero. "He is studying the Anasazi," the old man whispered. "And have you proved yet that those frozen foam volcanoes back home do not exist?"