The School on Heart's Content Road (12 page)

You know the woman loves the man who sits beside her, each in a straight wooden chair. But who would guess? The face of Claire St. Onge
is ever so stark of expression, eyes leveled on whoever or whatever it is that turns her head. Reflections of the kettles and dippers, and the many strewn Settlement-made ceramic plates and cups painted a pretty eggnog yellow, purl and flurry on the glass parts of her specs. A dimple by her mouth once seemed girlish; now, at age fifty, it increases her severity with a look of clenching jaw.

She is short while standing, short while sitting. And fat. Not pudgy. Not chubby. Not stocky. But fat. Her long graying black hair, often worn up and out of the way, sometimes with Swiss-looking embroidered sewing-shop trim or a barrette, is free today. It forks partly over one mighty arm and mighty breast, partly down her back. Her work shirt is pale chambray and tight. Her wedding ring is silver and plain as are the rings of all the St. Onge wives, none etched, knurled, or exclusive.

She raises her chin, staring off flatly into a chaotic memory. With her old steel-rimmed glasses (found in a trunk with ancient tools?) she possesses that sepia dignity of all 1800s people preserved in frames today as they waited then for the photographer's black-powder flashes.

Beside her at the table (empty of other breakfasting Settlementers), the towering one's face lurches through dozens of expressions. In a photo of any era, he would blur or be caught with one or both eyes closed, the illusion of no mouth or two mouths. Claire and Gordon. Such a pair! And truly in years past, they were only a pair, not this branching out, thicker tree of their current lives.

In a future time, Claire remembers more of that morning.

Through the nearby doorway into the Cooks' Kitchen there was yipping and yowling like coyotes, the breakfast clean-up crews in true form. Mostly teens long-leggedly galloping by with bins or trays, a few smaller helpers trailing along asking squeaky questions and carrying a real big spoon or towel. I forgot which kid it was who patted me on the head, but it was Heather who kissed me on the head as she passed by with a wet rag in each hand. Heather was twelve. You see, it was their little joke about how I had become much shorter. Actually,
they
had grown too tall for me to kiss or pat
them
on the head anymore.

Glennice pushed a ceramic cup of coffee toward Gordon's hand and offered to take mine and refill it, but I was done.

I looked sideways at Gordon's eyes, swollen, almost purpled from no sleep. “You're damn late,” I said.

He took my hand.

I sighed.

He said, “Do you think it'll let up some, all these people? Think they'll lose interest in a while?”

“I don't know. But this is more than we can handle, even the co-op stuff—especially the co-op stuff.” I hugged myself. It could have been fall. Cold mountain smells moved foggily with the smells of cold eggs and smoky meat grease.

He released my hand.

I made a teasy face at him. “You don't want to hear that, do you?” I pulled my chair a tad closer, nearer to his warmth.

His chin was up, collars open. He was in a sort of heat.

“Somebody I know is always saying that nobody can save the world. Let me see . . . .” I pretended to search my memory. “He sometimes backslides. But mostly he's been pretty committed to the idea of doom.”

He looked so suddenly into my eyes, it made my insides hop. He grinned.

I was trying not to smile. “Years ago he—this man I know—he said the world of humans was a bucket of maggots.” I tried to make my voice deep. “A bucket of maggots.”

His grin stretched wider, twisted, overcrowded bottom teeth and straight uppers. Eyes. His whole head. Too merry. He said, “Who is this dude, some crank?”

I could see my young Gordon in the shifting but honest eye of my memory. More colt than stallion. A redneck bookworm in his off hours from the mighty DePaolo construction biz. I liked my history texts sunny-side up. He dove into the cold sea of the total human life story. In those days, I feared he would hang himself. Now, on the big porch, I sighed. “He was young. But his words were not frivolous. Civilizations always end in starvation, tree stumps, washaway soils, madness.”

He looked away. He seemed to be admiring the near mountain behind the Quonset huts. I'm sure what he was seeing was free energy for everyone, old and new inventions, spinning, humming, booming,
including some of his latest rambling about random jitter, microscopic lightning, electromagnetic energy, zero-point energy—endless energy, enough to purify water—to undo the crisis of the modern age.

I laced my fingers together in my lap primly. In those early days of our marriage I knew that to love him meant I too would dive deeply into that sea of the total story.

Then, in the 1980s he got the Settlement idea and threw himself into its creation like forty men. He never rested. He was tired, loud, and content.

But once we were not an idea but
the Settlement,
and the place was full of kids and our own history unfolding, and food was stored and spring water bubbled and celebrations became traditions, there was time for study again. Time to look outward. Time.

So now, there at the table in the cool leafy morning, sun striking the yellow coffee cup near my hand, I murmured, “I just tend to my chores now. And my little job at the university. Correct papers. Trudge on.”

He frowned.

“I can't go back and forth so fluidly as you do, my love,” said I.

He rubbed his face some more. Rubbed his hair, his ears. Yawned big.

“But I'm okay. It's okay. Really.”

“I'm sorry.” His eyes were so pale in those Black Irish Italian French Indian dark lashes. Their violet exhaustion overtook my own.

“Don't be sorry. You know when I left you and went to live with Danny and then came back, I wasn't running
from
Danny. I was running
toward
you. I am not going to say anything mean about Danny except that in this world where we find ourselves struggling to understand, Danny was . . . ah . . . well, he's a plastic light-up Halloween pumpkin and you are Portland Headlight.”

Gordon snorted.

In the kitchen a
clang!
and a teen boy voice, “Watch out!” A few shouts of emergency. Then cheering.

“Right now I'm in a place of hope,” Gordon said apologetically.

I didn't look into his face but at another memory, one of his other faces. The time our friends from Waterville showed up with a Panamanian whose name we took an hour to learn to pronounce right. It was a winter evening. The man, part Mayan, part African, part European, was dressed like Maine, a knitted red-and-green Pierre cap and huge socks.

He told of how two years before, in order to permanently replace the military of Panama with “North American” military, and to “possess my country,” the city where he lived was leveled “in the night, just before Christmas by ‘North American planes,'” and his brother, a labor union official, was executed. “Many executed. Professors of the university. Priests. People of the assembly.” He had later helped “shovel open” the mass graves “where the North American soldiers dumped the bodies.”

He and the others wore masks and bagged the bodies. He said people were wailing “when they recognized a little dress or maybe the watch on the rotted wrist with no hand.” He said, “Four thousand people at Christmas mashed by tanks—some as already dead bodies, some wounded and alive—and many executed or bombed. One got melted by some horrible weapon. My friend, he saw. Maybe laser? Whole person turn to blood like hemorrhage of every blood vessel.”

Gordon's face had tightened. Then it went ice white.

Later, we walked our guests out to the snowy parking lot. This was around 1991, and we waved good-bye as our friends' newish ballooned-out-looking pickup truck swept away. Gordon stayed out there in the dark as if for a smoke, but he wasn't a smoker. Last I saw him that night, he was leaning against the fender of one of the Settlement rigs, stargazing, arms across the hood.

Yes, sympathy hurts. But rage hurts too, if it can't leap out to strike. More times than countable I saw him face these discoveries, rage, and then back off from what he couldn't do, beat to death the “octopus of U.S. power” or go beyond that into the stratosphere of banks, that “system of faceless unrestrained international mammoneering”—also his words.

That expression of his every time. Bloodless with the agony of restraint, bearded over darkly with his youth, then graying frostily on the chin through the years, and now even grayer.

Yeah, years went on, and here I was looking into the face once again of Mr. Sunshine.

Shouldn't I have been relieved? No, I felt disgust. His face, the farawayness of this aspect, this expression of hope was dazy and—well, it was gooey. Like pie in the sky. Like a man sucked whole into Amway or church. His bucket-of-maggots outlook gave him a grown-up eminence. This is the paradox: Is happiness only for the newborn? the brain dead?
the self-deceiving plastic Halloween pumpkin lighted by a four-watt bulb?

In a future time. Among the papers sneaked out by government agents during one of the Settlement's public events is this overly-fondled-by-authorities excerpt from a carbon-copied letter written by Gordon St. Onge to a friend. It reveals his preoccupation with the end of the world.

World peace? Sure. When there's nothing left but ultraviolet lint and hot pond scum and radioactive microspawn, then there will be world peace.

Claire recalls the August Sunday, a couple weeks following the
Record Sun
feature.

We always encouraged people of the community to join us for our Sunday meal, to bring a dish if they could, to bring musical instruments, to share stories—a lotta old stories here in Egypt—and yes, we shared gossip. But even with all the Good Neighbor Committee's flyers posted around town and on windshields, we never got more than a dozen Sunday guests, unless it was the summer solstice. Fine. It was sweet. We were content.

But one Sunday after we got famous, something different happened. Long before noon, coming up the Settlement road, we could see unfamiliar cars. They parked. Some of these visitors got out but just stood there. Then more cars, a dozen more, then more. And more. They parked in the lot, along the gravel road, and they parked in the fields where our last crop of hay had been standing, mashing it flat.

Quickly, some of our people had gone out to meet them, redirecting cars out of the hay fields. Mostly, these visitors were not local people. More and more were arriving every minute, but just as many were leaving, driving slowly away. They hadn't come for the meal but just to get a look. “To gawk,” as Settlementer Paul Lessard called it.

Gordon was not one of those who went out to the road to welcome the visitors. He sat at a table, off to one side, with his back to a screen,
waiting for food to be brought out to the piazzas by the kitchen crew. Some of the men at his table were talking in French. He seemed to be listening, but he offered nothing. Food came; he ate. He chewed everything slowly.