The School on Heart's Content Road by Carolyn Chute

!
Listen to
meeeee.
Bomb him again.
Boo, hiss!
We will bring the gift of democracy to all the people. We, America, the peacemakers. We, America, rich and godly. God bless us. See his face? Bombs away.
    Next day, Donnie at home.
    Donnie Locke sits at the table in his chain-store clothes. There’s a heated (screaming and yelling) soap opera scene on the kitchen TV, but his eyes are on his brother, who has just come in from somewhere, a large paper bag under his arm. And Mickey is happy to feel the heat of his brother’s eyes on him, like the kind of heat you have in a house when you come in from the cold: a comfort, even if a little on the scorching side.
    Upstairs, the kids are loud.
    Donnie says, “What’s in the bag?”
    Mickey says, in a low-as-possible voice, “Beans and greens.”
    Donnie says, “Oh,” with a haunting smile, just a flicker of his heavy white-blond mustache. He asks, “So how’s everything coming along? With your life?”
    Mickey likes the way Donnie has said this. The question goes into the muscles at the back of his neck, and the hairs on the back of his neck move,
not
like a chill. It is a man-to-man question, a new thing these days, not the voice Donnie used to have for Mickey.
    And so, in a tone unconsciously mimicking Donnie’s, Mickey replies, “Good. Considering.”
    And Donnie says, “Good.”
    Donnie Locke, like Mickey, is not much of a talker. Now his silence thickens and his eyes drift over to the soap opera, where a woman with earrings that look like chandeliers shrieks, “HE STOLE EVERYTHING! EVEN MY MIND!”
    Mickey lowers the bag of beans and greens to the table. Then he moves light-footed to and through the bright little entry hall with the window and two jade plants. The living room is empty. He passes through it, his back straight, everything about him new and wiry and hard.
    Upstairs, he passes a closed door, beyond which are the screeches of kids, kids who spend a lot of time in midair jumping off stuff. He hears the tinny wail of the TV, there, somebody messing with the remote, probably stomping it. Maybe it was simply thrown. Celia and Elizabeth, Audrey and Tegan. And probably Jola, one of their friends from down the road. And of course Isabel. They seldom seem part of this household. Always in another room or outdoors. Or down the road at the Hartfords’. A massive girl gang that makes Mickey nervous but which everyone else thinks is cute. Cute? It’s nothing but
I win I win I win.
This versus that. Me versus you. No collaboration. No compromise. No sweetness.
    Rex’s militia seems sweeter.
    Mickey takes a second set of stairs, the narrower and steeper stairs that lead up to the small third-floor attic space that is all his. But hot. He likes how Erika has started, these last couple of weeks, to toss a few freshly washed shirts (and his other pair of jeans) in a wrinkled pile on his unmade bed. And she even straightens the top blanket of his bed and changes the pillowcase. It used to be he was expected to do his own laundry. But now this, her homage to the new Mickey. Something about his position in this house has changed, something that speaks the word
able
. And Mickey, who resists housework and grooming, is eager to enter in this little secret thing with Erika, to change several times a day into one of the clean wrinkled shirts, more shirts than he had before: yard-sale T-shirts with messages and ads, hand-me-downs, one cowboy shirt, one baseball shirt, and one camo—a nice coincidence. All clean and sweet from the clothesline. This is the thing a woman does for you when you’ve made her feel protected. This gift of home, which is also a kind of protection. Protection, yeah, it goes around and around. And thicker and thicker. Like a tornado of love. Mickey smiles.
    What is “the Settlement”? Why is six-and-a-half-year-old Jane Meserve prisoner there? Where is her mother, who is as