The School on Heart's Content Road by Carolyn Chute Page A

animals, flowers, and funny-faced bugs. Only a few of these new people had brought a dessert or casserole. Our usual Sunday guests, attracted by the flyers, almost always brought food. But with this mob, the food we’d prepared wasn’t stretching—and there still were
more
people straggling across the Quad. Bonny Loo and her crew were throwing together emergency soup, biscuits, and several pans of yellow cake.
    More people came up the road. More people gathered on the Quad, out under the tall high-limbed trees, marveling at the dinosaurs and Martians, asking questions.
    And more people left. A lot used camcorders and expensive-looking cameras from a distance, sweeping their lenses around as if taking in the scene of a publicized murder, then driving out fast, raising the blond dust.
    As still more folks came up on the porches, most of them quite courteous and friendly, we would find them a place to squeeze in at a table. And they always recognized Gordon, so easy to pick out, a head taller than most of the other Settlement men he was sitting with, and like the AP photo (Ivy’s, actually) by the merry-go-round, his devilish dark and gray beard and dark-lashed, pale, dangerous-looking eyes perhaps caused the visitors to feel a little pleasant thrill of fear. He did not rise up out of his seat to go and be gracious, and only a few went near him. This was neither Gordon as we knew him to be on a typical Sunday nor the Gordon of our breakfast talk a few days earlier, gooey and hopeful.
    Usually when those few Sunday visitors arrived, he was all over them, pawing, teasing. And he might get a little drunk. Or
too
drunk, loud and foolish. During our sing-alongs, he’d beller all the words off key.And after our history plays, he’d often do his dove whistle and stomp his feet and be the last to stop clapping. He might lead a group of guests and helpful Settlement kids up to the mountain to see the windmills. Sometimes he would take them up in a caravan of electric buggies and tractors. I remember him once leading the caravan, himself on one of the really small electric buggies, him with his knees up to his chin, a really oversized person on that thing, with a middle-aged visitor, a guy dressed in his best Sundays, clinging to his, Gordon’s, waist like a motorcycle mama.
    Gordon loved people. But this? This was not part of his dream. This was media cheap. Now he whispered to me that it was going to get ugly before it got better.
    I remember one guy who was with a little group of maybe two couples, two or three, I forget exactly. But I remember his face. He wore glasses and a golf cap of Christmas-tree green, real long narrow visor. He drank from a cup of coffee and watched our Barbara taking away some empty platters and dishes and his eyes slid to the shop doorways, the outside walls of the building shingled and stained dark brown, then the dangling bright mobiles of glass and pottery and wood. And he looked across the row of faces in deep chairs along one wall, old Mo and Helen and Annie B and Chlea, all of them with their mouths hung open, even Chlea, who is only in her thirties, but retarded, her lips thick and too bright, her eyes set with the Down’s slant. Another woman, Vera, who had a couple of strokes the year before, could barely hold her head up, but on her lap was a sleeping toddler nearly naked, bare feet
very
dirty like little browned doggy paws. We were a mixed people. Not sorted, graded, or scored.
    The man’s eyes moved on, on to other faces, other surfaces of glass, wood, and screens with dappled sun. And flesh. How those sneering eyes violated my home!
    After the crowds were gone, we found our nice leafy-smelling compost toilets dripping and smeared like restrooms in a bar or roadside tourist stop.
    Next morning, a seasonable August deep-bone chill, we didn’t have the inside “winter kitchen” tables set for eating and wished we had.
    We all munched breads and whatever