Free The School on Heart's Content Road by Carolyn Chute

hiss of all those
x
’s and
c
’s was starting to give me a kind of migraine.
    On that same show, there came the inevitable. A caller reported that he had heard things about Gordon, that Gordon was a pedophile. That there were stockpiled weapons, drugs, pagan worship. The radio host made no comment except “thanks for your call,” and then another caller said we were Fundamentalist Christians and Jew-haters. The next caller used the word
Nazis
. The talk show host himself called us
separatists
. The next caller said, “They are not allowed outside their gates. Only in chaperoned groups, especially the women
. . . his
women.”
    There was mention of a possible group suicide and a probable siege with government agents. The host challenged this statement by asking, “Are
you
the FBI? How do you come by this knowledge?”
    One very low-voiced man, a kind of Boris Karloff sound-alike, spoke of his “knowledge” that very little girls at “that school” were pregnant.
    â€œTruly amazing,” the talk-show host said, in an “oh, wow!” way. His disgust was gone now. He seemed to be drunkenly resigned to the titillating turn his show had taken.
    Days passed. People started coming around to the Settlement in person. Some said they had trouble finding us. But they found us.
    One night, I came upon Gordon and his cousin Aurel arguing. Some of what Gordon snarled out was in French.
    But Aurel was
all
French. Valley French. Ah, those Acadian swooping
R
s! With a few English words like
fuck you!
and
idiot!
and
Ivy Morelli
. Mostly Aurel raged at Gordon, and Gordon just tried to deflect. He said it would have happened eventually anyway, and he was sorry. But his sorrys weren’t soft, they were yelled. And the two of them paced around like cats with their backs prickled up.
    Meanwhile, as ever, there was so much work to be done here. Gordon and Paul Lessard and Ray Pinette and Eddie Martin and Glennice, all of them who were in the co-op and CSA stuff, they were either in huddles with strangers, answering mail or talking on the phone. Gordon was mostly missing his meals.
    One of these mornings, Gordon came late for breakfast to the piazza and slumped down at the head of the two long joined tables, all the seats empty, everyone gone off to their jobs. He was rubbing his face and eyes, a slow self-massage, a self-soothing.
    I sat down next to him without pulling my chair in.
    You, crow, superintending the new day, shift easily on your roost of the topmost triangular green-Popsicle color plate of Tyrannosaurus rex’s mighty wooden head. No Settlement children presently peer out through the teeth (two-by-sixes painted white).
    You have a special interest in Claire St. Onge. She leaves dry corn for you just outside the windows of the interestingly small ice-shack-sized sunroom off the east side of her cottage. Everything so cramped, too cozy, stuffed with baskets, notebooks, picture books showing tools and weapons of people gone so long they preside only in the ore layer, lava and ledge, pressed like souvenirs. Or in the tannic-soggy peat pools, where some fell in and drowned and those who loved and missed them fell elsewhere, fell and fell and fell. Some might be in museums alongside stuffed crows.
    Also in Claire’s sunroom is a tea table carved from basswood in the shape of a table-sized mushroom, which you often admire through the glass.
    But nobody is home at the little cottage. Claire is here in the midst of Settlement life. You hear her voice in one of the piazzas of the shops. You love that voice, which calls you Crow but in the old language of the Passamaquoddy. She is not speaking your name now but his, the towering one, Gordon St. Onge, there beyond the checkered shadows of screen. Both are talking of less interesting things than dried corn.
    You know the woman loves the man who sits beside her, each in a straight wooden chair. But who would guess? The face of Claire