Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"I was a tourist; that’s all I was."

"You were much more than that, Margaret," her husband said with a strength of accent that made the grandson stop chewing and look at these people he spent quite a lot of time with — well, much more than that — his grandmother had taught him to whistle when he was a small child coming into bed with her in the morning when he stayed over.

You know they gave the new Santa Fe Railroad the right of way forty miles either side of the tracks but they broke it into one-mile squares and the railroad got the odd-numbered squares like the grandfather’s checkerboard and some of those odd squares the People, the Navajo Nation, had been running their sheep on for the twenty years since they were allowed out of that mass internment-tomb Fort Sumner during the Civil War, and long before that, before that country through which they walked three hundred miles to captivity (people do that) beside the screak and shimmy of their wagon wheels had even conceived of the Santa Fe trackbed.

Jim heard some cowboys in a movie render the song "Wagon Wheels," he looked forward to Saturday matinee at one of the two movie houses, and his younger brother Brad, who occasionally cooked at home and wasn’t much of an athlete and come to think of it wasn’t very smart either though sensitive, was the one in the family who played checkers now and then with the grandfather who talked while playing, and Brad didn’t mind being beaten.

Well, they grew corn, those Indians, they had their fried bread, they had to go a ways to find water; seed mush they made; we saw squash, we saw melons, and the end-to-end pestles of a pony’s bones, and long after Margaret’s day we see pihon nuts like wampum growing on trees except salted and in jars and hear a goat chomping on a succulent fruit of some cactus in the middle of nowhere, which is a large loose place accommodating on a map a host of small-scale possibilities.

You couldn’t imagine how undernourishment makes fat, Margaret was saying. The railroad was liquor, the railroad was sickness shot straight into the system.

"No immunities, of course," added the grandfather.

Though it was the railroad that swelled Coxey’s Army of the unemployed in ‘94—the big contingents came from west of the Rockies—

A third of them were newspaper correspondents, Margaret laughed, and Jim didn’t right then but some time after did think (historically), so it wasn’t 1893 any more and she was still out there.

A thousand from Los Angeles, two thousand from San Francisco, Cant-well’s Army from Seattle, nine hundred came from Oregon but only fifty-eight marched from Boston.

One from New Jersey, said Margaret.

Oh I went out to meet you, said Alexander.

And missed us both, she said to him.

But got back home in time, said Alexander, so that Jim didn’t ask what he meant. Margaret recurred to the Navajo question. Kit Carson killed their sheep.

But at the time of the Civil War and Fort Defiance and’Fort Sumner and the eight thousand captivity, a rebel group hid out on Black Mesa, among them the very Navajo whose father’s cousin had taken the pistol in question from a Mexican who’d taken it off one of General John Wool’s young lieutenants at Buena Vista in 1847 an obviously communal pistol that Samuel Colt the original inventor was said to have manufactured in Hartford about the time the Mexican War revived his failed firearm business that had begun in Paterson, New Jersey, mind you.

Jim wasn’t much interested in Buena Vista and neither was his grandfather, who knew history but didn’t amplify on Buena Vista beyond some of the steps by which the military sidearm on the mantel in the study had passed into family life, steps which in the collective mind from the time that, back East, the Windrow Democrat was observing its tenth birthday, to a generation and a half later approaching the present century, this pistol that changed hands and belonged successively could appear to proliferate concurrently into many pistols.

"I was a tourist," said the grandmother.

"You were much more than that, Margaret, coming as well as going."

The boy stood up from the table drinking the last of his milk.

"I leave the history to you," she said.

He carried a plate and glass to the sink, grabbed a cruller from the jar whose top the grandfather had left off, but with the door knob in his hand on his way out to the kitchen porch he heard, "Whoa, mister," he had forgotten and was being told clearly what his first errand was before he set foot out of the house.

But whose child, and where, is this? asks the interrogator, and we can hear in the pounding, the noise, in our stereo earphones that he has said "we" — that is, in his statement, We cannot wait any longer for you to decide which you mean. And did the grandfather mean he went out to meet Margaret and someone else when she was returning from the West?

And, noting his "we," we see (but we see nothing — we hear. Hear) our own breathing from several parts of the room, breathing that is not that plural one of the eight sacred kinds of breathing but is literally more than one of him in the room, as if he’s all things to us, which he’s not —and the pounding in our ear is not just us but the telephone torture aforethought by our physician when we imagined what would deter his diva from going on with her fascist mufti, and which we now get without actually seeing, and if the telephone treatment is somebody clapping behind us so two hands never meet yet do meet cupped in the intermediating head — boop boop — whose bared ears they insufferably clap upon hearing us, in lieu of answering the interrogator’s demand we interpose the point "He’s not a child —by this time Jim’s probably thirteen going on fourteen!"

Yet the pain just isn’t quite here — you know? — that is, the pain in the sense of a weight of needing to be instantly not here; and the torturer’s clapping hands in this telephone treatment (if it’s not more than one torturer around us) crash through our head and hardly squash it except to the verge of being in the abstract, and, passing through, meet soundless so that we are threatened with having been already sacrificed to the void without living our death as did (unsedated) an occasional Pawnee maid, whose heart belonged (if not to Laughing Antler here tonight gone tomorrow to the high horizon’s ridge) to Morning Star, rising and dying god of vegetables, son of the Sun God and of Mother Earth, though of the four Pawnee groups the Tapage (or Noisy) went in hardly at all for human sacrifice and if you want to know about that kind of thing look south of the border because our Indians don’t carry on like that, as that original New Jersey explorer Zebulon Pike of Pike’s Peak certainly had at least the time to put it, who before being taken captive from Santa Fe to Chihuahua encountered Pawnee in his quest for the headwaters of the Arkansas; ate toasted spirals of pumpkin flesh (he s’posed they were) but never knowingly met with one of the then but not later (by historians) taken-for-granted sex surrogate aunts of the Pawnees and anyhow had hardly enough bare let alone red skin to pose as her traditional pupil-nephew (Yeah, yeah, yeah, good ol’ A-position P-V — read penis-vagina if you don’t read power-vac —a later Grace "Enters," punching into her single Self such programs of Change that, despite being that reliable mid-American one-thirty-second Pawnee, she is into habitually breaking Habit Patterns) nor did Zebulon ever personally see a girl’s heart cut out for Morning Star Mexican-style. . Zebulon Pike, explorer, geographer, American, who, if he got the wrong lake thinking he had the source of the Mississippi in Minnesota, still came close.