Gordon’s right hand almost touches Catherine again and again. She’s in easy reach but he is a complete gentleman with her. And maybe he is even trying not to sound like an oinking pig when he eats . . . for her. He is so good with the two young people, Sadie and Brady. Asks them questions about their interests and their dreams. So fatherly. So THERE for them. He laughs quickly and loudly at their little reserved almost-businesslike jokes. And you can tell Sadie and Brady really like Gordon. Reaching behind Catherine with his long arm, Gordon touches Sadie. Once. Playfully. Her startling pale hair. The hand, the hair throw sparks in Catherine’s eyes. How disorienting!
Focusing back on Catherine, Gordon has that same fatherly expression. Well, he surrounds everyone who comes near, doesn’t he? Like a boa constrictor but different. Hugging and fondling young and old. Well or sickly. Soaking them up. Owning them. Staking claim.
Catherine watches all this with her restrained but flickering smile, chin high. And Gordon looks like the merry king. Or is it the Prophet? That is what he has been called on the radio, isn’t it? And the papers as they were quoting a couple of townspeople. And Catherine, floating and freefalling in confoundedness, is detoured into territory that has no markers for her. The disarray is only in her “right brain,” because in her body and heart she feels blessed. And she is thinking how this amazing and cuckoo Settlement situation becomes ordinary once you are inside. Could that be called brainwashing? Now she is breathless with a moment of panic. No, not a moment. A half moment. Now she is back to body and heart.
Bree is nowhere in sight. They say she is painting, really into painting tonight. No supper for Bree, neither here nor at home with her father and brothers. Just the muse. Her escape from life. This, Bree’s life, the problem that will be addressed this evening.
Tools. Brooms. Boxes. Cabinets. Jackets on hooks. Two trash cans. An acorn on the floor. Dim light. Fifteen watts. Thrifty watts. An industrial-looking space. This is the upstairs hallway of the Quonset hut where the studio is. Main door to the studio is open. Privacy sign on the door.
Bree stands, smiling sort of, her hair tied back tight to expose all of her face. “What are you all roaming around for?” She asks this with one of her giggles. Paint on her hands. Paint on her work shirt. Black and orange. A twinkle in her wide-apart freaky honey-color eyes.
The women aren’t really roaming. They are standing. And staring.
“We came up to check on you. We missed you at supper.” This is Vancy. Age twenty-five. She is very pregnant. But also she is a fat person to start with. Huge square face. Brown tightly-permed short hair. Tiny little pig eyes with nearly no lashes. She has just finished helping three out-of-touch elders with their soupy suppers and has one small splat of color, like pink watercolor, like the makings of art, on the rounded-out middle of her white maternity shirt. She also wears a prominent heart locket, a wristwatch, and the plain silver wedding ring of Gordon St. Onge.
Catherine, hugging her shopping bag of gifts to her chest, says, “Maybe we can get a little peek at your work, Bree.”
Bree laughs sharply. “No way, José.” Then giggles apologetically.
Catherine clasps one of Bree’s large paint-covered hands. “Bree, there is not a person here in this hallway who doesn’t love you. You can trust us. Let’s sit down. Let’s talk.”
Bree looks past Catherine at short, round-faced, bosomy Claire, and then to Lee Lynn and Gail and then at the several young mothers who are not Gordon’s wives. Catherine still hangs on to Bree’s hand even as she shifts a bit to manage the loaded shopping bag.
In the dim hallway of light, Claire St. Onge’s eyes behind their steely specs look fiery. “Gordon’s birthday is next week. His fortieth.”
Bree whispers. “Oh. I see. You’re planning . . . uh . . . scheming something for him.”
Catherine squeezes Bree’s hand, then releases it.
“Forty spanks!” laughs Bree, wagging her head playfully. Shifts to her other foot. But her feet in those high-topped leather work boots of hers are still set apart in a way that means nobody is getting past her into her studio.
Claire says, “No, Bree. That’s not what I meant.”
Bree’s eyes turn down to wide little Claire’s upturned face.
Claire finishes her thought, “We mean, we know a girl of fifteen who knows the facts of life. That’s good. But a forty-year-old man knows more, should know more . . . should at least know enough to keep his hands off.”
Bree looks a little stupid, mouth ajar. Lee Lynn, skirling high voice, Chicago accent, hair of a gauntly lovely witch, addresses the girl. “Bree. We need to talk. Can’t we please come in and see what you’re working on?”
Bree stands taller, her stance more iron-like than before. “You guys think Gordon and I have had sex?”
“It’s a thought that’s occurred to us, yes,” admits Catherine, looking up at Bree, who is so much taller than everyone present. Catherine is giving Bree’s elbow a slow consoling rub.
Bree snorts with disgust. She raises her eyes to Vancy, who stands close behind Catherine’s shoulder and then to the row of faces beyond. Says Bree, “Don’t worry, you guys. Maybe you haven’t noticed. I’m not pretty.”
Vancy says, “Haven’t you noticed, Bree? I’m not pretty.”
“You are not a freak,” Bree says evenly.
Vancy sighs. “Freakhood is how one sees oneself.”
Catherine says firmly, “Pretty is beside the point. We’re talking about a man taking advantage of someone who is young, susceptible, and already a victim of violence. Bree, this is my studio, too. Let us in. We’ll sit over on my side if you wish. We won’t look behind your tarps.”
Bree doesn’t budge. “Something tells me you already have.” The hallway where they all stand seems to grow even darker, the lights over and beyond the hanging tarps to Bree’s space blaze like suns.
Claire reaches to put her arms around Bree and Bree responds with a little slump, her cheek to the top of Claire’s glossy black hair. Claire tips her head back, Bree so tall. “Okay. You’re saying Gordon is clean. But your fathers and brothers . . . is there something you want to tell us about them? About—” Her voice softens even more, a hitch of sorrow. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you sweetheart?”
Bree stares for a long moment into thin air.
Claire says, “What about the others, sweetie?”
Now Bree glares straight to the back of the group at the one young woman she had most recently showed THE BOOK to. One of those she trusted. With her story. Bree’s bottom lip trembles.
The young mother looks down at the floor. Guiltily.
Claire continues gently, “Your brothers have been monsters, Bree. Haven’t they?”
“No!”
“Yes, oh, yes!” insists Catherine. As Claire hugs Bree harder, Catherine scoots around them into the studio, Vancy following her. Catherine pulls the tarp to Bree’s side of the bright room aside. She throws out a hand toward the canvases beyond. She announces, “See him! Them. All of THEM being HIM. Are THESE not monsters?!!!” She backs up to the tarp, holding it open with her back, still clutching the shopping bag, her lovely chin high. “Please come in here and tell me I’m not crazy. See for yourselves!”
The younger women reluctantly but obediently file toward the lighted room, Catherine’s teacherly voice a crowning force, and Catherine turns to Bree and cries out pleadingly, “Bree!” Then accusingly, “You depict here every sort of beast. THIS is how you view men!!! Because this is how you’ve been subjugated! It’s . . . oh . . . yes . . . spelled right out here. You can’t deny it!” She pushes the shopping bag into a chair, keeping her back to the tarp bunched behind her against the Homasote. “And your father and brothers . . . oh, yes! I have seen the book.” She rubs one eye hard, as if to make that eye forget. “Until you come to terms with that whole rigmarole, until we get you to some good professional help . . . dear heart, you can say all you want but—” She looks over her shoulder into t
he blazing light and color of Bree’s studio space. “These paintings are, without a doubt, the work of a young woman damaged, if not by the act, then, at the very least, by the basest patriarchal environment anyone could imagine. It makes me sick! It makes me angry! And I tell you, if this has been done to you, the perpetrators must be punished!”
All the other women look sharply at Catherine as she speaks the word punished.
Bree begins to half-squeal, half-howl. “Get out of here! Everyone get the fuck out!”
Lee Lynn’s urgent shrill inquiry, “You really haven’t had sexual intercourse with Gordon? Be honest. Pleeeeze be . . . it’s okay.”
“No! Never. No! Get out!”
And then Claire, “We’re not going to punish anybody. And we do not need to get professionals of any kind involved. But Bree, it’s best if we know . . . we’re your family.”
And Lee Lynn, not giving up, “All those men in the book?”
Bree laughs. Quite a beastly laugh. Makes her hands like claws. “No! Nooooo nobody! Nooo-body! No-body!” She now shrieks with laughter, then hunches her back up, gripping Lee Lynn’s thin lovely face, then tips her own face up as if her neck were twisted, rolls her eyes, and says in a low gruff scratching voice, “The bells! Hear them!” Then backs away, lunging at another woman who stiffens, wide-eyed as Bree, hunchbacked and shaking a fist, bellers, “THE BELLS! THE BELLS! HEAR THE BELLS!” She laughs heinously at all their stunned faces. She hops around, back hunched, head low and twisted.
Now she looks up at Catherine, and, still in her low scratchy animally voice, asks, “You like that, dontcha? That’s my Quasimodo imitation! He’s in special ed.” She snickers and stands up straight, then bursts into tears, strangled wretched sobs, holding her face. The women begin to move toward her to comfort, while staring down on them from every direction, the pale green eyes of Gordon St. Onge, face, beard, throat, navel, cleft hoof, wings violently constricted or spread, feathered wings, lashing tail of a bull, here falling into flames, here steady in the turbulence of countless babies that are fat and green-eyed and powerful, boy babies and girl babies, POWER BABIES. And there are other figures, men and women . . . but Gordon is THE FIGURE, the epitome of perfection, sexuality, power and transcendence, damnation, exorcism, and forgiveness.
Bree doesn’t wait to be hugged or soothed. She strides proudly (it seems) out, down the stairs, out of the Quonset hut, across the sandy lot, hops up into her truck, driving that truck neither fast nor slow, just driving out of there, bye, bye.
Catherine that night, head on pillow, eyes wide. Silently she speaks.
My god. My god. What is it, Bree, if it isn’t that? Your sweet raw soul biting the rescuer’s hand! If not that, Bree, what is it? What is it? I don’t understand.
Six-thirty that next morning at the Vandermasts.
Dark green Chevy pickup with white cab rumbles down slowly into the Vandermast dooryard, parking lights glowing. A dreary cloudy morning, just a moment here and there between long drizzles and cruel gusts. Not full daylight yet.
Claire St. Onge and Gordon St. Onge head for the kitchen door of the house, Claire gliding along in the lead with her arms crossed under her huge breasts, brown button-up sweater, her hair down, which makes her look young . . . sort of. Gordon wears one of his billed caps, which he takes off when invited into the kitchen by Bree’s father. Bree’s father wears his cap in the house. Soft-spoken man. Blue eyes. Hands crusty as fossils. Welcomes the two visitors. One of the brothers is at the table with five cereal boxes of five different cereals around his one bowl. Collie dog swishes around happily, no longer barking since John “Pitch” Vandermast has pointed at him.
Pitch explains that Bree has gone to stay for a few days with his deceased wife’s younger sister, June Shaw, in Belfast. “He used to live down this way till his work took ’im” (He, his, and ’im meaning the woman’s husband?).
“Was Bree upset?” Claire asks.
Pitch Vandermast raises an eye. “Well—” He tips his head down, digs at the back of his head luxuriously a moment, which causes his billed cap to flop forward a bit, covering his eyes. Then he quickly readjusts his cap, screws it on good, and smiles. “She’s awfully cross with you folks.”
They talk about Bree awhile in the kitchen, then are still talking about her out in the dooryard while one of the brothers loads up an orange Timberjack skidder onto the low bed and the groan of the engine and low low low gearing punctuates every sentence and then the Vandermast men have to leave and Claire steps up to the father and hugs him, and he’s not much of a hugger, but he doesn’t fight it.
Saturday, sweet, warm, late a.m. Catherine at home.
She decides on fresh air, some wholesome exercise. Dressed in her white sneakers and loose pants and sweatshirt, she explores the roads and paths of the Settlement, nodding and smiling a bright-faced, “Hello!” to people she passes. Her eyes under their handsomely thick eyebrows seem the color of green olives in the sun, eyes that have that way of color coding the day, the place, perhaps even the ambience.
As she comes to a narrow gap in a stone wall, she sees the woods here have been recently and brutally logged. Sometimes the Settlementers don’t live up to their eco-friendly maxims? She studies the nearest opening between remaining oaks. Oaks with manly girths, saplings, suckers, and russet-color slash. The lane beaten and rutted. Rocks and slippery stumps, roots, yellowing ferns in bunches, elbow high. She sees this area has also been recently fenced. Double-strung electric fencing through the white eyes of old outdated insulators, above a fence of wide and battered horizontal boards, larger than any pigpen she’s imagined. The fencing disappears beyond this sunny opening up into the thick blotchy enigma of undamaged woods. Looks like half this mountain is reserved for pigs. Though she has been told “pigs and hogs” are here, she can’t seem to catch sight of one.
“Pigs!” she calls, “Here, pigs!”
No response. She decides to come back later. She’d really like to see one.
She is starting to feel deeply for this place.
At breakfast the next morning in the muffin-warm, coffee-hot, kazoo-zippy, baby-back-thumping, flame flickering winter kitchen.
There Gordon sits at one of the smaller tables. Empty seat at his side. Catherine carries a cup of coffee and her little basket of herbal “treatments” to this seat and makes herself comfortable. There is a kid a few feet away, playing a guitar softly, playing quite well. Catherine notices that it is Ricardo, who isn’t on the kitchen crew this morning. He wears a baby blue cowboy shirt. He sits squarely under several trophy-sized stuffed paper fish, painted in bright tropical colors, which churn and bounce prettily on strings, as if tripping the light fantastic.
Gordon tells Catherine that he heard she enjoyed seeing the pigs last evening.
“Yes! They were wonderful. I asked Aurel to show them to me. He’s such a nice man. The animals are well-treated.”
“Yes.” He smiles.
She sees that he is drinking beer. For breakfast. One untouched piece of buttered toast on a Settlement-made plate of blobby red and white stripes and boxy green clovers.
She does not plan for this subject to come up. It just pops out of her. She tells him she plans on picking up a few more things at home after classes today. Including her TV. She wants it in her studio, for watching videos mostly. Educational. “And the news. Which is important.”
He shifts to fully face her. The smell of the beer reaches her, like unquestionable eminence, not trespass. “We have a rule here. No TV. It’s an important rule.”
Catherine smiles, looks down, flushes prettily. Looks back into his face. “I understand that institutions have rules. But not families. Yes? No?”
He looks at her oddly, reaches for the brown beer bottle, label-less, filled with homemade beer, of course . . . hoists it up. Swallows once, twice, three times.
She answers her own query. “Well, yes, rules . . . families do . . . but they are for children.”
He smacks
his lips once, wipes his mouth and mustache with his thumb and fingers once, drops his hand. “This is a big family, you understand. We desire to survive.”
She smiles. “Are the rules posted on the wall here or do you just make them up as you go along?” She unscrews a bottle from her basket, two capsules roll into her palm in a frisky way.
He watches her hands. “I’ll write them up for you if you want.”
“YOU’ll write them up. So YOU write the rules here?”
He smiles. “Okay, I’ll dictate. YOU write ’em down.” He laughs. A nasty laugh.
Catherine appears unflustered, her off-brown eyes steady on his face, her curved naughty-seeming eyebrows raised. Little pretty mole by her mouth. Mouth a hard line of certitude. Shoulders squared. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a VCR here for tapes? I know you all have tapes here. Why have them if you don’t watch them? And there are so many available that you’d be interested in. Films particular to your causes.”
The guitar music seems to be climbing, becoming lighter. Feathery. Breathy. But in the foreground, Gordon’s voice, thick and substantiated. “Yes. We’ve been talking about having a TV, just for the VCR. Only we would sabotage the antenna works if necessary.” He laughs. “Maybe break the channel thingamajig. Pull it off or something.” He laughs again. Playful, but in a vinegary sort of way. “Reception isn’t so good up on this road anyway. It’s the hills. That’s why you see so many elaborate antennas bigger than the houses themselves on the way up here from town. Some have those dishes. No cable around here yet.” He narrows his eyes at the wonder of all this, the craziness of it. “Probably we’ll do the VCR thing eventually. But this isn’t a good time. We’ve agreed on it. And when we do, there would not be a TV in each home.”
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 52
