Read The School on Heart's Content Road for Free Online Page B

works to pry this money out of his fist. His cigarettish and carelessly unwashed smell is enormous. Her eyes are now bright on the money, on the fist, on Mickey’s face, on all of him, his thin little, ratlike self, ragged and untended and suddenly now quite princelike.
    Out in the world.
    Providence, Rhode Island, a rain-drenched evening, the setting sun, a perfect yellow, glitters on chemically velvet lawns and on pavements, glass, and stone, everything green made greener and more urgent. The shopping center parking lot is packed. Most of the empty spaces are on the farthest outer edges. A muted copper-colored two-door car slips into a tight space close to the buildings. Tinted glass hides the occupants, but the bumper speaks loudly: MY CHILD IS A NATHAN BISHOP MIDDLE SCHOOL HONOR STUDENT. (Yes, another one.)
    Claire St. Onge speaks.
    Gordon has never wanted anything to do with the media. When the call came last night, I was there in his kitchen with a few others. As he held the phone, he listened very hard, with his shoulders, with his neck, with his face. When he hung up and said it was a reporter with the
Record
Sun,
I knew all our lives were crossing a line. What was he doing!!, agreeing to this “little” interview?!
    You, crow, so bright-eyed there on top of the silvery limbless die-back beech, are the only witness when Ivy Morelli,
Record Sun
reporter, shows up for her first interview.
    The St. Onge Settlement is hidden in the cleft of the mountain behind the 1800s farmhouse where Gordon St. Onge grew up. He still resides here in the old place, his name on the mailbox and in the phone book, so at first glance things seem ordinary. Your eyes, crow, follow him trudging up the hot flowery sloped field toward a homemade merry-go-round. You fluff your feathers, make yourself momentarily bigger. You turn your head back to the old house. So typical. A Cape Cod. Light gray with white trim. Ell. Long porch. Anyone can see it was once an open porch because of the lathed columns behind the fog of screen and the scrollwork along the top.
    Three connected shed ways off the ell once protected farmers from icy winds, rain, big snow, as the family made their way to and from the barn, which is now just a stone foundation, lopsided under where the tie-ups would have been. Birch trees are spoking out around one corner.
    Bank of solar collectors across the house roof. Big and boxy. Made by kids.
    The front “lawn” has nothing to draw year 2000 criticism. No leaning towers of tires or hubcaps. No bundles of used boards. No piles of rusty iron. No farm equipment. No tacky whirligigs. Though some nowadays might frown at the grass itself: sandy, seedy, weedy.
    The driveway is rutty and rocky and bunched with plantain. It circles an ash tree the diameter of a small building. The leaves are thin, like the hair of an old man. Its shade is ghosty. A sign nailed to it reads OFFICE . It points at the house.
    Fresh paint is in the air.
    An old pickup truck is in the driveway. Chains and a gas can are in the bed and wiggly heat lines cover the hood because Gordon St. Onge has just arrived here from somewhere else. The field begins close to the house, immediately rising. A red smog of devil’s paintbrushes and thefaded purple of vetch, a universe of daisies. Soft greens, tough greens, witch grass, clovers, nettle. And then the woods. And then the mountain, not a Kilimanjaro but it is so near and therefore big in the way a face gets big and hot when it comes to whisper in your ear. To the left and to the right are other mountains, technically foothills, blue in the humidity but intimate enough so you can see the character of the highest treetops.
    This is the St. Onge property, nine hundred acres in the wooded hills of Egypt.
    You, crow, know every secret of this rocky mean old land. You turn your head for another glimpse of the reporter’s red sports car, parked between the ash tree and the truck.
    Now back to the action,