Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Ivy spanks her hands together with a crack. “You fucking coward. You’re not going to take any blame. One minute you tell me it’s not a message from God, but somehow you weaseled it around to be all God’s fault!”

  “Yeah, right. Everything is God’s fault because everything is God.”

  She says, “Get out.”

  He looks at her mouth.

  She points to the door. “Go away! Go. This is horrible. What you’re telling me is you have something like twenty-five or thirty kids. Next you’ll be admitting that some of your wives are fourteen years old, young virgins that your grown-up followers give you as gifts . . . out of gratitude or something. Or maybe a protocol of the militia, your Willie Lancaster and Rex York connections. Onward Christian soldiers!! And it’s not your fault or their fault, but God’s fault. Right? It’s sick! You make me sick!”

  He murmurs, “Okay.” And he goes.

  She leans against the frame of a curtained window to listen to his truck door slam, down there in the street. The engine starts sluggishly. Truck chugs away. She feels as though a hundred warm arms have withdrawn. She feels the vitality and noise and carnival colors of his world diminish to a hot speck, then gone.

  About the days of her youth and Gordon’s youth, Claire St. Onge speaks.

  We were just two kids. Married young. We were never needing for anything. His share of the Depaolo family business was certainly what I would call wealth, if you put it next to reservation life, if you put it next to most people’s lives. The Depaolo family even had a cousin in the Legislature to . . . to rely on. And several dozen “friends.” It was working-class rich. Rich and getting richer. So much construction in those years, especially for those well-organized and shrewd low bidders, big enough to bid good and low or do sneakies for no-bid contracts, yeah, big, like the Depaolo Brothers.

  But Gordon and I weren’t happy.

  In front of his mother’s family, those Depaolos and Gleasons, his uncles, aunts, and cousins, all this devout Catholic swarm, Gordon was spirited, full of sudden fun-filled antics. Plus, he worked like a fiend. And they liked that.

  But when we were alone, he would say to me, in the most ugly and dark way, “Do not conceive.” Funny, huh? Was this a mean streak or a streak of panic. Well, when Gordon gets panicked he can be nasty. Rumors of his sainthood are greatly exaggerated.

  I understood this. With my family in Indian Township and his father’s people in decimated Aroostook (the county), it was a thing you could understand. Most of the world was not the Depaolos, with their fleets of equipment, big roomy houses, and their own state senators. Okay. So most of the world suffers, then gets mean. Fact of life. “But our child will have opportunities,” I insisted.

  He said, “The mega-Mammoneers will bury the next generation.”

  Okay, so I say we were kids. I was almost ten years older. I was twenty-nine, nearly thirty. He was twenty. Twenty. He was lean, almost bony in the shoulders, like a colt. Small hips. And that dusky Italian-French-Indian skin. And no gray in his beard then. And I was this little smooth golden thing with a head of hair like a wild mare and a wiggle when I walked. A little on the hippy side. A little. And a little bit nerdy, too. I liked to eat history in whole volumes. And I liked current events. But I liked to eat my current events sunny-side up. And here he was flipping books into my lap, what he called “The Other.” Or he’d say, “Here you go, baby. Another one the ministry of truth hasn’t blessed yet.” And he’d say, “The mega-Mammoneers will bury the good.”

  What could I say to that? Could I say, ‘We’ll raise our child to be bad.’?

  Well, of course I got pregnant. I tried some birth control devices. But as we all know, sperm are small and ingenious and frisky.

  We didn’t live in Egypt then. His mother still had the place on Heart’s Content Road, still called Swett’s Pond Road then. She had been widowed for several years but she had friends in East Egypt. Ladies. Reading club ladies. Church women. Do-good people.

  In Mechanic Falls, we rented an old place converted from a store. It was an odd space. The front yard was a tarred parking lot.

  Rex York was still coming around a lot in those days. Yeah, Rex, the one you may have read about in the Record Sun. Captain of the Border Mountain Militia these days. But back then it was the tail-end of a heavy-duty hard-drinking every-weekend brotherly relationship between those two. Rex York. Always a gentleman. A quiet, gloomy well-mannered person. It wasn’t a fight or anything that ended their intensity. They just both got married and brotherishness gradually took the backseat.

  And there were other people coming around, Gordon’s people, my people. We’ve always had a lot of people.

  But this night, there were no people but us. And this night I will remember forever. It was early dark. Winter. Snow shovel in the snow bank by the step. He was just coming in from work, dropping from that brand-new company truck he drove in those days, armload of groceries. And I said it fast that I was pregnant. I stood with my feet apart, a fighting stance. Like I say, I was a trim little person then. Trim and fit as a little bantamweight boxer, only, you know, with a figure.

  I couldn’t see his face, just his vaguely lighted shape in his heavy jacket. And the bag crinkled. He was shifting the bag. He didn’t say anything. I waited. Waited. He didn’t say anything. I said, “Please don’t ask me to get an abortion.”

  “Yes, I’m asking you,” he said.

  “I can see this baby’s face, the way it will be,” I insisted.

  He said, in a most gravelly way, “Yep. Abortion is killing. Yes, it is izzzzz killing. That’s not debatable. And a fetus is a person, sure. That’s not debatable.”

  “Not debatable,” I repeated. I wanted so badly to see Gordon’s face, the generous look of his eyes, his playful smile. Or even his sorrow. But the winter dark was his veil.

  What was his voice that night? A gray stone. Then his unseen face said, “There are all kinds of killings. Killing for food. Killing for self-defense. Killing for anger. Killing in order to rob. Killing for resources and territory. Killing for revenge. Killing for political expediency and political bluster. Then there’s ethnic and class cleansing, the aggressive kind and the passive-aggressive kind. And then there is killing for mercy. This would be killing for mercy.”

  “Yes, mercy,” I repeated.

  “You see a coon squirming in the road, spine crushed, bowels smeared from one side of the pavement to the other, you bust that coon’s head with a rock! The old dog goes lame, deaf, and blind, you shoot him. Coons, dogs, fetuses are honored with the right to escape torment, if a helpful killer stands by. Ah, that you and I should be so lucky, aye Claire?”

  “We would be lucky,” I said. By then my argument of mother love was a skirling vacuum.

  Each day, Gordon shed more and more of his youth, the good humor he seemed so blessed with when I met him, it was only part of a funny mask he wore for the Depaolos on holidays. Between him and me there was still sweetness. No name-calling. No fights. No game playing. None of that shit you hear about with others. But the books and journals and newsletters piled around the house all testified to the cruelty of our species. The cruelty of life. And the doom of life as we know it. Doom would be soon. Oh, boy. After reading, he would pace the house. Or slam a door. Or go into a diatribe at breakfast, spitting food out with his words. Eating and yakking and yelling about the increasing peril of the world. It was all true. I could hardly eat. His yelling and muttering made me actually sick. But it was all true. Then for a few hours, he was sweet again.

  I actually considered hiding all his books. And the TV? He didn’t want it on when he was home. He called it “the box of torpors and created needs.” He called their news “the Six O’Clock Follies.” He said he would shoot the TV. He had a few rifles and I said to myself he might really shoot it. But then he would love me up, hard kisses and hump hump humping and all the hugs I could want and sweet talk in the patois and bits of mangled Blake or Shakespeare and in those eyes
his right of ingress in buttery green-blue. And wasn’t he one for bouquets and hemlock cones and pretty rocks and teasing and wrastling.

  A lot of people we knew, people with less resources than the Depaolo family, were getting pretty deep in debt. This was the early eighties. Hallelujah. Things looked rosy. People talked rosy. But Gordon cautioned them. “It’s all an illusion,” he said. “No money. Just credit. Just bubbles.”

  He photocopied articles for all our friends. Articles that would curl their hair if they’d read them. Nobody read them.

  Of our friends and family, of the people who mattered to us, none knew what Gordon knew. Not even me. I couldn’t stand reading all that stuff. It depressed me. I would even try to shut out his angry complaints at breakfast . . . try to nod and look interested, but not hear it. Somewhere out there in the world were strangers who knew what Gordon knew. But they were there. He was here. Alone.

  Someone said, The truth will set you free. Was it Jesus? Jesus was nailed to a cross.

  Claire’s love-hate.

  I agreed to the abortion. I wept and wept and wept.

  In the nights, that whole week before the appointment, we both lay awake, me with wide eyes and tossing, him silent as frost.

  The abortion was hard, both the pre-appointment and the day itself. The whole time was full of snowstorms we were trying to drive through. And blood. And hot cramps. And hollowness. And then there was the niggling question I asked myself again and again. What next? I loved Gordon. Gordon was forever. What next? Another pregnancy? Another mercy killing?

  I went through the whole business. Got my tubes tied. Yeah, they had vasectomies then. And there were times I knew he was thinking about it, like when the word vasectomy was mentioned by someone in conversation. There was the word like a roar and flaming letters VASECTOMY and he would lower his eyes. Vasectomy was not an option with him, I’ll tell you that. After all, Gordon was, and is, when all is said and done, just a great big proud redneck man.

  Okay, so now you hate him. I hate him a lot.

  Claire’s story of the birth of the Settlement.

  Get ready for this: a year or two later, his mother, Marian, moved closer to some of her family in Wiscasset and gave us the house and 920 acres of land in Egypt, some of it farmland, and a lot of it well-managed woods. Gordon’s father is buried on the land in one of the fields, a windy grassy-in-summer high spot. And Marian also gave us more than half of her shares in the business, and all of her shares in other businesses, which meant a heavenly sum of money. And around the same time, Paul Lessard and Gordon had their heads together with half a dozen solar and wind schemes. And even Rex York was back to coming around a little because he was only just down the road. Rex. A great little plotter, that one. Yes, as I said, I am speaking of he who many now call Mr. Militia.

  And so the Settlement formed, first a bunch of St. Onges, Lessards, and Souciers, cousins and friends of cousins of Gordon’s father from THE County. Then my cousins, Leona and Geraldine and Macky from the reservation and Chuck, a distant cousin of mine who had been living in downtown Bangor since graduation. And his wife, Dawn. And their friend Carol. Macky didn’t get along here. He went back to the Township. And Carol left for other reasons. But then others from around Egypt joined us and brought their families, even their old grammies and various other elderly relatives, and our sweet sweet community came to be, and we all pledged to make a dignified life for ourselves and we taught the children how to be a community, and Gordon started to believe that all people could have lives worth living if they lived like this. He finally had others who understood about the growing high-tech oligarchic system, the terrible dilemma. He was no longer alone. And so he believed in the possibility of an epiphany on the part of people. The great ideal. That people could then take power, make a “we the people” government and society out of many, many small interdependent and variedness-of-character communities.

  And here we were, living proof of the part of it called community. I say it again. It was sweet. There were good days and bad days. There were smooth sailing times. There were ugly glitches. But the dark horrors of Mammon and its tyranny were less of a concern now for us who could make this good thing work, we believed. Me, too. Of course. Sunny Claire. Don’t laugh. I’m not one to grin and coo. But my heart is almost all the time full of good heat.

  The revelation. Claire remembers.

  It was exciting to be part of this. Within six years, we had organized a solid network of fifteen little solar-wind communities around the state and in New Hampshire, including two groups around Augusta that were experimenting with making turbines and inverters and alternators and photovoltaic collectors, all the stuff you usually depend on the big guys for, the systems, the grids. And humanure composting systems about which Lee Lynn always loves to twitter, “It’s really about keeping our water clean and our rye fields green.” And we were devout collectors and savers of old “grandparent seeds.” There was a growing network for that, a “seedy web” (another of Lee Lynn’s repartees).

  When I refer to some of the other communities, I do not mean as large or as tight as ours, but they are working out well, yes. And some of these are combined with the CSA farms. That’s Community Supported Agriculture, where residents in a given area altogether invest money or time in a crop in return for a share of the harvest. We travel the state back and forth for shop talk and noisy feasts with communities that are usually built around home-schooling, three of these fundamentalist born-again-style Christians. We learn a lot from each other and sort through a lot of differences. Yes, I tell you, good hearts are everywhere.

  Meanwhile, our Settlement grew and the hammers rang as more little houses went up on the hill, some with building permits, some without . . . depending on Gordon’s mood. And Gordon was tireless. He would go in and out of spells of drinking but he was always tireless. He was not one to drown and go down in his drunken tears. He worked. He watched over us all, even while goofing around and gabbing people’s ears off, and his other distraction, which I hadn’t realized yet.

  Meanwhile, he started to organize a network of little family-owned furniture factories around Maine, middle-grade pine. He said it was evil to take a log that could be made into a locally sold supper table and chip it all up for megaprofit global market biomass or paper. From those little enterprises came our one big cooperative Maine-made furniture exchange, which was actually the idea of a guy named Mo Petre, who lives in Patten, a friend of Rex York. The exchange and warehouse was set up in Gray, near the turnpike exit-entrance.

  Energy. Food. Keeping the water clean. Furniture. Trade. Low-profit trade. Good trade. Community. Dignity. It can be done. There was even talk of community banks. One and a half percent interest. And why not some based not on debt, but on services and commodities.

  But you guessed it, there was that something else. Behind closed doors. He didn’t tell me this at first, but there came to be women here who welcomed into their hearts and beds this man, a man so many people naturally acquiesce to, a man who, being part of so many minds and hearts, had taken on a salience . . . a size larger than life . . . a, yes, power. Like fame. His unraveling weaknesses were all in the past, or overlooked. He had become the perfect being. Desirable. Oh, indeed.

  Claire continues.

  As far as any of us knew, Gordon never touched other men’s wives, even though he was stupidly solicitous with everybody. He always managed to stop short. But also there were living here women who were not “wives” of Gordon. There were unmarried and divorced women with no kids, women who society had kicked, ripped, and mangled because of their gentle ways. Some women arrived here with plenty of children. They simply wanted to be mothers, not “workers” and “servers.” Meanwhile, those who had gone to Gordon willingly, left their doors open in the night, or waited in the tall grass under a sugary moon and lather of stars, here in the safety of this loving place, and started making a lot of babies. Most of these mothers even gave the children the last name of St. O
nge. Whitney and Michelle, for instance, are his two oldest daughters. Quite a few of his children were young teens by the time the Record Sun set time ticking faster. They were all ages. Down to crawling babies and a few brand new. Natty was due real soon. And Vancy was showing. And Bonnie Loo had started up the “morning drools,” as she called it. This, her fourth child, the third by Gordon.

  There were many families, married and unmarried couples (one a lesbian couple), and a lot of very old people who lived here. There were kids and various adults who came to work with us during the day. So you see, not everyone was a St. Onge “wife.” And there were a few women who wore that silver wedding band for Gordon, women who lay with Gordon and knew all those special whispers of his and his bear wrastles and his moods, but did not want or could not have pregnancies. I tell you this to let you know this wasn’t just a breeding ground for Gordon. It’s wasn’t just that.

  Okay, so I might have been able to handle the “his having sex with others” concept. Barely, but maybe. The women, most of them, were like sisters to me. But the babies! All those children with his face and those tall robust bodies. Especially those with Passamaquoddy looks, my cousin Leona’s bunch, for instance. Today, I can almost see my own face as a youngster in the face of twelve-year-old Shanna St. Onge.

  When I first got wind of his other relationships, I said to him, “Don’t ever touch me again.”

  And that was it. I filed for divorce.

  He didn’t want the divorce. He made a few small scenes. But he backed off. Did his sulking alone in the big old farmhouse he no longer shared with me.

  After the divorce, I lived with Sonny Estes in East Egypt Village for two years. But of course, Sonny Estes seemed small as a fruit fly after what I’d had. And a lot went wrong. Sonny ridiculed fat people, and I was getting fatter every year. And Sonny had a relationship with TV. TV! The very thing I once wanted so badly and defended against Gordon’s TV wrath. But Sonny was a real TV man. How do you respect a man whose face every evening and weekend has that mindless palsied TV stare?