Read Online The School on Heart's Content Road by Carolyn Chute - Free Book Online

quite pink. Red suspenders over a white T-shirt. And like the boy Thad, he has breasts.
    One guy Mickey can never warm to is Doc, a really hard-assed guy who also wears a camo shirt with an arm patch. Although the word
God
comes up at all meetings in a rather rote fashion, this guy speaks the word
God
like you or I would say the words
club
or
guillotine
. Mickey fears this guy worse than Mr. Carney and his henchmen at the high school. Probably because back last spring Mickey had surmised it was only a matter of time before he’d walk out of that school scene forever. But here, he can’t imagine his future without the militia. It is everything.

August
    The inevitably leaky press.
    Gordon is working here in the largest Quonset hut with his son Cory. Tall, imperious-looking Cory St. Onge (although he is not in actual spirit imperious). A lament in his black eyes (though he is a fairly contented sort), Cory of the immense shoulders and back (like Gordon), is noticeably Passamaquoddy. Almost fifteen years old. Nothing like his father in the need to blab, no crooked smile, no twitching eye and cheek, no awkward charisma. Just a boy, ordinary as winter.
    The rest of the furniture-cabinet-making crew are all and about as well.
    In through the hum of lathes, the screech of saws, and drifting sweet light, and sweet dusty air strides a messenger. None of his children call him Dad or Father or Papa or any of that. Like all the rest, she—the messenger—calls him Gordie. She is his child by Claire’s cousin Leona, and a sister to Cory. Her name is Andrea St. Onge, the only one who has turned out to look so completely Passamaquoddy, not so much like a Frenchman, an Italian, or a folk of the shamrock (Gordon’s side). No, nothing like Gordon—except her stature, long arms, long body, and easy gait. And
some
of her squinty smiles. She is accompanied by two small spotty white dogs who often hang out here and now waste no time in wetting down the legs of the equipment and lower shelves. Three angry men chase the dogs out.
    Andrea is not quite seven. Yes, tall. Short china-doll haircut, like her mother’s; long Settlement-made skirt of red. Baggy black Settlement-madeT-shirt. Settlement-made moccasin sneakers. She is graceful and tiptoeish, bringing this “message.” Just back from visiting an old Settlement man in the hospital, some doctor appointments, windshield leafleting, and other Settlement-style gang-style missions, all made possible by one van trip out into the world.
    Gordon is slipping off his safety glasses, sees in her hands a newspaper folded in a careful odd way. She places it in his hands. She doesn’t leave until she’s nuzzled into his shirt, found the solidness of his ribs, and patted his back comfortingly. “It’s the lady in there who wrote something . . . about us. See the folded part? That’s where it is. Okay?”
    â€œYep.”
    She leaves, looking neither left nor right, having important business elsewhere.
    He walks quickly to the passageway that leads to the other half of the building, a narrow passageway with deep shelves and cardboard boxes and tools and “cultch” and not much light. He squats there under the little dim yellow bulb like a wounded animal, safety glasses still on his head, and reads what Ivy Morelli has written, although she had sworn she would not go ahead with the Settlement story. Quite a spread. Pictures. A lot of pictures. And, yes, a lot of words. He reads each word and the punctuation and the spaces between and the shapes of the columns and the feel of the newsprint against his thumbs.
    â€œBetrayed,” he says to himself with a little snort, and holds his face awhile, lids shut, seeing Ivy’s blue eyes, the set of her small pointy-lipped clover-color mouth, the stalwart shape of her body, and, of course, her raffish laugh. How is it that when you do right by some it feels wrong to others? What now? What will