The School on Heart's Content Road (29 page)

“Yes, my son. David is his name.” Inside, she says, “Take your sunglasses off. It's not that bright in here!” She laughs loud and bubbly.

“I need these,” I say.

“Oh.”

On the fridge is a magnet thing that says
BERNICE'S KITCHEN
. They have such a pretty house. Full of stuff. Stuff you
buy
. Plants and books and statues and a huge TV . . . you know, the biggest. She has me sit at the kitchen table and pick four kinds of cookies from four cookie jars of different shapes, a lighthouse, an apple with a worm for a handle, a cowgirl, and a cowboy. All cute.

The weed wacker starts buzzing outside and the lady hollers, “Hallelujah!” and this cracks me up. She and I both laugh a minute.

“Is your name
Ber-nice
?” I ask. Like
burr
and
nice
.

“Yes, but you pronounce it
Ber-neece
. And what is
your
name?”

“Jane Miranda Meserve.”

“A lovely old-fashioned name. Jane. Feel happy your mommy didn't name you one of those names nobody's ever heard of.”

“I've heard of Ber-NEECE before. It's nice,” I lied. I never once heard that name, but I am trying to be nice like you are supposed to be.

Her voice is so tweedly and bubbly and loud. “I'll get you some milk, Jane.”

“No thank you,” I say, very nice. “I don't like milk. Even the good kind.”

She says, “Would you like some lemonade?”

“I like Coke.”

“We have club soda.”

“What's that?”

“Soda without sweetener or flavoring.”

I frown. Sounds pretty weird. “Well, I don't really need anything to drink. I'm not thirsty anymore.”

“Well, if you change your mind, just say so,” she says, so brightish.

I say, “Are you a teacher?”

“Why, yes!” she says. “I retired eight years ago this spring. My goodness, how did you know?”

I shrug. I give my glasses a little wiggle to keep the power.

She sits across from me with a cup of coffee and she says, “Well!”

And I giggle. I look through the archway at her TV, which is not on, just quiet, smooth, grayish. “I like your TV.”

“Yes,” she says, turning to admire it herself. “David got it. He likes to stay abreast of the news.”

“Is he a teacher too?”

“How did you know?!!”

“Oh, I just know stuff.”

She says, “You probably know because your parents told you. Where exactly do you live? Are you summering on the lake?”

I look at the backside of a nice butter cookie. “I'm just visiting some people,” I say.

“Oh, take off your sunglasses, Jane. I'd like to see your eyes as we chat.”

I let her see my eyes just a little, then push the glasses back fast, to keep up the power.

“You have striking eyes,” she says. “I don't know why you'd want to hide them.”

“I have my father's eyes. You ever hear of Damon Gorely?”

She looks into her thoughts, eyes up. “No, I guess not.”

“Well,” I tell her, “he's famous in rap. Well, pretty soon famous. He's trying to get publishity . . . pub-
liss
-ity, I mean. He has talent, Mum says. He's in California. Mum met him once in person and has a picture of him which we look at all the time.”

She pats my hand.

I nibble a cookie.

She sips her coffee. She says, “Have you been upset? Your eyes are . . .”

I sigh. “I've had a horridable day.” I hold my forehead for a moment to show her I mean it.

The buzzing weed thing goes around and around the yard.

I say, “Ber-NEECE. I shouldn't call you that, should I? You shouldn't call teachers stuff like real names. You have to say Mrs.”

She giggles. “Here, it's okay, dear.” She looks so pleased. She sips her coffee. “So you must be visiting some people on
this
road.”

“Yuh. I have to stay with Gordie till my Mum can come home.”

“Gordie?
St. Onge
?” Her face gets a wave across it. I can see the thing she is thinking. She does not like Gordie. “You mean” she jerks her thumb in THE direction—“down there, at that
. . . place
?”

“Gordie's house.”

“I've
heard
about him,” she says, and looks at her coffee.

“He's mean,” I say. “He squeezed my arm and threw me on the bed. He is”—I lean forward and make my teeth real plain—“he . . . is . . . big.”

She looks up at me. Then she says, even more loud and bubbly, “I want to fix you a treat! I can mix club soda with lemonade and make you a wacky lemon wonder!” She stands over there with her back to me, mixing mixing mixing. It is not too hot here in Ber-NEECE's house. She has all the windows shut. And drapes across the sunshine-side window.

Outside, the weed thing buzzes around. I look out the picture window near the TV, and the awful trailer house across the road has a little dog-sized door and I see it open up and out walks a white horridable dog with dirty fur, a black spot eye, and curled tail. I know that dog! He visits me a lot at Gordie's.

I sniff the air. Ber-NEECE has such a nice house. She gives me the glass of stuff. I don't want to tell her it's gross, so I drink a little. She is so nice. Her eyes are very watery and pinkish-green and her wig hair is so funny and cute. I say, “Do you want to see my secret book?”

She says, “Oooooh. A secret book!”

“I have it on me now.” I feel into my sundress pocket. “I am a spy and I watch them at Gordie's all the time,” I tell her in a low voice.

Ber-NEECE smiles thin and polite with her lips and she says, in a voice that's different, not as high but kind of cloudish, “How nice.”

The buzzing stops outside and in a minute the man comes in and he says, “It died. I'll need to make a trip to town.” His voice is thin, buzzy. Like the weed wacker. And boy does his Adam thing jump! Soon as
possible, I am going to draw that Adam thing and all of him and his weed thing in my secret book and Ber-NEECE with her funny wig hair.

Ber-NEECE is acting funny. Making expressions at the man.

He comes over and stands by the table. He looks down at my secret book open with Ber-NEECE's fingers there.

“What's wrong?” he asks.

Ber-NEECE says, “David, this is Jane. She's from the school. The
school
down the hill.”

He looks at me, my whole face, my whole head, then down again at my secret book under Ber-NEECE's fingers.

Ber-NEECE says, “Dear, tell us true. You are safe here. You can tell us anything and everything. Is anyone hurting you at that place?”

The man is staring at my mouth, waiting for words.

I put both hands in my lap and take a deep breath, and I sigh so deep. “Gordie is very mean. Too horridable to describe. Won't let me have food. All I want is food. But all he has is this
black stuff
! And cold beans. And he squeezed me!” And I burst into tears, real ones . . . which come even worser than before . . . wicked out of control, which is actually a surprise even to me.

Out in the world.

The people work. The people shop. The people hurry. The people wait at streetlights, grumbling. The people now talk on phones
while driving
—and chewing, swallowing, on their way. Work, shop, drive, talk, chew. Tinted windshields. Flashing mirrors. Automated voices and hidden cameras. The people are on their way. Credit cards. Interest. Faster money. Longer days. Lighter meals. Memories of no past. Catalogs. Packaging that crinkles. Packaging that opens faster.

How the Border Mountain Militia and the St. Onge Settlement come to a rough but workable junction.

Another day. Another evening. Getting dark a little early these days.

Down at the old St. Onge farm place, which sits close to the tar road, Gordon St. Onge and six-and-a-half-year-old Jane Meserve are out on the screened piazza. Each is outdoing the other with fabulous stories,
fictions about walking watermelons, and Little Red Riding Hood's wolf friend who rides a Harley and wears a leather jacket, and the girl who goes to California to find fame as a rap singer and meets stars, all of them dripping in jewels and money and secrets. Both Gordon and Jane have a flair for the dramatic and far-fetched. Their stories weave one into the other, the child's giggles and the man's growls punctuating and underlying the most madcap moments, though a tension takes place, each pressing to give his or her values center stage, jewels versus thrift, for instance.

A rare thing for anyone to be alone this long with Gordon, here in the almost darkness, evening time, a place usually so hubbubish with lives. But now, a humid gray night sags around them, their skin is clammy, and all surfaces have an unpleasant dew.

The phone rings.

“Gordie, it's probably Mum calling.”

Well, yes, it's too sticky to want somebody on your lap tonight, not a dog, not a kid, not anything with a live temperature, but sometimes you do what needs to be done in spite of the wishes of your skin. Therefore, Jane is curled in Gordon's lap, her long golden arms and legs tucked under her, which makes her seem quite small and beetlebug-shaped. She wears underpants with a pattern of fat purple dinosaurs which, in this dusky evening darkness, are just spots. And she wears one of those little girl undershirts, straps, bitty rayon bow. Her heart-shaped secret agent glasses are in an important tight grip in her hand underneath her, her head is turned to the side, cheek against Gordon's chest, her expression alert. As the phone rings again, her rough velvety voice, the voice more of a young woman than a six-and-a-half-year-old, again speaks. “That is probably Mumma calling.”

How many hundreds of calls since this child's arrival here? And how many times has she made this same statement, though it has never once been her mother calling without planning the time?

Gordon says, “That is probably
not
Mumma calling. Probably a goddam TV producer. Probably the
New York Times
or
USA Today
or the goddam FBI or the social worker with all the sharp teeth. Maybe it's
all
of them in a phone booth together sharing a quarter.”

Jane laughs deeply. “You're funny.”

The phone rings.

All up and down this porch, the silent chimes and mobiles hang while just three rockers away leans a four-foot-tall chunk of basswood tree trunk carved out as a beaked and eared totem-pole face. Painted in anxious colors and ringed all over its flat top like a flaming crown are small handsome leaded-glass candle jars that give off a winking rosy light. The candles inside the glass shapes are grayish-green blobs, which smell like mouthwash. Candles made by Jane. Jane the impatient candlemaker. But such a proud thing! It's as if the rosy light itself is Jane's. Jane's radiance. Jane's willpower. It's no coincidence that Jane's face is directed at that light.

The phone rings again.

“Maybe it's somebody looking for somebody,” Jane insists.

Gordon sets his beer down and tightens his moist arms around her. “Everybody who is anybody is here,” he says.

She
tsks
. “We are not
everybody
.”

The phone rings again and again.

An engine can be heard now, down the hill, working hard in low gear. It shifts down again for the last few yards before the St. Onge dooryard, the steepest part of this mountain. Headlights swipe across the house: a pickup truck turning in. No gate, no KEEP OUT signs here at the old farm place. The notorious gate is at the dirt road entrance to the Settlement, a few yards uphill.

The pickup purrs to an easy stop under the ash tree. A late-model truck, the kind with payments (including interest) totaling what a house cost ten years ago, it has a plastic-looking sheen. Engine and lights die. Door opens. Dark shape steps to the ground. Shuts door nice 'n' easy.

“Who's that?” Jane asks. The approaching figure walks like a cop.