The School on Heart's Content Road

by Carolyn Chute

  I stare at him. Without my secret glasses I can still see Gordie’s thoughts because when he is thinking fishy thoughts, he looks weird. His eyes squint and blink an extra amount.

  “So when is Mum coming home?”

  He says he doesn’t know. He says, “It’s hard to explain, Jane, but it’s not up to a judge anymore. Not these days. It’s not up to a jury. It’s all decided. It’s a political thing. Laws made by Congress and the guys who control them. It’s a very awful thing, and, I have to tell you, Mum might be there a long time.”

  “When is she coming home?”

  “We’ll go see her next week and find out. Your Granpa Pete will ride down with us. Her trial will be in Boston. It is a federal trial now. Not the other kind. It’s a very serious thing.”

  He pulls me really close to his shirt.

  “Is Mum coming home for my birthday?” I ask, in a plain cold voice. I can’t see his face. He squishes his nose and mouth against the top of my head and hugs me hard enough to hurt. I think he thinks I’m going to cry. But I don’t feel sad. I feel mad. I feel like I want to kick this rock. I feel like picking up this rock, which is as big as a bus, and throwing it. If a government guy walked by right now, he would be sorry. He would be under this rock in about five seconds.

  The screen is indignant.

  Oh, isn’t this just awful! Our country, Number One—yes!—but crawling with these low-income and no-income types who want to get your darling precious perfect Catherine and Joshua hooked on drugs: heroin, crack, ice. Here is one now, wearing orange, right from the Oxford county jail, between two sheriff’s deputies, all making their way down those stairs in the wind and rain to a vehicle. Destination: Boston. This one is Lisa Meserve, especially frightening because she was posing as a dental assistant, an ordinary person, right there, hovering around the faces of your Catherine and Joshua!!!! The deal was worth so much!!! This makes it EXTRA CREEPY!!!! SHE might have become RICH while YOU work like a slave at your three dumb jobs making NOTHING. The brave Drug Warriors will make your darlings safe. One less sneaky lazy wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing monster drug dealer roaming the clean otherwise safe streets and alleys of our red, white, and blue America. God bless!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Glennice St. Onge recalls.

  It was fall, after the Fryeburg Fair, I think. It was in and around that time. Under the sinks there was a cricket creaking. I remember that. You couldn’t find him. He’d get quiet if you put your head in there. I remember how he would start up at funny times, significant times. He gave even crowded mealtimes an edge of loneliness.

  After one of my committee nights, I decided to go in and check on things in the kitchens before heading up to my cottage. I had my flashlight in my hand, swiping it around; then I switched it off.

  Sure enough, the cricket started up, as if to remind me that I was not alone in the dark, on this dark earth, in this Life so few have reverence for.

  But then I understood that the cricket was telling me something else. Yes, something perfect.

  I saw a shape in the dark Winter Kitchen side of the room, there on the other side of the half wall of cubbies. I pressed on my flashlight and swiped the beam across Gordon’s face. He kept right on sleeping. He was in a rocker, legs out before him, and Jane was curled in his lap, face buried in his old work vest, both of them dressed heavy like they had just arrived or were just about to leave but had been cast a spell upon by a fairy-tale evil queen . . . because they were both so beautiful, my heart ached.

  She with her part-African part-Indian parentage and her Frenchie mother, a golden girl with a profile right out of some mythic tale of beauty and tribulation, dragons and evil trees. And Gordon, head flopped to one side—a great big man like that, you’d think he’d radiate protection—but I had a terrible terrible terrible premonition of him being not long for this world. I could hear his heart! It was strong, squeezing blood through its chambers in a most perfect way. There was nothing wrong with his health. No growths, no stuff in his veins clotting or blocking, no failures of any kind. He was strapping and perfect! But, God help us, the enemies of goodness were closing in!

  I got down on my knees right then and there and prayed that I was wrong, prayed for help from the Almighty. I prayed aloud. And I even wept. And believe this or not, but neither Gordon nor the poor little child woke up due to my weeping, rustlings, and pleas.

  I have prayed ever since that I never forget the image of those two.

  Trip to Boston.

  Pete Meserve drives. His car is one of the “midsized” Pontiacs, which means it is small. It is not new, but it is nice. Gordon rides with him, watching the scenery pass. Jane rides in the back. No room for three people in front. But she is not interested in the front seat anyway. To Jane, Granpa Pete is always quiet and icebergish, but he’s very very quiet now, and his face has gone old.

  Secret Agent Jane tells us about the Boston jail.

  Gordie had to wait outside. You are only allowed two people. And they said no to my secret agent glasses!!!! We had to put them behind little doors in the wall. Plus you have to take off your shoes and do X-ray and Granpa said to the copguard, “This is like a Communist country.” Gordie would have said a bunch of stuff.

  Then we go in a hall with a big line like school, and guess what? We could sit with Mum in the other jail place. But here it’s a big window and Mum is on the other side sounding like a telephone through a radio speaker thing. But Mum was glad to see us anyways.

  Still, she didn’t say much. Mostly we just looked at other people in the room cuz it’s weird to look through a window for a visit. Mum put her hands on the glass so we put our hands up on the glass to pretend there was no glass. Hands to hands. First me. Then Granpa Pete. Granpa Pete’s hands are not as nice from working on too many cars.

  Mum said some jails have TV screens, that we are lucky for glass.

  I said, “But we were waaay better before when we were lucky to have just air.”

  Granpa Pete said, “In Russia they have salt mines. No visitors.”

  I made squints at Granpa Pete. I folded my arms and said to him with very careful teeth: “We . . . are . . . here.”

  Granpa Pete laughed.

  I asked Mum if maybe she could just come home for a visit for my birthday so I can turn seven. She said a weird thing. Like this: “The world is not nice. The human race is crafty but not very bright.” She said Gordie told her that once. I said, “Figures.”

  Granpa Pete said everything was okay back home. Everything was all right. Which means he’s too busy to take me places and do stuff, which is why I had to go to be at Gordie’s. Granpa Pete is busy on so many broken cars, he has a very junky-looking gas station but no gas for sale.

  So I say, “Great. My birthday. Right around the corner. Nobody listening. Muuumm. Could you get a day off from this place?”

  Granpa Pete laughed and poked me in the arm.

  Mum smiled at him, sort of.

  Getting mad, I said, “So. On my birthday, I bet I know where I can get your favorite ice cream, Mum. Chunky Monkey.”

  Mum said, “I can’t believe you’ll be seven. So fast.”

  I said, “So you will need to be there. It . . . is . . . important.”

  Mum said, “It is important.”

  I crossed my arms again and made so much air whoosh into me to be bigger. I said, “Be . . . there.”

  Granpa Pete laughed again. So loud, guys visiting all around looked over in a eye-wide way.

  “Do not laugh,” I told Granpa Pete, giving him the hairy eyeball.

  He says to the window with Mum there, “You know who she reminds me of?”

  Mum looks at me.

  “Aunt Bette,” he says. “She was a ticket too.”

  Mum smiles, but sickishlike. Probably germs in Boston. I heard there was once. Leprissy. Stomachaches. Pee demics.

  I keep my arms folded. No secret glasses, but with only open eyes I can know more than I used to.

  At night, alone,
Secret Agent Jane considers.

  Today I worked on the Beauty Crew and cut Dragan’s hair and Rawn’s hair. One is only age three. One maybe is actually four. You practice that way, then you get real heads. But I was only halfway near Rawn’s ears and started to feel sick from Boston germs. I felt very on edge. I threw the scissors on the stupid floor. I think I was shivering sort of. A fever about to hit. But Penny said I wasn’t hot. She is very pretty. She’s Whitney’s mum. She said, “Let’s walk to the pond.” I told her I was sick of beauty. I said I wanted to get a bomb and blow up the government. She looked at me funny and said, “We should all be good to each other.” I said, “Who’s we?” She said, “Humans.” I said, “Sorry . . . But . . . I . . . Am . . . Ready . . . For . . . Bombs.”

  The pond is little, an ir’gation ditch with big pipes sometimes. But pretty. Penny saw I was collapsing. She sat with me in the grass while I went wicked to pieces, screaming and snot everywheres, not on purpose, but I got empty so then it was quiet, and cold too. And the bugs were cricking all around and the pond was getting pink and dark like the sky and she rubbed my hair backward the whole time. And after it was more pink and more dark out, she said, “The human race is crafty but never very bright.”

  I covered my ears.

  With the assistance of a five-year-old and a four-year-old, Jane Meserve writes a letter, addresses it, and finds the right cubby in Cook’s Kitchen to mail it from.

  DeaR Govimint—

  Let a PeRson name Lisa Marie Meserve coMe HoMe. She is my MOTher. I am heRs name Jane. Jane Miranda Meserve Ejpt Maine Hearts Content Road. Yours last chance Jane.

  Out in the world.

  The machinery of this vast cracking overripe civilization, which shreds up small concerns, does not reply.

  Long night.

  Going on 2 A.M. The school on Heart’s Content Road is in session. Well, yes, the True Maine Militia is meeting. But is there a difference? Nine girls in the East Parlor, five more in the print shop. Many pairs of scissors chomping into stacks of blue index cards that have been run through the Settlement copy machine. Four True Maine Militia membership cards from each index card. Some will be mailed. Some will be handed out. Hundreds of finished membership cards are now in the boxes. Fingers quick and strong. Fingers with purpose. Fingers with patriotic ardor! Chomp! Chomp! Chomp! Scissors that never tire. Glasses of milk and maple candies going around. A few sandwiches. Musty-flavored wild cranberries picked and dried for cooking by Settlement crews, eaten now by the mouthfuls. Membership cards for the whole planet.

  Just a few candles now in the East Parlor. All the windows are covered with blankets, here and in the print shop as well. You never know where Gordon is, and you can’t trust him on this. One minute he’s green light concerning activism. The next minute he could be red light again. Best to lie low.

  Next night, up in the woods: cold.

  Colder than last night. Frost in the open fields. Not the kind of frost that frizzes gardens and makes a squashy goo of your window-box impatiens, but an open field of granule-sized stars, palest silver, under the snow-white high-powered moon, and all the crickets and singing night bugs are quiet.

  On a small mountain in Egypt, Maine, a tree house made of found planks and trash. A young boy is curled up in this, tight as a squirrel. He wears one T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and over that a camo BDU shirt with the patch of his militia. Jeans. No long johns, but some nice new wool socks. New work boots. No pillow. No mattress. He is the new American youth, multiplied by thousands across the land. His hands are fisted against his stomach. His dreams are complicated, his testicles flattened into his shuddering musculature, in fear of the impending. How much worse can it get?

  He is now fully formed, the masterpiece of a culture that rends souls with its clean hands. He is what we asked for, fifteen-year-old Mickey Gammon. Will he pull the trigger someday? On us?

  Another evening. Ten-thirty P.M. St. Onge farmhouse on Heart’s Content Road.

  Gordon thinks the phone is off the hook, though mistakenly it has been hung back. At least right now the thing is quiet. He is sitting at one of his heaped desks under the cold fluorescent light. Alone.

  In one heaped box of mail, a fat old tortoiseshell cat is curled. Her nose whistles. She’s a very old cat, nearly twenty, having been his mother Marian’s cat in the last years of her living here.

  Many boxes of mail. Some say INCOMING. One box says OUTGOING. On the edge of one desk, looking like it still might be warm from the copier, a fresh ream of one of the True Maine Militia songs he’s taken a special liking to. He sends copies of it out in his letters to friends, yes, with his fat philosophical letters. The songs are such things as “This Land’s Not Your Land.” Dozens of tiny Abominable Hairy Patriots, with open mouths singing, make a busy border around the song sheet’s edge.

  How clever the Settlement young people are! he is thinking. Though other times, their activism scares the living shit out of him. He does not want to attract the gooey soul-stealing hand of the growing police state of the “outside world” to fondling and frisking his family.

  He squats to the floor, to a large diagram of a community-friendly “wind-turbine-solar-combo” regenerator for electric vehicles, with fold lines like a road map. He spreads his hands on this but then stands, distractedly. On the table a buff-colored pamphlet featuring micro-energy. Fuel cells. Frictionless flywheels. They call to him with an urgency louder than voice.

  Meanwhile, against the wall, an old shoebox of letters from the superintendent of schools’ office, some opened, some not, none answered. Always these superintendent’s letters, but never a phone call from the superintendent. Some things best left unconfronted and undealt with is perhaps the superintendent’s feeling on the St. Onge situation. But, for the record, stern letters do exist. None of these call to him. He almost knocks them over accidentally on his way to his old desk chair.

  Now he moves his pen across a postal money order, two money orders totaling $1,500, both going to the same place. He signs each one in careful print: EGYPT ENDOWMENT FOR SMALL LOCALLY OWNED AND OPERATED BUSINESS AND THE SELF-EMPLOYED. Then he writes Happy Birthday in one corner of each, a tax write-off trick he learned from the old construction-biz days.

  These money orders are both made out to Russ Welch, owner of Welch’s Service Center, this, Gordon’s little secret for a few years now. Once every three months, all the interest from a certain batch of his inherited stocks, those last few he has not sold off, goes to one or two small locally owned, locally situated businesses or farms or to plumbers or loggers or carpenters, strugglers, diehards, tough old relics.

  Egypt’s small businesses. He knows their faces. Concerning these, Gordon always has his ear to the ground. If someone is about to go under, he hears it. Those who are fair and never cheat you. Never cheat you. Yeah, yeah, without cheating, it’s a game you can’t win. Yes, yes, honesty is silly. According to the new way, this is especially so. Be honest and down you go! And so Gordon makes out another money order, bearing hard on the pen to make the print perfectly clear.

  As he licks the envelope, he sees his mother’s disappointed face in his mind’s eye. His actions will ruin him in the end. Marian says this. And he knows this. Lately he has had to start selling off the last of the stocks. The rainy-day nest egg breaking down. But doesn’t he despise stocks anyway? And besides, the stock market is on borrowed time, no? Everyone says so. Borrowed, yes. Well, the nation is. Borrowed, bloated like a heat-ripe corpse, but still lustily hungry. The globe is its apple. Eeeeeha! And Marian’s voice, “You invite disaster,” voice of the human mother, echoes of the other. He is weary of the fuzzy edges to right and wrong, the cruelties of kindness, the rightness of greed.

  He hears voices and feet out on the piazza. He tenses. A late-night reporter? An old friend with yet another homeless family? Or Settlement people with emergency needs, that which are the heaviest responsibility of all?

  Soon he hopes to get a crew together to fence and gate the yar
d to this place and—sure—a sign much like the one to the Settlement road: ANYONE TRESPASSES WILL BE SHOT. TRY IT.

  He considers the True Maine Militia’s opposite goals. He sighs.

  Piazza screen door slaps shut. He lays the envelope down, stands up quick, burping the taste of homemade hard cider. Reading glasses go into his chest pocket.

  Inside door opens. Several young men swagger into the kitchen; Joel Barrington in the lead. Joel, not a Settlement resident, but the next thing to it. It is always good to see Joel, a bright-faced thick-shouldered blond twenty-year-old, sporting the gregarious and sometimes bossy ways of the Soule family, which he is blood to and raised by. And yet also Joel has carried on that mysterious high-minded sneaky thieving look in the eye like his father, Lloyd Barrington, who plagues the rich or unconscionable around town but never sees the inside of a jail.

  “Nice night. Clear as a bell,” casually remarks Evan Martin, who is the one kid of all the Settlement’s kids to get cursed with pimples, pimples of every shade of blue and purple and red and yellow. His cheeks look burned and torn. But his hair, a shock of black, flopping to the left side of his forehead, is lustrous and appealing. He dresses just like a lot of the non-Settlement kids do these days, cut-off sweatpants or ballooning things that look like culottes, cut up sweatshirts, and a blaze-pink-billed cap turned around backward on his dark hair. Fashions of the outside world, no matter how ridiculous, reach in through the gate of the Settlement like a big hand that teases and tickles. In spite of all the busy sewing machines. In spite of everything.

  Christian Crocker, whom everyone calls CC, who looks like a born-again Huck Finn, freckles and all, heads through to the attic stairway to find the bathroom.

  The little group at first seems to be all Settlement kids, all but Joel, all facing Gordon with that not-used-to-the-light squint (although the light here is dim). But now Gordon sees there is a stranger who keeps drifting over behind Joel, now just a bit of elbow sticking out.