The School on Heart's Content Road (8 page)

The St. Onge Settlement is hidden in the cleft of the mountain behind the 1800s farmhouse where Gordon St. Onge grew up. He still resides here in the old place, his name on the mailbox and in the phone book, so at first glance things seem ordinary. Your eyes, crow, follow him trudging up the hot flowery sloped field toward a homemade merry-go-round. You fluff your feathers, make yourself momentarily bigger. You turn your head back to the old house. So typical. A Cape Cod. Light gray with white trim. Ell. Long porch. Anyone can see it was once an open porch because of the lathed columns behind the fog of screen and the scrollwork along the top.

Three connected shed ways off the ell once protected farmers from icy winds, rain, big snow, as the family made their way to and from the barn, which is now just a stone foundation, lopsided under where the tie-ups would have been. Birch trees are spoking out around one corner.

Bank of solar collectors across the house roof. Big and boxy. Made by kids.

The front “lawn” has nothing to draw year 2000 criticism. No leaning towers of tires or hubcaps. No bundles of used boards. No piles of rusty iron. No farm equipment. No tacky whirligigs. Though some nowadays might frown at the grass itself: sandy, seedy, weedy.

The driveway is rutty and rocky and bunched with plantain. It circles an ash tree the diameter of a small building. The leaves are thin, like the hair of an old man. Its shade is ghosty. A sign nailed to it reads
OFFICE
. It points at the house.

Fresh paint is in the air.

An old pickup truck is in the driveway. Chains and a gas can are in the bed and wiggly heat lines cover the hood because Gordon St. Onge has just arrived here from somewhere else. The field begins close to the house, immediately rising. A red smog of devil's paintbrushes and the
faded purple of vetch, a universe of daisies. Soft greens, tough greens, witch grass, clovers, nettle. And then the woods. And then the mountain, not a Kilimanjaro but it is so near and therefore big in the way a face gets big and hot when it comes to whisper in your ear. To the left and to the right are other mountains, technically foothills, blue in the humidity but intimate enough so you can see the character of the highest treetops.

This is the St. Onge property, nine hundred acres in the wooded hills of Egypt.

You, crow, know every secret of this rocky mean old land. You turn your head for another glimpse of the reporter's red sports car, parked between the ash tree and the truck.

Now back to the action, the reporter and Gordon St. Onge, both having arrived in the shade of the merry-go-round's roof, are not shaking hands. No nice hellos. The reporter wears a stripy dress, bracelets, shoulder bag, camera with strap, the weight of that other world outside this place. That which makes Gordon St. Onge's undigested heavy noon meal freeze.

The merry-go-round is of monsters; wide-mouthed, horned, pop-eyed, some with human heads and spear-ended tails like Satan's. No pretty polka-dot high-stepping horsies. The reporter, Ivy Morelli, is scribbling away on her lined pad after pushing her sunglasses to her head. Her hair is black—no, it's purple, a tint, no doubt, created for urban interiors.

The man is Titan-sized, unlike the reporter, who is small, even for a woman.

In the lacing of one leather work boot, the man, this Gordon St. Onge, has gotten a daisy snagged. His brown hair is not long, not short, not touched up with a comb for this special occasion. Green work shirt. Sleeves rolled up. No visible tattoos. No wristwatch. Which might explain why he was twenty minutes late.

Does the reporter note the belt buckle? You, crow, have noticed that coppery blushy sun. Probably made by kids. It has the face you would expect for the sun, grandfatherly, toothless, eyes closed, too bright even for itself. And the dungarees. New. Oddly fitted. Also made by kids?

Reporter swipes at a deerfly.

Reporter writes across her pad:
VIKING
.

Then she adds:
COULD EAT A WHOLE REINDEER
.

Reporter whacks another fly. Bracelets bonk and clank. Her bowl-cut hair slides from side to side in an attractive way.

The man whom you, crow, know very well through many generations of crows—this man is uneasy today.

The woman, who is young, is also nervous. But stalwart. Even wise-ass, almost crowlike.

The two humans are now talking fast, overlapping, arguing.

You tip your head, enjoying.

Now the man steps around the woman, the wild grasses hissing and snapping around his pant legs. Keys on his belt loop jangle once. Squatting in the hot blue shade, he checks the oil and gas of the carousel generator. He yanks the cord hard, then harder. Again, harder. The engine sputters to a ragged hum. Another adjustment. The engine purrs. Now the lever. The circle of monsters creaks into motion. One of the heads is gold, like the domes of some state capitals.

Reflections of monsterific colors brighten and darken upon the reporter's face, her small mouth even more clover-colored now than its formerly honest pink, the eyes in their dark lashes a cold no-feeling blue. Trying to look objective? She cocks her head. Her silky bowl of black but purple hair slides to one side, then back. She has stopped taking notes. Just staring.

She watches Gordon St. Onge's work-smoodged hand on the lever, so familiar in its humanness but in another way new, and now she raises her eyes into and through the traffic of beasts. There is only one that actually rises up and down. It is yellow and black and gleaming as a hornet. It has wings. But not a hornet. It gives off an agonized lowing sound. And it farts. In its eye sockets are red Christmas twinkle lights. One begins to work now, after a long warming.
Twink! Twink! Twink!

Beyond the slow, hot, miserable trudge of creatures, Gordon St. Onge's face is clear. He has a mad-scientist aspect, one eye squinting, fluttering, blinking, almost in sync with the yellow and black creature's Christmassy eyes. This man is suffocating in burning indecision. His beard is short, darker than his untidy hair. Chin of the beard graying, kingly. Brown-black mustache heavy. His crowded teeth are revealed as he wags his head and gives Ivy Morelli a goofy grin, not goofy and full of sport but goofy as in apology. Doglike.

You, crow, watch all this. You hear the man say, “You have to imagine your own calliope music.”

From this perch you, crow, can see over the treetops to the Settlement, its metal-roofed Quonset huts shaped like loaves of bread. Meanwhile, the main building, a massive horseshoe bending around a quadrangle of tall oaks and maples and wooden creatures, one taller than the buildings and painted Popsicle green, and there a silver spaceship, and there a purple cow. Dozens of cottages in both sun and shade, also in stirring colors. Pastures. Shingle mill and sawmills. Gardens, some childly, with too many scarecrows that don't look scary. Some gardens are in effortless rows, the soil dark and loamy, sacred. Mountaintop ledge with windmills paralyzed by the dead heat.

And you can see kids.

But the reporter cannot. She will have to work hard to get that far. You, crow, in whose bony chest beats alert and fretful wisdom, understand the look in Gordon St. Onge's eyes. Fear.

From a future time, Claire St. Onge speaks.

It eventually changed everything, his giving in to this reporter. She didn't do the big feature immediately. After she discovered where the Settlement actually was and we were friendly—we were embracing—she settled into a mode of friendship for a few weeks, and Gordon, who can be either a huge downed tree blocking your road or a big puppy wagging and wagging to please, had become honest with her about
everything
. Our Bonny Loo will tell you that this reporter was devious. But I think she was confused. Friend or reporter? How could she choose while flabbergasted by Settlement life and Guillaume—Gordon—St. Onge?

Tonight Erika is again wearing the Persian cat T-shirt when he brings her another fifty dollars.

Sometimes he presents a whole batch of twenties. Once a hundred-dollar bill. And she says the same thing every time. “Sure you're not dealing drugs?”

And Mickey sneers at this. “You see too much TV.”

He never tells her about the militia, nor about the jobs these guys arrange for him: mowing lawns, helping vacuum a swimming pool and “shock it,” being a chimneysweep's helper, doing roofing, haying, working in the woods, babysitting, housepainting, feeding rabbits, and then, over on Promise Lake, crawling under the big summer camp porch of two out-of-state ladies to get a dead skunk. They were nice ladies. Chatty and huggy. They gave him root beer and an earful of advice. That's where he got the hundred-dollar bill. One had a Southern accent. The other, Boston or something. They had an old well-kept Plymouth Duster, repainted gold. They were married once to two brothers. There was a lot of mention of “the Milwaukee days.” They wore black bathing suits, the one-piece kind. One suit was white dots on black. They wanted him to come back one weekend and meet their friend Millie, another old lady. He hardly talked the whole time, but somehow he liked them. He keeps wondering if they know that Stan Berry, whom they also fuss over, the guy who brought Mickey to them, is with a citizens' militia. Even more officially than Mickey.

Now Erika says again, “Sure you aren't dealin' drugs?”

Whatever money he makes goes into Erika's hand, except for buying cigarettes. He has tried to give up cigarettes, but he can't. Where the drive for food is felt in the stomach and the drive for sex is a hot spot between the legs, the drive for a cigarette is felt in every cell. It is a hunger shaped exactly like Mickey inside Mickey, a flaming Mickey shape screaming,
I need! I need!

And so the summer is passing in this way: Jesse dying, Mickey providing. Erika and Mickey's mother grateful. Everything costing a little more, Mickey's brother Donnie working the Chain for just a little less. Jesse getting smaller, dying. Donnie getting smaller, Mickey getting bigger.

Mickey at home.

And Erika is always right where he knows he'll find her, at home in one room or another, like Britta, his mother. Or in Erika's case, out in the field rounding up the disoriented old retriever, Boy, or hanging out the wet clothes by the dead tree, clothespins in her strong teeth. But mostly these days Erika is curled up on the big bed upstairs, poor Jesse in the cradle of one arm, her eyes on the TV. Britta and Erika, home sweet home. They argue a lot, but gently. Little snippets of despair.

Upstairs, the little girls scheme and pretend to do the things they see on TV. If they bang about too much up there, Britta will take the broom and thonk the ceiling with the handle. Or Erika will if she's downstairs by herself. This makes them quiet down awhile. There are so many children, including the children of neighbors and the daughter of Erika's younger brother, Isabel. These extra children they look after on certain days of the week for no pay, just niceness, just the natural thing people do for one another. And on those days, on the couch, alone but kept within earshot and heart's embrace, is the child Jesse. You never hear his powerful shrieks anymore. The pain medicine money is always just in the nick of time from Donnie or Mickey, the refills hand over fist, the little white pharmacy bags decorate every part of this old house.