The School on Heart's Content Road (62 page)

“You're not making sense. I'm talking about Feds.”

“I know what you're talking about.”

Rex squints. “You don't have to listen to me if you don't want. Go read your Socialist Commie books for the answers. They know it all.”

Gordon grabs a lemon chewy bar off a plate and stuffs it in his mouth.

Claire, her graying black hair worn in a long braid down her back, graceful and rotund as a bubble in her green cotton dress and red sash, passes with a group of women strangers, her voice like a tour guide's, like a professor, her well-projected, sometimes commanding, sometimes breezy voice.

And then.

Out among the tables, under the trees, under the slant of early October sun, reporters scribble away.

“So why are you here today?” a reporter asks a visitor.

“To see what's going on.”

“You here to join the militia?”

“Sure.”

“Aren't you worried about the reputation of militias?”

“Not really. This ain't like that. This is all of us. Just people. Kids, even.”

“Have you heard Gordon St. Onge called the Prophet?”

“Yuh.”

“What do you think of that?”

“Pretty weird.”

“It doesn't bother you?”

Shrug. “Nobody's perfect.”

Strangers stride through the crowd passing out flyers on the U.S. government's role in the massacre of one-third of the East Timor population. Other flyers on Cuba, Iraq, Uganda, Sudan, Chiapas, Guatemala, and Yugoslavia. Colombia. Stealing and plunder. On and on. Bad America, bad.

The Unitarian Universalist minister, accompanied by a friend, chats politics under a tree with a tall thin man in a white shirt and a Maine Greens button.

The band continues to unload and set up.

Gordon speaks in a muffled way.

“Well, I can tell you one thing, Richard.” He's munching on his fifth lemon chewy. “There're Commies here. The place is crawling with 'em. Socialists, at least.” His teasing eyes hover on the tree-furry crown of the near mountain.

Rex squints. “No doubt.”

Gordon draws his face against his upper arm, cleaning his whiskers and mustache on his sleeve. Then, with raised chin, a little smile, eyes on the growing crowd, he says, “Democracy. She's beautiful.”

Rex glowers.

Meanwhile.

Louis St. Onge backs his little yellow seventeen-year-old pickup across the weeds to a high spot behind the Quonsets. He is preparing to unload his cannon, which is about the size of a huge man's thigh but weighs as much as a whole huge man. Its carriage is oak, four small oak wheels, a bore the size of a camera film canister—small for a cannon. But the boom will impress you. It will be heard for miles.

Bree ignores Gordon.

She steps up onto the piazza where he stands with Rex. She is just passing by,
his
Bree. Intent on something. Her red hair is thick and fresh and savage. Black Settlement-made T-shirt, a full bright skirt that almost reaches her heels, a red sash, and today a necklace, a fleet of little ships and boats, carved from wood. All stained in the grain, sea blue. She doesn't look at Gordon at all.

She is fully and totally and completely mad at him.
Sigh
. Because
he
was mad at
her
. Just this
A.M
., he had almost sobbed. Red light. Green light. Red light. Green light. Truly. And it is because he, Gordon St. Onge, is all talk, no action. And Bree, genius with oil paints and ink, frisky with words and thoughts, a reader of even more cinderblock-sized books than he is, is
action. She
was the one!
She
organized the True Maine Militia.
She
did the op-eds. Gordon St. Onge, crawling like a worm on his belly, while fifteen-year-old Brianna Vandermast St. Onge holds an almost visible torch aloft. So now he supports her. Reluctantly. A drink would help.

And so they pass by, Bree and one of Gordon's little daughters, Angelique. They are carrying cardboard boxes. Mysterious boxes. Something concerning the True Maine Militia, no doubt, that which goes on behind Gordon's back at all hours. You raise kids to be like anarchists and you will be the first power they tear down, especially when someone like Bree comes along to whip them into high gear.

Gordon has spent his whole life wishing for someone like Bree to be close to, to be fused with, soul to soul. Bree, fellow philosopher! Big-picture person! Passionate duty to humankind! Older than her years, a creature like no other! And there she is, walking past him, three feet away, untouchable. Here, but not his. Married by Settlement law but pissed off.

He glances now to the outside wall of the kitchen: three of his other young wives, all with babies, one nursing: Natty with her pale foxy little blade face. Natty with her thin blonde hair parted in the middle, falling carelessly at either side, split sweetly over the back of her neck. The baby nurses at her open shirt, but Natty is staring down the length of the porches. She wears the red sash around her newly restored waist. Is she feeling restless now with the outside world muscling its way in here, all these young men with their verve and unlined faces, and all that danceable music about to begin? She is one of those Gordon feels edgy about. But Bree:
over
the edge. Over and out. He aches to think of it.

Now he looks straight into the eyes of a young man who has just stepped in through the nearest screen door and stands next to a loaded table staring at Gordon. Bald as a stone. A tattooed forehead. Tattoo is of the phoenix, rising not from the ashes but from flames. Though it is noontime and warm, he wears a long heavy coat and corduroy pants of a check print, tight at calf and ankle as pants were almost fifty years ago, and on his feet military boots like Rex's. Hands in pockets.

Gordon doesn't break the stare.

This guy's eyes are so wide, the whites show all around the irises. Not just the head shaved. Eyebrows shaved off. Huge long narrow nose. Spiky short red beard. Mouth a wet thin line. A gold nose ring. Seems he's jiggling one leg.

Gordon glances at Rex, and Rex is—yes—more rigid than Gordon has ever seen him.

Near one of the shop doors, one of Gordon's small sons and two little visitors are having a sword fight, one plastic sword and two big sticks. All three little boys wear a dull-eyed manly concentration. They holler, “Whammo! Whammo! Whammo!”

“
Out! out! out!
” a Settlement woman commands from her sentrylike position in the doorway to the kitchens. The small sword fighters lunge through a group of preteen girls, all dressed in low-necked ankle-length prairie dresses, and a lonely-looking girl who has a motherish grip on her beloved black pet chicken. “Watch it!” one of the girls snarls at the sword fighters.

Meanwhile, Gordon looks back at the bald leg-jiggling stranger, and the guy is looking Gordon up and down slowly with an expression somewhere between madness and well-perfected seductiveness. The eyes come to rest solidly on Gordon's crotch.

Rex makes a sound. Like the sudden blowing and champing and moist snort of a bull.

Gordon steps toward the guy. “Are you hungry, brother? We have plenty of everything. Help yourself.”

Brother. If the word were a fine black Caddy, even then, how many could ride in it?

The guy looks at Gordon's hand outstretched to him. The guy pulls from his pocket a stump. No hand. Just a violet-colored stump, made all nice and fatty and smooth by hurried surgeons.

Gordon hesitates by about two beats, then folds both of his hands around the mutilated handless stick. Then he sees that the other hand, now pulled from its pocket, is another stump. “Where're you from?” Gordon asks, loosening his grip and dropping his own hands with a graciousness some people would save for big landowners, selectmen, legislators, movie stars, kings, queens, and high priests.

“Buf,” the guy replies, a wetness building on his lips.

And then.

Another leaf lets go. It dips, spins, slows. Down, down. This one a maple leaf, red with a purple center. Lands on a picnic table, among half-eaten gooey rolls and the bone of a lamb.

And now, an interview.