With the hen still in her arms, Alyson clambers out the door opposite the one she got in, opens the front passenger door.
Glory says, “I came here tonight special to see him, to show him something.” (Him means Gordon.)
Alyson positions the corduroy shoulder bag daintily on Glory’s lap, on that little bunchiness of her hiked-up skirt and much bareness of the thighs. Glory paws desperately through this bag, sniffing back her tears, her nose seeming even more plugged now.
She finds a little book.
Gordon squats down so that he is lower now and she is higher, up on the seat. The poor dome light makes the little book show up unsettlingly significant there in her fingers. Like a declaration that could crush a nation. Turns out it is only a little journal filled with Glory’s handwriting, a book Gordon gave her years ago, she explains. He can’t remember doing this but supposes he did. Like with Jane. Only instead of the spy stuff and the drawings of Settlement misdeeds, Glory would have kept track of joys, visits to her grandfolks, friends at school (mostly public school), favorite TV shows at home, visits to the Settlement, especially the two Settlement ponies (gone now) and board games, and the skits that she was too shy to be part of, but she would definitely write about them. They mattered to her. Her handwriting is large, with little round bubbles for dots on js and is.
“I was eleven,” she explains.
Now, getting closer to her, he smells the beer. She tells him to keep the book awhile. “It’s fun to read about the past. Mostly stuff I forgot all about.”
He sees one Budweiser can sideways on the floor. Empty.
He slips the little book into his shirt pocket, then tells her playfully, “Come on, leap on outta there and let me behind the wheel. This chariot’s going to roll.”
“But I’m stuck here forever!” she laughs. “Poor ol’ ankle!”
So he has to help her out of the seat. She hobbles along with him to the other door, ooooing and owwwing.
He is reserved, cold? None of his usual ear fondling and bear hugs. Not with this one. There are possibilities here that fill him with terrors small and large. Terrors in every shape and texture and malignant pose. Something that keeps coming to him in the manifestation of Rex’s eyes.
Next day.
In some moment alone, he reads Glory’s tiny journal, written in her bloated curly handwriting, that nevertheless tries to fit so many words on each page, margins gorged, every space filled with her abundance. And the word LOVE always in caps. Love is, indeed, a certain kind of genius, of hard intelligence, a way of organizing information, a way of analogy . . . “this” means “this” so “that” means “that” . . . and the world is precious and thrilling and I trust it. Yeah, Glory trusts this world. She has no nagging doubts. And thus she shall celebrate! Unlike her father, Rex, she sees no set traps, no deep holes, no more than what you’d have if you sat home and watched TV and died from the inside out. And so all Gordon’s protective instincts rise.
He slips the little book into his shirt pocket again. If only she were that tiny. That easily swathed in safety.
The vow.
And he whispers wearily to that which is in his mind’s eye, Rex’s hardening face. “Brother, you don’t have to worry. I’ll never touch that little girl.”
Whitney.
Yeah, we had finally reached Senator Mary again and she had given us the “go!” on our State House plan. Got the governor’s schedule for that whole week, which was the key missing piece up till then. The True Maine Militia was bracing for action. The next day would be D-day. “D for democracy,” we said. Agents and operatives would not have to beg to get one of our blue oak-tag militia membership cards. The sky would snow down membership cards. Welcome! was our militia motto yodeled out to the wide world.
History (the very recent past)
“Maine is no longer a warm place in the heart. It’s a line on a spreadsheet.”
—Governor King, speaking in Bangor
circa 2000 Bangor Daily
Oceanna St. Onge recalls the next day.
We marched along the old State House tunnel and up the winding stairs to the Hall of Flags. Hup! Hup! BAROOOOM! Hup! Hup! Hup!
It was sort of like our solstice march. Only no mountain and no sun. We had all the littlest pipsqueaks from home and basically kids of all ages. Even Butchie, Evan, and C.C., Cory, too. Jaime, Seth Miner, Steven and Eben and Jakey Savage. They offered to help out, you see. Though I caught a few smirks. Mickey wore his Border Mountain Militia jacket. But mostly it was tykes. The whole thing was Bree’s idea. She kept saying, “Kids are the thing.” Flags. Banners. Big drum. Squirt guns. Kazoos. Brooms. And one never-before-used plunger. Big cardboard signs saying stuff like BOMB THE CORPORATE CAMPAIGN FINANCE SCHEME. SPARE THE HUMANS.
Rachel Soucier telling what she remembers of the “siege.”
There were public schoolteachers and their “best” students with science displays. Boy, these teachers went into cardiac arrest to see “bad” kids like us on the loose in a place of such high order and majesty.
C.C. Crocker looking back.
Some of the True Maine Militia were eating the school people’s donuts, which were on a big tray for the public. We thought we were the public. They thought we were rats and mice. Only corporate lobbyists got smiles when they plucked a donut from the tray.
Aleta St. Onge, who was a preteen at that time recalls.
They didn’t like our message.
Samantha Butler.
It was the Maine State House in Augusta, the people’s house. The office of the governor was upstairs. It was the True Maine Militia’s first offensive and official action. We had a grand speech on democracy written out on a scroll. Lots of signs demanding the lobbying industry and other tools of Mammon be banned from our government. We had drums. We had kazoos. We had badly played bagpipes. Loads of signs, buttons, camo, robes, helmets, feathers, face paint, body paint, and joy! Even the toddlers learned how to say “co-putt!” (corporate slut!) with expertise.
We all said it together: “Corporate slut!” at the governor’s door, which nobody inside seemed inclined to open. We were in sync. It was like thunder. It was a sunny vista. It was like candy. It was like cake. It was beautiful. We were beautiful.
Mickey Gammon.
They kicked us out. Cops in suits like bank presidents. But for once I was leaving with a crowd, not alone. In school you are alone on the moon. You are the big, the bad, the one. It was a kind of high to be shoulder to shoulder now. Souped up. Like twin tailpipes. That’s how a rebel army works. Only in this case, no one had to bleed. After that, you want more. I knew the minds of certain ones were already cooking, the True Maine Militia. Pretty silly. Girls throwing orders and doing little jumps like cheers on the way out into the rain. But when you are a guy you have the instinct to protect. So you just hang around like a ghost in case things get serious and the girlies fall apart and beg for help. That’s why I was there, with C.C. and Butch and the others. In case things got out of hand. You just can’t believe how jolly those girls were in that weirding-out place. They just didn’t know life. The enemy was not going to laugh off their making a mess of even one of their days of business as usual. Eventually you knew there would be the pain of the knife. Pepper spray. Whatever.
Whitney St. Onge looking back on that October.
Stirred things up in the papers again. And talk radio was turbid with hysterical jibber-jabber over abused Settlement children, pedophilia, Nazi men, terror, illiteracy, polygamy, gunzzz. Even the squirt guns the little kids had at the State House were discussed as promoting terrorism.
Yes, we had a not-so-secret radio in the summer kitchen to “monitor the media” as Claire called this. Not a peep out of Gordon. By then, he had his own militia sins developing. How could he bitch about ours? Our militia. Or our little radio. I loved my father completely but he had to grow up!
In a future time, Claire laments on another matter.
Yeah, I knew of Catherine’s
shopping obsession, the browsing, the selection, the euphoria of filling the backseat of her little green car with crinkly bags of gifts and clothes, video tapes, herbal remedies, sweaters. She loved to buy sweaters. She was not a clothes horse, really. There were only a few things she actually wore. Then there were her memberships, like aerobics and the gym and the pool. She had a calendar full of appointments: massage therapy, nutrition therapy, acupuncturist, shrinks and counselors, music therapy, dance, psychics and astrologers. And the shopping. Every day. Every day another carload of bags and that smell so particular to new merchandise.
I was starting to suspect there was something death-defying going on here. And later we would know the whole piteous picture. That she was doing something sly and desperate and messy with credit, first exhausting her batch of credit cards, then overextending the credit line of her equity loan, then selling off stocks, and then forging her sister’s name on her sister’s credit cards, which she stole. Though her sister would forgive her, her husband Phan would not. It had been what started all the trouble between them in the first place, but now it was worse.
Then I heard from others at the university that she had been making long-distance calls at the university’s expense, some to Phan to argue for hours in whatever hotel room in whatever country he might be installed in. Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Indonesia, Mexico. And nice newsy deep-feeling chats with her friends in places where she had once lived, and chats with her sister, and her dead mother’s best friend. The provost was wild. This especially wasn’t good for Catherine’s position. But since she hadn’t done this with the phone before, it could have been chalked up to stress and a temporary emotional breakdown, which perhaps the provost would agree a good treatment regimen and repayment could fix.
But then there was the Settlement phone. Yes, I had been taking Robert down to Gordon’s house to call his mum at her office but there were those times when Catherine breezed in here with her gifts, sitting in for a noon meal or supper, but she herself was also stopping down at the farmhouse for a while, warming the phone with calls to Phan in Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Indonesia, Mexico.
Robert Court Downey Xiem
He is four years old. He whispers, “Are we shepherds?”
There was a biting wind yesterday but it has died. Wind has so much push and noise but this new whispery silence feels holy.
Gordon whispers, “Real shepherds would sleep outside with the sheep. We’re half-assed shepherds.”
Robert gives a manly single snort of a laugh. He keeps glancing at the way Gordon’s right fingers and thumb are locked around the forearm of the rifle. Then he glances back up at the sky. They are looking for a sign of the missing lamb, hopefully a live lamb, though Gordon is not expecting a live lamb. Mainly he is looking for a small piece of mottled evidence.
The sun is stuck in the trees up along Hanley Brook Hill. It is a small white, weak sun.
Down here are five acres of balsams planted in factory rows and pruned. Some are chest high. Some are hip high while others are small as bouquets of clover. There is a sense of strenuous order in this, of too much human touch. A rat-tat-tat-tat unhearable drumroll of perfection. Robert and Gordon walk abreast here, Gordon taller than trees, Robert’s dark eyes wide, concerned only with comparisons.
Somewhere, some coyotes or an eagle or someone’s pet dog knows the answer to the mystery Robert and Gordon mean to solve. Robert knows wild animals and other sneaky types are like ghosts with special powers. He glances at the rifle, gray worn iron and dark worn wood. It too seems supernatural. He looks at Gordon’s fingers, the green cuff of Gordon’s shirt, the raggedy sherpa-lined vest. He looks at the weak cool light of the sunrise pressing between the tops of the special trees It is all merging, weakness and power, beauty and fright.
Steph remembers.
At noon Robert sat with Gordon at dinner. His eyes sparkled. John Lungren who was sitting on the other side of Gordon asked Robert if he wanted to help him rewire a lamp. Robert squinted.
John said, “You’ll be an electrician before the day is out.”
“Robert can do anything,” Gordon said. “He takes to details.”
“Can you fly?” Montana asked him, Montana who was a bit of a beast, a wordy beast, when she was seven. Beth’s oldest, one of her two, one of Gordon’s many.
Robert lowered his eyes and shrugged.
John said, “We’ll get the lamp fixed. That’s good enough for today. Leave flying to turkeys.”
Robert laughed, then sighed.
Gordon placed his hand on Robert’s glossy black hair.
Montana said, “Your fingernails are dirty, Robert.” She tsked and her eyes crawled all over him, looking for more to mention.
Gordon lowered his hand slowly and held it out across the table to Montana.
Montana’s eyes widened. “Gawd, your fingernails have buckets of dirt. You men are hopeless.”
Robert squared his shoulders, his Settlement-made hand-woven shirt laying upon his small shoulders like the kisses of many, many, many fans. I will always remember how Robert looked around at all the tables and, keeping something to himself, that indescribable small power of being part of a people, not to repeat the idea too much, but that is the idea, right?
In a future time, Claire remembers the day when Gordon saw that month’s phone bill.
He was rip shit. He came into the winter kitchen at noon and just stood there in the doorway with the envelope in his hands, staring at Margo. And then Samantha. And when Whitney stepped in through the door around him, squeezing one of his arms affectionately, he turned around and said, “We need to talk.” He wore that new store-bought vividly scarlet chamois shirt that his mother, Marian, had given him for his birthday. That red took over that whole huge room in every way. Everything except his face, which was bloodlessly furious.
So the girls stood with him out on the piazza arguing. They denied making the calls to Mexico, Canada, Indonesia, Israel, Pakistan, India, Poland, and Russia. “Well, then, who did make them?” he demanded. They shrugged. And Samantha, looking insurgent with her feet apart in her black military boots and that black jersey and camouflage vest, flashed her pale, pale corn silk hair and said indignantly, “You always blame everything on us.” She looked to Margo for agreement and cherry-cheeked Margo made a squinchy face that said: true, true, true.
In the nick of time, I was there to the rescue, took Gordon by the hands, looked him in the eyes, and whispered who the real culprit was.
He flushed. Now his face matched his red shirt. He left the kitchen, returned with a handful of tacks to pin all seven long-distance pages of the bill up on the wall by the stoves. And a small sign, scribbled in marker: Anybody who puts their hands on the Settlement phone again to make a bill that looks like this will have their hands hacked off with an axe.
For the first few minutes of the meal, he sat along one side of the table, drinking beer and glancing at Samantha, who was almost exactly across from him. Finally he said, “I’m sorry, dear.”
Samantha smiled. “Apology accepted.”
The rest of the day was quiet.
Although later that day I did overhear through the doorway of the print shop a loud voice saying, “Jeepers, did he really think our militia had gone global? Don’t I wish!”
And then—
I can’t recall how many days later. Maybe the next day. Catherine came around. Beautiful and breathless. Her sleek new haircut, even shorter than the last cut. And some more hair straightening, too. Her pretty mole remained. The little car bulged with gifts.
She was bustling from one building to another and did not seem to be anywhere near the phone bill tacked on the wall with its accompanying scribbled threat.
And nowhere did she cross paths with Gordon.
I figured before something happened, I should talk with her. I didn’t fear the axing off of the hands. Deo volente! Just more heartache. But I couldn’t find her. She was gone, Bev told me. Turns out one of the
young kids had showed her the tacked-up phone bills and sign. He didn’t realize the sign was written FOR CATHERINE. I was told she read it quietly, made no remark. She just got in her little car and drove off back to the world.
With Robert.
I’ll tell you this right now. She wanted Gordon. She wanted us. The whole deal. She wanted his approval, his intimacy. She wanted the nestling of all these shoulders, hands, long tables, rumbly buzzy voices for the rest of her life. We were a writhing grounded modern tribe. But Gordon had only two arms and a head of snakes. A boy Medusa. And what had she really done wrong other than be needy . . . yes, the addictions . . . but wasn’t Gordon a sucker for need? He had hated her before the TV incident a while back and now the phone bill, so it wasn’t the TV and phone bill. What was it?
Farewell forever.
When Gordon notices Robert Court Downey Xiem missing at supper, he asks for him. He is told that Catherine is gone. Robert is gone.
Gordon leans back on two legs of his chair, stares gray-faced out through the low many-paned back windows into the early October darkness.
“Gordon?”
He looks up. It’s Penny wearing a lovely square-necked black jumper. The straps and neckline embroidered in pink roses, that dainty effuse work that had to be at the hands of one of the elders here. But in Penny’s hands now there it is, the copper sunshine belt buckle. She folds it into the fingers of his right hand and says sadly, “She said to give it back to you.”
History as it happens by Draygon and Tamya edited somewhat by Heather.
A bunch of us picked up the mail. The postmistress Cookie said our mail is making her tired. We explained it is letters from all the people in America who are scared. No place to live! Land Lord and Land Ladies who own it all! And banks! Jobs are masters cause the union stuff is outlawed! Slavery doesn’t always mean real chains and whips. The people are freaking out! Help!!! Help!!! When they write us it is with screams in their hearts.
The postmistress said, “Good thing there’s a zip code.”
History as it happens as written by Vancy St. Onge.
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 62
