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—
Who now? butts in the interrogator with apparently food in his mouth, torturing our words, and wondering with a blink of his eye, a flick of his tail, what it might mean that the American President was learning to embrace other men in public—
For "Who now?" hears in itself sometimes "What now? what next?" (that is, will the god or once and future goddess think of): but if the Who is Grace, where did our knowledge of her come from, for we are but relations: the answer is, "From her, from her," knowledge given up from her to us though power given’s pow’r received we learn she came one day to say because she knew it all her life and if, once in a Thorsday-afternoon kitchen (though not in that event legally penetrated, for history’s precision yields humor ‘bout it if no one else), or once by a Sunday-evening lake, she got enterred so against her will that for actual decades she ran her own industry of disseminating happy powers of herself among women like offspring of a brief but seminal fuck (you) times an organic friendly uncle (who styled himself itinerant, staked Yellowstone-ward either by Nat
ional Parks Department or the Secretary of the Interior) who got inflamed by how a teenage girl alloyed a well-equipped (one-thirty-second) Pawnee-American kitchen, but soon after by a friend-of-the-family man in uniform lakeside to whom she did not have the heart, once locked onto, to holler the information that from a point of "no return" as was said of an innocent wartime bottle with the neck broken off, the power she was being given was a certificate certifying that she had been raped long before she saw a work of art that proved all that carrying-on called (scream it jokewise in the shower) rape didn’t have to be entry for whether there’s a difference between up-against-the-kitchen-sink Uncle Walter’s hand coming down behind to clamp around in front thanks to his extensible wrist-watched wrist and (hard by the shore of a manmade lake) that other man that soldier’s gentleness that just got going going and hurt only in (a) one lower vertebra where the experience was ever after permanently housed and (b) her heart that got scared into a death she years later knew had been given her by the goddess to come back from like end we know by seeing it from the far side in each event she got raped without the word "rape" luckily so she could only use it as a growing/learning experience (words, words, words, you can stuff ‘em) until one year she found herself a center of once many distances, now all one by fiat (hers), here in a defurnished apartment breathing tragedy out of the trapped women who came to her and life in—into such formal closets of unused amazement (nee resentment, nee goodness, nee unpaid labor divided by that unwritten chronicle of come-come—or cum-cum) that one day when the children are grown we could just as well come out of the closet and check it out if when we do we leave our gowns lay where Jesus hung them or was hung whether or not Grace could prove not just to the satisfaction of those lives she helped but to her own mysteriously distant satisfaction that Jesus could have enriched the incarnation by getting into being woman too— a thought she had on the plane east—an original thought till years later she recalled her grandmother (somehow, she was sure, not non-orgasmic) who heard a dime-museum orator in the nineties preach about money and economics and claim we were all compound reincarnations from the caldron of former souls—it stayed with Grace:
—came out of the West, never imagining that beyond the general shape of her future husband quickly filled by one Lou (his index finger in 1950 held down upon the tilted shaker’s silver cup) was a "starreen" role in the very history she sprung out of her own refrigerator one wonderful, scary morning some years later aforementioned, yes New York cliff dweller that she stayed (leaving Lou by kicking him out) but restructured, now noisily now quietly and gently, into what her idea of history told her had always been—before Mesopotamia (wherever in the brain’s zodiac that was) and the flattening of the goddess by all her consorts who rolled and positioned themselves into one economy-size husband—oh before all these and more, before American Indian Pakulpota, herself the nurturing world of her own sacred stories, got bloody fucked by the gore-horned Greek goat of Grace’s birthday sign—before all these flowed into the pregnant forms that, suddenly that breakthrough morning in the kitchen like her heart in her mouth, bulged into being—which was the matriarchal force that can bring together and bind and renew you (hear also, in song, "Shampoo you") come again upon the Earth to supplant Dad’s power vac (read P-V sex) through whose nervy dispersals and non-orgasmic romps the balling patriarchy (if we may speak for Grace) disarms all risks abutting Dad’s Pad.
Receptive mixed bloods, we nonetheless find not the siwash cheese smoked roe man-hour (-like) truth-surplus we’re logging every damn bastard day, drinking Kickapoo Juice to change toward human, something more doing our potatoes in Seneca Oil, chewing our peanut-spiked Chiclets, gargling with whole pineapples, barking our noses on Ponderosas to try their chocolate scent in the midnight divorce and marriage ceremony of the late century in question, and (far) above rich deposits of coal, steaming our peppers, our squash, our grasshoppers, our tobacco, and our beans upon a bed of long-fiber cotton, while to really understand this Indian meal, we bounce a rubber ball fifty times without thinking succotash, and watch our joint muscles relax with a curare aperiplus trying in the midst of our silence at day’s end to recall through saying the full name of a sacred laxative we meant to pry away from the Indians before they upped their prices (though we will break it down in the lab, name or no name). But think only of corn—if potatoes are your nemesis—think but of corn to remember what we didn’t know we knew, that half our world crops were tamed first by proven red-blooded American Indians. Think but of the vast reserves of reservation taming all but, say, barbed bulbs of cactus whose babies, it stands to reason, are baby cactus (if the Indians, who like the technologists and the economists feeling technological/economical problems require technological economical solutions, feel Indian problems require Indian solutions, would only export these baby cactuses to the diva’s favorite Mexican restaurant in New York, pricklies depilitated! There it is possible for a small, once-dusty, highly metabolized correspondent-woman to sit at a nearby table thinking she actually hears all that half-conscious Navajo landscape dreaming of great planted fields out of the letter Flick read her—and she has shared a veritable granary of information at Grace Kimball’s loosely structured Body-Self Workshop (where she’s found that all the women who stayed at home while she was in South Vietnam bear with her nonetheless strange kinships) and while she doesn’t know that James Mayn (personally unknown to her) in the line of work Stateside took a story off her flown-in tape of a self-incinerating Buddhist monk with commentary (hers), she does know this very newsman’s daughter Flick, and hears his voice in Flick’s quiet, ironic, loving one reading Dad’s letter, and . . . women, she is starting to think, have seemed in ordinary social contacts lately more substantial than men by and large.
Flick works in Washington, boards her absent boyfriend’s motorcycle, but drives reluctantly (and parks) a great old white sedan given her by her father. She read to the correspondent-woman a letter her father wrote her from The Future (as he headed it) postmarked Farmington, New Mexico, claiming for that landscape this very dream of great planted fields, as if—as if—and our small but growing woman ignoring the well-known mezzo at a nearby table talking Spanish with a broad-faced, dark-mustached, elegant-lapeled male who listens to the diva beyond her words and into her following silence, lovers without question—the correspondent-woman chews a moist, slick baby cactus, moving it around with her tongue, and suddenly she has it! The way Flick’s father talks about that western landscape it’s as if he were—but she has lost it ... he were what? She can’t think?, is this being a woman? can only recall his written words in their imagined sounds read by his daughter Flick who found "kind of irrelevant" his response to what she had written him (God they had a good relationship, didn’t they?) about that strangely sophisticated South American country most distinct for us for being almost not there—2,500 miles long from Peru to the Pole and a quarter of an inch wide, though a thousand feet deep and now most "tragic," the daughter had written—what "we" did to Chile (cut off spare parts for trucks, paid the truck owners’ confederation per diem to strike, and then reported it as a workers’ strike): to which her father rather rambled on (yet not long-windedly—how was that?) about ‘69 and asking a well-heeled German-Chilean beekeeper in Temuco what was going to happen. Answer: if Nixon could be elected last year, Allende the good medical doctor can be elected next year. (You mean . . . ?) That both have been working toward their presidencies for years. (But what will happen if Allende squeaks in?) Listen, the only way for Washington to win this one is for Chile as a whole to win. The beekeeper whose parents came from Germany in ‘45 asked if Mayn was CIA but figured the CIA had other interests than a beekeeper’s father years ago. The beekeeper, whose money came from lumber and brewing, now has just the bees down here in the South, two houses, two hundred acres, two cows, a huge, exact, and green vegetable garden. (What will Dr. Allende do if he gets in, and are you for him?) The only Alliance for Progress will be Chileans with Chileans. (And w
ill he stand his enemies up against a wall?) Is that what doctors do in the United States? (But he is an economist as well.) Allende has said what he will do.
O.K., we know how vulnerable we are to the interrogator and his or her questions; but now, in whatever garb, reverse-collar clerical asking us to confess, or mufti, or period, or (ostensibly to infiltrate certain groups in the big cities) nude, he now does not after all ask if by "kinships" the correspondent-woman means that the other workshop women have bodies like hers or in the local or non-statutory sense are governed at some distance by their mothers’ own trapped dominance and will be until they become their mothers; but instead, the interrogator asks verbatim: "The so-called newsman Mayn coded an eastbound message to his daughter ‘The Future’; she works in an agency in Washington; he has been observed watching the Manhattan apartment house if not the very windows of a former national in whom we too are interested, while Mayn’s people in New Jersey we know accumulated if not proliferated a standard military sidearm at least from the early 1890s on, but possibly since the Mexican War a decade after the founding of the family’s weekly newspaper now defunct—so, is Mayn armed?"
We found we counted on our bodies to tell us even what words we were to know. Until we learned too late (which is our life’s apparent time), that the bodies had not been ours and that we some of us were mainly metabolism mapping live the processing of foods and their absorption into time in persons who now had gone! Leaving us a metabolism working away with violent good cheer but with no body to prove it was our thing—our thing to change. For which—O.K.—Let’s change our things (we suddenly recall our mother said as we all came in in the days when metabolism was relatively unknown and we called our bodies our own and they came running until now).
Women and Men Page 29