The School on Heart's Content Road by Carolyn Chute

around 1991, and we waved good-bye as our friends’ newish ballooned-out-looking pickup truck swept away. Gordon stayed out there in the dark as if for a smoke, but he wasn’t a smoker. Last I saw him that night, he was leaning against the fender of one of the Settlement rigs, stargazing, arms across the hood.
    Yes, sympathy hurts. But rage hurts too, if it can’t leap out to strike. More times than countable I saw him face these discoveries, rage, and then back off from what he couldn’t do, beat to death the “octopus of U.S. power” or go beyond that into the stratosphere of banks, that “system of faceless unrestrained international mammoneering”—also his words.
    That expression of his every time. Bloodless with the agony of restraint, bearded over darkly with his youth, then graying frostily on the chin through the years, and now even grayer.
    Yeah, years went on, and here I was looking into the face once again of Mr. Sunshine.
    Shouldn’t I have been relieved? No, I felt disgust. His face, the farawayness of this aspect, this expression of hope was dazy and—well, it was gooey. Like pie in the sky. Like a man sucked whole into Amway or church. His bucket-of-maggots outlook gave him a grown-up eminence. This is the paradox: Is happiness only for the newborn? the brain dead?the self-deceiving plastic Halloween pumpkin lighted by a four-watt bulb?
    In a future time. Among the papers sneaked out by government agents during one of the Settlement’s public events is this overly-fondled-by-authorities excerpt from a carbon-copied letter written by Gordon St. Onge to a friend. It reveals his preoccupation with the end of the world.
    World peace? Sure. When there’s nothing left but ultraviolet lint and hot pond scum and radioactive microspawn, then there will be world peace.
    Claire recalls the August Sunday, a couple weeks following the
Record Sun
feature.
    We always encouraged people of the community to join us for our Sunday meal, to bring a dish if they could, to bring musical instruments, to share stories—a lotta old stories here in Egypt—and yes, we shared gossip. But even with all the Good Neighbor Committee’s flyers posted around town and on windshields, we never got more than a dozen Sunday guests, unless it was the summer solstice. Fine. It was sweet. We were content.
    But one Sunday after we got famous, something different happened. Long before noon, coming up the Settlement road, we could see unfamiliar cars. They parked. Some of these visitors got out but just stood there. Then more cars, a dozen more, then more. And more. They parked in the lot, along the gravel road, and they parked in the fields where our last crop of hay had been standing, mashing it flat.
    Quickly, some of our people had gone out to meet them, redirecting cars out of the hay fields. Mostly, these visitors were not local people. More and more were arriving every minute, but just as many were leaving, driving slowly away. They hadn’t come for the meal but just to get a look. “To gawk,” as Settlementer Paul Lessard called it.
    Gordon was not one of those who went out to the road to welcome the visitors. He sat at a table, off to one side, with his back to a screen,waiting for food to be brought out to the piazzas by the kitchen crew. Some of the men at his table were talking in French. He seemed to be listening, but he offered nothing. Food came; he ate. He chewed everything slowly.
    Some of the strangers were coming up onto the porches, invited in by those of our emissaries who had gone out to greet them. A good-sized little mob of strangers, maybe thirty at first, then thirty more, came and found places at the tables, including tables on the adjoining piazzas. We got out every dish and bowl. Our almost-sacred solstice breakfast dishes, yeah, even those, normally reserved for that “soiree.” Hand-painted. Mostly on yellow: windmills, smiling suns,