The School on Heart's Content Road (53 page)

Lights are dimmer in the kitchen of tables than in the kitchen of stoves, but Settlement-made candles hither and yon make a greenish light on faces and throats, the same green as the candles' wicked green and weedy scents.

A catlike sound, a very new baby, stops suddenly.

Groaning laughter at a bad joke trying too hard to be good.

Stories. Always the stories.

Gossip. Always the gossip.

Gordon St. Onge sits with a table of snowy-haired solemn-faced women and men who have eaten before sunrise to get that out of the way. Teacups, coffee cups. A dried-out muffin. Each set of hands clasps a fan of playing cards. A spindly hunched-into-contortion woman slides her eyes to Gordon's face and winks. He squeezes both eyes shut. A code? Are they cheating?

Gordon doesn't have cards, just one Zeus-sized arm around a woman who is asleep. Her cards still rest where they were dealt. In a moment or two, her nap is over and she awakes with a smile. Pats Gordon's arm and speaks, part French, part English. All brightness, not at all sleepy.

The cards whir and slap, open and close. A gravelly voice speaks of the rain. Gordon now watches a man wearing a brown dressy sweater and pastel shirt. He dolls up like this for meals and for Settlement meetings (announced on the bulletin side of the kitchen archway). This gentleman's chin lifts slightly, faking a good hand.

Gordon's chair goes back suddenly as he sees a storm of small boys headed his way.
Swamp monster!
they scream.

“Red ants!” Gordon groans, covering his eyes. Cringing. The wob of keys on his belt jangling almost tunefully.

The kids (red ants) cover him, some climbing up both sides, some just muckling onto his legs. Some tug his shirt.

Guitar strumming mixes in with the screams, bad jokes, whirring of cards, oven doors. On a foot-high stage in a corner far from the tall windows, sort of shadowy now, a teen, maybe twenty, wearing a chocolate brown satiny Nehru jacket, gives the breakfasters some early morning chords, heartbreakingly beautiful. Three-dimensional paper fish churn lazily on strings over his head. No kazoos yet. Eventually, a gang will whip out their trusty kazoos for more cheery wake-up music.

Gordon is now effortlessly holding a screeching four-year-old upside down over the pack of red ants, who are snapping and clawing at the
victim's upright red hair. “Enough, Guillaume!” one woman scolds Gordon, and whatever it is she says in her snappy Aroostook French seems to work.

Within moments, Gordon is crossing the room to a balding man in a denim barn jacket spotted blackly with rain.

Gordon says, “Hey, man,” in a grave way and embraces the guy. Then, pulling away, shakes his head.

The guy says, “He's better off. That was no life, ya know?” Eyes swirling with tears, he speaks in even phrases of his father in some nearby town. In these ways the Settlement can never be and was never intended to be a barred-up place of separatists.

“Your ma got anyone there right now?” Gordon wonders.

“My sister Ginny, but only till Tuesday.”

Arriving in the Cook's Kitchen now, a very drenched and arrow-straight Mickey Gammon. A light step, but of course he is noticed by the breakfast crew and cooed over. And the cook herself, Bonny Loo, bullies him into taking a biscuit from a pan. Biscuit burns him but he hangs on to it manfully, nodding thanks.

But he isn't noticed yet by Gordon, who, beyond the archway, still listens to the man in the barn jacket and now suggests, “Let's get a crew together to go over and at least take care of the hay. I'll put it up on the schedule.” And then within a moment he has hoisted a diapered just-walking little guy up against one shoulder, his small face pinked from sadness. Points toward another little guy who is leaving the scene on a homemade wooden Trojan-style cow (yes, cow) on wheels. Disappears now through the dozens of tall legs of the breakfast crews and breakfasters coming and going.

Against Gordon's shoulder the child sniffs back nose tears, then wipes his nose across Gordon's shirt, today a plaid of lime and red, almost matching the floor tiles. The child's hair is a thick sponge of copper-colored curls.

One of the card players, a tall straight woman with a white braid, has found Gordon, tugs his sleeve, winks.

Now a wife, also tall: Penny St. Onge. Tucks something in Gordon's shirt pocket, a receipt or maybe a saw logs order, maybe battery level readings or a call on the farmhouse phone.

The old woman and the less old woman vanish into the crowd.

Gordon looks into the face of the child gripped loosely in his giant arm. “My lamb,” he says, in a husky way, his throat now less a vortex of desperate words, more a harbor of simple prayer. He reaches to place his hand on the little boy's head.

Maybe the boy, Mickey Gammon, might wonder, as many have, how this father, this husband, this cousin or buddy to all, this giant guy—but indeed, only one guy—could give any one other person enough. How? When spread so wide, so thin, so all about? Not when one friend, one father, one fellow soul is all some of us request of this world. Anything more than that is just a state of drowning.

Saturday.

Twelve members of the Border Mountain Militia, not including Willie Lancaster (who is “busy,” they say), get a tour of the Settlement's shortwave setup. It has an impressive tower structure between two Quonset huts, not on the bald mountain, as was once considered. There is a little studio, its broadcast capabilities as yet nil. “A project that has not yet been top priority,” Gordon tells them.

They are also led uphill to see the windmills and then down again for some of the solar stuff. They stand around, some with hands in pockets, for it is a smarting cold day. Snarly, sort of. Bit of wind. No BDU shirts or patches visible, though three of them wear military boots. Army caps.

Down at the old farm place, the rotund ash tree, which had turned early, has leaves flying around on the sand and grass in fingered clumps, yellow edged in mauve. Inside, in the cluttery dining room, the men have a meeting. Nine Settlementers join them, including young Butch Martin, Eddie's oldest, and fifteen-year-old Cory St. Onge. Also Mickey Gammon, who is now both Border Mountain Militia
and
a Settlement person. And, with some embarrassment, has connections with the girlie militia.

They talk about the mail Gordon has been getting from patriots around the country, invitations to attend meetings or just to exchange information. Kentucky. North Carolina. Western Mass. Colorado. Florida. Idaho. Ohio. Oklahoma. Montana. Texas. Rex advises which ones to avoid and which to go for. Rex pushes something across the
table to Gordon. It's a patch, olive and black. Then he issues patches to the other Settlement men. He says, “I suggest the group in western Mass. See them first.”

Late-afternoon sun, autumnly and solid and cold as a refrigerated peach, roams entirely to the other side of the building. And so this causes a backyard maple and the blue-violet shadows from some old sheds to make a polychrome flush on the dining room walls and on several overly serious faces.

Gordon looks at his patch, front and back, then positions it on the table in front of him so that the mountain lion—or bobcat or lynx, whatever it is, in its dark border of words—is perfectly upright.

Gordon says into Rex's eyes, “I was sort've hoping you guys would go with us.”

“Of course,” says Rex. And he actually smiles.

Gordon says, “In a convoy, right?”

Rex makes a disgusted face. “Not exactly a convoy.”

Gordon says, “Think they'll listen to me?”

Rex is sitting very straight, eyes into Gordon's eyes. “Don't say
democracy
and don't get overexcited. All right?”

Gordon grins. “Okay, captain.” Gordon looks over into the faces of Ray Pinette, Paul Lessard, Stuart Congdon, Rick Crosman, Gary Kennard, and Eddie and Butch Martin, who happen to be watching him. He sighs. He looks down again at the patch. “Well,” he says cheerily, “this is it.”

Meanwhile, Mickey Gammon's own wide, alert, wolfy eyes press upon an old dish hutch, where a heartily and hysterically pink ceramic cherub, which is sort of flying, is definitely pointing at him, Mickey. The cherub's lips smile wicked pleasantly.

Secret Agent Jane in love.

He is the new person. He is of the Milishish but beautiful, with a little hair thing in back and nice eyes. I wish he would notice me. If I had new earrings, maybe. And a new outfit from
stores
. Something bright like pink. If I went out on a date with him, I would probably die of happiness with one small kiss. Then a big kiss. But he spends every
minute with the sole cars. His name is Mickey but they call him Hey, Mister Sole Man. Last night with these secret glasses I watched him at supper eat a whole pile of FISH and gross spiced stuff, and I could tell he was suffering.

In the cold blue-wallpapered dining room of the old farm place, Gordon buttons the sleeves of the stiff BDU shirt.

Old Lucienne, one of the Aroostook tantes who live
here
now, in Egypt, stands behind him in the doorway and says something softly in French. And he, in French, replies. Softly.

She
tsks
.

He picks up the olive-green pistol belt from the table and twists the buckle into place, the belt snug around his waist outside the jacketlike shirt.

Lucienne points at the mirror, again
tsk
ing.

He steps up to the mirror, which is small and only shows the collar of the jacket and his face. He can't really admire the full effect, those blossomlike shapes of woodland camo: greens, tan, black, brown.

He hunches a shoulder up to see the patch Lucienne has sewn on the sleeve for him. She had
offered
.

Now she places a hand on the middle of his back and he turns and looks into her face, which is a storm of fine lines all summoning their concern over the scratchiness of this shirt. Her eyes a summery blue. For the moment, she is his buddy, in collusion over this, his transformation. Member of an armed citizens' militia, so-called terrorist.

In a future time, Claire St. Onge (Gordon's only
legal legallegal
wife, although actually now legally an ex) remembers Our Purple Hope.