She steals another glance right into his eyes. She has this really mushy look. Like she just found him out, all his worst crimes and fuckups, then erased them totally. Some type of Mother Power. Even a mother like her has it. It’s like now he’s just all pudgy and little and new. A perfect baby. Clean. It’s embarrassing. But an old and tired piece of him likes it.
Before noon on a perfect October day. The True Maine Militia prevails once again.
Three hundred cars and trucks, it is said.
Leona St. Onge and Claire St. Onge are side by side in the doorway to the kitchens. Leona (yes, a wife of Gordon’s and a cousin to Claire) says with a snort, “You’re not surprised, are you?”
Claire answers gravely, “No, I’m not surprised. I only pray that our system for keeping track of the kids works.”
Both Leona and Claire wear the red sashes embroidered with flowers and suns. The power of the red sashes, like the warmth of a sisterly embrace. The power of their shared beliefs.
Behind them on a narrow table are several thirty-cup coffeemakers, their red and amber lights glowing. Eddie Martin (married to one of Gordon’s cousins) squats there, fiddling with the plug of one of those borrowed from Glennice’s church, or it might be the one borrowed from the Mason hall, Crosman Lodge. Eddie is all spiffed up, wearing his jazzy belt of studs and coins and fake jewels. His T-shirt reads WHITE STAR LINE TITANIC CREW on front and, on the back, MAIDEN VOYAGE HMS TITANIC 1912. And, though you might not notice with his pant legs out over them, new black military boots.
People are everywhere, streaming across the Settlement parking lot, bunched around on the grassy quadrangle and on the porches, still coming up the sloping gravel road. Each minute brings another batch of new faces, and more food, six-packs, or plastic liters of soda. Tables are set up on porches all the way around the horseshoe, out under the trees in the spotty shade and occasionally cascading yellowy leaves, and out in that wide-open sunshine.
Remember Bree, red hair and deformed face? The Vandermasts are her family. They fill up one table: the older brother, married with a big batch of kids and stepkids—all tall, handsomely dressed children, some visiting friends at other tables, relations of their mother’s—and Bree’s father’s girlfriend’s people, some of whom visit the Vandermasts’ table; and Bree’s father sits under a tree with a cup of cider, watching everything. See his raised proud chin and tiredly pleased blue eyes? By the way, where is Bree? Last seen whispering to some of the other officers of the True Maine Militia.
Strangers are taking photos of the sign that now hangs over the door to one of the parlors, a Mark Twain quote: I never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Gordon is loud. There is no music yet, but he is dancing the Highland Fling, the cancan, the twist, the Charleston, and a few hold-’em-close waltzes with everybody in sight. And, of course, as Swamp Monster he has devoured a few small screaming tender children. Gordon has only started to drink, so it can’t all be blamed on drink. Maybe overtiredness. Gordon, like most of the Settlement people, was up late with preparations, then rose at quarter to four A.M.
Inside a shady porch, a smiling group of retirement-age visitors, men and women, dressed in schoolteacheresque leisure outfits, are comfortably seated and munching. One asks, “What is this green leafy veggie? Tastes like peanuts, only kind of bitter.”
“I don’t know. But they grow everything here. Things you never heard of.”
“Did you try those yet?”
“Yes, they’re chocolate biscuits, kind of. You’re supposed to put a sauce over them, but I don’t see the sauce. Someone took it. It was right here.”
Suddenly a nearby chair shivers. Easy to see it is a small white flat-faced curly-tailed dog, who is dripping and smells strongly of a body of water that never circulates. He springs to the table, snatches a crispy chicken leg from an unguarded plate, and then, in a side-to-side Charlie Chaplin gait, stepping in platters and saucepans and overturning cups, crosses to the opposite side of the table, lands in the lap of a gasping visitor, hops down onto the floor, among many feet, and away.
“Isn’t that something,” says one of the retirement-age visitors, gripping his own plate protectively.
Meanwhile.
Gordon walks among the people now, a little sedately, less playful, the dapply light of the horseshoe of porches and the Quad runs like mice over his face and now flutters onto one sleeve of his new plaid shirt, a plaid of greens with an occasional intersecting red thread, a well-made Settlement-made shirt. And that leafy light stirs in such heavenly sweetness on these people who surround him, older couples, bikers in black, fashion-dressed gangs of youths, quiet groups of working men, possibly patriots, possibly not, so many strangers, but some you would recognize from town, and there are a sprinkling of liberal-looking older women in pairs or trios with their handsome Cleopatra haircuts or boy cuts and perfect teeth. And Gordon overhears that standing nearby is a Unitarian Universalist minister. But these days it’s hard to tell who is a minister and who is not. No clerical collars, no big crosses, no Bible in hand.
Gordon introduces himself to a family, a husband and wife, both blond, both pink-cheeked, and their baby and little girl, also blonde and pink-cheeked. The father is missing a front tooth but not afraid to smile and yak. The wife’s hair is a punk cut. She is friendly but not yakky. Gordon rests his hand on the little girl’s head. As it is so often with kids, her warm skull and soft hair yearn upward against his hand. In his other hand, a beer, a dark and dear Canadian brand brought here by visitors.
Two vans are now backing slowly through the crowd, stopping flush with the high, very new, very temporary plywood stage at the end of the last piazza on the south side of the horseshoe. Now there is the unloading of instruments, fiddle-shaped and guitar-shaped cases, a base fiddle case, and a sax. Three accordions. Some drums. A diaper bag. And a baby.
The vans are splattered with purple and lime-green fleurs de lis, yellow musical notes, and, in big print, THE BAND FROM THE COUNTY.
One musician looks spookily like Aurel Soucier, same glittering intense dark eyes and long nose but such a long bony body, more like that weasel physique of Louis St. Onge (Lou-EE, yes). But this guy wears a white smock with blousy sleeves, a red sash, and a French-of-the-past sort of shirt: The habitant.
Several men, three women. One woman wears cowgirl boots and a red dress, red lipstick. Heavyset. Her laugh is loud and as lovely and complicated as the liquidy solo of a hermit thrush.
One guy is in his early fifties. Splotchy, almost boyishly soft dark beard. Fit-looking in red T-shirt and jeans. His T-shirt features a picture of three chimps. One chimp holds binoculars to his eyes. The second chimp has his hands cupped around his ears for better hearing. The third chimp is speechifying through a megaphone.
A crowd of teenagers closes in around the vans.
The guy with the Evil Chimps T-shirt screams hoarsely across the nearest long train of piazzas to Raymond Pinette, “Tout l’mondes, là—ah! ah!—je vais renvoyer! J’ai trop gêné, moi! Je vais tomber mort!”
Ray Pinette screams back, “Ah, fermes ta yueule, Monsieur Show-off!”
A lot of girls make up the teenage swarm. Teen boys too, who try not to seem too interested. They look as if they just happened to be there, just passing through.
Out in the sun, away from the trees, it seems the whole Letourneau family is here from across town, taking up many many tables, looking settled and happy and now extremely alert to these new arrivals, all heads turned toward the vans, hearing Acadian patois spoken. And Norman Letourneau, cleft palate and wild dark eyes, party animal in his own right, screams something in his French that even these French can’t understand, and now the musician in the red dress and red lipstick calls something to Norman in French, hard to make out because she’s also throwing him kisses, and now in English, “Get your dancing shoes on, my dearest!”
More drums are unloaded from the second van.
People are still hiking up th
e dusty Settlement road. But for a few, no cars are allowed. Gatekeepers are assisting visitors with parking down along the paved Heart’s Content Road, and it is reported that these cars now line that narrow road for at least a mile.
The musicians scurry around on stage, setting up a sound system that looks earnest enough to knock anyone over who stands within a hundred yards of it.
A Settlement preteen girl in a long blue peasant dress and bare feet, with hair like cornsilk, longer and silkier than that of Mickey Gammon’s dream girl, Samantha Butler, hair almost to her heels, starts an eager jerk of the hips.
“I know this band. They mean business,” troll-like Stuart Congdon (the Settlement’s head sawyer) tells some visitors with a chuckle. “This whole place is going to be dancing, even those who don’t want to. To try ’n’ hold still, it would hurt.”
History (1819: the past), weavers of Halifax, England.
“We groan, being burdened, waiting to be delivered, we rejoice in hopes of Jubilee.”
Gordon St. Onge: they come to him.
The man who is approaching Gordon now on these long connected piazzas has a thin funeralesque voice, as though remembering a long-gone friend. But his woes concern recent and complex Maine fishing laws. Gordon agrees it is a bad mess.
“Liberty and justice for all, ha-ha,” says the man.
Gordon glances into the solemn eyes of three teens next to the shoulder of the sorrowful man. The man goes on. “A lie and a figment.”
Gordon replies, “I agree.” And his eyes skip a moment to more young guys who are closing in, all in billed caps bearing ads, then to the fifteen or twenty faces of strangers and Egypt neighbors ringed around, and then another half dozen beyond, all staring. Gordon sees a vision of each and every one of those mouths eating a fish from Lange Pond and Spec Pond—this sudden uneasy epiphany: mouths, esophaguses, and bubbling stomachs of a whole planet of shoulder-to-shoulder people—and one last fish, hiding. He sees, yes, his children, their hunger, their fingers grasping.
He pushes the thought away. He calls the big quiet dark-eyed man “My brother.”
Eventually, he reaches the end of the last piazza, temporarily connected to the high stage, little temporary set of stairs there, going up. So good to see his old friends and distant cousins from Aroostook, THE County. They don’t seem at all tired from their six-hour ride. He embraces them all. Now a smooch or three. Some yowls. Then he chats with them, catches up on some things, swept happily along in that cheery hoarse back-of-the-throat Acadian-English mix; then, seeing they have much more setting up to do, tuning, revving up, he turns and sees Rex.
Rex has been standing behind him for how long? There with his thumbs in his belt, feet spread, boots shined, the whole nine yards of military bearing, but no uniform, no cap, just a rust-brown T-shirt and work pants. And no dark cop glasses at the moment. His cold gray-blue eyes have an odd circumspection. As if he wore earphones and was listening to the instructions of a militia dispatcher who is conveying information from militia pilots in choppers or towers, people who have a clear overhead view of the awful, surging, unbraiding mob that is filling up the roads, the Quad, the yards and fields of the St. Onge Settlement.
Gordon raises one eyebrow and gives Rex’s shoulder a little hello poke, a shoulder like a rock which, under the brown T-shirt, doesn’t give. Rex brings his right hand around and gives Gordon a slip of paper. “I got a call. She was looking for Mickey. His brother’s widow, I think. She wasn’t doing very well, her and the others there. Upset. I couldn’t really make her out much. She wants him to come home and talk or something.” He looks down along the length of connected piazzas, open porches, and boardwalks crammed with humanity, the loud drone of voices making him have to talk louder than he likes to. “She was . . . upset. Crying.”
Gordon holds the note way out from his face, squints at it. It reads: Call Erika. Important. He looks over shoulders and heads and hats into the faces of strangers who are passing by; they are watching him hard from the corners of their eyes. He glances out at the Quad, where there are more and more layers of strangers pressing in, with and without covered dishes, paper bags, and liters of pop. He studies the note again. “This message. It must have been before nine P.M. last night.”
“Six-twenty.”
“Yuh . . . well. She found us.”
Rex nods.
Gordon squint-blinks. Then smiles. “Well.” He stuffs the note into a pocket. “She’s safe now.”
Rex works his lips a bit, like they itch. Then a small snort that means it figures: one more needy soul. Maybe even one more wife. What else is new?
Gordon asks, “You just the bearer of emergency communiqués? Or are you planning to hang out awhile and maybe . . . meet some nice women?”
Rex flushes. Then a trace of a twinkle skips across the cold eyes. “You mean all these women aren’t yours?” Nods toward the crowd, which anyone can plainly see contains over four hundred people, about half of them women.
Vastly, Gordon smiles. He gets real close to Rex, closeness not being Rex’s favorite thing, and speaks in a low voice. “Brother, I envy you.”
Rex looks away. Rex does not envy Rex. Nor does he envy Gordon. Rex considers both situations deeply flawed.
Gordon and Rex stand there at the screen now and watch more faces coming around from beyond the larger Quonset hut, from the parking lot and road.
Rex says, “I expect you’ve got a few agents out there.”
Gordon tries not to smile at this. “Richard, agents go to meetings of real militias. Secret meetings. This is . . . so . . . so wholesome . . . so public.”
“Don’t matter. You can tell after a while when you got them. They’ll try to stir the crowd up . . . agitate . . . or hang out with you and others in charge, win your trust, turn people against you, get you to . . . break a law. It’s called neutralizing leadership and entrapment. They do it all.”
Gordon squints at this. “When it’s in the public debate, you get assent and dissent . . . each side will work real hard to twist the other one’s arm for or against. People just naturally make their own trouble.”
“You’re not making sense. I’m talking about Feds.”
“I know what you’re talking about.”
Rex squints. “You don’t have to listen to me if you don’t want. Go read your Socialist Commie books for the answers. They know it all.”
Gordon grabs a lemon chewy bar off a plate and stuffs it in his mouth.
Claire, her graying black hair worn in a long braid down her back, graceful and rotund as a bubble in her green cotton dress and red sash, passes with a group of women strangers, her voice like a tour guide’s, like a professor, her well-projected, sometimes commanding, sometimes breezy voice.
And then.
Out among the tables, under the trees, under the slant of early October sun, reporters scribble away.
“So why are you here today?” a reporter asks a visitor.
“To see what’s going on.”
“You here to join the militia?”
“Sure.”
“Aren’t you worried about the reputation of militias?”
“Not really. This ain’t like that. This is all of us. Just people. Kids, even.”
“Have you heard Gordon St. Onge called the Prophet?”
“Yuh.”
“What do you think of that?”
“Pretty weird.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
Shrug. “Nobody’s perfect.”
Strangers stride through the crowd passing out flyers on the U.S. government’s role in the massacre of one-third of the East Timor population. Other flyers on Cuba, Iraq, Uganda, Sudan, Chiapas, Guatemala, and Yugoslavia. Colombia. Stealing and plunder. On and on. Bad America, bad.
The Unitarian Universalist minister, accompanied by a friend, chats politics under a tree with a tall thin man in a white shirt and a Maine Greens button.
The band continues to unload and set up.
&nb
sp; Gordon speaks in a muffled way.
“Well, I can tell you one thing, Richard.” He’s munching on his fifth lemon chewy. “There’re Commies here. The place is crawling with ’em. Socialists, at least.” His teasing eyes hover on the tree-furry crown of the near mountain.
Rex squints. “No doubt.”
Gordon draws his face against his upper arm, cleaning his whiskers and mustache on his sleeve. Then, with raised chin, a little smile, eyes on the growing crowd, he says, “Democracy. She’s beautiful.”
Rex glowers.
Meanwhile.
Louis St. Onge backs his little yellow seventeen-year-old pickup across the weeds to a high spot behind the Quonsets. He is preparing to unload his cannon, which is about the size of a huge man’s thigh but weighs as much as a whole huge man. Its carriage is oak, four small oak wheels, a bore the size of a camera film canister—small for a cannon. But the boom will impress you. It will be heard for miles.
Bree ignores Gordon.
She steps up onto the piazza where he stands with Rex. She is just passing by, his Bree. Intent on something. Her red hair is thick and fresh and savage. Black Settlement-made T-shirt, a full bright skirt that almost reaches her heels, a red sash, and today a necklace, a fleet of little ships and boats, carved from wood. All stained in the grain, sea blue. She doesn’t look at Gordon at all.
She is fully and totally and completely mad at him. Sigh. Because he was mad at her. Just this A.M., he had almost sobbed. Red light. Green light. Red light. Green light. Truly. And it is because he, Gordon St. Onge, is all talk, no action. And Bree, genius with oil paints and ink, frisky with words and thoughts, a reader of even more cinderblock-sized books than he is, is action. She was the one! She organized the True Maine Militia. She did the op-eds. Gordon St. Onge, crawling like a worm on his belly, while fifteen-year-old Brianna Vandermast St. Onge holds an almost visible torch aloft. So now he supports her. Reluctantly. A drink would help.
And so they pass by, Bree and one of Gordon’s little daughters, Angelique. They are carrying cardboard boxes. Mysterious boxes. Something concerning the True Maine Militia, no doubt, that which goes on behind Gordon’s back at all hours. You raise kids to be like anarchists and you will be the first power they tear down, especially when someone like Bree comes along to whip them into high gear.
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 33
