Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

His grandmother, who no longer read to him, knew how to appreciate what happened next, all that was going on, she really saw it. "Why, that’s almost what happened to the Far East Princess" — Margaret looked up from the steaming frying pan into the ventilator over the range and gave a laugh as if she couldn’t help it till it began to come out: and in those days, she said— as if Jim’s maybe just waking daydream was of that time too — it got dark faster than the bird with its lunchtime horse tasty and warm under its wing could fly, though urged on by the Eastern Princess whom the bird would not land until they had reached the flower-shaped mountain which her father the king of the Long White Country thousands of air miles away (since his daughter was determined to travel anyway) had asked them to make an inspection tour of in order to learn all there was to know about the Indian way of doing things. So the great bird went without the lunch held captive under its wing and partly because it already held in its beak another horse, the white-and-black pony the Navajo Prince from a cliff, a crag, far ahead had called out to the Eastern Princess up in the sky on her bird was hers as a gift from all the fast ponies in the pack of wild, royal, and vanishing horses that traveled with him this day that a great sing was to be held, the ceremonial Night Way to heal a hole in the head of the Prince’s mother who sang her own song saying she would let the hole in her head be while, visible to others, spirits of many shapes flew in and out of this demon den in the upper middle of her forehead and her son the Prince had gone away to consult a Sioux cousin in the Northeast, get his thinking on the subject since he had twenty daughters and the Prince had been coming back over the plains and among the sheer canyons when he had seen the giant bird and the Eastern Princess, and, seeing the bird dive and take one horse under its wing and aim at another that was swinging wildly off back to the pack, the fastest and most beautiful, had called out over the miles from his lonely crag that that horse was hers, upon which the bird, swooping again, perhaps concerned that its mistress would find a new steed and desert the bird of the Long White Country, took the gift horse in its beak and flew on: which is all background to the twilight arrival at the flower-shaped mountain as preparations went on for the Night Sing to heal the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head where as night came you could see some of the demons settling down in there, not moving around any more, they liked it there. So when the Eastern Princess flew in on her giant pale-colored bird she was accepted as a harbinger of some change the Night Way chants might bring. And when asked if she saw the demons with winged heads and fat cheeks passing in and out of the Prince’s mother’s hole-in-the-head said only that she did not — but that she did find herself seeing into the thoughts of the young, handsome Indian Prince whom she had met on the way and who pointed to her now as an event he had brought to his people.

But as Jim — having spent the night down the street at his grandparents’ and having understood he was probably not alone — sat at the kitchen table that he had laid with plates and silver for three, and doodled drawings that weren’t drawings really but parts of drawings on a pad of his grandfather’s lined paper, he needed to know more before he could tell if his grandmother was correct that the woman in the mirror of his vision was almost the same as the Eastern Princess. For there were some differences, out there in that western territory. Here he was, now arrived in the center of the glittering internecine fires, they were telling him a thing in Indian he knew he understood and had more than once heard in American words but did not, there among the fires, recollect—

— because it was all one single language, said his grandmother, that’s what you forgot — but who was the person? she asked, if you know who, then you’ll know what. .

— but he understood that the council fires had other fish to fry — heard a guffaw from the distant living room and the crackle of a newspaper — and the circling talk had told him and his stolen pony that he had to go back where he came from and tell his people their peace offer was not enough and they would have to send a hostage. But desiring to stay there in the burning dark of the ring of glittering campfires, he called to them. And it came out in their language. Which if he tried to understand, then he didn’t, but when he stopped trying he got the main idea that he could be the one to stay, he was volunteering because he was already there, why go back, he’d make the decision there and then and be the hostage.

But at that instant the fires were banked and seemed to retreat and he was left down the barrel of the family Colt revolver knowing that now behind him lay all that land and the other way, which was the only direction he could go because he was cramped, was a pale, nocturnal woman seeing him and he didn’t know if she was in a mirror or he was looking down the barrel at her until the American words of the Indian directive came silently from her to him and he knew she was a decision, a future decision, and he woke with the familiar words, words his mother down the street had spoken more than once but as he woke he heard only the bubbling doves, heard them until he knew that it was them.

"That woman was the Eastern Princess, probably," his grandmother had said, "or at least she reminds me of her," going on to the next step which was the familiar story of the Princess’s arrival among the Navajo the night of the Night Sing.

Jim’s grandfather came into the kitchen with last night’s Newark paper. "At it again," he said, admiring the strips of rationed bacon being lifted on a spatula out of a smoking pan onto a torn-open brown paper bag.

"At what again?" said Jim, who’d heard it before so it must mean this first-thing-in-the-morning get-together between an enthralled vision reporter and a true tale teller.

"Your grandfather’s mind is like a perfectly clear pool," said Margaret.

"Or you see to the bottom of it because it isn’t very deep," said Alexander.

"The Navajo Prince s grandfather," said Margaret — and Jim knew she said it to him—"when he taught him to spear fish showed him it was the clear waters of the stream that were always deeper than they looked."

"But for sheer sharpness," returned Jim’s grandfather, "few could match the East Far Eastern Princess who at a turning point in her life disarmed the Navajo Prince, acquired a Colt revolver, and with amazing foresight changed the course of history."

Jim wanted a canoe though he’d been in a canoe only once. He would never ask his grandparents for it. His mother in her way of seeming not to make noise when she spoke had said that if Jim could earn half she would dig up the rest — what later were known as matching funds. Was there only one Colt pistol out there, for God’s sake?

"You can’t imagine how poor they were," said Margaret of the Navajo. "It’s common knowledge and it’s getting worse."

Oh Alexander recalled her dispatches to the Windrow Democrat, it was 1893 because that’s why she went to Chicago, the World’s Fair, the New Jersey exposition, the crystal labyrinths. But then she went further west and her dad, then editor of the Democrat, was fit to be tied, but she sent back good copy, from Dakota, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico. How did she do it? she was nineteen, a sensible girl in a long skirt and high neck, a hat with a brim you didn’t argue with though she changed her costume at some Dakotan point west-northwest of Chicago-Omaha, Jim Mayn for years never looked those articles up in the Democrat archives in the basement of the red brick Revolutionary home that housed the Historical Association (capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units).