Women and Men (169 page)

The grandmother’s grandson dimly recalled territorial versus shared weathers, and colored weathers which were beautiful but in the mind felt threatening; and that the earlier Hermit had smelled the Anasazi’s pistol two kilo-miles away, and much else. But in i960 or 1965 Jim had to believe his fragile, clear-voiced, steady-talking, uninflectedly slow-talking granddad Alexander, whose ankles, as always raised from time to time of recrossed knees, were now like pretzels in their blood-red socks snap-gartered and silver-clocked above the perennial cordovans, and though he might forget the Cordwainers’ Union in Philadelphia Alexander did recall Margaret’s heartfelt arguments over of all things weather in ‘45 and ‘46 with her grandson because often she would tell them to her husband who calmed her—"down," as the phrase still has it, not as in "put" (though why the grandson even in later years let himself find in outlying parts of another’s body functions of thinking perhaps, or perception, or half-assed recall, we almost do not know, though hands and forearms and tongues seem more plausible than ankles if we are faithful to the grammar above, not to mention knees and necks).

"Well, it was a tradition longer than Margaret knew, of those two chaps that when they met they talked about weather or did until the old Indian died about the time Margie came back home through all that unemployment agitation. And during the bad period after your mother passed away and you had differences with Margie—which were beyond
me,
for I never saw her like that before or after (though the death of the
older
Hermit,
her
particular friend, threw her for a loop)—and in the middle of that protracted wrangle she said to me one night, ‘And I taught that boy to whistle and told him all the stories he knows,’ but whatever she was talking about when she said you were scaring her with your strange disagreements over what were after all just her tales as if you knew things in all this stuff that she didn’t, you’ll agree grandmothers have their uses. And your dad, who was one for detail as the newspaper demonstrated and so did his somewhat limited conversation though not his obit for your mother, would phone us at six and say Braddie had baked some macaroni and cheese in that big old glass casserole your grandmother would insist on steelwooling the burnt crust off of at least twice a year, and there was likely to be strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for dessert (‘likely to be’ was your dad’s humor), and where
were
you?, your grandmother would say
she
didn’t know—better try that girl’s house—Vandevere. But after Christmas you came back to her, I think, and you would get her to talk about the western adventures and how she broke her back harvesting dry country corn,
but
now you were bickering over half of what she told you, until she berated
me
her best
friend
one night as if it was my fault and I recall she said sometimes you made bad jokes about your mother being picked up by a fugitive German submarine cruising the Jersey shore and going to Argentina or Chile instead of dying like a respectable tragedy—and you didn’t
talk
that way! and I told her once I didn’t believe you did talk that way and she said, ‘Ask him, he told me he gets transmissions because of that eardrum of his that was infected once from swimming and he isn’t sure if the transmissions are from himself or from south of the border or both but they say go away where you belong’ (‘He persecutes me,’ she said)" (and Mayn: "/ was like
that?")
"—but nutty things like as if you took your grandmother too literally and took it from there until I guess it all stopped and by the next summer you two were both sort of grown-up again, I mean the way you normally always were, and friendly and a little sharp with each other, that sort of thing, Jim":

Oh remember the "pre-sound" of the Anasazi’s last words posthumously conveyed a mile or more to the Hermit direct by breath from the heart of the Anasazi’s materially dissolving mind which slowly peeled and delayered, in fragilest fossil-like blades or leaflets?

But do you remember
adding
that the Anasazi and the Hermit might have been in another life
one
person not two (because except for the Indian’s laughing at him and the Hermit’s getting friendly-mad, they often mingled their sciences of shared and territorial? Mind you, if a cloud stops over your country and sheds water that gets all the way to the mouth of the ground (for this had come to the boy-man descending the stairs hearing his mother suddenly break off her piano playing)—you have it, it’s on your territory unless you’ve gotten to be a state ({he grandmother laughed at her grandson’s historic wit), but so what, it might help the corn, especially right after it was planted, you don’t give that cloud
away;
and point number two, if a tornado comes along with a lot of people’s horses and houses and someone’s gun and a couple of half-busted chairs from another territory, who the heck wants to share a tornado?—which ain’t the same as between weather that just happens and weather that is caused, or between colored weather and black and white—or the Hermit looking into a box he had for measuring, and the Anasazi turning ninety degrees, then turning again, and so on.

Margaret was upset in the spring of ‘46. The Hermit her old friend was very ill, though she never saw him much—some friends you don’t need to see—and the day before she was going to New York to see him after he had told her not to, and he got mad and had his phone disconnected and when he hung up his lung collapsed; he died, and a nephew of his sprang out of nowhere talking fast on a pay telephone, and she went in to the city and she came back two days later—

—don’t remember that—

—well she fretted over him; we do make people
into
things, and she actually would rather not see that old scamp who never had a decent pair of shoes in his lifetime—

—not even in the West?—

—I bet he wore his moccasins all the way out and all the way back—

—who invented a thing around the turn of the century . . .

—yessirree, it predicted weather according to the exact configuration of coastline but they needed machines they didn’t have then in order to utilize this thing, today it’s called . . .

—a
baroclinometer
, comes back to Mayn in ‘60 or ‘65 in the presence of Alexander, but he doesn’t know from how far back, not far, did Margaret use such language?, it was ahead of its time, it could predict fronts and pressure zones from the way the coastline was cut and from densities of people and flora correlations between color and rate of C02 discharge—

—sounds like a tall order—

Well, it isn’t the way a modern baroclinometer works—I don’t know where that coastline stuff came from.

Somewhere.

Perhaps. But the words were different when Margaret told it—

So sometimes Jimmy, according to his grandfather, added to what he was told (which is sometimes necessary to make sense, though Alexander opined that a doctor might need to
subtract
from what he was told as when women working with felt went crazy and to get to the heart of the matter which was mercury you had to discount various answers that seemed likelier) as to the Anasazi’s distinction between night clouds that are young and, near the moon, show colored rings, blue yellow red, etcetera, and night clouds that are old and have less brightly colored haloes because their old gray blood is thinner if it hasn’t in fact become air, for they take their transformations more lightly and with less fuss, Jim pointed out that the Hermit had said the same thing in another way, the color all depended on the pulverized rock out of which the water was made that produced the droplets that the
light
was bent into shape by, that in turn became the given cloud—and since she had never actually
met
the Anasazi—

—but the Princess met him one day when she rode alone away from the Navajo Prince and had a bellyache which we call
stomach ague-qua
and he told her to find some wwpulverized rock and stare at it until it—

—what would she want with rock?

Well, stones.

Oh.

He must have been a very gentle type of healer, the grandmother suggested, as if the boy-man might know what she did not.

You mean because he didn’t tell her to pound the stones into her?

It came back some nights when he told humorously a rather technical-type story to a daughter and a son—and didn’t know who had invented what, or why (no,
how)
for years he had all but forgotten this stuff especially the "hard" weather of that period apparently ‘45~’46, probably he was in shock from his mother’s suicide though why didn’t he feel so?

His friend Sam came running up to the house and, first greeting Margaret—being more polite than his older brother, the fat one who didn’t look more than flabby but drove like a racing driver and could fist you paralyzing muscle shots deep
inside
your arm whether you were defending or not—told Jim that Anne-Marie’s brother had probably broken his back and was stuck in the lower level of a tree in the Vandevere backyard where he’d fallen from an upper perch, and Jim jumped up and without thinking said his own
mother
had just plain
left, hadn’t
she!—and she’d told
him
to go away where he belonged and it was amazing what there
was
in people and what they were able to do, he had just said to Margaret while Sam stood surprised: upon which Margaret, feeling the boys move to go, retorted that there was no connection between his mother and the old talk about weather as given Jim in these stories because the stories started after Jim was born, and Jim, in turn not knowing what was in him, though feeling that some stories had to be started and started and started again and again, said for Sam’s benefit, Was she pregnant? like the night at the ballfield when Sam called to his father, "Out tomcatting around again, Dad?" when his father didn’t
do
things "like" that and absolutely wouldn’t—but something got across, some possibility?, some true force expressible only against the father?, and his father docked Sam two weeks’ allowance at a crucial period when there were three birthdays including one birthday party—but never "laid" a hand on his son. "What’s that got to do with the weather
or
the price of eggs?" retorted Margaret, but Jim said, "All that weather stuff is crazy" (taking the four porch steps at one weightless fall) only to hear his beloved grandmother say so clearly she might never have uttered the words except in his own being, "Why the Anasazi medicine man went on with it just to give that lonely Hermit some friendship, who didn’t know how to talk to him standing on that ladder high up against the cliff peering into the dark cell or for that matter sitting in there with him, sucking corn."

What a great friendship! (scornfully tossed over the shoulder running away with Sam to the stranded brother of Anne-Marie whose own neck flowered in the dark to the sounds of their breathing and palms upon cloth and all morning with gentle languorous tension within the steel frame of a borrowed pickup truck unwilling still to forget). The spectacle of the Hermit-Inventor of New York come for a summer sojourn to the West-Southwest calling at once on the narrow ancient of whose shadows in this cell he was the original shadow of watchfulness, smiling with tolerance as the Hermit’s head appeared like a greeting which then took word form: "We were talking about the weather of presence and of absence when I left: now what in your view has that to do with spiral winds?" "Possibly nothing," replied the voice from the grain-scented dark, "yet that would be strange. For presence and absence—the long sky of morning or the thunderhead of late summer afternoon—unite in containing the
change
that weather
always
is, and the tiny Pressure Snake that sucks a man’s flesh into that mountain that may someday begin to move eastward once was a creature that worked with the cactus to make spiral winds which in turn can be of use, and that snake could return to that prior shape, for what is
prior?,
but the mountain moving toward the coasts you study might fill
up
the sea
or
make it
rise."
"Something must be done," said the Hermit; "there must be prayers one can perform." The Anasazi caught his breath, and the Hermit knew someone was outside looking up at the cell in the cliff. It was a white man in a sombrero. "He is studying the Anasazi," the old man whispered. "And have you proved yet that those frozen foam volcanoes back home do not exist?"

Not to the Hermit’s knowledge, but the "snowdevils" he had once doubted
had
now been seen in the north of New York State, he replied, tracks skimmed off a field of snow by a whirlwind much like the whirlwinds out in these territories but at the base of its vortex stirring cold crystals (while, as a matter of fact, New Jersey and New York are states still seeking to be territories but they may be disappointed).

And for the two days Jim later could not remember his Gramma being away, he reflected coolly on that poor jerk of a hermit being
tolerated,
politely and humorously, by the Anasazi who would have discussed much else or nothing, but for the Hermit’s endless queries, oratings, floatings upon weather so that some might have found the subject an obstacle that just got in the way of closeness and the boy did not much know what was happening except he was so in love that he must have said to Marie in the moonlit golf course alongside the cemetery that they could wait for sunrise and if it was cold enough see a real sun pillar which the sky used to rest on until it figured out that the pillar dissolved in daytime and the sky would still stand (because it basically knew the pillar was made largely of ice crystals and it knew the shape and size of them). But he knew that she did what she never had done before because it had been in both their minds and had again driven out a strange potential fact he nearly could not think about—but he had been reluctant to ask her though he tried to make her see it in his horny mind, and then afterward she rose up like a tender power in front of him blocking the windshield on the passenger side where he was glad to be, when he was not driving, and then blocking his face, then the windshield: