Gordon has spent his whole life wishing for someone like Bree to be close to, to be fused with, soul to soul. Bree, fellow philosopher! Big-picture person! Passionate duty to humankind! Older than her years, a creature like no other! And there she is, walking past him, three feet away, untouchable. Here, but not his. Married by Settlement law but pissed off.
He glances now to the outside wall of the kitchen: three of his other young wives, all with babies, one nursing: Natty with her pale foxy little blade face. Natty with her thin blonde hair parted in the middle, falling carelessly at either side, split sweetly over the back of her neck. The baby nurses at her open shirt, but Natty is staring down the length of the porches. She wears the red sash around her newly restored waist. Is she feeling restless now with the outside world muscling its way in here, all these young men with their verve and unlined faces, and all that danceable music about to begin? She is one of those Gordon feels edgy about. But Bree: over the edge. Over and out. He aches to think of it.
Now he looks straight into the eyes of a young man who has just stepped in through the nearest screen door and stands next to a loaded table staring at Gordon. Bald as a stone. A tattooed forehead. Tattoo is of the phoenix, rising not from the ashes but from flames. Though it is noontime and warm, he wears a long heavy coat and corduroy pants of a check print, tight at calf and ankle as pants were almost fifty years ago, and on his feet military boots like Rex’s. Hands in pockets.
Gordon doesn’t break the stare.
This guy’s eyes are so wide, the whites show all around the irises. Not just the head shaved. Eyebrows shaved off. Huge long narrow nose. Spiky short red beard. Mouth a wet thin line. A gold nose ring. Seems he’s jiggling one leg.
Gordon glances at Rex, and Rex is—yes—more rigid than Gordon has ever seen him.
Near one of the shop doors, one of Gordon’s small sons and two little visitors are having a sword fight, one plastic sword and two big sticks. All three little boys wear a dull-eyed manly concentration. They holler, “Whammo! Whammo! Whammo!”
“Out! out! out!” a Settlement woman commands from her sentrylike position in the doorway to the kitchens. The small sword fighters lunge through a group of preteen girls, all dressed in low-necked ankle-length prairie dresses, and a lonely-looking girl who has a motherish grip on her beloved black pet chicken. “Watch it!” one of the girls snarls at the sword fighters.
Meanwhile, Gordon looks back at the bald leg-jiggling stranger, and the guy is looking Gordon up and down slowly with an expression somewhere between madness and well-perfected seductiveness. The eyes come to rest solidly on Gordon’s crotch.
Rex makes a sound. Like the sudden blowing and champing and moist snort of a bull.
Gordon steps toward the guy. “Are you hungry, brother? We have plenty of everything. Help yourself.”
Brother. If the word were a fine black Caddy, even then, how many could ride in it?
The guy looks at Gordon’s hand outstretched to him. The guy pulls from his pocket a stump. No hand. Just a violet-colored stump, made all nice and fatty and smooth by hurried surgeons.
Gordon hesitates by about two beats, then folds both of his hands around the mutilated handless stick. Then he sees that the other hand, now pulled from its pocket, is another stump. “Where’re you from?” Gordon asks, loosening his grip and dropping his own hands with a graciousness some people would save for big landowners, selectmen, legislators, movie stars, kings, queens, and high priests.
“Buf,” the guy replies, a wetness building on his lips.
And then.
Another leaf lets go. It dips, spins, slows. Down, down. This one a maple leaf, red with a purple center. Lands on a picnic table, among half-eaten gooey rolls and the bone of a lamb.
And now, an interview.
Out by the open bay of the livestock Quonset hut, a reporter finds a woman, wearing an ornately embroidered red sash through the loops of her jeans and carrying a coil of rope, leading a baby goat, a perfect baby goat, brown and white and clean, little hooved tiptoeing dancer’s feet. See the most delicate mouth in all creation, gentle innocence; see the horizontally pupiled amber eyes, eyes of the Devil, and white tail that shakes like a torn rag in a warm breeze. Baby goat with no name. Fattened on milk, on daisies and clover, on pond water and play.
“Do you live here?” the reporter asks the woman.
“Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Glennice.”
“Last name?” Reporter smiles. Reporter is friendly and casual.
“St. Onge.”
“Ah.” Reporter looks Glennice over quickly and another quick glance at the goat. Reporter smiling. “Taking the goat to show those little children over there?”
“Yes.” Glennice is smiling squintily: sun in her eyes. “You call it a kid.”
“Oh, of course.”
Glennice smiles. Yes, Glennice, whose teeth are too small for her smile. Nose too small. Glasses too big. Hair too permed. But all of this together radiates an enviable at-home contentment.
“Well, this is quite a day, Glennice. Must be really something for you people who usually have a quiet life here, huh?”
Glennice laughs.
Reporter scribbles these one-word and no-word answers while the next question is asked. “So you know Gordon St. Onge pretty well.”
“Yes, I sure do.”
“Is he your husband?”
Glennice nods without hesitation.
“What’s he like?”
“He is love. He is from God.”
Reporter scribbles this, bearing down to get each letter fat and clear and legible. Reporter persists. More questions about Gordon St. Onge, and Glennice’s dreamy biblical replies fulfill all reporterly hopes and dreams. And half a notebook.
The sun yearns quickly into its early afternoon position.
When Gordon starts chasing two giggling little boys with a realistic-looking rubber rattlesnake, Rex excuses himself, saying he needs to make a call on the CB in his truck down the road.
Meanwhile, more people arrive. And more people. Some in loud bright-eyed groups. Some are loners. Some get tours of farm animals, electric cars, the shops, the windmills, the greenhouses.
In a huddle behind the furniture-making Quonset hut, Eddie Martin (who wears his Titanic T-shirt, a wide belt of coins, and fake jewels and studs and so forth, and beams under a strenuous shave that makes his long jaws look waxy) advises his sons and some other young people who are rotating gate duty and parking assistance and the big job of keeping track of small kids. “Good to spread the crowd out. Keep those windmill tours going. Takes ’em forever to hike that hill.”
Aurel agrees. “Den dey doan’ suffocate each otherrr as much and mash us.” Aurel’s searing black eyes study the mountain.
Gordon, who has done some circulating out on the mobbed quadrangle, now returns to the same piazza as before and finds the handless man gone. Shanna St. Onge breathlessly informs him that cars are parked all the way down Heart’s Content Road to the Day log yard.
Other teen and preteen girls rush up to him, surround him.
Tall, yellow-haired, fifteen-year-old Whitney, with a crooked funny-faced smile, gives her father’s rolled-up plaid left sleeve a little stroking. The din of hundreds of voices seems, at the moment, equal to the engines of jets on a runway. As Whitney’s voice gets drowned out, Gordon dips his head down so she can shout into his ear. “Some people were walking on the kids’ gardens. Cory yelled at some guys. There was almost a fight.”
“Where’s Butch and Joel? Where’s David? Where’s Mickey?”
Whitney shrugs.
Gordon says, “If you see them, tell ’em we got Rusty and Shawn down at the house. Aurel and Eddie got the parking and gate crews rotating. So see if they can rotate with Steven and Joel, and Jaime when he’s done helping Glennice . . . see if they can swap off for a small garden crew. They can make some signs. Rope off a little part of that road where the tractor pa
th is.” He pushes open the screen and steps out. Whitney follows. And now Samantha Butler sort of hops toward them from the crowd, her newly found olive-drab bush hat pulled on hard over her eyebrows. All that silky blonde hair. Red bandanna around her neck. Black T-shirt. Army pants. Army boots. A kind of far-left far-right fashion mix. A Revolution poster child. Gordon gives Samantha a one-armed bear hug. “I love you,” he says, with a choke of tenderness. She is not his child. Nor a wife. She is a smart-ass difficult one, therefore precious.
“I love you too, oh, beloved Prophet.” Now she pulls away to fuss with her bush hat, working it back to its cocky angle.
Gordon smiles at each girl. They smile back. Suspiciously sweet.
Now he sees two other girls coming down off a distant piazza, hurrying to reach him. They are gasping when they arrive, eyes on his face, something coordinated here. “Okay, what?” he asks loudly, above the din of the crowd, which is bigger and denser than a few moments ago.
Again, Whitney strokes his sleeve, now one of his ears, pat pat pat, stroke stroke, hug hug . “We’re worried about our meeting. Like, how’re we going to get all these people to sing the songs? We don’t have enough song sheets. And now everybody’s chickening out on everything. Like, we had a great document for everyone to read together, like a chant, but that’s out. Like the songs, out of the picture. Nobody wants to do a speech. Bree talked really big like she’d just take over and do this wicked cute speech. But now she’s, like, no way. Everybody’s such wimps.”
“Including you, Whitney!” scolds Michelle.
Gordon looks at Samantha. “What about this thing?” He ruffles Samantha’s hat again and hugs her head.
“Not me!” says Samantha. “I’m purely behind the scenes. Secret Service, that’s me!” She pulls away, again fixes her hat.
“Soooo,” Whitney coos, stroking Gordon’s left hand, “we need to scoff up the Prophet. We need him. He’s so cute. He wins hearts.”
“I’m tired.”
“Please?”
“Okay.”
All the girls applaud. A couple of them frolic around. Gordon is looking into Whitney’s spirited and lovely and way-too-clever green almond-shaped eyes while a couple of the others give his ribs hard hugs.
“I knew you’d do it,” says Whitney. “You’re just dying to get up there and show off.”
He flushes, glances out at the crowded Quad and Quonset hut yards, raises an eyebrow.
Samantha looks at her Rex-like watch.
Margo asks Samantha, “When?”
“Soon. Before everyone leaves.”
Gordon says, “Let ’em dance first. Let ’em get tanked up and tired out. Let me get tanked—”
“No!” Whitney stands on the toe of one of his boots with one of her boots. “No more of that stuff. We’re counting on you to act grown up.”
“The True Maine Militia,” he says, with a wink, “is authoritarian.”
“Darn tootin’ it is!” Erin shouts, with a pretend scowl.
“Are you proud of us?” Rachel Soucier asks.
“I’m proud.”
“Are you really?” presses Carmel, who looks a lot like Whitney, although she is younger, less fleshy, more twiggy. And she has a different mother, less jaw, and rounder eyebrows that make even her real scowls look cheery.
Gordon squashes his tired eyes with two thick calloused palms. “I’m goddam fucking proud.”
“Proud today, pissy tomorrow,” he hears Whitney grumble as they now all hurry away, Whitney’s and Carmel’s honey-yellow ponytails flashing in and out of pools of sun and shade; and there’s Samantha’s olive-drab hat and dear Shanna’s heavy midnight-black hair in a tail to the backs of her knees, made tame with about six rings of brightly dyed burlap cloth—all their energy making a blur, their arms and shoulders and dresses and pant legs mixing.
Meanwhile, a press conference is taking place on the hillside.
Yellow truck and ramp. Cannon, small; Louis, tall. Wedding ring. Plaid sleeves not long enough. Cannon ramrod in his hand. Softly explaining everything anyone needs to know about black powder, muzzle loaders of every kind, a bit of Civil War history, especially where artillery comes in. The questions come in at Louis from all sides. But he is cool and calm, tapping the outside of one leg with the ramrod. “No. There won’t be a projectile. I have used a projectile in this, part lead, part wheel weights melted down; you just aim a little high. But what I really got this for is for the boom.” He laughs to himself, softly. “I use toilet paper for wadding. Makes a mess. And you have to be sure, especially this time of year, that you haven’t left anything smoldering in the grass or the woods.”
One reporter asks what time the cannon will be fired today. Louis shrugs. “When the True Maine Militia gives the order. I don’t know when that is.”
The crowd continues to swell.
Once, when Gordon squats down to put his face eye to eye with a small child, a total stranger child with blue amazed eyes wide on Gordon’s own, she gives him her stuffed blue rabbit. Floppy ears on the rabbit. Cotton tail. He holds the rabbit while the parents talk about Social Security.
In a while, he moves on to another group. More stories told by small-business owners, more stories of strong-arming by giant chains. Stories of regulations that small biz can’t dodge like the big guys can. This from a pizza shop owner, who speaks softly and quaveringly but with certainty, gone hard and wooden across the face: “And we’re not even called small business anymore. We are called microbiz. That’s like micro organisms. Like being a germ. What happened that we aren’t the heart of the community anymore? The words free trade are a lie. Even trade is a lie. There is no trade at all. There’s no even-steven. These are evil times, sir.”
Gordon says, “My brother, it’s time. We have got to band together. We have no representation. We need to turn to our own kind.” He starts on about food shortages, the bad news of ruined soils, erosion, water dried up or polluted, peak oil. He insists on small brotherhoods of trade and says, “Our relationship with the soil and forests, the source of our food and water, must be loved like a mother, not sold!” He begins to really boom now. But three elderly ladies interrupt, asking Gordon to autograph their militia song sheets. Which he does. But also he mashes beery kisses on their cheeks.
Gordon illustrates his roar of words.
With a brown, almost empty beer bottle as a pointer, he addresses a huddle of L. L. Bean–dressed fellows (pastel knitted shirts, khaki or olive shorts, sandals, long-visored caps), who to Gordon are, yes, brothers. “You were probably going to say that too, right? Everybody does. Especially wind. Oh my!, too labor intensive. You were going to say that, weren’t you?”
One guy confesses, “Maybe.” Then laughs brotherishly. The feeling has become solid, rising, pulling.
Gordon smiles, twisted bottom teeth almost grating against his straighter top ones.
“Okay, let’s suppose we’re dumb enough to—you know—give up our valuable TV-watching time, and let’s count in the fact that a lotta guys have been laid off and can’t find new jobs half as good as the old ones, and our clocks seem, you know, to be going backward or something. So tell me what’s wrong with spending time?”
His audience nods or chuckles. Pleasantly, one mentions invertors and lead batteries.
“Man, yes!” Gordon hoots. “I want to figure out this mystery. I mean, we folks here in Egypt are”—he lowers his voice, as if there were hostile listeners in the fields, in the trees, in the sky—“human too. We aren’t chimpanzees. We aren’t less intelligent than the experts. We just aren’t experts.” He winks. “Yet.”
One guy nods briskly. The others are open-mouthed, caught in trying to get in a word.
Gordon cackles. “We aren’t lacking humanness. We are only lacking education. All those years we spend in their fucking six-million-dollar-a-year schools, and not one peep about this emergency skill!”
Hope.
In and out of clusters of people, moving into the de
nser shade of the quadrangle trees, there are stories. Now in listening mode, Gordon has left his beer bottle on the edge of the parking lot. He hears these, his brothers, in their distress. Boss betrayals, which lead to government betrayals. Union betrayals. Neighbors calling on hotlines. Neighbors watching to catch you at a crime. “You are our only hope,” a red-faced balding man tells Gordon, this man in the company of several other fiftyish guys, caps with ads, solemn slouched shoulders on some. One man is miserably pockmarked, probably since his teen years. These guys are almost certainly not militia. They look too sad. Militia guys aren’t sad. Militia guys look paranoid. Yeah, paranoid, the opposite of trusting. The opposite of what a lamb looks like waiting near you, while you scrape that knife across the whet stone.
And militia guys look armed. Usually nothing of a firearm shows, it’s just in the eyes. And in the way they walk.
Gordon says, “I’m not your only hope. We do this together.”
“But you are the only one who is speaking for us! No one else is doing it. Politicians are assholes.”
Gordon frowns. “You say I am speaking for you. Who is it I am speaking to about you? Nobody. I speak only to you. I say, I am in this sinking boat with you.”
All the guys in this group look at Gordon’s mouth in doubt.
A tall gray-haired man, clean-shaven, with dark-frame glasses, appears from another direction and puts out his hand to Gordon. “Walt Glenn.”
“Good to meetcha,” Gordon says. “Come to join the militia?”
The man smiles. He fingers around inside his wallet a moment and produces a small blue card for Gordon’s inspection. Little flag on the card and the words: The True Maine Militia. Card signed by Bree St. Onge, Secretary, and Samantha Butler, Recruiting Officer. Gordon hands the card back. Smiles funnyish.
The guy puts a book and a thickness of copied materials into Gordon’s hands. “Some good reading there. Good exercise . . . for the adrenal glands.” He winks, then speaks in a low, summoning, near-whisper, partly inaudible. “I am honored to meet someone who pays attention.” He winks again. Laughs. Turns away.
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 34
