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. A bunch of us. It was wicked funny. We all died laffing exep Kirky. He had done resirch and sayd the microorganism are our anchint relitives and we are still 80% bacteria right in our sells. Called Simby Oh Siss.
When you dump the piss shit peet buckit stuff with layrs of shredded and chopt leaves and straw and othr carbns the micro guys make heat. So the big piles in the bins get condishons for fung-eyes and then the fung-eyes fix it so erth worms move in and enjoy Delishis lome.
Gordie and Oh-RELL have a place they go to for tests for path oh gins and so far so good.
Kirky says the micro guys make there heet from compition competition and war.
Beth sayd to notiss they doant do any musick or art or good deeds.
Bard sayd maybe tiny musick.
Kirky says the book only minshins war and COMPETITION.
Teachers, mommies, daddies, may I ask you a question? Is not competition at all costs the thing you made? Teacher, teacher, weren’t “Success” and “Excellence” and “Performance” the name of every game? Higher and higher scores. Isn’t winning how you taught us to define life? The gold! The gold! Wasn’t I your golden child?
We were married when I was twenty-nine and he was only twenty. Just a boy. But, of course, his six feet and five inches towered over my five. What quickened my blood besides our lust was that all around him wavered that edgy harassing phantasm of light, the light of a thinker, a ponderer. He was unsusceptible to suggestion. His mind was not like others, not a receptacle. It was an auger. No TV for him! He always had a serious book going slow but sure. And journals. Acres of those. And all this would fire him up into a tizzy. My darling boy chatterbox. I thought this was good.
We had a rented place in Mechanic Falls that had once been a variety store so the front yard was tarred. We had no unmet needs moneywise, if you compare it with reservation life or if you put it next to most people’s lives. His mother’s people were the Depaolos of Depaolo Bros. Construction, which was painted in brawny letters on the doors of the brand-new pickup Gordon had use of, all dusty from a site. Yes, the Depaolos. The ones who always had and still have substantial connections at the statehouse . . . the House, the Senate, the departments, the governor, the media, and the heavens. Get it? Endless closed-door “bids.”
Gordon and I both had a thing for history, me leaning toward archaeology, all that life and death at a safe terra-cotta-and-rust distance, while he was swept away by something else, something dangerous to one’s spirit.
Not to say he couldn’t frolic. Before that vast and noisy Gleason and Depaolo holiday assemblage, cousins and uncles and so forth, he was a legendary clown and at job sites a legendary hard worker. Oh, boy. In that manner, familial love prevailed. Both ways. Loyalty reigned.
But when we were alone he said to me in a raspy ugly croak that I should never let myself get pregnant. He said soon this world would not embrace life, soon there would be no ice, swollen seas would swallow shores. War! No corner of the world cozy enough to be unruptured by all that is “fair in war.” Soon much more mind control and sky control (his word for surveillance), soon automation of nearly every job description. Soon refugees would scale like hot magma every parallel and fence of the globe. No bedtime stories there.
Who would bring a little person down to that from the lofty sweetness of nothingness?
He was lean and had that dusky Italian-French-Indian-black-Irish skin and no gray yet in his beard. And I was golden! And I was silken! I could flash my long hair so guys would blow their horns and call “Hey, honey!!” I was not like what I am now. I was not fat and fifty. I was plush and high voltage. I didn’t need glasses. I didn’t have insomnia or leg cramps or reflux. And we were, like all young things, very frequently joined. Yeah, like a stirring green deep in its clay vernal pool and an immense thirsty oak root.
I used birth control. But it failed me.
These were days when Rex York visited a lot, hadn’t met his Marsha yet. He was such a gentleman but this was the tail end of a couple of hard-drinking years he and Gordon had had and some wild antics I’d rather not dwell on.
Gordon always called him “my brother.” Or “my blood brother.”
Rex came home unwounded from the Vietnam War and its horrors and shames and from the clamor of many brothers, came home to bleed on the beaches of Maine, as the tale goes. Bikers from a planet of giants taller than Gordon in a phantasmagoria of fists, brass knuckles, nunchucks, and at least one knife were the lullaby that put Gordon and Rex to “sleep” in the Old Orchard Beach sand and seaweed and incoming tide in the late summer dark. The story ends with Gordon dragging Rex, sometimes conveying him bride-style, to the truck, a pint or so of blood left in a long razzle-dazzle trail all the way up East Grande Avenue and on and on, fuzzy on where they had left the truck.
After Marsha and that white lace and white cake, and then the baby, Glory, Rex’s dignified wooden-faced self wasn’t at our kitchen table so regularly, not till we moved to Egypt, where it was just a skip and a jump between us.
But that night in Mechanic Falls when I told Gordon I