Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  “Where’r the éclairs?” He lowers the water glass, looks eagerly about with his penetrating, too-keen, crazy-looking eyes. Hers are the eyes of restraint, of earned virtue.

  She replies, “In the refrigerator. They must be kept chilled.”

  Happily, he says, “Let me look at ’em.” Swings the refrigerator door wide.

  She flutters her eyes. “I wouldn’t waste them on children. A child would be just as happy with a cheap Tootsie Roll.”

  Gordon lets the door ease shut by itself, which makes a mashy rubber-edged sound, just as old Lucienne, the elderly woman who looks after Jane many nights, appears in the door to the front part of the house, making no sound, then disappears, never seen by Marian, and now something big, almost unmanageable is going around inside one of Gordon’s whiskery cheeks. He speaks in a muffled way. “I will respect your wishes.” He swallows. “Who was on the phone tonight? Anybody we know?”

  At the sink now, she is rinsing off a plastic lid, squinting, holding the lid close to her face, her glasses reflecting her nebulously lighted hands. “Your wife. She was calling from Portland.”

  He stares a long moment at this word wife. He almost blurts out which wife? But gives himself another three seconds to remember that Claire is spending the night with Catherine Court Downey in the big city. Catherine is packing up her art supplies and some other gear to bring to the Settlement, has trouble with concentration, wants Claire to be “close by.” So it’s Claire whom Marian is talking about. And Marian is not in the dark about the wife situation here. It’s just that Gordon’s “polygamy” to Marian is like the “corporate grid” is to Gordon.

  Gordon swallows again and works his tongue around his chocolate-and-custard-covered teeth and gums a bit. He leans back against the fairy-tale red chimney, one foot out before the other in that Viking-at-ease look Ivy Morelli was so amused by. “You’re looking good, Mum,” he says. “You must be feeling a lot better. Back pain all gone?”

  “How can you say I look good, Gordon? In this awful light, you can’t really see me.”

  “You mean in better light, I’d see things about you that would worry me?”

  Her expression is almost military, a repeat of Rex York’s. Her fashionable glasses with large frames nicely enhance her high cheekbones, the light-colored almond-shaped eyes, something enduringly well-favored about that Irish-Italian mix. She says, “I don’t know what I’m saying.” But she knows when she gets home, she will bawl for hours. Her fine face will cave in, will swell and discolor.

  Gordon asks himself why it is he can never make her happy. His father Guillaume did a better job. His father Guillaume had the magic touch. Gordon wants to make Marian happy. But what is the key? Guillaume Sr. from Frenchville was not a gift shop gift giver or book club, garden club, church club social schmoozer. Marian’s family are the ones with the big flashy cars, wardrobes, and colognes, and professionally attended hair, thick wall-to-wall rugs, appliances of every gleaming beeping sort, and big jewelry worn on every appendage, much show. Guillaume was so naked! No rings. None. Not even a wedding band. His reading glasses had frames of almost boiled-looking black plastic, which made his very dark intense eyes look sad and introspective. He wore a Saint Christopher’s medal, but under his shirt.

  How could Marian stand Guillaume? He was just this little slouched person bumping around doing little carpentry jobs and feeding birds. He had been a power shovel and crane operator when she met him! His English was awful. He sometimes licked his fingers at meals. His best and only friend around here was Stan. Stan visited every weekend. Stan had a reedy voice and a banshee laugh, always at the wrong time. Stan told gruesome hunting stories and hog-killing stories and stories of hoochy-koo girls at the fairs LOUDLY and this made Guillaume be loud, too, and giggly and manly. And Stan was always farting. Marian was not thrilled with Stan. But Guillaume was her “dear Gary.”

  Gordon sighs darkly now. Trying to figure out the ways of another person’s heart! It can drive you bonkers.

  He looks at his mother in a most tender way. Now his voice, getting a tweak high, getting urgent, says, “Mum . . . I beg you. Get rid of your TV.”

  “Gordon, I’m leaving.”

  He rushes past her, blocks the door with his big damp body and those maniacal eyes. “First hear me out.”

  Her chin trembles as she looks at his face. “I just realized who you look like since you’ve decided not to shave.”

  “Who?”

  “Fidel Castro.”

  He opens his mouth, then shuts it. He fingers his jaw. “I haven’t shaved clean since I was nineteen! And all these years, you’ve been working that thought out?” If there were more light, he’d see she is losing color, as one might before fainting. He says sheepishly, “Well, thank you for the compliment.”

  She says thickly. “It was not a compliment. And you know it wasn’t.” She pushes her fingers up under her glasses. She seems to be squashing her eyes to blind them. She whispers, “Next time I see you, you’ll be on TV with the FBI trying to shoot you and Rex and those other crazies out of a bunker. I . . . I can’t believe I raised . . . a . . . person who would . . . would stoop so low as to socialize with that sort of element.”

  “Black Elk. You ever heard of him?”

  “Never,” she says. Proudly. Defiantly.

  “Well,” Gordon tells her hurriedly, “he was a chief, a sage. He said these words: It is the story of all life that is holy.”

  Silence between them. She is unmoved. Her pale eyes on him are wide, as though witnessing a horror feature from a seat too close to the screen.

  Gordon repeats, “All life.” He waits.

  She says nothing.

  He says, “Black Elk never saw TV. He never saw the eyes of his family glazed over by cheap transistors, mountains shrunk to the size of cupcakes, skies the size of envelopes, and the lives of real people and their struggles, even the lives of their own neighbors, grated and mashed into passive-aggressive political garbage so a brother would turn away from brother and a neighbor turn her back on her neighbor.”

  “Let me out, Gordon. I’m leaving.”

  “I love you,” he says gruffly, yet ravishingly, but does not move his hands from the door frame, does not reach to caress her ear or shoulder.

  “You love everyone. Your love is easy. Not very special.”

  “You mean . . .” His left eye squints. Incredulously. “Is Marian St. Onge making a statement that love thy neighbor is a sin? That As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me was a stupid thing to say?”

  She pushes hard around him. “YESSSSSSSSSS!” Betraying her promise to herself to not cry until she is home, she is bawling before she’s pulled open the door of her beloved little car, the sporty car that she’s told her friends and family “is me,” has given her “a new lease on life,” has made her feel young again. So sleek, so fast, so red, so easy to park.

  As Marian’s car speeds away, the phone rings.

  It’s Claire.

  Gordon listens to her speak, the phone in the crook of his neck, watching a freckle of Settlement light up there on the hill, flickering through the wind-churning leaves of that patch of woods behind this house. The mobiles and chimes bash themselves violently on the piazza. Claire is saying, “And she said you told Rex you plan to take a couple of the kids to one of his militia meetings.”

  “Sure.”

  Silence. Just the clamor of hissing crackling trees and the racket of the mobiles and chimes.

  He goes to the refrigerator, stretching the phone cord too tight, fetches the big Saran-covered enamel pan, stuffs another éclair into his mouth.

  Claire is, yes, laughing. Or something. Sounds like laughing.

  He laughs. Laughing is catchy.

  She says, “Rex has lost his noodle. Everybody knows it. The militias are crazy and they hate hate hate and are . . . paranoid. It’s one thing all the fundamentalist folks we deal with in the cooperatives. We’ve done
okay because most of us don’t let them engage us in conversation concerning the Bible realm. That’s worked out. It’s been okay. But the militias. Get real, Gordon. For children, I would say this is a little little little not okay. Gordon, some militias bomb kids.”

  He has listened, chewing, dragging his tongue across his chocolatey thumb, slurping, slisking, the phone amplifying all this over the miles down to Portland right into Claire’s ear. He says, “Tell me how you know this.”

  “Oh, shit, you know. Conventional wisdom.”

  “Ah-ha!” He unwraps another éclair. (Yes homemade by Marian. Custard deluxe.)

  She listens to the crinkling.

  “And conventional wisdom these days originates from . . . from what?” He laps the waxed paper first.

  “Oh, stop it! School’s out. This is your media-is-at-the-root-of-all-evil lecture again.”

  “Geronimo said I think I am a good man, but all over the world they say I am a bad man.”

  “That was before TV.”

  “But not before Big Money owned the USA. And counterintelligence was in its seedling stage. You need to read up on COINTELPRO. Especially what it did down on Pine Ridge. You—”

  “Is it just me you use those Indian quotes and references on? Or do Leona and Geraldine have to listen to them, too? You know what I mean, us folks from the reservation?”

  “Oh, no, baby. I use ’em everywhere. Why just ten minutes ago, Black Elk was speaking to my mother. My mum just loves Black Elk.”

  Claire snorts. Says wearily, “Jesus, Gordon. Please don’t get the Border Mountain Militia involved in our lives.”

  “So you’re suggesting we begin a list of untouchables? Could you call this place a home then? A community? Erasing people? Especially our old neighbors?”

  “Sure! If they hurt us. If they’re dangerous! We can still wave at them when we pass their houses in our cars. I don’t mean we sh—”

  “Tell me, when did Rex York or Stan Berry or even our illustrious Willie Lancaster ever bring injury or any sort of harm down on you or anybody we know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You know the worst hurt our people have ever known has been from the outside. The outside, baby. Rex is inside. And Willie . . . he’s really inside. We’re related!”

  “Through marriage.”

  “Third cousin . . . Lou-EE is my third cousin. BLOOD. So when Dee Dee has the baby, the baby will be my fourth cousin. But also, through Dee Dee, the baby will have militia Willie genes in him or her, so the baby might start using explosives on the toy box—”

  “You’re talking stupid.”

  “I dare you to find a television so we can have our first militia act of terrorism. We’ll all dress in camo and sneak up on the TV, during prime time, and then I personally know where there’s a whole case of 1-F and I personally will blow the fucker up—”

  “Your poor mother. I can imagine the way it was for her tonight.” Claire is quiet a moment, listening to the ghastly sounds of Gordon eating the last of six éclairs. And outside the wind, which blows even harder in Portland. Over the phone, the anxiety of the piazza chimes and mobiles can be heard in miniature. “We need to talk about this some more, Gordon. All of us. All the adults. Of course, everyone will eventually give in to you. They always do. You’re convincing in a way that scares me. And then there’s your bullying.” She tsks. “But I hope you’re right about the militias. I’m feeling very tense about it. I think there’s such a thing as being too trusting, too open-minded . . . too nice . . . too . . . too something. It has to do with boundaries. Like sex. Some people will sleep with anyone. And then they say that incest victims, for instance, develop a sexual promiscuousness tha—”

  “That’s feminist bullshit. Professor Ms. Catherine Something-Hyphenated-Something is poisoning your mind.”

  “Should I erase her?”

  “With a wet diaper.”

  She laughs, but not for very long. “That’s an exceptional imitation of a classic asshole. A person, I, myself, wouldn’t care for. Where’d you learn that?”

  No reply.

  “Okay, hotshot. I just need to say a little more. DO NOT INTERRUPT. I’m sure that if polled, ninety-five percent of the people in this country would agree with me that militias, even if not dangerous, aren’t wholesome—”

  “They do food drives for flooded Indian people in the Southwest.”

  “DO NOT INTERRUPT! Okay . . . I know . . . ninety-five percent of America is misinformed. But if something happens, something bad happens to one of our kids, your apology will not be enough.”

  “I realize that,” he says somberly.

  “How has our Jane been today?” Her voice has changed to something softer.

  He holds his forehead. “A strong, self-conscious, selfish woman. Your friend Catherine Blah-Hyphenated-Blah would approve. Jane is going to grow up and be a CEO for AT&T or governor of Texas or some-such and execute manacled prisoners and move vast sums of capital through the outer stratosphere while wearing lavender fingernail polish and . . .” He goes on and on while Claire, at her end of the line, sitting in Catherine’s pretty green and white summery decor alcove den, is smiling a kind of pained smile and she says, “I’m going to hang up now, Gordon. I wish life were simpler. You know I do.”

  “Yep, I know.”

  “See you tomorrow at supper,” she says firmly.

  “I love you, woman.”

  She sighs indulgently.

  After hanging up, Gordon laps his fingers some more, paces a bit. Wind slams a door upstairs. A limb crashes outside. And the chimes and mobiles on the long porch are no longer lovely or haunting. The violence that is upon them now just hurts them, tangles their strings.

  Now as he goes about the house, shutting a few windows, he says to himself sadly, “God is bad.”

  Breakfast at the Settlement.

  Big cold wind. Big cold sky. Soon to be a blue extreme, abyssal and thrilling, like prehistory, like before memory. Soon the cold white sun will come. Breakfast is in the winter kitchen this morning. Long sleeves. Real socks. Fuzzy sweaters. Closed in like this, the breakfast smells so good. Bacon. It’s smoky force satiates you just by wandering up your nose. Yeast breads. Corn breads. Molasses breads. Molasses out of bulk tins, yes. Preserves from every Settlement tree and vine. Butter. And maple. And coffee. Store-bought coffee, yes. And cold strained juice of the tomato. A lot of tomatoes this year, cultivated from saved seeds of old neighbors in the valley of North Egypt. Platters of sliced tomato. Slathery seedy red piles. Fried green tomatoes and cheesy omelets. A plain egg for Jane. An egg that somehow came out perfect on the first try, even with Jane’s nose inches from the pan. Jane still refuses to cook the egg herself, insisting she is “a guest.” But at least she is here this morning, her white-rimmed pink-heart-shaped lensed secret agent glasses swiveling in all directions from where she sits. Gathering evidence.

  The mothers stare at Gordon all through the meal, or at least glance his way frequently, while some make a point of avoiding his eyes. Most mornings, Gordon and each woman he is “wedded” to will, across the mobbed kitchen, exchange a look. A kind of two-second accounting for. Nothing erotic. More like checking the gauges in a plane before takeoff. Life and death. Dearly beloved, we are still a strong unsurrendering people. Dear one, hold fast.

  This morning the eyes of the wives, especially the mothers, are different.

  It’s one of those times when Gordon sits at the head of one of the two longer connected pairs of tables. He sits hunched a little, the sleeves of his jazzy yellow and red plaid Settlement-made flannel shirt rolled up, big, good-looking smile on his face. One woman, not one of his wives, a woman named Ann, not a regular kitchen crew person, but a musician and scholar, does a lot in the library with kids, mostly sciency stuff, birds, bugs, microorganisms, geology, meteorology, a real weather expert, and mother of two teens, not a fan of militias, is pouring Gordon’s coffee, pours a little over his hand as his fingers lay loosely around the
cup. He snatches his hand back fast. She doesn’t say, “oops!” or “I’m sorry.” She just moves on to the next cup, old blind Mrs. Morse’s cup, Mrs. Morse brought up here for the day from town, Ann pouring Mrs. Morse’s coffee oh, so carefully.

  Another woman, also not one of Gordon’s wives, comes along and takes his full cup away.

  “I’m not done with that yet, dear,” he says with his big ol’ nice smile.

  Her eyes steam into his, her eyes hotter than the burn on his hand. “You’re done,” she says, then keeps walking away with his cup.

  This goes to prove that bad news travels like wildfire, as the saying goes. But Claire is right. If he wants to take some of the kids to an armed militia meeting, it will be so. Whatever Gordon wants badly enough, that is the way.

  And so throughout the day, you can see his bright shirt and thick slopy shoulders across the quad, or up in the gardens where the trucks and solar buggy wagons are being loaded with bushels and crates of summer squashes, zucchinis, corn, beets, small mild pale turnips, and late greens, early parsnips, more tomatoes, herbs, and late toughened kale. Piles of potatoes. Potatoes ever so dear, sacred. Without the potato, how much of humanity would have been erased even before calendars. And now as the singular and global food trade system shows spots of rot, might the little locally adapted potato receive back its dirt-caked eminence? Settlement-wise this is already so!