The School on Heart's Content Road (11 page)

The Eskimo Pie is less frosty now due to Mickey being detoured, waiting for a customer who took a
Record Sun
from the rack. And then the Bean behind the counter says to the customer, “See this big spread on the Settlement? Picture of ol' Gordo looking like out of that scene in
Murder at Midnight
with all the carnival stuff.” He flaps and crinkles his way through the pages.

The other guy laughs. “That whole place is a carnival.”

“Well, this is him”—the Bean is pushing his finger over the colorful picture—“by some sort of a merry-go-round.”

The other guy titters almost girlishly. “Like having your desk at Disneyland . . . Morrisseys send their kids up there.”

“You ever been up to one of their solstice marches?” Big grin.

The other guy howls. “At four in the morning!?” Shakes head, eyes wide.

Bean sighs pleasantly. “Well, you know they set up a windmill with Whitmarsh and . . . uh . . . what's their names . . . uh. . . .”

“You mean those on the bog?”

“Yeah.”

Head shaking. “Can't place their name.”

More talk while Mickey waits and waits.

Then, “People been calling Gordo the Prophet.”

“Oh, boy. Waco, Texas, in Maine.”

More talk. Quieter now.

Of course, Mickey's eyes were riveted on the rack.

Now, on the thick see-through ice-cream-cooler top, he goes through the paper, lifting each page in a heavy way, like a rock, like under it anything could squirm or march out.

Turns out to be the whole first page of a thick inside section. He cannot read very well the words in columns or in lines under the pictures. But he can read the pictures themselves like an old-fashioned Indian on hot deer tracks. He studies the photos. Kids making papier-mâché sculptures, picking cukes.

Then there's one of Gordon St. Onge, aka the Prophet. Yeah, Mickey has seen him in the distances around town, big distances, never this close with the pale eyes looking right into Mickey's own. One of the guy's eyes glows electric. Like a lightbulb with gas inside it, not an eyeball of solid
stuff. Probably due to sun on half his face, which also cuts his beard in half, part dark, part sunshiny.

Blurring across, some to the left, some to the right, a bunch of heads, long necks, rears, tails. Some heads are eyeless. A very weird merry-go-round, yes, kind of blurry, while the Prophet's face, shoulders, and one hand are crystal clear.

For two days,
Record Sun
reporter Ivy Morelli tries to reach Gordon on the phone.

Instead, she gets dozens of others: children, women, men, once even a baby that made obscene gasping noises and sucking noises and breathing noises and only one word: “Dah!” Then, finally, Gordon calls her.

She hurriedly tells him that the story went AP. “I'm sorry, Gordon, but they added in
things
. . . like there has been controversy around you . . . which is true. Seems there's been a lot of calls to their offices, not just ours, and AP's been interviewing people right and left, including grandparents and ex-teachers of some of the Settlement kids who have come to the Settlement recently, or recent teachers of kids who left the Settlement a few years ago. AP just says you are
controversial
and mentions
passionate disapproval
by many . . . and then of course some emphasis on kids lacking
education
and
a competitive environment;
these are quotes.”

She stops for one small
tsk
.

“Even with all the changes, the AP version is very short. Condensed. Really condensed. It . . . changes the tone of the piece from the way I wrote it. And the picture we never used for
reasons;
they seem to like that one a lot. In all the papers that are using the piece, they rewrite the copy and use
that
photo. One of the ones of you by the merry-go-round. Closer than the one we used. And cropped. You look”—she swallows—“pretty scary.”

Claire St. Onge remembers the days following the media stories.

Everything seemed to snap into place. It felt like a thing already existing once, maybe in another life, just needing to be reassembled. We could never go back to what we had before the
Record Sun
feature.

The phone, for one thing; it seemed to burst. Reporters from big outof-state papers and magazines. A couple of TV producers wanting to do specials or
segments.
Radio talk-show hosts inviting Gordon to go speak about our lives as separatists.

“Aren't they afraid of all the stockpiled AKs and tanks and such?” wondered our Eddie Martin, with one of his happy chortles.

Gordon said no to all the media calls. But then there were calls he was thrilled with. People interested in joining the solar-wind community, or the furniture cooperatives, or the CSAs, or all three, in hopes of restoring interdependence in their economically and socially devastated little towns.

Gordon loved these calls but was now tied to the phone a good part of each evening.

We got a few weird calls, people saying goofy things or making dangerous noises.

The mail increased to six times what it had been before. This included media people, who, finding the phone's busy signal a challenge to their patience,
wrote
to ask for interviews.

Funny, not one educator wrote to speak for or against our philosophy. But the editorial pages of the
Record Sun,
even the editorial pages of other papers, were loaded with letters that decried the fact that our children were not pushed into competitive mode, not aiming for high scores and “excellence.” They insisted these children would pay later. They said that not to prepare kids for the highly competitive workplaces of the global economy and institutions of higher learning was irresponsible, even cruel. Some said they weren't against homeschooling
if
it was state-monitored.

A week later, letters were still appearing in the papers. Some called the Settlement a
labor camp
and
brute school
. Several insisted that authorities should “get those children out.”

“They don't even have flush toilets!” one letter gasped.

We heard some of the radio talk shows, hashing over whether or not the FBI should be brought in. I remember one talk-show host who was really angry at this suggestion, and, while cutting this caller off in midword, said gravely, “Let's keep this conversation out of the realm of the absurd.” And right then, a caller got through who ran a small private school up on the coast that worked with principles similar to ours in the
areas of reading and writing. With the deep kindly
patient
voice of reason, she explained that forcing children to read too early will just turn them off, that before the age of seven they are often still in the motor stage and need to master any hands-on skills at that time joyfully. She called the special ed experience a “social crucifixion, especially in the antisocial competitive atmosphere most schools create.”

Then her beautiful strong patient voice was gone, replaced by shrill ones, all sorts of memorized propaganda about the importance of singling out
special children
and
honor students,
and the word
excellence
was repeated so often that the hiss of all those
x
's and
c
's was starting to give me a kind of migraine.

On that same show, there came the inevitable. A caller reported that he had heard things about Gordon, that Gordon was a pedophile. That there were stockpiled weapons, drugs, pagan worship. The radio host made no comment except “thanks for your call,” and then another caller said we were Fundamentalist Christians and Jew-haters. The next caller used the word
Nazis
. The talk show host himself called us
separatists
. The next caller said, “They are not allowed outside their gates. Only in chaperoned groups, especially the women
. . . his
women.”

There was mention of a possible group suicide and a probable siege with government agents. The host challenged this statement by asking, “Are
you
the FBI? How do you come by this knowledge?”

One very low-voiced man, a kind of Boris Karloff sound-alike, spoke of his “knowledge” that very little girls at “that school” were pregnant.

“Truly amazing,” the talk-show host said, in an “oh, wow!” way. His disgust was gone now. He seemed to be drunkenly resigned to the titillating turn his show had taken.

Days passed. People started coming around to the Settlement in person. Some said they had trouble finding us. But they found us.

One night, I came upon Gordon and his cousin Aurel arguing. Some of what Gordon snarled out was in French.

But Aurel was
all
French. Valley French. Ah, those Acadian swooping
R
s! With a few English words like
fuck you!
and
idiot!
and
Ivy Morelli
. Mostly Aurel raged at Gordon, and Gordon just tried to deflect. He said it would have happened eventually anyway, and he was sorry. But his sorrys weren't soft, they were yelled. And the two of them paced around like cats with their backs prickled up.

Meanwhile, as ever, there was so much work to be done here. Gordon and Paul Lessard and Ray Pinette and Eddie Martin and Glennice, all of them who were in the co-op and CSA stuff, they were either in huddles with strangers, answering mail or talking on the phone. Gordon was mostly missing his meals.

One of these mornings, Gordon came late for breakfast to the piazza and slumped down at the head of the two long joined tables, all the seats empty, everyone gone off to their jobs. He was rubbing his face and eyes, a slow self-massage, a self-soothing.

I sat down next to him without pulling my chair in.

You, crow, superintending the new day, shift easily on your roost of the topmost triangular green-Popsicle color plate of Tyrannosaurus rex's mighty wooden head. No Settlement children presently peer out through the teeth (two-by-sixes painted white).

You have a special interest in Claire St. Onge. She leaves dry corn for you just outside the windows of the interestingly small ice-shack-sized sunroom off the east side of her cottage. Everything so cramped, too cozy, stuffed with baskets, notebooks, picture books showing tools and weapons of people gone so long they preside only in the ore layer, lava and ledge, pressed like souvenirs. Or in the tannic-soggy peat pools, where some fell in and drowned and those who loved and missed them fell elsewhere, fell and fell and fell. Some might be in museums alongside stuffed crows.

Also in Claire's sunroom is a tea table carved from basswood in the shape of a table-sized mushroom, which you often admire through the glass.

But nobody is home at the little cottage. Claire is here in the midst of Settlement life. You hear her voice in one of the piazzas of the shops. You love that voice, which calls you Crow but in the old language of the Passamaquoddy. She is not speaking your name now but his, the towering one, Gordon St. Onge, there beyond the checkered shadows of screen. Both are talking of less interesting things than dried corn.