The School on Heart's Content Road (13 page)

Some of the strangers were coming up onto the porches, invited in by those of our emissaries who had gone out to greet them. A good-sized little mob of strangers, maybe thirty at first, then thirty more, came and found places at the tables, including tables on the adjoining piazzas. We got out every dish and bowl. Our almost-sacred solstice breakfast dishes, yeah, even those, normally reserved for that “soiree.” Hand-painted. Mostly on yellow: windmills, smiling suns, animals, flowers, and funny-faced bugs. Only a few of these new people had brought a dessert or casserole. Our usual Sunday guests, attracted by the flyers, almost always brought food. But with this mob, the food we'd prepared wasn't stretching—and there still were
more
people straggling across the Quad. Bonny Loo and her crew were throwing together emergency soup, biscuits, and several pans of yellow cake.

More people came up the road. More people gathered on the Quad, out under the tall high-limbed trees, marveling at the dinosaurs and Martians, asking questions.

And more people left. A lot used camcorders and expensive-looking cameras from a distance, sweeping their lenses around as if taking in the scene of a publicized murder, then driving out fast, raising the blond dust.

As still more folks came up on the porches, most of them quite courteous and friendly, we would find them a place to squeeze in at a table. And they always recognized Gordon, so easy to pick out, a head taller than most of the other Settlement men he was sitting with, and like the AP photo (Ivy's, actually) by the merry-go-round, his devilish dark and gray beard and dark-lashed, pale, dangerous-looking eyes perhaps caused the visitors to feel a little pleasant thrill of fear. He did not rise up out of his seat to go and be gracious, and only a few went near him. This was neither Gordon as we knew him to be on a typical Sunday nor the Gordon of our breakfast talk a few days earlier, gooey and hopeful.

Usually when those few Sunday visitors arrived, he was all over them, pawing, teasing. And he might get a little drunk. Or
too
drunk, loud and foolish. During our sing-alongs, he'd beller all the words off key.
And after our history plays, he'd often do his dove whistle and stomp his feet and be the last to stop clapping. He might lead a group of guests and helpful Settlement kids up to the mountain to see the windmills. Sometimes he would take them up in a caravan of electric buggies and tractors. I remember him once leading the caravan, himself on one of the really small electric buggies, him with his knees up to his chin, a really oversized person on that thing, with a middle-aged visitor, a guy dressed in his best Sundays, clinging to his, Gordon's, waist like a motorcycle mama.

Gordon loved people. But this? This was not part of his dream. This was media cheap. Now he whispered to me that it was going to get ugly before it got better.

I remember one guy who was with a little group of maybe two couples, two or three, I forget exactly. But I remember his face. He wore glasses and a golf cap of Christmas-tree green, real long narrow visor. He drank from a cup of coffee and watched our Barbara taking away some empty platters and dishes and his eyes slid to the shop doorways, the outside walls of the building shingled and stained dark brown, then the dangling bright mobiles of glass and pottery and wood. And he looked across the row of faces in deep chairs along one wall, old Mo and Helen and Annie B and Chlea, all of them with their mouths hung open, even Chlea, who is only in her thirties, but retarded, her lips thick and too bright, her eyes set with the Down's slant. Another woman, Vera, who had a couple of strokes the year before, could barely hold her head up, but on her lap was a sleeping toddler nearly naked, bare feet
very
dirty like little browned doggy paws. We were a mixed people. Not sorted, graded, or scored.

The man's eyes moved on, on to other faces, other surfaces of glass, wood, and screens with dappled sun. And flesh. How those sneering eyes violated my home!

After the crowds were gone, we found our nice leafy-smelling compost toilets dripping and smeared like restrooms in a bar or roadside tourist stop.

Next morning, a seasonable August deep-bone chill, we didn't have the inside “winter kitchen” tables set for eating and wished we had.

We all munched breads and whatever was left of the eggs and cold chicken. There was no coffee. Everyone was in a kind of mortified hysteria, murmuring about the previous day. Gordon stood and spoke quietly, but we all heard him. We had all stopped whatever it was we were saying when we saw him push back his seat and wave his arm. He said, “No more ads and flyers for Sunday meals.”

One of the kids of the Good Neighbor Committee called out, “But it wasn't the flyers that got all those people! It was the newspaper stuff!”

“Doesn't matter,” Gordon said thickly, like he'd swallowed his arm or a shoe. “Those flyers give directions.”

“Not fair!” called a really small squeaky child. A noble protest.

Gordon looked out into the cold morning, at the impressive wooden Tyrannosaurus rex, purple cow, and spaceship, the really tall high-limbed trees of the Quad, and back at the little kid who had spoken. His face was still expressionless, and unchallengeable. But his voice was kindly. “Let's try it for a while, Fiona. Till things calm down.”

Bonny Loo remembers.

A bunch of the older boys were sent down to make a gate, down where the dirt road comes in off the tar road. It was actually just two posts, with a removable pole across and a hand-painted sign: KEEP OUT.

Forty-eight hours later.

The
Record Sun
features a color photo on the back page, which is, of course, as highly visible as the front page. It shows a lovely shady woodsy dirt road with spots of sun and a horizontal sapling pole with a KEEP OUT sign tacked on it. The caption includes the words “separatists” and “barring intruders” and “their leader” and “seems more nervous” and there are words it does not exactly use, words between the lines, words implied, words aquiver, tantalizing, hot and bothered, words that are felt on the skin and beneath the skin of that great big anxious public.

This too goes AP, and within days the written words and the unwritten
felt
words are finding every household of the nation, yeah, this great
big anxious nation. The name Gordon St. Onge is not a household word yet, but it has begun to ring a bell with quite a few.

Out of pain medicine again.

Britta Gammon, who is Mickey and Donnie's mother, is not always reliable, you see, because her sadness can sweep her away at any hour. But today she has made eggs, a big batch, and there's more greens, which Mickey has brought from militiaman Artie Mitchell's family's garden, although Britta doesn't know what to do with fresh greens and is right now boiling them to a slime.

She has always been “a lady” and yet too rough with her life and with things, like food and pans and plates. A tender hard person. She was a “Portland girl,” she'll tell you proudly, with a
nice education.
“I'm not a kitchen type. Not some hag.”

But
nice education
meant high school diploma. How quickly the bar was raised on that, eh? Now you need not just a diploma, but a bunch of degrees to be somebody.

Her dream was Boston, Boston rush, Boston civilization, and to have a kitchen with conveniences, a kitchen that didn't make you old. Yes, she had had good grades in school and the guidance counselor had urged her to take up nursing. How ugly! All that skin and stink and scabbiness and death.

“Be a stewardess!” her friend Maryanne suggested. A stewardess! Her pretty eyes. Her shape, her smile. And good grades, yes, the keys to escape. Her people were good people, but not people of the world. Not people of success. With good grades and pretty eyes, success is yours. The sky is the limit. Goodness is just milk and crackers, vanilla ice cream, flat, no better than death.

But success never comes to those of us who can't look people in the eye. Success goes to the bold and bubbly. The meek inherit only the quiet shelter of family.

This was before the world decided that family was an obstruction, another category of failure. And yeah, she loved hard, her first man (a boy really), Chucky . . . Chucky Locke and the family, the troubles, the excuses, the bills. Nice days too: the new washing machine that had a fluorescent light in it, the refrigerator that had shelves on the door, and
the dryer and the dishwasher and everything in avocado or coppertone, and Chucky was a good man, quietly funny, drew a lot of people around for “games,” beer and bowling and baseball and sometimes long drives to Boston, which she loved.

But there was the ruin of her teeth and then Chucky died, so there was Mark Gammon and Mark died hard while Mickey was small, and then David took her to Boston—well, very, very close to Boston—and how fast her new little girl babe arrived. The years were like moments, but somehow the days were long, the nights bad, and four different Massachusetts men, none of them dying, just politely packing up, and all along she had that wild hurt-in-the-gut homesickness and sad eyes.

Home. This is it. Finally. To make a meal of eggs and greens, to stare rudely and openly at the faces and profiles of your loved ones, that is the end of the race, home plate, atta go!

So here and now in this kitchen in Egypt, not so far from Portland, where she started out, she carries a plate of eggs and greens to the screen door and stands there and looks out at the yard as she eats and song bugs are creaking in the tall blond grass and the hillside is covered with Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod and something pink, phlox or something, and a car goes by and toots a hello, some old friend of Donnie's, and in the nearly evening sky there are no birds or planes, just a creeping coolness, and her sweater is green, which makes her eyes look almost green, and bustling through the kitchen, past her and out the door, the querulous gang of little girls, and she is thinking how even with this dying and struggle and the horrors of no money, she knows contentment at last. Contentment is never a part of success, is it? Success can only be a big eager smile. Contentment is here in the ashes of her dreams.

Behind her, Donnie and Mickey, the two half brothers, eat at the table.

Round-faced brown-haired Erika sits on the floor on a small gold, red, and green braided rug with her back against a cabinet door, her knees up, with bony two-year-old Jesse in her arms and he is whining oh, so softly, exhausted. He should be dead by now. But he is so young, his heart is as mighty and meaty as a discus thrower's. Little Jesse, center stage in this brightly lighted kitchen, this holy place, room of souls, old trivets on the wall, pastel potholders made by Erika's aunt, and . . . oh, yes, perhaps even more center stage than Jesse, perhaps more demanding than souls and meaty hearts, the tinny electronic voice of
the kitchen TV and the other TV in the living room, which you can see through the little sunny hall there.

Where did the money go? you ask. How come they can't stretch their money better? You might demand to see figures in order to make your judgment. You see them there watching TV like the survivors of a bombing watch the glowing console of a radio for word of what they should do next. The TV has to know. It is the guardian of the Dream.