I blubbered through my big square crying mouth, “My husband is dead! I loved him!!!!” The sweater I was holding flopped to the floor. Gabriel gasped, breathless. “They took my house! I can’t win! I can’t win! I can’t keep up! I can’t pay for everything! I can’t do it! I can’t just paaaaay for the friggin’ exhaust . . . just like whip out the friggin’ money like I just carry a big wad around with me!!!” I open my eyes and see him backing away and he turns in one kind of tough, arrogant, get-out-of-my-life motion and as he walks away, I scream, “PIG!!! YOU FUCKING PIG!!! YOU PIGS KILLED MY FATHER!!! And probably my HUSBAND, too, if he hadn’t died first! You PIGS threw me out of my house, which was MY house!!! Threw out this little BABY!!! YOU PIGS ARE PIGS!!!!!” I wanted to get Gabriel out of his seat and hold him but I couldn’t think of how to get to the back seat and undo the car seat . . . I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything but scream and I hung my head and gripped the wheel and yanked on the wheel and punched my head against the horn and it beeped a little and I screamed screamed screamed, “Jesus!” Of all things, “Jesus! Jesus help me!! Help me Jesus!” And the snot was running out of my nose and my tears were mixing with the snot and drool was coming from my mouth, everything mixed and running down my chin.
I think I screamed like this for about ten minutes. Who knows what neighbors mighta seen me as they walked by from their cars to the IGA too terrified to help, seeing the cop, seeing my Volvo, knowing it was me, figured I had DONE SOMETHING BAD. Then I see the cop is still sitting there in his cruiser behind me, all this time, a good ten minutes. Just sitting there without his big Smokey hat on his head.
I lean forward again and hang my head and grip my head . . . yes, now I was gripping my head or my ears or something. I was really losing it. And Gabriel was still screeching and fighting his car seat.
Cop’s voice at my window again, “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“You know what it’s like to work two jobs . . . two AWFUL jobs?!!!!” I screamed at him. “You know what it’s like to work twice as much to make half of what you need to live on? I don’t drink!!! I don’t do drugs! Not even grass! Okay, cigs. I fuckin’ smoke cigs! I drink coffeeee!! But I don’t have pretty clothes—” I grip the chest of my T-shirt and stretch it out at him. He’s wearing his shaded cop glasses but I can see his eyes get big and worried and he backs up again. “You do NOT know what it’s like!!!!” I howl.
And you know what the fucker says? He says nothing. He just goes away again. This time for good. In less than a minute, I see his cruiser slide away and I manage to get Gabriel out of his seat and I hug the hell out of him and I kiss his face and I laugh and kiss kiss kiss that little fat face and, oh, how I love that face and his husky little laugh . . . and that laugh finally comes after a while. And I wonder what am I going to do? Nobody can help me. My family, Ma and Reuben and them, are struggling enough . . . and Reuben sick with the soon-to-be-in-the-graveyard disease . . . and my cousins and their families aren’t making it, and my uncles, my aunts, no one. I can’t live with any of them squashed into their space, sleeping on their couches and all we do is fight . . . cooped up like that. I hate to fight with my people. It is the worst thing to fight with your people. Ma says once families could help each other. No matter what else went wrong, you had a place to go. And usually some land so you could set up a little house next door or a trailer and have a little space around you, but close enough to share stuff and protect each other and be there for children and emergencies. But now a trailer costs as much as ten big fucking fancy houses with two garages apiece and mink-lined septic systems. And then there’s all these fucking snoopy hard-assed grand selectmen sneaking around trying to catch you breaking a code and there’s codes AGAINST everything you do these days down to how thick your walls are and how many doors!
Nobody has land. It’s all chopped up, owned by outer space aliens or New York people. Or companies! And also if you add anything, a room! a shack! A tepee! to your existing place, up go the taxes! Fine if you’re rich but if you’re not rich, taxes are paid from a pound of flesh from the cardiopulmonary region of your bod. Where can I turn? I am so so so scared. Jesus, am I scared.
Anyway, that was then. Like I say, the day the cop gave me that ticket was about six years ago. Now, I live at the Settlement. Home at last. Gabriel is so happy here. And now my two younger ones. We have this cute little house that I designed. It’s painted a pale pink, like cotton candy, with dark green trim and a wooden, old-timey door—like something the woodchopper probably lived in, the guy that saved Little Red Riding Hood, wonderful little fairy-tale house with tiny bedrooms and homey rugs and chair covers embroidered purple and yellow. And you would not believe the handmade quilts Lucienne and Jacquie have given me. Those things take nearly a year to make! Yuh, this is home with a capital H.
I don’t have one of the full-photovoltaic houses. And I’m not hooked up to the wind-power line. I’m too far up in the woods, where some of us prefer to be. There are some of us whose souls would die without trees and mossy rocks and ferns and trilliums bunched right up to our doors. So I get some of the charged windmill batteries brought to me, which is not economical because batteries wear out fast but I conserve and I have a few real nice kerosene lamps to use on rare occasions, celebratory occasions. I grew up with kerosene lamps. I know how to clean and trim them. I can do it with my eyes shut.
I have a green enameled woodstove. And guess what! Wood magically appears in my woodshed. And snow magically disappears from the path. And there’s the Window Washing Crew that makes the rounds. And there’s always some older kid out there in my yard doing his duty for the old. Ha ha! I’m almost twenty-seven. Just a matter of days. Anyway, most of us don’t need to have a lot of electricity in our houses. We spend so much time down at the Shops and Quonset huts or in the gardens or out on errands down in North Egypt . . . or other things in other places, one thing or another.
When you live here, you are not alone. Not alone in the “abandoned” sense of the word. Not destitute, not scared shitless. You will not wind up waiting on a public housing list for a cement cubicle in a treeless, stinking, cement city. You will not eat from a trash bin. And nobody can get you—no cops, especially no cops. You don’t see any cops here unless they come as friends of Gordon. He says, “They’re just working men and women like ourselves.” But I say shit, Gordon would make friends with a poisonous snake. But you know Gordon, he just says, “It’s not the police, it’s the policy.” Okay, like it’s not the snake, it’s the swamp.
In case you are all reading this a hundred years from now, what do you think? Jane Meserve came from nowhere to live down to Gordie’s house last spring. Poof!
She says to me her father is a rap star that her mother met him once. Met once! Is this believable?!!! Maybe Jane only met her mother once. I hardly can tell if her mother exists. Oh, she was in the newspaper as a big drug criminal. Some of the mothers here say do not believe corporate-controlled media or the police. Whatever. Jane’s mother is in what my mother calls the slammer. My mother is Beth St. Onge in case you are reading this a hundred years from now.
Different people here take Jane to visit the criminal. She is in the Androscoggin County slammer, which uses a lot of gas to get there to see just one criminal.
Jane is kind of brown like most rap stars but she only has talent in how to have wicked tantrums and fits.
Nan Waters, who is seventy-nine years old and has bad feet and gas, said Jane Meserve needs her rear end warmed till it peels. I happen very personally to know that is an idle threat. Violence is rare here. But (to kids especially) you can threaten mass murder, human sacrifice, being hanged by a big toe, cooked in a stew.