Now on Tuesday, shortly after 9:30 a.m., he has turned up at the Duotron Lindsey regional corporate offices, his hair oddly messy, no suit jacket. Wedding ring gone, tie gone, funny crooked smile gone. No, he isn’t drunk. He is alert. He carries two coffee cans that slosh with liquid.
People are looking at him. Even those who don’t know him sense something. And they see him unhesitatingly, with shuddering depths of resolution none of us will ever understand, pour the watery contents of the coffee cans over his hair and face, chest and back, feet and shins and thighs, and then flick a match, which, with a great orange crackling weirdly soft whomping roar, covers his entire shape with fire and fills the lobby with horrified pandemonium.
Growth! Growth! Growth!
Today another American factory closed. Another dozen family farms withered . . . “Get big or get out!” Another factory restructured, downsized. Another many thousand people temped and temperamental. Another forty factories and six hundred family farms evaporate. Another seventy factories, two thousand local “micro” businesses, and seven thousand family farms lift off into the clouds.
Blank and dumbstruck.
Here we have interviews with welfare mothers. Look close. Here’s one in Boston, sitting on the stoop with a buncha kids. How many kids? Fifteen! That’s a lotta kids. And we just know they’re all her kids, with fifteen different fathers. Hear her talk. Bad English. A really ignorant stupid type. (Not like us.) A real pig. And she’s black. “We” have nothing against black, of course. But . . . you know . . . this one is not a black to be proud of. Not a nice Harvard black or We-Shall-and-Did-Overcome black. This one is a grungy black. Grungy ultimate. Poor. Lazy. Soaking the taxpayer. But sexy. See her hair! Rippling and fixed to attract. Look at the sexy way she smokes. Cigarettes IN FRONT OF THE KIDS! Cigarettes paid for by YOUR tax dollars. And here’s a white one. Gawd! She has twins! And nice clothes! Probably a shiny car hidden off-screen. She is telling us something. What is it? Something about “busted pipes.” She is whining. Thinks the world owes her! But also, she is laughing. Hear that giggle. What’s that she’s saying now? Sweet little-girl voice, eyes all aflutter. “I love men.” Did she say that? Most likely that is what she said.
In the valley of the St. Onge Settlement robust acorns let go . . . thwack!thwack!thwack! upon Quonset hut roofs and orderly stacks of old rusty-edged metal roofing and clonk! on an inverted plastic pail, the iron, the steel, the aluminum, the slate, all in array around the sawmills and furniture-making Quonset hut guarded by helpful oak giants. A rhythm band of the queerest sort is playing a march.
The figure in brown flannel check and green wool crossing the Quad and sandy lot with a basket like Little Red Riding Hood is the Settlement’s chief cook, Bonnie Lucretia Bean Sanborn St. Onge, who we all know well. She has managerial and caustic traits at times, and mythical traits of violence. She has a hale stride.
She passes through the nearest Quonset hut’s wide-open bay as through a sieve, leaving light and rhythmic thwonks! and silent grasses behind.
Up the dim stairs to the attic.
She knows which room, though this is her first time bringing a meal. Ground control to Silverbell Rosenthal! Ground control to Silverbell Rosenthal! some of the other basket deliverers had sadly joked when returning to the kitchens.
Bonnie Loo shifts the basket. Her broad knuckles, used once or twice to pummel other wives here, it has been falsely rumored among newer residents, now punch the pine door, jolly punches, shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits!
She knows there are no windows in the room beyond this door but before the door inches open, she expects lamplight. But there is only dark, from which the sharp immobile-featured white face and white Common Ground Fair 1990 T-shirt of Silverbell Rosenthal§§§§ emerge.
Behind Bonnie Loo the four-watt baby-pink night-light bulb in the wide, tool-cluttered hall broadcasts what it was intended for, a sleepy nighty-night dimness. Bonnie Loo wags the basket. “Brought your dinner.”
Silverbell renamed herself in college. She was Sarah Bowen. That was before she married Aaron, then the Bowen part also went the way of the winds of change. She wasn’t a feminist in how you’d want you and your man to be on separate ships through life’s journey.
So why Sarah to Silverbell?
To erase her given name, her mother’s and father’s gift, wasn’t there something wrenching in her soul even before the storm, the SWAT storm, faceless men in black first shooting her Doberman pinscher in the kitchen, pow!pow!pow!pow!pow!pow! pow!pow!pow! taking nine shots to down the screaming dog. Then a black mirror-shine boot stomped the newborn puppies! It is said this is to provoke you into attacking a police officer.
So maybe she did that . . . raised her hand to the shooter or the stomper . . . it isn’t clear. But they broke her arm and stomped her head. Same boot that solved the squealing puppies problem? Well, today you can see something about the intensity of one of her eyes.
Then it must have been her husband, unprovoked, who raised a hand to the red and noisy panoramic scene before him because they thumped him around for a while, although his crime of growing the plant was heinous enough to earn him all those rib and kidney and hip and belly kicks and, well, it all happened so fast and there were so many of them, memory is more about sound than seeing. It was, after all, the middle of the night and both husband and wife, and then the wailing kids, were tipsy with the surprise of it.
But of course it would be hard to see anyway, with her eye bulging like a baby’s head coming out into the world. Oh, boy, blood izzz hot. And there was a lot of her blood gliding down from not just her eye, but nose, one ear, and mouth.
Somewhere beyond the haze of surgery and morphine drip everybody was missing. Aaron gone to a cage. His children (she had adopted them, so let’s say their children) carried off to a secret undisclosed location. Did their heads get stomped, too?
No, as it turns out. But when she looked for them she found that DHS is another sort of SWAT operation . . . total and unflinching dominance. They strip you for the crucifixion, parade you through the courts bare and friendless . . . DHS does not allow friends. Family? Forget it. Mum, Dad, aunts, brothers? Reports get made up with descriptions of people you don’t recognize . . . everyone is a child molester, everyone is a drug addict, a sadist, dishes left in the sink, listless, no ambition, never gainfully employed, angry, poor students, thus poor in purse, no car, no license, they move too often, unfit as grandparents or aunties. They shout a lot.
She never thought of her family that way. Something is left out! Something is stretched thick, something is stretched thin.
But of course since the police seized all the land and the house and Aaron’s truck . . . listless, oh, yes, that’s herself. And the report states that she is dysfunctional due to constant trembling, jumping at the least sound, she screams in her sleep. Is antisocial. Like a stag beetle in the ground.
And the