And before the host could think to answer the guest’s casual suspicion, he was adding what, as he said, the guest knew little if anything about, to illustrate the business carried on between bias and impartiality, for whereas the family paper—the Democrat—had come into being well over a century before to put the county if not New Jersey squarely behind Jackson and against the Central Bank and its sovereign favors to the big guns, to property as Hamilton stitched it into our founding chapters (honorable and succinct as a Swiss ledger) and it multiplied into paper you couldn’t pay my taxes with, we have to give to Lincoln in the early 1840s if not total agreement at least space to duel in his own way with James Shields, the Illinois state auditor, who told the tax collectors to take the notes of the tottering Illinois State Bank at only their real value (you know this story?), which was forty-four cents on the dollar, which Lincoln—

—dueled in his own way? came the unexpectedly knowing retort—(and the sub-rosal or sub-cathetral auditor stirred upon the dark earth, smelling through porch boards the noble gas against natural law descending from the afore-related wind, as from treated seaweed, or from a fresh, soundless second, only to hear, then:) you sure you didn’t hear something? as if the tapping of the boot tip on the porch above the boy answered the frequency of his own sound yielded by who can tell what motive beyond accident or, to travel on ahead to a Washington bar in ‘62 and a friend Ted, that key to history known as small talk and so small it might be the space past or yet to come of the tapeworm’s expansible tunnel—

—second wind? says the interrogator turning our trial to his own personal uses—isn’t that what you people call the reserve breath that runners reach only at un certain deeper hollow of fatigue? better be sure it’s not the oxygen-depletion stage of running on fat cells which we know are not the greatest back-up.

—Lincoln’s own way was to choose cavalry swords against James Shields, went on Jim’s father—who was so nearly right above Jim that pomposity closed in on love that was surprised alone, not grasped—the jumbo size, a plank on edge between, and an eight-foot limit behind for each. For Lincoln had much longer arms than Shields (and, we add, arms which were to be one day the longest arms of any American President in history though not matter of profound wonder to their beleaguered owner).

—But—and the visitor rose, transferring his weight—but that was a sure thing, Mel; are you sure you got the facts right? I mean I know you always do, but I thought Lincoln was a fearless—

—That’s why he wanted to avoid the duel though he’d brought it on in

the first place: he wrote these letters to a paper showing Shields at a fair using

state paper to pay off the town’s women who came to his window let down

‘cause he couldn’t marry them all" "so handsome and so interesting"—

Shields was Irish and Lincoln wrote the letter as a certain Aunt Rebecca—

"Well," said the visitor’s creaking porch and shoes, "I’m sure I heard something."

"Shields you know caught a bullet in the lung in the Mexican War but he lived to be outmaneuvered by Stonewall Jackson fifteen years later in the Shenandoah rain while the bossman General McClellan was building bridges like a politician, soon after Grant beat Johnston at Shiloh—and when the Governor of Pennsylvania said Grant had been drunk and lost thirteen thousand men, Lincoln said, ‘He fights.’ "

"Once got drunk and mislaid my toolbox," said the other.

"Lincoln was a fighter if there ever was one. Hardest kind of fighting."

"He didn’t eat good I seem to recall," said the voice, "but wasn’t he married to an impossible lady?"

Jim moved his foot and rang a trowel against the upended teeth of a dark rake, whose earthy rust he now knew was what he had been smelling.

After a second, "I wouldn’t want to say for the record," said his father, and for a moment the men might have looked at each other so that nothing could keep up appearances: but the diversion of the boy’s presence was not the only fact between the two men who were not willing to hate each other, nor (deep down) willing to spend time at the beach with their wives and children though the visitor and his wife—loudly difficult to a point of throwing a muffin tin at him fresh full from the oven—had no children for all that went on between them.

And on Brad’s Day, scarcely a month after a woman whose whereabouts in her New Jersey town had been unknown for several hours was discovered or inferred in certain of her effects (including a large black towel) well above high water at Mantoloking, with incidental vague apologies written to a neighbor, whose gray dory, with those sweeping proud lines that, of all months, in August needed a coat of paint on its bottom, was reported found on a spit in Barnegat Sound with one oar gone and a damply darkened paper bag rolled tight as a toothpaste tube yet with one lengthwise half of a dill pickle inside it wrapped in white store paper not waxed, the discussant men above on that porch were two of the four principal folk to "look in" on young Brad’s bereavement, though at least two others also came during the day.

Brad turned his head up away from the piano, and, his profile toward where his grandmother Margaret knelt with her hand no longer touching him, he knew his brother Jim was still there. Jim respected the little bastard, who still was telling Jim nothing more than the day at the beach when Jim got suddenly stuck above him in the sand towering murderous but hearkening to the threatening call of their mother from her black towel blinded by the sun. And meanwhile Brad on the floor of the music room wasn’t going to school. It’s embarrassing having your mother kill herself. And no more point in Jim telling him than forcing dry cornflakes scratch by scratch down his throat. Yet Jim didn’t go to school all that day himself. There were other people in this life of theirs who could come to the house. And on this day probably for the first time Jim thought about the look of the house. The dark-brown shingles of the porch roof led you up to the roof angles and facing of the second and third stories. The dormers and the other sections of roof spread in what seemed a lot of directions when you weren’t actually looking at the house. He couldn’t draw, he thought, but he drew the house, doodled its thick white pillars from the low, thigh-high wall that ran around the porch to the porch ceiling, the day after Brad’s Day, when he was sitting in History and couldn’t think, and out it came onto his notebook, but the angles of dark shingled roof section varied less than the mountainous watercourses he found he had with some instinct drawn, but he’d never thought of what the house looked like till Brad’s Day.

But here was the music room which he absorbed for the first time, as if it had been a shifting article of furniture turning up here, there, like good and bad sounds, wet or dry sounds, night sounds heard in day—and he’s here with just this person, all ‘long, Dad gone to the office of the newspaper, Dad gone to work with his worried look which he might not have had on the wedding day of that friend of his when he mounted a roadster’s running board to sail to the reception expressly to meet Jim’s mother Sarah, but had worried ever since—whatever you could say he was worrying about; and here’s the little brat brother who, Jim realized, knew that Jim was here with him in the music room, so that together they grasped the meaning of Brad’s gaspingly interrupted "You going to . . . school?" and Jim looked into the eyes of his grandparent and as a prime resident of this house, not the one so often visited down the street, said to his brother he guessed he wasn’t going to school, and told him it was O.K. while bracing himself for a more tedious display to come. For . . . {for?) their mother had said to Jim (whatever she had said to his more protected brother), had said to Jim on the occasion of his taking a summer farm job and not "going to work" at the paper (which was more for his father than for the family which his father, though with the same name, had married into), "You will go away where you belong, and live ..."

—that’s what he remembered—

—yet she had been the one to go away if we’re getting technical, even if she was merely dead, which wasn’t much of a going away.

Jim thought, You have to go to school. But he wouldn’t make Brad; didn’t want to shake his leg or talk to him, make him do anything; didn’t want to talk to him (like Saturday night finding Brad turning Jim’s papers in his room and when he got caught by Jim he said, This place needs sweeping, there’s dust or sand or somethin’ on the rug and the floor). Nor groan, cry, sob like him, much less hit those same keys out of which, minutes later, the grandfather had made some surprising music.

Yet Jim just didn’t want to be apart from Brad. God! That little shit? Just be with him, the brother so different and, not so secretly, despised: for not being a fast runner; and for recounting to others things Jim did, though not to tell on him.

Just be here in order to know what had happened. In order to leave, one day; to fall forward.

What had happened. Regardless of what the future would tell about the mother who sent them away though they had the idea—yes, they—Jim knew, and some future we—it was the two of them knew, that they had the sinking feeling that she was the one who had gone away.

Implausible, this, said the interrogator, forgetting to give us the business; a rather artistic mother, one has forgotten in the decay of the middle-class liberal family with its aspirations toward Eurodollars, may be not the head of the home on account of she is the home.

Of Sarah’s grandmother it might have been said she had the vapors many multiplied mornings chilled by her night’s rest.

But Sarah was not her grandmother, and not her mother Margaret—not one to stroll the raw sidewalks of Salt Lake City when her father had edited her trip to the Chicago World’s Fair in advance, he thought; and not one to make up stories to tell her sons when—

—Did you tell the Princess-and-the-Navajo stories to Mom? he asked in the near-stillness of the room measured by the sounds of the boy Brad on the floor—surprised to hear himself.

—What stories? sighed or gasped the central griever on the floor near the kneeling grandmother’s hand.

I hardly knew those stories till after you were born, Jim, she said.

Where’d you get them? Did the Princess’s bird have Paiute blood to eat horses?

Oh most of them are true enough, said Alexander, Jim’s one-time Paiute "source," who rose from the piano, stood looking at his grandson Brad’s faintly rising and falling form before ushering himself from the room saying a word or two under his breath that included "wheelbarrow" and "leaves," and after he shut the music-room door, a word or two in the hall.

How could you not know these stories till then?

Your mother was in the hospital with you for two weeks and they were talking about an operation, and one day I went to the cemetery to see if Eukie Yard had died because he hadn’t bought a pint of applejack in ten days according to your father who had heard it at the store when he bought a bottle of rum and a bottle of sherry to celebrate your arrival with us—and when I got to the graveyard looking for our notorious caretaker and heard the pounding of the trotters down at the track like game birds, I forgot about Eukie Yard and maybe I was thinking I might tell my grandson a thing or two more than

Jonathan Jo

Has a mouth like an "O"

And a wheelbarrow full of surprises.

And while I was looking at the green grass between my dark father’s long life and my poor blond brother’s short one, I remembered the Navajo Prince’s mother’s hole in the head that wasn’t big enough for the giant bird of Choor to do more than fly over, leaving the landing to the spirits who buzzed in and out without asking.

Demons was what they were.

Demons, you’re right.

The front door was heard to open during the ensuing silence. Brad breathed normally. His carrying-on only seemed to be ending. But as the glinting brass door handle spun loud and hard against itself and the door swung in, Jim knew his grandfather was out carting leaves, and, as if to ignore the unfortunate man who stood half-noticed in the doorway of his wife’s music room and sanctum, Jim said, "Gramma, was that before or after the Navajo Prince left to follow that stupid Princess of the East? because—"

"Both," came the word.

"—because if it was after ..."

But the man, more like an uninvited guest than a father, asked what was going on here. But not as if the boy on the Persian rug was in the wrong: Mel Mayn’s readiness was in his arms and hands; and his square, absent face had been waiting fourteen years and more for his giftedly ironic wife to ask something possible of it. Now she was dead—"his late espoused saint," Byron Kennett her music friend had put it, though who was "his"?—and the open palm of Mel’s extended hand, moving across the room and down to the boy on the floor, seemed to leave the sphere of his face to give it room to be alone and find all its dumbness of feelings.

(What’s that? asks the interrogator, whose machine didn’t pick up such vagueness except as danger.)

But Mel reached halfway across this mildly contemptuous space where his wife had succeeded in being alone when she wished and he had felt about the room all the cruel force of hoping mistakenly to love what one does not understand.

Or care to understand, muses the interrogator, who hardly knows what he does, when caressing the fresh-juice button momentarily liquefying our ever-serviceable bone system, ‘cause he’s got his living to hack and his cash flow to keep massaged—but he’s lately so alive to the fineries of feeling that these rooms discriminate that he doesn’t know what to do except receive the ensuing information that held its warmth—yet the wind (as this woman Margaret testily answered her husband as if prophesying) was cold, and the third adult to enter, coming as he did from a nerve center of the town, reported that a sudden cooling of the air in motion off the Jersey shore had created a dangerous pressure belt and there was a chance of that rare phenomenon a hurricane that originates along the mid-Atlantic coast—air, he said, touching Brad on the back of the head and speaking softly, travels like that—from high to low pressure areas and when it does that, it—

"Mel, for heaven sake!" said Margaret.

But Jim recalled his father’s very face noting once that a giant thunderhead had funneled a waterspout down the day of Sarah’s departure; so "it" came to Jim that not only had things happened to Margaret like the stories he’d about outgrown; the stories had; and if the giant bird’s fly-over was "after," then the Indian son’s leaving (albeit in pursuit of his white girlfriend) could have brought his Indian mother back to life.

Oh crap, and more crap, then oh memory, then mere memory, his voice changed, though to itself for years and later years when he came to make his living arriving at facts. Yet at that moment of Brad’s Day, the task of refiguring some of those pieces of stories was too great; that is, at the moment when the father who had been at the newspaper office in which Jim had declined a summer job in favor of the Quirks’ farm, which was mostly horse corn and where he stayed the night when he could go riding after supper, or when two skinny, sassy girls he knew came to dances at the Grange (which Margaret would ask about) when, that is, the father knelt near Margaret with the boy between them and Jim immobile after an hour or more near the door, and when the father sort of ducked his head round toward his son Jim and shook his head and began to speak to Brad even before turning back to him to contemplate the boy’s head and neck, and his dark blue T-shirt, and his arm in the sleeping position (so Jim thought, painfully, Has that little shit-ass gone to sleep?).

But no—for, in answer to Mel’s reassuring words "She’s not coming back, boy, she’s gone," "Yes," said the boy; and the man said, "But we’re not, we’re not gone, you and me and Jimmy." And Brad, with a veteran huskiness from tears and a hysteria of breathing that had become its own measure, answered the man who’d been a father to him, "/ know that."

Mel put his hand on the small of Brad’s back, one of the few if any opportunities we who are relations have taken to say Mel touched other humans—and all Jim saw was that hand, till Margaret stood up and went out of the room to the kitchen. "I know it too," said the man.

"So do . . . ," said Brad, sobbing again, . . . "so do . . . I," heaving his lung half through his shoulders, but not with the soft screams or noises Jim had heard half an hour ago, noises Jim had never heard before from his little brat brother.

And so it went. Margaret brought thick sandwiches in. This time they didn’t move to the sandwiches as on the day a month ago of the memorial, from living room to dining room, and she surprised even Jim by putting the plate of cake-rich home-baked crusty white-bread sandwiches beside Brad and Mel on the floor—

—who were related only by marriage, breaks in the daydreaming interrogator, if we have got the facts right—

Some are liverwurst, some are egg salad, and some are American cheese, Margaret said and—

—was there time to hardboil the eggs?—

—and stood up and looked at the boy on the floor, and was gone again to the kitchen.

Mel actually stroked Brad’s back—and said (but really to Jim, as if Brad were elsewhere, staring into the Earth, say), "It was something missing in the equation—/ knew it—she had her music and she had Jeanette Many who was fine as long as she was playing the viola, and she had Byron and Byron had Sarah when his mother didn’t have her dancing shoes on, and she had the others she talked to who appreciated her. Sometimes she had her way of narrowing her eyes at you as if she couldn’t see right, and running her hand down the side of her face like she was looking for a bite. And besides the friends, she had this town which she might have left at the time she and I met, and she had nothing much from me except she knew I’d always be here, be here longer than the Democrat—which wasn’t enough for her but what did she ever do about it?"

The results are before us, murmurs the interrogator idiomatically.

"It’s all right, Dad," said Jim.

"Is it?" said the father.

Margaret sang briefly in the kitchen as a drawer opened and slid shut and the refrigerator door made a noise. The front door came open, with voices, and here were Alexander, having transferred a pile of leaves from one place to another, and Bob Yard, who didn’t know what to do except say, "Havin’ a rest, Braddie?" And Brad raised up as if for air, or thinking about Bob’s voice. And the violin case lay shrined at the head of this ceremonial length, which had gotten longer, yes Brad had gotten almost longer, imperceptibly stretched by a motion contained in him. "Yeah, guess so," the boy whispered.

Mel said, "Any more news about the storm? It’s the pressure belt." "Yes, that’s so," said Alexander memorably; "air travels out of your high pressure area into a low pressure area, they say"—or words to that effect, and years later Jim told his colleague Ted so it came out funnier. Brad was groaning again, he rolled abruptly onto his back—God, first time in all these two hours—and cried in a creepy, embarrassing, slow cadence as if he were seeing something, and Jim heard the old stairs—which could have been Margaret, but she sang again in the kitchen and Jim knew she would be bringing in a black-and-gold wooden tray of chocolate milk in the tall tumblers of cloudy-blue, rough-rippled glass his poetry-quoting mother would make iced tea in. (What poetry? He didn’t really know; he had never asked. She would not ever tell stories about when she was young; she flipped it all away with her hand.) Jim listened to his grandmother bring in the chocolate milk—he loved her thoughts but did not understand her storytelling any more, for now he thought the stories had been true, though certainly some weren’t. But some were.

the finger tips of the Navajo Prince made a sound that the Princess taught to the Prince, but the sound flashed waves of danger through the hills and brought the gigantic bird-thing to hover hopefully above the moving bodies of the tribe until the cries of the Prince’s mother had their effect. His grandmother read him The Last of the Mohicans, which was this side of the continent north of here with woods and rivers for canoes, not the dry land of the Navajo Prince and his mother and brother and family and People that the East Far Eastern Princess visited by chance, until the piteous cries of the mother roused the lazing demons who got out of her cavity and molded themselves round the elder seers who claimed that the music of the interracial fingerprints fitting so subtly during dawn song and noon song were the real reason for the hole in the Prince’s mother’s head, the two sets went together into audible whorls, never mind that the Prince’s mother had had the hole in her head for years before the Anglo girl arrived, and these elders spoke of the famous long afternoon when the sun did not go down past the mountains of the sky but held firm at ten paces above the horizon and the specks of spirit awash around the famous matron’s head were briefly her ancestors telling us that the white Princess was related to the Prince so long as she did not return to her father’s nation of Choor but stayed here where three old Spanish ewes who had long forgotten the lambs birthed in the silent blizzards prospered in the Princess’s presence as she learned to weave but so slowly (with three spindles of lightning and one of rain) regaling the women with tales of swimming—so that they were reminded of the slower ways of weaving and the hard-won desert dyes they had once used and in the East Far Eastern Princess’s slow, clumsy learning relearned their own old slower ways before trading with strangers had pushed them to work faster:

until the Hermit-Inventor of the East, returning from further south, gave her not even the time of day but let her know, in the long-range glint cut by his eye, that he would meet her where her bird nested, she had better be there:

and the Prince’s mother with the demons still sucked terribly upward and downward complained that the alien girl had so befriended the ewes that they had not been butchered in their natural time, and the alien girl must stop writing her language-messages upon paper every morning and evening and must not wear her quillwork-decorated antelope shirt from the Cheyenne Germans if she expected the demons to vacate "her mother’s" head—for so the Navajo Prince’s mother related herself to the young girl for the first time— mother—so that the Princess, seeing the teeth and tongue of her adoptive Indian mother, recalled with a shock her own mother sitting up straight in a black-and-gold sulky-bare carriage breezing to church with her cousin the highly pleased banker-tenor who possessed a trotter as glossy and eager in its motion as any the race track would see—and sang in the Methodist choir—

—but this wasn’t the queen mother of the rational mountains of Choor, broke in the interrogator, sounding ye faint self-echo as if he hadn’t been tuned for a while. In New Jersey eider dey allow horses into the Methodist choir or dey breed singing horses!—

—until, having completed her day’s apprentice weaving too fast with her whorl-ended spindles three of zigzag, flash, and sheet lightning, one of rain streamer whirled with white shell and hearing the maidens whisking stone-ground corn flour, singing to their unborn children, she walked away like the visiting Princess she was, to her pony, and rode away to meet the Hermit-Inventor, who told her she was in danger, a hollow statue could hide her if she could reach it in time and let herself be changed to another form but it was a long journey but today was a once-in-six-hundred-years Window, open like a reverse volcana (as the hermit always pronounced it) from the sky if she might only be conscious of it: and though he, not the first nor the last of the Hermit-Inventors to be dismissed for unwarranted observations, gave credit to the Anasazi healer for supplementing his information with Owl Woman’s remembered songs and serving to confirm the Hermit-Inventor’s pilot construct of several layers of atmosphere—exactly two-sevenths as many years ahead of Teisserene de Bort, the discoverer of the stratosphere, as the man who claimed to have discovered jojoba was ahead of his time prior to being killed in early Salt Lake City.

And on this day under the enormous breathing of the bird, he told the Princess in the Anasazi’s language rather than his own more technoloon that she must act upon the future that afternoon:

Meanwhile, Jim felt on Brad’s Day that it was only like yesterday that his grandmother had told him how the Navajo Prince’s mother had died brimming with demons who had become more numerous and flowed together like crowds in future until those knowing elders staring down into the hole in her head saw less hole and more surface of teeming flume and a surface they would incredulously check by darting their heads around to see her face, for the fluid surface where had been the reverse fountain of her head top and where Owl Woman’s namesake the woman Manuel had applied oil of the jojoba bean to encourage reseeding of hair came to resemble the kindly storms that were her eyes’ insight and the large, nicely shameless cheeks like muscles to welcome you and reflect all you knew you could do. Which encompassed even marriage to a girl as alien to the Navajo mother as Harflex, that young noble of faraway eastern Choor, seemed far and familiar to the still not homesick Princess; until, while the demons talked louder and louder and the lady herself said nothing but wept, the impending union of the foreign, much-traveled girl and the Navajo son seemed to herald her thoroughly convincing death at the hands of demons who carried out their impulses suing for her energy more than her. Which they grasped no more than the medicine women who would not touch her or share out the clothes she wasn’t wearing during her curious period of death. And then her dying ended like a season when the noisy winds go away and the birds, if any, wing back reincarnating these same winds:

But the night the Princess left, thinking herself the cause of the Prince’s mother’s death, and the Prince left in pursuit, the demons returned to the wonderfully preserved head of the lady, and once more she suffered, lived, and, upon ceremonial occasions, including one remembering her son, whose much-sung trek around the core of Earth never came full circle, she made long noises unmistakably music to Indians and authentic to a Mexican spy openly out of work and a dark-spectacled German gun-and-honey importer from Chile who smiled as if it were his show and who, though tone-deaf, knew by heart her country’s eminence in music and by sight a Chilean lady whose daughter had become a zoologist and run away.

Why did Margaret’s account of this feel like it had been given only yesterday, when this was months ago in a dark night’s backyard? Doubtless because Jim put it in its place with the long afternoon when the sun did not go down because the rough lip of the Earth didn’t let it, as because, too, rifts in all these once speculative layers lined up by convergent pang of all or most of the gods flexing, for a second, one universe, to remind themselves of time.

—Did you have a mother-in-law like that?

—The Princess almost did.

—What about you?

—Not quite.

—What about your mother? (whose uncle in earlier New Jersey made. her a table every other year and her friend the banker designed a slick racing sulky double-size well a sort of little open carriage to show her off in).

—I was my own mother then, Jimmy.

Out West? The favored grandson, remembering on Brad’s Day, the day when the sun did not go down on time, and thinking what he’s missing today at school because this is only the second week and he hates to ask for even some beautiful girl’s history notes, finds in himself a thought as deep as two parallel thoughts—one, that he never did more than hear and appreciate Margaret’s "fish stories" yet knew they demanded questions, and from him, that he never asked; and two, that Brad, without knowing, has taught him they are brothers—no matter that here they all come, Alexander Granddad (eyes alive and taking aim on what needs to be done) and Margaret rubbing her damp hands on her apron, and Pearl W. Myles of all people, the high school teacher, a stranger, who, when she phoned the Democrat for advice and support, heard from Mrs. Many that the younger boy was having a fit on the rug and who had come at once, though a stranger.

What were the parallel thoughts? The interrogator, who has more than enough to do with his button, is thinking no less cheerfully, "Enough of this, it is of course deeply affecting."

He meant (for everyone has perhaps had a brother), do you mean "breather" asks the interrogator—Jim feeling brother to Brad for once: he could look right at him, anyway, without vomiting or wanting to liven up his pallid bony puss (mayhap seen snoring, of a night, when Jim, scorning the stairwell where no one was likely to be found to catch him, took to the roof, toeing the balsa-light slant of each personally known shingle as slow as but fast as one jump from window to grass).

(. . . to Earthward, murmurs incorrectly the interrogator, moved, his hand dreaming of that putative U-boat conning postwar haven from the Jersey shore 252-foot-length by 252-foot-length clear around to the long nation-coast of Chile, dreaming the more because he’s convinced it was created not to wait for the woman who owned a black towel who vanished into the sea, its surface, its clefts, its cells, its temperature, so that the interrogator’s hand slides relaxed over a button (don’t you know) momentarily juicing the grime off a suspect in the next room . . .)

(we infiltrate like angels trying to change and are broken in on by a young voice down the hall from a 1977 apartment in some articulate structure accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and the voice is talking to the basso profundo but not about the //amto-opera warehouse gig thrust upon him, who gives off a delighted rumble now at the words "This weekend we’re going to play leapfrog in the asparagus bed, Popsy" accomplished by a clink which as Larry does not guess is a large jar of the basso’s down the hall in his apartment, his latest discovery, Clamato Juice!)—

Until there is nowhere to go except understanding: however, the division of sadness which was Brad’s way of shouldering brotherhood—"and crawls on his belly like a reptile," sounds the barker’s cry in the voice of more than one fourteen-year-old including Jim—left a less-known job of grief or action to the superior brother Jim, the study of which he found one day in his still teenage grandma’s Democrat "piece" on Mars, done when interest was at a height (August 18, 1892—"apogee," darts in the interrogator), but Jim’s interest betrayed itself in a quite foreign detail, it improved Jim’s study of his side of the grief responsibility (awkward words, but) also of how the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the Anasazi healer’s theory of the cleft by which the layers enveloping our neat fragment of the brother Sun, brother to others yet not to us who are a mere breakage become anxiously clear (through convergence of semi-explosive clays) and bent on becoming more, came periodically into line; and on that day, the Sun would not go down until those drawn by convergence of the many gods’ periodic effort to think one thought in common had had the chance to be found by cosms of this tearing or breakage of the Sun which, like ceremony, recalled that signal tearing one of many tearings or great breathings of this brother Sun when at the peak of breath or inhaled explosions of possibility that drop of fire blood split off, in love with, or expelled by, its own hunger for the void or to find what rein of force waited like a relative string arcing some bond unknown even to the cactus with its nesting eye and the birds that the winter wind becomes when it leaves: and the person who is struck by such reminiscent cosms of the Sun’s inhaled breath would find such purpose, at last, that she would start her life over as if either she had aimed inward to the center where the hells and rock-skinned saurs and river-rhines and the rock-skinned rhinogog and also the rich kettles of change tipped gimbaling this way and that upon the magma of a magnet that was not there, or her starts had been launched as secretly outward as her inexplicit "hello" to other worldlings in her 1892 Democrat piece when Mars, in opposition to Earth every twenty-six months, reached its regular fifteen-year extreme of opposed closeness—"hello":

amidst speculation engendering in the mind a wild longing to know whether people like ourselves live there and enjoy the hills and valleys and rocks and all the waterways of the universe, the rivers, waterfalls, even yes canals, and the eternal sunsets—they surely have enough moonlight! we would want to know if they were anything like ourselves and slept, eat and drank to live; and whether they knew anything of electricity and gunpowder or would like to know; and if they were going to have a World’s Fair

(the giveaway)—she would make a start "out of" no less than her future, or, in awesome fact, marriage to Harflex, the suitor, who awaited her presence,’ her go-ahead back along the shores of Choor: while the Hermit-Inventor of New York explained the effect of these cosms of the Sun winging all instantly through this long window comprising in one long "point" all the single clefts in layers of breath embracing our own known world, the bodily senses of one’s given future: but Jim found later he had on Brad’s Day begun extending this material, having gotten mad at his grandmother—and maybe from the moment when Pearl W. Myles, his statuesque journalism teacher, appeared in the bereaved Throckmorton Street house, dark red paisley draped across the Chickering grand, a dust of English biscuits hovering round their sweet tin in a curtained dining room where a fortnight’s supply of Newark and Asbury Park and New York papers stared neatly stacked on a pulled-out chair, soap (Pear’s mild), upstairs flowers (fresh from Margaret’s garden which Sarah always accepted, while calling them "dead"), a nutmeg left to roll around the kitchen table (it might have been a brown Mexican jumping bean Bob Yard’s wife gave Jim after a trip to New York where she said it was the Italians who imported Mexican jumping beans) as cold as a dead turtle: the East Far Eastern Princess listened, and as she did so, the Sun began to tip into the horizon line of irregular mountains warped up toward the Sun as if (to allow the Hermit-Inventor his way of accounting for this strange afternoon) the axis had tilted so that this southwestern corner of the Earth became a pole. This explanation was no better than the Princess’s twin dreams the night of the long afternoon, nor the large turtle mouth painted upon the face of dancers in the snowy dawn of the year according to an outcast cousin from another people who carried water to the Anasazi twice a week though he was by now barely more than an occasional if intelligent fume given off by time’s inching root, which the Anasazi’s own thin mouth fresher than all the rest of him put together could be heard to tell, though with a softness audible only to those at a certain distance from him, not those as close as the Chilean javelina specialist Mena emerging before him upon the last in a series of ladders, her mouth painted white only by some love in her mind’s quest for the white-lipped javelina, not by ceremonial pigment, nor to the Navajo Prince when, long before Princess came along or giant bird, he knelt next to the Anasazi healer and took from him a Colt pistol, having at a distance of half a mile heard, moments before, the breath of the ancient healer telling how he had let his medicines take him for decades at a time away from his faithful and humorous wife and doting children only to find that one day they were gone across the space of one unending sunset which begot a double moon inside the Princess’s mind that night whereby she saw the Moon singly with each eye and dreamt that she was agreeing with a council led by the Prince’s brother that she would cost that young horseman "her" Prince his life.

And the trails he left, when she departed three nights later toward Zuni country (with its afternoon-long ramparts and nests of red cliffs), were not of cornmeal nor of crusts from her wooded memories of Choor but were only in her lover’s mind grown there by the thought of her womb hair and the embrace of her pale breasts, all such parts lost along the cells of his hand’s brain, bold as decision, humble as seeming-fact that’s beyond what idiots call sacrifice; and so he followed her.

We are such mingled growths, which the interrogator incorrectly remembers as Owl Woman’s words "I am running far to see the land, / While back in my house the songs are intermingling," who has yielded his button (though to no one) for the moment and says "We" to us and sees our no doubt human matter here as a far cry from some center of information and political identification.

Well he may, for the Anasazi medicine man claimed that not he but his many hundred years younger colleague Owl Woman had sent the Princess the dream she came to him with on the morning after the Hermit’s interview with her near the eyrie of the giant bird: to wit, that having run hard all night to get to where she was to see what was vital to her precisely at dawn, the Princess was stricken by the dawn rays too soon, as if life won’t wait for you to find it.

When the Hermit, asked by her to prove the news about cosms bolting briefly through a vastly thin window in all our spheres, ran away to check again with the Anasazi, she knew she was being left alone. Above her, through the spruce and juniper pinon sat the giant Choor bird lessening in scale as if the great eggs, previously hidden, grew and the song or noise out of this still, animal peak atop what the Hermit named a volcanic neck came from the eggs as much as from the bird’s hunger.