I couldn’t see his face, just his shape in his heavy work jacket. As he shifted the bag it crinkled, some glass jars clonked. He didn’t say anything. Another two or three cars passed on the busy road, headlights cold and the smell of exhaust like devil breath billowing around us.
We drove through snowstorms to both the preappointment and the thing itself. I had cried myself empty already so on these journeys I was as composed as a marine. After all, this abortion was an act of “mercy” . . . his word.
Okay, you get blood. You get hot cramps. And you get hollow. And then I knew that if I was to stay with Gordon till the end of time, I would need to get my tubes tied. Forget vasectomy. Redneck men do not do that. Not to themselves, nor to their male dogs and cats! I am sure, as I tell you this, that you will see Gordon with different eyes and your heart will be turned against him solidly now.
I, too, hate him for this. But I also hate me. It was together that we committed our grueling mercy.
Gordon’s mother Marian? Well, her parents were from Portland. Her father’s people, her Italian half . . . Munjoy Hill. Her Irish-descent mother’s people were all wedged into the West End: Libbytown and Gilman Street, Valley Street, and Saint John, near the trains. But as her family’s construction business grew muscles the brothers edged their way up the coast, in oceanfront properties with stone lions and wrought-iron gates.
But Marian married a power-shovel operator, Guillaume St. Onge. From “the County.” He almost wept, “T’a ocean smells like a gutterrrr.” He always used a lot of extra r’s.
Marian countered, “The County is too far from America.” Thus, the compromise! Oxford County. Lower Oxford County, “near America.” Marian never uses extra r’s. But lots of little corrosive bites were needed in the reshaping of her beloved on this and other issues involving a “respectable life.”
When Gordon’s papa died, Marian gave the farmhouse and 920 acres in Egypt (Oxford County) to Gordon (their only child) and to me. Marian was always warm to me and bragged me up on how I got my master’s degree, saying I’d “go far in a career.” She never said in that special withering tone, not even a slip of the tongue, no lapsus linguae for her, anything racist.
My family had more to say on race, Gordon’s race, not in words but in the narrowing of eyes and the making of clown faces. One of my uncles always said, “All white people have new trucks. They’ve got no idea how it feels to keep an old shit-box duck-taped together.”
And sure enough, Gordon and I would show up to visit in the Depaolo Bros. rig and my uncle Ray just sucked through his teeth and looked ever so smug in his wisdom.
When once I said, “Ray, it’s not Gordon’s truck. Gordon doesn’t own a vehicle now,” Ray slid his eyes over that rustless prince of a vessel and said, “Who does that truck belong to? Some rich Indian?”
I covered my eyes with a hand, could hear clearly his happy snivels at his quick wit.
“No,” said me. “Bunch of Eye-Talians.” I used the pronunciation I’d heard so often from various Maine corners. I loved teasing Unkie Ray.
Shortly after the gift of the farmhouse and land, Marian signed over half her shares in the Depaolo business, including several restaurants and all her investments in other businesses through her broker. It was scary to me. I had always imagined winning the Megabucks, for instance, to be a seat on cloud nine. But no. This treasure chest posed grand possibilities for fuckups. Not to mention shame, when I recall my uncle’s sniff of pride in his hint that there was no such thing as a rich Indian. So what was I!!! No longer Indian??? Was I now some bubbling corpse with no heat? No handsome blood tie to my handsome (even with his several missing teeth) straight-shouldered thick-waisted Unkie Ray???
Was I now a wraith, invisible to my most dear ones except for scorn and jest? A profligate? A reckless waste, a hoarding demon?
So then Marian was up in Wiscasset (with the stink of the sea . . . ha ha!) and we were in Egypt on Heart’s Content Road, which, when Gordon was a big little boy and for some time after that, was still called Swett’s Pond Road. It took only two trips with that one pickup truck to move all our stuff from Mechanic Falls.
Gordon’s cousins came to live with us . . . cousins on his father’s side . . . from the County, the valley, Maine’s proud crown, people of that icebound river, Fort Kent, Wallagrass, St. John, St. Francis, Allagash, St. Agatha, Frenchville, Daigle in New Canada, Eagle Lake, Soldier Pond, heights and lowlands, potatoes and rocks, steep-roofed houses, priests and family and nowhere to go but the in-betweens wide open to miles and miles and miles of road like over rolling sea, not many roads, just three roads, 11, 161, and 1 of the leaning blue-green and dark deeps and full-boil blowing snow in the in-betweens . . . wind is everywhere there, no droopy flags, no laundry that just hangs, no rigid hairdos. There were all these cousins who spoke the patois or some of it. All these who we’d been driving up to see quite regularly, six to eight hours away depending on how fast you drive and whether or not you stop to pee.
Well, now they were here in Egypt scheming in their tight-family all-jokey way, Souciers, Lessards, Pinettes, Eddie and Lorraine Martin, and of course blood brother Rex, hovering over journals and blueprints, no room for food on the dining-room table, and whenever Gordon breathed words like “windmill” or “solar” or “the main building with quadrangle and porches” or “the Quonset huts” or “the sawmills,” it was as if he were beholding a precious child, our newborn, the cutest, the smartest, the biggest, the best.
I no longer heard him rave and nearly sob against the global system of endless-to-the-end growth and its frantic hungers and machinating spooks and proxies of terror and war.
I’m not a gooey smiler, but inside I felt the sun was rising on my name: Claire St. Onge. Life could now begin. My dear one was no longer clawing the stony dungeon walls of his fears. He and I were plotting with steady down-to-earth people to raise up this bright thing, this settlement not far from Gordon’s father’s grave, which, by Guillaume Sr.’s request, was up up up past the vernal pool, up up up into the reverie of trees at his little bitty hunting camp almost a mile from the farmhouse. In all directions from the flagged markers at the building site of the Settlement’s soon-to-be main building were such humpy little mountains where the sun would startle us most mornings by bounding like a big yellow dog through the tip-top trees, and the moon from that same cleavage was a fairy-tale spectacle, white or honey with sugar and salt stars stirring and beating about in both calm and fury.
So then here came more of Gordon’s Aroostook County cousins and mine from the reservation and folks from around Egypt and Brownfield whom Gordon had grown up with or knew of. And some of these brought their aunts, unks, and grammies. And kids.
I remember our first feast on the big porch outside the kitchens, my cousins Leona and Geraldine and Carol all younger than me, Tambrah still young enough to have an excuse for being “overactive” or “hyper” as you might say, her older brother Macky telling her to “shut the fuck up” . . . well, we were all raising our hands to pledge to make a dignified life for ourselves, that we would be a people, that we would teach the kids, who were watching us closely from their seats at various tables, how to be a true community, because out there was, yes, a growing fearsome irresistible high-tech system with a life of its own. A life that was pathological and unstoppable, with oligarchs with no different turn of mind from those who nailed small-time thieves and other human beings to crosses to curb the annoyance of “bottom feeding” or uprisings of the same. But we were safe here!!
I watched my husband’s face. He was all teeth, a big triumphant grin. He was no longer cornered by it. He was no longer a boy, that boy I married, practically pissing himself with despair. No, he was past that.