Then we all did a laughy screaming encore and I howled it loudest of all, “I pledge!!!”
After six years we had a network of solar-wind-agriculture communities, mostly in Maine. Up to Aroostook, “the County,” there in the St. John Valley, where, yes, wind has that constant voice, we focused on our off-Settlement projects; oh, we were on the road there mighty often. And also to Washington County where my brother Stevie and his wife organized a bunch to raise one starter windmill.
My uncle Ray gave a quirky smile when Gordon and I and Leona showed up in our old Ford with the skip in the motor and rusted cab mounts. Gordon, as you may have guessed, wasn’t a Depaolo Bros. employee anymore. I was never to ride in a satiny new truck again, not as Guillaume St. Onge’s wife.
Also we had people in New Hampshire we consorted with, some of them experimenting with the making of inverters. Nobody being especially efficient. A lot of breakdowns happened. But when we reminded ourselves that we were a people now, we saw inefficiency in a new way. It’s not always the done but often the doing.
Meanwhile, crews were banging away on yet another and yet another cottage, now having settled a good part of open field and new cleared areas, pushing up into those shady lanes of the steep rocky woods. There would be a little private cottage for each of the families and for others. So much time spent out and about, night was a solace requirement for some and for others it meant other things. We were not striving for sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. We wanted our cake and to eat it, too.
Gordon and I still kept nighttime residence down at the farmplace, where the only phone was. And the lights were still running off the CMP‡‡‡‡ meter that Gordon triumphed over by keeping the rooms vivaciously dark. And Marian’s two cats who decided not to move to Wiscasset still lounged about in baskets of socks and boxes of newsletters or in cupboards where they were just sets of eyes.
We left the kitchen and porch doors unlocked so anyone who needed the phone could get in. On one of Gordon’s desks next to the plain black dial wall phone was a coffee can loaded with change and I-owe-yous for toll calls. And a standing tall spike driven into a board, its sharp point up, always loaded with scrap-paper phone messages, some scribbled by small kids. Example: gt wan bod.
But you’d not see me there in the light of day. I was always on the fly. When not up at the horseshoe main building of kitchens and Shops with crews and committees or at USM being unfruitfully employed as an adjunct, good chance I’d be up at the solar cottages, the one shared by my cousins Leona and Geraldine, or at Penny’s . . . Penny was a nineteen-year-old sweetie from town whom everyone loved but she tended to be alone too much, married to old Russian novels. At that time she was trying to learn Russian phonetically and would practice on us. And we’d say some phrases or words back. Penny said in a former life she had lived near the Taiga. She remembers stone bridges, too, and some small modest blue onion-dome buildings. “I’m not a spirity person. It’s just something that flashes into my noggin from time to time.” Then, “Tee-men-ya-nee-ravyisya!!” Or “Mirr EE Druzhba!” And then we’d all shout it back. With Russian we felt you had to shout it. It’s a deep-heart full-lung language.
Those solar cottages were out there on the sloping field, near the apiaries, clear of the woods but not far from a line of courtly old field trees. You could watch the grazing sheep and cows and two black mules from the doorsteps. You could see the irrigation ponds ruffle in breezes. And, oh, those red-orange and eerie green sunrises and sunsets that would so ceremoniously and enrapturingly scald your soul. How did we get so blessed?
Our CSA project took off like a bat out of heaven, you know, where people from town could invest money or work time in the veggie crop in return for shares of the harvest. We had about fifty people sign up early on, including a group of professional-class ladies wearing cute sun hats and special gardening gloves. Many CSA folk introduced themselves on first meeting by putting out a hand to shake, as if it was a business deal, which, yeah, I guess it was. Made some of us realize how outside upper-caste America we were, that we hadn’t comprehended things the way of the utility eyes-into-eyes handshake, that as rednecks we were always in a liturgy of work, side by side, a different sort of utility.
We also did farmers’ markets and supplied some of the IGA’s produce. Gordon got interested in town politics for a while, him and our John Lungren who, freshly divorced, joined the Settlement in our second year. Egypt embraced us.
Gordon was, as he’d been for his uncles, the Depaolo Bros., in those big construction projects, an up ’n’ at ’em worker. He hurtled into the beer and cider overly much at times and had his moods but still managed somehow to be in six places at once, hauling, hammering, digging, and wiring, all while gabbing away about the latest project, the raising of another Quonset hut (if you call mortar and cinder block “raising”), or milling out shiplap for the new sap house. Then the furniture-making co-op meetings. Or purchase of four Jersey cows. Or driving Paul Lessard’s father to a doc appointment, a chance for Gordon to keep his patois polished up, since that’s the only language old Reggie spoke or understood. And Gordon loved teasing kids, though he was warned that tickling could cause nightmares and saying brown cows give chocolate milk could create distrust.
Another favorite practice of his was to smooch old ladies. Or to sneak a plastic rat or worm into their apron pocket . . . even though he was warned such a thing could stop a rickety elder’s heart. He was an ear feeler, a shoulder or wrist squeezer-stroker. Well, he was an obsessive fondler.
Okay, so I guess it was inevitable what I missed at first. He had, in his private firmament of sparkly nights, tall yellow grasses, and soft rooms of rugs and hand-stitched quilts, merged body and soul with my cousins Geraldine and Leona and Carol. And Tambrah who was seventeen. Also with Penny, with Steph, with Gail, with Lee Lynn, with Beth, with Glennice, with Ellen, with Maryelle, with Vancy, and, later, more. They would never see him as I had, the sometimes sheepish boy with the dusty new pickup truck and big construction outfit lettering on the door. His bewilderment. His overt terror. He would always be to them the sun in the center of the Settlement galaxy, a man of miracles, their rescue from the frigid, calculating, nothing-is-sacred handshakes and move-over-buddy outside world.
When I caught on to his betrayal of me I said to him in a voice as calm as burned toast, “Don’t ever touch me again.”
I fetched me a lawyer. Divorce time. “I don’t want any of the St. Onge land or investments,” I sniffed. “Just a big fat clean divorce.”
Gordon made a few scenes but when I threw a dining-room chair at him and his chin deep in the dark forest of his short beard squirted blood down his shirtfront, he stopped looking into my eyes. He saw, I suppose, time unwinding backward.
After the divorce I lived with Sonny Estes in East Egypt Village. Two years. Sonny was a good man, steady, sturdy. He gave me little presents. He liked buying things for me. He’d blush as he’d lower the little box or bag into my keeping. He worked for the state. Road crew. Union man. He knew and understood the dark history of a pre-unionized past. He wasn’t “gullablized,” as he called it with a shake of his head, by all that deep steep pro-corporate bullshit that had bubbled all around him since his boyhood in good old Republican Maine. I was proud when he murmured some nugget of organized people’s triumphs that he managed to locate and took so to heart. In this way Sonny was a flag-loving patriot . . . yes, flag on an aluminum pole in his dooryard going clang!clang!clang! in the wind.
In