down from Belfast, one of the Maine Community-Made Furniture Cooperative exchanges, here early to pick up a tractor-trailer load of pine tables, chairs, beds, cribs, bureaus, hutches, and cabinets.
There by the door of one of the shops, a group of kids are gathered around the visiting shoemaker. They ask pointed questions about everything but shoes. Where is your car? Which cottage are you staying at? Do you know my mother? How come you hate butter? Were you fat once? Do you know peak oil? Climate change?
There by the low stage, a group of teens are setting up a few props for a quick breakfast-time skit and there are Rachel Soucier and Jaime (son of a Settlementer “single dad” named Rick) with their guitars, hoping to engage everyone in a happy start-the-day sing-along.
On Gordon’s plate, nothing. Not yet. He has waved away various offerings. His hands are in a pile on the table. He sees Lee Lynn arriving, hand in hand with her beautiful bright-faced toddler, Hazel. His wife, his child. His pale eyes again spring onto Bonnie Loo, her brassy, dark hair in that purple raggedy piece of cotton, that cable-stitch sweater of forest green giving her handsome olive complexion and amber eyes an autumnal magic even if her expression is as sour as a lake of lemons. It’s the first morning she’s cooked breakfast in a while. Her pregnancy doesn’t show yet, except by sound . . . the sound of occasional retching. This will be her third baby by him. He sees up ahead a crisis coming between himself and Bonnie Lucretia Bean Sanborn St. Onge. There will be no shock. But all of life’s severings do bleed.
And stepping from the kitchen are Aurel’s wife Josee Soucier and six-year-old Jane, both carrying pitchers of fresh tomato juice. Jane looks regal. Dressed in head-to-foot black.
Gordon’s eyes move quickly from one face to another. So many faces here to account for. And he accounts for them all. If you are not at a meal and were expected to be, he, before anyone else, will notice. The sights and sounds of the Settlement men and women and children; and the round fuzzy nearer mountain rising up blackly against the pale orange east, where the sunrise will need to claw and slog its way up through those few jam-colored clouds; and the shorn fields still in deep shadow, a deep gloamy blue; and the shorn ewes, more nappy now than a month ago; and the lambs, looking more like sheep than two months ago, all in anxious clusters near the gates and Quonset huts; and that funny little hum of two electric buggies crossing the Quad, all this a one-piece tapestry under the loving and, yes, panicked scrutiny of Gordon St. Onge’s zigzagging eyes.
He leans forward now with his elbows on the table and bites at a broken nail. He hears his oldest son, Cory, pulling a nearby wooden chair out from this table, making a celebratory sound from his throat up through his teeth . . . something like reveille. All over this boy’s left hand and wrist words and numbers in pen. Reminders. Which is a little bit like Lorraine Martin, who hurries past now with big notes clothespinned to her sweater. Almost nobody here at the Settlement is naked of responsibilities.
Gordon’s eyes swing over toward the throaty belchy laugh of Suzie, who is married to Andy. Both Suzie and Andy have the puckery eyes of Down syndrome, but their love is as lustrous as any other couple’s when they are squirming warmly beneath the weight of each other’s bodies or holding hands across the breakfast table. What is there about Suzie and Andy’s perfectly focused quiet fire that makes Gordon St. Onge more whole?
Now he watches with rigor and chilled soul the arrival of Jordan Langzatel from Portland. He is the nineteen-year-old from the university whom Gordon’s oldest daughter, Whitney, soon to be sixteen, calls “my sweetheart,” and he has come to take her rock climbing in New Hampshire today. But Whitney must tote along her chaperones: Bray, one of the Settlement twenty-year-olds; and C.C., a Settlement neighbor. This is a Settlement rule so ancient, so rusty, too utterly and totally politically incorrect, and yet Jordan Langzatel takes it and lots of other Settlement customs in stride. So far. And the Settlement notoriety? The radio talk-show hysterics? The sensational photos and TV clips meant to scare? And now this morning the new tidal wave of terrors over what some talk-show hosts are describing as “Gordon St. Onge getting past security to threaten nearly forty governors’ wives and the governors themselves.” It’s the “Dumond House incident” or the “Cape Elizabeth episode.”
But Whitney’s sweetheart seems unfazed. Where he stands now among a group of young Settlement mothers, there’s lots of giggling. Gordon studies the scene. The boy is blond. A tall, broad-shouldered critter like himself, often clowning but in the eye a dirk-like stab of seeing the largeness of the world, of the life, of the predicament. Something familiar there. Except for Gordon’s darker hair and time spent on this “mortal coil,” it seems Whitney’s got herself a man cast from the same mold. But of course.
Jordan’s hiking boots aren’t new. The collar of his wool shirt is turned up. A freshman at USM. Ready to declare his major in chemistry. His home state is Nebraska. “Like being at sea only no waves and more solid,” he has said with a smile. His accent to a Mainer’s ear is a spider that paralyzes o’s and a’s. Or is it that he reverses them? This causes the eyes of Mainers to squint.
Will Gordon’s cherishling Whitney St. Onge leave the Settlement someday?
Leave town?
Leave Maine?
Whitney, blond bouncy ponytail, brighter than sun through a crystal; remarkable eyes, almost Hollywoodish; and classic nose like her mother Penny’s but goofy in the smiles passed on from his seed. The searching mind? His. But like Penny, love is calm, all is calm, enthusiastic but not confused. Girl at ease.
And what is she to the whole Settlement? Heavenly gift.
Here it is. The possibility. Tentacles reaching in. And restless youth makes its expeditions out. In, out. Closer, farther.
A little girl with white hair and white eyelashes takes hold of Gordon by the leg and calls up to him, “Gorgi!” and holds up her arms. This is not his child. And he is not her father. But when you are a little stubby thing whose life is measured in months and you are of a solid tribe, DNA has no dazzle for you; what has dazzle is only such matters as stout arms that raise you up cathedral-high.
Once the child is up in Gordon’s lap, she stands, one foot on each of his thighs, and grips his head, gazes around his head at those who hunch miserably in rockers there in the growing freezy daylight along the shingled wall of the building inside this porch, and she has an expression a little bit like that of George Washington crossing the Delaware (the artist’s version) as though Gordon were a vessel that could withstand the blackest, meanest, coldest waters.
But this is not so. Gordon St. Onge is not indefatigable, not even a minor hero, not even a mildly self-assured man. He is, as we know, filled with terrors and self-doubt. The grip of his massive arm around the little one’s hips feels right to her. But he is weaving inside. Burning in shame. Feeling somehow still suspended in a certain blunderish nudity before the eyes of thirty-two governors’ wives and their protectors. What was he to them but a cheap thrill, an interesting attraction, an experience they can add to their lists of trips, adventures, conquests, and purchases?
The tiger came to our brunch. He had big paws. Big teeth. He had a large litter of cubs bouncing about. He flirted with us. On his hind legs. And he had been trained to talk. He made no sense but it was amazing all the same. We’d like to have seen him dance, too, in a little circle. And to bow low. Dance, tiger, dance!
Today we started an investagishon of the secret lifes of bacterias, the ones in the humanur compost bin.
