Chapter Thirty-Five DEPRESSION
Tom Gravel died in childbirth at the age of 61.
Wouldn’t it be nice to relay the joke Marie Fire in Flight repeated to the crowd at her baby Tom’s funeral, Tom’s favorite joke, about the little Injun boy who asks his ma how they get their names, and she says, well, after we give birth we have to stay and recuperate in the teepee for a while, sometimes a few days, and so when we finally get to go outside first thing we see we name our child after, what makes you ask this question, Two-Dogs-Fucking?, and some would laugh, some weep, Marie Fire in Flight, her voice a whisper beseeching the mountains for breeze, they would all understand, they would all understand what this meant to mother and son, who lived as much apart from folk as they decently could while still hoping to sell them horses long after they had sold the joint in town, lived so far apart it was a rare event for Tom to meet a single woman, rarer still for the thought of her being single and he, too, and so they could, that rare was the sex act once he had reached his thirties and old were his horse breaking bones when the shy, slender, barren some would say, Ethel Rothgerte fell for him before the menopause that overtook her features at age 19 but not her body until after the birth her husband had tragically attended of her son, fell so hard she asked him to marry her, upon which shocking moment of event Tom asked, what’s your name missus, I ought to know that if I’m going to marry you, for Marie Fire in Flight was not the least concerned with extending a family line or coddling a grandson, enough of life having signaled smokey to her from what all she knew and all what beyond related, an apocalypse, a world dying fast and if another world were rising it was no concern of hers, for hers was but her life and hern such as Tom even if she did have what from the outside seemed to some a family way sort of feeling for Rance, who bought the joint, further distancing her from the worlds that were tectonically migrating different directions, or rather distancing her from the puppet show of commerce and quotidian pretense of purpose, she would rather not observe as long as she could sit on her porch like old Hector and would have like to have with her man Tom long into evenings unafeared of high mountains, mountains above the clouds, snow atop the mountains, vast vistas from cold foothill ranch country all the way to fiery morning desert, horses naysaying, the few daily scratches signifying Tom at work, limbent cries of tree in bluster of long gust, rushing of stream or brushings of windwrenched forest in distances cold as dark or frozen as lambence of magical northery skies, the hottest of day cold with lack of odor or odor of cold imagined distance natural meanings of mystifying presences unquick with life, if in movement movement unseen, time to Marie Fire in Flight untied of fear, for if ever she awoke inside a teepee, young and vibrant and exultant expecting an exalting day she had emerged to see one dog fucking, not two, one dog fucking another dog, fucking and fucking and fucking, its great dog cock locked in concupiscence of death, fucking as natural as a bear fucking a beaver fucking the coyote fucking the jackrabbit, fucking the dog to its death? But you can’t just make things up and say they happened if they didn’t. Which don’t mean you can’t joke, especially as we do about the alienating, clashing, whiskey swilling othern with their names like
Black Cloud,
Still Deer
Sitting Bull
Buffalo Limp
Shacopay
Louise
Pinus Strobus
Young Beaver
Flapping Ear Of A Coyote
Bird
Condor of the Sun
He Interrupts
Mink
Witch
Lean Bear
Snake Maiden
Dawn
Not Yet Dawn
Spider Woman At Middle Age
Mud Mound
Porcupine
Bear
Crazy Horse
Horse
Lone Horn
Young Man Afraid Of His Horses
Owl
I love You
There Goes The Coyote
Low Dog
Black Knife
Running Dog
Eskimo John Walkara
Blackhawk
Black Hawk
Blue Jay
Brown Bear
Blue Eye
Green Eagle
Yellow Snake
White Buffalo
White Hawk
Blue Balls
Bull Balls
Bear Balls
Blue Horse
White Bull
Black Moon
Maroon Molly
Old Chief Smoke
Flumulf
Fast Salmon Swimming Up A Rippling Stream
Osceola
Tumult
Alpacapla
Green Turd
Feather Weeping
Tree
Savage Son Of A Bitch
Heart
Moose Horn
Killed Many
Roman Nose
Wovoka
Little Raven
Great Sparrow
Fart Dragger
Gray Owl
Luckless Neophyte
Antonio Garra
Pouncing Wolf
Black Kettle
Screaming Scorpion
Cornstock
Snarling Wolf
Sly Snake
Heavy Feather
Light Feather
Rainbow Warrior
Otter Eyes
Many Treaties
Little Wound
Mirthless
Ambush Snake
Night Snake
Snake In Tree
Bury My Heart
Dagger In My Heart
Little Crow
Teal Eye
Amber Snake
Gator Snout
Crazy Horse
Wild Horse
Horse With High Ass
Little Turtle Deer In The Woods
Flying Deer
Eagle
Spread Eagle
Eye Of Hawk
Soaring Eagle
Soaring Hawk
Song Of Owl
Talon Of Owl
Dog Eyes
Cat Eyes
Night Jaguar
Puma
Bear Belly
Conquering Bear
Salmon Leaping
Condor Of The Moon
Star Blanket
Charging Thunder
Lightning Bolt
Burning Teepee
Jump Like Frog
Climb Like Squirrel
Tommy Graywolf
One Woman For Every Moon
Man Lover
Eel Fingers
Beaver Tooth
Crazy Son Crazy Sun
Neck In a Noose
Nose In Soup
Forgegrof
Tenet
Rowor
Rumbling Innards
Cochise
Chases Butterfly
He Who Talks Too Much
Peace
Black Fox
Grey Fox
Black Wolf
Gray Wolf
Mountain Lion
Gray Puma
Magpie
She Brings Happiness
Black Mountain Lion
Sparrow Chaser
Swift Arrow
Wind
Soft Wind
Moon Shining
Moon
Half
Moon Moon On Water
Moon On Leaping Water
Leaping Water
Strong Hunter
Strong Like Bear
Strong Like Woman
Strong Like Man
Present For Chief
Someone
No One
Black Foot
Child
Oglala Girl
Digger
Sky Runner
White Man
Invisible Hands
Forest Water
Peace
War
Hair Cut
Crow
Mother Spirit Hawk
Mother Spirit
Laughing Maiden
Coughing Fish
Green Raven
Raven
Brown Dog
Poke-Her-Highness
Billy Two Moons
Jim Thorpe Professional
Nathaniel Canak Henderson
Abelewasi
Eareye
Sawelba
Bear Feet
Twicsttwn
Beaver Fart
Tender Wolverine
Gray Squirrel
Runner
Dinty Havesuminjuninum
Hippocrates
Darwin
Tell No Lies
Burn Forest
Strong As Tree
Dancing Bear
Dancing Otter
Dancing Wolf
Dancing Dirt Devil
Dancing Arrowhead
Dancing Madam
Dancing Wolfpup
Dancing Magpie
Dancing Trout
Dancing Vision
Dancing Dog
Dancing Cat
Dancing Puma
Dancing Tracker
Dancing Left Behind
Dancing Jack McPhee
Dancing Moon
Pas de Deus
Folie A Un Grapple
Senator Wind
Dancer
Zipping Zendel
Red Cloud
White Cloud
Keokuk
Red Grizzly Bear
Black Ass
Grizzly Paw
Bear Cub
Wife Of Grizzly
Grizzly Wife
White Bear
Many Names
Atwin
Whiskey Joe
Irish Whiskey
Joe Kentucky
Whisky Joe Canadienne
Whiskey Jacques
Firewater Joe
Hoppone
Hop Like Rabbit
Hasay-Bay-Nay-Ntayl
Apache Kid
Jack Ass
Whiskey Jack
Wequash
Sassafrass
Sassacuss
Sass Mouth
Jefferson
Measly Pikkins
Skunk Ass
No Longer Deer, even Young Tom Gravel, why not, and the infinite rest in their sacred volcanic mausoleum dreaming in the fumaroles of massacre, risen smoke signals the Battle of Bad Axe, Marie Fire in Flight looking down at the river splitting the coulees, the cuts of the driftless zone, and on that river a giant ship gassing the sky like a lofty predilection, and on that ship white folk with guns, and along the eastern bank white soldiers with guns pursuing a peaceable assembly of mostly Sauk and Fox, whole chunks of Winnebago having wandered back to villages in ingenuous warpminds of peace they had declared to lively ignorant ears, a moist, heated summer day begins early in the morning as the white soldiers rise early to fall upon the injuns, whose scout leads them astray, but the riverside is a trap, the bluffs steep, the tribes cohere too well, so well that as the men are bayoneted, the women and children flee into the Mississippi to drown, hundreds of injuns are killed, and look now down and see women and children Sauk and Fox too clever to flee spilling their blood with the men, that countless years of negotiations might cease, the many aggravations the injun brought to the tables of budding statehoodery might cease, and Marie looks there, up a bluff, three soldiers piling nine dead injuns when a shriek rends the ploppery, a timber rattler has appeared, and see there: a brave soldier bludgeons it with his gun butt and it goes the way of all combatants; risen smoke signals a stone wall Marie Fire in Flight flies fearlessly above to witness a camp of Chehaws or Muscogees, the neon signs are cursive, confusing, the taverns are closed, the neon blinking intermittently, but there: there is someone, an adolescent Chehaw, hopping with adamantine purpose that unnerves the heartiest of anthros, entering a village of Chehaws or Muscogees before he stops, animated now only from the bent waste up, his slopy shoulders flapping out arms, fear shuddering of flaying arms in restrained flight, birds laugh, cruel crows cackle, and old men laugh for they are not at war, they have just sent two canoes to Cuba on a tribal trade mission, a skinned eastern diamond back a good ten feet before choppage cooks in the fire they tend like the crops they tend to tend to, they have bullets for eyes holes and frantic women, entirely out of control as if blood were not of the quotidian, as the man who neither dismounts nor draws a firearm wonders at this display of foreign custom, this grating cacophony, this mock shock, the wide eyeholes, that one hopping as if a cricket with its ass on fire; risen smoke signals reveal to flying Marie Fire in Flight a dry sky burned blue, desert terrain below of mountains, ravines, aretes, arroyos, rattlesnakes in crannies of sharp stone or husks of saguaros, men scattered, striving, alert, familiarly execrating the horrific terrain in this year when all the cacti and the mesquite died of winter heat, yet the men do not melt despite temperatures above 110 in Spring, temperatures that put humans on edge, discombobulate their minds, Marie flies to witness this phenomenon, which is much worse where people are gathered close as they were near a dry creek bed, Apache refugees on one side, on the other the white Americans and those who did their bidding, in strokes of heat, the Apaches invited the white Americans and those who did their bidding to cross the crackling creek bed and end their sorrow, cool them into the celestial drifts, or at least in some cloud somewhere for none were here about, even the children begged—29 were not so lucky for they were forced to live, sold into slavery—for mercy, for death, vivid death, violent and sure, and further for the scalping which should always follow directly upon death that the skull might cool should there be any delay in postmort take off, which can certainly be the case when women and children stricken by heat and already prone to feckless thought having been raised dependent upon savage men number nearly one hundred and fifty, lamented one sergeant that day: it is so much easier to organize the kill than the aftermath; risen smoke signals strolls up and down the Siskiyou, Tom Gravel shaggy on shaggy plug, Tom Gravel held up, Tom Gravel and Rance Hardupp partnered passing through Old Shasta, Tom Gravel pissing into the, Tom Gravel passing into mist, for such is the rigamarole of the fumarole, wherein Pakistan elders convene, drone blown, a casserole of flesh and bone ashed–a mist mistake–for no, now Wintu elders are convened, for there’s troubles fuming from furnicularos, white men in the morning are black men at night, seeking something sacred within ancestral earth, a substance one Wintu, Walleye, claimed to have held in its pure form, which he found too soft as to doubt it would retain its form piercing a fawn hide, no magical qualities would confine themselves in such inutile fragments, so council it be, these white to black men were lunatics, certainly, but lunatics en masse, so it would take more than the rope around the waist like with that half-Flathead juvenile, Woeboy, or Woe Be-Guile, let him wander the woods and take turns winding towards him at dusk, yes, these white to blacks were a ferverous febrile fulmination, a fixed idee demon, a demon of fire, fire everywhere in the council house, Wintu elders fleeing to the crepuscular guns of miners, who had already slaughtered even the Rattlerman and as well his pulsing blue Pacific rattlesnake necklace, which anyway meant doom for a doomed tribe; risen smoke signals weird alewifes aplenty if mystic in the stakepole fortress village of Pequot remainers, lazy womenfolk and lackluster lusterless chuffy adolescents refusing to watch over angstbawling young’uns, that one there screeching tears even as clung teethy to a wide bloated breast, while finer men went off is seek of salvation as if they believed it were thereabouts within the protoconurbatory expanse of grasses and woods and short stubbed, inconstant rivers, for life were getting measly and promising meagerlier both here and wherever the proffered there might be if the land stretched beyond the Mos, hawk and hegan, well, if it even existed as other birdly ethereals, and thorny saplings backslap to scratch thighs—did the white man drive all the deer and rabbit into the Mo lands? Can we convince Sassacus that as the copperhead is not so deadly and is plentiful and we haven’t seen hooved creatures for three days that one hundred copperhead will do sometimes?—while the white coalition creeps to the stakepoles not even bothering to keep their voices down, for their spies have let it be known the men-folk are off hunting, you know, looking for white female flesh, the idiot injuns and their stickpole circumscribance with its mere two door places, and the fires started at opposite corners, meeting in the middle, all who didn’t burn shot, all who were not shot, swordsliced, all dead, five hundred?, six hundred?—they knew; risen smoke signals infundibular, so lies: upturned teepees, where the gas will go once the tin is finetinned, reflective Marie Fire in Flight casts her eyes about first taking in the birds in their millions, casts her eyes about for the moles in their millions, for irresolution prevented their apocalyptic armageddon, their redundancies, yet even maggots in their teethy billions stalk not the moles, even the most carnophagous among them are as the sarcophagous-most among them, having as they do a thing for the dead likely indescribable, impervious to research, beyond reason, as beyond reason reasons Marie Fire in Flight as what she has seen in her century more or less of human, too much of it white human, shades of failure to reason that perhaps Baby Kelly warnt no baby no more, and Jimmy Footlong of the farm down mile away long Red River was up to some funnin that got them thinkin bout Saint Louis or Natchez, the problem being to gain time, the easiest way being to bloody up a doll, break and bloody an arrow, a note I’m a gone to see Baby Kelly home for she hath gathered much a whatever needs gatherin, a Comanche arrow being most effective as they’s still feared near abouts though they be gone and the longer the gone the finer tuned the tale like the cottonmouth venom tipped arrowheads, though them Cheyenne the federals say give up their weapons cept for hunting arrows and them bow things, but there being still near three hundred should they get their asses lit afire could wipe out a family or two before they could hear about it at the fort, and look now the Baby Kelly Massacre on the banks of the river Redder than before, three hundred fourteen with precision in this case, for reasons that escape the historian, for the reason that none escaped, not one, Marie Fire in Flight knows not the relation between her will and her visions, only that the wheelbarrows are dreamlike gigantic overflowing European apocalypse painting type and the shadowy drooling hirsute Bocklin giant employed to infant toss the corpses into the volcano emanates a certain sense of placid damnation, a dumb feint towards delight, an endurance almost human, a mole badly in need of sunlight buried miles deep and magma hot on its ass digging toward the light that will be off in its brain before it comes anywhere near the surface; risen smoke signals, fumaroles and roles within fumaroles, holes and hole, dying moles, the scourge of assholes…
Tom Gravel, dead of heart attack at child birth, age 61.
rickharsch 