Morse stood smiling one of his almost Tyrannosaurus rex smiles, with a million teeth, and he arched his back, as if under stage lights, as the Settlement van’s headlights swept off to the left and away. And that was that.
This time all that was worthy to carry home from the beach and fields in jars was shells and one nice black cricket, for the munching yumming-it-up stage is over for future monarchs and the party stripes are gone.
The people who lived at the ocean, Janet Weymouth and her friends from somewhere, were very impressed with everything I said. They also said I did an excellent job as the monkey flying the fighter jet.
The whole time Jane Meserve did not take off those stupid sunglasses with pink heart-shaped lenses and white frames. She thinks she is very sexy and gorgeous but she never conversed. She just kept clinging to Gordie and saying, “When are we going?”
My mother says Mata Hari¶¶¶ was never that clingy.
The Record Sun’s headline is:
CONTROVERSIAL SPEAKER ST. ONGE RANTS,
THROWS 33**** GOVERNORS’ WIVES FOR A LOOP
A color photo shows Gordon in profile standing next to a table. Two seated women are looking up at him. They look stunned. He looks vicious. And big. BIG and VICIOUS.
Oh my gawd see this urgent don’t-miss-it newsy moment!! Guillaume “Gordon” St. Onge, known by many as “the Prophet,” terrorizes a roomful of upstanding persons including the wives of governors from thirty-six states. Here’s a mini clip of dozens of immaculately dressed and coiffed persons in an alcove all springing aside as the glowering giant plunges through to the exit. Hear his warty marshy bullfrog-deep voice as it croaks something to someone who didn’t skip out of the way fast enough. Fear in St. Onge’s wake is palpable. Danger is in the air.
How I’m taken for granted is a sign of my godliness, that my pull and exhalations are your true universe, heartbeat of a planet. I am the sea. All is fed because of me. All comes and goes into and out of my sweetly lathered chemistry, my pH, my open soul, my cup, my deeps.
But you, the conduit for rude change, risen on hind legs and with curious fingers, you are the dumb gear of your vaster oneness, you have crucified this rangy source in me. And so this universe of jumbo monsters and velvety clouds of the wee has already begun to blink out, one finned wriggling hungry star at a time. There will be no judgment but there will remain no sustenance. No barnacle. No snail. No fillet. No feast.
The screen is blank.
It is cool, a mistake to have set up breakfast out on the piazzas. Everyone is a little or a lot hunched in sweaters and jackets. Some shiver. The old ones in rockers and wheelchairs complain the most. Right now some are being escorted away to the Cook’s Kitchen to be close to the woodstoves. The Elder Assistance crew is, as ever, directed by young Vancy St. Onge, boxy faced, wilty-haired at times, other times with tight law-and-order spit curls. Today it’s the spit curls. Small languid piggy eyes with nearly no lashes. Prominent bottom lip. Square boxy body with stout arms and legs, and those double chins, all being even before she was pregnant. White blouse swaying and poofing in the currents of motion, like a sail. Always starting out the day fresh, white. But not after feeding eager-wide or clenched mouths various breakfast stir-abouts. And there is one fellow known for slugging and spitting who has two teenage bodyguards who call him Rocky and keep his quick bony fists in line but they are useless in keeping brightly colored or white or gray spits from the bull’s-eye of Vancy’s broad white-shirted belly. Therefore Vancy looks like an artist’s palette, today specifically one used in the rendering of a battle scene.
And have we mentioned already that Vancy is a skilled midwife?
Everywhere at once! Yes, the white sail. A fleet of them, it seems, so utterly revolving are her locations in parlors, kitchens, the shops, and broad piazzas, the cottages hither and yon. All those stout brown-haired Vancys! Each one with the slim silver ring of Gordon St. Onge.
There is, this morning, the distant staccato of acorns letting go up on the side of the mountain, striking the metal roof of one of the shady cottages. There are candles here on the tables because it is not full daylight. Settlement-made candles in their Settlement-made stained-glass lamps. The smell from them is greasy-sweet. On platters and in tin pans there are loose towers of steaming second-batch cornmeal pancakes and rolls made in experimental fashion, herbed to distraction by Bonnie Loo, the mad-scientist cook.
See Bonnie Loo now in the doorway to the kitchens, a robust twenty-seven-year-old of that streaked orange-blond-black fountain of hair knotted with a piece of scrap quilting cotton. She has had to tape one of the bows of her glasses, eyebrows shapely and dark and forbidding. Her unraveling dark green sweater has loaded pockets.
Gordon likes to sit at the head of the long connected tables, though he doesn’t always do this, intensely sensitive to possible resentments of other men here, old traditions felt deeply, as the eye feels a piece of grit and thinks it’s a stone. This morning Gordon has taken this end-of-table seat in a heavy slow-motion way that seems full of portent. He is square-shouldered in a fresh but old navy blue work shirt, no jacket. Hair combed with a careful part. Is that a little frozen breath you see coming from his nose? He stares off at something as Settlementer Paul Lessard murmurs to him some urgent matters of their lives . . . doing the monthly water-level check on all the batteries, trouble renewing a certain permit, and over off outer Pleasant Street in North Egypt, Bob Leighton’s dug well is dry. May need to put up a sign-up sheet for a tile-making, tile-setting crew and, of course, diggers. With shovels, coffee cans, and pails. Neighbors in need? Settlement helpers are on the way.
Paul Lessard is a pointy-faced, clean-shaven man with eyes of a sometimes reproachful-seeming brown and a long straight nose, a Frenchie nose, with frozen breath squirming out from it. He is stuffing a hunk of warm buttered yeast roll into his mouth. He wears a black corduroy jacket with tiny checkered flags, the race-car kind, crossed on one chest pocket.
At Gordon’s right hand is Stuart Congdon of the wild red hair, sky-blue eyes, and squat broad-chested troll physique. Only about five feet tall, if that. He has just arrived, his shoes wet from crossing the field, the soggy soles had chirped like a nest of tiny robins. This chirping had made everyone turn and look at his feet. Now that he is settled, he says nothing to Gordon and Paul but starts up a quiet chat with the teenage girl next to him, one of those who will be on that plane with him to Texas soon. The Death Row Friendship Committee. This girl has a big-necked soft-knit top that shows the strap of an undershirt but she is hugging herself, her nose red, her eyes full of tears caused by the cold.
Over
