The School on Heart's Content Road (61 page)

“I don't know. But they grow everything here. Things you never heard of.”

“Did you try those yet?”

“Yes, they're chocolate biscuits, kind of. You're supposed to put a sauce over them, but I don't see the sauce. Someone took it. It
was
right here.”

Suddenly a nearby chair shivers. Easy to see it is a small white flat-faced curly-tailed dog, who is dripping and smells strongly of a body of water that never circulates. He springs to the table, snatches a crispy chicken leg from an unguarded plate, and then, in a side-to-side Charlie Chaplin gait, stepping in platters and saucepans and overturning cups, crosses to the opposite side of the table, lands in the lap of a gasping visitor, hops down onto the floor, among many feet, and away.

“Isn't that something,” says one of the retirement-age visitors, gripping his own plate protectively.

Meanwhile.

Gordon walks among the people now, a little sedately, less playful, the dapply light of the horseshoe of porches and the Quad runs like mice over his face and now flutters onto one sleeve of his new plaid shirt, a plaid of greens with an occasional intersecting red thread, a well-made Settlement-made shirt. And that leafy light stirs in such heavenly sweetness on these people who surround him, older couples, bikers in black, fashion-dressed gangs of youths, quiet groups of working men, possibly patriots, possibly not, so many strangers, but some you would recognize from town, and there are a sprinkling of liberal-looking older women in pairs or trios with their handsome Cleopatra haircuts or boy cuts and perfect teeth. And Gordon overhears that standing nearby is a Unitarian Universalist minister. But these days it's hard to tell who is a minister and who is not. No clerical collars, no big crosses, no Bible in hand.

Gordon introduces himself to a family, a husband and wife, both blond, both pink-cheeked, and their baby and little girl, also blonde and pink-cheeked. The father is missing a front tooth but not afraid to smile and yak. The wife's hair is a punk cut. She is friendly but not yakky. Gordon rests his hand on the little girl's head. As it is so often with kids, her warm skull and soft hair yearn upward against his hand. In his other hand, a beer, a dark and dear Canadian brand brought here by visitors.

Two vans are now backing slowly through the crowd, stopping flush with the high, very new, very temporary plywood stage at the end of the last piazza on the south side of the horseshoe. Now there is the unloading of instruments, fiddle-shaped and guitar-shaped cases, a base
fiddle case, and a sax. Three accordions. Some drums. A diaper bag. And a baby.

The vans are splattered with purple and lime-green fleurs de lis, yellow musical notes, and, in big print,
THE BAND FROM
THE
COUNTY
.

One musician looks spookily like Aurel Soucier, same glittering intense dark eyes and long nose but such a long bony body, more like that weasel physique of Louis St. Onge (Lou-EE, yes). But
this
guy wears a white smock with blousy sleeves, a red sash, and a French-of-the-past sort of shirt: The
habitant
.

Several men, three women. One woman wears cowgirl boots and a red dress, red lipstick. Heavyset. Her laugh is loud and as lovely and complicated as the liquidy solo of a hermit thrush.

One guy is in his early fifties. Splotchy, almost boyishly soft dark beard. Fit-looking in red T-shirt and jeans. His T-shirt features a picture of three chimps. One chimp holds binoculars to his eyes. The second chimp has his hands cupped around his ears for better hearing. The third chimp is speechifying through a megaphone.

A crowd of teenagers closes in around the vans.

The guy with the Evil Chimps T-shirt screams hoarsely across the nearest long train of piazzas to Raymond Pinette, “
Tout l'mondes, là—ah! ah!—je vais renvoyer! J'ai trop gêné, moi! Je vais tomber mort!
”

Ray Pinette screams back, “
Ah, fermes ta yueule,
Monsieur Show-off!”

A lot of girls make up the teenage swarm. Teen boys too, who try not to seem too interested. They look as if they just happened to be there, just passing through.

Out in the sun, away from the trees, it seems the whole Letourneau family is here from across town, taking up
many many
tables, looking settled and happy and now extremely alert to these new arrivals, all heads turned toward the vans, hearing Acadian patois spoken. And Norman Letourneau, cleft palate and wild dark eyes, party animal in his own right, screams something in his French that even these French can't understand, and now the musician in the red dress and red lipstick calls something to Norman in French, hard to make out because she's also throwing him kisses, and now in English, “Get your dancing shoes on, my dearest!”

More drums are unloaded from the second van.

People are still hiking up the dusty Settlement road. But for a few, no cars are allowed. Gatekeepers are assisting visitors with parking down along the paved Heart's Content Road, and it is reported that these cars now line that narrow road for at least a mile.

The musicians scurry around on stage, setting up a sound system that looks earnest enough to knock anyone over who stands within a hundred yards of it.

A Settlement preteen girl in a long blue peasant dress and bare feet, with hair like cornsilk, longer and silkier than that of Mickey Gammon's dream girl, Samantha Butler, hair almost to her heels, starts an eager jerk of the hips.

“I know this band. They mean business,” troll-like Stuart Congdon (the Settlement's head sawyer) tells some visitors with a chuckle. “This whole place is going to be dancing, even those who don't want to. To try 'n' hold still, it would hurt.”

History (1819: the past), weavers of Halifax, England.

“We groan, being burdened, waiting to be delivered, we rejoice in hopes of Jubilee.”

Gordon St. Onge: they come to him.

The man who is approaching Gordon now on these long connected piazzas has a thin funeralesque voice, as though remembering a long-gone friend. But his woes concern recent and complex Maine fishing laws. Gordon agrees it is a bad mess.

“Liberty and justice for all, ha-ha,” says the man.

Gordon glances into the solemn eyes of three teens next to the shoulder of the sorrowful man. The man goes on. “A lie and a figment.”

Gordon replies, “I agree.” And his eyes skip a moment to more young guys who are closing in, all in billed caps bearing ads, then to the fifteen or twenty faces of strangers and Egypt neighbors ringed around, and then another half dozen beyond, all staring. Gordon sees a vision of each and every one of those mouths eating a fish from Lange Pond and Spec Pond—this sudden uneasy epiphany: mouths, esophaguses, and
bubbling stomachs of a whole planet of shoulder-to-shoulder people—and one last fish, hiding. He sees, yes,
his
children, their hunger, their fingers grasping.

He pushes the thought away. He calls the big quiet dark-eyed man “My brother.”

Eventually, he reaches the end of the last piazza, temporarily connected to the high stage, little temporary set of stairs there, going up. So good to see his old friends and distant cousins from Aroostook, THE County. They don't seem at all tired from their six-hour ride. He embraces them all. Now a smooch or three. Some yowls. Then he chats with them, catches up on some things, swept happily along in that cheery hoarse back-of-the-throat Acadian-English mix; then, seeing they have much more setting up to do, tuning, revving up, he turns and sees Rex.

Rex has been standing behind him for how long? There with his thumbs in his belt, feet spread, boots shined, the whole nine yards of military bearing, but no uniform, no cap, just a rust-brown T-shirt and work pants. And no dark cop glasses at the moment. His cold gray-blue eyes have an odd circumspection. As if he wore earphones and was listening to the instructions of a militia dispatcher who is conveying information from militia pilots in choppers or towers, people who have a clear overhead view of the awful, surging, unbraiding mob that is filling up the roads, the Quad, the yards and fields of the St. Onge Settlement.

Gordon raises one eyebrow and gives Rex's shoulder a little hello poke, a shoulder like a rock which, under the brown T-shirt, doesn't give. Rex brings his right hand around and gives Gordon a slip of paper. “I got a call. She was looking for Mickey. His brother's widow, I think. She wasn't doing very well, her and the others there. Upset. I couldn't really make her out much. She wants him to come home and talk or something.” He looks down along the length of connected piazzas, open porches, and boardwalks crammed with humanity, the loud drone of voices making him have to talk louder than he likes to. “She was . . . upset. Crying.”

Gordon holds the note way out from his face, squints at it. It reads:
Call Erika. Important
. He looks over shoulders and heads and hats into the faces of strangers who are passing by; they are watching him hard
from the corners of their eyes. He glances out at the Quad, where there are more and more layers of strangers pressing in, with and without covered dishes, paper bags, and liters of pop. He studies the note again. “This message. It must have been before nine
P.M
. last night.”

“Six-twenty.”

“Yuh . . . well. She found us.”

Rex nods.

Gordon squint-blinks. Then smiles. “Well.” He stuffs the note into a pocket. “She's safe now.”

Rex works his lips a bit, like they itch. Then a small snort that means
it figures: one more needy soul
. Maybe even
one more wife. What else is new
?

Gordon asks, “You just the bearer of emergency communiqués? Or are you planning to hang out awhile and maybe . . . meet some nice women?”

Rex flushes. Then a trace of a twinkle skips across the cold eyes. “You mean all these women aren't yours?” Nods toward the crowd, which anyone can plainly see contains over four hundred people, about half of them women.

Vastly, Gordon smiles. He gets real close to Rex, closeness not being Rex's favorite thing, and speaks in a low voice. “Brother, I envy you.”

Rex looks away. Rex does not envy Rex. Nor does he envy Gordon. Rex considers both situations deeply flawed.

Gordon and Rex stand there at the screen now and watch more faces coming around from beyond the larger Quonset hut, from the parking lot and road.

Rex says, “I expect you've got a few agents out there.”

Gordon tries not to smile at this. “Richard, agents go to meetings of
real
militias. Secret meetings. This is . . . so . . . so wholesome . . . so public.”

“Don't matter. You can tell after a while when you got them. They'll try to stir the crowd up . . . agitate . . . or hang out with you and others in charge, win your trust, turn people against you, get you to . . . break a law. It's called neutralizing leadership and entrapment. They do it all.”

Gordon squints at this. “When it's in the public debate, you get assent and dissent . . . each side will work real hard to twist the other one's arm for or against. People just naturally make their own trouble.”