The School on Heart's Content Road (52 page)

Later, a secret meeting. It's the True Maine Militia. In the woods, the militia way, which Mickey found out about when everyone showed up.

A single electric buggy's headlights serve as lighting, a frostiness drifting across it.

On a carpet of pine spills under Mickey Gammon's tree house, figures are hunched in their jackets and big Settlement sheep's-wool sweaters. Mickey Gammon wears the camo BDU shirt of his
other
militia. He takes quickie glances at Samantha Butler, Recruiting Officer, whose pale hair is topped tonight with a black felt crusher hat made for a larger head. The end of Mickey's cigarette glows prettily with each hard draw that follows each of his glances in Samantha's direction.

No little kids at these planning sessions. “Little kids have loose lips,” Samantha reminds everyone. “And, as we all know,
Loose lips sink ships
.”

Dee Dee St. Onge, absolutely pregnant, is part of this. She sits in a grand way on a sheepskin on the ground. She sits Indian-style like Samantha and, like Samantha, wears a crusher, what she has always called “a log driver's hat.”

They are going ahead with their new statehouse plan. If Gordon had said
yes,
they wouldn't have to be so secret. But when Bree had asked him for permission to round up all the littler kids for this, he had said,
no
. “Clandestine,” says Erin Pinette. “Privy,” Samantha adds, in her usual naughty way, and Mickey Gammon's Lucky glows cherry red.

“So this isn't exactly the Million Man Woman Kid Dog March,” Dee Dee observes.

Samantha laughs. “That's going to have to be a long way down the road. For now, just this reconnaissance mission. For now just the family. No public announcements for this.” She tosses an acorn at Kirky Martin, who tosses it back. Harder.

Whitney explains. “We finally reached Senator Mary, and she is mailing us a map sort of thing with the whole layout of the statehouse and office building. It's got that tunnel we might march through. Mary says these are the exact times the governor will be in his office next week. But we have to call her again the night before we head out.”

“Senator Mary gave us her secret cell phone number too,” says Sophie, swanlike Sophie, so silvery a person she shines in the night.

“This!” crows Carmel St. Onge, wearing a checked cap with flaps, “is going to be a siege!”

“So we need to bring everything we need for the whole day, two weeks if we have to: dried cranberries, nuts, apples, and we oughta pop vats of corn the night before,” Kendra B suggests.

“Lightweight long-lasting rations,” says Rachel Soucier, with an ivory-white megasmile.

“They're not going to get us out of there without tanks,” declares Kirk Martin with a manly (he thinks) growl.

Dane St. Onge speaks, voice both deep and squeaking in that adolescent way. “They'll need a
lot
of tanks.”

“Excellent!” three voices of three preteen girls chime, then fall away into giggles.

Bree, the deformed-faced girl, is there, only fifteen, Mickey's age, yes, but a wife, no shit, of the Prophet.

Bree's eyes sweep over the beautiful faces, unbearably beautiful in the frosty light. Even their red noses are beautiful to her. And that soft scratch of the record keeper, Margo's, pen. Bree's eyes also move over Mickey, the only one standing, leaning, slouching in his beautiful insolence against the tree trunk of his abode. Smoke around his face. No hat. Just that uneven streaky blonde part in the middle of his forehead. And then Whitney, her confidence, her humor, her father Gordon's eyes, Gordon's nose, Gordon's mouth. Hair blond like her mother Penny's.

If Bree stares at these faces long enough, she feels confused. Nicely confused. The warm whirl of St. Onge genes, their somewhat husky voices all merging, the similarity of their body movements, that laugh, that squint-blinking of the eyes. Even those who are
not
Gordon's children have taken on his manner. Maybe even Mickey already has begun to adapt. And Bree?

When the group breaks up, pens are pocketed, everyone stretches. Michelle and Margo are helping the laughing, very pregnant Dee Dee to her feet, and everyone is saluting each other and calling out in militia fashion, “God save the Republic!”

From a future time, Claire recalls.

Yeah, Gordon would actually
wed
each wife. Not a license from the state. But a little ceremony. No newspaper announcement, no invitations, no cake or dancing or silver-papered gifts. None of that. But there was this little man, about ninety, maybe a hundred and ninety, Andy Emery, the Reverend Andy Emery, who would show up one evening to talk with Gordon and the about-to-be bride. He had an old car, flat crappy blue with a black top. Big car. Paint dull, but motor quiet and dignified. Seems he had that same car all his life. I don't remember any other. You'd see that blue-and-black car parked down to Gordon's house—usually that's where they'd meet, in the dining room with the door shut—and the news would start flying:
Gordon was taking another wife
.

Then, a day or two later, the wedding. Up to the ancient Hurleytown Church, which had no heat and met only in summer, worship services presided over by another minister, the Reverend William Capp. But anybody could do weddings there. Rent was next to nothing; some small donation was all. It was a sweet church, a poor church. Outside paint, white of course, was peeling like the scales of a long-dead fish. Walls painted on the inside a blazing turquoise, a pump organ that was out of tune. But tall windows filled with yellow and orchid glass, so even a cloudy day looked sunny! But on a really sunny day there in late summer, the harsh sun transformed into a big corral of light, a glowing crown in which you stood gladly subordinate, and you would have “God” really visit you there, almost in the flesh.

As I said, this wedding would be quiet. Nobody there but Gordon, the bride, Reverend Andy Emery, and Beck (Andy's sister-in-law's daughter), a woman in her sixties who was so fat she almost couldn't walk, but she could sing hymn solos quite prettily. Though I don't think she sang for any of these weddings. I know she didn't sing when Gordon and I “married” that second time. She just served as a kind of matron of honor, hovering, telling me how happy she was for us when it
was done. And she took some snapshots. She sent me the snapshots a few weeks later. I believe she has sent snapshots to all the brides, at her own expense. These pictures take on significance, and so does this woman's blessing, because everything else about the day seems a little too much like pretend.

But at the same time, it is profound. Those few words Gordon speaks to you and you to him, the kiss, the flowers you wear in your hair—or evergreens if it is winter. The silver ring. The promise. Don't laugh. You could take his promise to love you forever seriously. Gordon was forever.

Yeah, laugh if you want. Sure you shared him, but you would never be deceived. You would never be dumped. He would never fall out of love with you. And from his hands into your hands was transferred the invincibility of the family, diametrically webbed across the whole. Yeah, he was giving you something ancient: a whole. Like the grit-and-ore planet under our feet.

Dawn of another day.

You tip your head, your hearing troubled by the rain, which punches you all over. You consider Mickey Gammon's tree house, seeming to produce rain from its soggy edges. The uncovered window reveals the inside space still stuffed with tree-boy gear. But no Mickey.

The whole.

In the west side leg of the Settlement's horseshoe are shops and piazzas—screen ones and open ones—parlors and library, also the kitchens. Built at first as one room, the floor is laid with Settlement-made ceramic tiles painted in designs and images with all colors known to the eye, especially lime and red. Under the tiles, copper tubes flow with sun-warmed water when needed. The floor surface is fiercely attended by cleaning crews to make things right for crawling babies.

This Grange Hall–sized space is divided into two areas by partial walls of cubbies and an archway of sign-up sheets, mailboxes, notices, complaints, photos, and art.

The first kitchen you enter from the piazzas has sinks and stoves. Tall many-paned good-for-the-soul windows frame at this moment a small dawn-dim foggy field, the rain solid and sparkling. Sometimes three deer appear there to graze, churning, fluttering ears and tails giving them away.

Significant thumps and clangs of Settlement life will bring their heads up.

And always there are crows, who can't seem to mind their own business. Even now in the downpour one is out there slumped on the point of a broken-off pine.

The first kitchen is called the Cook's Kitchen. It is hotter than the other, warmed by shouts, orders, jokes, frying smells, and lots of lid, drawer, and door slamming.

People who need to be fed by other people's hands are arranged in thronelike chairs near the radiance of this hubbub, and on days like this a few extra sticks crackle in one cookstove firebox.

The bigger kitchen you get to through the archway. This is called the Winter Kitchen. Only on stuffy days or steamy days are the piazzas fully set up for meals. Today they are not.

See from this inner kitchen the same little field through the tall windows. To the right of the field, close enough to block the summertime view of the southwest sky, are the rain-blackened shaggy trunk and limbs of a hundred-year maple. Its foliage is hot-tempered, more purple than red or orange. Majestic to human eyes.

But most eyes are turned inward. Many dozens of persons this moment, making plans, gobbling hungrily or daintily, testing the steamier stuff, sipping, leaning back—or forward and ready to lunge out into the big day.

Three long tables are made up of smaller ones, and smaller ones are in Ts or alone. Biscuits in piles. Meat and eggs in bowls. Raw milk of the cow and the goat in tall pottery pitchers, and some pitchers of well water, if you prefer. Jam and preserves in jars with missing spoons, some empty. Real butter. Black store-bought pepper and salt. Roughly sliced dark and light breads, warm or cold. Ripped-apart breads. Muffins with bites. Syrup of the maple tree in jars and pools and trickles. Potato cakes. Tomato juice in shapes like the bottoms of somebody's shoes crossing the floor. Someone with a mop is already on the way.