Читать книгу The Recipe for Revolution - Carolyn Chute - Страница 16

A Brief Flashback to June

From a future time, Claire St. Onge remembers way back to the June morning when the reporter Ivy Morelli first turned up at the Settlement, uninvited.

So this, of course, was before her Record Sun feature changed everything. It was the morning of the solstice march and one of the biggest breakfasts of the year, where we’d be joined by good-sport neighbors and friends out there on our big screened porches, after the sun rose—the sun, the god of all life, according to many peoples of this world. And to us, significant.

The mountains that cradled us were blue-green that day, and wobbly due to the steam being so full and lustrous.

Beth St. Onge§ remembering that June day of Ivy Morelli’s sneak attack.

Gordon got shit-faced drunk on cider, then drunker and drunker, then you’d know a big stupid gorilla when you see one. He made a bad impression on the reporter. We weren’t feeling proud, either. He would only once in a while fall off the wagon like that but why’d he always pick the awfullest times to do it?

The reporter, whose hair was tinted purple and who wore a yellow dress, very short, and striped socks with black, buttoned-up shoes like out of a junk store . . . and tattoos of pink and turquoise kissing fish going around her thin upper arm, you couldn’t miss them . . . she seemed about to call out the marines when Gordon got to teasing little Michel Soucier, holding him down and letting out a dangly hot icicle of drool over the kid’s face, Michel screaming, then Gordon sucked the spit back in, a rare talent.

Penny St. Onge remembering.

Ivy Morelli had told Gordon the night before that she had decided against doing a piece for the paper. She said to him, “I’m your friend.” But some people use that word loosely.

Steph St. Onge’s recollections.

Before she left, Ivy Morelli agreed to come back another day, when we’d have a tour crew ready and the Brazilian heat would be gone and normal Maine weather back. But when she returned in a fresh dress of moons and stars it was almost a hundred degrees, according to the first piazza’s six thermometers which usually all read different.

Bonnie Loo (Bonnie Lucretia) St. Onge remembers the tour day.

My cigarette tasted like insecticide. My stomach shot to my ears. Me in the shade of the trees in the Quad, saw them herding her along through the suns of hell, between Quonset huts and mills, Ms. Media, who I knew would fuck with us. Her cute little artsy outfits and tropical fish tattoos circling her little upper arm. Her laugh was a foghorn, which was tricky because you’d assume here’s a person who is just one of us, not the smooth snooty type, but then you see the permafrost blue eyes.

I scraped the ash off my cig on the underside of the picnic table. I rose. I was going to cut her off at the pass.

From a future time Claire tells us how it went.

I look back with shame. For here was mass media’s great ruthless blue eye inside the very heartbeat of our home and I was being some showtime master of ceremonies, throwing out an arm and an open hand, oh, view this fortress of cookstoves and kettles and bubbling stuff!!

Admire the canning crew and supper crew, svelte teens in shorts and aprons, soft shoulders. And the tykes on stools, half naked, burned and nicked and bruised. Feeling the food with grubby appendages, wagging their heads like inchworms, watching, mimicking, feeling their futures in their palms. Many with that nose, those cheekbones, the likeness, a species particular to this location, this altitude, cradled by these certain surly hills and the arms of too many mothers.

Geraldine St. Onge, one of Claire’s cousins from the Passamaquoddy Reservation.

We worked nearly a dozen hardwood-topped tables in that summer kitchen. Acres of glinting still-hot canning jars, the quart kind, the sixty-four-ounce kind, and the widemouthed, twelve-ounce kind, bulging with deep green leafy, or seedy red. June’s harvest.

The reporter curled a small hand around the handle of one of the tall green hand pumps at the end of one of the slate sinks. When she looked up her mouth was smiling. Her cold-blistering eyes studied everything.

From a future time, Lee Lynn St. Onge confides in us.

Gordon has always fussed over the danger of the media. So of course, some of us here asked, “Why did he invite her here?” For he had agreed to an interview alone with her at the farmhouse, but then he panicked and talked in riddles and . . . well, none of that matters. The question is: Why did he say yes in the first place? Was it the sound of her hearty wiseacre-yet-letdown voice on the phone?

Had his spine of resolve, usually thick like one of the monster tree supports of our summer kitchen, buckled under the weight of something so nimble and invasive as yet another fertile female?

Back in the Cook’s Kitchen. (There are three kitchens.)

Ivy Morelli turns away from some chitchat with a small doleful little boy named Rhett. She stares in resplendent wide-eyed discomfort at the hulkingly too close voluptuous Bonnie Loo.

Ivy’s small clover-pink mouth flattens against her teeth, an attempted but fizzled smile.

Bonnie Loo smells like cigarette smoke. And that queasy weedy ointmenty smell of all the Settlement candles and soaps and salves that Ivy’s tour has highlighted, the vats and kettles of witchy Lee Lynn St. Onge’s corner of one Quonset hut, and kids too little to stir scalding stuff stirring away. But the smell is especially now wafting from Bonnie Loo’s two-toned whorish-looking hair and body.

Okay, her eyebrows are comely. One has just arched. Like a question. How gleamy the eyes, contact lenses for certain, and out of those eyes seems to come the mile-wide gusty voice, speaking to Ivy Morelli, “Thirsty from your tour?” No waiting for a reply, just leans over one of the steel sinks, braless, the damp, filled-out green T-shirt a quickening exhibit of obscenity as if it were part of the tour, somewhat literary, somewhat theological, somewhat instructive, like Never look this floozyish or you will be eternally damned. But there’s no stopping Bonnie Loo, the wagging Atlas breasts, if Atlas were a woman, she cuffs at a bulky tin cup that leaps to her other hand. Now dips water from a speckled kettle. That black and harshly orange topknot of hair tosses around from left to right shoulder. She straightens up, cup in hand. This, too, is a demonstration, this one on how to operate the Settlement plumbing? Yes? The cup is held such ’n’ such a way.

The little reporter asserts, “I’m okay. I had plenty of beverage at lunch.”

But Bonnie Loo now throws her shoulders back as humans do who are not expecting blows to the gut from the enemy, but showcasing her vulnerable parts because the enemy izzzz weak.

Again Bonnie Loo’s hot orangey eyes are driven into Ivy’s.

Ivy almost lowers hers, just the merest flicker.

Ah hah! Bonnie Loo the victor!

But I am your friend, Ivy’s inner voice pleads. Well, I am Gordon’s friend. Cringing friend, shuddering friend, I-vow-not-to-write-a-single-word-on-you-guys friend.

But Bonnie Loo stands back reproachfully, some grudge grander than the victim-seeking-mass-media betrayal on the horizon, the seconds ticking away, her upper-body dimensions unclouded by the T-shirt fabric, as thin as paint.

Nobody in the whole crowded room makes a helpful wisecrack or cheerfully scolds in order to end the tension. Everything weird about this flow of seconds is unweird to the onlookers.

Ivy keeps her eyes on the big enamel cup as Bonnie Loo dashes the water from it into the flared opening on top of the tall dark green pump, raising the pump’s impressively long arm and clenching the fingers of her broad hand around it, works it hard. And Bonnie Loo’s own arm, yellowy dark from her Maine mix of bloods, heritage that whispers of peoples stirred and shuffled, blurred and ruffled up together because of ships, because of snowy trails between lodges, jammed ice in big rivers, then jammed logs, the blur of big woods greener than the heart can stand, gray waters, green waters, human heat, and myriad hungers. Then Bonnie Lucretia Bean was someone’s foxy-orange-eyed black-haired infant, chubby little doll arms, but now grown, now a towering brute, now holding not the pump-priming cup but a pretty little ceramic one, maybe nearby is a matching saucer, the Colonial America carriages, ladies and gents, preening blue and mauve.

The cup is ever so suddenly overfull, drizzling. But the great pump’s arm proceeds. The little dainty cup gasps. The lake under earth rises to swallow Bonnie Loo’s golden hand and slim silver wedding ring in a blur. Up, down, water pound-punches, making a cold breeze on Ivy Morelli. The cup, the unending overflow, that terrible abundance from so deep under the Settlement’s granite footings, how can it not be polar?

Now there! The dripping cup is thrust into the mass media’s hand.

“Here. Drink up,” Bonnie Loo commands.

And Ivy Morelli herself overflows with her deepest “HAW! HAW!” but doesn’t draw the cup to her face for she is locked in a pause like the solstice.

Bonnie Loo, now with her hands on the hips of her long skirt, one with intricately embroidered flora and elfin faces around the hem, says low and moltenly, “Good God, it ain’t poison.”

Claire remembering.

By August, the yearnings of the Record Sun enterprise were grander, less complex, and with more grasp than that friendship notion of little Ivy Morelli. And so her hand was forced. The big-spread feature came with no warning, just pow! It was not hostile. In fact, it was becoming to us. But as my crow says . . . my crow, you know, the one who is different from all the others, the one who comes to my cottage’s sunroom window for cracked corn . . . someone’s abandoned pet, he ducks under the open window or flaps in ahead of me as I open the back door. He has a good view from the Norfolk pine in its tub near my chair and midday coffee, or flaps into my bedroom where the tall bedposts are, ripples his feathers tightly to give his whole self a gloss, checks out my stuff. He loves stuff, a true American. So I had my copy of the Record Sun open in my sunroom on my little carved toadstool table, holding my head, he was there, cocking his head as if to join me in considering the photo of blurred Settlement-made merry-go-round critters surrounding Gordon’s face and upper body. How Gordon could look both benevolent and dangerous was not a trick of the photo but it sure was an opportunistic photo.

Crow’s voice, resembling a tinny cheesy-made boom box, pealed from his seesawing black beak . . . “DING DONG DING DONG. Oh, God. Get the door. DING DONG. Oh, God. Get the door. Oh, God. DING DONG.”

History as it Happens (as recorded by Montana Bethany St. Onge. Age nine. With no help).

I personally know and truly experience how Gordie’s telephone rings all the time now since the newspaper thing. Lots of people calling about the way you can get your own very nice windmill with help from our crews that teach stuff. And homemade solar buggies. Or CSA¶ farm ideas. Some call to make fart noises or groans. My mother Beth says not to encourage these meatballs, just hang up. But I am very smart in dealing with meatballs and I tell them I am so smart I can find out technologically right where they are and cops are already on the way. This is an exaggeration, of course. Not a lie. Once I kept a meatball talking for a half hour at least about how he knows a million cops and is not worried. I said there aren’t a million cops in Maine.

In case you are reading this a hundred years from now, the phone is in Gordie’s house. No other phones. Settlement is up in the mountain. No phone there.

So one of our mothers who had come down to use the phone says, “Who is that, Montana?”

“A friend,” I said. For you guys reading this installment, I did not lie. It was just an exaggeration.

Also the mail is now like an explosion. Doesn’t all fit in Gordie’s mailbox. That’s the only mailbox. It stands on an old post by the driveway at Gordie’s gray wicked old farmhouse. No mailboxes up in the mountain where I live with everybody at the Settlement.

I sign up for the mail crew now, the part where we sort and deliver to the cubbies in the Cook’s Kitchen and Winter Kitchen. I am, of course, very good at it.

Also nowadays some of the guys like Oz and C.C. (whose name is really Christian Crocker in case you read this a million years from now) and Dane go to the post office in East Egypt riding horseback. Oz never walks on his two only legs. He’s a lost cause. Someday he’ll marry a horse, says Ellen, one of my father’s wives.

Also people drive up the long dirt road to the Settlement these days just to look at us and take pictures. Some use binoculars to make like a doorknob or a button on your shirt look big. My mother calls them assholes, tourists, and rude fuckers. I’m absolutely forbidden to go out to these cars to have my picture taken or to show them how much stuff I’m good at which happens if you get educated here in this supreme best and now totally famous place.

Edward “Butch” Martin, Settlement twenty-year-old, tells of what he remembers about fame.

Um . . . well, the newspaper did us in late August and after that bunches of nose-trouble types drove up the Settlement road to study us . . . from the parking area and edge of that nearest hayfield . . . well . . . um . . . some came over to the shops or Quonset bays to ask questions about our projects. Gordo was okay about that, building the cooperatives was his, you know, glory.

But man, we got mostly, you know, sightseers . . . like maybe they went to drive by a murder scene or house fire, then they come look at us. With binoculars!

Okay, only one with binoculars. But several cameras and camcorders. And they backed their cars and SUVs over one of our hayfields, squashing it.

So down where the gravel ends at the tar road, Heart’s Content, we put up a gate. Well, not a real gate. A horizontal pole. It was temporary, right? Little dangling sign said to KEEP OUT. And nice and handy, a message box. Neighbors and CSA volunteers and customers for our stuff could just lift the pole, right? It wasn’t anything but self-defense. Not even violent as there’s so much twitter about these days. So what’s the crime?

Seems like it was a matter of seconds the Record Sun has a big motherfucking picture of our little pole and KEEP OUT sign. Beside the picture they had a runty little story, not like the Ivy person’s. This one called us “separatists” and went on about Gordo being “their leader” and that he “seems more nervous.”

The Ivy article on us had been wicked warm . . . um . . . you know, because like she . . . liked us. This new “news” had an edge like something had changed.

Penny St. Onge remembering.

And then it went AP. All except what Ivy, dear dear Ivy did not include, though she by then knew . . . Gordon’s polygamy . . . and how many children here were his. She left that part a blank. But you could tell, the great slobbering questing baying mass media was circling.

They used photos that Ivy had taken but didn’t select for her piece, ones that showed shadows and hints. Gordon’s pale dark-lashed eyes boring into the lens, the short gray-chinned dark devil beard and the merry-go-round of kid-made mounts blurry with motion. Not horses, but monsters, born of cruel minds? And the kids themselves in certain shots, grubby and drizzling and Third World. The ominous KEEP OUT sign.

My only child, Whitney, blond jouncy ponytail, Gordon’s lopsided smile but not the full cheek-twitch, she our bright-shining-star fifteen-year-old, his oldest. She had gotten awfully quiet as a few of us stood in the Settlement library with the latest dozen AP clippings spread across the big table in gray lusterless rainy-day light. I hugged her to me.

“Well,” said she.

“Well,” said me.

Critical thinker of the past.

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the Common.

But lets the greater villain loose

Who steals the Common from the goose

Anonymous

Meanwhile Secret Agent Jane Meserve, age six, almost seven, visits her mother. She speaks.

The only way I can get here today is that Montana’s mum drives me. Montana’s mum is named Beth. She has hair sort of the color of my mum’s but in long wiggles. Mum’s is straight. Mum’s hair is actually brown but she has always used Light ’n’ Streak, which is so pretty. I don’t know Beth’s real color, but the beauty crew works on her a lot. She says, “Hands playing with my head have a calming effect.”

Mum always says my hair is a good color without doozying it up. She calls my hair “wash and wear,” which is so funny.

Sadly, Mum has the orange outfit again but we don’t talk about it cuz she gets tears in her eyes. We have to sit at the table and no touching. Mum looks at me a lot and she always says she loves my secret agent heart-shaped sunglasses, then winks because it’s our secret together, about me being a spy. These glasses are white on the outside edges, pink where you see through so everything looks pink. While Mum looks at me, Beth talks all her wisecracks.

I want to give Mum a hug bad but they have a way of making sure you never hug. It’s a cop-guard in his brown outfit and gun who has a chair but hardly fits cuz he’s about five hundred pounds with a stomach that bulges front and sides and back. If you squint, it looks like he’s wearing an inner tube thing for floating in the lake. He’s taller than Gordie but his hair is shaved, not a real fade but more like a little hat and also what Beth calls a Kung Fu mustache. This she whispers so loud, then says in her voice, which is deep and crunchy, “He’s the one they probably handcuff people to when they take ’em up to court, right, Lisa?”

Mum flashes her eyes over at the guy who is now looking at Beth and then he looks away.

Mum says she misses me so much. Today she has lost her tan even more. Definitely no sunshine here. Mum always has to work on her tan. She says my father, Damon Gorely, is the best color. I saw his picture once. But she actually met him when he was at his concert and very famous in rap and hip-hop. Mum says I am golden like a Gypsy queen and she would give anything to be me. But today we don’t talk about our usual stuff, tans or hair or outfits or me. We mostly listen to Beth, who is telling all her jail jokes and then says, “Oh, fuck. I have to pee.”

If I get a word in the edgewise of Beth I’ll report to Mum about the food they want to make me eat at the Settlement and at Gordie’s house, where my guest room actually is. I will never eat fish with skin in ten million years. And they have big rules about sugar. When Mum and I and our Scottie dog Cherish lived our regular life in Lewiston there were no rules. We had TV. We had sugar. Now there are jail rules and Settlement rules and I’m so sick of it.

I am getting tears in my eyes but I don’t make a single noise.

Mum gets tears in her eyes and no noise from her, either.

We almost touch.

§ See character list at back of book.

¶ Community Supported Agriculture.