Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Mountains that had always been there, not like that other mountainous Rock called the Ship, that most men said had sailed down across the People’s desert from the northern ice lands, but with no sail now except in memory, there in the desert where the People had walked and lived and that was theirs long before it was given to them by the white men of the East. Yet, No, some said — and he heard his mother say — that Ship sailed instead from the ocean to the west. Twice she had said it in his hearing, if it was even a ship. Once he had been in the Northern Arizone with the corn-eating people, finding at first power in seeds but then receiving a command to go away, to migrate.

The farmhouse-doorway people here along this river said, "New York," and pointed the finger of an outstretched arm east or north so the hand looked like a pistol. The smell of the low silver cloud this night held the softest, most inaudible voice. Through the forest to the further curve in the river, a farmhouse doorway always was: and coming from it, and from the faces, a current: coming out and through him and back through him and into the doorways: so he would not think about it.

Faces knowing, unknowing; the constant doorway not like the People’s doors. Distant, distant; so now his bed nearer the sky; the near lumen cloud lower than the sky. His bed a riverbank, brown and eastward in the Pennsylvania night. His Mexican blue mare softly stirring. His hunger forgotten for some moments now contemplating as he never stopped doing what his hand held warmly in his buckskin pocket, the dried, strong-warped cut of tongue he had had with him since he had left his people and before: cross-section of northern bison’s tongue, while now in the night of this rich, moist territory sloping always eastward toward that ever-homing white girl who was no more the one reason for his journey than were the pistol and its designs he carried after her and some more and more bodily part of his soul, this collop of northern bison’s tongue compacted such old forces that suddenly he knew himself not just here two arms’ length above a river for the night but also far away in motion across an isthmus thinly hinging the top of this one world to that other world whence mammoth and bison came to this; and the power secretly at rest in the dried, grainy section of tongue in his pocket came out and enclosed the meat like the skin of his own knowing hand, much as the pocket of cured hide held its source, the great deer that he had so trapped with his own advancing eye that he had felt himself to be the human form of that demon-timberwolf, and he killed with his hand that great deer and opened and divided it under the afternoon and all-night eye of the mountain lion that could turn itself into a huge timberwolf, it was said. Watched closely and with understanding by the mountain lion. Not with the haste today and yesterday in the eyes that stood in the doorways here in Pennsylvania. He would stand waiting until food would be handed to him that he never looked at as he ate it. Haste in the eyes of these farmers, these people, like what came from their doorways and passed through him where he stopped, then back through him into the doorways seeming to make them close up tight again, for they did then close, and the thing that had passed out through him and back through him and into these doorways was a current that could injure him if ever he woke up to what it was, a fluctuation he did not need to know of while, at the riverbank at night, his hand upon the bison tongue with all its waiting power took him closer every time to the doubled sight of that isthmus at the top of the Earth, where the two continents could not be looked at at once unless that isthmus could be seen for what it also was — a moving, a turning from there to here, a motion, a moving which, if seen, made the mammoth and bison and the hunters with foreign seeds clinging to their leggings, frost in their eyebrows, no longer move but wait like pictures carried by this perhaps-soon-to-be-broken land from the world out behind to the world here before, one sky behind (oh quoia, he hears, or more exactly, oh quay a, or even, oh quay), and one sky before: though the Great Spirit ought to be near either sky, yet some power in the Navajo Prince’s science said No to that: the Great Father was not always near, and then it came to him that that was why he thought "Great Spirit" ‘stead of "Father." Yet if ahead, where the East Far Eastern Princess sought her home, then the Navajo Prince might take strength and faith from his own hunger: not at the door of some farmer who did not even see the true figure of the Indian in front of him (for the Prince did not see that true reflection in the eyes of the farmer) but at some longer step the Navajo Prince envisioned far further ahead than the thing hanging over him tonight was above him, the cloud lumen with some shape in it, wheel yes, but wheels, but one many-wheel, as though a ring had blossomed laddering faint vines up and down its many rounds that now the Prince might spy only if he did not look at this tower-like shape for then it would not be there but it was in the cloud, shape of some memory of withheld storm or force-to-be that he would study if the cloud would come down; and for a moment as his blue Mexican mare’s neck abrading the gray-blue body of this river-tree he might name before he left this territory tonight or tomorrow seemed to take with the briefest sound a split of bark although his horse was not hungry enough to eat bark, whatever bark might be made into as you turn bison spines into jackrabbit traps and bison feet into saddlebag buttons and into such wind handles as only the Prince knew of though he their accidental conceiver did not yet comprehend their workings, he found himself across that ancient isthmus (so brief a hinge between huge world-islands yet also so puzzlingly long), found himself in motion there if he wished to see that way just as the riverbank here in Pennsylvania night he now saw might be what moved and not the river that it thus left behind, so the cloud that almost should not be there above him alone in a sky of broken Moon moved also and with him— and, crushed once again though for the briefest moment by what lay always around him and ahead in the person of the white girl he wastefully in love pursued together though with the other things all unequal he sought too, plus the anguish that if he let himself be in that far isthmus long enough to discover what he was doing there apart from witnessing and rooting forth what he knew from his own living and dead family forked world-dividingly from that point that the Hermit of New York when he’d once heard said was just the old Bering Strait, that’s all, when the Navajo Prince knew it was a place in motion and between — he now also here in the cold eastward night knew that the split-sound he’d just heard wood-like, bark-like, was not his horse again meeting the tree that he must name before leaving, but was of another presence nearby, and that if he slept and dreamed, he might lose his horse stolen into his very dream by night to ensure that he would not recall it in the morning on this bed of eastward riverbank he so nearly rises from, in impending sleep, that he wakes with a start hearing half in half out both a questioner deep in him saying, "Eastward? which was eastward? the river, the bank, the passion-slave’s Oh quay-a head? and what means ‘broken land’ and what will he someday use this forked force for? to speak dupely and find the sky’s light in the very Earth and weigh it and wind his way into it to speak out of both sides of his tongue?" and, "half-owr" (hearing) that split-sound again and the weight, then, of two steps he felt were a woman’s (but why? was it that she should at this cold moment come back to him? but how? — did she know where he was? had she not only the power to leave him as she had done the night after the strange storm, to go away into the land alone as if never to come back, but also the power to come back to him at any time?) — while he knows that whatever happens here, someone stealing his horse or even picking his pocket of the bison tongue, he must risk being elsewhere on that far-north icebound isthmus he has only heard about and never actually seen: for there he will be able to understand what he knows he has the spirit of inside him already; and he knows this as he knew before he met and heard tell from a Zuhi outcast under a red cliff that his own already storied departure from his Navajo home in pursuit of the East Far Eastern Princess had caused his strange mother to come to life again together with the demon-raw hole in her head that shifted from forehead backward and forth, and that had closed up when she had died but opened when she had, according to the report, come again to life following her son’s sudden departure. And he hears inside him and outside the words Go away, but mixed with other words as if he is mixed with other people, who recall him in honor and remember him as man and child, and the words are here near the riverbank yet on the lips of a medicine woman speaking out of a cactus while his mother, who has tried to tell how her chronic malady came upon her, is restrained by an old woman and a young woman while the lips windowed by the head-like cactus explain for her that the Prince’s mother went walking in the mountain and saw a hunter withered suddenly to his mere skull and clothes and saw another man who told her to go away for there would be another flash hailstorm and she would be broken by those rocks of ice if not sucked away into the mountain. But these words (interrupted by the small boy’s being taken away from the sick person’s lean-to though he heard more words for a long while after that were carried to him or reached by a wind where they already existed in him) in turn have come, this night in Pennsylvania, from that immemorial isthmus the Prince, who is only a would-be knower, cleaves to a knowledge of that he seems, under the night light of the strange-smelling lumen cloud above him, to have come all this desperate way to find mixed inside himself: and these men, these hunters crossing from one world-territory to the other following the mammoth and the bison feel the brief isthmus breaking up under their strong feet—"strong man," he hears, but asks, Where are the women? and thereupon finds them tracking the brief but in some way unthinkably long isthmus, children on their backs, things in their dark hands, coming closer and closer to the men, from whom they are indistinguishable, falling back from the men as if drawn to the homes they left—"home," he hears, "Home is where one is," he hears, though the words come back to him from inside him where he has yet to go, if ever in this life, though "home" he hears as well outside him in the eastern night cold, holding still to the isthmus at the top of the two worlds breaking apart as the fur-skinned hunter people flow unconcernedly onto this world hardly looking back but he knows one man, no, one woman, no, a man and a woman near each other, turn away from each other to look back for each other and see only the isthmus dissolving into mist, reshaping all the other animals besides mammoth, bison, sheep birds of the long mountains bearing asleep in their stomachs the egg from which the whole rainbow range of most powerful snakes will uncoil upon and give motion to a heaven of new mountains and within grasses thickened by weathers not yet breathed: until this man and woman pair turn further and see each other and know it was each other they saw shaped and fluctuating and lighting up and glancing off the animal mist of the isthmus’s dissolution into sea.