A few other St. Onge “wives” left the Settlement because it is hard to share a man. In some cases the fur was flying. Some stayed but shut Gordon out. Some even paired up with a different Settlement man. What Gordon’s reactions were to these events varied.
Meanwhile, he certainly collected more than he lost. And day by day, we made it work. Yeah, it was weird. I agree. And sharing a mate is harder for some than others. So I’ll speak only for myself.
I came back. And I was happy to have him in my bed on those nights when he came around.
The voice of Mammon.
The company is family now. The company appreciates loyalty! The people work. And they work and they work and they work. Heigh ho! Heigh ho! There are seminars now where big-business–minded people go to discuss finding the soul of business. At these seminars a luncheon is served by college-age waitresses and waiters in maroon or green golf shirts, so Ivy League and wholesome. These waitresses and waiters are called servants . . . oh sorry, we mean servers.
Meanwhile, the speakers have well-managed hair and skin without blemish or chafe or too much age and they are conservatively uniformed, a boon of identical grays, and they are beaming with know- how. Lots of beaming. One of the speakers is going to the podium now. She adjusts the mike. Everyone smiles, smiles, smiles. Such a positive concept! Finding a business’s soul. Like warm lips in the night and a whisper of love. Behold the trembly breath of the corporate thing floating up sweet as a child’s prayer.
In Ivy Morelli’s Portland apartment.
The phone rings.
David Morelli. Ivy’s Dad. Only forty-seven years old.
Too young to die. But yes, he smoked. A pack a day.
Ivy knows “Mr. Morelli” didn’t look right that day they all drove to their cousin’s camp on Moosehead. He walked funny. Funnier than usual. And his eyes looked . . . reddish . . . or was it yellowish? “You okay, Mr. Morelli?”
And he had quickly said, “Doing good.”
Too quickly.
He wants for you never to feel even a slight inconvenience or worry, let alone pain. Did he think he could keep liver cancer from them forever? Is she right to believe that even her mother didn’t know about the liver cancer?
So she had put it out of her mind. Her questions had melted.
This morning, her mom told her over the phone, “He has known for three months.” She didn’t say “we.” She said the doctors thought, with the treatments, he’d have more time.
Treatments. Step right up and get your snake oil. Only $14,000 a whack or whatever ransom figure they can pump out of you. Was Mr. Morelli getting treatments?
“Oh, yes,” her mother assures her. But maybe she really means, Oh, yes, I think so.
“And you knew?”
Hesitation. “I . . . do now.”
How could he have managed SECRET TREATMENTS? Secret vomiting, secret baldness? No, no, no. He no doubt put the treatments off, needing time to figure a way to carry this creaking, bristly, foul harvest by himself, to traverse the great epic of terminal cancer without his dears noticing!
On the way to the hospital “at home” upstate, Ivy hardly sees the wet road, traffic lights, cars with their left- and right-turn signals. She plays the screaming thumping radio, feeling it only on her skin, not in her ears.
When she gets there, he is in a coma. Or something. He opens his eyes and shifts around. But sees nothing. Eyes close again dreamily. He is VERY yellow and VERY small. Even his head. Weird now (and partly bald from age) and doll-sized on the pillow.
She cries in her twin sister’s arms. She loses it. She is screaming. His death will be nothing after this, the dying part. The little head on the pillow will be taken away.
She goes out to her car in the big parking lot and holds her face. The rain closes in around, thrums on the cheap tinny roof.
Days later, back at her apartment, in the pile of sympathy cards, one card from a person she hardly knows . . . met once at a party (somehow they have stayed in touch), a wacky artist type named Sarah. It’s not even really a sympathy card. But it is being used by this Sarah as a sympathy card.
It is a drawing in yellow, pinks, and turquoise. Feminine colors. No, Easter colors. Fun colors. Sassy.
It shows a hallway of wild ripples, the walls wackily decorated in spirals and diamonds and ferns. The ceiling is stripes. A door with a jazzy fan light window over it. Beyond the door, a stairway leading upward into darkness that is adorned in Hollywood-style stars . . . not like gold teacher stars . . . these are chubby stars. Kind of jokey stars. Ivy stares and stares at this stairway, tears pouring from her eyes, but she’s kind of smiling, too.
If that’s where Mr. Morelli has shuffled off to, then okay.
Back at her desk in the newsroom.
She is transfixed by her screen. Which is off. Blank. The future is blank, yes. The past even more incomprehensible. She moves her clover-color lips in her paler than ever face, pale as though lighted by the science-fictionesque glow of the screen, if it were on, that is. Her lips speak voicelessly. Her throat gets an “apple” in it, clenched to circumscribe great unplumbed grief.
Teacher man, you lied!
Ivy getting even?
Today Gordon rides a Settlement horse. Arkie. The trail is old and the first half mile is worn brick-hard, except where it is occasionally dank and fleshy. Two small recently reinforced bridges. This path unbraids up through the trees to the old camp built in the 1920s on the southwest top side of the mountain. The horse is old, too. All is old today. Horse steps along in a clompy but ladylike fashion, up, up, and up. Trail’s not overly steep but no leveling. Lofty bank on left, mostly rock, but lichen and mosses and twining roots have metamorphosed the rock bulges into faces and shoulders of great gray spooks and beasties.
There is a branching of this path you need to avoid like the dickens when taking a horse through. Some bridges “there thattaway” have rot. And there’s a very black mucky hellhole that sneaks up and sucks you and your mount toward the earth’s creamy core. Or just glues horse hooves and fetlocks in place. Then, if you get past that, low limbs plot to poke your eyes. And too many partridges. They explode from your chest it seems and this makes certain horses take to the sky.
Kids have made signs at this juncture. Path of Life. And Path of Death. Though horses can’t read they never fail to make the right choice, whether you rein them in that direction or not. Arkie chooses “life.”
Gordon’s face is seamed with rocky sorrow. He has worn an old stained felt crusher, once a forest green, his riding hat today; other days, this hat gets to be his logging hat. No resemblance to the big modern cowboy hats of the Southwest, more of the old, old hat style of log drivers and cowboys pre-Hollywood. The saddle is old and it has an old voice; more snivel than creak.
Oh, yes, the day is mighty old.
Old Arkie is officially a pinto but almost entirely the color of a used-up yellowy bedsheet. A face like a skull; let’s say “spirit.” Black splats on his eyes and ear tips and black whispering along through the yellow white of his tail. He’s too old to dance or prance, buck or churn. Gordon is not that sure a rider, so the two are a perfect fit. Gordon could have walked, since he isn’t really going anywhere, not all the way to the old camp, just in the direction of deep people-less void. But he wanted someone along, someone who wouldn’t be bothered by his stature turning to pudding today. For what if he should sob?
He hasn’t toted along a copy of the Record Sun his little daughter Andrea pressed into his hand about an hour ago at noon. One of her important errands, Settlement life so always glutted with weighty comings and goings, the swarm of the thing.
He left the paper behind, carrying it only in his head.
Here comes a tunnel of hemlock boughs, a black firmament with which to merge one’s wounded incorporeal self. The man closes his eyes, hears and feels the horse’s hooves pad like a cat’s paws across the moss. Arkie has no expressed opinions on this place, as ever his rider’s sturdy
slave. His ears turn, but not worriedly. An overcast embraces both beings suddenly, giving the forest darkness a deeper, more silent seamlessness. Arkie’s pupils open in his apple-sized eyes but his great old head remains directly face-front. Gordon reins him up.
There’s a leveling off here and so they stand together going nowhere, the crusher hat low over the man’s eyes, the horse’s black pinto splotches around his eyes, which the kids call his “cool sunglasses,” though the skull look is what Gordon always sees, a damn creepy-looking animal, actually.
The sun rips back out through a mouth in the purpling sky. Man and horse both stare at sunny polka dots and lacy gloom of manifold trunks, fern, turkey-tail fungi, the dust of spores, mist, and fallen limbs caught against the standing mass, altogether reaching out as ghoul arms begging the man and horse “come hither,” “come to Hell’s gates,” “you belong.”
In his mind’s eye, Gordon sees the columns of what Ivy has spilled, a full spread, photos, the works. It is plainly not an attack on Settlement life, just a baring of it. There it is. Dangling. Buck naked. Out there.
There is no reference to his “more than twenty” wives nor to the face-smacking of the boy Jaime in the heat of that day on the mountain. But—
Can this silence and woody August sweetness help organize the chaotic terror inside him, the terror that increaseth in his gut every day, the militia-connected and polygamous master of the Settlement, soon to rip out onto the stage of America in truth and in exaggeration, beyond, far beyond the intentions of Ivy’s pretty little pale hand?
The newsroom.
Ivy, diddling with her column, this, her belated Kotzschmar review, still trying not to sound too passionate, too corny, but she is feeling both passionate and corny about this most grand instrument, sees something scarlet in the corner of her eye, sees two substantial figures, understands in the way they move, even in the feeble blur of her periphery sight, that this is Gordon St. Onge and someone who has inherited Gordon’s way of standing, and the same way he holds his head. She wheels around fast. Yep.
She goes to them, leads them to her desk, Gordon and a Nordic-Slavic-faced blond teenaged boy who calls her “Ma’am” and holds his cap by the bill against the outside of one thigh, as his father does. The boy wears a scarlet chamois shirt and jeans. Keys on his belt like Gordon. Maybe only age fourteen or so, not bearded, just fuzzy, but an air of self-sovereignty, of mastery, of capability, which Ivy knows by now is learned but also shared.
Gordon does not make an introduction. He just looks at Ivy with an unflinching pale gaze, none of his usual twitches and squints and such.
She offers them seats. “Coffee? Juice? An apple?”
“Naw,” says Gordon. “But thanks.” He looks toward the boy. Boy is now looking the other way, bright-eyed, cap loose in both his strong hands, looking around at all the computer screens, and from both this boy and Gordon a smell of the Settlement, their strongly scented prickly almost stinky herbal soaps, their food, so many smoked meats and smoked fish for “holidays,” herbed soups, maple desserts.
Ivy’s dress is a plaid of many grays with an old-fashioned patent leather belt. Very short dress. Bared legs. Sandals. Her hair, shimmering purple-black. Both hair and clothes flounce around stylishly as she asserts how happy she is to see them. And yes, animal crackers dangling from her ears! A tiger and a zebra. Cookie-colored and crunchie-looking. Are they real? Fresh from the little circusy box? Both critters leap and lunge, as Ivy won’t hold still. She is nerved up. Almost squeaky. She is very, very nerved up.
She offers seats again.
Gordon sits. The boy, still staring around, says, “Yes, thanks.” But he is slow to comply.
Gordon’s eyes slide over Ivy’s computer screen with the Kotzschmar story glowing passionately and yes, cornily, there.
Ivy promises them that she’ll give them a tour before they go, that it’s a great educational experience. “Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts come through here a lot.”
She has never seen Gordon so devoid of expression. His color is stony. Makes the gray on the chin of his dark beard look white-hot.
She takes the plunge. “Gordon. It was a sympathetic piece. You know it was. I made it clear that . . . what I heard and saw was exemplary. And . . . magical. And good and right. And revolutionary! You know it’s true. I didn’t slam you.”
Now he lets go. He squint-blinks mightily, his bewildered look. “Yes . . . i’twas a beautiful piece.”
“Please, Gordon. Don’t hate me. I did it for you. From this end, things look different.”
He looks at her mouth.
She sighs.
The boy asks about newspaper pictures, how it is those are done.
Ivy says that it is mostly now by state-of-the-art computers and digital cameras. No more real photo developing in the photo lab. “That will be part of the tour!” she tells him with gusto.
Gordon turns in his seat, places his arm over the seat’s back, glances across the tops of cubicle walls, over heads, over glowing screens, glowing faces, the strange slightly dim new look of an almost twenty-first-century newsroom, then again his eyes fall on her screen with the Kotzschmar story which, only days ago, was filled in brightly with the Home School story and the lives of Gordon’s loved ones in a nutshell and breathlessly about to be made public.
Ivy says softly, “I broke your trust.”
He looks back over at her.
She is on the edge of violent weeping. In the grief and loss side of her heart, where she has spent so much time these past few days, it is all pressing to stumble out, like a wire cage tightly and mercilessly packed with eye-rolling panicked animals. Into her wheeled chair she slowly sits. She looks down at her fingers, wiggles them.
Gordon is deathly silent, eyes on her fingers.
She says, “It had nothing to do with the other night . . . about us . . . honest.”
He looks at her face again.
She says, “Gordon . . . it’s just a matter of time. There’s a lot of smoke . . . you know . . . the rumors and complaints. I heard the state is poising itself to really go after you on a few things . . . child- protective stuff. They’ve figured out you have Jane . . . instead of Pete Meserve, who is supposed to have her. It’s all hush-hush but Shawn Phillips has been accused of being lax, and the governor is asking questions. This stuff . . . the complaints . . . the accusations about . . . you . . .” She glances at the boy. “Are ugly.” She winces, her voice terribly grave, no HAW HAW. “Several agencies have begun compiling reports . . . casual reports, they say . . . whatever that means . . . reports . . . about . . . your . . . wives. They say some of them are too young. And that could mean prison and the whole sex offender registration bit.”
Gordon flushes. Definitely the look of guilt. He snorts out a little laugh. He says, “The state machine. Slow. But . . . big. And . . . hungry.”
Says Ivy, “My feature on you is, if anything, a favorable character reference.”
Gordon’s face is still stone, in its color and how it would feel if you touched it now.
Ivy stands up abruptly, almost a leap, which catches the eye of the person at the next desk and a couple of people just coming into the newsroom, and they stare as Gordon stands up quickly. Tall and, yes, bull-built, powerfully built, and demoniacal when you consider the worst of the rumors.
Ivy opens her arms and leans into him, and with his billed cap in one hand dangling from his fingers at her back, he hugs her up hard against him and she cries without sound, just huff-huffs, and puts a big wetness on the front of his old patched green work shirt and her words audible to a few of the nearest desks, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Gordon rubs his beard across the top of her shimmery head and the boy gets up from his chair and thumps his billed cap against his leg embarrassedly and all the newsroom is poppingly hotly alert. Ivy’s editor, Brian Fitch, is stepping out of the managing editor’s office with an armload of old folders and printout sheets, and Brian looks to the face of the copy
editor nearest him, who throws up her hands and grins with the great marvel of this, everyone in the newsroom knowing who Gordon is, knowing from the rumors about pagan worship, the Satan worship, the child labor, child lust, child death, stashed weapons, the militia connections, the “forty” wives. So what does this make Ivy?
Eventually the tour. Then good-byes. Good-bye forever. Ivy will not ever go near that place or him again lest she go mad. After he and the boy amble away, she breaks into unsuccessfully suppressed wild sobs, hurries to the women’s room where she stays for over a half hour while the newsroom buzzes and bubbles with this, the kind of news it loves best.
For two days, Ivy tries to reach Gordon by telephone but nobody knows where he is “at the moment.”
But then he calls her.
She tells him in a rush, as if time counted, “I found out only a few minutes after you left the other day that the story went AP. I’m sorry, Gordon, but they added in things . . . like . . . that there has been controversy around you . . . which is true. Seems there’s been a lot of calls to their offices, not just ours . . . and AP’s been interviewing people right and left . . . including grandparents and ex-teachers of some of the Settlement kids who’ve come to the Settlement more recently, or recent teachers of kids who left the Settlement a few years ago. AP just says you are ‘controversial’ and mentions ‘passionate disapproval’ by ‘many’ . . . then, of course, some emphasis on kids lacking ‘education’ and lacking a ‘competitive environment,’ these as quotes.”
He hears her small tsk! He inhales, holds it. She rushes on. “Even with all the changes, the AP version is very short. Condensed. Really condensed. It . . . changes the tone of the piece from the way I wrote it. And the picture we never used for reasons. They seem to like that one a lot. In all the papers that are using the piece, they rewrite the copy and use that photo. One of the ones of you by the merry-go-round. Like I say, not the one I used. And it’s cropped. It’s this slightly fuzzy whir of creepy beasts in front of you and your face in sharp focus. You look . . .” She swallows. “Pretty scary.”
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 44