The School on Heart's Content Road (46 page)

The pond is little, an ir'gation ditch with big pipes sometimes. But pretty. Penny saw I was collapsing. She sat with me in the grass while I went wicked to pieces, screaming and snot everywheres, not on purpose, but I got empty so then it was quiet, and cold too. And the bugs were cricking all around and the pond was getting pink and dark like the sky and she rubbed my hair backward the whole time. And after it was more pink and more dark out, she said, “The human race is crafty but never very bright.”

I covered my ears.

With the assistance of a five-year-old and a four-year-old, Jane Meserve writes a letter, addresses it, and finds the right cubby in Cook's Kitchen to mail it from.

DeaR Govimint—

Let a PeRson name Lisa Marie Meserve coMe HoMe. She is my MOTher. I am heRs name Jane. Jane Miranda Meserve Ejpt Maine Hearts Content Road. Yours last chance Jane.

Out in the world.

The machinery of this vast cracking overripe civilization, which shreds up small concerns, does not reply.

Long night.

Going on 2
A.M
. The school on Heart's Content Road is in session. Well, yes, the True Maine Militia is meeting. But is there a difference? Nine girls in the East Parlor, five more in the print shop. Many pairs of scissors chomping into stacks of blue index cards that have been run through the Settlement copy machine. Four True Maine Militia membership cards from each index card. Some will be mailed. Some will be handed out. Hundreds of finished membership cards are now in the boxes. Fingers quick and strong. Fingers with purpose. Fingers with patriotic ardor!
Chomp! Chomp! Chomp!
Scissors that never tire. Glasses of milk and maple candies going around. A few sandwiches. Musty-flavored wild cranberries picked and dried for cooking by Settlement crews, eaten now by the mouthfuls. Membership cards for the whole planet.

Just a few candles now in the East Parlor. All the windows are covered with blankets, here and in the print shop as well. You never know where Gordon is, and you can't trust him on this. One minute he's
green light
concerning activism. The next minute he could be
red light
again. Best to lie low.

Next night, up in the woods: cold.

Colder than last night. Frost in the open fields. Not the kind of frost that frizzes gardens and makes a squashy goo of your window-box impatiens, but an open field of granule-sized stars, palest silver, under the snow-white high-powered moon, and all the crickets and singing night bugs are quiet.

On a small mountain in Egypt, Maine, a tree house made of found planks and trash. A young boy is curled up in this, tight as a squirrel. He wears one T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and over that a camo BDU shirt with the patch of his militia. Jeans. No long johns, but some nice new wool
socks. New work boots. No pillow. No mattress. He is the new American youth, multiplied by thousands across the land. His hands are fisted against his stomach. His dreams are complicated, his testicles flattened into his shuddering musculature, in fear of the impending. How much worse can it get?

He is now fully formed, the masterpiece of a culture that rends souls with its clean hands. He is what we asked for, fifteen-year-old Mickey Gammon. Will he pull the trigger someday? On us?

Another evening. Ten-thirty
P.M
. St. Onge farmhouse on Heart's Content Road.

Gordon thinks the phone is off the hook, though mistakenly it has been hung back. At least right now the thing is quiet. He is sitting at one of his heaped desks under the cold fluorescent light. Alone.

In one heaped box of mail, a fat old tortoiseshell cat is curled. Her nose whistles. She's a very old cat, nearly twenty, having been his mother Marian's cat in the last years of her living here.

Many boxes of mail. Some say
INCOMING
. One box says
OUTGOING
. On the edge of one desk, looking like it still might be warm from the copier, a fresh ream of one of the True Maine Militia songs he's taken a special liking to. He sends copies of it out in his letters to friends, yes, with his fat philosophical letters. The songs are such things as “This Land's
Not
Your Land.” Dozens of tiny Abominable Hairy Patriots, with open mouths singing, make a busy border around the song sheet's edge.

How clever the Settlement young people are! he is thinking. Though other times, their activism scares the living shit out of him. He does not want to attract the gooey soul-stealing hand of the growing police state of the “outside world” to fondling and frisking his family.

He squats to the floor, to a large diagram of a community-friendly “wind-turbine-solar-combo” regenerator for electric vehicles, with fold lines like a road map. He spreads his hands on this but then stands, distractedly. On the table a buff-colored pamphlet featuring micro-energy. Fuel cells. Frictionless flywheels. They call to him with an urgency louder than voice.

Meanwhile, against the wall, an old shoebox of letters from the superintendent of schools' office, some opened, some not, none answered. Always
these superintendent's letters, but never a phone call from the superintendent.
Some things best left unconfronted and undealt with
is perhaps the superintendent's feeling on the St. Onge situation. But, for the record, stern letters do exist. None of these call to him. He almost knocks them over accidentally on his way to his old desk chair.

Now he moves his pen across a postal money order, two money orders totaling $1,500, both going to the same place. He signs each one in careful print:
EGYPT ENDOWMENT FOR SMALL LOCALLY OWNED AND OPERATED BUSINESS AND THE SELF-EMPLOYED
. Then he writes
Happy Birthday
in one corner of each, a tax write-off trick he learned from the old construction-biz days.

These money orders are both made out to Russ Welch, owner of Welch's Service Center, this, Gordon's little secret for a few years now. Once every three months, all the interest from a certain batch of his inherited stocks, those last few he has not sold off, goes to one or two small locally owned, locally situated businesses or farms or to plumbers or loggers or carpenters, strugglers, diehards, tough old relics.

Egypt's small businesses. He knows their faces. Concerning these, Gordon always has his ear to the ground. If someone is about to go under, he hears it. Those who are fair and never cheat you.
Never cheat you
. Yeah, yeah, without cheating, it's a game you can't win. Yes, yes, honesty is silly. According to the new way, this is especially so. Be honest and down you go! And so Gordon makes out another money order, bearing hard on the pen to make the print perfectly clear.

As he licks the envelope, he sees his mother's disappointed face in his mind's eye. His actions will ruin him in the end. Marian says this. And he knows this. Lately he has had to start selling off the last of the stocks. The rainy-day nest egg breaking down. But doesn't he despise stocks anyway? And besides, the stock market is on borrowed time, no? Everyone says so.
Borrowed
, yes. Well, the nation is. Borrowed, bloated like a heat-ripe corpse, but still lustily hungry. The globe is its apple.
Eeeeeha!
And Marian's voice, “
You invite disaster,
” voice of the human mother, echoes of the other. He is weary of the fuzzy edges to right and wrong, the cruelties of kindness, the rightness of greed.

He hears voices and feet out on the piazza. He tenses. A late-night reporter? An old friend with yet another homeless family? Or Settlement people with emergency needs, that which are the heaviest responsibility of all?

Soon he hopes to get a crew together to fence and gate the yard to this place and—sure—a sign much like the one to the Settlement road: ANYONE TRESPASSES WILL BE SHOT. TRY IT.

He considers the True Maine Militia's
opposite
goals. He sighs.

Piazza screen door slaps shut. He lays the envelope down, stands up quick, burping the taste of homemade hard cider. Reading glasses go into his chest pocket.

Inside door opens. Several young men swagger into the kitchen; Joel Barrington in the lead. Joel, not a Settlement resident, but the next thing to it. It is always good to see Joel, a bright-faced thick-shouldered blond twenty-year-old, sporting the gregarious and sometimes bossy ways of the Soule family, which he is blood to and raised by. And yet also Joel has carried on that mysterious high-minded sneaky thieving look in the eye like his father, Lloyd Barrington, who plagues the rich or unconscionable around town but never sees the inside of a jail.

“Nice night. Clear as a bell,” casually remarks Evan Martin, who is the one kid of all the Settlement's kids to get cursed with pimples, pimples of every shade of blue and purple and red and yellow. His cheeks look burned and torn. But his hair, a shock of black, flopping to the left side of his forehead, is lustrous and appealing. He dresses just like a lot of the non-Settlement kids do these days, cut-off sweatpants or ballooning things that look like culottes, cut up sweatshirts, and a blaze-pink-billed cap turned around backward on his dark hair. Fashions of the outside world, no matter how ridiculous, reach in through the gate of the Settlement like a big hand that teases and tickles. In spite of all the busy sewing machines. In spite of everything.