nods, eyes scanning the guy, now his Tourette’s-like cheek and eye flinch as he registers the camera that is snapping several “frames” of him about three feet from his face and so his expression hardens. And this malevolent burning look, the Mertie’s Hardware billed cap and old bloodred chamois shirt, all a testament to his class, which of itself sustains the accusation of wrongs, a generalized inexhaustible infamy, are frozen forever in digital format.
Today the mail was worse than ever, like a “goddamn ton of bricks” my mother Beth screamed when Oz and C.C. and Jaime dragged all the feed sacks with letters and stuff into the kitchens.
Also we got more meatballs on the phone down to Gordie’s house. I handled three of them all at once and got them to confess they were calling from the Maine Mall. I am very good at this, better than Jane Meserve who believes she’s a secret agent, which is ridiculous. She is not even seven yet and cannot spell. Actually with spelling I am better than the Record Sun which made four typos in the article about us.
Gordie was depressed or something because another newspaper guy nailed him with a picture that went onto a front page in Massachusetts ←(notice my perfect spelling).
They always take lots of pictures of him and pick the scariest ones and call him “the Prophet” or “with militia connections.” All our windmills and gardens and conservation projects that Ivy liked aren’t mentioned now. They say Gordie is “a charismatic leader.” My mother, Beth, says if this keeps up, the FBI will be in here with tanks and CS gas . . . which she heard is explosive in close quarters. She says the government loves to explode things because Americans like to watch explosions. It’s all very exciting but when I said tanks were funny she squeezed my arm HARD. “Shut up” . . . her actual words. And she looked afraid. Not her usual self, which Gordie calls an “unflappable smart-ass wench.”
On talk radio they talk about how Gordie has twenty-five wives. That is a bit of an exaggeration.
He trudges up the flagstone-and-vinca path to her yard, the velvet-skinned white birches yeowling in the wind. He notes there is a ceramic cup left on the little stone bench from where you can, on a less misty day, see for miles, including the reedy narrow end of Promise Lake with all its wee islands, some too small to build on, a few barely the size of trash-can covers.
Claire’s friend Catherine and her child Robert have been staying with Claire, a tight fit, and he has heard that this Catherine fancies the little stone bench, the view, the peace. But too windy and yeowly today for peace.
And besides, Catherine has been gone for several days, being straight-out busy at the university, Professor Catherine Court Downey, the interim “chairperson” (Gordon’s word) of the art department, she who is under Gordon’s skin in ways contradictory to skin.
He has carried here, for Claire to see, yet another newspaper that has been squeezing out more sensational mileage from the Settlement “situation.” Yes, his home is now being referred to as “a situation.” And this is a fearsome turn in the road and Claire and her tiny steeply roofed cottage of colored-glass panes, reservation baskets of sweet grass and ash, and lusty hanging plants, and that carved dark-stained furniture, made by him, are the cave of comfort he crawls into when most stung by fears, most uneasy. He sees her in his mind’s eye, standing in her open door, those twenty years all layered, twenty layers of soft transmutations, all the Claires, starting with that age-thirty Claire, his first bride, her strutting little figure, the sway of her hair, more hair than figure, a mane of mirror-shine black. No glasses in those days. Just eyes. Black eyes. Unexcitable eyes. And yet, they were thunder eyes, speaking eyes, eyes that often could rivet him to the wall. Or the bed, as the case may be.
It wasn’t until he had betrayed her that she began to put on weight. But before that, oh, how she used to swing those hips. Nearly ten years older than he, an “older” student (if you aren’t fresh out of high school), USM history major, history and archaeology, the stirring finds of recent digs all over the mean curve of the planet, oh, she, Claire, was both ancient and ripe.
It is through his especially developed feelers of the heart that he knows he has missed her, her after-the-noon-meal “quiet time” when she reads over her university students’ compositions, these from her adjunct position in the same building as the “chairperson’s” office. So he can surmise Claire has had an interruption other than himself.
But here is the crow, not the usual bunch who scream jocularly over the cracked corn on the two windowsill shelves. But the crow, the one who recently breezed in to win Claire’s heart, perched today on the lumpy man-sized kid-made “sculpture” near the front door. Part of a beech tree, this sculpture; looks like a fellow with too many arms. Mossy flappy logging boots are fitted to the locations of the feet, if there had been feet.
“Art by kids is sicko,” his wife Beth loves to observe. Though this sculpture is hardly as disturbing as the kid-made merry-go-round mounts that the Record Sun’s Ivy Morelli photographed, and all of America now gasps over, those eyeless leering monsters of molten colors that blur around Gordon in his most famous media image.
The wind now brays awfully.
The crow’s feathers flicker just as Gordon’s dark brown hair flicks and flops. The bird cocks his head. Gordon is not charmed by this crow’s moxie. He just stands stiffly, his eyes on the other’s eyes.
There are no shadows today. Everything is sluggishly and hysterically straightforward. The bawling wind rises up and once again tests crow and man. Inside the cottage a door wind-slams.
Gordon’s eyes narrow, his fingers tightening the rolled-up paper.
Crow shakes himself, which means he has something to say, gets a more secure perch on the beech sculpture’s square head, and out comes his scratchy advisory voice, “It’s Bob. Don’t answer the door. It’s Bob. It’s Bob. Oh, God, it’s Bob. Don’t answer the door.”
The other crows are in the pines many yards west of Claire’s yard. Across the wraithy white-mauve sky darker clouds go scudding along helplessly. Gordon aims the paper like a revolver at the sassy crow. Crow hops, turns to one side, says quite clearly, “Salad. Yuck. I ain’t no friggin’ rabbit. Yuck. I ain’t no friggin’ rabbit.”
Gordon again pictures Claire in the doorway, this time just her round most recent self, the way she would look today, her hair beginning to gray, the spectacles and the vast bustline in a rough-knit sweater. Oh, that for once this afternoon his plans would dead-bolt silkenly into place. She would offer him tea in the cloudy-today sunroom. She would rub the sleeve of his shirt over and over and over.
Crow expands his wings as if to rise, settles again smugly in the same place, then imparts, “Thou art the thing itself: Unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”
Gordon knows this bird has not really spoken this last bit. It’s just absurdity and stark loneliness merging in the frontal lobes of his, Gordon’s, brain. It can happen to anyone, of course. It’s absolutely not a form of insanity.
The
