But she retorted, The eyes went bluer, the hair whiter, Bob—as if to dismiss him when she knew that he really had loved that Sarah of hers (who had never been hers though she had known that Sarah would have to do some original thing), absent now invisibly absent now under the wedge of (when you stared at it) sparkling gray granite in the graveyard where Margaret would stand with Jim and recall that Sarah had asked if Owl Woman had been married and came to Margaret once (a unique meeting as far as intimacy went) with Owl Woman’s words from a book Margaret had never heard of (just as Sarah had never, as a girl, been told most of the tales of Margaret’s West—though told something in return for something she one day told Margaret):
In the dark I enter.
I cannot make out what I say—
Not the most trenchant verse Sarah would quote, Margaret told Jim— Jimmy—too smart a boy to let catastrophe show, though who could say what daydreams washed his mother inshore until, when he was all set to see her, the coast was of a different place or held an unmapped gap, unmanned so any foreign matter at all might drift in, and he turned to check where he was and never did see the body: "let catastrophe show"? for what was catastrophe, after all, but (let alone catastrophe theory that journeyman journalist Mayn heard tell of from those who cared more than he to know the going theories and so forth) a dramatic chance to be elsewhere, launched into that supposedly strong detour by the awful pain one nonetheless got credit for bearing the weight of, when maybe one just was somewhere else instead and not in two places at once?
Catastrophe here so unnatural and remote you almost didn’t have to run away from it, whether you can measure a mother, and her grandson’s run was an absorbed sprint down the sidewalk of upper West Main Street from her house to his and further, sometimes clear to the Fire House by the railroad tracks with a football pumping in his arm zig-zagging away across the grass-lawn of the private home of the owner of the American Hotel downtown, zigzagging right behind the gardener-mower one-hundred-year-old Mr. Lester Brown, who ate one bomb of a Bermuda onion and that was his lunch under a tree, and who knew that this dangerous athlete in a time when the Olympics had been suspended was detouring to criss-cross behind him and his hand mower and grass bag—then to zig-zag off the sidewalk into the street between the cars, so that once Mr. Brown saw him do it and feared that if hit he wouldn’t (momentarily) skid and roll like Lilac the pale hairless bull bitch that when the car braked to a stop (partly because of dog) ambled away, first up the street’s very white line (like she was a conquistador in shock), then off onto the sidewalk, and never looked back until she began to run; but Jim never got hit though he caused more than one car to brake, and gave his grandmother pause and gave her inspiration to tell her stories right down to the truth though never at the cemetery, where he and she would go, and she would guess that Jim was too willful to let the catastrophe of his mother’s death draw him into a center where, like little Brad, he would fall apart with a passion that Brad at nine or ten never had betrayed before (had he?) and never would again, in her opinion.
Meanwhile our Wide Load bore eastward—a home, or house on a trailer, winding through the Colorado night, bending the Kansas dawn to make telegraph wires yowl and every seven or eight miles make the monumental grain elevator from its oasis of trees, brief white-frame dwellings ("homes," as is said in America but literally true here), church, and mega-barn complex flow upward the Chilean economist assured his waking but still dreaming wife Clara as if its gusher-shaft guiding the feed of electrons from the unseen sphere of Earth toward the positive ionosphere a short forty miles away were the gusher itself, silent as space-minus-solar sirocco, while our Wide Load (a transport tradition with us here on this map-worn continent) sweeps on toward its various coast. The Wide Load with us stretched on top of it passes through several weathers, a muffled catalyst to be unchanged by them (oh the weather of the heart! exclaims one adult to another ‘gainst a tree, unaware of today’s kid upstairs in the same tree destined soon to feature an open-plan house who closing a good book contemplates loosing a compact goober Bombs ahoy! or stares up through live branches at the actual air of the sky).
Yet so what if these words of Owl Woman come down to us, so what if the multiple child in the next room is researching the eco-system of its neighbors, did it wreak aught that we heard distinctly
I am going far to see the land,
I am running far to see the land,
While back in my house the songs are intermingling
and does it wreak aught that the Chilean woman zoologist with lips turned white by months of following the chalk-mouthed javelina ran into botanist Marcus Jones in southwest country in roughly ‘83 and was more interested in just how Owl Woman’s words got conveyed than in what they were. She had a right to wonder, for how else would she explain being distracted from her trail by a curious man-botanist (historical, Jim one day years later found out) who told her he was bicycling the territory in search of all the kinds of locoweed, and she believed him, as he her, when she wondered aloud in his presence there in the solitary but quietly thoughtful desert how Owl Woman’s words which were obviously Owl Woman’s—"I am afraid it will be daylight before I reach the place to see"—came to her, a passing South American zoologist, only after Owl Woman had seemed to disappear: and all this Chilean traveler could see (though not hear) in the twilight was the biggest elf owl not in captivity staring snug from the porthole of a random cactus suddenly handy. The elf is the tiniest owl, just as small as the pigmy owl, and this one was keeping an eye out—like the eye of the cactus itself—though this elf owl saw distant hawk moths, beetles, and insect larvae plus also the occasional mini-vertebrate. All of which convinced Mena the woman-zoologist that the elf owl must have incorporated Owl Woman or been done-that-to by her. Remember the fine depth of her poems and the elusiveness of her person small as a fine horn spoon and as at one with others as the singing corn grinder who passes her fine meal to her neighbor until it is like pollen; a person even comparatively small for those who might want to go up to someone in order to say and mean something instead of grasping that meaning something is not the same as going up to someone, it’s only like it:
an insight in all of us simulcast also in the form of its denial: as Jim about half-knows in his unwillingness to tell the information peddler Spence (as sleazy-acting as if he knew he was your relation) a thing or two, for example that this gramma went on hearing these words of Owl Woman across the half-light, yet in the precipitating dark there’s less and less sign of the Papago seer herself: yet now witness other verses later known to be hers coming across the air to the Chilean zoologist as on some line of communication from the eye of the columnar cactus to the seeming forehead of the woman telling this to Marcus Jones later at rest upon his bike taking a breather. So, as she said, she began to think about the water-bearing interior structure of cacti, so close (for comfort) to animal life (though nowhere near the animal she had been tracking). Surprised at what the margins of the inner desert had brought forth in her, when she’d been shadowing javelinas (read peccaries) up from eastern Argentina, she found the meaning of the name Owl Woman not only in all the lines of that known Indian woman-poet’s making, but between those lines (as sinewy-calved, lonely Marcus Jones in all his botany remembered till his dying day, although those who were with him at the end could say for certain only that he recalled at that final moment how the Chilean zoologist the woman Mena had found her own left life, her own original musical household plus the why of her setting out in search of wild pigs yet of search itself "research"), in all the other words which were also apt but especially in
I am running far to see the land,
While back in my house the songs are intermingling,
which meant, if only to her, that back home the art of war refined and strengthened its texture around her angry, fantastic mother, whose native Chilean operas on serious Anglo-European themes had met with repeated rebuffs from the musical establishment—from even her own London
-based (secretly anti-Argentine) dear father governing from a book-ridden house in Chelsea one of the major Chilean liberation lodges, on down to her cheerful, scar-faced husband (the javelina-zoologue’s father) who made (while ever seeking the secret of Stradivarian permanence) violins, and made agreements and claimed friendship with that gifted Bavarian emigre Aquinas Reid, composer of the first opera written in Chile, dead just fourteen years ago in 1869; and to Guillermo Frick, still active—"ser o no ser!" he was fond of saying—at seventy, one more German who had relocated in Chile with much Spanish on his tongue, who found Mena’s mother’s restless masterpiece unfortunately political when it was nothing of the kind—though hardly ahistorical as its leading tenor-pessimist falsely imagined he was—and no more secret(l) (much less Masonic) in architecture than any notoriously unperformed opera loosely drawn from Hamlet if not directly via Shakespeare but from a half-abandoned anti-miso-gynistic Italian score surfacing in manuscript in Civil War America.
Marcus Jones liked the naturalist Mena on sight, perceiving her gradually across the plateau floor as if she were daring the blinding colors of the darkness to reach Marcus before she did, and he thought her unflinchingly an Indian god at a distance, fixing Marcus in some attitude of intense feeling, awe, friendly awe; hence, he confessed having moved hardly a muscle when, upon seeing her in her many-colored cotton summer poncho down even to her hair pants from a distance despite the half-light lowering from the sky and wanting to go to her, he had waited where he was, his hand on his bike, until she should reach him; for do we go to the gods or do they come to us? and are there angels much less angel invaders in us?—and to the six-hundred-year-old Anasazi healer (who predicted not only telephones but the social power principle in the telephone expressed in the words unspoken and on certain occasions spoken, "Who called who?") she at another time recounted that Marcus had come toward her. And he would not get over those lunar lips, for he had never seen a javelina, muzzle to muzzle (which was to become, with its hind-mounted scent glands, sacred to the memory of Mena for years afterward in his mind). Marcus didn’t want to explain Mena’s white lips, only feel the divine wind. Marcus’s Spanish complemented Mena’s English, and before she had reached him where he waited on the plateau, they were conversing, and never saying things more than once. She said she had been coming from the south; but she had in fact already visited the multi-laddered eyrie of an Anasazi medicine man who, by Marcus Jones’s sense of direction, should have been slightly north of this present point of his locoweed-naming spree. Well, her interior map proved as resilient and infectiously blessed as his own navigand was firm and customary; and before she would leave him dumbfoun-dered (his own nautical word) with enough delight to do what he did not actually do—pursue for years more locoweed as yet unnamed—she had told Marcus Owl Woman’s words and the reaction they produced in the ancient Anasazi when she passed them on to that leaf-crisp memory of a man who had reached a phase so exactly fragile that one touch upon his presence and he would detonate into a cloud.
But while she spoke to Marcus of that old luminary-healer to the north who Marcus believed might be south since she could not yet have met him (if she was coming from the lower Arizone where Owl Woman flourished in and out of form), Marcus could believe in her both as a god and as a teller-bearer of likely truth, in particular the effect of the double moon on him. For this had yielded in him through its two shadows doubt as to what Marcus was later told by the Hermit-Inventor of the East in return for informations he gave to the Hermit. Who, to continue, surprised Marcus with the news that the double moon doubly shadowing the Anasazi medicine man, as Mena the javelina zoologist reached the top of her last apparently original Apache scaling ladder en route to the old healer’s eyrie, had come to her and become hers to convey (she said) on the evening when Marcus Jones, one of the most vivid men she had met, had pedaled up to her upon the desert floor and upon dismounting from his great bike cast (perhaps with its wheels) the double moon’s shadow and its light on her, which was then hers to convey until her next human.
Whatever the sequence, Marcus could believe the Anasazi’s reported quandary as if he were himself the pistol that had been suddenly struck by the double moon’s effects—the double moon, we already recall for it was ours to explain—to wit, a phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties (as the multiple cum melancholy child-in-residence in next room will corroborate). So that before Mena the zoologist had reared her head and shoulders upon him-and-his, he was telling her, whoe’er she was, that the pistol in question had gathered into itself its alternative sources. It might have come to him some years after "the Mexican business" from a mestizo information peddler with a rare thirteen fingers and one in every wind so that he no longer sported quite the fingers he’d been born with. And this man the night before the battle of Chapultepec had promised a nearly albino Englishman {el Nord) that he would recover his speech if he would risk his interesting Colt revolver in a blind game (both players hooded) known among condemned mestizo prisoners as Magnet but played here with a loaded deck. The information peddler in question had wound up with the young Nord’s pistol, the Nord with his voice back; and the winner (who learned he was taking a chance on condition his voiceless but not uninformed companion took a chance himself) wound up with the information that he must never "unload" the pistol (i.e., divest himself of it) on anyone except a dark-skinned healer at least two centuries old. However, the other possible source for the pistol double-shadowed by the zoologist-assisted presence of the double moon, slanted with a virtual momentum and doubly east and west down the minds whose idea it touched, was, as the Navajo Prince learned when the pistol became his in the early nineties, that a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer, one of that clown elite who used to act out (like static messengers agitating in a storefront window) their lousiest nightmares and their most threatening daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out, had been given the pistol as a deathbed donation to this Thunder Dreamer’s dream art but, too, as an Anglo charm to stall that tragic Indian religious movement of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Which in turn seemed to us (as one of our prisoners-of-the-month was heard to tap— upon, in fact, the INside of an endless rusty pipe) information we might tell the interrogator that would be true but would not hurt any of our living-or-dead fellow prisoners about whom the interrogator wished damaging revela- tions. At all events, the aforementioned settler, dying among the wind grasses of a southern Dakota plain, at length offered the pistol to the Thunder Dreamer dancing all the while, as if he felt that if it was not better to give than to get, it was better to quit than be fired, and he was about to die. Mysteriously, however: or so the Indians said who stripped him of his curiously made oaten trousers and leaf-quilt planting jacket: for like his angry warning that the Indians did not know how God meant the land to be used coupled with his soft-cheeked sadness, as he lay looking upward out of the wind grasses as down from a firmament of gray-green rain, that a race he seemed to think himself kin with (and, as his undertakers felt, doubtless in some root way the white race) had had to wage war in order to find victims to sacrifice yet must likewise sacrifice in order to wage war—he seemed as crusty across his strangely divided genitals as an old hand, yet he had the beardless cheek and clear thigh of the youngest, tenderest brave of all and could not say what he had farmed and had no land he could speak of and, passing the pistol to the dream-news-dancing Thunder Dreamer, reputedly spoke of his conception the night before the Battle of Chapultepec as if it explained something, though hardly his willed and causeless death:
Women and Men Page 85