what had long belonged to us was the nothing that thus was strange in his heart if he could only leave his child here in the ground with its surely mountainous heart where it would rest its own light even in this New Jersey territory. He rose, wondering if he would return to his people or go elsewhere. He imagined a foam volcano risen as some hollow cylinder when bubbles formed in the unexpectedly overnight thawed water and froth oozed from its holes and froze — or so they had heard from the nine-fingered botanist Marcus, or perhaps from the traveler who had been in Chapultepec and in California and in Utah and northeast among the Iroquois and alone.
And seeing the figure of his rival Alexander slow his steps, he found the other figure clear across the burial ground, rushing toward them with that girl-mother’s imperious and loving swing of her wonderful hips, her dark hair now loose and thick, a person with the most beautiful large eyes in both worlds put together, eyes in which he would see his own country again when she came nearer, yes she was finished with even the fears that she had seldom admitted to him when they had smelled the ponderosa bark and seen the sunrise out of the mountain and laughed at a big-pawed wild cat halfway down a tree, and he had said, Nothing lasts for too long, and she had said, No. . no— this brave person who scoffed like him at magic.
He wanted to throw away the pistol and the man near him was angry and was going to speak to him, and the Navajo Prince took out the pistol to give it away perhaps as a present, but to give it away as the Anasazi had said, which now seemed wrong and unknown but here it was in his hand, loosely, not gripped, and as if the trigger were two thousand miles away, he understood the man before him as if he became him at the same time that he was himself.
He extended his hand with the pistol, and Margaret called, and he saw into Alexander’s hand and saw that Alexander was going to shoot him.
The northern sun spread through the overcast, which hung like no noctilucent cloud if such had ever existed at the height at which the young Indian had claimed their reincarnate friend the Anasazi traveled. The Hermit-Inventor had reached a place where indubitably three foam volcanoes rose evanescent out of the ice-bound April stream. But the Anasazi and his cloud were not here, unless precipitated in some happy form here during some recent night. Nor was the young Navajo, who might be anywhere, on his way home, on his way here, or speaking curiously to some resident of the land.
And then, for seeing was believing, the foam cylinders risen from the stream or descended from these brief waterfalls drew his attention upward to what he had not seen before. A double sun replying to itself through the overcast. An optical illusion. Hard to explain. The Hermit gazed at it until it became the one sun, though it was still clearly two. He heard a motion along the surface of things. He thought he would stand here awhile.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph McElroy was born in 1930. He has received numerous awards for his fiction. He lives in New York City. This is his sixth novel.
