Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

by Carolyn Chute

  Egypt—

  Richard “Rex” York, leader of the Border Mountain Militia and self-employed electrician, is being held pending arraignment in Oxford County Jail since yesterday on charges of assault with attempt to kill, following the alleged brutal attack on Guillaume “Gordon” St. Onge.

  St. Onge, known as “the Prophet,” the charismatic anti-government preacher and father of several dozen children by numerous wives, remains in critical condition at Maine Medical Center. The attack, which witnesses describe as “a blood bath” in which York used a rock to disfigure and possibly blind St. Onge took place outside a local diner while as many as 17 witnesses looked on, police said. Three witnesses report the presence of a handgun, while others suggest only a rock.

  State police spokesperson, Myra Guthrie, said that the incident may have been instigated by militia infighting but one witness on the scene said it was “over a woman.”

  St. Onge is also reportedly a member of York’s militia.

  The St. Onge family includes as many as twenty-eight “wives” and many children in what is known as “the Settlement,” a compound on 900 acres of land owned by St. Onge, the injured man. A sign on the single entrance reads: KEEP OUT OR YOU’LL BE SHOT. TRY IT.

  Ken Meyer inserts another word, pushes police said to another sentence.

  Ivy walks back to her own desk.

  Two weeks pass. In the newsroom of the Record Sun, Ivy covers the mouthpiece of the phone to prevent sounds from entering it.

  Through the window at her left, she could see part of the hospital complex where he is, if she could see through several blocks of stone, cement, structural steel, and brick.

  “Could I have the room of Gordon St. Onge, please?” she had asked the hospital operator and then, immediately, the extension to his new room purred in her ear.

  Several rings now. She imagines an empty hospital room. Another ring, another. Empty bed. Empty world.

  “H’llo.”

  It is his voice.

  She says nothing.

  Heart pounding ever so painfully, she hangs up ever so reluctantly, ever so gently. Now she covers her face with her hands, pretending for a few moments that she is alone. She smiles. Yessiree, it is true, he lives.

  NOVEMBER

  In the newsroom of the Record Sun, Ivy Morelli is at her computer. To fully picture Ivy, you have to remember her purply black hair is now spiked.

  She is going to be late with the feature on toxic waste dumped near yet another river in mid-Maine. Her fingers trickle over the keys but she is not aware of fingers. Or the fact that one of her earrings (a red feather) is lying on the carpet. She hears someone behind her. Of course it is her editor, Brian Fitch. That’s his walk, the way he approaches.

  “What?” she asks without taking her eyes off the screen.

  “Ms. Morelli.” He calls her this as a nickname, not a formality. When he’s being formal, he calls her Ivy.

  She wrastles the mouse a bit, eyes squinting at the last three lines now. She has lost her train of thought. She turns in her seat and looks squarely at him. He has ordinary brown hair, gray eyes with fun in them, and a short-sleeved pinkish-beige shirt, editorish pants. A wristwatch of white gold. A cup with the word VIRGO written in leafy vegetation, bugs and birds. As we all know, VIRGO is one of those earthy signs, fertility and all that. But also persnicketiness.

  Ivy again says, “What?”

  Brian says, “York is out.”

  Ivy blinks. She pictures New York.

  “Richard York . . . Rex . . . the one who mutilated St. Onge.”

  Ivy swallows. “Let him out? You mean on bail?”

  “No, on technicalities.”

  “Like what? There were twenty witnesses.”

  Brian shrugs. “So far, it’s vague. Vaaaaaague. Oh, maybe the rock was a piece of quartz in the report, but tested out in the lab as feldspar.”

  Ivy stands up. She is a short person but Brian is not a lot taller. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Suppose York is FBI?”

  “HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW.” (Ivy’s big laugh resonates cottonishly through the carpeted and semisoundproofed city room). “Brian, you are starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist!”

  “I’m a systems analyst. There’s a difference. Systems behave in a certain way.”

  Ivy swallows again. “Rex York loose.”

  “He’s been out five days.”

  “How’d we miss that?”

  “Ask Tony.”

  She looks toward the hallway, beyond which is the clerk’s new desk. She swallows again. Stunned. She moves her foot. She steps on her earring. Chrunch!

  Ivy’s epiphany.

  It doesn’t come to her as a question, a reporterly question or a philosophical one. It comes as a little groan. She knows! Mystery solved! Gordon had dropped the charges. Gordon the great big all-forgiving noise. Gordon too soft and in that way a danger to the world?

  In the night.

  It’s never dark here. Never quiet. Never fragrant. The sound of little wheels in the hall. Gordon has tears on his mangled face, staring into the hungry schemy shadows of this room’s corners, the broad open-curtained window with its brick and breathing city beyond. The two TVs. Off but ever-ready. And what are those at the other end of the bed sticking up under the blanket? He can’t remember exactly the words. Hooves? Handles? Claws?

  Butch Martin remembers Jumbo.

  Um . . . a bunch of us came across the quad from the meat-cutting shed, headed for the kitchens midday. This included Blinky, real name of Ryan, one of those eleven persons who had come to live at the Settlement from Jaxon Cross’s place, with Gordo’s blessing a few days before his demise. There weren’t many sitting around on the piazzas cuz it was a bitter rotten day. High winds and the sun; I remember it winking so there must’ve been some small clouds hot-rodding along. But also it was bone-damp. Gordo and my father Eddie were braving it, both in rockers there on the first piazza by the kitchen doors, like a welcoming committee, but both were dressed big like bears. Flannels and wools, mucho layers. And then there were the two wool felt crushers, one for each head, which stand out in my thinking because they were store bought and were that eye-splitting hunters’ orange.

  We all tromped up onto the porch, holding the door for each other, feigning extreme manners and laughing, Cory especially bloody, his denim chambray and thermal sleeves light, so it showed. No blood on the hands, though. That’s part of the rules of clean meat. Hands have to look like snowflakes. And before heading across the yards to the meal Cory had even taken the rawhide out of his hair and brushed it. Longer every day. And never a tangle, in part due to so much primping.

  I hated looking square-on at Gordo. It was hard to get used to. The way he no longer filled up a place, you know, like he used to sort of blind you, even without the orange hat, more like when you are steering into the headlights and you can’t see anything but. A true force. But now different.

  My father, Eddie, Dad, was reading to him something, I can’t recall what, but it would be, for instance, a parts list for, for instance, our main turbine.

  So see, Dad’s voice was just poking along informationally.

  But also coming along the porches from one of the shops were Lawrence and Jill, these other real new Settlement citizens since just before Gordo’s “accident.” Neither one had teeth. Both him and her were . . . um . . . skinny except her rear was wide. But man, from the waist up Jill was a skinny girl and Lawrence was pure sticks and twigs. He kept his head shaved and cold and hatless, but his head was . . . um . . . skinny, not a skull you’d want to show off, right? His eyes were dark so they sort of jumped out at you from all that white. Well, he had a beard. Small, sort of reddish, I guess. Like a stain.

  They had a little kid that would crawl when they lowered it to the floor. And an older kid. Named Jumbo. He wasn’t rugged or round so the name Jumbo must have only went with his voice. He was only about three years old, maybe four, if you were looking
at him, not his voice.

  Under the jacket and shirt Lawrence had tattoos covering him like another shirt. And every one of those tattoos was a race car—street rods and speedway classics and Daytona stuff. But that day all you saw was the jacket, neck, skull, and skinny face in dead-body white. These were poor people and everything about them was hard up. This is why Gordo had arranged for them to be here, because they needed to be, but they didn’t yet do much here to participate. Very . . . um . . . clammed up. They’d just hunch up together at meals and talk soft to each other and nobody else.

  You couldn’t help but notice how the poor of America, by the dead end of the 1900s, were pretty much being hung out to dry. America was and is now barren, like a desert, man, when it comes to brotherly love, right? But Gordo, in this way of throwing open the door for refugees, was a fucking high priest. Therefore, what happens next purely pisses me off. I try not to BLAME. But for about three seconds I wanted to kick the little fucker across the yard, little Jumbo.

  Soooo, see, that day, Jill was carrying the crawling kid. Sometimes Lawrence did. I gave him, Lawrence, a friendly poke in the shoulder and he looked at me, nodded, then hunch-huddled up as if the cold wind had just blown all his clothes off, even his tattoos.

  I noticed Gordo was looking up at them from his rocker . . . he’s looking up at these two he had rescued from OUT THERE IN THE ROTTEN WORLD and then their kid Jumbo runs out of somewhere and in his deep-for-a-three-year-old voice, his tubalike voice, blasts up at Gordo, “Yoooooor face looks like a butt!!”

  This made Gordo get one of his eye squirm-squinch things and it’s the eye that’s been all stitched and sagging so there’s all this effect, and so then he’s staring at the kid with this EYE in a way that would creep me out if I were a little kid not used to the way of things around here, but not Jumbo, he’s just inflating to a more dangerous version of himself, eyes fixed without a blink on Gordo. Well, Jumbo’s TV-watching legacy personality traits were already famous here. And we all figured he was having TV withdrawal on top of his TV reality show courtesies.

  So my Dad, Eddie, he’s looking at Lawrence and Jill to see how they’ll deal with this latest but they just keep an even trot toward the door, which someone who has gone ahead holds open, door of the kitchens, with heat and foody feasty smells rolling out and then inside they go.

  So Jumbo is staring Gordo down. He’s still out there with us and so I guess he’s our problem, right? Normally, there’s a pretty free-ranging spirit to kids here, fine. So yuh, okay. Here’s what. This is all in a matter of cold hard seconds, this skinny kid, hair clipped almost as bald as his father’s, no hat, but wearing his nice new Settlement-made duds. This is what he does next. He spits at Gordo, aiming for his face, but the spit fans out, and some seems to go on the big black and red wool sleeve of Gordo’s jacket and some seems to stick to one of the carved bear heads of the back of the chair, maybe some down inside Gordo’s collar, but sort of like dewdrops. Cory, yeah, all blood-smeared from skinning and sawing on that deer, this bigger-than-Mr.-Maine Cory Guillaume St. Onge, grabs the little motherfucker and Cory’s long totally black hair flash-whirls and tornadoes and full-rushes around himself and the kid. And the kid is like freaked, right? He screams bloody murder, baring all his little white teeth, wrenching and twisting and this is stretching out his new sweater cuz Cory’s hold is not being reduced.

  So then Gordo’s head is turning. Looking at Dad. As if the spit and insults and screams ejecting from Jumbo’s little wet animal mouth were nothing at all. And Gordo’s face had all that disfigurement, floppy eyelid and fiery red scar all the way to the corner of his mouth where his broken-teethed situation was like a bucksaw and beard growing back funny and one ear like a knob and this is what he says to Dad in a weird flat monotone, “Who were they?”, jerks his thumb at the door where Jill and Lawrence had just gone.

  Now Jumbo is calling Cory “pig!” as Cory stuffs him under one arm in a casual way and heads into the hot kitchens. I’m thinking that Gordo asking who Lawrence and Jill are, even though he ought to know who Lawrence and Jill are, means Gordo’s brain, man, it’s pretty near the same as the brain of that buck whose about-to-be-taxidermied head is in the cardboard box back in the cutting shed with the customer’s name marked on with tape.

  The screen (marching music in the background) commands:

  You must vote! It’s all in your hands! You have the choice! It’s your duty! It’s profound! Wow! Wow! Wow! America the best!!!

  Slipping into a quietly idling long cream-colored car with tinted glass is Gregory Allen, Madison Avenue public relations brain-muscle for certain goliath corporations, national and transnational, whose interests must be secured in this year’s presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. Yes, Gregory Allen is one of those who sees to it that the elections go as planned. Settled into the back seat now, with a wink to the man next to him, he remarks—

  “It’s certainly easier to put it over on the public these days, but a lot more expensive.”

  Over and under, left and right, inside and outside, hither and yon—

  Corporate power grows.

  The voice of Mammon.

  Growth! Growth! Growth! Growth!

  The Anti-Rich Society.

  Motorist slows at the narrow bridge that crosses into Egypt by the abandoned woolen mill. On the radio is pleasant jazz piano tinkling harmlessly.

  Suddenly and awfully, young giggles and gasps cut off the tinkles and the motorist’s hands tighten on the wheel as one of the young voices speaks. “Testing. One. Two. Three. Testing.”

  More chatter and one chortle, then a hushy womanly ever-so-slowly-speaking voice: “Hello. This is the Anti-Rich Society’s high tea and literary hour. Coming to you from that secret undisclosed location in your heart.”

  Young male voice, less touching and breathy but equally earnest, “This poetry reading today is especially for you out there in Voting Day Land where you probably believe you are citizens . . . but . . . you . . . are . . . DOGS.”

  “Yes, Bill,” says the wonderful womanly voice. “Our listeners will therefore be especially inspired to hear you read today from your famous poem.” The sound of tea being sipped.

  “Thank you, Miss Munch. It’s a privilege.” More tea is sipped.

  Womanly voice says, “Yes, we have on our show today, William Blake brought back from the grave to read to you from his oft-misunderstood poem, which, no, is not about a big kitty but about what was once known as ‘the hydra,’ the dangerous revolts of slaves and sailors all over the world where they used the only weapon uniformly available, fire. They knew tyranny when they saw it and they weren’t going to lie down and beg . . . or vote.” Tea-sipping sounds. “Okay Bill, you’re on the air.”

  An old-time fog-cooled London accent it is not, but an accent of steamy North Carolina begins to recite: “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night; what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  The motorist is squinting, not especially impressed with the tea sipping?

  The Carolinian Blake voice rolls on, “What the anvil? What dread grasp, dare its deadly terrors clasp?”

  Miss Munch interrupts, “Oh, terrors.” More tea sipping.

  Blake’s revived corpse finishes up, the words spaced drumlike and dirgelike, “In. What. Distant. Deeps. Or. Skies. Burnt. The. Fire. Of. Thine. Eyes! On. What. Wings. Dare. He. Aspire? What. The. Hand. Dare. Seize. The. Fire?” And the word fire spoken in this drawl is fiarrrr. You almost hear and smell its orange licking terrorific swallowing roar.

  Then after a long silence, pleasant jazz piano returns tinkling in its calming watery way from the normal broadcasting network.

  At the voting place.

  Building has clapboards painted white. Floors inside are tipped like a ship on a nasty wave. Wonderful, old, old smell. A place of enduringness, the Old Towne House. We in America are a people! it enthuses, whether or not it is true, it feels so, thus it is so, today.


  A Settlement car packed with elders approaches, a big squishy-looking stubbornly maintained old gray (and green) car chugging past the leafless row of November maples with creased rotund trunks, uncountable arms and witchy fingers. Stonewalls, the Maine kind, piled, not absolutely squared. And now the cemetery of 1700s and 1800s slate markers, some tipped fore, some tipped back, there on the heaved ground as if underneath it all there was a joyful rumpus.

  Fieldstone and maple, lichen and slate all in complicit grays. Thousands of grays that work together as one, like robust tissue merely resting its brute force.

  But what is this ahead? Who are these people with the signs? And faces like skulls! Face paint, a greasy sheen. Terrible. Black grim reaper robes with hoods. Some with old scythes. But mostly signs. But some are wearing suits such as lawyers do. Or maybe lady governors. Or senators. Or those who tell you the news at six if you were a TV watcher out beyond the world of the Settlement. But these faces are bare of greasepaint. Suspiciously young. And suspiciously familiar.

  Some signs read: THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED while others say: ONLY MONEY VOTES . . . PENCILS ARE JUST FOR PRETENDING.

  The young grim reapers and young senators bow and smile and wave their signs and scythes. Some are playing kazoos. It is so very confusing to the people in the car. “I thought they were for democracy,” one says thinly.

  So the True Maine Militia lives on. And maybe they are a little too close to the voting place and the constable will come or the state police and lock them in prison! This is worse than misbehavior. This could be crime, the old dutiful Settlement voters observe.

  DECEMBER

  The thread.

  Today Jane wears an alarmingly yellow jumper, yellow and green plaid flannel with a spider-web-thin red line shooting up and down and across. This fabric matches shirts and outfits of dozens of other people here because it had come to the Settlement in bulk, several hefty rolled bolts. Her dark fluffy hair has been brushed and brushed by the beauty crew. So clean and smelling like weeds, yes. She is melding with Settlementness, while this other thread, the tight looping interstate telephone company cable is all that connects this child with her mother now. Since Lisa’s case became federal, she has been “transported” away away away away.