The Recipe for Revolution

By Carolyn Chute

The PEN New England Award–winning author returns to Egypt, Maine, where revolution is brewing in a rural compound as the twenty-first century approaches.

It’s September 1999, and Gordon St. Onge, known as “The Prophet”, presides over his controversial Settlement in rural Maine. It is rumored to be a cult, where his many wives and children live off the land and off the grid. The newest member, fifteen year old Brianna Vandermast, is fired up and ready for change. Forming her own militia, Bree spreads her vision by writing “The Recipe”, an incendiary revolutionary document that winds up in the hands of wealthy elites—including one who is about to have a fateful encounter with Gordon.

A chance drinking session during an airport layover brings Gordon together with multinational CEO Bruce Hummer. Bruce hands Gordon a mysterious brass key which has the potential to spark the unrest that is stirring in Egypt, Maine. As word of “The Recipe” spreads, myriad factions from across the country arrive at The Settlement wanting to make Gordon their poster boy. Gordon soon finds himself at the center of an uprising, the consequences of which no one can predict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9780802129529

Carolyn Chute

Carolyn Chute is the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine; Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts; Snow Man; and Merry Men, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Thorton Wilder Fellowship. She currently lives in Maine with her husband.

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Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 2020 by Carolyn Chute

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

This title was typeset in 12-pt. Granjon LT with Bernhard Modern by Alpha Design and Composition of Pittsfield, NH.

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: February 2020

first edition

ISBN 978-0-8021-2951-2

eISBN 978-0-8021-2952-9

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication-data is available for this title.

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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Author’s Note

The Recipe for Revolution is one of several novels that make up the School on Heart’s Content Road four-ojilly, a series of overlapping or parallel books that focus on different characters and their place in the story’s key events. Characters who play major roles in one or more of the books may be only walk-ons in others. Each book stands alone. No need to read them in a certain order.

Welcome

to

The

Recipe for

Revolution

. . . as told by many witnesses: friends, family, spies, agents, demons, critical thinkers, and other beings, testimonies verifying and conflicting, some voices very large, others somewhat tiny.

Author’s Note 2

There is a character list at the very back of this book to help with identifying important and semi-important characters. Don’t twist your head trying to keep every character straight. Continually referring to the list is not necessary. As you read along, eventually characters who are meant to matter a lot will become obvious. Others are walk-ons, walk-bys, faces in the crowd. I, myself, love character lists because I like to refresh myself on how characters look and how they might be related and associated. Maybe you do, too.

List of Icons

Home (the St. Onge Settlement)

The voice of Mammon

Neighbors

Out in the world

Claire and Bonnie Loo and other women who run things at the Settlement, usually speaking to us from the future

The Bureau

Others speaking from the future

The screen insists, scolds, grins, cajoles

Voice of Pirate Radio interrupts

The Apparatus speaks

Secret Agent Jane Meserve speaks

Voices of the Crude and Raw speak

History as it Happens*/ History (the past) and critical thinkers

The deepest voice speaks

Microorganisms speak

Deep State

Bruce Hummer speaks

Dear Reader

Cyberspace

Think tanks and tin hat conspiracy theorists

---

* History as it Happens are settlement-made books of news and illustrations.

Contents

BOOK ONE:

MY GOOD BEHAVIOR

BOOK TWO:

PLEASED TO MEET YOU

BOOK THREE:

DANGEROUS GIFT

BOOK FOUR:

SOME DAYS ARE DIAMONDS,

SOME DAYS ARE STONES

BOOK FIVE:

CUI BONO?

BOOK SIX:

Brianne, tu sais, la vie est dure

(BriannA, you know, life is hard)

BOOK SEVEN:

BREAD AND ROSES

BOOK EIGHT:

HERE TO PROTECT

Gratefulness Page

Character List

Some say it was 1999.

Some say it was 2000.

One thing for sure,

the years, they do blur.

In those years,

big things

happened in America.

But you never

heard about some of

them. They were erased.

Here’s

the

Story

BOOK ONE:

My Good Behavior

Words from history (the past).

If I repent of anything it is very likely to be my good behavior.

Henry David Thoreau

SEPTEMBER

The voice of Mammon speaks.

For the preservation of this edifice that holds high what is fine and fair, there can be no being too hard on the threat.

The Apparatus speaks.

O masters! O lords and ladies of national and transnational finance, State Department, Pentagon, big media, and other vast grasps. You, the majestics of boardrooms, deeper rooms, private jets, mists, seashores, and lost memos; lords of strategic worth; gods of this universe! I am your whip, your bulwark, your sword, your Weedwhacker. Proud to serve you.

Duotron Lindsey International’s CEO Bruce Hummer slitting mail open at his desk, tugs out a grayish newsprint article from Maine, sent by an acquaintance who knows of his summer property up there on the coast.

He leans back, reads. It’s a full three-page, dated feature including photos. Written about wacky people. Very strange. He reads every word. And he stares at and into a face staring back into his brains from a blur of moving and monsterific merry-go-round horses. It’s the face of Gordon St. Onge.

From a future time, Claire St. Onge speaks.

This story is a noisy one, my own voice a merest chirp in the roar. But I can say without the vulgarity of pride that though many voices will wrench this story of him into a confusing and grainy spectacle, I am more than any of them your true tour guide.

Delivered.

He is alone down at the old farmplace by the tar road called Heart’s Content Road, as picturesque as its name implies, especially fifteen years ago, when it was still Swett’s Pond Road, picturesque with a capital P.

It is the house and 920 acres where he grew up, an only child, overly adored, and this land, never worked in those years, no tilling, no grazing, just croquet, while the fields were kept mowed by his papa and a neighbor’s borrowed tractor. No barn. That burned long ago. But there are still the old shedways. There is still the ell kitchen, the porch with lathed columns that stand out white in the night from the morose hair-thin glow of the quarter moon. Inside there is still that old dry smell, a house of generations of solemn ghosts.

Yes, it is dark outside now. And inside, too, but for the anemic, yes, thin, single fluorescent old tube light over one of his desks in the officey part of the cluttered kitchen made by taking out the old pantry shed wall. Such thrifty light gives his hands and the opened Fedco catalog the same cold color. He is almost forty and uses old-man reading glasses. He doesn’t flip through this catalog but stares into its depths, Frostbite, Wolf River, Yellow Bellflower, Zestar. He positions the words Monroe Sweet centrally within his entire being, the apple of memory, nearly unbelieved, his Tante Ida’s pink pies. Panoramic with longing this great big memory is because he was allowed by his mother Marian to visit Tante Ida and other of his father’s people only ONCE.

He supposes this Aroostook apple will thrive here in Oxford County, but if he invites a couple of these trees into the Settlement orchards, to thrust the solidity of the pink-flesh apple itself into the present, to give it life again in the now, would it not transform the fruit to unremarkability? Death to the spell of memory, deeper in the grave Tante Ida! Her eyes, as black and starry as his papa Guillaume’s, would finally close.

So lifting from the page to the next, his eyes behind the reading glasses readjust. Eyes pale green in a stewed cabbage way, and dark lashes. Not eyes of bird-of-prey-yellowy-pale nor wolf pale. Just a mixed ancestry pale, where there was maybe some jumping of the fence, those silent hearts and peckers that never speak in the records of town halls or in letters in a trunk . . . this dissonance of history’s beds and tall-grass fucking have filled the warm ponds of his eyes with a green of forbearance. And a Tourette’s-like flinch.

He spreads his hand upon the English morello cherry, a huge hand because he is a giant guy as seen by the average. Six-foot-five he is said to be. Seems he is feeling the heartbeat of the page, the heat of this tree where cherries will be hurled into Bonnie Loo’s pies, Bonnie Loo the star cook of the Settlement, Bonnie Loo of the present moment, not twinkling with the magic of death and boyhood memory, Bonnie Loo who can cut you down with her orange-brown eyes and the long considering way she lets out lungs full of cigarette smoke. He sees her clearly the last time she looked at him, three hours ago. His neck muscles tighten, a certain kind of fear.

There are headlights on the wall. He leaves the catalog open flat in the weary light and pushes back the wheeled office chair, pockets the reading glasses, stretches.

Going out onto the old piazza he sees that it is a van and no one is getting out yet. Engine running. Headlights still blazing upon the ell of the house, blazing at him.

As he steps outside he buttons the top button of his shirt and trudges straight into the light, digging into the graying chin of his short dark beard.

Van door opens. Gordie . . . hey . . . I’m sorry.

The voice sounds familiar in a way that makes his head break apart and swarm, searching for which decade it hurtles at him from. Not as far back as Tante Ida’s pink pies.

The van is patchy-looking and has a sorry-sounding skip to the engine. The guy still has a ponytail, though he’s looking a bit thin on top. Long skinny jaw. Professional-class teeth. No beard. A laugh like hiccups, like Goofy, the big cartoon dog.

Jack Holmes. Gordon embraces him. Jack laughs. We got lost and rode all over hell or I’d have been here earlier. Then for a second, I thought no one was here. I thought maybe you sold this place and moved up back with the others. With your . . . uh . . . harem. He laughs.

Jack Holmes, yes. One of those guys who started out in law school, headed for success, then descended into social work and educational newsletter stuff, sporadically funded statehouse lobbying for ridiculous things like support for prisoners’ rights, which don’t exist, and the rights of all races of ex-cons, minimum wagers of all races, welfare recipients of all races, animals, trees, clean water, and breathable air. So Jack Holmes pitched success overboard. And yes, the descent has continued, Gordon suspects, eyeing the mottled van.

Gordon stands now with his hands in his pockets, smiling funnyish. "Well, it’s good to see you. You’re looking good for an old warrior on the losing side. Howzit goin’? I mean personally."

Gordie, I don’t have a personal life, Jack says with his little hiccupy laugh. Then he grinds his fists into his sides. "Cold. Feels like a frost. Shit, you’d think this was the Alps. The difference in the weather here is mighty noticeable."

Come in then.

The guy turns back to the van, kind of hops over to the door, which is still hanging open, wiggles a finger for Gordon to come. Then stops, turns with his back to the van, and says, We need to talk. I want you to meet these people. You can’t get the picture unless you . . . see the picture, okay? These are neighbors of mine. You remember Aaron Rosenthal?

Yep.

Well, I heard somethin’ . . . from the grapevine . . . that you . . . well, tell me if it’s not true . . . but I heard you took in a kid . . . an orphan of the drug war. The newsworthy dangerous-as-the-day-is-long Lisa Meserve, her little girl?

Gordon stares into his eyes, says nothing, but wiggles both eyebrows.

Okay, I thought so. Well, Aaron, he—it’s bad news. You probably heard he went to federal prison.

Gordon lowers his eyes.

In fact, Aaron doesn’t exist anymore. He, ah, killed himself in prison . . . down in Georgia. He uh . . . beat himself to death. He laughs his burbly laugh.

Gordon looks back into Jack’s face. He says without expression, Pretty funny. Then the Tourette’s flinch.

Real funny. And neat. I mean, it would take a certain gift, wouldn’t you say?

Gordon nods.

Jack hugs himself now, gets a shiver. Jesus, it feels like snow. He looks up. "Well, anyway, Aaron had that place over in Norridgewock . . . nice chunk of land . . . it was actually his great-aunt’s . . . she left it to him . . . but just this little bungalow . . . I mean a big dog couldn’t turn around in it, but, man, there was land. Seventy acres. Pretty spot. You know, something somebody would want to grab from a person too poor to finance a team of lawyers. Well, Aaron’s wife dies, Michele. You didn’t know her. She was after the days. She died of breast cancer, age of thirtysomething. And guess what. There’s two kids . . ."

Gordon’s eyes leave Jack’s face and slide over to the van. Then back to Jack’s eyes.

". . . then he marries Sarah,† who adopts his kids legal smeagle. You know Aaron, attuned to details. He might have had too many interests but you can’t deny his clearheaded perfectionism. I mean, he was a complex man. And life goes on. Sarah started a little kennel. Raised Dobies. And, well, you know Aaron had a . . . green thumb . . . just enjoyed organic farming and . . . and . . . marijuana retailing. You know Aaron . . . wouldn’t hurt a soul . . . no stealing, no drunk driving, a million friends, a million customers . . . and one enemy . . . that’s all it takes is one enemy . . . a spy or somebody mad at you and their finger dialing the drug war hotline . . . one call. In this case, it was a spy. He lowers his voice. Jerks his thumb toward the darkness beyond the open van door. These guys have seen action, Gordie. Shakes his head. No laugh this time. They broke her arm. Blinded and loosened one eye. Points at the van. Had the kids in foster homes . . . two different ones, for two years." Jack jerks his thumb toward the van again.

And the narcs grabbed their house and land, says Gordon, folding his arms across his chest.

Jack snorts. You psychic? He snorts again. Yeah, the usual. A great tradition. Like the cavalry and the surveyors behind them riding in to save the day . . . from those goddamn hostiles . . . yep, very American tradition. Oily as clockworks. He opens his palm on the van roof. Come look here and see what’s been made homeless, roaming from one relative’s place to another. No one wants them. Though of course the DHS would steal the kids again if she hadn’t lost their hounds in the dust. It’s one of the DHS rules . . . you can’t move a lot.

Gordon steps closer, looks inside. A woman about forty with straight white-blond hair and dark roots, haggard face, her gray eyes on him. Neither eye looks very loose but she has an expression like a dog that wants to rip out his throat, like a dog that’s been poked and poked and kicked and kicked and kicked again. Her face is the color of ice. Her shoulders are small. She’s bunched up in a big sweater but she still looks cold, even with the heater blasting away and the engine running.

Two preteen or early teen kids. Painfully beautiful faces. Thick blond brushy haircuts, deep Jewish eyes, both sitting up perfectly straight like two bright mushrooms that have appeared under a dark damp porch. He remembers Aaron so well now, ever alert. Aaron, always joking. The kind of jokes that tried to be funny but his sense of irony was usually poorly timed. But you laughed because Aaron was sometimes a little too sad. You wanted to stand between him and that blue-tinged zone. Maybe he did beat himself to death.

Hey, Gordon says to the woman.

She stares at him, looks him over. Her mouth opens as if to snarl. She’s missing a tooth. She says, Hey.

Jack whispers, You want them, don’t you?

Gordon looks again into the fierce weary eyes of the woman and then backs out of the van doorway, then nudges a finger along down one side of his mustache. For how long?

Forever, I guess.

Benedicta is delivered. Two nights later, a lilac-color dusk and the songbugs creaking thunderously in the tall grasses and mountainy miles of foliage.

Gordon steps off the porch of the old gray farmplace with intentions of heading up to the Settlement along the woodsy path, a shortcut with a little bridge and large, sort of fantasy trees leaning in. Tonight is his night with Misty in her cottage with her cats who all despise him, his body usually occupying the best of Misty’s sunporch chairs as he and she gab about their day. And then he of course always takes up most of the bed. For the cats he doesn’t even make an effort. No invitations to his lap. No stroking them to set off purrs. Also he groans in his sleep and sleepwalks corpselike, which causes all the tails to flick in disdain.

Now, just as he takes a deep breath of the evening, he sees someone standing by the monster ash tree in the sandy lot next to the road, a small elderly person with a two-fisted grip on a leatherlike pocketbook bigger than a bread box. He veers in her direction. There is no parked car and he only vaguely recalls a vehicle slowing down a half hour ago, maybe stopping on the tar road, maybe a thump that would be a slammed door, but he was upstairs washing up.

He can see that the old person is smiling up at him and that she wears no glasses. Her eyes are possibly blue, hard to tell in the flagging light. In his deep big-guy voice, he asks, You looking for me?

Her hair isn’t white but an ashy light brown with a neglected perm, the hair jaw-length and listless, but thick and combed with a nice part on the side. She wears a dark button-up sweater, jeans, sneakers. Her nose isn’t small, snoutlike, or curt. Maybe once she was quite handsome. She has been nodding her head to his question, her eyes wide and seeming to show some sense of humor about the moment.

He has a sinking feeling, knowing someone has dumped her off. The way people sometimes dump off boxes of baby rabbits or, once in a while, a pup.

Well, says he. Let’s go up where all the hot corn muffins are and get the world by the tail.

Once they start up the wooded shortcut, he fumbles for the small flashlight hooked to his belt along with his batch of keys. She isn’t talking. She must be fuzzy of mind. He reaches for her hand as they come upon the rooty part of the trail. He thinks about the aspirin bottle he keeps at all times in a pocket but just keeps on swishing the light through the overbearing purple dusk inside the crackling-underfoot tunnel of old trees.

On a different evening. Alone with fifteen-year-old Seavey Road neighbor girl Brianna Vandermast who visits a lot.

She stands so erect and easy by the scarred dark table in the farmhouse dining room, the old blue-with-white-polka-dots wallpaper Gordon’s mother herself pasted up once upon a time. How musty-cool this room is but the cherry-pink ceramic cherub in the corner hutch cabinet looks overheated.

Bree spreads her ringless hand on the thick, stapled document lying amid three empty coffee mugs on the long leafed table. She asks, What is this?

He is just now entering the room with two more mugs, these with maple milk in them, one for her, one for him. His eyes widen. "Oh that. Well, in this world there’s your Recipe. Then there’s their Recipe."

Her voice has always had a smoky edge. "Project Megiddo, it says. It’s the FBI. But what are you doing with it?" She giggles.

He positions the two brimming mugs on the table. He glances at her face, which is purposely hidden by squiggles and twists of shining young-girl hair, perfectly orange hair, her face deformed by whatever it was that went wrong when she was the size of a thumb . . . or earlier . . . maybe when she was a mere idea . . . though who could imagine Bree, her honey-color eyes set apart like a funhouse mirror image and her mind that to him once seemed shy, nervous, or something . . . but, no, he is beginning to understand that she is not nervous of anything. He bets that the coil of her brain is radiating far more redly than her hair.

He explains, "Everybody has a copy of that thing. It’s not top secret. It was issued to fire departments, cops, EMTs. Rex‡ . . . you know . . . he’s with the volunteer fire crowd."

I figured. Cuz of the red light on the dash in his pickup, she says in a warm way.

He grunts. Richard York. He’s just like you. He loves to share. He’s probably churned out half a million copies of that report.

She giggles.

Drink some of your ambrosia, Athena, he chuckles, pushes her mug easy-careful across the table toward her hand, which is, yes, ringless, but speckled and dashed with three shades of muscley purple, one shade of red, one splotch of yellow ocher.

She reads aloud: The attached analysis, entitled Project Megiddo, is an FBI strategic assessment of the potential for domestic terrorism in the United States undertaken in anticipation of or response to the arrival of the new millennium. She doesn’t look into his face square-on. She never does. But her eyes drift toward his shoulder, his work shirt, and his Sherpa-lined vest. Have you read this . . . all of it? She flips through, pausing, blinking.

Gordon speaks in a cartoony play-voice, If we is to hassle Mr. York about reading our stuff, it’s only fair we reads his.

She tsks. Looks like the FBI wants to scare everybody, huh?

He says nothing. The expression across his dark-lashed eyes is smirky. His cowlicked hair adds greatly to his appearance of What? Me worry? though weary is a more accurate word.

But her voice becomes almost academic and there, see her touch her chin with a musing finger. "I mean . . . their language is . . . well, you know, Poeish. You can hear funereal music in the background. I mean . . . it’s funny . . . but not funny. Cuzzz they are trying to make the militia movement guys into something . . . terrorists. She giggles. I mean it’s not funny . . . but they sound so . . . like . . . bad actors in . . . well, like Joe Friday!" She hiccups with laughter.

He pulls out a chair and sits with a tired groan.

America needs to be divided, she says. "Divided we fall. That’s it in a nutshell. We . . . the little guys. Meanwhile, these . . . these cops or whatever they are . . . they get paid for being dangerous and . . . and silly. She flips the top page, lets it drop. I hate to see people be such suckers. There’s got to be a way to outsmart a bunch of funny cops." She snorts.

So, says he, I saw where the print shop did up about two hundred more of your Abominable Hairy Patriot flyers. What are you going to do with those?

She giggles. Guiltily. She’s aware of the ethic of thrift Gordon stands firmly on, so she might be feeling she has wronged him? Oh . . . like, we’ve been passing them out, around. Bulletin board at the town office and IGA. Telephone poles. Windshield wipers.

You and your wicked comrades from the Socrates group, right?

She hesitates, then says lushly, Sure. Comrades. Which reminds me . . . She steps around one of his towers of books, a plastic crate of oak tag files, and a couple of satchels of yet-to-be-answered fan mail to the nearest darkening window. She keeps her back presented to him. Always her back (and perfect bottom). Always her profile (within the veil of her long hair). Never, never square on. She will face everybody but him, even though he and she have been together so much this summer, perfecting the three versions of The Recipe for Revolution. Is he wronging her to feel suspicious . . . of . . . something? That she is scheming things that she is too young to realize are too hot to handle?

Some here call her gifted, her art, her welter of calligraphy, her way of leading the other girls around by the nose. But she is not sixteen yet. She still believes that monsters can be tamed by princesses, that the world beyond the Settlement gate can be fixed.

She tells him, I reached the people I told you about . . . the . . . leftists. The ones with the folk school project, the ones who printed that great brochure on democracy versus corporate power.

He is suddenly and deeply silent.

They said it would be their pleasure to come, she adds.

All at once he slurps and sucks and splutters and slobbers away at the edge of his mug of maple milk, the syrup settled languidly at the bottom, then with a red bandanna from his pants pocket, cleans his heavy dark mustache like a cat, defiantly and precisely. And still he offers no words. Runs his tongue over his teeth, getting more mileage out of the maple.

She steps back and turns toward the corner hutch.

One of his eyes tends to widen when he’s overawed by life, the other eye narrowing and flinching. This is happening now. "You send them our Recipe? I mean your Recipe. You are its mastermind," says he.

All three versions, yes, which include the one-page flyer. She giggles. She is reaching to touch one of the pink cherub’s wings. Now his eyes swipe down over the whole of her. Logger girl. Yes, she really does work in the woods with her father and brothers. Often she has turned up at the Settlement for the East Parlor Socrates nights covered in sawdust, smeared with bar and chain oil and the sour grease of the machinery.

He has seen artwork by her, on her passions: woods, sky, work. Her brush refuses to sit, stay, lie down, and happily throws 8.5-magnitude seismographic cracks in all that’s revered.

Yes, the wide slow sway of her hips makes her, in spite of her face, a sexy girl. And yes, she is only fifteen. And he is more tired by the minute and also curious about her stopping in tonight, almost always another hint for him to save the world, always the romanticized plunge into the chasm, like Malcolm X or Emiliano Zapata or Big Bill Haywood. Oh, to be fifteen and foolish, thinking every landing to be so dreamy, so soft, so green!

Well, says he. Keep me posted on when these new friends of yours plan to ride into town.

She strokes the cherub’s other wing. She’s a tall girl. Almost six feet. He’s a tall man. Six-five. He realizes how at times when he’s near her, she and he seem of a species apart from most Settlementers . . . except his oldest sons and daughters and then his wife Bonnie Loo, who by virtue of the Bean family legacy, is of rugged and towering stature, too.

He is grateful to be sitting down. He’s been up since four. His headache is there right where it always is and basketball-sized. He leans back in the old dining room chair. He watches Bree carefully.

She speaks in a most dreamy way, What kind of mind believed in wings? She has, obviously, no interest in her portion of the maple milk.

Gordon says huskily, Millions still believe in angels. And pregnant virgins. And kings visiting Bethlehem on camels that must be turbo camels to make such good time from North Africa . . . uh . . . . hours after the babe hit the hay. According to Christmas cards.

She is a bit more in profile to him now, no response to his camel wisecrack, and withdraws her hand from the rigid pink wing, though her fingers are still in the cherub’s personal space. I guess you’d need wings to flap up to heaven. She touches without hesitation the cherub’s bright penis, then declares with a release of held breath, Heaven is on earth.

The last gooey swig of what’s in Gordon’s mug goes down. He reaches for her full cup, draws it to himself.

Speaking from the future, Claire St. Onge remembers some things.

It changed so much about our lives at the Settlement. That Record Sun feature. And all the wire pieces and talk-show fervor that came on its heels. We could never hide anything again and we had plenty to hide, all that which made up Gordon’s humanity. He was stood on a stage now. He was cut into bytes, a collage for the titillation of America. All of us at the Settlement were part of that collage, like some sort of jokey frat-boy art.

But our gardens wagged in the rains, simmered in the sun, and our children continued to be vivacious. And our elderly elders wore their invisible crowns, chin up. At times we could pretend nothing had changed.

When I get a minute, I’ll tell you a little about the reporter who was the first to crash into our lives . . . the lovely and fox-cunning Ivy Morelli of the Record Sun. Bonnie Loo hissed that she was a bitch and a cunt, but to me she seemed just another vulnerable sticky soul snagged by our towering king of the Settlement hearth.

The voice of Mammon considers.

This glowing growing of free exchange, these acquisitions, accumulations, these deserved accretions, the flow, as unencumbered as the sea, is the rock of civilization. It is immoral not to defend it!

The Apparatus speaks.

Overlords and overladies of the free world! You rang? I bend. Gladly.

There is no weight to your trillions, once the currency of evergreen and gold, now just the sheen of the scrolling screen, your gains mounting taller than the twin towers, those dispensable giraffes that soon will go down in the hot dust free fall of our ingenious brew of delicacies. You rang? At your service! Proud to serve! Kabooooom!

No need to concern yourselves with that which walks on billions of legs, the restless, enraged, suspicious, unpacific folk of the homeland and beyond, such flesh the weight of rubble. At your service! I will stun them, freeze them solid, with precision, the inexhaustible constant constant constant televised flutter of that hot dust and fire and live bodies dropping like apples from a cloud-tall tree. But also I will arrange smaller terrors, these lone gunmen and bomb men of and on the busy streets, schools, movie houses, even church! Mosques! Whatever!

Proud to serve you, gods and goddesses of the global exchanges, I give you the full and juicy terror of this nation and more, oh, to keep that terror in high red, a crescendo like Ravel’s Bolero, like a thumping bed, yet one more mass shooting by a dog-toothed depressed non-man loner, another bang! bang!, another sprawled child and choking-on-her-tears mother, today and tomorrow, bang! pop! boom! You rang? Oh, yes, I am proud to serve.

But for now, for this warm-up before the truly BIG DAY of box-cutter magic, O lords, O ladies, in my ever-resolute service, I am soon ready to give you this lunatic, armed and dangerous, weird-for-blood spectral signifier of what all good Americans abhor, that god of a little dot on the map of Maine: Guillaume St. Onge. Take him from my palm.

---

† Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.

‡ Don’t forget the character list at the back of the book.

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.

Forward Again to September

Egypt town hall parking lot. In a small metallic blue-gray car waits a fellow wearing a short-sleeve golf-style shirt.

An old dark-green-and-white Chevy pickup pulls in and the giant, a bit slope-shouldered Gordon St. Onge steps out, a tax bill or some such in his huge hand, a harmlessly overcast expression on his bearded face. Three little boys are on the truck’s bench seat raising hell. A perfectly nice apple with no bites sails out the open passenger window and bounces toward the groomed town hall shrubberies. No seat belts but gun racks, yes, with one gun. No, actually it’s a large carpentry level. For newspaperly photo purposes, guns are better, but the golf-shirt guy flies out of his car anyway and seems to be blocking Gordon St. Onge’s next step.

Gordon nods, eyes scanning the guy, now his Tourette’s-like cheek and eye flinch as he registers the camera that is snapping several frames of him about three feet from his face and so his expression hardens. And this malevolent burning look, the Mertie’s Hardware billed cap and old bloodred chamois shirt, all a testament to his class, which of itself sustains the accusation of wrongs, a generalized inexhaustible infamy, are frozen forever in digital format.

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

Today the mail was worse than ever, like a goddamn ton of bricks my mother Beth screamed when Oz and C.C. and Jaime dragged all the feed sacks with letters and stuff into the kitchens.

Also we got more meatballs on the phone down to Gordie’s house. I handled three of them all at once and got them to confess they were calling from the Maine Mall. I am very good at this, better than Jane Meserve who believes she’s a secret agent, which is ridiculous. She is not even seven yet and cannot spell. Actually with spelling I am better than the Record Sun which made four typos in the article about us.

Gordie was depressed or something because another newspaper guy nailed him with a picture that went onto a front page in Massachusetts ←(notice my perfect spelling).

They always take lots of pictures of him and pick the scariest ones and call him the Prophet or with militia connections. All our windmills and gardens and conservation projects that Ivy liked aren’t mentioned now. They say Gordie is a charismatic leader. My mother, Beth, says if this keeps up, the FBI will be in here with tanks and CS gas . . . which she heard is explosive in close quarters. She says the government loves to explode things because Americans like to watch explosions. It’s all very exciting but when I said tanks were funny she squeezed my arm HARD. Shut up . . . her actual words. And she looked afraid. Not her usual self, which Gordie calls an unflappable smart-ass wench.

On talk radio they talk about how Gordie has twenty-five wives. That is a bit of an exaggeration.

Claire’s cottage.

He trudges up the flagstone-and-vinca path to her yard, the velvet-skinned white birches yeowling in the wind. He notes there is a ceramic cup left on the little stone bench from where you can, on a less misty day, see for miles, including the reedy narrow end of Promise Lake with all its wee islands, some too small to build on, a few barely the size of trash-can covers.

Claire’s friend Catherine and her child Robert have been staying with Claire, a tight fit, and he has heard that this Catherine fancies the little stone bench, the view, the peace. But too windy and yeowly today for peace.

And besides, Catherine has been gone for several days, being straight-out busy at the university, Professor Catherine Court Downey, the interim chairperson (Gordon’s word) of the art department, she who is under Gordon’s skin in ways contradictory to skin.

He has carried here, for Claire to see, yet another newspaper that has been squeezing out more sensational mileage from the Settlement situation. Yes, his home is now being referred to as a situation. And this is a fearsome turn in the road and Claire and her tiny steeply roofed cottage of colored-glass panes, reservation baskets of sweet grass and ash, and lusty hanging plants, and that carved dark-stained furniture, made by him, are the cave of comfort he crawls into when most stung by fears, most uneasy. He sees her in his mind’s eye, standing in her open door, those twenty years all layered, twenty layers of soft transmutations, all the Claires, starting with that age-thirty Claire, his first bride, her strutting little figure, the sway of her hair, more hair than figure, a mane of mirror-shine black. No glasses in those days. Just eyes. Black eyes. Unexcitable eyes. And yet, they were thunder eyes, speaking eyes, eyes that often could rivet him to the wall. Or the bed, as the case may be.

It wasn’t until he had betrayed her that she began to put on weight. But before that, oh, how she used to swing those hips. Nearly ten years older than he, an older student (if you aren’t fresh out of high school), USM history major, history and archaeology, the stirring finds of recent digs all over the mean curve of the planet, oh, she, Claire, was both ancient and ripe.

It is through his especially developed feelers of the heart that he knows he has missed her, her after-the-noon-meal quiet time when she reads over her university students’ compositions, these from her adjunct position in the same building as the chairperson’s office. So he can surmise Claire has had an interruption other than himself.

But here is the crow, not the usual bunch who scream jocularly over the cracked corn on the two windowsill shelves. But the crow, the one who recently breezed in to win Claire’s heart, perched today on the lumpy man-sized kid-made sculpture near the front door. Part of a beech tree, this