BOOK ONE: His Sun

JUNE

From a future time, Claire St. Onge remembers the way it all went. She speaks.

So you've heard about us before, doubtlessly, how this tiny world, our home, our "chez nous," cradled in the lap between two mountains, got blasted straight out into the eye of America. Yes, America, what one of our adopted teenagers here calls "The Land of Panicked Mice." But really it was us, the family of the Settlement, who were the mice, the outside world a hale and majestic foot, the triumph of that foot set in motion by one small hand.

At 7:33 p.m., a message left on the answering machine of theRecord Suncolumnist and feature writer, Ivy Morelli.

"Hello. I'm not going to tell you my name. I'm sure there's the possibility of retribution by the individuals involved if you choose to proceed with this. There are several of us who are worried about what we see as very serious abuses to children at the so-called school located on Heart's Content Road near Promise Lake in this town ... Egypt. We're aware of others who have voiced concern to authorities and to one or two other newspapers. We are furious about the lack of even an eye blink of interest shown! Unreturned phone calls. Passing the buck. Rudeness. Treating us like we are crazy. Like we are crazy ...

At 7:59 p.m., on the same evening, on the same answering machine of the same Ivy Morelli.

As before, the caller doesn't introduce himself, though it is clearly a different voice. Voice tells of the "school" in Egypt. Voice is dull, weighted by a sort of weary grief. "... and we're talking here, ma'am, about children who are beaten, worked like animals, who have easy access to drugs, who are probably sexually abused, live in improper sanitation ... and the parents ... whenever anyone has seen them, seem like they are in some kind of trance, probably high ... or, you know, could be victims of fanatical religious brainwashing. We all know these things happen. Waco, for instance. We're all grown up, aren't we? Of course, none of us would dream we'd get it right here in Maine. But here you have it ..."

Next day, a different voice. A woman, a firm-sounding woman, not one to let things slide.

"... and we know of a woman who has a grandson in this so-called school. A thirteen-year-old who hasn't even learned to read yet! And she says that he hasn't even been pushed to do so. She doesn't want to reveal her name, either, but I'm sure there are plenty of others who will talk if you were to investigate. The place is a work camp, a prison for children. And there are guns. So you see what kind of people we are talking about here. We know about other calls you have received concerning this situation so we know you know there's something going on at that place. If you could state in writing that you would not reveal our names, we'd be more than happy to meet with you in person. One of us will call again. Thank you very much ... CLICK."

Ivy Morelli listens to the snippet of dial tone before the next recorded message. She is picking at the rough weave of her skirt, frowning.

Claire St. Onge in recollection of that summer.

Always there were crows. Came for the cracked corn I spread on the broad sill of the big windows to my tiny sunroom, my morning room. Two chairs, some baskets, and a toadstool-shaped table, which is only big enough to hold a cup of coffee and a book. It is carved and streaky with grain and time. Looks like a relic.

One of the crows must have been a lost pet. Very chummy. And had had his tongue split or whatever cruel thing it is that is done. The first time I heard him, I thought it was the tinny voice of a small radio. I found he'd gotten in through the kitchenette door, and claimed a bedpost. The crow's voice was urgent, "Church at ten!" He cocked his head. "Church at ten!"

Another message on Ivy Morelli's machine.

"Hello. I am calling in reference to the Home School, a sort of military compound situation on Heart's Content Road in North Egypt, on land owned and lorded over by a fellow named Gordon St. Onge. It is an urgent matter and I hope that one of us is able to connect with you soon.

I am unable to reveal my name, phone, fax, or e-mail for the reason that there are probably enough firearms in that St. Onge place ... and explosives to eliminate fifty government buildings ... so taking care of a few concerned citizens like us would be nothing to them ..."

Ivy jots down a few words and slashes across the soft pink lines of her reporter pad.

This man's voice is a different voice from those who have called over the last few days. And yet equally indignant. And she knows that those who have called her editor, Brian Fitch, or reporters in other departments here, have all been indignant, even a little discomposed.

Brian tells her, "Just keep on trying to nab somebody at DHS and the supe of the SAD, which Egypt is in. You know, Ivy, nothing goes into print without the official lowdown first ... 'less you can charmingly get inside that compound and tape the grunts of laboring children and the crackings of the whips." Brian flutters his eyes. "Meanwhile, good luck reaching some living breathing officials who know anything or want to spill it. There's something here. But. We servants of the news shan't be allowed the crumbs until we grovel a bit first." He turns away, then back. "Jesus, this whole country gets fruitier by the minute. This might be real."

Claire St. Onge speaks.

When the call came last night, a few of us were there in Gordon's kitchen. As he took the phone, we could tell by the way he held his shoulders, and how his face iced over, that the person on the other end was danger. When he hung up and said it was a Record Sun reporter, I felt the blood stop in my arms and jaws. He had, yes, agreed to an interview! He had always warned us of the commercial mainstream press. Now he became all gooey and helpful as he said goodbye. One of Gordon's many selves. A traitor, even to himself. And to us. He'd be taking us down with him, right?

Claire St. Onge again.

And then on another morning on my white-picket gate, hopping left, then right, the crow. "Oh nooo! My floors!" and "Oh nooo! My floors!" he ranted.

This morning with the iris beds in head-spinning sweetness, he swept down, his wingspan always a little jolt to me, making the sun blank out like a missed heartbeat, and there on the sill he admired the cracked corn feast. But he didn't eat. Arranged his classy black suit of feathers, did one high-stepping turnabout, and said into my eyes, "The ending was lousy."

When Ivy Morelli shows up at the St. Onge property to get her story.

Dark windshield, dark glasses, dark "modified bowl" haircut tinted with violet clipped to a hot edge at the nape of her neck. Thudding beat of the radio. Gas pedal to the floor, fixed there rather continuously by the flabby little plastic heel of her dress sandal. The all-American driver. The race! The win! Time ticking in the blood. The engine straining to please. And Ivy Morelli wears a little stripy dress, her mouth set hard, the hard young modern woman, expression hard as nails.

Here it is up ahead. The St. Onge residence, as it has been described to her. A plain typical old farm place, gray with white trim. Cape and ell. Long screened-in piazza that was once open. There are the old lathed columns behind the haze of screening. And the dooryard, sandy with scattered plantain leaf. A nice big old tree. Everything tidy and well-kept. Seems there's even fresh paint riding on the air.

Ivy Morelli's sports car skids to a stop. Car door swings open. Nearly as fast as the speed of light she gathers her bag and camera from the passenger seat and steps out into the settling dust. She studies the bank of solar collectors across the roof of the ell. These collectors are strange. Big and boxy. She pushes her dark glasses to the top of her head, scratches a few notes on her slim reporter pad. She casts a cold eye over everything. Her eyes are, yes, a frigid blue in dark lashes. She is not tall. Her hand with pen, small.

"Hmmmm," she says to herself, gazing dreamily up into the rivuleted limbs of the old ash. Big, dumb, old, dutiful beast. Not really much for shade. Just a ghostly gray pale shadow spread on the sand and out across the tiny front lawn of halfheartedly mowed grass, down into a ditch, then out onto the warm tar road.

Her eyes widen. "Look, Ivy!" she tells herself. She wiggles her pen. There on the great girth of the ash, a wooden sign, hand painted with letters that dribble like blood. OFICE.

Ivy Morelli snorts, then says to herself, "A school, yessir, with a misspelled sign."

There are so many doors, especially along the ell and shedways. "Where's the wacky sign that reads: 'PARKENG'?" she asks herself with narrowed eyes.

She decides on a door with a single window covered with a pink curtain. She gives it a couple of sharp raps. No cool shade here, just the ugly bare truth of sun. And silence. She knocks again. Waits. Nothing.

She knocks again. Two real THWACKS. She squares her shoulders. Small person, small, yes, but.

She speaks indignantly. "Okey-dokey, pard'ners. So what's up?" Anyone looking out at her from inside this house, seeing her here in her short striped dress and sandals, would certainly surmise she's the reporter who called last night and arranged this appointed time. The camera, for heaven's sake! The narrow lined pad and pen. She is clearly not a vacuum cleaner salesman!

She glances around the yard again and counsels herself, "No kiddie jungle gyms. No toys. No catcher's mitts or basketball hoops. Take note of this."

She looks at the dormer windows above, a silvery fog of brand-new screen and homey ruffled curtain. Cups her hands around her mouth. "HELLO!!!!!"

No answer.

Ivy Morelli drops her sunglasses back down onto her face and turns toward the little sandy rutted parking lot. She is so very young. On fire with the present. Her dark glasses reflect two sharp hot little suns. Her wristwatch flashes. Her small blue and pink tropical fish tattoos swim around her slim bicep. Her seven bracelets are both bright and noisy. Her earrings shriek light, spinning into lighter light. Her violet tinted inverted bowl of hair has an actual metal sheen. Her stride across the lot is filled with purpose. All that clinking-clatter. She is almost an after-image of a well-armored knight. Will she be triumphant? Will the crowds cheer: such intrepitude!

The field rises up. Hazy. Red clouds of devil's paintbrushes and the washed-out purples of vetch. Daisies, like a cheery galaxy of reachable stars! And all the greens, witchgrass, clovers, nettle, all on their toes celebrating heat, hell, being their heaven. And then the mountain, hot and close. And the other mountains humped politely behind and beside the bigger guy. Blue, spiked with hot black spruce and paler pine. Maple and beech and other leafy vegetable greens ... trillions of individual leaves. Holy cow! And leaping lizards! It boggles the mind.

So this is the St. Onge property. Nine hundred acres in the boonies of Egypt. And how many ghosts of babies corralled within? How many Bibles? How many guns?

"What do you suppose that is?" Ivy Morelli asks herself. A peculiar thing up there along the tree line. Looks like the rusty steel roof of a pig shed, only perfectly round.

A prickly coolness (a warning?), moves up the back of Ivy's damp neck. Fear. Just a few seconds of ugly, unfettered terror.

She looks back at the house. Over at her car. Down at her sandals, her feet spread apart in the sand. She tosses her shimmering bowl of hair. "Okay, Ivy. It's okay. Easy girl. Holy horse whinnies!" She heads for the field. The vetch and daisies grab and break at her shins. Heat shimmers in a yellowy way over the rusted roof of the faraway construction. She remembers a movie about prisoners of war in Korea kept in small corrugated steel sheds in unbearable heat. All the torture and grimness of that movie! And she was only a child. Why was she at that movie? Yeah, a goin' out movie. Popcorn? Soda in a cup? Who took her to see it? She can't remember. Because all that was gentle and loving in the real world of Ivy Morelli no longer existed as the keepers of the POW camp peeled away the steel doors to find another succumbed man or to drag a live one out to be "interviewed" once again.

She marches on with a hard soldierly expression. She considers stopping to pick a bouquet. But why? It would only wilt in this heat. Why are our hands always in some reflex to outmoded practices? Will hunting and gathering always be with us? It is a query that to Ivy feels dirty, sneaky, and fleeting, like thoughts of nudity while in midconversation in a formal place. All this nature! All this breathing, unbraiding, sexy nature! Ivy laughs. "HAW! HAW!" Shakes her shimmery metallic hair.

She hikes onward, up into the deeper brighter heat. So much silence and yet her eardrums feel assaulted and swollen. The heat buzzes louder than any insect would. Louder than a small sporty car. Her stripy tight dress, her bracelets, her shoulder bag, her camera all weigh her down ... the weight of that other world outside this place, her world. The world where child abuse is considered a crime.

She turns, pushes her sunglasses up on her head. Snaps a few pictures of the St. Onge house with her solitary car in the yard as seen from this higher elevation. She says to herself in a husky way, "With this fort unmanned, all this is at my mercy." She cackles evilly.

Treks onward. Higher and higher.

Well, the rusty roof does not shelter pigs or prisoners of war. Instead it is a merry-go-round of every sort of wide mouthed, big jawed, horned monster. No pretty high-stepping stallions here. No, indeedy.

Observe "bloody" eyes and teeth made from jackknife blades and 16-penny spikes. Ivy Morelli steps very close. Some of these merry-go-round faces look human, as weird and anguished as faces frozen in death. Bad death. Now the epic-sized flashback of that movie returns, runs scampering cool through her hair again. What kind of merry-go-round is this? So many wide joyless eyes. Not many flashy tails and manes. But yes, a lot of color. Black and yellow. Red. Purple. Warrior colors. But for one creature spray-painted all over with gold, like the gold leaf on state capitol domes and other monuments to human arrogance and audacity.

Ivy's editor, Brian Fitch, has been on her back these past few months. He suggests that she get more quotes than she tends to for her feature stories, even for her columns! Readers like quotes, he says. Does he insinuate she kind of well-meaningly invent quotes? Maybe paraphrase, then put speech marks around these as if spoken? This, the not-so-well-guarded secret of "the press" and therefore a norm of the institution? For surely interviewees seldom actually speak in conveniently condensed newspaper-length statements. If honesty matters to you too much, the muscles of your jaws and neck will be forever knotted and your heart will crack. The wishes of business, the wishes of the clock, are all bigger than you. Bigger than humanity. Yielders are survivors. To yield is to be strong.

Funny how those things go. Honesty? Like the hunting and gathering reflex of the fingers, there is shame in these outmoded things we've evolved away from.

Down on the road (Heart's Content Road), an engine strains, that steep wriggling-like-a-viper hill making the gears hum down as with "mi re do." Can't see the road from here. Down that way, the woods are thick and tight as a green and gray weave. But indeed, there is a vehicle. A busload of manacled kids maybe. A shipment of bazookas. Replacement Bibles to replace the others worn out by wet sobs.

Through sweaty eyes Ivy studies a red merry-go-round face. Its black eyes are penetrating. Rusty teeth leering. She prints carefully on her lined reporter pad: CHILDREN ARE INHERENTLY EVIL. "I'll quote myself," she says with a low playful chuckle. Is it supposed by Ivy that kids made these in the image of their inner selves? She leans even closer through the hot blue shade of the carousel roof, her sunglasses slipping from the top of her head. Immediately a deerfly swings around her hair, a chainsaw-like buzz, and works a chunk out of her face. "ACHH!" she cries out. Feels her cheek, smearing blood.

She caresses the all-golden merry-go-round creature whose body is silky to touch, like human shoulders. But its two heads are lumpy and scarred. "Some little dear beat this with a board," she whispers into the hot stillness. They say violence is a cycle. Maniac schoolmaster beats kid, kid beats the golden watchamacallit.

She peers closer. "Yeah ... that linty stuff in the eye sockets ... that's glue. This thing used to have eyes." She gives one of the glowing bald heads another sensuous rub. Neither one of the hideous eyeless heads speaks a quotable remark.