The School on Heart's Content Road

by Carolyn Chute

  We get five minutes for each visit. That’s what they give you. Then you have to leave after your five minutes are up. So many in the family to take up the next available five minutes. I need to make my five minutes count. But . . . I don’t touch him. I don’t take his hand. And Bree doesn’t touch him either. It’s like we’ve come to check out some museum exhibit, some science thing, maybe a fossil, something once preserved in ice. Mostly she and I just look at each other, in stolen glimpses. I always thought her face was terrible. But now the most deformed and terrible thing imaginable is lying on that pillow, breathing through broken teeth and tough-looking green tubes, both eyes bandaged, both ears bandaged, no beard, just purple and swollen “skin.” Gordon’s face, no longer good-looking—though he was never really movie-star material. It had more to do with his personality, the light behind the eyes and at least twenty types of smiles. But now . . . that face . . . it’s just garbage.

  Bree St. Onge.

  Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.

  Claire St. Onge.

  The one small and two large waiting rooms farther down the hall are always filled with us. We fill up seats. We stand along the walls. Then there are people who have come to see Gordon whom we don’t know. Only immediate family is allowed to see him. But they hang around anyway, waiting for news.

  Immediate family. As you can guess, the St. Onge immediate family has given more than one nurse a bit of a stutter.

  There are reporters too. Some identify themselves. We have agreed not to talk with them. But we try to be courteous. None of them act like jerks, so why should we? It’s just a kind of war of polite smiles. A war of patience.

  When Mary Wright, an old pal of Gordon’s, came down the hall, the reporters came to life. “Senator Wright, what brings you here?” She replies, “Same thing you’re here for.” She smiles. She is a petite person, but her smile is usually panoramic. Now her smile is spare.

  Marian, Gordon’s mother, does not hang out with us or eat from our baskets of food. I’m not sure where in the hospital she has been going off to, to wait alone. But she has been near. She and I go way back. It hurts to see her handsome face all swollen from constant sobbing. Once Whitney went up to her and hugged her, two lovely tall women, one older, one so young, those pertinacious St. Onge–De Paolo genes. The embrace was a long one, though not a single word was said. I believe there will come a time when Marian embraces all her grandchildren, will hold them dear. But not today. She still needs to pretend that her son is an ordinary man.

  We always have kids with us. They read to each other, brush one another’s hair, play word games, whittle out whistles and animals and little soldiers from basswood in satchels. Some knit or stitch. Some just slump against a parent and look bored. The teenagers whisper a lot. They walk the halls together, restless. They help change diapers or take little kids to the restrooms. “Don’t let them sit on the seats,” the mothers caution. The reply: “We’ll try not to.”

  Bonny Loo St. Onge speaks.

  During the night, Gordon stirs. The doctor tells us he’s not paralyzed, that he remembers who he is, where he was born, what year he was born, but not a lot of recent events, but some of that may eventually come back okay. He explains that there is sight in one eye but the other eye needs more surgery and more time—“severed ligaments” and something about the cornea. Trauma. And blah blah blah. The doctor smiles, says, “He’s tough. Give him a medal.”

  We cheer. Some of us scream and sing. Cheers and chants go up and down the hall. We are promptly told by a small unsmiling nurse to shut up or leave.

  In Augusta, the attorney general sits in his new remodeled office, a few boxes still unpacked.

  He stretches his arms over his head, phone receiver between ear and shoulder. He chuckles, drops his arms. “I would say this could be one of those times.” He listens, smiling. Then, “Yeah, yeah. That was when I was just a pup. I think you’ll find my tastes have changed.” He listens. Laughs again. “When?” He listens. “Right. Right.” He listens. Laughs. “Yeah, they were the only Democrats in the county. It was lonely for them.” He listens and he laughs heartily. Snorts. “Was that one of the figures in their coat of arms?” More hearty laughter.

  More listening, shifts in his wheeled office chair, reaches for his pen, writes on a pad. “Yes, uh-huh . . . right.” He listens. Writes. He is left-handed. His hand and the pen and pad are twisted as if in a pose of anguish or ardor, waiting for the caller’s next words. “I see.”

  He listens some more, pen raised.

  He listens even harder, pen raised.

  He listens, pen moving now, down toward the pad. “Arraignment date would be when?” He scribbles.

  More listening. “Richard York? With a Y? Well, is Bernie on this? He’s our Oxford County guy now.” He leans toward keyboard and screen, chair a soundless swiveling, cool leather shoulder-high. He taps into the recesses of the Maine justice system. He says, “Oh, of course. That’s the reality . . . Yes . . . Yes, I’ll see what I can do. You, uh—” He listens and mmms as he taps, pokes, taps, jabs, taps. Stops. Eyes sweep the screen. Then lock. “Well, now, it seems as though we don’t have to do anything here. Mr. St. Onge himself is not filing charges.”

  He listens. Then, “I have no clue. It’s not unlikely. But if you people want him out of there, he’s going to—”

  He listens. He laughs. He listens. “Well, yes. Sure.” He looks at his watch. “Okay.” He writes REX. He chuckles. He says gravely, “Great nickname. When he’s not assaulting his friends, what is he, a German shepherd?”

  S. A. Kashmar hangs up the phone, swiveling to scribble up an old, old, old-fashioned pink while-you-were-out memo. His thoughts.

  If you want bees to make honey, you have to let them fly around. If you want a large choice of patsies for when you need them, you have to keep them out of jail, keep them out and about. You want all these guys not to trust each other, okay, and you want them to act crazy—but also to be handy as a mop when you need to use their faces and names and bad reputations for what we must accomplish, which I cannot tell you, the public, about, because you, the public, can’t handle necessities and complexities. Hell, even some people here in this line of work can’t. The numbers of stars in their eyes could light the Superbowl playoffs into infinity.

  November

  One of the many calls Lisa Meserve has made from Boston to the Settlement, always scheduled and always answered with the long golden fingers of the child who never gives up.

  As always, the dark hair is barretted prettily, gushing in bubble curls from the latest Settlement-made ornament. As always, Jane keeps her face to the wall, away from those who might otherwise see her private expressions. Sometimes she stands. Sometimes she sits, if Gordon’s ancient wooden office chair isn’t filled with books, maps, letters, or junk. Today she sits. She doesn’t wear her powerful pink spy person’s glasses. There are just her clear black eyes.

  Without any help, she “sees” her mother’s eyes, blue “like wonderful jewels.” She listens to her mother’s voice, which sounds slow. She doesn’t know about the drugs called sedatives given out in jail to prevent wailing. She speaks. “Mum, Claire says you are postponed again in the trial thing.”

  She listens.

  Then, “But that’s stupid, Mum.”

  Her mother agrees. As usual. On the workings of the world, both Jane and Lisa have come to unfailing agreement.

  “Mum, tell them they are—”

  Her mother butts in with a woozy jokey moment.

  Jane laughs.

  Her mother tells her it’ll all work out. She explains this very slowly, almost gravely, due to the wail-preventing sedatives.

  Later next year, when Lisa is sentenced to a mandatory life sentence, to be served in a California women’s penitentiary, her wooziness comes naturally (drug free) as it does when a person faints while being nailed to a cross or tied to a wheel to be broken and dismembered and buried alive by pharaohs and queens or modern s
ystems working efficiently.

  Jane finds Mickey still living in his tree house. She visits awhile. Mostly painful silence.

  He passes the bag of Cajun Tacos to her, and her long fingers squirm happily inside the noisy bag.

  He watches her a minute while she isn’t looking at him. “So your mother . . .” He jiggles his foot.

  “What about her?”

  “Jail . . . what’s it like? Does she say, how . . . how bad it is?” He jiggles his foot faster.

  “Well, she gets to wear a very pretty orange thing.” Now she laughs and covers her face. Dark eyes peer out between her long golden fingers, her forehead wrinkled. “Actually, it’s hideous . . . orange and hideous.”

  “What’s her cell like, small?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He watches his own foot, tries to stop the jiggling. He says in a husky way, “Some people never get out.”

  Jane’s hands drop to her lap on top of the crinkly bag. She frowns. “In Boston, you get fed’ral trials. It’s in California, the prison, maybe.” Jane’s eyes flutter, the frown deepening, throat swallowing. “The judge needs a bashed brain. Like under a truck, I hope.” Then she gives him a narrow squinty look. “You are very curious about jail.”

  “Yeah, people I know are there.” He does not say Rex. Nobody here at the Settlement speaks the name since what happened happened.

  Still frowning and yet another hard swallow. “She’s probably wearing the awful orange thing.”

  “He.”

  “Oh. Maybe he likes orange.”

  “I doubt it.”

  Rex in jail.

  They come to his cell in a matter-of-fact way and take him to the visiting room. His lawyer is there, smelling like a car interior and fresh air, both alien smells now. The lawyer tells Rex things Rex cannot believe, and boy, this lawyer is unusually wound. Talking fast. Almost a squeak to his voice. Almost a giggle.

  Maybe he is as stunned as Rex is by this turn of events. How forgiving, this Guillaume St. Onge. Broken, mutilated, forgiving.

  Ruth York.

  He is telling her to please come get him. Everything is dropped. His mother can hear him over the telephone, swallowing, grave as ever.

  Rex free.

  In the rain, he waits. He lets the rain wash through his hair and over his face and heavy mustache, down his collar. His mother will arrive driving his truck, so he watches the street down there for the color red. Where the parking lot, court, and jail are it is high, like a battle position. Town of South Paris, Maine. The county seat. Cars passing. People like ants, shortsighted in their routines, breathless with their burdens, blinded by rain. Big sky. Big rainy white sky.

  Before he sees his truck, his mother’s face behind the glass, the rain has turned to a mix of snow that smells like nothing else in this world, each tiny flake designed with care and dainty laborious concentration by the huge hand of God, purely perfect.

  Lee Lynn remembers the first day Gordon was home.

  He was odd, sweet and odd. The dark universe was uneasy, and the power of this planet to heal was stuttery. We had a lot of rain that week, funny rain, rain mixed with snow, or sleet or freezing rain, then switching back to warm and windy. And there was thunder and flashes of light, which is not what you’d expect in November.

  Everyone wanted to be near him. In some ways it was like a celebration, but a most gentle and reverent kind.

  We spent a lot of time in the Winter Kitchen and the Cooks’ Kitchen, where he sat in that old oak rocker near the stove, surrounded by all the older folks, some half-witted, others clear, and I saw to it that he had many little bitty cups of honeyed sweet-fern tea. And he interrogated the old people as he never had before, wanting to know how this or that thing was done back then: farming, logging, sawyering, machinery, sickness remedies, wool carding, and all the stories of record-breaking snows. He seemed to no longer be a species of the now. And some words he had lost, so he defined them. Like “the thing you ride in looks to be stuck in the stuff.”

  We were expecting Réal—you pronounce this Ray-ahl—Gordon’s third cousin from Aroostook, but Réal’s wife, Terry, and teen daughter, Ray-Lynn, showed up too, so there was very special music: parlor music, healing music, fiddle and guitar, and the concertina, which our Ricardo played as if he’d done it all his life. “Cine Cetta,” “Waltz of the Wallflowers,” “Ashokan Farewell,” “She Beg She Mour.”

  Gordon rocked slowly to and fro with such a look of distance in his eyes, those pale dark-lashed eyes, normally so full of play and green-white fire. And his hair now! Part crewcut, part red scarring from the surgery and wounds, the beard hurrying back, long bristle by long bristle.

  Eddie Martin said, “He looks like roadkill.”

  A child was always near, hugging Gordon’s head, a child standing at his chair like a sentry or attendant, eager to please him, whispering and leaning; some small kids sat between his knees and feet. The image of crows standing around carnage crossed my mind. But why? Gordon always attracted children.

  There was talk about the major repairs necessary on the greenhouses, and pouring the foundation for the new machining Quonset hut, the ground not fully frozen yet, the fierce freeze normal to November nowhere in sight.

  The Christmas wreath orders were good that year, neither hurt nor helped by the newsworthiness of the Settlement. CHRISTMAS TREES FOR SALE, CUT YOUR OWN signs posted down by the guardhouse. Meat cutting as usual. This meant you’d have to have people in and out, probably strangers. Gordon seemed disinterested in all this. Quiet. He watched us talk. Decisions were made in his presence, but without much input from him, just a little joke, a nod, and his new quiet smile.

  More music. Lots of music. The Aroostook cousins rosined up the bow, prodded the guitar, went at it with leaps and lunges, effervescent (like soda pop) eyes. “Give Me Your Hand” (that one sounded like a little poky donkey and rider in a lighter moment of a lite TV Western). Then “Avant de s’en aller,” “Westphalia Waltz,” “Lovers’ Waltz,” “Orange Rouge.” And “Road to Lisdoonvarna,” that one a bit lovely and haunting at first, then a kind of wide-eyedness to it, very nice. But I remember when they finished playing “Metsa Kukkia,” swoopy and busy and Old World, he said quietly, “Make that again.” He had no expression. His face was like a picture of his face caught between expressions. It was the kind of music that would make you want to stand up and dance, dive about, flinging your partner around, not fast, not like rock and roll but a graceful violence. But he didn’t move from his chair. Didn’t rock his chair. Just stared into the music. I don’t know what he saw.

  When the cousins were finished, he said, “Sound that again,” in the same dead voice, same stony face.

  I said, “Can’t you say please?”

  The cousins laughed.

  He said, “Yeah, please.”

  And again it was played.

  The next day, there was snow, the kind of snow that changes to rain at noon, then to ice, then back to snow, making a cold mush, and so the messages were pretty sparse in the box by the gatehouse. Only four. Among them, this handwritten letter from Ruth York.

  Dear Gordon,

  Thank you for what you did. No one can talk against you, as far as I am concerned.

  I always knew you had a specialness, but now I know it best. You know Ricky would never do anything like that on his own, especially to you, but that blond young guy Andy who brought the pictures and got him all worked up, like when he has the Vietnam dreams. If I were you, I wouldn’t hold on to Andy much longer as a friend. I think you should know that he done that. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

  Glory has moved out and broke my heart. We got along so well. We none of us ever fought, not her and her Dad either. But there was something edgy when she left. She was probably in a shock about what Ricky did to you. Like me. I am still in a state. Even when Marsha was living here, Marsha and Ricky never had fights like some do. It was just that other man she had to have. And what did R
icky do about the other man? Nothing. He just let it go. He just kept it all to himself, a silent sufferer.

  He has always been like that. He was an easy child. Easier than his brother. And then Glory was always just like him, even when she was a baby. As you know, seeing her so much when she was growing up. I just hope she don’t drink no more. She can’t handle it. I don’t know what’s going on now, if she’s drinking or not. I don’t know. But I wish on a star for us all to be happy.

  I am sorry this all happened. You was always family to us, you and Ricky like brothers. It is so spooky to me how he changed that day. Ricky has lost customers. But since you dropped charges, he can keep his guns, which as you know have always meant everything to him. I think he is trying very hard now to figure himself out, how he changed like he did, and maybe someday make it up to you. Someday it’ll all work out, I guess. I heard you’re going to need doctors to work on your face and your teeth. I will pray for you. You were always such a handsome boy. Your parents were handsome people. You had looks, but you have always had personality to boot. Just remember, nobody can take that from you: your personality.

  Love, Ruth

  Gordon stares at this letter, folded too many times, the creases softened and damp from the damp day. The paper is lavender, cool to touch.

  He never knew anything about any Vietnam dreams. Rex never even talked about the actual Vietnam.

  But he knows Rex hates this Ricky business. But that’s mothers for you. And who in hell is Andy? Blond? He can’t think of any blond Andy guy he’d call a friend. And pictures? Pictures of him and Glory? Oh, boy.

  He sighs miserably.

  He has almost no memory of that party on the lake after the True Maine Militia event, or of the True Maine Militia event itself, or the next day, and certainly not the next. But those who remember the party on the lake have told him what they thought he needed to know. No one mentioned a camera. No one mentioned the name Andy.

  Rex alone.