Women and Men (36 page)

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).

"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.

Grace Kimball came east out of the West, hung high above the clouds, and for many moments pursuing the night with all of America around her, she wanted her brother, who wasn’t delivering milk any more, and had a job and was just married, so instead of him it was all of America she let herself desire to be in like a restless, pivoting (not yet unfaithful) spouse—from the wind-filled gorges of Wyoming where a hermit uncle lived, from the gusty Great Lake near overflowing into Minnesota where her brother had served on a cutter; from the herds and vast hot green of the Flint Hills near Wichita; from the school grandstands that she had once seen from a distance approaching an Oklahoma wheatfield as if the miles of pale brown grasses drew spectators with no football field in between, from town to town throw in the extreme southern Rockies of nearby New Mexico of all this sentimental continent, she loved it. She wanted anything but New York, anything flying in the opposite direction, anything but the New York she flew toward when she also felt but didn’t know she felt (right?) that New York was where everyone and no one would know her—didn’t know this any more than (she knew that) she might like to lie down with her brother beside the man-made lake they grew up swimming in, lie down with her brother another year, nor could have known then (could she?) that she would (in private with her intimates, at least, if not to her loosely structured Body-Self Workshop)
preach
incest if you feel like it for our post-marital era with its changed alliance systems: Came out of the West, she did, like—