Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  “What town?”

  “Cornville.”

  He is standing with a teakettle. His bearded chin is raised. He looks confused, all that squint-blinking now in both eyes. And a drop of sweat or bath water moves out of his brown hair at one temple. Then, “Does regular coffee not set well with you?”

  She spins around, crossing her arms under her small bustline, says in a husky way, “If I touch that stuff, I’ll be doing bird calls and Elvis imitations till four in the morning.”

  No longer blinking, his pale eyes move over her funny beret, the silky even edges of her violet tinted dark hair. He gives the bill of his own cap a serious adjustment, again screwing it down tight, the printed word MOFFIT seesawing.

  “Anything I can do to help, Gordon?”

  He puts a blue flame under the kettle, says, “Naw. Thanks. You just relax.” He comes over to the little table, pulls out a chair, and commands, “Sit.”

  She sits.

  He squats down and feels roughly one leg of the table. “Watch out,” he warns her. “It should be dry. But . . . it got a pretty heavy coat this time. Might be tacky.” He smiles farawayishly, as though there may be some especially endearing story connected with this paint job.

  He finds a place to stand, leaning back against an old corner hutch of knobbed doors and drawers next to the gas stove, pushes his cap back, crosses his arms over his chest, one leg out before the other, Viking at ease.

  “The light here,” Ivy says with a squint.

  “Solar heat. Commercial power,” he says. Then with an ugly grunt, “The electric octopus.”

  The what? Ivy’s pointy top lip sort of vibrates, holding back.

  Phone rings. The old black dial-type wall phone she has been squirming on the other end of so many times. He reaches for it, tips it to his ear with “yep”s and “uh-huh”s. Ivy watches him, his left side lighted by this osseous fluorescent light, the rest of him slipping off into warm shadow.

  Okay, Ivy, she tells herself, Check him out. Forget none of this. Details, please. Get him while he’s off guard. She stares. She memorizes his dark blue work pants, which look new. Really new, like still creased from the display rack, but his chambray work shirt is paled and frowzy from washings. And goofy. Yes, it seems rather poorly homemade. The phone looks small in his hand. Great big ol’ son of a bitch with that face of a hundred expressions, who could snatch all the reporter pads he wants from little women, maybe even little men, without much effort expended. Ivy narrows her eyes and tsks. Except for these special features, he reminds her of so many you see around, hundreds of them out in the world with their dry knuckles and smashed nails, building and fixing, hefting and hawing, digging and tarring, making things float or fly, purr or roar, making things grow, cutting things down, loading them on, and always that billed plastic cap with the ads for the companies that own them, own their children, own their homes, their minds, and their hearts.

  His belt buckle. A sun with a mouth that is either kissing or whistling a tune . . . or startled . . . you know, that “oh!” of surprise. Hammered-out copper. Good chance it’s child-made. Like the shirt. No rings on his hands. No tattoos. No watch. Just a pair of reading glasses in the chest pocket, just the plain miracle of making it to your forties without obliteration.

  Ivy frowns. She listens to the house. The antique dry-woody air isn’t moving at all. She fans herself a little with the closed fingers of one hand.

  He speaks one last “yep” then hangs up the phone, which immediately rings again, and he answers it and begins speaking the language of electronics, intermingled with English words like “Fred” and “Wednesday night” and “a carloada them from Monmouth.”

  The teakettle whistles sharply. He reaches and twists off the burner knob while still tuned in to his caller, yet when Ivy looks up the next time, he is looking right at her face with unmistakable tenderness.

  She flushes deeply.

  When he finally says, “Yep, bye,” he goes to the drain board and makes a fuss with some mugs and spoons.

  Ivy asks, “Where are the nice women who I met the other night, Gordon?”

  He has his back turned to her now. He shrugs. “Damned if I know.” He glances around the room. “Lotta doors here, you see. Sometimes . . . you know . . . it’s like those old Charlie Chaplin movies. You’d be put to mind of them here.” He turns and wags his eyebrows. He stoops and sniffs the paper flowers passionately as he passes them once, zigzagging around the kitchen in search of sugar. He doesn’t know where the sugar is in his house, Ivy notes.

  She fiddles with her necklace, mind brewing.

  The phone rings. Hearing the person’s voice, he hoots, then, “Vic! Holy shit! Watcha up to?” and then a whole long series of “yep”s. He turns and grins and wags his head apologetically at Ivy. But then his face goes slack and he’s really listening ever so keenly to whatever the caller is saying, listening with a kind of hard edge, with pale and narrowed eyes fixed on Ivy. She doesn’t like the feeling. It is as if they are talking about her.

  When he’s off the phone, he positions two beehive-shaped glazed red and green pottery cups on the table and strokes one side of his heavy mustache thoughtfully. “Do you trust me not to be wicked and give you the real stuff, dear?”

  “No, I don’t trust you,” she says thickly. “But it’ll be you who suffers if I get the caffeine gabs.”

  “What would that be like?” he asks. He glances at her hands as he sloshes hot water into the cups of measured coffee. He is giving her hands a careful study. And now, yes, he is looking slyly at her low-cut neckline and all the bareness of her collarbones, and the necklace, all those brightly painted wee butterflies with wings lifted nervously for takeoff and he asks, “Wood?”

  And she says, “Yes.”

  And he asks, “Who made it?” And he draws closer.

  And she says, “I don’t know. I bought it. At a shop. In Vermont.”

  He turns away, carrying the kettle back to the stove, murmuring, “The miracle of human hands and hearts.”

  She dabs her sweaty top lip with an open palm.

  He returns with the jar of sugar he has found, a jelly jar of cream, and a nice print saucer. Little roosters, hens, and ducks marching around the border of the saucer. Too small for the Junebug bread actually, which he is unwrapping. Upon this small dish, he bestows his most crazed, penetrating look. He jerks a knife from a leather case on his belt. “Oh, what the hell,” he says good-naturedly and saws the loaf into rough quarters, stuffs one whole quarter into his mouth.

  Ivy’s eyes widen on the whiskery bulge of his loaded left cheek. She crosses her legs, spins her foot.

  He circles the room once, chewing noisily. He tosses his billed cap onto a pile of papers on one desk. He circles the table with Ivy stirring and sipping her coffee. He seems distracted, his mind on something urgent and elsewhere. But now he is jerking out the chair opposite Ivy, then sits, looking too big for this chair, though comfortable. The sad blue light from the area of heaped desks illuminates Ivy’s face and throat and the back of Gordon’s head and the pale shoulders of his old soft-looking blue chambray shirt, yeah, those slopy peasant shoulders.

  Ivy sips more coffee. She lifts off her beret and places it on the table. Okay, bit hot tonight for a covered head. Hot room and burning questions.

  “Aren’t you really going to grill me?” he asks.

  “I said I wasn’t.”

  “I’m not a trusting man.”

  She tsks. “Well, since I’m not a trusting woman, it’s only fair that you get to be distrusting, too.”

  He looks down at his coffee.

  She says, “Okay, if it’ll make you happy. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  She smiles. “I guessed pretty close.”

  He snorts, then says darkly, “The nines are hard.”

  She sips more coffee. “You make good coffee, Allah.”

  “What’s your boss like? Hard to please? Or kinda laid back about
all this?”

  “He’s a liberal.”

  Gordon grins weirdly. “Liberal? I know not what that means. Tell me.”

  She plays along. “He’s for things.”

  “As opposed to against,” Gordon offers lightheartedly, his strange eyes steady on her face.

  She smiles. “He’s for people. He’s not into the great white conquering male thing.”

  Gordon leans back and slips his hands off the table to rest one on each thigh and says, “I am. I am for the great white conquering male thing.”

  “It figures,” she says with disgust. “I mean, after all, God is a big white conquering male, right?” She sees a barely detectable flutter disturb one of his eyelids. It’s hard to tell when he’s teasing or serious. He is not consistent and so far presents only extremes. And riddles. And jokes. And weird parables. She glances at the prune bread remains. “You can have all of it,” she tells him. “I have to watch those ol’ calories.” She slides the little plate toward him. Now she spies a row of six-packs of unopened beers underneath one of the desks, the curved necks shyly defined in the shadows of their hiding place. She looks back into the man’s eyes. “You are a scary guy. I’ll give you that. And this place . . . it must know some terrible heartache.”

  Gordon St. Onge looks at a closed door just to the right of the red chimney. “I’ll give you that.”

  She says, “I’ve been getting a lot of calls and messages from worried people. They’re saying some disturbing stuff about you and your school. They’ve been calling your administrative district superintendent here, even the school board, calling the police, calling child protective workers . . . calling me!”

  He says evenly, “There’s no school here.” But she sees his face has gone drywall color and some wrath, some force is inflating his neck. Seems this news is upsetting him. He slides his hands from his thighs to his knees, rocks slowly forward and back a time or two on the back chair legs. On his jaws between the gray and brown hair of his beard, the sheen of a fearsome real sweat.

  She continues, “Most don’t identify themselves to me out of fear . . . of you . . . and your people. Some sound a little overexcited. But others sound like just regular nice folks who have heard and seen some things. They say they have proof . . . or at least know people who have seen bruised children, pregnant girls who you’ve forced yourself on through a rather self-serving definition of the Old Testament or some such. And drugged children . . . dead children. They claim you work kids here like slaves, make them use dangerous tools, machinery, and animals. There’s mention of pagan worship, animal sacrifice . . . though it seems screwy to me how you work that into the Bible, the Jesus part anyway. And they tell me you are . . .” She closes her eyes. “. . . stockpiling weapons.” She opens her eyes.

  He is stroking both sides of his mustache with the spread fingers of one hand, grooming the coffee out of it, and just plain grooming.

  Ivy sets her mug down with a thwonk. Empty. She says, “Those are serious charges.”

  He places his hands on the table and looks down between his spread knees at the shadowed floor. “And what luck have they in riling authorities?”

  Ivy shrugs.

  “What do you think? A little or a lot?” He presses her on this.

  “Seems not a lot.”

  His expression remains frozen.

  She says, “But you know, some authorities are not quick to act. They sit on paperwork until someone from above pokes ’em with a stick . . . usually for some political reasons . . . depending. You know, everything is politics. The people who call me are frustrated. That’s all I know.”

  He is back to looking at the floor. Won’t look her in the eye.

  She says almost squeakily, “Why aren’t you staunchly defending yourself about this stuff?”

  Now he looks up at her with his searing almost-cross-eyed scrutiny. “Those accusations don’t make sense. It’s as though they speak from Alice in Wonderland, where big is little and little is big and rabbits and cats and playing cards talk and time goes in reverse.”

  The hair on the back of Ivy’s neck moves spiderishly.

  Gordon stands up. He stretches. Pushes his chair back into place. “More coffee?”

  “No, thank you.” She raises her chin high and her dark bowl of hair shimmers with a line of light across one side.

  He goes to lean against the red enamel chimney, the bluish soulless infliction of fluorescent light now on his face and front, purpling the chimney. It’s only Ivy’s guess that it is really red.

  “So,” Gordon says. “What are some of Elvis’s best songs? ‘Hound Dog’? ‘Heartbreak Hotel’?”

  Heat flares along Ivy’s arms. Her face. She turns and looks straight into Gordon’s grin, his big blue-white evil grin, all those teeth. “You tricked me! This coffee is real! Show me the decaf jar, you worm!” She leaps from her seat, hurries to the cupboard. “Haven’t you got any better light in this so-called kitchen!”

  “Well, maybe that’s the problem,” he suggests. “I couldn’t see to read the jar very well. Or maybe it’s just old age.” He pats the glasses in his chest pocket. “I forgot to use my specs.”

  She flings open the nearest cupboard door. The shelves are almost bare. No cereal. No cans of green beans or jars of applesauce. No boxes of elbow macaroni. Mostly just bare space and . . . these . . . whatever these are . . . a jar of peppercorns. A label-less jar of tan stuff . . . cinnamon sugar maybe? No, too powdery. Something ancient and metamorphed and creepy. Anything goes here in this realm. And yes, there’s plain ol’ coffee with caffeine. She slams the cupboard door. She gives her knuckles a boyish crackling. She shouts, “WHAT IF I HAD HEART TROUBLE OR SOMETHING?!!!!!!!!!!”

  “You didn’t mention heart trouble . . . just the Elvis and the bird thing. I wanted to see that.”

  She clomps along with her heavy-heeled 1800s boot-shoes back to the table. She sees through a back window a wriggling glimmer of light high up in the trees of the near mountain, light that she hadn’t noticed a few minutes before. She steps closer. “You have neighbors in the woods up there?”

  “A regular metropolis,” he admits. “You—”

  She interrupts, “So that’s not your land?”

  “It’s the Settlement.”

  “Shit!”

  “Some call it the Home School. I used to try to discourage that. But, oh, well. School is home. Home is school. Not to ever be separated lest one die. Like the body itself. You take a sharp knife and cut the heart from the chest of a living person. You know what happens, dear, don’t you? You know what happens when the miracle of arteries and nerve endings and a happy jig and smiley face is eliminated from the heart?”

  “It dies!” she answers desperately. “That’s what you want me to say, right?”

  “Yay, I say unto you, my family lives.”

  The biblical language, albeit old English, which Ivy has been ready to pounce on, but all she does is squinch one eye.

  Something flumps onto the floor upstairs.

  Phone rings.

  Gordon St. Onge crosses the old floor and reaches for the receiver and speaks deeply, “H’lo. Yep. It is he.” Pause. “Yeah. Sorry about that.” He chuckles. Then shuffles through the curled pages of a giant desk calendar. “Yep. Thirty lambs. And some with—” He listens. “Yep.” He listens. He pulls a rag from his work pants pocket and snorts something from his nose into it. “Yep, I know. Uh huh. Uhhh, could be long ’round then.” Listens while pulling at his somewhat large nose some more with the rag. “I don’t know where you can come by that but I’ll check. Might be Aurel did that last year but I know as a rule, he doesn’t lettem go for that. I’m only going by his order sheet here. Maybe . . . yuh. He’s good at that.” Gordon chuckles heartily.

  There’s the eeeeeeerrrrk of a swollen door opening at the far end of the kitchen, the darkest end, to the right of the glossy chimney and woodstove and wood box. Now a narrow hallway shows and steep attic stairs. This draws both Gordon’s an
d Ivy’s attention, and Gordon’s face changes and his expression is none of those expressions Ivy has been witness to before.

  It is a girl dressed in nothing but a white sleeveless undershirt, the kind with straps and a little bitty satinesque bow. And flowerprint underpants. The girl’s arms and legs are long and golden brown. Could she be ten? Eleven? Twelve? She walks straight to Gordon and leans into him. Then she turns to face Ivy. She stares at Ivy. Eyes large and sulky and black. She is clearly a mix of Africa and old Europe and probably American Indian . . . or something like that . . . the great American love-hate story. This child is breathtakingly beautiful. Dark hair floofed into a soft loose curly sphere. Long neck. Her voice is rough and deep as Ivy’s own. “I thought I heard Mumma.”

  Gordon says, “Okay, Bryce . . . you can count on it. Thanks. Yep. Bye.” Hangs up the phone. Slips one hand into the middle of the girl’s back as she turns. And he pulls her to him. Ivy’s eyes settle on the two of them with smoky regard.

  Gordon checks the clock between two windows. He says, “Jane, I’ve got to go.”

  And Jane pleads, “WAIT!” pushing her chin into his shirt. “I want to read you a story.”

  “No reading now, dear. I have to go.”

  “Don’t goooooooo,” Jane pleads weakly.

  “Oh . . . you mean you’ve changed your mind and want to come?”

  Jane wrinkles her nose.

  “We’ll read tomorrow,” he tells her, guiding her along back toward the attic door.

  But the girl resists, slumps weakly, gripping the front of his old worn-pale shirt. “It’s lonely, Gordie!”

  “Gin is staying with you. You like Gin.”

  “She’s asleeeeep. She won’t DO anything.”

  “That’s what night is for, dear.”