Women and Men (77 page)

Which end was supposed to be when the People forget the Blessing Way that positions the Earth and the Moon, the mountains and the sky, the He and She rains, and lose power over the winds and lightning and over the great wolf we had rather not see and the nuclear coyote den-bound its entire first year waiting to be fed by its parents but quite competent to bring disease in a dream: this threat doubled, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York (whose own depth cared not a whit for Indian lore as lore), if besides the coyote you discern the deer the coyote runs at, at night where the mountain relative to the long plateau stirs unfelt by those who move around upon it— but what is doubled, the disease or the dream? for the Hermit-Inventor of New York and his other appearances in the century in question has it both ways and doesn’t answer questions except those posed by himself in what is left of his railroad flat in Manhattan which Mayn, a conservative newsman, keeps separate from grandmotherly fables of some last century and this current Hermit-Inventor isn’t available for comment to interrogators or their delegates who don’t even
know
they would like to ask if Margaret Mayne found the East Far Eastern
Princess
glinting in the ingot of the vacationing New York hermit’s eye in 1893 or the Princess passing on her new horse found in that eyrie glint
Margaret.

For the interrogator like the diva’s officer betrays that special personal neatness of the police, and can seem our personal interrogator with the seared earphones bearing terrible frequencies in honor equally of lie or true. Still, like a breathless stammerer, he asks where we were coming from and what our thrust was when we reported that the diva whose tapeworm once just about obscured her its host is acquainted in all those opera cities with so many exiles better than herself. And we, who have sometime felt the burden of the interrogator’s thrust have gone out of our way to save Mayn when it was he who casually told Lar’ that this Hermit (in his 1893 manifestation) from the City of the East was remarkable single
or
plural.

Only listen to what comes out of you. Because Waste Can Be Recycled, this truth has made it onto afternoon TV even when no one is in the room to watch, although why can’t Mayn see how what he is takes him right off a bar napkin, that is right off the diagram he draws on it of wind-force in terms of length:

Which can’t express that one wind if it tried except by some second diagram (or sometime four-color map) of all the words that ever used to substitute in that family for feelings that were
its
history: where a mother unhappy but mysterious about it left, but had already left
before
she left.

Larry had pointed out that the Hermit-Inventor had, O.K., taken his five to six months’ vacation from New York but not necessarily from
himself.
But if you listen to what comes out of you—as if you knew much real history— you risk hearing not just breath, which is also spring air dividing around the man Jim’s father, the young man, dressed up (cutaway and mustache) for someone else’s vintage wedding and (on the running board of a vintage roadster coasting like a figure skater)—but you risk as well hearing your own voice which can contain incarnate that once-young best man five minutes before meeting and being introduced into the future of a young woman who was ever after thought to have wed him because of her family newspaper the Windrow
Democrat
(exactly nine months to the day before Jim, the first of that mother’s two sons, came two weeks early to light—but doesn’t that mean a whirlwind romance, or
something?)

But your voice can contain also conglomerates of seemingly grandfather-generated facts: such as that William Heighton, editor of the
Mechanics Free Press
in the late 1820s and the founder of the Philadelphia Working Men’s Movement in Jackson’s time, had been a cordwainer, and, regardless of that, that cordovan itself (from that Spanish
city
of leather, Cordoba) was either goatskin or split horsehide and, unlike morocco, holds its natural grain (when tanned and dressed) and regardless of
this,
continued Mayn’s grandfather Alexander

(who went out in vain to wait for Margaret or seek her where she did not expect it when she returned in early 1894 from the West stopping, stooping, finding in Ohio and Pennsylvania detours from the myth of her journey near its end as if, fearing (which she really did not) her father’s reaction to her being months late coming home, she flew in on a wind only to target some penultimate capillaries by which, having blown in at last to the great City of the East, she took her strange time winding down to Windrow fifty miles away)

Hakluyt in his
Voyages
refers to that costly Spanish leather
Cordoweyn
cargoed with "figs, raisins, honey, dates, and salt"—

—and for a moment we who have stood back in invisible company with the interrogator and his ready whip must add through the thinking fingers of an unseen-composer-furniture-mover-part-time-boyfriend to the basso rotondo adding them in an aria central to the climax of his original soon-to-be-privately-showcased comic opera of
Hamlet
(with music so strangely derivative it might be from an undiscovered score of the
Otello-Falstqff
’master) nine rhymes, one for each year of wear that according to the gravedigger the unusually waterproof body of a tanner will last (like Shakespeare’s problem child through upwards of a score of different tragic operas) after and beyond burial but this time with one mystery-guest star-singer whom he (tough little unknown Roslein) has leaned on and maybe another star who would be the curious diva—

: an illustrious craft, cordwainery, added Jim Mayn’s grandfather, who knew good shoe leather and who kept a curiously successful Odds and Ends & Second-Hand (mainly American war) Books shop diagonally across (the Jersey Central tracks) from the firehouse—and we hear, he said, in England of the cordwainers’ craft guild in the City of Exeter suing for favor to the Lord Mayor—

"... who was sometimes a Yard," said Margaret—"Bob Yard’s father’s family, very important in Exeter before they came here, even if Bob’s more like a Spanish pirate with those wall eyes."

Which was neither here nor there, said Jim’s grandfather, who spoke facts like a tongue and as if he fancied them plucked free of causality’s warp or cured of any fleeting convergence with others.

Yet this was just his habit. For, by contrast, witness the Mayne family pistol, i.e., what Grandfather Alexander did with it by way of tracing it but never in Jim’s memory
holding
it along two alternative dumb courses: the
‘
‘mantel
piece,"
he neatly called it before Jim knew "piece" was a word for a hand firearm—where it rested above the parlor hearth pointing at a couple of finger-like cigar containers that were monster fingers of course. The serial number on the left side of the cylinder supposedly dated its manufacture well prior to the 1847 run of one thousand Colts rushed down to Mexico for the Battle of Chapultepec, an order that had revived if not rejuvenated Samuel Colt’s business at its new factory in Hartford after it had failed in Paterson a few years previous.

Now, in 1894 the Navajo Prince told a blonde woman by a Pennsylvania river bank at dawn that he had found the pistol some two years ago in a cliff by the light of the double Moon upon that retired medicine man the last of the Anasazi people. He was so old he was likely beyond death or mere life and in weight as light as, according to Grandfather Alexander’s own estimate, those six-hundred-year-old Texans breathing the purest air there was, in the time when the guerrilla Charlie Quantrill with the lynx eyes preyed on Kansas abolitionists, killed twenty-eight (he said) of his brother’s murderers, and vanished into East Texas to be afterward the brains behind Jesse James whose appropriation of federal funds was to have enabled the redleg-Abolitionist-hating Quantrill to reopen the Civil War which would have been another effect of the Texas "pure" that kept some Lone Star elders alive six hundred years until they dried up and were wafted away eastward where they might have mingled, leaf-crumble-like, with the crude oil and snakeroot used as a last and Indian resort after emetics, cathartics, "cupping," and opium to bring round old General Harrison whose Inaugural Address of March 1841 though edited, expurgated, and violently abridged by Daniel Webster still ran too long (at one hour and forty minutes) for the brand-new President to survive without an overcoat or survive as a historical power (for unlike the body of the immortal Tecumseh the body of General Harrison was not at once secreted mysteriously away so that having never been seen to leave, it might be expected to return). A woman naturalist in the Southwest who was thought mad not because she, a Chilean far from home, claimed a blood bond with the Anasazi medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince had taken the pistol but because she had developed white lips exactly like those of the fierce javelina (or peccary), the only wild pig native to the Americas whose habits and in particular curious scent glands situated in the rump she had been studying on foot all the way north from some teeming point of the Chile-Argentine border, reported that the late medicine man had been given the pistol in question by a many-fingered mestizo spy who had coveted it but upon acquiring it had been uneasy with it precisely because he had been told he mustn’t "unload" it on (or divest himself of it to) anyone except a dark healer at least a century old. Or so he had been assured by the young Englishman with white or blond hair who had let himself be hoodwinked in a game of chance the night before the Battle of Chapultepec in September 1847 in return for recovering his speech which he had lost when questioned some days before about a German visitor (perhaps a spy) who had left with him a map-like, abstract-chart-like thing executed on a square of paper and had then disappeared on a road north toward Guanajuato’s silver-veined hills—
questioned
the young English person had been by one Marion Hugo Mayne with an
e
usually, whose western diaries had come into his distant relative Alexander’s hands years ago (read
years later)
from a friend of Margaret’s, and, bound with them, an account in brown ink in a different hand but with a curiously similar manner and vocabulary, of President Jackson’s use of a safe widower Martin Van Buren in gaining some measure of social acceptance for Peggy O’Neill Eaton, a tavernkeeper’s daughter whose second husband, Jackson’s Secretary of War, she had had relations with prior, though, to marrying him, all of which irked Old Hickory up to and beyond his angry reaction to Henry Clay’s attack on his bank policy, which in turn pushed the President to shift large deposits from the Bank of the United States to "pet" banks just when these claims must be paid out in gold for western lands so that the banks were, so to speak, financially embarrassed when then forced to meet the sudden demands of English banks for repayment of short-term loans. And so it went, as Alexander’s grandson Jim Mayn more than once told a late-evening colleague in a bar of some American city—and Van Buren got stuck with the Panic of 1837.

But the year before the depressed winter of ‘37~’38 when Greeley wrote of "filth, squalor . . . want, and misery" in New York’s Sixth Ward, who but the cordwainers led the way toward federation of local craft unions convening leatherworkers from all over including Philadelphia whence notably the aforementioned editor Heighton, not to mention the Mayn family founding editor of the Windrow
Democrat,
a Mason who had been pressuring President Jackson to explain his interest in a village attorney’s daughter from upstate New York who had pursued her lover William Morgan all the way to New York and Philadelphia after he had been in a way expelled from that upstate village by being thrown into its local jail for promising to reveal Masonic secrets and had been then sprung secretly one morning by a supposed friend who had disappeared after having allegedly tried and failed to shoot Morgan on the road.

"Cleopatra’s Nose," Mayn’s grandfather would muse—the fine trivia that workaday Mayn and his "ilk" dumbly overlooked—but his grandfather had once mentioned it when Jim had asked about the wanderings of a pistol and there was a gun-control law somewhere in the speculations of his granddad’s memory, for Jim had never known him to hunt or target-shoot, or to touch that pistol on the mantel, and one day Jim might get back to figuring it out because who else was likely to trace the firearms of that earlier family history—unless it was one of his brother Brad’s kids back home in Windrow a million miles from those ancient rainfall fluctuations that may have converged upon the Anasazi cliff dwellers parallel with (and independent of) the Apaches climbing their lethal ladders (as the East Far Eastern Princess compassionately learned) up into those sun-annealed apartment-house honeycombs with not just rabid blood in their hearts but with undreamt knowledge of a magic oil that the Navajo Prince’s irritable though ventriloquially musical mother (for whom the ceremonial sing was in progress the night he arrived with his newfound Manchoor Anglo girl) would apply to restore if not her temper (good or bad!) but the hair to that part of her head where the appropriate people were chanting the Night Way to heal her head-hole in and out of which cream-colored demon-types moved and from moment to moment settled or not. That is,
apply
—
apply,
we said—an oil from a bean from a plant that survives only in the driest earth: water is sealed into its leaves by a film of wax, and its taproot goes down thirty feet—a waxy oil the Indians used as a coffee substitute before they knew coffee; as a wax for women’s eyelashes; and to bring on labor contractions plus halt skin cancer in its tracks.