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

was left of the eggs and cold chicken. There was no coffee. Everyone was in a kind of mortified hysteria, murmuring about the previous day. Gordon stood and spoke quietly, but we all heard him. We had all stopped whatever it was we were saying when we saw him push back his seat and wave his arm. He said, “No more ads and flyers for Sunday meals.”
    One of the kids of the Good Neighbor Committee called out, “But it wasn’t the flyers that got all those people! It was the newspaper stuff!”
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” Gordon said thickly, like he’d swallowed his arm or a shoe. “Those flyers give directions.”
    â€œNot fair!” called a really small squeaky child. A noble protest.
    Gordon looked out into the cold morning, at the impressive wooden Tyrannosaurus rex, purple cow, and spaceship, the really tall high-limbed trees of the Quad, and back at the little kid who had spoken. His face was still expressionless, and unchallengeable. But his voice was kindly. “Let’s try it for a while, Fiona. Till things calm down.”
    Bonny Loo remembers.
    A bunch of the older boys were sent down to make a gate, down where the dirt road comes in off the tar road. It was actually just two posts, with a removable pole across and a hand-painted sign: KEEP OUT.
    Forty-eight hours later.
    The
Record Sun
features a color photo on the back page, which is, of course, as highly visible as the front page. It shows a lovely shady woodsy dirt road with spots of sun and a horizontal sapling pole with a KEEP OUT sign tacked on it. The caption includes the words “separatists” and “barring intruders” and “their leader” and “seems more nervous” and there are words it does not exactly use, words between the lines, words implied, words aquiver, tantalizing, hot and bothered, words that are felt on the skin and beneath the skin of that great big anxious public.
    This too goes AP, and within days the written words and the unwritten
felt
words are finding every household of the nation, yeah, this greatbig anxious nation. The name Gordon St. Onge is not a household word yet, but it has begun to ring a bell with quite a few.
    Out of pain medicine again.
    Britta Gammon, who is Mickey and Donnie’s mother, is not always reliable, you see, because her sadness can sweep her away at any hour. But today she has made eggs, a big batch, and there’s more greens, which Mickey has brought from militiaman Artie Mitchell’s family’s garden, although Britta doesn’t know what to do with fresh greens and is right now boiling them to a slime.
    She has always been “a lady” and yet too rough with her life and with things, like food and pans and plates. A tender hard person. She was a “Portland girl,” she’ll tell you proudly, with a
nice education.
“I’m not a kitchen type. Not some hag.”
    But
nice education
meant high school diploma. How quickly the bar was raised on that, eh? Now you need not just a diploma, but a bunch of degrees to be somebody.
    Her dream was Boston, Boston rush, Boston civilization, and to have a kitchen with conveniences, a kitchen that didn’t make you old. Yes, she had had good grades in school and the guidance counselor had urged her to take up nursing. How ugly! All that skin and stink and scabbiness and death.
    â€œBe a stewardess!” her friend Maryanne suggested. A stewardess! Her pretty eyes. Her shape, her smile. And good grades, yes, the keys to escape. Her people were good people, but not people of the world. Not people of success. With good grades and pretty eyes, success is yours. The sky is the limit. Goodness is just milk and crackers, vanilla ice cream, flat, no better than death.
    But success never comes to those of us who can’t look people in the eye. Success goes to the bold and bubbly. The meek inherit only the quiet shelter of family.
    This was before the world decided