LITMIR.BIZ

      BOOK ONE:

      My Good Behavior

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

      Henry David Thoreau

      SEPTEMBER

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

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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

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