Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Oh Poppy, I’m not Jim; I almost hit you. What are you talking about, Poppy? I almost hit you. I stepped on your beautiful shoes, Poppy, did I hurt you? You have silver on your red socks, Poppy."

He opened his eyes and his mouth in the sun, and remembered how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been, how mad he’d been.

Their smoky fire held their faces close to it and kept the Moon’s clearer light far down the course of the tree-shrouded sky. The blonde woman gave Alexander an apple and wrapped herself again in her blanket.

"This Indian said he did not need to eat much. He had been followed by this cloud. I did not believe him at first. I know what work pays and what it costs to buy a blanket, I don’t believe in magic. But then neither did he. He said he knew the cloud contained an old friend. He said he himself contained spirits of ice stones that had come from the sky, and they were spiral — and he made the motion with his hands, and then he went to sleep. But later he woke up."

"He did not dishonor you," said Alexander.

The woman shook her head pensively. "Some mad Indian you mean?" she said. Alexander smiled into the blazing, smoking fire. He felt compelled. " ‘What work pays’?" he asked. "I don’t understand."

The woman ignored his query. "Your clothes, your shoes," she said. "Do you travel like this?"

"Almost never, but my cousin who is a medical student says I am part porcupine."

"He had a horse over by a tree. It looked blue in the river darkness."

"Near here?"

"Not the same river. A different river. The Juniata, south and west from here. He was on his way to consult with the Iroquois. He had come all the way from New Mexico territory."

"To do that?"

"He was on his way east. He said he was going to meet a woman."

"Going?"

"He asked me if I had seen storms rise up out of eastern mountains. He asked me if I could smell seared metal coming from the night-glowing cloud above us. He asked me if there were tall houses that cast a wind shadow."

"What did you say?"

"To all these questions I said I did not know."

"How did he swallow the dollop of night-glowing cloud?"

"He said the friend up there was hundreds of years old."

"Perhaps he meant that through his people he carried a long history in him."

"He was more of a scientist. But I liked him because he said he was studying secrets that would give his people more food to live and more water to grow their crops and he was looking for material to build with that would last. I told him that white workers did not have enough to eat either."

"Old Marion Hugo, your" (Yes) "in those journals, Granddad" (Yes) "Was he the one who mentioned a Morgan" (Yes) "a mathematician from" (Yes) "from Europe, an Alsatian, I think, who played the pickel flute" (Yes, yes, the pickelflote) "and did he know — did he know that zoologist gal who had the mother back in South America who wrote music? what about that, Alexander?"

Later he woke, and he reached at once into his pocket as if to see if something was still there. She herself never slept except when a dream was coming on and then she would find a place to sleep for the length of the dream. He told her he was going to the Iroquois to find the meaning of two dreams. This was a turning from where he was going but he had faith he would meet his beloved. She was carrying his child, he was certain, but she had left without telling him. There was a great emptiness between them and they were in touch with each other because there was a river like an underground river in their bodies, a river of blood and milk with a thousand invisibly small beings flowing in it and each was a thought of theirs in common.

Alexander felt like he was asleep and the campfire was losing itself in him. He asked why the Indian’s woman had left. The blonde woman said she had to go back and see her people, he said. The Indian loved her very much and he loved his studies. Alexander could understand that.

Yes, said the blonde woman. And she had in common with the Indian that she had a beloved who was apart from her.

How so? asked the young man with the black satchel and red socks and muddy shoes.

Her beloved was married and lived in Ohio, and she had known him once in Pennsylvania when he was only a boy working a stationary engine in a rolling mill. She knew what he knew. She knew how the ingot is rolled and rolled to become the right-shape sheet of steel. How the mills use sand from quarries. How much the owner sells the steel for. Her beloved knew the workers. He knew the farmers, too. He had General Grant’s love of horseflesh. He became a rich man but cared for the workers. He was leading a march on Washington at Eastertime. She was a fallen woman, but she did not care now. Her lot was cast with the real people who made the industrial clockworks run and who made the corn grow and who walked long roads to get to their work and to look for work as well. Her lot was not with the hundreds of Pinkerton detectives ferried by night up the Monongahela (Alexander nodded), but with the men who needed greenbacks to seed their fields (Alexander nodded, thinking that Monongahela was both an Algonquian name and the name of a whiskey). A river has two coasts, she mused.

He said, You are talking about Jacob Coxey. He is the reason I came to Selinsgrove.

The woman frowned. She told him that that was what she had heard in town and why she had followed him here to the river.

"No, of course you’re not your daddy Jim, sweetheart; I was replying to him… but I took so long that. ."

"Oh Poppy."

"Dumb old Poppy."

"Yes, you’re very old."

"I’m almost ninety."

"Sweetheart old Poppy. See how high I can throw the ball."

Two rivers, the Juniata where things were heard and the Susquehanna where those things were told.

"That’s very high, Flicky, very very high. Who taught you to throw that high?"

"Nobody."

"Where did your father go?"

"In the house. What’s the matter with him?"

"Nothing. I think a friend of his died."

"Is he going to the funeral?"

"I think she died far away in South America."

"Look at Andrew. He can ride his bike."

He said air came in vast sheets that water might ride on or ice or poisons, or bad spirits or mixtures. He said these planes controlled the wind and might raise water like a hundred buckets so it ran nearly upward into the great bush of a cloud and might well pass back above the river guided aloft by the river’s course and empty down into it so you could wash in the same water seven days later. He said he and his woman talked all night and each learned to hear new things that only the other had been able to before. Each bent the heart and will to the other. She told him of a Statue that was the highest in the world guarding an ocean harbor with light and she had seen it when its head and limbs were scattered over an island. When she went home she would go inside it. He must have been talking about the Statue of Liberty.

Yes, said Alexander.

He said his woman had a friend among her people whom she respected very much, and he had very big feet and was wise and went fishing in a lake where there were pine trees only smaller than the ones in the West, which was of interest because, as this man told me, they might be smaller because they were weaker or smaller because they grew for a different purpose. His woman’s friend back among her people went fishing because there were many lakes there. She must go back and see him someday, she would say. She called this cousin an angel.

Alexander was wide awake and got up to find more wood. He offered the blonde woman the apple she had given him but she shook her head and he bit into it. He brought a great branch and left it beside the fire and sat down.