He says, “We’ll welcome them, your lefties.”
She looks up again. “The seminar people?”
He winks. “We’ll roll out the red carpet.”
She misses the joke. Still pondering. Her mind is a wheel. Her mind. So maybe she’s not a genius. There are no genius kids here at the Settlement, including Whitney who takes the show at salons and so forth. So what is it? Passion. In his own image. The lust for understanding, lest you rot while still breathing. He cherishes her.
“But you watch. I bet they won’t like what they find here,” says he. “Especially the . . . witches. They will not like the witches.”
She cocks her head, listening for further clarification on witches. But he is only staring at her. She gulps. “They’ll only be here a couple days. And not till winter, I think.”
He sniffs the air. From the cook’s kitchen, something baking, something yeasty, rolls or bread, snaking around the building and in through the sunny screens, mixed with pine and mown hay in their dry hot articulation.
He moves quicker this time, gloms onto her wrist before she gets jumpy, steers her toward the door. “Mademoiselle Bree. Stay for supper tonight. And sit with me.” He walks her through the cool library, out onto the piazzas. “You always avoid me. I’m too loud. I know. Everyone says it.”
She says, “I’ll write you about it sometime. In a letter.”
He says, “Write the giggles in, would ya?”
A giggle starts to gush out but a handy swallow clamps down on it.
They pass the kitchen door and Bonnie Loo, cracking eggs at one of the sinks, looks up, sees them, braces her shoulders, looks away, cracks another egg. BLAM!
Near 11:30 p.m., a hard rain.
Gordon hunched over one of the desks down at the farmhouse. Sorting through phone messages and mail. Books and notebooks teeter in ramparts about him. He tosses a copy of Real Good News into the box between the desks. Written on the box: To Library.
Kitchen door that goes out to the screen piazza is open. The mobiles and chimes are still. But the rain really drums and sings.
Headlights. Engine, eight-cylinder. Truck door slamming.
Gordon keeps on sorting, cheapie reading glasses giving him a slightly old-geezer aspect.
Someone raps on the door. This tells him it’s not a Settlement person. But he pulls off the glasses and stands. Finds Bree out there in the rain. So Bree must still feel like an outsider.
He holds the door open for her and his eyes sparkle on her face that, yes, does not look that horrific anymore. Time makes adjustments.
But she still cocks her head at that angle that keeps the curtain of hair semidrawn while she clutches something up under her shirt and peers up at him. “I know it’s late. I was by twenty minutes ago. Bev thought you’d be here then.”
He smiles. A funny sheepish smile as though he were the outsider, or the owner of the deformed face.
She goes to the little table. Pretty dim, being too far from the ring of cheap indecorous blue that the fluorescent lamp over the desk makes. She lays out some paper, and a bottle of ink, some pens . . . the old kind. She flops down a batch of notes, already blocked in with hurried calligraphy. She says, “I have an idea. It’s no-wing.” She doesn’t look up at him, just pushes the papers around a bit, searching. “No left. And no right.”
He folds his arms, eyes twinkling. Waiting.
“Let’s call it The Recipe,” she murmurs, but she still doesn’t look at him, won’t look him in the face. All that is revealed to him is that perfect bottom in jeans, her shoulders, her thick swingy hair.
He says, “A manifesto? Tonight?”
“No, not a manifesto. That sounds too commie.”
He snorts. A double snort, actually. He steps closer to the table.
“We’re going to change the world,” she says. “Sort of.” She sighs. “Well, we . . . will . . . educate.”
He says nothing. He wants to bathe deeply in this enthusiasm. This innocence.
He watches her begin. Her wrist. Her fingers. The blackness of the ink to a bolder blackness on the page. For a moment he recalls his dream of an old woman in photographic negative, skin silhouetted deep gray, hair white and weedy from too much winter, but whirling, dancing, outliving him.
He sees Bree now, her lack of hesitation, scratch scratch slisk slisk, dip, page after page, and yet not one single idea on how to fix America. Why did she call it a recipe??
For several pages Bree’s pen loops and unfurls, blaming The Thing. It, The Thing shows itself only in pieces and halves.
More pages reveal that our minds are left in tangled dingle dangles straining to simplify, hungry for the slogans, ohhhh, the Thing’s management of our airwaves and printing presses and schools, our art! It has penetrated all of us intravenously. No one is spared, but transmogrified into numbered appliances for its use. Nothing can be realized until we get it out of our musculature and arteries and glands, even as it dictates from a cloud of power through all its organizations, media, shut doors, sticky webs, and systems, both private and governmental. Our technology has evolved faster than we have. We are dumbfounded primates. The race is on.
She writes on and on, never steering right or left, never grasping for hope from any of the offered opiates, gods, parties, ideologies. Just spirals and Ss and dotted is, the calligraphy of despair, the archaeology of baring the hidden, the deeper bone.
We are the outside, the wee flecks, the creaturely. But we, compounding our voices, if we could, are a single HURRAH!! We are the mothers, fathers, welders, builders, growers, cookers, soldiers, teachers, young and hoppity, old with the remembering, nobody must be left behind. We must rise like a hot mountain of red ants, and then our size will be known. The Thing MUST fear us. THE THING MUST FEAR USSSS! Which comes first, learning who we really are and tearing up the myths? Or does our rising come first? BOTH!!! Or The Thing won’t fear us. LET US BEGIN. THEN ALL WILL BE KNOWN. Pick up the drum.
Her calligraphy and splashes of rubric, now in a half ream of damp puffy sheets, ends, but reaches no conclusion. Except that if you follow this recipe, you will be ready. For what? For war? Of sorts.
What does Gordon St. Onge do when she dries her pen, lays it back in its box of cherished mates, and looks into his eyes? And no giggle, just silence.
On Ivy’s desk this morning, she finds photos, the flat cheesy metallic digital dull product of the computer age.
They show a highway. Deep ferny ditches. Dirty ragged children dragging or carrying over their shoulders huge bulging fabric sacks. One shot shows just humped-over backs with several nearly naked figures standing in the distance, thigh-deep ferns and steamy-looking pavement. Faces turned away from the camera, profiles of pain and fatigue. Here’s a frame that shows a dirty childly hand with a wood tick on each of three fingertips. Ivy looks at the back of the pictures and sheets. Nothing written. She looks for Brian. No Brian. She enjoys some gossip with Laura, a feature writer whose cubicled desk is near. A desk plastered with family pictures and her squeaky rubber dog toy collection of presidents busts, starting with Ronald Reagan, whose nose is chewed off. Laura and Ivy laugh and whisper for a while, then Ivy settles in with her computer, snaps through her lined pad for the slashed notes on today’s column, interviews with used-car dealers, a charming experience, of course. Ivy intends to slam all of them.
A rustle and a little scuff on the rug. She wheels her chair around. It’s Brian. Fresh from the cafeteria. He holds a melon slice with a bite out of it. He says, “Good morning, Ms. Morelli.”
“What are these?” She nods to the picture pile.
“Kinda Charles Dickensesque, wouldn’t you say?”
She keeps silent.
He adds, “Or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Or the coca fields of South America or—” He flutters his eyes.
“Or what?”
“Or Home School urchins collecting beer and soda cans over the border in New Hampshire where there’s no bottle law . . . just a lott
a bottles and cans . . . the discarded can being New Hampshire’s state flower. Live free or die.” He waits for Ivy to laugh.
She forces one.
He continues. “. . . Settlement people make their passive solar collectors primarily from cans with the ends cut out, painted black. Takes a lotta cans. You see, Jeff was coming back from North Conway and came across this amazing scene . . . had a little talk with these people.”
Ivy flips a picture over. “There are no adults in these pictures.”
“The power of the camera,” Brian reminds her, in a robotic voice.
Ivy frowns. She flips through more pictures, glances at faces. Maybe there is, yes, a familiar face or two. “What are you going to do with these?”
“Right now? Nothing. You just keep ’em in your folder. For your spread. For when the big day comes. When this all busts open. We can add some of these to the photo of St. Onge in handcuffs. Keep yourself a nice thick file on this. That’s an order.”
From here, Brian can see the copy “boy” standing by his cubicle. He scurries away in that direction, melon slice held aloft.
Ivy closes her eyes. The only picture she can see with her eyes shut is the torn and gummy knuckle of Gordon’s hand as he grooms the grand effluence of his dark mustache and stares into her eyes. At Kool Kone. Not a photo. Just a memory. See that face of a hundred expressions. The one of seduction, her favorite.
The grays.
We abducted another specimen, the human Earthlings’ pride and joy. We placed it on one of our laboratory tables and watched. Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick-Tick. This one is digital. Oh, whoopee. Our speed is the thing. We are too fast for them to see, too slow for them to believe. Their eyes dilate. Rods and cones strain. Their chest cavities are blind. Their devices x-ray and interrupt, delve and probe and record and spy, but never see. No, they never will see! They believe we will come to master them. But for what purpose? They are just monkeys with toolboxes. Monkey hands. Monkey ways. Monkey lungs. We have no time for pets. Our eyes beat. Our hearts blink. So we now at last study this sample of their greatest achievement. Time. Tick-Tick-Tick. Almost five o’clock. Tick. Tick. Tick. Like a tongue dragging over a sticky fruit. BEEP!!! BEEP!!! BEEP!!! Rise and shine!
Ivy thinks about her father, David Morelli.
It’s Saturday. She was with him today. Her sister Ida drove behind with her kids and Maureen, Ivy’s and Ida’s mother. As foggy as a dry-iced rock concert. The two cars creeped along; to Ivy’s mind, walking would have been faster. Ivy sighs. Her father, a junior high science teacher in SAD 55, talks. Yes, he smokes a pack a day. But not in the car. In cars, he talks. Talk, talk, talk. He is small, fussy, thin, with curly hair. What there is left of it. Students like him. “Mr. Morelli.” After all, Mr. Morelli is a character. All his inventions and experiments concocted with such glee, not always from the textbooks. And his comical expressions. And his funny remarks, some intentional, some not intentional. There is a dopey innocence about him. Like how a few years ago, during third period, there was a construction accident behind the school where the new addition was just beginning. A laborer, running to avoid a collapsing crane boom, fell into the open fifteen-foot deep concrete cellar, broke his back and both legs. Mr. Morelli had snatched his little first aid kit from the closet and dashed out, wearing an important look on his face. Nobody in that classroom laughed any big laughs . . . but they made little tsks of appreciation. Of fondness.
Today he is wearing a dressy cardigan sweater, a sunny-day blue. But in winter, he often wears his long-out-of-date dress overcoat and goofy snowflake scarf so he can ride with the window down. “Winter air is healthful,” he has always insisted. Ivy believes he is probably really cheating, smoking in the car.
Sometimes Ivy and Ida are embarrassed by him. As teens, they’d hang way back in stores, use other aisles. Race back out to the car ahead of him.
Even today, as he pulls the square little Buick up to the tollbooth, fumbling for silver change, he inquires of the toll man, “Are you in the mood for this?” Ivy closes her eyes.
But Ivy’s mom, who is in Ida’s car behind them, has always been proud of him. Being a schoolteacher (or in this case your husband being one) means you have arrived at a height, some acceptable plateau in this clearly casted world. Are the fine details of minor shames not gaugable by Maureen Morelli?
Ivy’s mom calls her husband “David.”
Ivy and her twin, Ida, call him “Mr. Morelli.” Everyone but Ivy’s mom calls him Mr. Morelli. Though when Ivy is mad at him, she calls him “Father.” But the main thing here, the big pounding pink heart-shaped measure of Ivy’s life, is the quickening fact that the definition of the word “teacher” to Ivy means sweet bumbler.
And maybe this is Ivy’s definition of a man: someone who makes you furious, embarrassed, and who keeps you awake at night with your attempts to analyze him and then maybe there are secrets behind his eyes.
Settlement assistants Bev and Barbara (both white-haired, both sun-ruddy, both square, sort of terrier-built) are on the long porch at Gordon St. Onge’s farmhouse while six-year-old Jane Meserve, after taking a bubble bath upstairs, now stands naked at the mirror doing commercials for cosmetics and shampoo (although there are no such products in Gordon’s bathroom).
It has turned drizzly this afternoon, a little distant thunder, periods of light and dark, air of the porch extra muggy, more like sitting in one of a cow’s four stomachs. Usually, Bev reads aloud from a magazine or newspaper and Barbara nods her concerns or approvals and interrupts with annoying questions. Or else Barbara reads and Bev nods and interrupts. Right now, Bev is reading to herself, making the sound “Uh-oh,” which means she is about to share. She says, “Hear this. Willie Lancaster has been arrested.”
“Oh, no. What for?”
Bev reads just to herself, whispering just to herself as she reads along, holding a humid turquoise and yellow tie-dyed bandana to her cheek or upper lip, alternating. Then her glasses need wiping. The steam of the day pushes around them in ship-sized billows. She says, “Something to do with militia. He’s joined a militia.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Barbara sighs.
“It says 36-year-old Egypt man released from Cumberland County Jail with no charges Wednesday following . . .” She trails off into a mumble, reading along again just to herself, now positioning the bandana to her forehead. Some sort of coughing sound uphill beyond the trees. Something agricultural. Something Settlementesque. And the rain has begun to wail.
“What’s it say!” Barbara demands.
“Well, seems he was in a bar in Portland with another guy . . .”
“I thought he didn’t drink.”
“Well, it doesn’t say he was drinking.”
“Then what was he doing in a bar?”
“It doesn’t get into that. Just listen, okay?” She reads along a little more to herself. “He was wearing a gun.”
“Wearing a gun?” Barbara also has a face-wiper, this one a plain charcoal gray fabric. She just leans into the whole spread-out cloth, whole face at once, as if to smother herself.
Bev says, “He was wearing it in a holster outside his shirt. And he was flashing it around in the bar. And . . .” She reads along silently now.
Barbara pulls her chair closer. “Beverly, will you share!”
“Well, Russell Heald, the other man who was with Willie, was also with the militia and this man was preaching from the Bible.”
“In a bar?”
“That’s what it says. There was a fight. But not with the gun, though what Willie was arrested for was the gun. Sounds confusing. But—” She whispers to herself, then, “They interviewed Rex. While he was at Moody’s store.”
“Rex York?” Barbara fans herself now with another publication. Gray now-damp bandana on her lap.
“Yes. He’s in this article, too.”
“Tsk.”
“So he wasn’t in the bar, but you know . . . .at Moody’s.”
Silence.
�
��Get this. It says Captain of the Border Mountain Militia, Richard York, does not condone Heald’s and Lancaster’s actions, and insists that although Heald and Lancaster were in the uniform of the Border Mountain Militia, they were acting independently and irresponsibly by instigating a fight while armed. He also goes on . . . to say . . . that the militia is a civil defense organization, loosely organized . . . to be available for natural disasters and other civil defense situations . . . and . . . then . . . he says there are nearly two hundred members in his militia, but will make no further comment concerning them.”
Barbara moans.
“He also says that New England militias are coordinating with all militias nationally. But he refuses to name any. He goes on a little more about Willie. Sounds like he’s mad at Willie.”
Barbara moans again. Looks off into the rain with a worried motherly expression, fanning away at the right side of her neck.
Bev says, “This article definitely depicts Rex as some sort of nut. I never thought he was a nut. Just a little too quiet and a little too serious.”
“Still waters run deep,” Barbara reminds her.
“But Willie has always been wild. Nothing could surprise me about Willie.” She sighs, gives the paper a little shake, lifts to the next page. “Well, the whole business is just a little bit scary if you ask me.”
Barbara says, “A big world. Holds a lot of crazy people.”
Bev turns another page. “I know it, dear. But Egypt is small.”
Ivy reading the news hot off the press.
Suddenly she freezes and her steely pale eyes blink. She leans close, leans back, but the print still reads the same. Thirty-six-year-old Eygpt Man released with no charges Wednesday following a firearms incident at The Tap . . .
It’s WILLIE LANCASTER
. . . William Lancaster, member of the Border Mountain Militia . . .
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 37
