The School on Heart's Content Road

by Carolyn Chute

  Gordie grabs her and wraps his whole huge arms around her. She is an old lady, old for a mother, a tall old lady, but she is disappeared in Gordie’s hugest hug of love. Gordie’s mouth says, in a mashed way against her hair, “Mother.” He sounds soft and serious and beggish. I adjust my secret glasses, and everything wiggles and bulges out real to me. If I had my crayons and pen with me for my secret agent notebook, which is in my pocket in a secret way, I would draw a picture of Gordie’s mum in her pretty purple swirl vest and white blouse, crying. You can’t believe what all the people in the world do until you get a chance to listen to them in a secret way and SEE into their brains and hot hearts.

  From a future time, Whitney St. Onge remembers the Parlor Night Salons.

  Bree and I were both fifteen. Everyone thought I was smart. Physics, architecture, anthropology, politics, at least in some humid not-too-academic way, were to me desserts.

  But Bree* was ancient. Her face deformed, her brain golden. Daytimes she still worked in the woods with her brothers and her father. So we called her Paul Bunyan Woman. After work, she’d sneak one of their trucks and whiz up here to the Settlement, driver’s license–free, sawdust in her cuffs. And sometimes oil paints and ink on her hands, for she was an artist with no boundaries. Our salons began to wheel in high gear around that head of scarlet hair.

  One night I especially recall, it was deep summer. She arrived late, her arms loaded with newsletters and hurried notes, her research.

  It was damp in the West Parlor. Maybe not the most horrible hot, but that stuffy-clammy that makes the cedar ceiling pour out a prehistoric smell, as my mother called it.

  We older girls, the most devoted salonites, were hunched on the rugs digging through a box of Radio Free Maine audio tapes that belonged to our devout leftist, Nathan Knapp who, in his black waleless corduroy jacket and combed-wet dark hair, sat on one of the big couches, his dark-brown eyes level on everything. He was near Gordon’s age, late thirties or so.

  Our library had a stash of more such tapes, and Bree was sending away for further selections with her logger money. There were enough of these taped lectures to last a lifetime. And some you’d have to play three times or keep backing up so you could unravel all the Chomsky clauses, especially for Samantha and some of the others who would listen with such a toothache-looking squint.

  It was Bree’s idea to get more beefed up on events in South America, Cuba, Haiti, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and the old Soviet bloc. We already BB (Before Bree) had researched everything (everything but field trips) on the Open Door policy, the National Security Council document (NSC-68), the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Project for the New American Century, adding up to what Gordon and another Settlement man, John Lungren, called the octopus. Those particular study projects, we had guessed, were Gordon’s idea of putting a lid on our interest in the outside world—meaning outside the Settlement. Sort of like if you are jolted awake in the night to the smell of smoke, you do not open the bedroom door if it feels burning hot to your palm. You find a window to climb out of. Alternate route!

  Or so it seemed. Gordon would lead you down a lot of dark trails for no reason but to observe. He said knowing gave you dignity.

  But Bree’s idea was to do something about the world-sized fire. Yep, there was a lot about Bree that scared Gordon, our father who art on the couch in exhausted sleep at this particular salon.

  Bree and Gordon weren’t man and wife yet, man and woman, man and hurricane. She was still in that phase where she wouldn’t look him in the eye, just giggle and hide behind that explosion of red tendrils. But with everyone else she was not shy. Her face wasn’t exactly spine-chillingly ghastly, just nothing like you’d ever seen. It would make your brain hop the first time you saw the distance apart of her eyes and the stretched-out bridge of her nose.

  But maybe, to her, his face was too much. It seemed to blind her. She saw in his face something nobody else in this world could see. Some of it she was right about. Some of it she was dead wrong about.

  That summer night, she came straight to my side, between me and my half sister Michelle. She dropped to a limber squat, our agile logger girl!

  The usual salonites were on hand, slouched around on the rockers and love seats, couches, and little needlework-covered stools. My mother was there. Two other mothers, a few brave ten- and eleven-year-olds. Some men, but not many teen boys.

  As the daytime shriveled at the big floor-to-ceiling windows, nobody got up to put on brighter lamps. There was just a red stained-glass thing, shaped like a tall can glowing in a spooky way. Robins and wood thrushes were in full chirrup and tweedle beyond the screens. Some cups would clink with turning spoons. We had a few tea sippers.

  Yeah, Gordon was a-snooze, face squashed sideways into a palm, slackened shoulder and bicep braced by the puffy arm of the old patched couch. But his legs, straight out on the layers of rugs and crossed at the ankles, were alert-looking. He made gentle-but-lionish tisk-k-purr sounds, never a true snorer.

  On another couch was the Settlement’s head sawyer, Stuart Congdon. He loved the salons: the evening ones, the scattered afternoon ones, and some of the research committees. And what he called “oversight field trips” to the State House, where we all tried very hard to pretend we were docile.

  Stuart—who, by the way, stood about five foot, a dwarf, I suppose—got us on to much wow info. Such as how U.S. and British banks and European aristocracy built Nazi Germany and used the craziest guy they could find to terrorize Germans and the world. And they funded the Bolsheviks. Yep, they steered Lenin’s car, so to speak. There was tons of documentation on this but not heavily thumbed and pawed through by much of America.

  Stuart also got us into the realm of old documents and letters of the 1600s and 1700s written by Englishmen in the days of emptying the Commons. And letters and diaries of colonists. None of these old-time guys could spell any one word one way. Except slavery. We went into a research frenzy on sailors and pirates. This stuff is more dazzling and blood-pounding than you think. Jeepers . . . it . . . is . . . who . . . we . . . are!

  But some work at the Settlement is very hard. Sawmill, for instance. Like Gordon, Stuart would eventually tip sideways, his head pillowed by another salonite’s shoulder. He wouldn’t snore, but he usually had a growly stomach.

  My mother, Penny, was there that night with her Settlement-made skirt and little embroidered vest over a dark jersey, her dark-blonde hair freshened with a hundred brush strokes. She was not much for digging up the socioeconomic-political dirt, old or new. She’d sit through a whole session fully awake but saying nothing. Just a small smile.

  On the wall behind her where she sat that evening was an old shredded-looking American flag and a painted plaque. Words of Mark Twain: I never let my schooling interfere with my education. Flag and plaque were both on that tongue-and-groove wall before I was born, and I’m the oldest Settlement offspring. My mother, Penny, is so hushed, so invisible sometimes. But she was one of the founders of the Settlement, working away her youth to get the food and energy co-ops rolling. She had been a local girl. Most of the others were from Aroostook or the Passamaquoddy reservation. The big thing for her was knowledge and wisdom for our kids. And fearless curiosity.

  My mother’s dreams, I believe, have all come true.

  In a future time, once-passionate breathless Bree also recalls that night.

  The West Parlor! It was all simmering in red light, like faces beyond a thickness of plasm, a tissuey many-eyed thing, queerer than my own face must seem to others. And all those rugs, hooked and braided, giving back your voice in a hush. No cold glassy echoes here, no; it was like being tucked into a fold of flesh.

  We were running a new tape, taking notes, but also drowning it out with our three-word emergency critiques, our groans. Small kids were there. When they talked, we’d scold.
So they’d sit bright-eyed in the breezes of our ardor.

  The dim red-glass lamp—leaded glass, Settlement-made—caused a circle of white light on the table below it. But the opening was small, the glass tall, cylindrical . . . many devil reds and one band of a kind of buck-muscle purple.

  Stacked on shelves behind it, glowing redly, were fat scrapbooks all labeled HISTORY AS IT HAPPENS in very kiddie-looking print. Yeah, the kiddie thing. You think kiddie means cute? Here, in the fearsome secret of this mountain-valley world, kids had a different definition.

  There were two maternity persons present. Pregnancy, like gravity, the force that holds the planet together, pulling, steaming, seeping. The parlor felt warmer and warmer.

  Stuart yawned. Sky-blue eyes, spewing red beard, biker belly, short legs, arms freckled but tanned, folded over his chest. His whole appearance was thick and raw. Unlike Nathan, who was next to him, thin nose and hair so black, so wet. It looked tight. Like it hurt.

  Gordon’s big, baggy, homemade T-shirt was a blue that I think of as Neptune blue. Almost green. Jeans worn rough. He hadn’t given away his sun-face copper belt buckle yet, so it was still there to make its impression on me, its face trying to imitate old calendar suns, but in its eyes an estimation of time passing, which was jolly. Or maybe ridicule. Or just boldness. So positioned above his fly, it stirred me.

  After I’d delivered my latest newsletters and tapes to the heap on the rug, two girls on a flowery couch patted the empty space between them. “Come sit here!” one whispered in her cartoony kiddie voice. She was about nine or ten. Maybe a small eleven.

  So I did, I sat, feeling the red light and shadows gush all about me, like the vision of a pleasant hell. My heart beat like a tom-tom. Between us through the evening, a lot of words crackled. Rich, the cedar smell and dampness. Rich, the deep huggy feel of the chairs; the way one of the girls wrapped her bare ankles around another’s: sisters . . . or like sisters. And everything was sticking together, becoming one thing, commencing in tandem like a slow-motion race or a race backwards. So rich! Even the posters on the walls. Now a child voice speaks—“The Short Life of the Bretton Woods Agreement”—a hand holding a tape aloft through the musty scarlet light . . . a distant screen door slamming . . . our laughter, our ideas, our so-naughty questions, like “What is the real definition of wealth?” Oh, hey, what a coincidence that you should ask.

  “This parlor!” I cried out, almost panting.

  Richer than gourmet, richer than high art, because it was complete . . . or, rather, the rosy tip of the completeness of the entire St. Onge universe. A room. A summer evening. Chapter one. The sweet sugary tip, yeah.

  And chapter two? I believed it would be to help save the world. Don’t laugh.

  Penny St. Onge recalls that night.

  I can see blue. A blue shirt. I can see Gordon sleeping on his hand. I can’t think now if Stuart, our sawyer, was there or not. He usually was, but it seems some enthusiastic remark of his would have stuck with me.

  There was an audio tape playing. Something like water companies moving in on all of India’s water or the CIA’s installation of the dictator Pinochet in Chile and his recent flight to a European safe harbor. Maybe the tape told of American financiers’ roles in the present sadness of Haiti. Those tapes stitched an enormous patchwork of ruin and misery, bank-approved. It would crack your heart but for the lecturers’ voices, so collegiate and paper cold.

  I would listen with my hands folded in my lap. Some of the others took notes. We would usually have discussions after. I’d mostly listen through those.

  By the time we were ready to leave for bed that night, the older girls were making plans to invite real live lecturers from a prodemocracy group that had the lowdown on the history of corporate charters. We often had guests and speakers, so this wasn’t a big new turn.

  Some mosquitoes had gotten in, and one wanted my neck. My hands came out of my lap.

  “They are leftists,” said our Michelle matter-of-factly, the dark red light giving her a half-a-face look.

  “Yuh. You wouldn’t see a capitalist criticizing the capitalist setup,” Samantha Butler observed, leaning to get a better look at the flyer. Her Apache-style head rag was school-bus yellow with scarlet diamonds. Her straight pale hair sort of dusted the old box of Nathan’s tapes.

  One of the girls from the town who was around that night said she thought maybe some people with stocks weren’t exactly capitalists. “They aren’t the ones running the Federal Reserve. Not the ones disappearing Chileans. Maybe they would be for democracy for . . . everybody.”

  Michelle tsk ed. “These guys have to be leftists.”

  Whitney stood up, flyer in hand. “Seems people get into being left or right. Like frogs or toads.”

  Chuckles and tee-hees.

  Bree spoke in her cigarette-softened way that the left was more for people, while capitalism was about accumulation. “Getting more people involved with the left might save the world.”

  That’s when we heard the voice, gravelly and wet. “The octopus is three hundred years old. Its tentacles and suckers are stuck to ev-er-ree-thing, left and right.” It was Gordon, who we believed was still asleep because his eyes were still closed, even as other folks were stirring to leave.

  All the other voices stopped.

  The gravelly voice from Gordon’s face, dark with beard, and dark with crimson lighting, repeated, “ev-er-ree-thing.” He opened one eye and it swept the room, lighthouse fashion. “Remember? Remember?” Then he opened the other eye. He fixed his green gaze on Bree. She turned her face away, raggedly red-orange hair tumbling over her work shirt.

  “Save the world?” He sat up, blinking. His voice cleared, so it sounded more like himself. “Whoever sees the whole world as their object of fascination will be working toward centralization. Even if you are nice people.” He spoke in such a sad way, rubbing his eyes. “You would have to have a second man-eating octopus to fight the first one.”

  Whitney drew in closer to him, her arms akimbo.

  Michelle was holding a photo close to his face of Haitian men in a big cage. “You gave these to us! You were the one pounding your fist and slobbering all over everybody about Mammoneers! Rememberrrrr?

  Somebody still on one of the couches, maybe Dee Dee, let all her breath out through her lips, horse style.

  Bree was now standing, but outside the circle of girls, which had squeezed around Gordon.

  Committed leftist Nathan was leaving, slipping out, like he’d never been there.

  Gordon stood, solid and towering, the carnival light thickening his shoulders and head. He said, “Left is only the left legs of the octopus. The New World Order is industrial and centralized . . . and guess what? Debt-based. All tied in with the same bankers and system. And ‘open door’ imperialist policies. If it’s big, they have their suckers on it and—”

  “Weee know that!” snarled our flashy Samantha. “We want to start a new one. More chopped up. Like . . . anarchism.”

  “But you were talking global system,” another adult voice supported Gordon.

  “Weren’t you? You said left.” Another voice.

  Bree smiled. “I said left.”

  Samantha was rocking from foot to foot. “What about the Settlement? You guys are growinnng.” She said the word growing in a singsong nah-nah way. “The co-ops are all over the state. That’s organized.”

  Gordon said evenly, “Not a global system. Not a great net. Not an octopus. And, sadly, we aren’t a threat to the octopus, which is the big ugly child of both big communism and big capitalism. Or, rather, all three are tools of the grand accumulators. The world doesn’t even know we’re here.”

  “No?” one of the girls said with a squint.

  He lowered his eyes.

  In most ways, this night doesn’t stand out special for me. This was actually a typical night, the back-and-forth of ideas, the way Gordon’s squirrelly mind and loud mouth would always derail everyone. You had to get a sq
uirrelly head yourself to defend your premises.

  But there was something this night in the eyes of our girls, their eager eyes made scorchy red and deeper by the little parlor lamp. They were not going to go long with the wind knocked out of their sails this time. All over their silhouettes were sparkles.

  Samantha leaned toward Bree and, with just tongue tip, teeth, and lips, no voice, said, “No hope.” She was smiling.

  Michelle now did the same but with the swishiness of a whisper.

  Then Dee Dee too, and Whitney, and the others—and now Bree—a whispered chant of No hope . . . pause. . . No hope . . . pause. No hope no hope no hope, on and on with fluttering eyes.

  More advice from the screen.

  Hi-ho, there! Do not talk among yourselves. Listen to meeeee!

  History as it happens (as recorded by Rawn, age seven, and Lani, age eleven, with assistance from Whitney and Margo and Michelle, who are right here).

  We listened to a tape of a lecture by Gordie’s friend Bob, Bob Monks. Whitney understood it, Michelle understood it, and Margo understood it. It was hard but it was good to be there because Margo gave me a neck rub. I am Lani. Rawn fell asleep but Gordie says Bob is smart as hell. He talked about the Business Roundtable. Margo said it’s the most powerful union in America. Most unions are not powerful but weak due to laws made by big business. The Business Roundtable is a union of CEOs of the most giant corporations. So they don’t make laws against themselves. Bob Monks is worried about their power, and Gordie said to notice that, because Bob is not a leftist. He is a corporate lawyer of capitalism. Everyone says this proves that everybody is worried. Where is everything going? Big question, right?

  In a small American city in the Midwest.

  Yet another station wagon waiting to make a left turn in light predawn traffic exhibits yet another MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT bumper sticker.