Women and Men (229 page)

No, said the blonde woman. The woman was a white woman.

Alexander felt a long chill across his face. He threw the apple into the fire.

You throw away food? said the blonde woman.

Will Coxey’s marchers all come from Ohio? Alexander asked as if to say, Don’t talk to me about an apple—and felt terribly watched and cold and inflamed as well and felt the sweat in his smooth palms.

No, said the woman. They say marchers will come from all over the United States. Why do you ask?

Because I was thinking of something else, said the young man.

They say he is worth two hundred thousand dollars. One marcher for every dollar by the time they reach Washington. They will force Congress to help the unemployed.

Was the Indian armed? Alexander asked.

Well, she had thought he had a pistol in his pocket but it was a hunk of dried meat. Alexander contemplated the large, damp branch and the lowering fire. But he did have a pistol in his saddlebag, said the woman.

In his saddlebag, said Alexander.

We had been asleep, we already remember, but this might prove our patented way of being awake. As when a thing is done
to
us, and instead we are brought closer together and see some bend of will by which so far from our being acted upon, the responsibility
belonged
to us, and no hassle at that.

Big Foot Porcupine; or anyway, Big Shoe. The woman asked to sleep against him in the late February stillness. He said it was against his religion and at once corrected himself—
those
were not his words, surely. His thighs were resigned with cold, his mackinaw bulky. He felt behind him the tuck of her hard arms in the taut winding of her blanket, and after a mysterious time which was motion both absent and present she reached one slow arm around his ribs and he found that he took her hand between the thumb and palm of his woolen glove and she seemed to press a ring on his finger. They murmured with the soft, bed clarity of wife and husband. Where, then,
was
Jacob Coxey? Why with his family in Massillon, Ohio, three hundred miles from here, two hundred and eighty to be exact.

Anger, horror, pain, curiosity gathered him up into some darkling person and he knew he would sleep in the cold, despite Margaret, despite the Indian wherever his eastward frontier had gotten to. Alexander was thinking of geometry, of all things, and his loins felt better than he could have said. Have you borne a child? he asked the woman over his shoulder, the late winter and the undreamed solidity of near, dark trees cold against his eyeballs.

He
asked me that, she told him. He said he had thought there was more time but he had been absorbed in his studies of secret force and of earth veins and mountain messages and mixtures and absorbed in this woman of his from the East, to the cost of his People, yet also
forgetting
this woman who was sometimes all he remembered from hour to hour. His studies are for his people, but his march is not revolutionary like Jacob Coxey’s which will be an army as great as any Union.

Your news overwhelms me, said Alexander. Your heart is with the workers, said the woman; trust it.

But Alexander had not meant Coxey’s march of the unemployed. But
have
you borne a child? he said. No, she said, I have not borne a child, though I would have done so for him, though I am a fallen person anyway.

Do you want to be married? asked Alexander.

He thought of what the future expected. New thoughts shifted this trip as if the land it was grounded on—a land of dreams, he had once read to Margaret—mattered no whit more than farmers clamoring for paper money or Idaho silver miners forcing recognition of their union or railway-car workers getting a company model-town to house their families at dubious rent. A curiously compelling map grew like land in Alexander’s mind containing it (but which containing which?) that moved—this diagram of distances moving if he chose but making
him
choose—and he could not tell the woman that Margaret over the magnetic slopes of this darkling state rested but was in motion restlessly toward home while talking to a Jacob Coxey whom this woman behind him loved and had brought
to
Alexander by converging lines from Massillon in the west and from some bank of the Juniata in the south or southwest, while Alexander’s various trek for news and for Margaret was west while hers, upon a parallel equally various, came east, pursued (no question) along another parallel by a man with a pistol who was ahead of her, and was between her and this Alexander who went out to meet her: yet what if even now, and east of here, she was fingering a Navajo silver buckle passing through Pennsylvania on a sleeping train whose parallels of track curved some collision course of war or the American continent atip toward unknown commerce (west
or
east, inertial calculi of ours could trick suns into dramatically dying in the direction of morning if our cost-benefit figures arrive at such results for the sake of World’s Fair or parallel answer to multiple question) —and when he said to this now silent woman, This Indian is not my enemy unless I choose . . . , and got no reply except a whole bodily pulse coming into his spine from possibly more than the woman ... in these coordinated parallels that could lean like a curve-fleshed parallelogram or converge into some terrific clusterhood, Alexander eased over to the quite exhausted woman he had not bothered to ask about her home and about what she, a "fallen person," did here in the vicinity of her at least former home of Selinsgrove where the beloved had been hardly more than born, according to Alexander’s information—and he tipped her dozing chin and smelt on her breathing raw potato’s moistly glimmering root, and kissed her lips, and turned back to, briefly, a diagram until sleep caught him up loins and all into that gathered voice that could include what the future expected, conferring with him as to whether (damn all this land of dreams that lacked light though not geometry which itself equaled or was in the way of geography and of seeing clear, so he wondered what Margaret
looked
like now and if she was big with child), conferring with that gathered voice as to whether he would go to Paris with his elegant cousin who wished to study epidemics—or, as an obvious possibility, would not go to Paris but live as he and the future tacitly had agreed he would.

The woman spoke and hummed and spoke in sleep, their sleep it seemed: "He said he carried in him unknown mixtures spirited from a mountain that moved with shapes fine as snakes and some said formed by them and through human flesh and weather that sometimes came down a long, long cosmic room from a North he had once thought timeless, yielding spirals grown dense and tight as the inside of a tree bole that might help us or end all weather or might bore holes in us as in his mother who had died of such a demon-hole that moved around her head from forehead to top and back—and these mixed spirits or rays (though not visible like sun) he carried some of in him—
in
him! (I nearly laughed, we were hungry, we had already forgotten why we were sitting by that tireless riverbank, and he brought out a potato and an apple, and later his saddlebag proved to hold a pistol with devices or signs cut into the metal so as to make the finger fear touching them could make the piece go off) until Alexander did not know who talked to who, but thought the woman would not steal from his old black satchel his shirt or his forgotten long underwear or his books, his three books—the two diaries at this long instant of embrace humanly useless with their neutral needlework reports of Chapultepec passion or sun-swallowing dream or, as yellowing perhaps as one of President Lincoln’s greenback salary-warrants, that strange sheaf of foolscap music with Italian words shaken by a Thunder Dreamer coolly under the nose of a lean bicyclist-botanist at a remote trading post—and always, money-getting Democrats from rude wigwam to Congress hall, easing past mountains of, what was it?, salt and iron, lead and silver; while in this woman’s orie-armed embrace he dreams of freedom, yet not from her, though he would never see her again more than he saw her now curled not so uncomfortably behind him: freedom in fact from those impediments of Margaret’s months, for let life start and let’s go home, to where (with what help from the person behind him he could not think, asleep or half-asleep) he heard himself read to a young girl he had named before her birth, words (words words) recited to her by her father, of motion that could not stop and so
was
stopped
for,
in some sense spaced so intimately far to one side current history that the name of this child came to him who looked at him from the near future bearing naturally the name of this poor, strong woman behind him humming like a cello in her apparent sleep now, and Margaret would accept that name, he would make sure of that.

Neither porcupine nor angel: yet with, between them, some relation that would be Us: so mightn’t we prove upon the twain drawing boards of everyone’s peripheral vision to be what rose from such thoughts as that not Matter became God, but God at’s own developmental pace became Matter, plus that the Whole seeking Parts to share, give way, and lose its mind-set force to, must
force them
Parts into being in its way.

We had first heard of relationship in the early forties. But of what century?

Or two burning eyes shared among four eyes of two driven people flowed with the greater burning stranded through Nature.

Regular coughing like that of Alexander’s one-night landmate so went through the body of his dreams that he, too, at his own slower intervals coughed his way at last out of a western mountain only to find, clear of the mountain, that the woman Sarah had left and that all this time the independent territory of the nightmare mountain with its luckily only internal contagion had been moving in another direction.

But we in our day have learned that we can accept other systems. Yea, incorporate them. We are about to forget but have not yet, that right in the middle of apparently major events we had been mispronouncing the hard T in Chinese
Tao,
which should mean "the way" but in practice embraces like the whole show/flo as if Nature, spied back through one of its own eyes, was stratified ocean or at least successfully liquefied. The Chinese invented T, so they should be allowed to sound it like our D if that is what they do, but if they then cannot accept the topological relationship with
Dow
the chemical concern, lest by western pun linguistic contaminant find its way into their Tao, they may in long run have to let the original source-compound go—i.e., DOw (Dual—Di—or two, Openings, or Obstacles, to each power of Waste), which reframes (for easy reference—in other emergencies other times when the older transformation equations got us through ethereal obstacles as if they existed or plotted our inequalities up L slopes and round R curves) to: either DOw (one unpredictably divided atom of waste—or was it
water?
—for each ho-muncule of reaction),
or
doW (where the lower
d o
designating the W’s "prior power" identifiable uncertainly as "di-obstacled" or as dioxide or -oxen or -xin, or the more and more widely used interhemispheric verb
do)
acts on a W which is
Waste/We
where if
We
will = Singularity Rotated to Unity or I, we’ll still get
W
but a new
W
shared between the Waste and the We in relationship not yet known, in part since relationship at the present time is reciprocal with whatever this We proves-out to be. For as with angel and porcupine, dream and its forgetting, relative viewing screens one in each of two next rooms reciprocally showing (if we would only get them together) no other responsibility than our own to end the agony (and at least half surprised that a leaf of music from one North American person should join by way of a soft pocket-in-motion the suddenly parted legs of a warm-hearted, calm, fine-looking South American person who has plunged toward a long sea whose choppy swells the moment fixes into rocks), so with Relation at large in the nutshell of Our sea-to-land base,
it
strives now inertially, now non-, to be a We we have been privately assured is us.

"We didn’t decide if your granddad actually went looking for her."

"I wouldn’t know; he never talked about it. I think he met with some union noise-makers in Philadelphia somewhere in there, maybe February of ‘94 (? I guess it would be) and fired off a couple of pieces to Margaret’s father at the
Democrat
—maybe a farmer’s group in eastern Pennsy, I’m not sure; he did mention a band of jobless vagrants at a riverbank campfire."

"In his sleep?"

"You’re in a funny mood."

"We haven’t decided if we’re staying there for the night or coming back for that silly opera."

"We could cover both."

"Let’s not divide the labor."

They stood toe to toe beside a turnpike phone-booth capsule, and, occupying unbudgeable a cleft that perhaps they themselves made and were, in the ambient oxides and simultaneously approaching and receding noise particles of happily stabilized vehicles-in-motion, the world that could not easily get lost for love (so close about them was it) still promised in their silly old bodies to be waiting for them when they got back. And he stepped aside from all this hotline lovingly between them whose telepathy he had known of long since with his wife but then only as they receded from each other—and had now a thought or two private to himself wondering if he could even reach his daughter (who might be on this same turnpike right now if she had turned again to some link between the death of that weirdly gifted Trace Window guy’s murder and the place where he had recently used that gift yielding however information that Flick-Sarah was unlikely to have obtained)—and then also accepting that he had not thought about his son by love or image-signal reconstitution in hours if not days.

But he would not stay within himself apart from imagining
himself
each of the elements of this scene according to her serious-hearted dream theory (that he would like to tell his old friend Ted if it would give him a remission from sickness)—so he came up with: