The Recipe for Revolution. Carolyn Chute
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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