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 by the brightly lit Cook’s Kitchen doorway†††† are two men with coffees. These are two drivers 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