The School on Heart's Content Road (66 page)

It's the one made for skits during warm-weather meals, the one inside the piazza off the kitchens. Two men carry a chair between them, and in this chair rides an old woman with a crisp new tightly curled snow-white perm, a great hooked nose, Indian-dark skin, eyes black behind her linty eyeglass lenses, her legs, long and swinging, dressed in trousers a ghosty shade of blue. She wears a winter sweater with a heavy cable pattern, and she waves limply to people as she is transported past, her smile good-humored and tolerant of all this they do.

Walking along with the swaying chair and its bearers is an army of children, dressed in plastic helmets and feathers, tricorne hats, kepis, and robes, carrying their weapons: sticks, plastic swords, one plastic Uzi. Their faces, solemn. Military escort.

Because Annie B has trouble sitting in chairs for long, a mattress has been arranged on this little stage, with a number of pretty pillows, quilts, and all manner of soft things. The men arrange her there in a semisitting position, and the women give her a patchwork lap quilt for her knees. She waves out to the people at both ends of the big piazza; they cheer and call out, “Happy birthday, Annie B!”

And she nods and smiles.

A young teen voice calls out, “Happy hundred years!”

Annie nods, her head tipped to one side a little tremblingly.

They all sing “Happy Birthday” and bring out the cake, a cake big enough to cover a sheet of plywood. It is bright red and for some reason shaped like a lobster.

There are a couple of small speeches.

There is the presentation of the story box, a box filled with story stones with the oral history of Annie's life recorded in single words and phrases on each stone. Bev and Barbara explain this concept to many puzzled strangers, and there's a demonstration where people who have written on the stones tell their stories: stories about Annie and stories told by Annie to them over the years, stories of a century of ironies and softened sorrows . . . and some stories that are very, very funny.

Out on the quadrangle and in the fields and parking lot, down along the gravel road, word is passed of Annie B's giant red cake and story box, and some say, “Isn't that wonderful.”

Meanwhile, what is Annie B thinking behind those eyes in their satchels of withery skin?

It's cold. They say it's fall. Feels like January. A lot of people want to talk. But everyone whispers. They smile and they hug. That's nice. I like the babies. The world is full of babies. They all look alike. Even those that they tell me are my great ones or great-great-great. They don't walk well. They fall in the most comical ways. While everyone whispers. Everyone racing around, like Wee Willie Winkie.

There's another baby. I like that one. Where am I? Why is Judy here? That's not Judy. Maybe that's her daughter.

Everyone is smiling, holding rocks. Duty. You always got duty. Even in the end, like me. You want to just sleep. But to make them happy, here I am.

A young man stands smiling on one of the porches.

He is watching them cut the big red cake. His billed cap reads
SEA DOGS
. He has fresh blond looks. (Yes, right, he is Kevin Moore, a government agent.) A few young women glance his way and wonder about him. It seems
he
is wondering why the cake is shaped like a lobster. He gestures at the two claws, the legs, and, yes, the eyes on sticks and smiles at one of the Settlement women, who laughs, and he seems to hear her words because he nods and laughs too, though it is hard to hear her words due to the commotion of running children, yakking adults, and an electric buggy whining along on the grass, just beyond the screen, giving rides to guests, one of these guests being the Unitarian Universalist minister with the graying Cleopatra haircut and purple shirt. And now a small white flat-faced curl-tailed very homely dog lifts his leg on somebody's shoulder bag left slouched against a tree, a beige semisoft leather shoulder bag, maybe a camera bag. And out between the teeth of the grinning Tyrannosaurus rex (Settlement idea of a jungle gym), a child waves and the sun moves westward another significant notch.

And so the cake is eaten.

Wiped out, actually.

Meanwhile.

The musicians test their mikes in earnest. Golden stars of the late-day sun slip up and down the keys and buttons and front plates of the beautiful instruments. Leaves of every color of the soul seesaw softly downward through the cooling air. Around the shoes and boots of the musicians, a few leaves settle. A chicken on the stage pecks at leaves and shadows. Someone helps the chicken off the stage.

And so.

Before the music begins, Samantha Butler steps up to one of the microphones. She is, for the moment, wearing a black tricorne hat and a frozen smile. Before the crowd is done with applauding and cheering and hooting, Samantha too quickly has begun her announcement. Something about a “speaker” or “speech for her,” no one can tell for sure, “after the music is over. So don't leave!” She salutes the crowd, which again cheers and applauds, whistles and shrieks. Samantha steps over wires, between two fiddlers, and disappears down the stage steps to the piazza.

Jane Meserve stands as still as she can, just a few jiggles.

She is hearing what the plan is as Bree tells it, the thing Jane will be doing tonight that is “of great importance.”

“Are you scared?” Tamya Soucier asks, with big eyes.

Jane laughs. “Why would anybody be afraid of importance?”

Meanwhile, Mickey Gammon hangs around by one of the Quonset huts.

A bunch of Settlement and town teenagers are there, smoking grass. Mickey is laughing at something someone just said, his eyes pink and a
little popped from the stuff, and he notices the air is chilling and he looks straight up into the cloudless sky with its orangey cast of dying October sun and he is glad he is alive.

Tumult and joy.

As the chilling-down sky behind the near hill darkens, the music becomes the sun and all of life's business. Not much slow dancing, but a lot of dancing that would please the Devil, who is also known to steal souls during sneezes. There are chains of figures, frenzied and giggling through their idea of the bunny hop, and some contra dancing too, lunging in and out of the tight jiggling mass of rock and rollers.