From a future time, Penny St. Onge tells us how it went.
The whole business with Ivy Morelli and the feature article she put together had brought the media-cheap side of life down on us. Gawkers would drive right up in here to look. They’d park out just beyond the parking lot and Quonset huts and stare. Or maybe not stop at all, just circle around slowly, then head back down the hill to the tar road. There were those who greeted us and were interested in our solar and wind projects and the community supported agriculture. But there were those who greeted us just so they could get inside the buildings. Then they’d gape at everything and probe us about the polygamy experience that was rumored and the “stockpiled” guns. We were a cheap thrill.
Josee Soucier remembering.
It was not t’e big article itself t’at was t’mess. It was t’world. The article opened a big lid on t’a whole sick world.
Lorraine Martin.
It was really sickening to look up from your work and see a person leaning against a car, raising a camera or shouldering a camcorder, the lens stroking you ever so lightly yet ever so deeply. In your own home.
Beth St. Onge.
Our nice smiling faces were as twittipating to the poplace as twisted-necked corpses and squashed towns with airplane fuselages sticking up. Holy fuck!
Claire St. Onge.
Gordon had the kids go down to where our dirt road came off Heart’s Content. They made a gate with a pole and signs saying KEEP OUT. So then the media gets a few shots of the leafy lane, dappled sun, and unfriendly sign, announcing to the world that we were shutting ourselves in. And those publicized photos drew more media, which exploded into more sightseers, more phone calls, more mail.
Bonnie Loo.
Nobody should have been surprised.
Ellen St. Onge.
Gordon was pissy. More than usual.
Glennice St. Onge.
I prayed and everyone at church prayed, too, that the Lord would offer us a lesson in this and we’d all be better off. Mr. Baker, who leads our Wednesday night study and Sunday school, suggested with a giggle that we should charge admission. Meanwhile, Gordon’s mood miraculously changed from old grouch to Mr. Bright Eyes because he was adding lots more wind project people and CSA people to his rotary files. He was on the phone yakkety-yak every night going on about a world made up of little communities, local trade, good food, and “poop composting.” That’s what a lot of little kids loved to call it. Some of the worrywarts here thought the phone thing was too much. “He’s not eating,” they said. “He’s acting toooo happy,” one said. Too happy?
Geraldine St. Onge.
You couldn’t make a phone call pertaining to our needs here, calling a doctor, for instance; the thing was either ringing or stuck to Gordon’s ear. And once the “gate” was up, the sightseers would hang around down there waiting to catch us coming and going. Made you want to cover your head like mobsters do when leaving court. I started wearing my sunglasses a lot more.
Gail St. Onge recollects.
Radio shows talked about us. Newspapers in other states picked up the story but there the story took a different turn. Even the pictures looked inside out. We were whacked at like a piñata. Strewn all over the place. Hands grabbing.
Penny St. Onge.
We had always been good neighbors and enjoyably connected with people around town and beyond. Our businesses of wreaths and Christmas trees, maple syrup, meat cutting, the CSA and so forth depended on this. But also we did weekly, sometimes daily, field trips (all ages) to museums, concerts, lectures, the State House, and there were our cooperative windmill projects and the pine furniture exchange. What I mean to say is, our road in and out has always been busy. We were not separatists!! But because of Ivy Morelli’s deceit, because of the media’s glossy edge of fantasy in all of this, we now were, ta-dah! separatists.
Leona St. Onge.
I don’t think Elvis used to get as much mail as we did. The mail crew, mostly kids, were under a blizzard of envelopes, mailers, and boxes. “Don’t eat any of those cookies!” us mothers warned. God knows who these strange gift givers were. But most correspondence was sad stories of the lives of people out there. Some of the kids took these to heart.
“Don’t read ’em! Just sort ’em!” bellered Bonnie Loo. “Not if you haven’t the guts to share in a little agony!”
Busy at the bureau. Federal Building. Special Agent (S.A.) Kashmar scrolling over the Record Sun’s “Homeschool” story and all those stories and photos that have sprung from it. His thoughts.
Ain’t he pretty. Network television is going to yum him up. If we go that way. For now, we wait.
History as it happens (as dictated by Kristie).
We saw Randy Graffam at the IGA. He has a new potbelly pig who gets to live in the house. Pig’s name is Ghostie for some reason. Also he told us details about what happened this summer, which was bad. The social workers busted in at night with FIVE police at his sister’s and they held her down to get her baby. His sister is Rachel who works at the variety. She hung on to the baby but they pulled harder and the police said she better let go or else. But she screamed and screamed. Baby must’ve screamed, I bet. The baby’s name is Megan. The police got her baby and took her and then Rachel was on the floor in the corner rolled up in a ball. Her neck ripped from crying. Her boyfriend Aaron came home just as all this was going on and he got his gun and shot the cops’ tires so they arrested him and it was all in the news that he’s crazy. But everybody knows him how he’s nice, usually.
The DHS said the day care people saw the baby had sores and said they were cigarette burns. On her legs and arms and everyplace. But Randy said those were bug bites, which get sore, even his mum’s friend’s kids have that happen when mosquitoes and blackflies bite them. Me, too! Bug bite allergicness.
The social workers said “even then. Bugs aren’t supposed to bite babies.” In their heads they have plans. It doesn’t matter about what is nice. The judge believes the DHS guys and never checks. At first I felt scared because we have one trillion mosquitoes here. Beth says all us kids look like we have the pox. But she said ha-ha about DHS. We are lucky. We have a gate. And lots more guns.
In a future time, Claire remembers when Professor Catherine Court Downey became part of Settlement life.
In the middle of all this “fame,” which we were trying to push away, I invited Catherine to come stay awhile. To help her get off the pills. And to have a real gangly sort of extended family for Robert, less institution and less au pair. Her husband, amazingly, had had no idea about her drugs. And she didn’t want him to know now. He was gone a lot during this time. She would just need to close down her house in Portland, transfer her mail.
Let me tell you about my cottage here at the Settlement. It’s small. It is surrounded by birch trees. White birch with bark like velvet, which always gives my yard a magical silver light, except at night when it can be as black as pitch, and in springtime a thousand garden variety purple violets and white violets that started themselves out there in some puzzling way, and in winter, the whitest snow. But always there is something about walking around in those birches that makes you feel like a self-satisfied spirit.
I have a real tiny sunroom, mostly full of plants and baskets and those two-foot-tall bright red ceramic cats my mother-in-law Marian gave me years ago. The ceiling of the sunroom is too low for most people to stand under. There’s just room enough for two rockers and a little table carved in the shape of a toadstool, just right for two cups of coffee, or one cup of coffee and a paperback book.
Oh, yes, the baskets. These are from home. Princeton. Not Princeton, the college. Princeton, the reservation. Tough baskets, made the old way, like tough lives. Immortal, sort of. In the memory of the mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. Worthless in the way of the new way. The American way. Immortality of the spirit, I mean, is worthless. Not cost effective. Not part of the forward motion. Not part of the flow or the GDP. My sunroom: a gent
le cessation of the GDP. And my baskets breathe.
In the kitchen on the west side there is a wall of colored glass. Not stained glass. Just colored glass squares. Like an old English church. I love the mix. My home, the mix. All peoples since the beginning have striven to make beauty, not content with the moon and the wild clover, spiky blue lakes in a summer wind. Nope. They must make godly things. Baskets. Glass. Stone. Wood. Textiles. Glossy “well-bred” animals. Cleared vistas. And see, admit it, our beauty is equal to God’s. See, God made us, so what we make is God-made. And our destruction? God-made. God is all beauty and love? Ha!
But there was only one place here at my home for Catherine and Robert to sleep at night . . . my small bedroom. So we made it two bitty rooms using a hanging curtain. She did not complain.
Most nights we talked for an hour or two through the curtain, and then some more on the way down to breakfast at the shops. She talked about Phan a little. She said he was easy. She said he was never home. Then she’d laugh. She said he was always under.
“Under what?”
“Under our feet . . . on the other side of the world.”
Phan was a businessman. Vietnamese American. His people were still in South Vietnam. His English was excellent. But he was not a chatty guy. Maybe he was a good listener. Attentive. The time I met him, I recall that he was. And he told a few little businessman jokes. I thought his springy sort of zingy-zoingy accent betokened an inheritance of tenacious honeybee-like industry. Yeah, immortality of spirit, as I mentioned before. But Catherine now seemed happy to erase him from mind.
I figured now it was safe to tell Catherine about my husband. I finally let it all spill. I confessed that I was one of them . . . one of the wives. I told her almost EVERYTHING there was to tell. She was good-humored about it! She said she understood.
A few days passed. It was not cold turkey. She eliminated medications in stages. Starting with the spooky Zolpidems. She napped a lot, in a restless way. We all shared Robert. The whole family welcomed the two of them gently. At this time, Catherine seemed so vulnerable. All the women wanted to mother her.
She said once, “You’re right, Claire. Out in your yard it feels magical. It feels like an extension of oneself . . . a better self.”
“And light as a breath,” I added.
There was a little stone bench out there, and from it you could see for miles. She sat out there to meditate alone while most of us were off with our crews and committees and errands.
Then I suggested that we find space in one of the buildings here for her to paint . . . or meditate . . . whatever. Her own private workroom.
“A room of one’s own,” she said with a smile. And yes, she would like it very much.
In a future time, Catherine Court Downey remembers.
His face. His size. The way he stood and the strength in his hands and arms. Even his neck. He was six-foot-five but appeared even bigger to me that day at the university.
Yes, from my Internet search, I recognized him. A newspaper article where he spoke at the legislature on education had been posted. He seemed to be speaking with his hands. Like a foreigner. So in the cafeteria, I knew him instantly. Those eyes. Penetrating, like Rasputin’s. Have you seen Rasputin’s eyes in the old photos of the royal family’s court? And you are familiar with the havoc the shabby monk wreaked on the Russian empire?
The first morning I was there at the Settlement, Claire fixed a little breakfast for Robert and me, just she and I and Robert alone in her tiny crowded sunroom. She made up a little tea and toast with homemade bread, homemade preserves. And an egg thing with cheese that neither Robert nor I could eat. It was all too much.
The rest of the day, I slept and didn’t eat another meal. I didn’t want heaviness. I wanted to drift.
But the next morning, Robert and I went with her down to what they called the shops. It wasn’t even light yet. But the place swarmed. The huge kitchens, one the summer kitchen, not in use that morning but the cook’s kitchen and winter kitchen, were basically one town-hall-sized room in sections fluttering with light from dozens of glass lamps and candles. It was all true, children everywhere who looked like HIM. And women at the stoves and sinks, looking like the laborers of hell . . . hot crackling sounds, hissing, big roiling steam. Water was pumped from tall green hand pumps over the sinks. And everyone spoke with a kind of weird satiatedness.
And HE was there, horsing around with some young men. Arm wrestling and taking bets and laughing in ways that sounded sexual. One of them knocked over a pitcher of milk. Dogs and cats lapped it up. Women raced around with wipe-up towels.
When he saw me, his eyes widened. After a time, he came over to me and scooched down in front of my chair and asked me how I was feeling and he admired Robert’s new belt buckle (yes, the copper sun face) and got Robert into a conversation, Robert looking a little too intense. Then this strange man, Gordon St. Onge, looked back up at me and it was like his eyes were eating into my face. I noticed that he was younger than I first thought him to be. I had expected him to be Claire’s age or older, but he was nine or ten years younger than Claire. He was even younger than me. What was he thinking?
He looked like he wanted to take me to bed. And make ten more babies. But he just said, “Get strong, Little One” and patted my hand as though he were my father or a hotshot religious cult leader, which is actually what he was.
Lee Lynn St. Onge visits the sick.
I gave a little rap on Claire’s cottage door. Claire was not around but it was Catherine I came to see. She didn’t answer my little rap so I hustled in. She was in Claire’s bedroom stretched out, not asleep. She sat up. Her pallet was behind a curtain of hot, almost hurtful colors. She rubbed one eye with a hand of stubby nails.
I said, “Hello,” then, “I’m Lee Lynn,” and I bent to touch her arm.
She froze but smiled as if to apologize for the semirebuff.
I offered softly, “And you are Catherine?”
“What can I do for you?” she asked. Like a cool bureaucrat on the phone. Like someone not feeling embraced. Or safe. Or cozy.
“Nothing,” I answered. “Nothing at all. You are to rest. I have brought you remedies. And I can work with your energy. Help refresh you. And give you a foot massage? Or head and neck?”
She squeezed her eyes shut to stop this line of thinking.
So I explained the contents of the basket that I was lowering to the floor for her to inspect, my back to the curtain, the space only for her pallet of quilts and blankets, not for visitors.
She raised her eyebrows as if hearing a loud BANG! “I can’t buy anything. I don’t do . . . that sort of thing.” Whatever that meant. I heard she was a zesty shopper. And that she was no stranger to Reiki and other energy therapies.
I hurried to correct her. “These are gifts.” And reached again in a sisterly way for her shoulder which was skinny but iron. I couldn’t read her wounds. There was a blankness against my palm.
She covered both eyes as if an awful flash had filled the room and beyond. Then she said, “Sorry, I’m not good company. I’m not well.”
“You will be soon, Catherine,” I offered cheerfully. “You’re in good hands here.” I had several herbal liquors but mostly teas, salves, all calming and meant to boost the immune system. I took them out and, one by one, held them aloft just so. “But my favorite,” I went on, as hushy as possible, trying not to cause those dark eyebrows to jounce up again, “is goldenrod.” I enthused how you “don’t really need to enlist a gang of Settlement slaves, ha-ha, to assist you because you can gather quite enough by yourself with a couple of big baskets, making a few pleasant trips.”
I described how we “gather it, hang it up in an out-of-the-light place to dry. This would be early fall.”
Then “in later fall, you break it up and store it in large or small jars, leaf and flower.”
I praised it as an immune-stimulant antiseptic tonic if you make a tea from it, “but also tasty; it would remind you
of chamomile. It calms pain. Cures wounds. Astringent, diuretic, antitoxic. Anti-inflammatory, a urinary antiseptic. Used for cystitis, urethritis. Used for indigestion.” All this time I caressed the jar , just a nice old canning jar filled with the green of miracles.
“If you stop by at my place, I’ll give you some of the salve made with the crushed flower and lard and clove, also in jars. Jars are so pretty, some of the glass blown by my small witchy assistants, not slaves, really. I was only kidding.” Smile. Smile.
During my description of this blessed healing goldenrod, crown of our September hills, her eyebrows must have shot up fourteen times.
Slowly her hands slipped to cover her ears.
“Oh, dear,” I said.
“My eardrums hurt,” she whispered.
“Oh, dear.”
She sank back into the pillow. I covered her up, gave her dark hair a pat, left the basket on the floor, and tiptoed out.
In a future time, Claire St. Onge remembers.
She slept a lot. She was fussy about food. But she grew stronger. She drove to town in search of some herbal treatments to replace the prescriptions. St. John’s Wort and ginkgo, but there was nothing like that in or near downtown East Egypt except Lee Lynn’s homegrown or home-scavenged stash, which Catherine seemed distrustful of, so the next day she drove farther and stayed away all day. Returned with a lot of bags. She laughed, said shopping always makes her high. Robert hadn’t gone with her. He stayed at the Settlement shops, busy as a bee, the kids already treating him as a brother.
In a future time, Catherine Court Downey remembers.
It didn’t take long to figure him out. He surrounded himself with weak and injured people or the crazy. This made him a big man. This gave him an almighty position.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 45
