Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  So then he stands with the high-tech shriek spewing out of the receiver near his foot and he looks up at the ceiling. Jane still resides here at his house instead of at a Settlement cottage though everyone agrees moving her out of here would be best. Supposedly Jane is upstairs sleeping, not spying. And there is, not far from her room, an appointed night watchman (yes, not a companion now but a watchman since she has been running off and visiting neighbors up the tar road, neighbors unfriendly to Settlement life. Ooooo does she ever tell those neighbors wild tales. How could an almost-seven-year-old know of the consequences of this almost-year-2000 world? So yes, for now, a “watchman” for Jane.

  Something catches Gordon’s eye. Envelope on the bare table. His name. In bold calligraphy.

  He slips his cheapie plastic reading glasses from his pocket. There is a flyer. CITIZENS ALERT. It is a flyer about seminars being held to discuss “corporations usurping democratic authority.” Registration $10. This particular event takes place in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He notes that the date of the seminar has passed. There is an article enclosed as well, made from a transcript of a talk a man named Frank Parenti gave in Palo Alto, California. About citizen sovereignty, about controlling corporations that are not flesh and blood persons, just constructions. Quo warranto? you might ask when you believed all that about the people replacing the role of kings. And yet the corporation was given human rights (and kingliness) in 1886 in the court case: Pacific Railroad v. The State of California.

  Sounds almost like the very tirade Gordon gives from time to time. This lefty article sounds, yes, like Gordon’s own words but academic, gaseous, abstract, chains of clauses, weeds out any enthusiasm by the everyday person, black, red, white, or yellow. A discussion for the honor-studentesque.

  Meanwhile, televisions shout at everyday people. Frantic hold-your-attention noisy corporate sales pitches.

  Gordon thinks professional-class lefties are either afraid of insulting the common man with the TV-style hype or they just don’t like the common man enough to try to pull them in. Maybe they just want to show off in front of the muzhiks.

  And yet, Gordon stares dreamily at the flyer, not “tsk”ing it.

  He stands with a shoulder against the cabinet, eyes moving from left to right, and he understands that this is not like his own words in more ways than the academic part, something is missing, something that is sympathetic and brotherly in ways connected to a man like his old friend Rex, for instance. What is it? What is it? What is it? Hang up and dial again. Ah, yes, what is missing is HOME. And family. And boundaries. “Redneck” is missing. Yeah, we rednecks are so much like the red neckerchiefed Blair Mountain coal miners of not so long ago. Ah, the tongueless sorrow and homely rage. He understands that these seminar people, lefties, progressives, socialists, professional class activists are not even the same species as himself and Rex. They even walk differently. They hide their cards. They ask questions instead of teasing, bragging, and gossiping. They are always in positive mode. They don’t come to this with brotherishness, sorrow, and rage.

  When he is finished reading, he feels the edge of the paper . . . the flyer and the article. Now he reads them again. The flyer. The article.

  He flips over the flyer and there in Bree’s bold calligraphy. WE ARE NOT ALONE.

  He picks up a fresh envelope from a box of a hundred. Addresses it for the US mail. On a scrap of paper, by the stingy bluish light, he writes:

  Dear Brianna—

  Thank you for the info. You’re right. Looks like something’s happening out there in Lefty Land.

  Love,

  Gordon

  In the little attic bedroom of her family’s house, the room with the octagon window, Bree dips her fountain pen, her magic wand.

  Dear Gordon, I bet they would come here if we wrote them. We have enough people to make up one of the seminars. It would be educational. And it would be great to meet with other activists. We’re activists, aren’t we?

  Love,

  Bree

  (Your Witch of Duty)

  He doesn’t write back.

  But two days later, a warm, forever-blue sky afternoon, bone-dry, a hay day, last crop of the year, Gordon arrives at the doorway between the library and the west parlor. This, just as Del, bearded, long, lumpy blond dreadlocks, wheels out from the committee meeting, his wheelchair the kind that is worked with the muscles of the hands and arms and shoulders, his eyes steady on Gordon’s face. He says, “We’ve pretty much finished the whole mess.” This means the clearance applications and so forth, necessary for the Settlement’s new Death Row Friendship Committee to fly to Texas for their visits with Jeffrey, a nineteen-year-old in Huntsville, Ellis Unit 1, soon to be moved to the death house. Jeffrey has written his Settlement friends only a few halting cards and notes in response to the committee’s blitz of cards, drawings, pictures, and group letters, but in each one that he writes, he ends with “Soon you see me. My teeth aren’t good.”

  Del says, “The tickets are going to be expensive. We can’t reserve till we know when we can go, but the criminal checks take a long while . . . maybe longer than he’s got. He’s got two months.”

  Gordon makes no reply, just gets a hard bitter look. Then makes a winky clown face toward a Settlement mother listening to a tyke reading from a storybook, both now looking his way curiously. They, their lustrous pinked-by-contentment faces, the antithesis of death row. Stuart and Penny and one of the Martin boys, Evan, come up behind Del, their eyes also steady on Gordon’s face. Gordon ever-so-reluctantly turns his gaze back on Del.

  “We’ll be tourists!”

  This is Stuart speaking. This is simulated glee. Remember Stuart? He’s the guy who looks like a red-haired troll doll. And now red-faced with disgust.

  Penny says, “Yeah, tourists,” big frown, then she heads out through the library to the piazzas. Gone.

  Del sighs.

  Stuart says, “Yuh. I wanna get me some execution postcards and “Scenic Death” T-shirts for the whole family. And I wanna eat in a restaurant with electric chair, gas chamber, noose, and lethal injection motifs. Why not? Progress should be celebrated. Let’s immerse ourselves. It’s really the empire thing, right? Let’s not forget the Romans, our parental models. So no T-shirts. It should be togas for golly’s sake.”

  Seven-year-old Andrea, one of Leona’s, sidles up and hugs Gordon, takes a deep breath of his loose plaid shirt, which smells of today’s haying . . . sweet . . . and not terribly different from the smell of some Settlement soaps. But also the scent of the tangy spoor of toil.

  “You going, too?” he asks her, and pulls her head back gently by the hair, to see her face, that bright-eyed Passamaquoddy face, her China doll haircut really too slippery and short to hang on to for long.

  She says, “Yep, I am.”

  Gordon looks at midget-height Stuart, then to Del in his wheelchair who is wagging his eyebrows in a funny Groucho Marx sort of way.

  Stuart says, “She’ll be okay. We’ll all be together most of the time. We’ll all talk a lot before and after. You know. This is school, man.”

  Del shifts a bit in his wheelchair, pushing himself up with his palms on the chair arms. “We could protect them. We could lie to them. Sometimes it’s tempting, isn’t it? Even for you, Mr. Truth?”

  Gordon says, “Yep.” And now sees Bree, who is in some sort of huddle with white-blonde Samantha and brown-haired cherry-cheeked Margo and some others next to the open windows, with spots of sun like white coins in Bree’s orange hair. She is standing with her back to him. She wears her usual jeans and boots, but a black blouse with embroidery. That hair of hers. It hangs a little below her beltline in those ardent ripples, and Gordon can’t help but note the resemblance to Rex York’s daughter, Glory, whose much longer hair is not carroty like Bree’s, but a dark auburn, her face not freaky like Bree’s, but perfect (shudder), and she is probably driving Rex and the grandmother, Ruth, crazy with her wild Saturday nights, drinking, and fast driving, bu
t you won’t hear Rex speak of it. Yuh, Glory is definitely a different product than Bree but if you squint your eyes you’d think maybe this was Glory here now, especially the way Bree is swaying that perfect bottom back and forth as she talks.

  Gordon hangs around the doorway, trimming his fingernails with his buck knife, nodding as each person passes, hearing more details of the Texas trip from each. He keeps his grim expression, while only inches away, still taped to the parlor door, the old photo of the Haymarket Anarchists’ bodies hung by the necks. “The price of real activism in America” is handwritten in pen. Gordon winces. Yep, humans, baboons, hyenas. He sees these in a hectic snarling chattering, biting blur in the dead center of his mind’s eye.

  When Bree notices Gordon, she does the usual. Hides behind her hair. In fact, she pretends not to see him, keeps chatting and whispering with the others. Until they are leaving, in a bunch, and Gordon says, “A word with you, Mademoiselle Bree.”

  With a toss of her razor-edged longish pale hair, Samantha whispers close to Bree’s ear, “Sounds important.” Then rolls her eyes; oh, Samantha, chronic smart-ass.

  Margo, a kind of funny-faced girl with that stammering pink to her cheeks and brown hair, not tall, but stocky-framed like Stephanie, her mother, gives Gordon’s elbow a little push. “You smell like beer.” Then steps around him into the parlor.

  Samantha sniffs him. “Hay. He smells like hot hay.”

  “Both,” says Gordon with his full-latitude smile. “You can’t do one without the other.”

  Some of this group are girls from town and Gordon, not wearing a cap, tips a pretend top hat to each of these. And from them the giggles rain down. And of course Bree giggles along. And then in another minute, Gordon is alone with her in this darkly strong-cedar-smelling room, and asks if she’d like to sit down . . . here or out on the piazza? And she shrugs. So kidlike. She never seems like the same person who writes the letters or painted the pictures in that book, the only one he knows about . . . the glory and strain of work and horses and trees and rocks and stars.

  He points to a soft chair for her, and snatches a small armless rocker for himself. Straddles it backward, facing her. The library clock chonnnngs!s four times.

  Bree snuggles in her softie chair.

  Says he, “Well, here we are. In the days preceding the execution of Jeffrey.”

  Bree, sidelong, with her shoulder up, no face, just hair, says nothing. Zero.

  “Yessireee,” he says.

  Then a long silence.

  Gordon says, “Um . . .”

  Bree giggles, her mind not on Jeffrey.

  Gordon says, “I really like your letter-writing idea. How you and I write back and forth.” He gives his little backward rocker a back and forth easy-does-it push. “I um . . . think you . . . are rarin’ to go. As an activist.”

  She raises her face, enough to show clearly both eyes for a split-second. Eyes that are golden. And brownish. And greenish. With that weird panoramic distance between. “You didn’t answer my last letter.”

  “I . . . um . . . couldn’t think of what to say yet.” He frowns.

  “You don’t like activism and you don’t like leftists.”

  “I like your letter-writing idea a lot. It gives me a chance to edit out all my ums.”

  She giggles.

  “And you can edit out all your giggles,” he says with a pleased shake of the head.

  “Yes,” she says, and then, of course, she giggles.

  “I think you should invite these people to do one of their seminars here. Fine with me. We need to get all the ideas out on the table.” Now his face wrestles with itself Tourette’s-ishly.

  She says, “They have ideas on how to do away with corporate personhood.”

  He nods. He is looking at his knee as if that’s where her face is. He looks up quickly, catching sight of one of her eyes and says grimly, “You don’t want to believe I’m a baby man, do you? You won’t accept that fact.”

  She giggles. Shakes her head.

  Says he, “I don’t even have a diaper. Totally naked of ideologies, faith, hope, and all those grown-up human traits. I had ’em once. But now I’m just a mean-assed baby.”

  She laughs, big, smoky, husky chortles. She says, “Stop. Cynicism comes with great age. You’ve got it backward, sir.” Then she sighs. “Maybe . . . mayyybe each tempers the other, you know?”

  He says, “So go ahead and invite these dudes.”

  She is real quiet. Just one eye showing, but not looking at him.

  And he is real quiet.

  The Godzilla of floral fabrics and jumbo sneakers by the window is real quiet, too, his hefty tail stretched out over the floor in repose.

  She says, “But you hate corporate power. That’s leftist, to hate corporate power.”

  “I hate everything,” says he, flicking a spear of hay off of his thigh onto one of the prettiest rugs under their feet, a braided one in wines, pinks, and blues.

  “Everyone says you’re moody,” she offers, then giggles apologetically.

  Gordon turns and looks at Godzilla. He smiles. “He’s been reading that same book for about four years. Somebody oughta give him War and Peace.”

  Bree giggles. “Or Magic Mountain.”

  “Or Remembrance of Things Past,” he says, jerking a thumb toward the library. “He has the arm power to heft it at least.” He looks back at Bree. “Okay, so what does saying left wing and right wing tell us? It says we’re supposed to think that there are two halves of something . . . or two little rooms of a main room. Like poor ol’ Godzilla over there thinks the universe is made up of just reptiles and toads.”

  “If you liked the left, you wouldn’t be saying this.”

  He squints at his knee. “True. I’d be devout.”

  “You don’t like the left.”

  He laughs. “I like them. I even know some real communists. Old party people. Nicest people on the earth. Nicer than most. And courageous. I mean, these guys are pure people. In fact, between you and me, I think they’re the only true Jesus people. I speak not of a communist structure or the structure’s elites, but of them who are waking every morning believing their ideology will win justice and fairness for all the world’s people who have been crushed by those with technoadvantage and resource advantage but wanting equality for all more than anything in the world. So maybe they are the only real Americans. If we are to believe Americans are the good guys.”

  Now she is looking at her knee.

  Silence.

  Something catches Bree’s eye. It’s Godzilla. The book moved? No, just the late day August sun fluttering there on the book and the broad green floral print reptilian hand. And one of the alert-looking powerful reptilian arms. She says, “But you’re right-wing now? Everyone says you are. I didn’t believe it, but maybe I do. I don’t know.”

  He says, “In the fall, I go up on the backside of Stackpole and every year I see a buck and I take the safety off my Winchester and I do what I need to do to be who I am . . .” He gets a mean pinched-lip look. “I don’t want to be interfered with.” He widens his eyes on her. “Unless I were fucking with innocent people. Stealing, dominating, torturing, giving them unrest.” His eyes, neither one are twitching now. “That’s not about left or right wing, except to say that they both do it, fuck people over, whenever one wing is in charge. There izzz only democracy among lords and ladies and the top. The rest of us are just yard fowl.”

  “So you’re about rights.”

  “Don’t say rights! Say privileges. There is no . . . such . . . thing . . . as . . . rights. Whatever you have the right to do it’s only if the prevailing bully kleptomaniacs allow it!”

  Both of Bree’s golden eyes spring wide as Gordon now flings himself out of the little rocker. Stands. Begins to pace. Uh-oh.

  “Rights are a fantasy! And basically, left wing in America is a fantasy, too!” He paces in a small circle. He trips on a rug. Clomp.

  “But these leftists who are doing the
seminars are just into teaching. I thought you—”

  “They’re as manipulated as all the ressst,” he hisses, pale eyes unhandsomely bulging. “Foundations, dear! Foundations!”

  She keeps her eyes on him, no longer buried in hair. How startling, how harsh he is. She seems not ready for this.

  He comes back to his rickety little chair, leans his knee into it so that it creaks forward. “Brianna, there izzz no left or right at the top. Up there is the unity of ideology. There is only left and right down here among us crawling grubs.” He throws a punch into the air (left), then another (right). “It keeps us busy, eh?”

  “I know about their foundations,” she says. She stands up. “I am agreeing with you. There are them up there. But we have got to organize to fight them.” She stands up. She looks ready to wrastle. Logger girl.

  He keeps forgetting how tall she is.

  He smiles. “Forgive me.”

  She giggles. “I think the left has some good information.” She is fondling the embroidered flowers around the neck of her dark blouse. “It’s about education. You know, for the sake of it . . . education.”

  He glances at her hand and then her face. There they are. Both of her eyes. Blazing at him. He moves away, says, “So you should invite them. Everyone needs to work through the whole thing themselves. We need all the ideas out on the table.”

  She sees he is pacing a little again. She hides in her hair.

  He comes toward her, starts to touch her shoulder, that same heart-bubbling-over way he touches everybody. But she stiffens, her one visible golden eye wide and rounded. He draws his hand back.

  She giggles. An apologetic giggle.

  He says very slowly, “My dear friend. My dear conservus, trapped here with me in the very pit of life.”

  She does a shruggy sweet thing with her sturdy logger girl shoulders inside the beautiful embroidered blouse. Then her face is fully hidden again. Head of flaming hair nods eagerly. “Conservus.” Under her hair, her eyes scan her memory. “It means fellow slave.” She rocks a bit, foot to foot, pondering.