Women and Men (225 page)

But the blue mare snorted long, and the Navajo Prince who sometimes now began to think of himself as "prince" felt without looking at her off there by the tree that her neck was tense, and he felt her eyes roll, and the isthmus of the two continents withdrew before a woman’s voice: "Are you a strong man?" It was what his mother had said to him sometime after the hole had opened in her head but before it had begun to shift position. But he must hold if he could to the isthmus, or to the pair standing together on the shore of the disintegrating isthmus, who saw this developing bay of suddenly broken land, this Bering passage of mist-hung water, curve away from them, or so the Navajo Prince now in another age saw from his riverbank in 1894; and now above them all, all of them, he felt a cleft or clefts opening where the heavens dropped a channel of such light as devoured some thing in those fixed in its anchorage: so that, as he looked up—"Good heavens, there’s nothing here, why where’s your camp?"—he could see sun-risen that old hunting couple rejoined into one aim so that, with safe canyons to the south in their single mind they turned as one, turned to the south . . . that is, he could see what he found he had wanted to explore in his own memory maybe set off by studying forces ripe in the bison’s dark tongue both fresh-killed in the North where his mother had secretly, wordlessly hinted he must go away as if from danger, and later dried so that the forces had compacted and withdrew into such intensely sleeping force that he heard in his taste glands their vow to sow this Earth with food that would never make the People hungry again: "Where is your home?" came the words, his mother’s when he had returned from the North convinced that in the narrowest compactions even perhaps in his very mind rested some chance of food, of trees, of health, and even unity between his own old Athabascan ancestors now the Dineh known to outsiders as
Navajo,
and far away where tiny fires bobbed on the water the Yahgan and the Ona peoples he knew of from an old, old man the Anasazi healer who had not healed anyone in centuries and who had chosen to die precisely when the Navajo Prince needed him yet could sit quiet and remote in thought no matter who came to ask him questions and who was honest in his knowledge, ascribing it to those who had brought it to him, in this case the irritable and thoughtful woman with hands like desert crabs, Mena, who studied (and reputedly sang to) desert javelinas as the Navajo Prince studied bisons’ bodies and who reported with such exactness she would say two different things at once and had told the Anasazi of these peoples from the South where she came from who wore no clothes part of the year and slept in the cold and rainy beech trees, though she told as well of other peoples who made feather cloaks like sand paintings and split and hacked out and ground mirrors of obsidian rock and sailed as far up as an island called Cuba and studied the heavens as well as the pods of food bushes: and again, "Where is your home?" he heard, looking up now mto the long and quite friendly lumen cloud immediately above containing, he saw, lensed widely into liquid, precisely that part of the bright Moon that was darkly missing from the sky tonight, a cloud he saw he had just plain not admitted to himself had followed him for days to pause each eastward night like a miniature sky or giant trunkless tree,
or
some threat of
cloudburst
in these regions so much more watery than his own, for in the moist messages like those columns he had pondered as a child mushrooming out at the top to tell a neighbor mountain what it did not know it knew, he smelt now seared metal fleshing such welcome with as well a hunter’s breakfast-taste of cornmeal cake that the distinctly communal "Oh-quaya" or, so faint was the last sound, "Oh-quay" (not unlike the "Dee Quay" he had been told was the Hermit-Inventor’s (quick) Anglo for
Dineh quaya,
"the People always") that came to him seemed to be out of this bright break in the lumen cloud opening a Moon-reserve he knew to be at the very least his old neighbor the Anasazi healer’s will though not his body unless his expressed wish not to be reincarnated had been ignored by those self-breathing airs into which he had given his life—"Oh quay," though, was what he heard, and it was the same secretly painful current the farmhouse doorways had passed through him showing him he now saw just how far he was along their river, yet, in the outward and returning threat of that current, telling him what he might not catch onto without losing
what?
some portion of his sleep? some swath of pride that went with him on the way to that East Far Eastern Princess and other inquiries and studies and explorations he bore in mind? some bottomless power in the bison-body he held in the pocket sewn of the great deer’s skin? And yet this loss—of anything, of everything—of the Anasazi’s heart-voice dropping light down through the Navajo Prince so he must turn and face the woman voice that likewise said,
Oh quay,
but in the question "Are you oh quay?" turn away too from the Bering Strait hunter couple with one aim now bending south seeking not just food, but not each other either—this loss that divided him like one who bleeds from two wounds far apart came at him faster than the fastest attack, suddener than the Pressure Snake that drew the sky into the mountain as the second hunter man had said—his very last words to the Prince’s mother one afternoon before the Prince was born when she had wandered away up into the mountain like a lone visitor—and the loss came at him now in the "Pennsy" night (for he heard in his head and in the knuckle of his left, free hand the land’s name thus shortened) so he knew
he
was watched by
what
he watched and by, if not the Anglo girl Margaret doubled like the Moon, doubled as Margaret and the Eastern Princess, doubled as a strong-faced woman who endlessly asked about drying vegetables for storage and about crop-planting season and rainfall, and about irrigation, and about customs of rolling in the snow for strength and birthing babies by hanging on the branch of a pine tree (and many female questions to Tall Salt and other women) and about the use of cedar for houses and dead wood for fires, and must learn to weave and must think through thoroughly the cooking of what she named "less sweet yams," the fruit of the blue yucca, and make very small circle cakes with no middle so the women laughed at them and looked through the hole—this person who was also the soft-cheeked young mother, as he imagined her, singing, "Put on your old gray bonnet with the blue ribbons on it, and we’ll hitch old Dobbin to the shay," this foreigner who toward the end of her stay gave him the name of Prince, Navajo Prince (their private name for him he wasn’t sure he liked, though drawn possibly from the plants he taught her) and kissing him like an animal he had seen in a dream with her lower lip and upper lip separately though together many times one night upon a mesa watched by the eye of a tall, ripe old cactus, while she softened like late light so he realized how tough and strong she
had
been, watched as he knew he was now, months later, at his poor camp on the bank of the Juniata, not just by the pale-haired woman standing urgent near him but by some pale-faced boy somewhere—in the smoke-bright cleft of the cloud overhead or in the dream-blink of after-image when he looked away, some pale-nosed boy lying—where?—wide-eyed but asleep behind those eyes, who was also a man and yet who was always dividing and dividing in the pound of the Navajo Prince’s ears and temples and eyes, pounding into two, into two boys: but, thinker and studier of things and of force—and of terrain reaching always behind him to mountains that, whether it was dream or thought they sent outward over the land, had changed and plagued and sickened his mother since before he was born, and terrain ahead, east and north . . .

east to the Susquehanna Iroquois who he had heard nearby would tell him the meaning of two dreams he had had after fighting to the death a Plains Cree warrior with six rifles lashed to his horse over the way he had wasted half the body of a great queenly bison in order to get her hide to paint his conquest of her on—in the middle of one solitary morning’s vast and silver dawn during the spring when he discovered invisibility both in the presence of his father and far away while watching a Thunder Dreamer at a campfire wrestle a many-fingered yucca-creamflower-eating mestizo until the two of them became one suspiciously looking for the young nomad Navajo studying them while chewing a local winter-loving plant like prince’s pine but up there called by the Cree
pipisisikweu
("it breaks it up into small pieces")—though he felt so firmly his invulnerability to their single-minded search for him that he knew the leathery leaves and pink and dark-pink flower had dispersed his material appearance sufficiently for him to be quosi-quaia unseeable for a time . . .

and north to the Iroquois of the New York State where Margaret said a relative of her family had visited a league of Indian nations so devoid of poverty he had written her big-footed cousin Alexander that to be poor in America was your own fault in general and here was a society where no one stole, and white men in other worlds had heard of this and would copy it . . . the Navajo Prince, thinker and studier of things, will not put mere vision of one or two pale-faced boys over truth, guessing from the Hermit that, just before leaving, Margaret was with child: so it was way too soon for those two to be his own sons looking pale-faced up at the sky: nor need they be two! for suddenly they are one again in the face of the pale-haired woman wrapped in a green blanket here at what she pitied as not much of a camp at all, talking to him about being out of work and of a man who will lead an army of jobless soon and she was his beloved cousin near here along the Susquehanna but is not any more, while the Navajo Prince knows perhaps in her honest face that the vision of the two boys who were one and then one again is their vision and theirs is of him, here, and thinking of the waste of his forces wandering these continental paths in search of knowledge and the Princess and the eastern coast, he feels the sweat of his buckskin pocket’s bison tongue and wakes to such residue of that current that flew through him forth and back into the farm doorways he has visited that he is stabbed to understand that the hunter couple crossing that disintegrating isthmus were a nearly unthinkably long time past and the boy or boys seen by him are ahead in time so that while he cannot understand how that can be, for he knows that that boy is not yet born, he knows he is seen by the boy, watched in
wonder,
it comes to him in the midst of the woman’s words about a man named Jacob Coxey he doesn’t know and a cruel town named Chicago he does know though through the Hermit, who had watched over Margaret there and had studied the shadow of the wind blasting off the Chicago Lake and the secrets of new stone buildings in which people would work—knew of Chicago also through Margaret, who found it a wonderful meeting of all nations—meanwhile as that boy who is at once a man lying as if buried where he sleeps looks straight upward not over here toward the Navajo Prince in 1894, the Navajo Prince by some turn knows himself to be there
before
that boy’s eyes, light that glances off the boy’s speaking lips and that bends vision to oneself and
gets
bent and divided by it into other people’s stories that ours become, divided by it into the useful and the great, the colored and the penetrating, and is a mask through which the orphaned Prince recognizes the holes in
his
head, the eyes forming and the nose and mouth, holes opening even before the face forms in some time held glimmering within a cloud maybe like the cloud above him that he knows contains his old acquaintance the Anasazi in his interim and humorous compromise with reincarnation; and the Prince is glad that this future boy-man he has seen sees not only him but other worlds, other moons, other mesas, valleys, skies, new food sources that could keep hungry people from weakness (for Margaret’s circle cakes called doughnuts that she had said did not puff out well enough gave strength though made one want more and more, indeed like Margaret’s words), even new beings in those other worlds of the future that like the bison’s tongue-flesh could compact the past and life of other beings into power that the Great Spirit or all the gods dispersed in smaller scale could receive and return as creative force for living at peace; and the Prince now could read the very light on the lips of that boy who is somehow Margaret’s boy, and the lips meet and part, meet and part, was he recalling happily something eaten? was he saying Margaret’s name?, for the Navajo Prince can’t be sure he’s not finding himself on that dividing mouth, having found his creature self inside that glimmering cloud, with something like light running out of it which was only unfriendly when it came from farmhouse doorways that did not understand a stern, hungry Indian who refused to steal field roots or chickenhouse eggs, only unfriendly when it was that current that passed out into and through him and then passed back, returning into the farmhouse doorways from which it came so that he did not want to wake to what it was, lest he feel pain or die, until now he realized it was Time.

How long have you been here? the pale-haired vagabond woman asks and she sits down beside him tight and tall in her blanket as the cloud closes above them and his wrist presses the metal of his pistol and its designs.

How long is the future? he asks.

The future takes too long, she says. The workingman is forgotten every day. That is why Coxey’s Army will set out on Easter Sunday from Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York to march to Washington.

The
white
workingman, the Navajo Prince replied, feeling in his right palm the sweat of unknown compactions breathing from the cut of bison tongue, word of him among his People, his going-away, his mutual teaching with an Anglo beloved whom he told of the
original casa blanca
not in white Washington but in sandstone Canyon de Chelly, oh word of him, his love for an Anglo and for his studies, his mother’s death, stories woven larger and larger in the future he now had a terrible belief in, or pressed smaller and smaller by ostracism and forgetting.