Town meeting is held in a big, open room on the second floor of the Grange building. “The Grange” is a shorthand name for a national organization of farmers founded in this country during the 1800s, and judging from the condition of their building here, this might have been one of their first. Built right off the road, it is a rectangular, two storey structure of wood board painted, a very long time ago, white. The roof sags, the walls lean, and the floors creak. The first time Peter and Anna attended town meeting there, he commented to her, as they climbed the rickety staircase to the second floor, “I hope they issue parachutes.”
Next to the Grange is the town’s old one-room schoolhouse, which is no longer in use, having been replaced by a new school, owned and operated jointly with a neighboring town, an arrangement over which the two towns argue vehemently every year, even to the point of regularly threatening to dissolve the relationship. “Don’t look for merit in these arguments,” Peter and Anna were advised the first time they attended a school board meeting. “It’s like the weather. They’re just making noise because they know there is nothing else they can do about it.”
The original schoolhouse was built in the early part of the last century, and is one of only a few of its kind still standing. In fact, someone once suggested having it put on the National Registry of Historical Buildings, but that idea died of exposure after Radburn “Wrong Way” Radford, so nicknamed because he seems inordinately wont to misunderstand what he hears, responded to the suggestion with the comment, “You mean to say the Government keeps a list of all the funny looking buildings in the country? What’ll they think of next!” Here, Wrong Way had apparently mistaken the word historical for hysterical.
Across the road from the old schoolhouse is a church, perhaps best known for the time that a particularly potent bolt of lightning struck a tree along the road in front, ran across the lawn, up the steps, through the front door, and straight down the center aisle to the altar, and from there followed a length of electrical conduit to the basement below. As a retired master electrician, who was a member of the congregation, and who, generous as the sun, taught Peter everything he needed to know to install all the electrical wiring in their own house, observed on relating the story to Peter and Anna, “I’m sure you can imagine for yourselves what fun some folks had interpreting that event!”
Except for a small, family operated general store, these are all the buildings in town, other than an assortment of homes, barns, woodsheds, and summer camps.
That evening, when Montauk arrived with Pilikia and Cantachiaro, the field in front of the old schoolhouse which serves as a parking lot for the Grange was full of cars and pickup trucks. Clearly, our conspirators were among the last to get there, as planned. The horse came to a halt in the shadows, where his riders dismounted and donned their disguise. Tancredi went off to climb the wooden staircase of the fire escape to the second floor window, there to wait in reserve.
Presently, the side door of the Grange opened, and Claire Roomey appeared. Montauk, who loved her dearly, smiled. “Right on time,” he said to himself, “good girl!” Then, to his two friends standing beside him, he whispered, “She’s there. You two ready?”
“Anytime!” Cantachiaro crowed.
“Anywhere!” Pilikia boasted, heartily.
The cat and the rooster set off through the parking lot toward the side door of the Grange building. Watching them, Montauk wondered whether they could possibly get away with this foolishness, but then, he thought to himself, they seem to be having fun, and it’s harmless enough, so why not.
When Claire laid eyes on the creature coming toward her across the field, she very nearly dissolved into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. Of course, it must be said that, quick to see the humor in everything, Claire laughs easily.
Claire Roomey is an extraordinary child in a lot of ways. She is lovely to look at, but that is only the beginning and by far the least important of her characteristics, except to the extent that her outer appearance reflects an inner reality. Claire’s beauty resides in her unrestrained love of life and of the people, animals, and things that populate it. From the world’s point of view, she is something of a misfit, and she spends more than her share of time being scolded for having failed to meet society’s expectations of children. For example, I doubt that Claire owns a wristwatch or a calendar, and if she does, I am sure she pays no attention whatsoever to their dictates. Thus, she is often the target of impatient inquiries of restless elders. “What kept you?” or “Why wasn’t this done on time?” to which she will likely reply, “Well, you see, there was this butterfly …” or, simply, “I was looking out the window.” Claire is not a stellar student, and she does not do particularly well in her classes. And yet, the poetry she writes at home in her own room, to be read by no one but herself and the few with whom she shares it, reveals a wisdom that exceeds the vision of even her best school teachers or their textbooks. I suppose that Claire Roomey will not grow up to become President of the United States, but whoever among her generation that does will be fortunate to discover in the whole experience even half the joy Claire Roomey finds in every day.
“You are a visitor from outer space, I presume,” Claire said, with feigned respect to the thing that was now standing before her, “and you are looking for our leader.” At that, she doubled over with laughter, holding her sides to keep from splitting wide open.
“C’mon, Claire, it’s not funny,” Pilikia insisted. “We’re supposed to look like a human being, so we can get into town meeting.”
“A HUMAN BEING!” Claire howled, tears running down her face.
“Can I take it that you are not fooled by the disguise?” Cantachiaro asked, meekly.
The disguise Pilikia and Cantachiaro had developed, with the help and advice of Tancredi and some of the other conspirators, was, even they admitted, something of a grab bag. After all, they had not had much time or a great deal to work with. First, you will recall, it had been agreed that Pilikia would ride on Cantachiaro’s back. This served two purposes: It gave Pilikia a little height, and provided her with a single pair of legs. Then, to hide the two exposed chicken feet, the rooster wore a pair of worn out work boots which had been retrieved from the town dump, and buried in the Wensleydale’s woods by Tancredi about a year previously. No one dared asked Tancredi what he had originally intended doing with this discarded footwear, but certainly the twelve months in the ground had done nothing to improve their appearance or, for that matter, their odor. Above the boots was wrapped around Cantachiaro’s feathered body a piece of clothing borrowed from Anna.
“Well, maybe we didn’t exactly borrow it,” Pilikia admitted to Selene when the latter raised the issue, “more like …”
“Purloined?” Selene suggested.
“Yes, I suppose, sort of,” Pilikia confessed, adding quickly, in her defense, “but Anna never wears it.”
The article in question is a long, formal skirt in red and black wool. It is, to be fair to Pilikia, a garment Anna had probably worn no more than twice since she and Peter moved to Maine. Certainly, she will never wear it again. You see, there was about a yard too much material for the skirt to fit the rooster, so, at Pilikia’s request, Tancredi had chewed it apart. And it looked it.
Thus, the rooster was pretty much hidden from view, at least from being identified as a rooster, by the muddy boots and what was left of the red and black wool skirt. Atop him was Pilikia. She was wearing, if that’s the word, an art canvas from Anna’s studio.
As it happened, when Pilikia first dragged the painting outside for an initial fitting, the oil colors were still not dry, so the artwork was rather badly smudged, but it looked to have been the beginning of a portrait of an old man, leaning against his hoe in a potato field.
“Are you nuts, Pilikia,” one of the animals had remarked on watching Pilikia struggle with the canvas, “the other day I heard Peter refer to that as Anna’s best work,” to which she had replied, “Don’t be silly, he says that about every one of her paintings.” And she was right, he does.
The canvas was held in place around the cat by Tancredi’s leather and chain leash. “If you should misplace this, don’t worry about it,” Tancredi said on volunteering it for the mission. “I keep trying to convince Peter and Anna that it’s an unnecessary inconvenience anyway.”
Now, to register her vote on the speed bump issue, Pilikia was, of course, going to have to raise a front paw, which had to be made to look like a human hand. But in the discussion of this element of the disguise, Purrfect observed that a cat’s front leg and paw would never be long enough, however intently reaching, to be seen above a roomful of human bodies, especially from the back row. So, he suggested taking a sleeve from one of Peter’s shirts (“I’ll be glad to chew it off,” Tancredi offered) and placing it over her tail, and stapling to the end of that (“To the shirt, not your tail!” Purrfect added quickly, as Pilikia wailed in protest) a glove. Then, when the vote was called, Pilikia could stretch her long, fluffy tail straight upward, and for all the world it would appear to be a human arm and hand.
“Brilliant!” Selene said to Purrfect, who beamed at her praise.
And so it was that from underneath the smudged portrait of an old man there emerged a hunters’ blaze orange shirt sleeve with a worn and torn blue cotton carpenter’s glove stapled at the cuff. And as Claire stared at it in wonder, Pilikia flicked her tail just enough to demonstrate the effect. While it didn’t exactly look like a human arm and hand, it didn’t exactly look like a cat’s tail, either.
“What it looks like,” Claire said, with as straight a face as she could manage, “is something someone should have discarded at the laundromat.”
To top off this extraordinary ensemble, Pilikia placed upon her head a full brimmed, dark green, canvas fisherman’s hat with an attached face net. It is a hat Anna wears in the garden as protection against the fierce, chewing black flies that overrun the state of Maine for about six weeks every spring.
“Well, Pilikia,” Claire said, once she regained her composure, “I concede there seems to be a good reason behind every element of the disguise. But I’m still a little concerned about the face net. Now, if this were a church service …”
“But don’t you understand,” Pilikia interrupted, “it’s perfect to hide my feline features.”
“Yes,” Claire agreed, “it does that well enough. But, all the same, it’s bound to attract attention. You see, Pilikia, there won’t be many others in there trying to hide their feline features, or anything else, behind a bug net!” At that, it was again too much for Claire. She could feel a whole new round of laughter rising.
“If anyone notices it,” Pilikia suggested, “we’ll simply say I’m in mourning.”
That was the last straw. Claire was now laughing again, as she asked the cat, “Over what? The tragic loss of your only mirror?”
But, when necessary, Claire can be practical, too, and she recognized that they had no choice but to go with the disguise as it was, and hope for the best.
Fortunately, as Claire and her two animal companions entered the second floor meeting room, most of the people were talking among themselves, and did not notice the new arrivals. That is, except the children, Claire’s seventh grade classmates, at the table selling cookies and brownies and muffins to finance their class trip. The children noticed immediately.
“Wicked outfit!” one of them exclaimed.
For reasons not exactly clear, in the state of Maine the word “wicked,” used either as an adjective or an adverb, carries a positive connotation. Thus, if one is commenting upon something really liked, it is quite appropriate to describe it either as “wicked” or “wicked good.” How this began, I do not know, but I should not be surprised to learn that it was as a device by children for tweaking their elders. Imagine, for example, a parent’s discomfort, and an adolescent’s secret pleasure, over this exchange: “Did you have fun, dear?” a mother or father asks at the front door, unsuccessfully camouflaging unrestrained terror behind a false smile, about her or his child’s first date with a member of the opposite sex at night in a car without an adult chaperone, to which the youngster responds, cryptically, “Wicked fun.”
Anyway, Claire managed to get her friends to ignore the new arrival, and, without further incident, to escort her charges to the back row and into the seat next to the window, taking just a moment to confirm with a glance that Tancredi was at his station outside (gnawing a soup bone). Just then, when she thought this aspect of the mission had been accomplished, Claire heard Pilikia’s voice.
“Don’t you know it’s impolite to stare?”
Pilikia was talking to a gray-haired, elderly woman in the next seat, who was, it must be acknowledged, staring rather intently at Pilikia sitting atop Cantachiaro. Immediately, Claire silenced Pilikia by putting her hand over the cat’s mouth, while saying to the woman, with as much sincerity as she could generate, “She’s in mourning, you know. Lost her son, fighting the gorillas.”
“Oh, I see,” the gray-haired woman replied. “Dear me, I am sorry, I’m sure.” Then, turning to her neighbor on the other side, the woman repeated, “Lost her son, fighting the gorillas.”
“The gorillas?” Pilikia hissed behind the bug net and between Claire’s fingers. “The word is guerrilla, Claire, not gorilla. It’s Spanish, meaning little war. And it’s got nothing to do with apes.”
“Am I glad to hear that,” Claire whispered. “I’ve hated the thought of everyone’s beating up on those defenseless animals.” Then, as she considered Pilikia’s remark further, she asked, “What is it that’s little about guerrilla war?”
“You’ll have to ask that of another human being,” Pilikia sighed.
Now, there are about two hundred and fifty people who live in this town all the year around. In the summer, the number of residents varies, sometimes increasing by as much as ten times that figure, depending upon the weather, the state of the national economy, the price of gasoline, relations between the United States and a variety of foreign countries, and other unknowns and unpredictables. Notwithstanding this uncertainty, every year at the first sign of a thaw in March, every newspaper in Maine unearths an expert on the subject of tourist travel, and prints an article confidently announcing his or her findings, which reads something like, “Tourism to the state of Maine will be up by a factor of one point three this year over last,” and then the rest of us dutifully quotes it, equally confidently, as “They say that tourism will be up this year by as much as a factor of one point three.” Come fall, of course, no one remembers what was read or said in March, and besides, if it was a good season, who cares, and if it was a bad one, what difference does it make.
For those who care to do so, there are ways of discerning the difference between year-rounders and summer people, sometimes known as people “from away,” among them being the way they talk, act, dress, shop, eat, walk, drive, sail, swim, and think, but there is one particular characteristic or trait which, as they say in bird watching circles, is diagnostic: At the town dump, folks from away take in more than they take out, and year-rounders take home more than they bring in, most of which the summer people later buy back at the numberless yard sales, antique shows, and swap meets that infest the state during the warm month.
Anyway, at town meeting there usually show up something near to half of the year-rounders and none of the summer people, or about a hundred count, and this year was no different.
“Town meeting will come to order.” The voice belonged to Claudia Fisher, the town’s First Selectman, or senior elected official, and was punctuated by the sound of a wood gavel striking against an aluminum foldout picnic table that had been set up at the front of the room and behind which, on metal folding chairs, sat the town’s two other selectmen, Chester Delavoire and Walter Pineham, and the town clerk, Maria (pronounced ma-RYE-ah) Moller, and Chester Delavoire’s six year old son, Wilhelm, who had a box of crayons and a drawing book in his lap. Ordinarily, Wilhelm would be sitting out front with his mother, Hester Delavoire, Chester’s wife, but this evening she was over to Gardiner, in the central part of the state, visiting with her brother, Leopold, whose second wife Arthelia was experiencing otherwise unidentified “spells,” an ailment uncommonly common to the Maine woods towards the end of winter.
Now, when Claudia Fisher first ran for Selectman at town meeting the preceding year, Peter and Anna Wensleydale had been ecstatic. At the time, they hardly knew her or anything about her, but it was enough that she was a woman. The town offices had been the private province of the town’s men since the beginning of time, and a breakup of that ice jam was long past due. Happily, as it turned out, in addition to being female, Claudia Fisher was quite effective at the job. “Just as good, I’d say, and just as bad as any man we’ve had in the position since I’ve been of voting age,” opined Arthur Bestford one morning to Anna while she was picking up their weekly dairy order from his son’s Jersey cow, Cream ’n Sugar, “except for Malcolm Featherbridge, Junior, of course, about whom enough best left unsaid.”
“Does everyone who wants one have a copy of this year’s Annual Report?” Claudia asked the assembled citizenry as they shifted about in futile attempts to get comfortable in metal folding chairs similar to the ones occupied by their elected officials.
The reference was to the fifty-or-so paged booklet distributed to every mailbox, one to a household, several days to a week before town meeting, which contained, as its title suggests, reports of the town’s activities and expenses for the fiscal year preceding that evening’s gathering. Every year someone asks for an explanation of the difference between a fiscal year and a calendar year, and why the town report is set to the former, and every year a different response is given. Actually, it is likely that no one in town really knows for sure, or cares. Truth to tell, most of the questions raised in town meeting are intended solely to irk the town’s officers, on the theory that, as articulated to Peter by a very, very old man seated next to him at town meeting some years previous, “If we’re going to have to live for a year with their hands in our pockets, seems like they ought to dance for us at least once.”
Thus, the Annual Report contains such entries as a list, prepared by the chief of the volunteer fire department, of fires extinguished under his command. That year his report included two chimney fires, a grass fire, and a junk car fire. There was no indication of just what a junk car fire is, but whatever a junk car fire is, there was one that year, and the volunteer fire department successfully dealt with it. Similarly, the Town Clerk’s report “respectfully submits” the “whole number” of births, marriages, and deaths in town (that year, two, three, and five, respectively). Neither Peter nor Anna have yet been able to determine just what the use of the term “whole number” is intended to signify in this context, but it always appears in the Clerk’s section of the Town Report, and only there. Also listed is the town’s “earned income” from dog licenses ($22.25 that year). On this subject, Selene and Pilikia are quick to remind Tancredi that cats do not need to be licensed. “We are self-regulating,” they insist, in good humor, to which the dog rejoins, in the same spirit, “No, it’s not that. Rather, it is that cats are of no interest.”
Finally, and most importantly, the Annual Report contains The Warrant.
The Warrant appears as the last few pages of the Report. It is addressed to the town constable, whose principal function seems to be to receive the Warrant and read it at Town Meeting. “Greetings,” it begins, “in the name of the State of Maine, you are directed to notify and warn” (warn is what it says) the inhabitants of this town to assemble in the Grange at six-thirty o’clock in the evening the third Monday in April, “to act on the following articles, to wit.” There then follows a list of about thirty items, some of which appear every year (for example, electing and voting compensation for town officials) and others of which are one time occurrences. Reading over the shoulder of the gray-haired lady seated next to her, Pilikia could see that this year item number twenty-nine, the next to last item (item number thirty being “Motion to adjourn”), belonged to the latter category, to wit, “Vote to see if the Town will raise $350 to lay a raised strip of tar to form a speed bump across the road at the top of Meekum’s Hill.”
“Meekum’s Hill?” Anna mumbled as, seated a half dozen or so rows in front of Pilikia and Cantachiaro, she read from their copy of the Annual Report.
“What’s that?” Peter asked her.
“It says here,” Anna replied, “the speed bump is to be laid on Meekum’s Hill. Since when is our hill called Meekum’s Hill?”
“Since forever,” Peter said.
“Who’s Meekum?” Anna asked.
“Not who, what,” Peter answered. “Meekum is an Indian word meaning Joy and Peace Everlasting.”
Anna looked at him doubtfully, and said, “Meekum is an Indian word meaning Joy and Peace Everlasting?”
“It isn’t?” Peter asked.
Most of the evening’s business went smoothly. Claudia Fisher was reelected to chair the meeting and reelected to another year’s term as First Selectman. Although it was generally known she hoped to have the compensation for the office raised from $2,000 to $3,000, she did not offer it as a motion, lest she appear to be more interested in what the town could do for her than what she can do for the town, and neither did anyone else, except that Peter did observe to Anna that “these days, a couple thousand bucks hardly seems enough to get her attention, much less keep it.” The only potentially interesting question raised during the discussion of the vote for First Selectman was from Colin Masters who wanted to know of Claudia “How come the town just got done paving a road that doesn’t go anywhere except to your wood lot?” which Claudia answered, apparently to her constituency’s satisfaction, by reading a paragraph from a state report on environmental protection.
A suggestion that the title selectman be changed to selectwoman or selectperson, at least during Claudia’s tenure, never got beyond the shouting stage. “It’s not a title,” a voice was heard to say, “it’s the name of an office,” to which another opined, “That seems to me to settle the issue.” Both voices, incidentally, were male. Claudia did not press the issue. I suppose her view was that having the job for another year was what counted.
After that, it was agreed that consideration of the school budget would be postponed until further notice because, the school board regretted, none of the figures had yet come back from the accountants. Here, someone observed, almost certainly with intended sarcasm, that perhaps the problem was “the figures had grown so large they didn’t dare carry them across the bridge over Amand’s Stream,” a crossing at the base of Fool’s Hill that everyone agreed needed attention soon, and preferably before that year’s rainy season, already in progress, to which Marcia Silverstruck, school board chairperson (upon investiture, she, unlike Claudia Fisher, had held out for the title change), responded that the condition of the bridge was not her responsibility, and as for the size of the school budget, “the only way to avoid increases there is to stop having children, something none of you seems willing to do,” at which one of the seventh graders whispered to a friend, “Wicked!”
After that, the town agreed to reject the planning board’s recommendations, whatever they might be. “We don’t need a bunch of fancy Dans with briefcases telling us what to do with our land” seems to be the considered opinion of most townspeople on this subject. Immediately following that vote, the chair moderated a heated discussion over how an out-of-state realtor managed to purchase four hundred acres, including considerable pond frontage, this side of Three Mile Turn, and place it on the market as a subdivision. No one present seemed to connect the nagging question “How can they get away with that?” to the town’s rejection by acclamation, a few moments earlier, of its own planning board’s recommendations.
And so on it went, until, after about two and a half hours of active democracy, item number twenty-nine was raised for discussion.
“The Cranberry Tales” is
Copyright © by The Laughing Cat
All Rights Reserved
For copyright information, please click
here