“Stop.”
He sighs. “You should be proud of me. I have a spine. You wanna see it? I’ll rip it out of my back. For you.”
Her chin trembles.
He holds his face. He says into his fingers. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. Lack of sleep. It’s worse than a hangover.”
She has framed the newspaper photo of him from when a while back he spoke at the State House against what he calls “factory schooling.” In the bookshelves by the hallway it presides over shadows and a small table with the phone. She is confused, sad, and yes, proud, but also angry, ashamed. Though mostly confused. Mostly worried. In fact, in the past few weeks, she has been scared. Of him? Or of the media that she has heard is investigating his private life. Oh, boy.
He looks up at her now, one eye squinting.
“Drink your coffee,” she commands.
Sometimes when he visits, her sister or brother will be here, or one will call. Or one of the great uncles or cousins who Gordon used to work with, yes, the Depaolos who are funny and expressive and carry on much the same as Gordon does, with that red-hot Italian gene that Marian seems to be lacking.
But usually Marian is alone when he comes. They talk of the family. And they inevitably bicker. And they will look at each other sadly, each wishing the other were different. But he keeps coming around and once in a while, like in summer, she will drive her sporty car down to the old farm place, hoping to find him alone. A till-death-do-us-part loyalty. Parent and child. Old as creation.
Returning from a visit with Claire’s people at one of the Passamaquoddy reservations, the long drive home.
It is nearly dark. After ten. Now coming into Egypt, they take the old back road. Six-year-old Jane is asleep, her head in Claire’s rounded lap. The pickup truck they ride in is what some would describe as a rattletrap. The cab smells of tools and of the old sneezy quilted sleigh blanket that covers the seat to hold the seat stuffing in. The blanket may or may not have been washed since the days of sleighs. In daylight, you see it is made of black velvet and grizzly brown wool squares, a brisk rough weave.
As you know, Jane has no parents at the Settlement. Jane is an orphan of the “Drug War,” so ordinary a thing in America, like apple pie, like Elvis, like Ford. She is a possession of the Department of Human Services. Why is she here in this truck? DHS would not approve of the Settlement. So what’s up? This is a question for later. En passant, it will soon be told. A brief mention. Dear Reader, be alert.
Gordon St. Onge is at the wheel. His billed cap with Mertie’s Hardware on the front is pushed back. Some around Egypt say he drives like an old auntie.
Ahead of them is a set of taillights that now abruptly slide over to the right shoulder. It is another truck. It stops. As Gordon steers his own truck around, he wonders aloud, “A little trouble, you think?”
“Don’t stop. It’s probably lovers,” Claire advises.
Jane doesn’t stir. The big day at Indian Township has overwhelmed her.
The stopped truck has a row of glowing amber cab lights across the top and amber parking lights on each side of the grille. But the headlights are now out.
Gordon says, “Looks like Webb’s truck.” Webb, a neighbor, one of the old Egypt families whose vehicles are as familiar to Gordon as their faces, some vehicles friendlier than others, lopsided and limpy as old baggy-faced dogs.
“No, it doesn’t,” says Claire.
Gordon downshifts to bring his Chevy to a crawl, giving the other truck a chance to signal him if help is needed.
“Lovers,” insists Claire with a snort.
But now the engine of the mystery truck roars to life. Its headlights explode with brilliance on the backs of Gordon’s and Claire’s heads. Within seconds, the grille of the mystery truck is nearly pressed against Gordon’s back bumper.
Gordon gives his billed cap a quickie adjustment. This bumper thing puts him to mind of Ivy Morelli.
The driver behind them lays on the horn. And the headlights flash off . . . on . . . off . . . on.
Gordon glances over at Claire, sees only the dark spots of her eyes behind her glasses. “Ain’t lovers,” she concedes. “Maybe a truckload of circus clowns.” She tugs the summer-weight truck quilt (yes, a second quilt) to make it fit better over Jane’s long arms, long legs.
Gordon pulls his truck off the shoulder, shifts, waits. They are only a few snuggly feet from the old stonework culvert where Mushy Meadows Brook jostles along purposefully from the swamp to the lake. Frogs on the swamp side are in thunderous session. Every kind of frog. The man-in-the-opera type. The rubber-band type. And a few of those that you would swear were really little sleigh bells. Above is the stony breast of Pike Mountain, black against the bodeful purple evening dusk of June.
Suddenly the great jangling thunderous symphony stops. The silence is stunning. Jane stirs. She can smell that old truck cab smell and the worn-outness of the old truck quilts and that smell of Gordon and Claire, the smell that all Settlement people seem to have these days since the last batch of soap was made, mushroomy, potatoey, dry rotty, peppery. Yarrow and St. John’s wort? Goldenrod and turkey tail fungi? A Settlement woman named Lee Lynn is a regular magic witch when it comes to making the biggest tubs of nature-smelling soaps, Jane has overheard. And Jane, is as ever, unimpressed.
Gordon says, “It almost looks like Duey’s truck.”
“You’ll know in a minute.” Claire is annoyed by his chronic guessing. One of his traits that she has endured for half a lifetime.
Jane’s head of poofy Africa-thick hair (part Africa, part Europe, and no doubt some 1600s or 1700s or maybe 1800s American Indian connections) this head has come up. Her husky deep-for-a-child voice asks, “So, where are we?”
Gordon says, “Almost home, dear,” and squeezes one of her skinny knees.
A young man appears at Gordon’s open window, a light step, no scuffing or foot dragging, probably wearing sneakers. Plain white T-shirt. His face is round. Mouth, soft-looking. A small boyish mustache with everything else shaved off. Forearms and hands look hard. He stands in a whirl of mosquitoes. Slap. Slap. Slap. Cuff. Swipe.
And now another young guy right behind him, same build of a medium kind, but taller, wearing a dark T-shirt with an illustration that Gordon can’t make out. This taller guy wears glasses with metal frames. No mustache but the same soft mouth, hard-looking arms and hands. Smoking sweet tobacco in his pipe. So far they’ve said nothing. Just the sound of one bullfrog and two or three rubber-band frogs bravely recommencing.
And the hysterical whine of hungry mosquitoes.
It is the contentment of the man’s pipe smoking that signals this encounter shall be friendly. And it is this pipe smoker who speaks, standing there a bit beyond the white-T-shirt guy’s shoulder. “Gordie? You Gordie?”
“Yep.”
The nearer guy asks, “Howzit goin’?”
And Gordon replies, “Good,” and smiles and turns to glimpse out through the windshield. “Nice night.”
“Yep,” says the nearer guy and then, “Howzit we can get a kid into your school?”
Gordon says, “You gotcha some kids?”
“The sister,” says this nearer guy softly. “She’s fifteen. She don’t like . . . you know . . . the other kind of school.”
Jane squeals, “Ouch! Mosquitoes! Let’s GOOO!”
Gordon tells the two guys, “Bring her over. She’s welcome to check things out. Some of us will be away Monday and Tuesday. Couple little projects in Livermore. And . . . Wednesday is . . . New Hampshire. But Claire, you’ll be around Monday and Tuesday, wontcha?”
Claire says, “I shall.”
The mosquito whines are hale and hungry. Everyone is slapping and swiping their faces and arms. Jane moans, “My gawwwd.” And covers her head with the quilt.
Gordon says, “Thursday would be real good. We’ll all be around. About noon, we’ll be settled in for dinner. She might like that. Pretty laid back. But a lot going on. Singing, storytelling .
. . fiddle playing . . . history skits . . . karate demonstrations—”
“She’s shy,” interrupts the nearer brother, “of you guys.”
“Ah.” Gordon looks from the face of this nearer man to the other. “Well, we’ll have to arrange for her visit to be quiet. If you wanna call me.” He reaches for a pad on the dash and writes down his number, tears off the sheet, passes it into the near brother’s open hand.
The guy looks at the sheet, folds it nice, struggles a moment with a thought, then says, “She ain’t normal to look at.”
Instead of getting politely softened, Gordon’s eyes grow fiery, his full lunatic look, one eye big, one eye squinty. He gives the steering wheel a good squeeze.
Jane is whispering to Claire, something about the frogs being scary.
Gordon asks both brothers, “Has that been part of her school problem?”
The guy with the pipe says, “Brianna has a lot of problems.”
“With her mind,” says the other sadly, swiping at one ear, then smacking a forearm, then the top of a hand, then the back of his neck. But now he chuckles and the other joins in.
Gordon says, “You mean she’s retarded?”
The two guys look at each other and the near one says, “More like she’s from another planet.” He chuckles again. With affection. And the guy with the pipe nods and smiles.
Everyone is slapping, smacking, swiping.
“Well,” says Gordon.
Jane digs her knee into Gordon’s thigh. “Let’s go, Gordie. I gotta peeeee.”
The nearest guy warns, “Brianna’ll probably fight this.”
Claire leans across with one of her stern dark looks, while reflections skitter across her 1800s-or-early-1900s glasses. “You mean to say her coming to us is your idea, not hers.”
Both guys nod. The guy with the pipe says, “Actually, Bree knows a lot about you people. She’s talked about what you’re doing over there for a long time. She’s just . . . a funny person. If i’twouldn’t be too much trouble, could one of you come over and talk to her?” He steps around his brother and places a hand on the truck door, looks in at Claire and Jane. And the pipe smoke visits the inside of the truck, a kind of tumbling and timeless sweetness, especially nice mixed with the tumbling and timeless sweetness of a summer night.
Gordon smacks at first the top of one hand, then the other, now an ear. “Howzit we get over to your place?”
The pipe-smoking guy says, “It’s easy.”
Jane grabs Gordon’s arm. “I gotta GOOOOOOO. Please talk later!”
The brothers give their directions quickly.
Gordon tells them he looks forward to meeting Brianna.
And Jane howls. “EEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Let’s GOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Jane Meserve’s uneventful day at Indian Township, where she discovered the Passamaquoddy’s true secrets. She speaks.
You would not believe it. No feather hats. No buffaloes. Indians wear T-shirts. And sneakers. Nobody had stuff on their face. Indian kids asked me to play. I stood around with them. I asked them if they liked McDonald’s. They said yes. I asked them where was their TV. They showed me. We all watched TV. But it was boring. So I asked where was McDonald’s, one that is nearby. But one mother Indian said “not today.”
Vandermast is not printed on the tipsy silver mailbox across the road but this is the place.
Gordon St. Onge swings his truck down into the steep yard, house very close to the road. A bird chirruping in the tree over the house. Nice morning, no humidity, shade a bobbing blue-black against archipelagoes of tall weeds painted a ladylike early-day yellow by the fingers of the sun. Pole barn cluttered with the logging biz. Muddy low bed. Diesel pump. Rags of bark everywhere. Battered orange Timberjack skidder inside the bay. A wheel removed. Piles and clusters of needs-repair stuff. And parts. Rust and grease. Metal and rubber. Precious. This is, yes, small time. The bottom of the logging biz chain. Not the tip-top, not the nice lunches and projections and plots, not the smiles with legislative and bureau buddies-of-the-bosom behind closed doors that stay closed. Private. At least inaccessible to us low folk. No, this little barn by the home of loggers is as wide open as a yawn of exhaustion.
Dog barking inside the house. Gordon can’t see the dog but it sounds like a collie. House isn’t old but not new. A kind of forties or fifties red-shingled frame house with two additions in white metal siding.
He walks up to the door of the larger addition, it has a kitcheny look to it. He drives a homemade toothpick around in his teeth . . . casual . . . no hurry.
Dog is now at the nearest screened window. Woof! Woof! Woof!
Gordon doesn’t knock, just looks at all the windows, and up at the trees, and around. Two red pickups with no registration. A station wagon with the old-style aluminum registration tags up to 1964, parked deep in the bushy low limbs of a few dozen elm saplings. Fisher plow on pallets. No flower beds.
No spinning-leg Tweetie Birds or bent-over big-bottom plywood ladies.
He tosses down his toothpick, crosses his arms over his chest. Big ol’ dog bounds to the other near window. Something crashes inside. No need to knock. Dog is the doorbell.
He waits awhile, a good long while. He studies the gable with his most intense flickering mad-scientist expression, and there a small window of an octagonal shape like a cyclops eye staring back. But Gordon holds the stare, his pale murderous-looking hot green eyes, one squinted, one nearly bulging presently, devilish-looking beard, a man who stands nearly six-foot-five, muscular as a panther. Who in her right mind would answer the door to such a stranger? Even if she had purposely drawn him there.
In a future time, Brianna Vandermast remembers.
It was different than some believe. I saw not a lamb but a ram. I saw not wine-blood, nor flesh like bread, but musculature. I saw not holiness, but flaw. I saw not God there but all of the broken world, cries, complaints, whimpers, perplexity. I saw the beginning of a long road of trials. Trial by doubt. Trial by love. Trial by loss. Trial by a kind of explainable resurrection. There is no such thing as a savior, but there is a human epoxy that brings innumerable hearts into one hand.
Claire St. Onge speaks.
Finally the savage man, the fist-banging freaking angry one, metamorphosed back into our steadier teasy-eyes goofing-around version and the sky stopped drumming and the walls stopped panting and our meals were commenced with a forthright but unspoken grace. And our food got digested.
Newsroom.
Ivy is alone here. Still cartoon pink on face, neck, arms, legs, fingers, collarbones. But the torture by tickle has eased.
Old-timers have told her how once this was a big open room, blazing with light. Desks all faced north, like one-man or one-woman boats racing along on a sunny sea. There were three papers: morning, evening, and Sunday. Deadlines swooped above like enemy planes. But those were jolly times. “Like a family,” Ivy hears them say. And cigarette smoke, ringing phones, the clack of the wire services, the t-t-t-t-of typewriters, and there, raised on a platform like the goddess of the north was Ellen, the operator, poking at her lighted board. “Like a family.”
No more. Everyone is in a cage . . . well, a carpeted cage with walls that only go to your chest if you are standing. No more blazing light and cheery hellos. Just shadows so that computers can be seen and concentrated on.
No more Ellen.
Mostly now it’s just voice mail or a soft pulse if you are there to catch it.
It is sort of lunchtime, not a cheery merry “let’s all go to the cafeteria” lunch hour, but one of those coincidences where the place is empty.
No computer screens are busy. All are “asleep.” Even Ivy’s. Our Ivy is staring up at the dim ceiling.
There’s a sound behind her. Light as a soul. With sound-sucking carpeting, people pass behind you and you might not know it. But Ivy thinks it might be Martin the new reporter, a kid younger and less flashy than Ivy but with more college degrees than her. Ivy believes Martin wouldn’t make much n
oise even if he were walking on crushed rock.
She pictures Martin settling into his textured desk chair now back in his cage. He earnestly listens to his voice mail. Does Martin get calls from people demanding he investigate the Home School? Has Ivy failed to get the dope on the Home School story? Will Martin be sent to replace her?
And Martin would have quotes. Lotsa quotes. Quotes upon quotes upon quotes upon quotes. He would, of course, go to Egypt at least once to paint the setting. And then he would fill it with quotes. The perfect newspaper piece.
Is Ivy’s job on the line? Is Egypt Ivy’s Waterloo?
Ivy presses and prods her computer awake, checks her e-mail, then pokes around in her computer’s files to begin her afternoon’s work on her column, which today deals with road construction on Brighton Avenue. What a mess on Brighton Avenue!
The tour guides.
It is the appointed time.
A few yards up past the old St. Onge farm on the right, Ivy turns off the tar road, heads up the long graveled one, the actual way to the Settlement, first through mucky-green and mossy, black-smelling swamp-woods, then higher into open fields and gardens, up to the clefted plateau where the Settlement hides in its sprawly, tough ostentatiousness. The sky is nothing like blue. More white and creaturely than pure space, like a drooping furry belly getting ready to settle down on its big nest.
“Another hot muggy day,” she laments. But she’s had several nights of real sleep since the itching quit, so she feels ready to soak up the weird and compelling vibes of this place, which so many of the anonymous callers call the Home School. She hasn’t told her editor, Brian, that her status here has changed from reporter to friend. Of course, one could be both. Reporter and reported-on don’t need to be adversaries, do they? At the moment, Ivy’s left brain and right brain are twirling and stomping around in a terribly old dance.
She parks her sporty red car among a couple of vans, a few cars and pickups, one jeep, and three old farm trucks in the glowing, hot, crunchy lot out beyond and in front of the first Quonset hut, then hefts her shoulder bag and marches in her usual substantial way toward the shady quad. And what does she find but the quadrangle and piazzas and doorways almost as swarming and noisy as before. But different. Not much sitting or scooching. People are standing in bunches. Though griping about the heat, they look so bright-eyed and bushy tailed and enterprising.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 16
