No, this dream is just shadows of the softest velvetiest kind, a twinge of perfect blue. And within this velvety blue, Gordon’s baritone speaks in its matter-of-fact across-the-supper-table way: “Nothing’s wrong.”
Claire.
One morning she asked if I could have Robert call her at the university for little daily chats. Only once to her cell phone, which made waveries and slush sounds and harbor tunnels and coal mines seemed to hove in around every other word. Thereafter she insisted the university number to her office was where he was to call. Only later I learned that with a cell phone, you get charged both in and out. Wow! What can I say?
We arranged times. Uh, the chats were pretty long. Robert talked. He wasn’t an introvert at all. Only when things were wildly tense, chaotic, or too new. So, he talked some. But Catherine really chatted away. Even Lisa Meserve, who was in jail, kept her talks with Jane short. Lisa fretted over our “doing too much” for her, not wanting to be a “burden.” But Catherine seemed emergencyish with phone in hand.
Uh-oh.
I started to worry about the phone bill. Phone bills weren’t something Gordon bothered with much. Only a few times, like back when my cousin Macky lived here . . . shifty, shady Macky . . . and then a couple of other times the phone bill became a problem. If people made long-distance calls, we had a timer and a money can for that. It was all about trust. And Gordon wasn’t the bookkeeper. Bonnie Loo, Lorraine Martin, and I did that.
But THIS phone bill was going to be . . . uh . . . plump. And Gordon did check the bottom line of various pages of our accounts, and this time he’d sniff out something REALLY OFF. See, we had different categories. He always checked these in a cursory way so he could figure, including income, for instance, how well the CSA thing was doing, or the fall meat cutting, or Christmas trees and wreaths, and the sawmills or furniture, so then he could project expenses, like what we were going to be able to handle over the next six months, or over the next year. That sort of thing. And without exception, he was the one who signed the money orders and made up all of our allotment-shares envelopes, which were cash.
So I was feeling a little edgy.
But Bonnie Loo and Lorraine and I talked. We decided that once Catherine got her divorce settled and got herself resituated in Portland, as it now seemed she had plans to do, the phone bill here would not take this beating. She and Robert would both be in Portland and that would be that.
Progress.
Jeanne Tull, an old lady in Maine, just outside of Biddeford, is looking at a pale plastic object in her hands with tears in her eyes. It’s the third telephone she’s had to buy this year! She recalls her solid old rotary that was a pleasant shade of dark green. Never broke. Does a chunk of granite break? The repairman came from the company when the one before that lost its dial tone. No charge to replace it and give her a longer wire too!! Now this little thing you have to buy yourself, made to expire routinely. A milk jug cover is ruggeder.
Living on Social Security, which never goes up much, you do not have much of a sense of humor about being stolen from.
Whenever she calls (the unknown company on the phone’s wrapping) to complain, she doesn’t get a person. She gets a recording and a “menu.” The menu is too fast and causes her to feel very alone. And yes, robbed! Like a sociopath cleverly talking his way out of whatever it is sociopaths do, chaos and ruination on regular nice folks!
Anyone would say what a sweet old lady Jeanne is. Not a wild or mean bone in her body. But right now, she has a terrible thought, which she must keep to herself and never tell a soul. There it is, just a thought. A picture actually. She pictures herself tossing a stick of dynamite at the main offices of the Blue Booger Corporation or whatever outfit’s name is on the latest cheesy phone.
Now she feels really awful! Gosh, she just lost her head for a moment. Just a quick passing flash of insanity.
If she goes and puts on the TV for her show, which starts in eight minutes, gets the teakettle started, gets her mind off THE SUBJECT, she’ll do just fine.
Waste management.
Yes, I am speaking to you. I am the inexorable fact, size-of-the-sky pile of used plastic foam, wrap, boingy and cracked forget-me-nots, remnants of your washing machine, tires of your car numbering as the stars, all of which will become your new scenic mountains, going up, up, up, just as the old mountains are razed down, down, down for our helpful coal.
What? Someone of you just squeaked, Can’t appliances and vehicles be made more stoutly, nourishing a mighty army of repairpersons singing as they work like Disney dwarfs?
Whoa! But I, the heap, make jobs, all those trucks lugging the squashed cars and upside-down TVs, computers, cell phones, and egg timers hither and yon, folks in plants sorting through broken mercury bulbs and motherboards, manning the furnaces, the transport of ash to the heavens.
Sorry dears, but repair is outdated, old-fashioned, possibly commie, definitely NOT PROFITABLE. Repair is the wish of fools.
The coalescing of wolves. Oceanna St. Onge speaks.
Bree would be joining us for the Lincoln trip. Hurrah! We had gone over to her house a few days before and hugged and smooched her and yelled and crabbed at her and Samantha got military on her.
“If you go AWOL,” said Sammy in a husky sort of way, “it’s a hundred lashes.”
Most of us laughed but Bree cocked her head with a pale smile.
“Firing squad,” said Dee Dee.
And besides, this thing we had strategized we truly believed was going to stop entrenched corporate power in its tracks. Boyzo, did we ever feel wicked influential. Tsk.
In a future time, Whitney St. Onge (oldest daughter of Gordon) thinks back on that day, heading out for Lincoln, Maine.
When we left the Settlement, I was driving the Ford we always called “the Vessel.” Now it was our “Command Car.” The caravan headed down Heart’s Content Road through the dark and darker trees, the rocks piled in miles of loose ferny walls, unseen or barely seen. But the sky was brightening and so the woodsy mysteries were quickening. And we, too, were quickening, we the officers of the True Maine Militia.
Margo.
Samantha had her corn-silk blonde hair wrapped in a black and brown Comanche-style head rag. She was all snuggled down in her black military BDU jacket in the backseat feasting on the stuff addressed to the True Maine Militia, which we’d gotten out of the message box by the Settlement gate as we drove through. There were notes, business cards, letters scribbled onto receipts (the way emergency messages are usually left).
There were too many of us all to use our seat belts. The taillights of the Settlement truck ahead of us seemed to brake a lot. It was the truck with the turbine chained on back. That was the overt mission. We were the covert mission.
Steph St. Onge speaks.
We got there late in the day. I remember how sweet it was, the Settlement guys there with the Lincoln guys, inspecting the pylons together. Cement pylons they had set earlier on. These Lincoln guys were Bible-hard but smiley. Yeah, flushy angelic smiles. And it seemed they were all chubby.
Michelle St. Onge.
We got out of the Command Car. I remember how Samantha looked so cagey and strategic, eyes narrowed, studying the long field, the straight tar road below. Plotting. She looked SO OBVIOUS, I warned her that she might give it all away.
Claire St. Onge remembers.
The Lincoln families apologized for their water having a metallic taste and some of them apologized for the ground being hilly, and profusely apologized for the weather being muggy.
Andrea St. Onge, seven years old at the time, recalls later.
The Lincoln kids really LOVED the fart pillows we brought for them.
Rusty Soucier, fourteen at the time, remembers something of the first day in Lincoln.
Well, you know that was a buncha years ago. I kinda remember this kid with glasses who really loved the fart pillow we gave him, a pillow that makes a fart noise when you sit on it. He kept calling it “t
he thunder pillow.” I remember Mimi ordered me to sit in the truck but I can’t remember what for.
Steph St. Onge has a memory of that first evening.
When it was clear that the fart pillows were being used as weapons, they were confiscated. “You don’t chase people with these!” Leona screamed and snatched one of these pillows from Gus, who was taller than herself.
Claire.
There were three houses up on that hilly field, three families. One old house with a barn. Two newish solar houses built up back sort of, but also in the open. Not many trees. The families were all of that same church and their Christian school, and Pastor Rick was mentioned about forty times before he finally arrived in his little white car and he, Pastor Rick, of course, was fat and smiled an ear-to-ear smile.
Penny.
For the first couple of days, I don’t remember much. Seems it was sweet, kind of going along there. They had their Pastor Rick. All of them very churchy. They apologized a lot for stuff. And we’ve talked about it since how our girls, the True Maine Militia, looked so innocent.
Michelle recalls.
There was a mad scramble setting up the tents and cookers. The water tasted funny. Samantha kept whispering, “We’re going to die! We shoulda brought our own water!”
Whitney.
Bree and I were scooched by the door flap of our tent looking down across the tufty short-cut hay and she says, “He isn’t going to like it.”
I could see she was looking at Gordon, who was back to and goofing around with some kids. Even if I couldn’t see who she was looking at, I knew who she meant. I said, “We won’t let him blame you. We’ll protect you.”
She kind of laughed. Then her eyes moved again toward where he was, quite a distance away.
I looked down there at him. He had his big gorilla arm around one of those Lincoln Christian ladies and she was laughing all shrieky like a kid.
Geraldine St. Onge.
The first night passed. It was pretty uneventful, I think. We slept in tents. Some slept on the truck seats or in the vans and cars and three homemade campers, but mostly the tents. We had pretty good tents because we did this sort of thing a lot . . . the community wind-solar thing.
I remember the air the next day was thicker. I remember as work started, some of the other people from their church stopped by to watch. They parked down along the road and hiked the mowed part of the field. Some stood with their hands on their hips taking it all in. And smiling. I never saw a bunch smile so much. At one point, Bonnie Loo said the smiles were getting on her nerves.
Penny.
The temperature wasn’t over seventy, but it was muggy. Like midsummer. The grasshoppers and crickets were deafening at times. And they hopped high, striking people’s pant legs and bare legs, landing in cups of coffee and toolboxes and baskets where babies were sleeping. Everything seemed normal.
Gail.
It always gave me a little chill . . . you know, a chilly thrill . . . like hearing the tune to the “Star Spangled Banner,” to see one of the wind towers beginning to rise against the sky one piece at a time. There were groups of men and strong teens and a couple of gals lugging the steel sections from the Egypt flatbed trucks. The windmill co-op jobs are always fun, and something else . . . gives a self-concious edgy person like me a feeling of being part of something big. And warm. No, not a party. Better than that.
Glennice.
Well, what we planned was for some of the Egypt teens to show the Lincoln teens how to build a ten-foot mechanical windmill, the kind that pumps water, and one smaller version of the one the adults were setting up, only theirs would charge a small battery. And for the little kids, ornamental windmills. This was what we hoped. But. Through all this humidity here were all these sweaty shrieky kids lugging rough pine boards and conduit from the trucks while others were crawling all over the trucks, even jumping on the cabs and hoods, whomp!bang!whomp! bang! . . . and kids were sorting through tools. Mostly kids were losing tools in the grass.
Leona.
I remember how the men and older teens, mostly boys, were taking turns bolting sections of the big windmill together.
I could hear Aurel yakking up there. There’s no place where he was ever quiet for long. Not even forty-five feet up in the sky! “Juss like a big erector set, aye?” he says to the boy who’s up there with him, one of the Lincoln teenagers. And the father was up there, too, father of that boy, both of them on the chubby side.
Then I could hear the boy asking his dad, “Scared?” And the father was laughing as if to deny it.
Aurel scoffed at the very idea. “T’iss high-up part iss not t’danger. It iss far more off a danger down t’ere below where you got to keep dodging t’tools t’at we drop from here.”
Meanwhile, Gordon looked tired, though once we had to get a fart pillow away from him, which he was going to plant in this nice Christian lady’s lawn chair. Yeah, and he was his usual solicitous self with these women, all married women, these Christian ladies, our hostesses. But it didn’t seem to annoy the husbands whatsoever. Sweet smiles continued.
Bonnie Loo.
I think it was that third day, but no, it might have been the second, the muggy one, that one of the smallest Lincoln kids wound up with an opened can of turquoise paint flipped off the high flat bed of a truck onto her head. But that’s just par for the course. THE BAD THING was still on the way.
Claire.
Uh-oh. So here we go. I think it was the afternoon of the second day that three people showed up who were not part of the Christian group. I gotta say they acted strange . . . like . . . like suspicious. Observers, not socializers. I don’t mean that they didn’t say anything at all. One of the men told our Ray Pinette, who was especially red-faced and damp-looking from his work, that a windmill still stood in his father’s field near a pond in Milo. A mechanical windmill.
But otherwise, none of these unbidden visitors had much interest in the project. I watched them, saw their eyes move in sly ways over the Settlement’s old beat-ta-shit trucks, the half-finished child-made smaller windmills.
All the embroidery on blouses, jackets, and floppy skirts seemed to daze them.
And then they studied Bonnie Loo in particular, standing there with one hand on her hip, sucking a cigarette, with her orange and black hair rip-roaring out over one side of her head from its bright green embroidered “rag,” talking with Ellen who was probably wearing that above-the-knee tent dress, and who had a real bad cough. Oh, and yes, how could I forget her black eye. It was a stitched up blood-red mess, a surgically removed benign tumor. These strangers looked at her a lot. Yes, Ellen St. Onge, one of “the wives.”
And boy, did they study Gordon. I remember another carload had pulled up and these people really drilled Gordon with the old eyeballs. This bunch were too much like the sightseers we had had coming around at the Settlement before the pole gate went up. I looked over to see exactly what about Gordon intrigued them so much. He was standing alone, arms folded across the front of his work shirt, staring at a dribbling sun in a dribbling turquoise sky freshly painted by kids on our one-ton truck driver’s-side door. He reached to pick off a grasshopper that was stuck in the paint. Grasshopper covered with paint. Mercifully, he crushed it. And then he reached into his shirt pocket for a small bottle. Aspirin, yes.
The families we had come to work with had promised not to tell too many people that we were coming, and they understood this, Gordon’s media infamy. And now the kids’ op-ed. Maybe for a moment or two some of us suspected the Christians had broken their promise.
In a future time, Penny is remembering Lincoln, Maine.
After supper, there was a prayer and during this I was one of the ones who peeked. Like kids were doing. I saw that Gordon was sitting on a board bench with Ellen and Whitney.
His huge hands were clasped, the bare forearms, his carefully buttoned work shirt, his hair wet from the comb. Yes, Sunday school–like. It made me smile.
Lee Lynn.
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Before we opened our eyes from the prayer, Pastor Rick began to sing. I could feel that singing voice on my retinas, thin and high. It soared right up into the darkening sky as he gave thanks to God for everything from good food to good friends.
Bonnie Loo.
That sky in Lincoln was big. Unlike Egypt, no humpy mountain blocked the west. There was a pissed-off-looking red sunset with purple worms over the top edge and a bottom layer that looked like human organs, veiny and orange. HELL. Where the devil lives. Except that it did not roar or hiss or gurgle. And no screams. Just, you know, an unsullied silence and growing chill. I hadn’t seen Gordon and Bree even acknowledge each other at this point. Meanwhile, it was plain something was up, another one of Bree’s schemes. What else?
Margo St. Onge recalls that evening.
There was a sunset made up of every color. We were all politely praying with the Christians. I peeked at my father. He had his head hanging, eyes closed, fingers laced. Well, if you knew him, you’d have known how he had this side to him . . . this God thing. I think he really was praying. There was something there you couldn’t fake.
Penny St. Onge.
Now the colorful sunset deflates and, gracefully and driftingly, stained a hundred shades of blue, falls parachutelike into the dark, and the next song of the evening, backed up with kazoos, harmonicas, jaw harps, guitars, three fart pillows (sad to say), Settlement-made fiddles, and one small accordion . . . a “squeezebox” actually . . . was “The Log Driver’s Waltz,” then some of what Gordon called “complaints,” sang in valley French, memorized by most Settlement kids, and then came the hymns, most of which the Egypt people knew very few of but were happy to learn. I will never, never, never forget that evening. It is now a part of my past but also a wish for the future. Being a people with other Mainers. Peace and good will.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 58
