Here they come, envious low men and their familiars. They intend to climb our walls. See it in their eyes, envy and cunning. Softness won’t stop them. They are not as human. They are the sons of goats.
I was just fifteen years old back then, almost as tall as he was . . . yeah, I mean my father, Guillaume St. Onge. And I was getting the build. So we were two of those who were the muscle on the road crew . . . along with two pairs of red Durhams . . . heh heh.
Okay, and so we usually worked the haying crews, too. He was at the mills more than I was . . . rough, planing, and shingle.
Also keep in mind that the wind turbines and power lines and boosters needed a lot of human touch, so there we were, Johnny-on-the-spot. Gordon’s cousin Lou-EE was our best climber, though he had what some guys here called “the slow disease.” I mean, he just really was a slow guy. Same age as Butch Martin. But slowww, like a geezer.
In winter we all had a hand at shoveling and plowing snow but Butch Martin was an ace ox driver so in the warm weather he was doing a lot of plowing and harrowing fields, and we had an ox-pulled baler, so Butch was the one who worked the gore for the hours when it wasn’t too hot for oxen. If it was too hot for those ol’ boys, we put the tractor to work.
Butch, he was twenty. He wasn’t a brother to me by blood, more of a distant cousin, but we were planted in the same Settlement forest, so we were fitted the way saplings do, heh heh . . . and eventually had arrived at full size. He and I often went together to deliver furniture to the co-op building in Gray and we both did meat cutting and Christmas trees. Sometimes I helped him work on the Settlement vehicles, that’s how we kept the old monsters stickered though I can’t say they passed Gordo’s standards for gas mileage. But life isn’t perfect.
If you were working with Gordo on any project, he’d talk you to death. Working with Butch Martin . . . he was the silent type, but for his trusty kazoo, always in his pocket. It was how he explained himself, little tunes . . . from moody to broody to cynical humor.
Well, the big project this day was roofing the cottage for the new family . . . the Rosenthal people§§ . . . so there’s the roof and it’s a devil of a job where you need a tender . . . you know, to get the shingles up. And Eddie says, “Where’s Kirk?”
Kirk, who is Butch Martin’s younger brother, never signed up for dirty-work crews, but Eddie, their father, will say, “A soft body is as bad as smallpox or polio.”
So Kirk gets dragged into some of these jobs and either he’s huffy and grumpy about it or he’s singing chain-gang songs that he makes up because he’s got a mind of exceptional wit. He’s an inventor, a philosopher, a scribbler, and a comedian. So where I’m going with this is it’s just after breakfast and unfolding before us is a big day on the new cottage’s roof. Where’s Kirk? He’s not signed up for any crews. So Eddie Martin says to me and Butch, “A soft body is as bad as leprosy. Go get Kirky and save his life.”
So, um, it was after breakfast. Gordo and John and Oh-RELL and my father, Eddie, were setting up the staging at Silverbell Rosenthal’s cottage . . . Silverbell, that’s what her name was . . . I hadn’t even seen her. She was mysterious. She sort of didn’t exist. But her kids . . . Eden and Bard . . . they existed. They were twins, about twelve, both quiet but not afraid to meet your eyes. Small permanent smiles. Like cats.
Cory and I were on a big search for my brother Kirk. There’s Evan and there’s Kirk and there’s me who sprung from our parents . . . that’s my father’s word, sprung . . . “sprung from the loins” he says . . . whatever.
My mother is cousin to Gordon so there’s a little relation to Cory . . . but you’d swear Cory came direct from Princeton, the part of the reservation where his Ma Leona sprung from, and Geraldine and Claire . . . all cousins. And Cory had this thing at that point with his hair, parted in the middle, tied back. And he was going to wear out his BDU camo jacket with the blue-and-gold shoulder patch that featured a fir tree with the words in a crescent: HOSTILE INDIAN. The camo jackets were for special occasions, meetings, and such . . . I had one, too (no HOSTILE INDIAN patch), but I didn’t wear it to the furniture co-op, Bean’s Variety, and the town dump . . . nor to do a roofing job. Cory was like Gordo in that he was one to draw your eye even without efforts. But he wouldn’t leave anything to chance. Anyways, Cory, being only fifteen, saw no danger in “the extra mile” it took to step dead center of the big eye.
Some kids said they’d seen Kirk helping with the compost bucket brigade crew. This is taking the buckets out of the bathrooms . . . buckets of shit, piss, sawdust, and peat . . . and they get dumped into the bins you layer with chopped-up old leaves or straw and it turns to soil. Good soil. We’ve had it tested a bunch of times. Moisture and the oxygen that lies between the carbon of the straw and the nitrogen of the stuff . . . it makes heat. And the microorganisms feel like they are at the beach . . . ha ha! . . . no, actually, they go to war and they compete . . . just like humans . . . and that makes the whole thing work. And I guarantee you, my brother Kirk was not helping that crew.
Then Bonnie Loo said he had mentioned going up to the windmills with the battery crew. I wiggled my eyebrows at Cory. He wiggled his back.
One of the old guys on the first piazza, all of them playing poker with actual money, said Kirk was splitting wood with the firewood crew up near the mills. Was this some joke?
Uh-oh. We were caught. I didn’t glance at my coconspirators but I’m hazarding a guess that Rachel looked abashed. There we were all clumped around one of the typewriters in the print shop doing THE DASTARDLY DEED. And there in the doorway were Butch and Cory looking big and brutal, eyes on Kirk who stood beside me, pen in hand. Kirk always had a way of standing so straight his back was arched. In those days he wore a tiny fashionable, though out of fashion, pigtail in his otherwise trimmed brown hair. So, okay, he was out of fashion but that was Kirk, a true nonconformist . . . you couldn’t even call him that, because nonconfirmists always conform to the new difference. Kirk was nobody’s mirror image, just that maybe he inherited your basic weird character genes from his dad, Eddie Martin.
Meanwhile, Butch was your standard hunky redneck guy to look at him, walnut-color eyes, dark hair that was not long, not short. He was dusky-skinned from working in weather and from Lorraine, his mum, who was of a dark look and yet an unremarkable look. Also for Butch no weird bejeweled doozied-up belts like his father’s or flashy print bow ties and blinding orange or pink dress-up shirts as his brother Kirk often wore. And the middle son, Evan, just a plain guy but not as hunky-brawny as Butch. Evan possessed more gawk. He had a rough time with acne and scarring, almost a burned look across his long face. But Evan was not in the print shop that day, and not in the doorway closing in on Kirk.
“Well,” says Oceanna, kind of sidling nearer to me to block the view of what was in the typewriter though everyone knows Butch is dyslexic . . . quite so . . . and doesn’t read. But she obviously feared Cory’s dark ranging-about eyes because obviously he and Butch, too, were picking up on our vibes.
Meanwhile, Bree was standing over by the old monster printing press’s alcove because she was in love with the thing and took every chance to fondle its curves so she seemed not to be central to us and THE DEED.
Well, they got their man and bullied him away to the roof job and the rest of us all let our breath out simultaneously because THE DEED was still perfectly on course.