The Eskimo Pie is less frosty now due to Mickey being detoured, waiting for a customer who took a Record Sun from the rack. And then the Bean behind the counter says to the customer, “See this big spread on the Settlement? Picture of ol’ Gordo looking like out of that scene in Murder at Midnight with all the carnival stuff.” He flaps and crinkles his way through the pages.
The other guy laughs. “That whole place is a carnival.”
“Well, this is him”—the Bean is pushing his finger over the colorful picture—“by some sort of a merry-go-round.”
The other guy titters almost girlishly. “Like having your desk at Disneyland . . . Morrisseys send their kids up there.”
“You ever been up to one of their solstice marches?” Big grin.
The other guy howls. “At four in the morning!?” Shakes head, eyes wide.
Bean sighs pleasantly. “Well, you know they set up a windmill with Whitmarsh and . . . uh . . . what’s their names . . . uh. . . .”
“You mean those on the bog?”
“Yeah.”
Head shaking. “Can’t place their name.”
More talk while Mickey waits and waits.
Then, “People been calling Gordo the Prophet.”
“Oh, boy. Waco, Texas, in Maine.”
More talk. Quieter now.
Of course, Mickey’s eyes were riveted on the rack.
Now, on the thick see-through ice-cream-cooler top, he goes through the paper, lifting each page in a heavy way, like a rock, like under it anything could squirm or march out.
Turns out to be the whole first page of a thick inside section. He cannot read very well the words in columns or in lines under the pictures. But he can read the pictures themselves like an old-fashioned Indian on hot deer tracks. He studies the photos. Kids making papier-mâché sculptures, picking cukes.
Then there’s one of Gordon St. Onge, aka the Prophet. Yeah, Mickey has seen him in the distances around town, big distances, never this close with the pale eyes looking right into Mickey’s own. One of the guy’s eyes glows electric. Like a lightbulb with gas inside it, not an eyeball of solid stuff. Probably due to sun on half his face, which also cuts his beard in half, part dark, part sunshiny.
Blurring across, some to the left, some to the right, a bunch of heads, long necks, rears, tails. Some heads are eyeless. A very weird merry-go-round, yes, kind of blurry, while the Prophet’s face, shoulders, and one hand are crystal clear.
For two days, Record Sun reporter Ivy Morelli tries to reach Gordon on the phone.
Instead, she gets dozens of others: children, women, men, once even a baby that made obscene gasping noises and sucking noises and breathing noises and only one word: “Dah!” Then, finally, Gordon calls her.
She hurriedly tells him that the story went AP. “I’m sorry, Gordon, but they added in things . . . like 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 have come to the Settlement 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 . . . and then of course some emphasis on kids lacking education and a competitive environment; these are quotes.”
She stops for one small tsk.
“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. Closer than the one we used. And cropped. You look”—she swallows—“pretty scary.”
Claire St. Onge remembers the days following the media stories.
Everything seemed to snap into place. It felt like a thing already existing once, maybe in another life, just needing to be reassembled. We could never go back to what we had before the Record Sun feature.
The phone, for one thing; it seemed to burst. Reporters from big outof-state papers and magazines. A couple of TV producers wanting to do specials or segments. Radio talk-show hosts inviting Gordon to go speak about our lives as separatists.
“Aren’t they afraid of all the stockpiled AKs and tanks and such?” wondered our Eddie Martin, with one of his happy chortles.
Gordon said no to all the media calls. But then there were calls he was thrilled with. People interested in joining the solar-wind community, or the furniture cooperatives, or the CSAs, or all three, in hopes of restoring interdependence in their economically and socially devastated little towns.
Gordon loved these calls but was now tied to the phone a good part of each evening.
We got a few weird calls, people saying goofy things or making dangerous noises.
The mail increased to six times what it had been before. This included media people, who, finding the phone’s busy signal a challenge to their patience, wrote to ask for interviews.
Funny, not one educator wrote to speak for or against our philosophy. But the editorial pages of the Record Sun, even the editorial pages of other papers, were loaded with letters that decried the fact that our children were not pushed into competitive mode, not aiming for high scores and “excellence.” They insisted these children would pay later. They said that not to prepare kids for the highly competitive workplaces of the global economy and institutions of higher learning was irresponsible, even cruel. Some said they weren’t against homeschooling if it was state-monitored.
A week later, letters were still appearing in the papers. Some called the Settlement a labor camp and brute school. Several insisted that authorities should “get those children out.”
“They don’t even have flush toilets!” one letter gasped.
We heard some of the radio talk shows, hashing over whether or not the FBI should be brought in. I remember one talk-show host who was really angry at this suggestion, and, while cutting this caller off in midword, said gravely, “Let’s keep this conversation out of the realm of the absurd.” And right then, a caller got through who ran a small private school up on the coast that worked with principles similar to ours in the areas of reading and writing. With the deep kindly patient voice of reason, she explained that forcing children to read too early will just turn them off, that before the age of seven they are often still in the motor stage and need to master any hands-on skills at that time joyfully. She called the special ed experience a “social crucifixion, especially in the antisocial competitive atmosphere most schools create.”
Then her beautiful strong patient voice was gone, replaced by shrill ones, all sorts of memorized propaganda about the importance of singling out special children and honor students, and the word excellence was repeated so often that the hiss of all those x’s and c’s was starting to give me a kind of migraine.
On that same show, there came the inevitable. A caller reported that he had heard things about Gordon, that Gordon was a pedophile. That there were stockpiled weapons, drugs, pagan worship. The radio host made no comment except “thanks for your call,” and then another caller said we were Fundamentalist Christians and Jew-haters. The next caller used the word Nazis. The talk show host himself called us separatists. The next caller said, “They are not allowed outside their gates. Only in chaperoned groups, especially the women . . . his women.”
There was mention of a possible group suicide and a probable siege with government agents. The host challenged this statement by asking, “Are you the FBI? How do you come by this knowledge?”
One very low-voiced man, a kind of Boris Karloff sound-alike, spoke of his “knowledge” that very little girls at “that school” were pregnant.
“Truly amazing,” the talk-show host said, in an “oh, wow!” way. His disgust was gone now. He seemed to be drunkenly resigned to the titillating turn his show had tak
en.
Days passed. People started coming around to the Settlement in person. Some said they had trouble finding us. But they found us.
One night, I came upon Gordon and his cousin Aurel arguing. Some of what Gordon snarled out was in French.
But Aurel was all French. Valley French. Ah, those Acadian swooping Rs! With a few English words like fuck you! and idiot! and Ivy Morelli. Mostly Aurel raged at Gordon, and Gordon just tried to deflect. He said it would have happened eventually anyway, and he was sorry. But his sorrys weren’t soft, they were yelled. And the two of them paced around like cats with their backs prickled up.
Meanwhile, as ever, there was so much work to be done here. Gordon and Paul Lessard and Ray Pinette and Eddie Martin and Glennice, all of them who were in the co-op and CSA stuff, they were either in huddles with strangers, answering mail or talking on the phone. Gordon was mostly missing his meals.
One of these mornings, Gordon came late for breakfast to the piazza and slumped down at the head of the two long joined tables, all the seats empty, everyone gone off to their jobs. He was rubbing his face and eyes, a slow self-massage, a self-soothing.
I sat down next to him without pulling my chair in.
You, crow, superintending the new day, shift easily on your roost of the topmost triangular green-Popsicle color plate of Tyrannosaurus rex’s mighty wooden head. No Settlement children presently peer out through the teeth (two-by-sixes painted white).
You have a special interest in Claire St. Onge. She leaves dry corn for you just outside the windows of the interestingly small ice-shack-sized sunroom off the east side of her cottage. Everything so cramped, too cozy, stuffed with baskets, notebooks, picture books showing tools and weapons of people gone so long they preside only in the ore layer, lava and ledge, pressed like souvenirs. Or in the tannic-soggy peat pools, where some fell in and drowned and those who loved and missed them fell elsewhere, fell and fell and fell. Some might be in museums alongside stuffed crows.
Also in Claire’s sunroom is a tea table carved from basswood in the shape of a table-sized mushroom, which you often admire through the glass.
But nobody is home at the little cottage. Claire is here in the midst of Settlement life. You hear her voice in one of the piazzas of the shops. You love that voice, which calls you Crow but in the old language of the Passamaquoddy. She is not speaking your name now but his, the towering one, Gordon St. Onge, there beyond the checkered shadows of screen. Both are talking of less interesting things than dried corn.
You know the woman loves the man who sits beside her, each in a straight wooden chair. But who would guess? The face of Claire St. Onge is ever so stark of expression, eyes leveled on whoever or whatever it is that turns her head. Reflections of the kettles and dippers, and the many strewn Settlement-made ceramic plates and cups painted a pretty eggnog yellow, purl and flurry on the glass parts of her specs. A dimple by her mouth once seemed girlish; now, at age fifty, it increases her severity with a look of clenching jaw.
She is short while standing, short while sitting. And fat. Not pudgy. Not chubby. Not stocky. But fat. Her long graying black hair, often worn up and out of the way, sometimes with Swiss-looking embroidered sewing-shop trim or a barrette, is free today. It forks partly over one mighty arm and mighty breast, partly down her back. Her work shirt is pale chambray and tight. Her wedding ring is silver and plain as are the rings of all the St. Onge wives, none etched, knurled, or exclusive.
She raises her chin, staring off flatly into a chaotic memory. With her old steel-rimmed glasses (found in a trunk with ancient tools?) she possesses that sepia dignity of all 1800s people preserved in frames today as they waited then for the photographer’s black-powder flashes.
Beside her at the table (empty of other breakfasting Settlementers), the towering one’s face lurches through dozens of expressions. In a photo of any era, he would blur or be caught with one or both eyes closed, the illusion of no mouth or two mouths. Claire and Gordon. Such a pair! And truly in years past, they were only a pair, not this branching out, thicker tree of their current lives.
In a future time, Claire remembers more of that morning.
Through the nearby doorway into the Cooks’ Kitchen there was yipping and yowling like coyotes, the breakfast clean-up crews in true form. Mostly teens long-leggedly galloping by with bins or trays, a few smaller helpers trailing along asking squeaky questions and carrying a real big spoon or towel. I forgot which kid it was who patted me on the head, but it was Heather who kissed me on the head as she passed by with a wet rag in each hand. Heather was twelve. You see, it was their little joke about how I had become much shorter. Actually, they had grown too tall for me to kiss or pat them on the head anymore.
Glennice pushed a ceramic cup of coffee toward Gordon’s hand and offered to take mine and refill it, but I was done.
I looked sideways at Gordon’s eyes, swollen, almost purpled from no sleep. “You’re damn late,” I said.
He took my hand.
I sighed.
He said, “Do you think it’ll let up some, all these people? Think they’ll lose interest in a while?”
“I don’t know. But this is more than we can handle, even the co-op stuff—especially the co-op stuff.” I hugged myself. It could have been fall. Cold mountain smells moved foggily with the smells of cold eggs and smoky meat grease.
He released my hand.
I made a teasy face at him. “You don’t want to hear that, do you?” I pulled my chair a tad closer, nearer to his warmth.
His chin was up, collars open. He was in a sort of heat.
“Somebody I know is always saying that nobody can save the world. Let me see . . . .” I pretended to search my memory. “He sometimes backslides. But mostly he’s been pretty committed to the idea of doom.”
He looked so suddenly into my eyes, it made my insides hop. He grinned.
I was trying not to smile. “Years ago he—this man I know—he said the world of humans was a bucket of maggots.” I tried to make my voice deep. “A bucket of maggots.”
His grin stretched wider, twisted, overcrowded bottom teeth and straight uppers. Eyes. His whole head. Too merry. He said, “Who is this dude, some crank?”
I could see my young Gordon in the shifting but honest eye of my memory. More colt than stallion. A redneck bookworm in his off hours from the mighty DePaolo construction biz. I liked my history texts sunny-side up. He dove into the cold sea of the total human life story. In those days, I feared he would hang himself. Now, on the big porch, I sighed. “He was young. But his words were not frivolous. Civilizations always end in starvation, tree stumps, washaway soils, madness.”
He looked away. He seemed to be admiring the near mountain behind the Quonset huts. I’m sure what he was seeing was free energy for everyone, old and new inventions, spinning, humming, booming, including some of his latest rambling about random jitter, microscopic lightning, electromagnetic energy, zero-point energy—endless energy, enough to purify water—to undo the crisis of the modern age.
I laced my fingers together in my lap primly. In those early days of our marriage I knew that to love him meant I too would dive deeply into that sea of the total story.
Then, in the 1980s he got the Settlement idea and threw himself into its creation like forty men. He never rested. He was tired, loud, and content.
But once we were not an idea but the Settlement, and the place was full of kids and our own history unfolding, and food was stored and spring water bubbled and celebrations became traditions, there was time for study again. Time to look outward. Time.
So now, there at the table in the cool leafy morning, sun striking the yellow coffee cup near my hand, I murmured, “I just tend to my chores now. And my little job at the university. Correct papers. Trudge on.”
He frowned.
“I can’t go back and forth so fluidly as you do, my love,” said I.
He rubbed his face some more. Rubbed his hair, his ears. Yawned big.
“But I’m okay. It’s okay. Really.”
“I’m sorry.” His eyes were so pale in those Black Irish Italian French Indian dark lashes. Their violet exhaustion overtook my own.
“Don’t be sorry. You know when I left you and went to live with Danny and then came back, I wasn’t running from Danny. I was running toward you. I am not going to say anything mean about Danny except that in this world where we find ourselves struggling to understand, Danny was . . . ah . . . well, he’s a plastic light-up Halloween pumpkin and you are Portland Headlight.”
Gordon snorted.
In the kitchen a clang! and a teen boy voice, “Watch out!” A few shouts of emergency. Then cheering.
“Right now I’m in a place of hope,” Gordon said apologetically.
I didn’t look into his face but at another memory, one of his other faces. The time our friends from Waterville showed up with a Panamanian whose name we took an hour to learn to pronounce right. It was a winter evening. The man, part Mayan, part African, part European, was dressed like Maine, a knitted red-and-green Pierre cap and huge socks.
He told of how two years before, in order to permanently replace the military of Panama with “North American” military, and to “possess my country,” the city where he lived was leveled “in the night, just before Christmas by ‘North American planes,’” and his brother, a labor union official, was executed. “Many executed. Professors of the university. Priests. People of the assembly.” He had later helped “shovel open” the mass graves “where the North American soldiers dumped the bodies.”
He and the others wore masks and bagged the bodies. He said people were wailing “when they recognized a little dress or maybe the watch on the rotted wrist with no hand.” He said, “Four thousand people at Christmas mashed by tanks—some as already dead bodies, some wounded and alive—and many executed or bombed. One got melted by some horrible weapon. My friend, he saw. Maybe laser? Whole person turn to blood like hemorrhage of every blood vessel.”
Gordon’s face had tightened. Then it went ice white.
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 6