alt=""/>Edward “Butch” Martin, Settlement twenty-year-old, tells of what he remembers about fame.
Um . . . well, the newspaper did us in late August and after that bunches of nose-trouble types drove up the Settlement road to study us . . . from the parking area and edge of that nearest hayfield . . . well . . . um . . . some came over to the shops or Quonset bays to ask questions about our projects. Gordo was okay about that, building the cooperatives was his, you know, glory.
But man, we got mostly, you know, sightseers . . . like maybe they went to drive by a murder scene or house fire, then they come look at us. With binoculars!
Okay, only one with binoculars. But several cameras and camcorders. And they backed their cars and SUVs over one of our hayfields, squashing it.
So down where the gravel ends at the tar road, Heart’s Content, we put up a gate. Well, not a real gate. A horizontal pole. It was temporary, right? Little dangling sign said to KEEP OUT. And nice and handy, a message box. Neighbors and CSA volunteers and customers for our stuff could just lift the pole, right? It wasn’t anything but self-defense. Not even violent as there’s so much twitter about these days. So what’s the crime?
Seems like it was a matter of seconds the Record Sun has a big motherfucking picture of our little pole and KEEP OUT sign. Beside the picture they had a runty little story, not like the Ivy person’s. This one called us “separatists” and went on about Gordo being “their leader” and that he “seems more nervous.”
The Ivy article on us had been wicked warm . . . um . . . you know, because like she . . . liked us. This new “news” had an edge like something had changed.
And then it went AP. All except what Ivy, dear dear Ivy did not include, though she by then knew . . . Gordon’s polygamy . . . and how many children here were his. She left that part a blank. But you could tell, the great slobbering questing baying mass media was circling.
They used photos that Ivy had taken but didn’t select for her piece, ones that showed shadows and hints. Gordon’s pale dark-lashed eyes boring into the lens, the short gray-chinned dark devil beard and the merry-go-round of kid-made mounts blurry with motion. Not horses, but monsters, born of cruel minds? And the kids themselves in certain shots, grubby and drizzling and Third World. The ominous KEEP OUT sign.
My only child, Whitney, blond jouncy ponytail, Gordon’s lopsided smile but not the full cheek-twitch, she our bright-shining-star fifteen-year-old, his oldest. She had gotten awfully quiet as a few of us stood in the Settlement library with the latest dozen AP clippings spread across the big table in gray lusterless rainy-day light. I hugged her to me.
“Well,” said she.
“Well,” said me.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the Common.
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the Common from the goose
Anonymous
The only way I can get here today is that Montana’s mum drives me. Montana’s mum is named Beth. She has hair sort of the color of my mum’s but in long wiggles. Mum’s is straight. Mum’s hair is actually brown but she has always used Light ’n’ Streak, which is so pretty. I don’t know Beth’s real color, but the beauty crew works on her a lot. She says, “Hands playing with my head have a calming effect.”
Mum always says my hair is a good color without doozying it up. She calls my hair “wash and wear,” which is so funny.
Sadly, Mum has the orange outfit again but we don’t talk about it cuz she gets tears in her eyes. We have to sit at the table and no touching. Mum looks at me a lot and she always says she loves my secret agent heart-shaped sunglasses, then winks because it’s our secret together, about me being a spy. These glasses are white on the outside edges, pink where you see through so everything looks pink. While Mum looks at me, Beth talks all her wisecracks.
I want to give Mum a hug bad but they have a way of making sure you never hug. It’s a cop-guard in his brown outfit and gun who has a chair but hardly fits cuz he’s about five hundred pounds with a stomach that bulges front and sides and back. If you squint, it looks like he’s wearing an inner tube thing for floating in the lake. He’s taller than Gordie but his hair is shaved, not a real fade but more like a little hat and also what Beth calls a Kung Fu mustache. This she whispers so loud, then says in her voice, which is deep and crunchy, “He’s the one they probably handcuff people to when they take ’em up to court, right, Lisa?”
Mum flashes her eyes over at the guy who is now looking at Beth and then he looks away.
Mum says she misses me so much. Today she has lost her tan even more. Definitely no sunshine here. Mum always has to work on her tan. She says my father, Damon Gorely, is the best color. I saw his picture once. But she actually met him when he was at his concert and very famous in rap and hip-hop. Mum says I am golden like a Gypsy queen and she would give anything to be me. But today we don’t talk about our usual stuff, tans or hair or outfits or me. We mostly listen to Beth, who is telling all her jail jokes and then says, “Oh, fuck. I have to pee.”
If I get a word in the edgewise of Beth I’ll report to Mum about the food they want to make me eat at the Settlement and at Gordie’s house, where my guest room actually is. I will never eat fish with skin in ten million years. And they have big rules about sugar. When Mum and I and our Scottie dog Cherish lived our regular life in Lewiston there were no rules. We had TV. We had sugar. Now there are jail rules and Settlement rules and I’m so sick of it.
I am getting tears in my eyes but I don’t make a single noise.
Mum gets tears in her eyes and no noise from her, either.
We almost touch.
§ See character list at back of book.
¶ Community Supported Agriculture.
Forward Again to September
An old dark-green-and-white Chevy pickup pulls in and the giant, a bit slope-shouldered Gordon St. Onge steps out, a tax bill or some such in his huge hand, a harmlessly overcast expression on his bearded face. Three little boys are on the truck’s bench seat raising hell. A perfectly nice apple with no bites sails out the open passenger window and bounces toward the groomed town hall shrubberies. No seat belts but gun racks, yes, with one gun. No, actually it’s a large carpentry level. For newspaperly photo purposes, guns are better, but
