The School on Heart's Content Road (6 page)

The clerk has put up her hand. “I'm sorry! The state guidelines determine most of this, even for the towns. At town meetin', we only vote on the total recommended amount for the year. But the guidelines for eligibility are set. It's not up to me. I hear you, Erika, but it's not up to me. I'm sorry.”

She has used Erika's name. The warm sound of her name. This woman's voice, the family resemblance of her mouth and eyes to so many others in town. The sweet humid summer air that has oozed in the open windows, mixed with the imposing woody old smell of the building, these things that are permanent and emollient and too beautiful. For the first time since Jesse's cancer, Erika breaks down in front of someone. So unpretty. Her crying is like snorting.

The clerk shoots up out of her own seat and gets Erika a box of tissues, one thing she, as a human being, can do for another human being, a simple gesture, unencumbered, unprohibited, not too costly.

Not far across town (yes, in the town of Egypt), at the St. Onge Settlement, six-and-a-half-year-old Jane Meserve speaks again.

Somebody pleeeze help! You will not believe this horridable place!

Britta at home.

Her name is Britta Gammon. Her head and face are small. Her lips press together with self-conscious indignation against the toothless, rootless mouth, the dentures never filling out her mouth the way her teeth had. This makes her gray eyes look big and wishful. In Massachusetts, someone had thought her large gray eyes could make him whole. But here she is, back in Egypt, Maine, since Massachusetts “didn't work out.”

And now her younger son, Mickey, passes through the living room, coming home from somewhere. Mickey says nothing to his mother, just nods. A nice nod, vaguely friendly.

Britta says nothing to Mickey, but she watches him pass. The TV could hold her attention in the absence of real life, but nothing can win her regard above and beyond her daughter and sons and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and her men who made it all happen.

Shyness. Just how shy is Britta Gammon? Well, she has never been able to look anyone in the eye, not even family. And she's not affectionate. But she's always there. She is right where you'd expect her to be. Like a sturdy little mushroom.

Donnie Locke finds whiskey in the cupboard.

The child Jesse lies soured on layers of sheets in the living room, silent and rigid now, after his last siege of tears, cries that are softer today, for he has no muscle left to belt out his former wildcat yowls.

His father, Donnie, with the pale walrus mustache and chain-store name tag, comes home from work and stands in the doorway, feeling the doorframe over and over and over.

He turns to the kitchen, remembering something. When he reappears, he is gripping by the neck a half-full bottle of bourbon that has been in the corner cupboard for years. But you see it is, of course, still good. He knows, as everyone knows, a good drink sometimes helps. He goes to the couch and kneels. At his back, the TV is giving the world and national news. The child's evaporated monkey-small face turns slowly to the left, toward his father, because he can smell his father, that smell of the great chain store, of its chemically treated fabrics and acres of stock, oceans of stock, with that tidal-wavelike come-and-go rhythm of stock moving, on sale, big sale, big specials, big buys, the universe of all necessity and heart's content there on display.

The father strokes the little one's cool sweaty head, thinking how it is you would interest this child in a drink, in getting drunk, that thing you associate with fun.

Again, Jesse throws out one rigid leg and lets out a sweet, nearly lovely, small trill of agony, and young Erika flies from the back bedroom, where her two stepdaughters await sleep, for she must be a comfort to them too, the healthy ones, can't neglect the healthy ones, whose flourishing you must not resent in the shadow of the other's dying, and Erika is wearing a knee-length lilac nightie, her face so round and pudgy and wifely, but with eyes like a dragon's, red and terrible, eyes that have not slept for weeks.

She slumps to the couch at the end where Jesse's feet are, then sees the ridiculous thing that is in her husband's hand.

He, in the seriousness of the moment, becomes taken with a goofy grin. “Hard stuff.”

No money. No groceries. And now and then no medicine. No money. No groceries. No medicine. The hollow precincts of every commoditized need unmet.

He adds quickly, “It'll help him.”

Erika hisses something, too much teeth and tongue to be audible. No words, just smoke. A dragon. A bitch. No cooing sweet-natured plump cutie. Not today.

Donnie places one hand behind his son's head, to lift him, get him ready for a swallow, but the young mother leaps up and drives her knee into her husband's shoulder as he is squatted there and he says angrily, “If I were in that kind of pain, I'd want this!!!
I'd
want to be passed out!!”

“
You are nuts!!!!
” Erika shrieks. No fainting fear-stars cross her vision now. Her vision is sharp and actual. Everything in her body and brain is instantly aligned.

Donnie reaches again for the boy's head and shoulders, and Erika shoves Donnie with the palms of both hands, but this also jars Jesse and he is taken by a terrible ghostly lament, both weak and filled with power. And Donnie bellers, “
Maybe it'll kill him!
Yeah, let's
kill
him! Let's make him happy! Die baby boy sweet fuckin' Jesus
die!
” And he grabs the boy's skeletal shoulders. But Erika is, within a split moment, on Donnie's back, so the bottle tips and a stinking bourbon wave spreads over the child's pajama top and face and he goes rigid again with wrinkled brow, wide-open jaws, straight-out legs, arms to his sides, his fair little trill of despair seeming to come from the center of his concave chest, and somehow now Erika has the bottle, running to the kitchen, and Donnie just kneels and covers the rigid, now breathlessly panting, Jesse with himself.

“A gun,” Donnie whispers. Then yells it. “A
gun!
For a gun, I would give anything, Erika!
Where is Mickey's rifle?!
”

Erika's voice from the kitchen: “
monster!
”

And then he hollers, “No, you!
You!
You, Erika, are the big bitch monster who says
No, we don't sell the house or mortgage it.
And
Oh my, my, the hospital might take it!! You
are the one who says not to get him his chemo! They
said
they'd save him!
They said they'd save him!!!!
”

In the kitchen, silence.

In the night, into the silence of their wide-awake regrets and into the silence of Jesse's wide-awake dying, Donnie whispers.

“I'm sorry, Erika.”

And she whispers, “I couldn't believe you said that.”

And he whispers, “It came out.”

“We
agreed
about the treatments. We
agreed
.”

“It came out.”

And now she is off in a free fall of sobs.

And he says, “No no no no no no,” so gently, and strokes her soft young wifely neck and wrists and forearms, all the most trusting places.

“No no no no no no no . . .”

The screen shivers.

Be afraid. Poor people are lazy and immoral, and violence is on their fingertips for some reason, who knows the reason, it's just their idea of fun. It's always this way; they steal cars drugs money and gunnnnnz! They are filled with sex and rotten teeth and food stamps and Cadillacs and bad English! The men are bozos and incestuous. Poor women are all victims of poor, domestically violent men. But the big thing to remember is poor men for some reason all want to be armed and want to hurt hurt hurt kill kill kill. Here comes another one out of court, shackled and in an orange suit for shooting three times in the air to scare his girlfriend, who had all the charge cards. Weeee are so lucky to have police and politicians to keep these poor and violent and lazy-for-some-reason guys off of you and your darling Brendan and Olivia and your golden retriever and your
stuff
.

The militia at home.