Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  “An’ you know the complaints are coming in faster than call-ins to a 1960s music request hour.”

  “Those summer people again?” Gordon wonders.

  “Unh-unh. And it would be against the rules for me to tell you who.”

  “The neighbors uphill again. About Jane?”

  “What can I say?”

  “Well? Was it about Jane?”

  “This time, no. But yes. All of the above.”

  “Above?”

  Shawn chuckles. “I’m trying to make everybody happy, Gordon. I have so many people to make happy. That’s what I’m here for. Kinda like being Walt Disney.”

  “We have no abused kids here . . . that I know of anyway.”

  Silence on the other end. Then, “Just a minute. I’m scrolling through your long list of sins.”

  Gordon doesn’t laugh.

  “Ah! Here we go. Stacey Christina Kellock of Turner, Maine, Todd Bailey Kellock, age two . . .”

  Gordon says nothing as he hears the several names of DHS-targeted women and children he has rescued that have now been metamorphosed into data. He is standing in the kitchen doorway to the piazza, gripping the long-corded phone, one eye squinched shut, watching a group of teenagers (boys and girls) walking by from the tar road, shortcutting to the Settlement, coming back from somewhere . . . on foot? . . . from a hitched ride? . . . he knows not. After all, Gordon St. Onge does not know everything everyone here at the Settlement does every waking minute.

  Meanwhile, in Augusta, Shawn Phillips, who actually does look a little like Walt Disney, leans back in his chair and chuckles. “That particular child protective caseworker . . . Joyce Marden . . . she’s one of our finest. The CIA can’t hold a candle to her prowess. She’s like the furry thing that is the only animal capable of killing a porcupine.”

  “Fisher cat.”

  “Yeh, but I knew you’d deflect.” He chuckles. “But next time, I’ll suggest they send Jerry Thibodeau. Grew up on Pine Street in Lewiston. Spoke nothing but the patois till he was five.” He chuckles mightily.

  Gordon rolls his eyes. Then, swallowing an egg-sized knot of tension, he says in a voice that hunches down now with an unbecoming dog-like humility, “I appreciate your trust, ya know?”

  History (as it happens) as reported by Jane Meserve, age six, with assistance by Jenna Gray, age ten.

  In case I die from food, I desidded to get the evidints here, like all writen out. What they eat here is fish. And fish skin. Yes beleev this. Milk squirtid right from animals. Vegtables from the ground. Bugs walk on the ground, okay? It isn’t that far they go to need to get on a vegtable. Eggs come right from chickins bums not a clean facotorytruck like you see always.

  Bonnie Loo remins me everytime. She says remembr where these eggs come from nah nah.

  Mapel candis they make here are good and chocilat Homers. But do you think they let me have some? Only on sertun condishins. Everybody watches me to make sure I don’t get enough good stuff. All those EYES. Like mean tigars staring at my plate. I hope you are all reading this.

  Another day. Another night.

  Ivy Morelli, sometimes fearless Record Sun news reporter, flips and flops under the blankets. Another naked-in-public dream. She’s had three of those this week. Whatever happened to her old flying dreams?

  In the Settlement’s print shop, the old press whines and ch-chunks as the Good Neighbor Committee prepares yet another flyer blitz. Every few weeks this happens. “Invitations” go out into the world, tacked on bulletin boards like at the IGA or fire station, stapled to telephone poles. Some under windshield wipers. Some placed in hands. Some mailed. This newest flyer reads:

  Come share a nice meal with us EVERY SUNDAY around NOON. EVERYONE IS WELCOME. Bring a dish if you like but it’s not necessary. Okay? We have good things for you. Tasty food, skits about history and the news and science (the true, actual and investigated kind) and songs we all sing together and music. You know where we are. Just past Gordon St. Onge’s gray house on Heart’s Content Road, up the hill, then turn right onto the dirt road, keep going. Can’t miss us.

  The press ch-chinks off two hundred of these flyers, then the Good Neighbor Committee and some of the other committees and crews draw and color and paint on them to personalize. Such as smiling bugs and white poofy sheep and brown bulls, smiling flowers, smiling suns, smiling dogs, smiling humans, little houses, cherry trees, trucks, windmills, mountains, unsmiling monsters, orange pumpkins, birds.

  Every time two hundred flyers go out, a couple dozen visitors will show up, sometimes less. These visitors always have a nice time, and usually come back now and then. They are mostly ordinary regular folks from around Egypt, although “prestigious” friends of Gordon and the Depaolo family are invited as well; state senators and the Weymouths (old money), some elderly past governors of Maine, clergy, Council of Churches, heads of departments, heads of institutions, owners of thriving midsized businesses. NONE of these people ever turn up.

  JULY

  In a future time, Claire St. Onge remembers Catherine Court Downey and asphalt.

  We had run into each other unplanned, both headed to the university dining hall. She asked if I’d heard about the latest cuts to the humanities, more celebrating of computers, business, and sports. She said, “If this were a zoo, baboons wouldn’t miss the humanities.” She laughed.

  Sun, getting hotter, following and sniffing after Catherine and me across the parking lots as if it had us especially picked out to fry for lunch!

  Then all of a sudden, she froze in the middle of the treeless open tar with oil spots and starry side mirrors and big hungry sky and the yellow spectral eye above, and Catherine’s mouth opened, a huge pink square. And her bare arms reached for me. And she wept into my shoulder as at a funeral.

  “What is it?” I asked, and hugged her completely. She was pulling and twisting my lavender cotton collar. It was ninety-five degrees in the shadows, but out here in this open tarred-over space, body to body, it was going to bring on for me a faint. I was starting to see fairy dust.

  Of course, some students passed by and others, politely looking away, veered out around us.

  The grays.

  We keep at low altitude many moonless nights over the White Mountains and foothills. Human Earthlings publicly despair that we exploit desolation. What desolation? Miles and miles and miles of robust precious beings, bacteria, fungi, mites, grubs, dots of vitality, specks of brilliant force, alive and kicking molecules, steaming weak interaction force, all in concert with snow, rime, ice, soil, and leaf. Oh, marvel! The teeny weenie, which to each other are perfectly ordinary in size. And some of us grays in our multitudes of aircrafts are teenier than microorganisms, like those tucked in your cells. Hi! Hi! Hello! Hello!

  Bree remembers.

  I was being drawn deeper into its thick, black honey. It was, I believed, a place where mind, body, and spirit could come together. I had my spies, Whitney, Margo, and Oceanna, Michelle and Samantha, who had written and called me, girls about my age, quick and rowdy, raised Settlement-style. They came once to my house with Butch Martin, who had a driver’s license and was about twenty at the time. They called him their “escort.” I thought they were joking. Their “escort.” Butch was beautiful, all tawny and muscley with dark eyes. He didn’t have much to say, but for his jokes and plaguing his charges. He was beautiful, yeah. And maybe that made me just a little bit out of focus.

  Critical thinker of the past. An excerpt.

  The war is not between classes. The war is between individuals and barbarian society . . . [which] is rooted today in obedience, conformity, conscription, and the stage has been reached at which, in order to live, you have to be an enemy of society . . . The choice is not between socialism and fascism but between life and obedience.

  —Art and Social Responsibility (1946), by Alex Comfort

  Critical thinker of the past.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer, witnessing the first test of a nuclear weapon, confessed t
o tasting sin. But he and all his colleagues knew from the beginning what lay waiting at the end of the project. And which was the stronger flavor, the sin, or the satisfaction of having stolen fire from the gods?

  —Theodore Roszak

  Critical thinker and scientist of the past.

  The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil from the spirit of man.

  —Albert Einstein

  Critical thinker of the present.

  More than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

  —Woody Allen

  Stuart Congdon remembers.

  Of course I knew who she was the minute she walked in. The face was exactly as I’d heard. Koala bear. That’s what I thought of. Not a monster face. But where in tarnation was the shyness and continuous giggles? Hadn’t our old boy Gordo said that she hides behind her hair? That is not what we saw that night.

  Rainy (young married Settlementer) remembers.

  This was the east parlor. Lacy and pastel. Less slop than the west parlor. This room’s double doors opened into an entryway of coat hooks on tongue and groove directly off the horseshoe porches. This less-used parlor had a feeling of being away, across the quadrangle of trees from the west parlor, library, kitchens, and those porches and piazzas that were plastered with tables and thunderous life. Most of the windows here faced north, so you could see down over the kids’ gardens mobbed with scarecrows, some knee-deep or even neck-deep in arcs and halos of lusty sunset green. Others were just standing vigil over yellowed plant death. Then the sloping hay fields between first and second crops. Early evening. Sun still high enough to butter it all. Yeah, dear sun. He was as primary on his knees as he was flying at midday.

  Whitney recalls.

  It was Socrates night. For most of the younger kids, it was just nuzzle-smooch time, like our usual salons. Neck rubs. Sometimes hair brushing. You never saw Butch or Evan or any of those guys, but Lorraine, their mother, and my mother Penny, plus Claire and Geraldine were regulars. Gordon rarely came.

  Nathan Knapp was our usual facilitator, with his round woeful eyes of molten black. Clean shave. Complexion of a woodsy mushroom. Thin seam of a mouth.

  Margo and Oceanna (very unidentical twins). They remember.

  We heard feet slisking over the entryway rugs toward the parlor door and then there she was, filling up the doorway on the darker edges of the creamy white room and people turned to look, those of us who had met her and those who hadn’t. And for a few witless moments, nobody said anything.

  Lily.

  That night, she finally showed up while a group of us were in the east parlor. Her deformed face made those who hadn’t seen her before gulp. She was wearing her work clothes and looked like “Paul Bunyan woman,” a nickname that stuck for a while, sawdust in her cuffs. But some of us looked that way, too, dusty and defiant. Oh, yes. And her hair was wicked. Frantic red Ss and Qs. The world’s best hair. It just goes to show, nobody can have it all.

  Bonnie Loo.

  I was there the night she came, the girl who paints and draws like the angels. But. Die Bonnie Lucretia, die, I said to self. I knew she would be the final straw for me, the gunpowder in the cannon, me shot out of the Settlement finally, my ass in flames.

  Benjamin speaks from the future.

  I could be a really tough little prick, not Christianly. My mother, Glennice, was a model Christian, a sensitive person, yet in her own way, tough stuff. I inherited the toughie part. But that night the FACE appeared, I almost shit myself.

  Draygon.

  I didn’t let on, but I was weirded out.

  In a future time, Bree will remember this.

  The east parlor! It was just as they had described, but more so. All these faces. Nobody blinking. An almost ceramic scene. Among them my spies, Whitney, Michelle, Samantha, Margo, and Oceanna. And the almost wall-to-wall braided rug of yellows and greens. The antique furniture, high falutin’ and dark. And old lace, utterly elegant, utterly dingy.

  I sat down deep into a flowery delicately musty couch between Margo and Michelle, my boots crossed at the ankles. Two kisses. Smacking on each cheek of my face, two stamps of approval from my new sisters.

  Death! Drink up!

  “To Socrates!” shouts a Settlement teen.

  “To free inquiry!” shouts preteen Theodan.

  “To questions without end!” another shouts.

  “To answers that make questions!”

  “To questions or death!”

  “Death!”

  “Death!”

  “Death!”

  Clink!

  Clink!

  Clink! The jelly jar goblets go left, forward, right, touching, toasting.

  Swallow.

  Gulp.

  The smacking of honeyed lips.

  Each little goblet holds the honey for taste, the hot water for steeping the hemlock sprigs which are for “death!” Such commitment to QUESTIONs, as Socrates himself died by the cup, when offered that perfectly fatal choice.

  “Death!”

  Draygon remembers.

  But of course nobody dies from the tree hemlock. But being so young I was a little spooked.

  It begins.

  Besides the old and mended lace of this room, there is a blizzard of crocheted throws and valances, and a tablecloth to give the long tea table its illusion of classiness.

  Yes, Bree is here tonight. She is wearing her logging boots and old but fresh work clothes, her rivuleted red hair brushed into soft snakes. She is not shy. She seems invigorated by the “death tea,” searingly alert, cheeks too pink. After everyone in the many couches and rockers is introduced, she is invited to ask the first question of the night.

  She covers one eye while in thought. “Hmmmm. Okay. Uh, is it sensible to die for ideals?” she wonders, studying her empty hemlock tea glass with both of her freak eyes.

  Nathan Knapp, legs angled off the stool into the middle of the gathering, always the facilitator for these formal salons, stares at Bree. He does not like Bree, right? Bree feels it. Everywhere in this room is love except on that stool, his worn jeans, some sort of midnight blue slippers, black velour jacket open over a dark gray T-shirt. Black hair slicked back with wettest water.

  Bree shrugs nervously, states, “Socrates died for his right to free inquiry. Or maybe the right to argue. Whatever, he had to steal that right and then pay a price.”

  “Death!” says one of the unidentical twins, Oceanna, with a smack of a hand on one end table.

  Nathan’s eyes move toward the outburst and her short alley-cat brown hair and her oops!-having-too-much-fun grin.

  A hand goes up. Nathan nods toward it.

  Geraldine says, “Don Quixote died for his ideal of honesty. The ideal of a kept promise.”

  Another hand.

  Nathan turns, points.

  Margo says softly, “Jesus died for the poor.”

  Another hand, then, “Poor is not an ideal.”

  Laughter.

  Another hand at which Nathan nods.

  With her sleepy young husband (little goatee and glasses, knitted brown vest over his light T-shirt) leaning into her shoulder, pregnant Lily, whose eyes are silvery and sassy, says, “Sancho Panza lived so that his family could eat and live. He lived life for life. Some say it was selfish. But coming home alive helped his family survive. Is that an ideal? Or—?”

  Nathan swivels to face two raised hands, two offerings. He picks one.

  “Food is a thing,” says a bright-faced teen boy. “What I mean is, food is not an idea. Sancho Panza loved food and his family loved food.”

  Nathan smiles, touches a finger to his chin. “Let’s see.” Pause. “But did Sancho Panza also love his family? Did he make it home because he loved them? Is love a thing, or an ideal, or what
?”

  “No. Not an ideal. It’s a need. Love is a need,” replies the boy solemnly, then cracks a smile, blushes, laughs.

  Nathan swivels to the other raised hand.

  “Love is a feeling,” the mother of Samantha Butler explains levelly.

  Nathan points to another offering.

  “Back to Jesus. He died for the poor? I thought he died for sins.” This another fairly young boy.

  Nathan gives Whitney the stage.

  Whitney: “He died among the poor and he seemed to have only a few consistent themes. Mostly he was about poor.” Whitney is staring at the yellowy-green world beyond the windows. The picture of bounty. She goes on, “Some scholars ask if Jesus really existed but that doesn’t matter; the Jesus story is one of the greatest stories of all time. They say different people wrote the different books, the testaments. If he didn’t exist then his giving his life for whatever reason was an idealistic story, for sure. Some say his death signified the last human sacrifice of the ancient pagan tradition.”

  “Do you think Jesus existed?” Nathan asks.

  “No proof,” Whitney says quickly.

  “But did Socrates exist?” Nathan asks.

  “Maybe Plato made him up!” croaks adolescent and boyish Kirky.

  “Maybe Plato’s not real, either. Just a pen name,” offers a preteen without invitation from Nathan. “Maybe he was really Shakespeare and Shakespeare was really Bob, a poor bum and maybe Bob was really Bobette and maybe Bobette was really a cow—”

  Laughter and fond boos drown him out.

  “The biblical scholars almost all agree that the Revelation was written in such a different style it was someone else in a much later time,” Whitney adds.

  Nathan says, “Some suggest it was a poetic cinematic psychic who wasn’t seeing Jesus in the Revelation, but a Jesus likeness such as the paintings and descriptions people worship today. Jesus seems to evolve with politics and culture. In the earlier Jesus story, Jesus is a political problem to the men of Mammon, a scruffy rebel who was sometimes rude to his mother. The Jesus of Revelation is being used as a political tool as we speak. Have any of you seen sign of that?”