| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
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Sunday, August 01 2004 @ 12:00 PM EDT |
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The college I was heading for was located in a bland little town in western Maryland, surrounded by strip mined hills, and sustained by coal mines and struggling farms. It was in the middle of the Bible-belt, and my neighbors carried Winchester rifles in their pickups: many of the road signs were riddled with rusted bullet holes. Whiskey and incest, poverty and the Old Testament had hardened off many of the men, and their wives either submitted to the oppression or slipped away in the middle of the night to end the abuse.
The Baptist college boasted a liberal arts curriculum, but the right wing conservative administration blatantly enforced the ideologies of Lyndon Johnson, Dick Nixon, and the redneck views of the Old South. During my interview, I said the right things, wore a snazzy three-piece suit and wingtip cordovans. And I was happy to do it: I loved literature and I wanted to teach it. Graduate school and teaching had been serendipitous privileges that had allowed me the opportunity for self development, and to stave off the final decision: my country; love it, or leave it.
Earl Mytower, chairman of the English department, was instrumental in galvanizing my ultimate decision. Earl invited me to his home on the Sunday before classes began, strongly recommending I team up as a roommate with Jed Higbee, one of his favorites, who had a “honey of an apartment next door to the church.” Lifting his ample glass of scotch he confided,
“Between you and me, literature ended with the Romantics. Nothing worthwhile has been written since.”
“And my course, which includes Faulkner and Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Lawrence, and the post-war poets?”
“Wouldn’t know”, he said, “I’ve never bothered to read that trash. I teach Shakespeare; everyone who majors in English has to come through me! But somebody has to wade through the moderns. That’s why we hired you.”
I bounced down dusty back roads in my old, gray Mercedes, searching for any small abandoned farmhouse. I’d gotten into that pattern since Penn State, distancing from the group, dropping out of the fraternity, moving towards the woods. I’d followed my intuition at Bowling Green, landing a house trailer behind a farm with plenty of place to roam. And suddenly, there it was: For Rent. Phone Leroy: 362-4517. A shabby little house down in a hollow at the bend of a fork in the road.
“Yeah. You’re talkin to’m. Why’nt yah jus com’on over now an I’ll show yah right thru.”
A rusted Ford pickup pulled into the driveway and out slid Leroy, pompadour-hair glistening with Brill Cream, old leather bomber jacket, thick southern drawl. My first afternoon of cigarettes and coffee with a storyteller straight from a Faulkner novel.
“Yah, yu kin have’r. Two hunnert a month suit yah? Land behind goes up behind them rail fences’n down the other side along that stream. Ah’l plow yah out in the winter if there’s time. An all.” Chain-smoking Pall Malls, weaving one tale seamlessly into the next.
“Drove them big 18-wheelers for years, stayed high on Bennies an yellah-jackets. Ever try the yellah-jackets, Bob? Them’ll keep a fellah wired,” laughing, smoking, “Yah’ll got any that wacky-tabacky on yah”? Pushing back his coke-bottle-bottom glasses, “See this here crease in mah forehead?” Pointing to a deep dent running from between his eyes on up into his greased hair, “Some wacky sunuva*censored* rammed thru a roadblock, knocked me inta hell’n back. Six weeks in a coma; they figur’d I’d never walk agin; broke both legs’n mah back. Can’t never work no more. Gave me insurance compesation which is what ah bought my farm with, so now ah grow pigs an all, fiddle-*censored* around with a old tractor which ah can drive without no license, an this truck, an what not an all.”
I moved in that night, and Leroy came around with two of his little kids and some chicken that Judy had fried and put into a tin for me. Leroy came around throughout that winter and into the spring, until he fell out of boat trout fishing and drowned. Despite being half-blind and partially paralyzed, Leroy was my first true guide on my journey back to the land. I might have had the keys to the “cawidge,” but he held the keys to surviving in the backcountry.
By the third week of classes, Bunny was due to arrive. The hills were on fire with autumn when her bus rolled in beneath a towering flowering chestnut tree. Ten days later, when her bus to California rolled away in the pouring rain, a sudden loneliness swept through me; my heart went with her on that bus. The remainder of that year was a steadily deepening nightmare. The richness of my relationships with my students was parallel to the paucity of connections with my colleagues and Chairman Mytower. The hills were covered with snow by early December, and I’d taken to wearing a knee-length, woolen, army surplus coat. My suits had given way to jeans and boots; my hair curled over my ears and flannel collar.
“Well if it isn’t Pandora in a trench coat” chortled Dr. Mytower.
His double chins wobbled with mirth. My face reddened as I shook the snow off my collar and draped the coat across a table.
“I didn’t imagine you’d be preparing for the trenches so soon, especially while you’re still wearing your rose-colored glasses.”
I ignored his taunts.
“Ziegler, did you know we’ve decided to strengthen our emphasis on remedial grammar in the composition courses?”
“I’d heard something to that effect.”
“And you know, don’t you, that we have been holding remedial grammar sessions for first year instructors, but you have only attended one thus far?”
“I didn’t find it very interesting. It blocks kids from writing, rather than encourages them. Besides, I didn’t think the meetings were mandatory.”
“And how in the hell did you think these morons would learn to punctuate?”
“I ask them to write about their lives, their parents, the mines, the farms, their love life, their horses. Whatever. Later on, we punctuate, after they get something down on paper. That’s composition.”
“That’s hogwash, is what that is. These imbeciles don’t have a life to write about. They’re nearly illiterate. Wouldn’t know a composition if it was staring them in the face.”
“Dr. Mytower, it’s after nine. I’ve got to head off for class now.”
His eyes watered behind his spectacles. Food stains trailed down his lapels onto his watermelon-belly. He pulled his gold watch from its pocket, glanced darkly at me, and waved me out. I was going down in flames.
On a frigid morning in January, I turned on the stove to make my coffee, but the power was down. Outside, the sky was purest blue and the power wires sagged under a glaze of silver ice. Sudden thaws and subsequent temperature plunges had more drastic results on the outskirts of town. The wiring in the Mercedes was frozen too. I was going to be late again.
“Hello Judy? Leroy there?”
“Justa minit, Bob. He’s outback with his blowtorches on accounta the barn pipes is all froze up. How’s yer pipes?”
“Dunno, never turned the water on yet. I’m late for classes.”
“Ya’ll best test them spickets while I go fetch Leroy.”
Frozen. Not a drop, only a couple of clanks.
“Zat you, Bob? Judy sez yer car won’t start. Is yer pipes froze? They is? I’ll be down in the next hour. My ganders is loose, headin fer the swamp.”
Country hours were not city hours: ice and mud and broken fixtures, astigmatism and runaway critters on slippery slopes, sick kids and overworked housewives in drafty houses shaped the relativity of time. Some days I walked cross-country to the highway, then hitched into the college. Some days I felt I’d made a big mistake, moving to the country.
By late afternoon, Leroy gets my car running, jumper cables from the tractor. Inside the house he moves slowly from room to room, runs his hand along the copper pipes, some sort of Sherlock Holmes, tracking down invisible clues. His face brightens:
“Here she is, Bob, froze right here. Gimme that there little propane torch.”
He brushes the blue flame back and forth across the pipe until a rushing sound inside the pipes gives way to metallic clanking, and the water shoots in spurts into the sink, then flows cold and steady. Leroy lights a Pall Mall, takes a long pull on a mickey of Southern Comfort.
“Even you can’t see where them pipes is froze, can ya Bob? See, when the Lord closes a door, He generally opens up a window, somewhere in another part a His house.”
Leroy pulled me out of more than snowbanks and power failures; he pulled me out of the Ivory Tower; he palmed my monocle and replaced it with a binocular vision. Perhaps the change of lenses was fostering some distortion in how I was seeing things, or maybe they brought the world into a more precise focus; I can’t say exactly what I was needing to see more closely, but I do remember one day, walking through deep snow in the backwoods and suddenly coming upon a weathered old farmhouse I had never seen before. I was sure I’d walked that woods in autumn, yet there it was, right in the middle of nowhere.
Two tall and ancient pines stood sentinel in the drifted dooryard. A frozen oval pond shone in the sun, a stone’s throw from the creaking porch stairs. Wind whistled down from the pine-wooded hills, shifting the snowdrifts into snaking patterns out across the ice. An outhouse with no door and several deteriorating outbuildings huddled in the adjacent meadow, divided by lichen-covered fence posts and twists of rusted barbed wire. I decided, on the spot, that this was the “real country”: hushed, trackless, hidden. I decided I would make immediate plans to move in.
Leroy knew the owner, and he never asked why I was moving. One colleague, who had gradually befriended me, decided to move into Leroy’s place, and that worked out just fine. At first, the owner of the abandoned farm had little interest in renting the place, wondered who I was, why in the hell someone would move into that goddamned place at all, leastwise, in the dead of winter.
“There’s no gawdamn electricity into’r. No runnin water. Hardly a stick’a furniture, an no heat, ‘lest you count that old wood stove, an the Priestly-upright which ain’t much use, neither of’m, gainst this cold.”
“That’s okay. I want to. I like the place and I want to move in right now. I’ll pay what you figure it’s worth. I think that place has something to teach me.”
He scratched his gray head with a curled fingernail and looked at me as if I’d sprouted a third eye.
“There’s barely a stick a firewood there, y’know, Only coal, out in the barn. That’s what the Freemans’ was burnin up till he died. Then she couldn’t manage no more with them kids, in her condition, so they left about the same time’a the winter as you’re movin in now. An what Freeman died of they never did say. Just found’m dead in the upstairs bedroom. You know how to start a coal-fire in a wood stove?”
“I’ll learn.”
“You better, or you won’t last as long as Freeman did. I’ll want $50 now, and the same at the end of each month. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
It took Leroy until mid-afternoon to plough out the waist deep drifts in that lengthy stretch of driveway. His old tractor bucked and swiveled like a demented bronco, with Leroy cursing and straining to see through those steamed up magnifying glasses.
“How’s she comin’ up there, Leroy? Anything I can do to help?”
“Cain’t rightly see the edge of what’s been plowed from what ain’t, is why she’s goin’ out from under me like this. White on whites hard to see even for a man with two good eyes in’is head. Can yah see what I’m sayin?”
“I think so.”
“That’s good Bob, cuz I thought maybe yah could only hear what I’s sayin an miss my drift. In the field’s’a higher learnin, yah got to see it too!”
Leroy’d started plenty of coal fires and soon had enough heat in that kitchen for the linoleum to soften its brittle edges and begin to lie flat. A single bare bulb hung down over the stove on a fraying wire. The iron hand pump bolted to the slab-counter by the tarnished sink began to bead up with perspiration.
“Ever prime one ‘a these here pumps, Bob?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Well keep yr eye on the bouncin’ ball, cuz I ain’t gonna instruct yah again in the mornin’.”
He swirled some melting ice water around inside a dented teakettle on the crackling stove, poured it ceremoniously into an old cup, lifted it high and poured it slowly into the open top of the pump, pumped cautiously once, twice, got suction, then rhythmically then vigorously until rusty water splattered into the sink. Pumping, pumping, and suddenly water clear as crystal, icy cold and almost sweet shot out into his tin cup: well water.
“Now that there is what’s called water. No chemicals, nuthin but 100% pure water.”
He passed me the metal cup again and I drank as if I were tasting water for the first time.
“C’mon in here Bob,” Leroy called from the darkening front room.” Here’s somethin yah ain’t likely to have seen before. It’s a old Syracuse upright stove. Some folk’s call’sm a Priestly, though I dunno why. Strike us a match an put it ta this here kerosene lamp.”
The flame fluttered, then held, the yellowish light dancing along the tattered wallpaper.
“Turn up yr wick, Bob. See is there enuff kerosene there in the jar?”
“Almost empty.”
“Better be makin yrself up a list’a priorities: stick matches, toilet paper, what not’n all.”
A coal kettle and short shovel stood behind the tubular brown stove. Leroy swung the lid open and crinkled the brittle newspaper into balls. In the pantry, a small pile of kindling still remained from the Freemans’, and soon Leroy coaxed up a heating fire.
“This here’s the chimbly-draft, Bob. She’s open now; later yah damp’r down so’s all yer heat don’t scoot right up the chimbly. Too much damp an y’ll smoke yaself out. Y’ll catch the hang of’r soon enuff.”
Leroy shouldered open the back door. Snow had blown full against it. I got my shovel and a lantern from the pantry. We broke a trail to the outhouse, then crossed back through a broken gate, “Priorities, Bob,” and into the sagging barn.
His gaunt face gleamed in the light of the lantern. His pompadour had wilted in the house and had re-frozen at a funny angle, teeth broken off at another angle; no gloves, bomber jacket always open.
“Watcha starin at Bob? A ghost?”
“No. I was just studying you, wonderin why you do all this for me?”
“I ain’t much of a pitchur ta hang on yr wall, am I? Not much left after that sunuva*censored**censored*straight outa hell an broke me up short. I used to do an Elvis interpretation when I wuz single. I’d be buyin drinks fer everyone in the bar. Always liked givin’ stuff away ta people, too. Nowadays there ain’t much use I kin be ta nobody. Sides, I taken a likin to yah, Bob. Yah ain’t high’n mighty. An one’a these days yer gonna get sum’a that wacky stuff an we’ll share a taste of it.”
The lantern-flame flickered through the flimsy barn slats, throwing splinters of light on the snowy black pines outside. Rusted tools, bailing twine, rottten hay, nothing of value remained in the windy barn. A pile of coal, shiny and black, lay near the doorway.
“There’s yer heat, Bob. Fetch yer pail.” He lit a Pall Mall and gazed up at the stars and I wondered what he was seeing. Later he showed me how to bank up the coal, enough to last till morning, then made his way down the dark stairs and out of the dooryard. I watched from the window until his tractor lights had disappeared down the road, then carried the lantern up to the bedroom and laid down in the cold bed where Freeman had died.
By mid-February, I was learning to bake heavy damp loaves, cornmeal muffins, and chicken on the wood stove. Baths were a luxury, and I often arrived late for classes, clothes crumpled, hands smudged with charcoal, smelling gamey, boots soaking wet. When I looked into the brightly-lit mirrors in the college bathroom, I was sometimes surprised at the gaunt face looking back at me.
I graded papers, huddled under blankets, sitting in an overstuffed, crushed velvet chair by candlelight. The wax dripped into stalagmites down the arms, giving it the appearance of a chair from the House of Usher. I slept beneath a pile of thrift store blankets in my army coat because so little heat made it up the stairs. The insulation was only sawdust, and storm windows seemed not to have been invented. I was slipping into another era. What’s interesting to me, in retrospect, is how subtly madness gathers one into its folds. Because my changes were gradual, and because I was continually submerged in the minds of dead poets, I was certain it was I who was on the right track and that my colleagues were the ones fumbling with shadows. Because I was so isolated, I had no immediate awareness that I was only one among thousands of other young Americans who were passing through these transitional, preparatory stages before our eventual ejection into Canada and back to the land.
When spring began to break free from winter’s claw, I was filled with renewed hope. The earth was coming alive, and I’d never been so close to its birthing before. The pond-ice thawed, and clumps of silvery frog’s eggs clung to the reeds in the shallows. Stars in the velvet sky were in the dense millions, clusters of diamond-grapes. Letters from Bunny began to resume, and she sent me a small tin of marijuana, which I shared with Leroy. Letters from my mother also arrived, full of concern. I had been sending marijuana-inspired, stream-of-consciousness poems home, some of which were offensive to my father. And I’d begun mailing charcoal sketches done in that sixties psychedelic-style that, through overlapping images, attempted to capture the interconnectedness of everything. Charcoal-shaded forms unfolded out of one another: birds and breasts, eyes and nipples which ultimately converged into a picture, then broke apart again into splinters. My mother suggested I see the campus psychiatrist.
Curious colleagues who had visited me had sat round my large, saw-wheel table and mused about my upright, wooden, wheelbarrow-chair, and the chair covered in wax. They had reported to Chairman Mytower about my eccentricity. Word had spread through the students that I was strange and different, easy. My spring class enrollment nearly doubled, and in the warm weather I held classes out on the campus lawn. To stimulate the students’ interest in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” I played the long surreal songs of Bob Dylan, demonstrating extended metaphors, intertextual use of imagery, and juxtaposition. During one session my door clicked open, and like Robin Williams in “The Dead Poet’s Society,” I understood: evidence was being gathered. When I pushed the door wide, there stood Dr. Mytower. We exchanged a dark glance before he turned to leave and I closed the door.
My weekend meandering through those Civil War hillsides carried me into other curious circumstances. With a bottle of wine at dusk one night, I stumbled upon a rotting rebel-barracks with rows of mossy bunks back in a foggy woods. It was cold and I thought I heard a shot ring out. A man on a horse, with a Winchester across his saddlehorn rode towards me. What was I doing on his land? What the hell did I want, poking around like I’d been doing? I said I was just curious about the backcountry, and that I intended to move onto the land myself pretty soon. How it happened I don’t know, but he began confessing he hadn’t treated his son well and was worried he’d wind up in jail, that his own father had beaten him once too often and he’d run off himself. As he turned his horse towards the farm below, he told me to come back anytime and have coffee, thanked me for listening, then rode off.
Another time, I am ashamed to say, I entered a partially abandoned farmhouse, from which I stole an ironstone wash basin and an old butcher knife with a homemade wooden handle. I don’t know why I took them, perhaps because they were old and I like farm antiques. My act of theft brought down nearly Instant Karma when my own house was completely robbed three months later. I had been visiting friends in Washington, D.C. over Easter vacation and returned to find truck tracks sliced across my front lawn. I never locked, and the front door was still open. Ransacked. Nothing but a blanket and my books. Gone, my typewriter, electric guitar, stereo, clothing, shoes, dishes: everything, except the butcher knife!
I knew who had done it and drove right down to their dilapidated house in the hollow. Pillows had been stuffed into missing window frames, their feathers floating slowly on the breeze, like a giant hourglass, trickling bits of time. Three desolate brothers from a long line of inbreeding kept a pig farm there. I’d driven them to the liquor store on several occasions when their broken down truck broke down. One night they dropped in on me and we drank their homemade whiskey. By the time the moon came up, I had no idea who I was. They egged me on, to bring my guitar and amplifier down to their place, have a real party. I remember singing to their geese from a small wooden footbridge, singing for Bunny and the Vietnamese, for America and my parents and my childhood, and then I threw up in the water. They hooted and applauded, said it was the best damn show they’d ever seen.
When I accused them of stealing everything, they just grinned, suggesting I tell my story to the county sheriff, their first cousin. They whinnied and cackled like donkeys in a folktale. Tears ran from their rheumy eyes, through the grizzled stubble on their faces. I pitied them, as I drove away. They looked sad and crazy standing there, and, behind them, the feathers from the pillowed-windows, drifted slowly across their flat, muddy acres.
It began to seem that I now had more of a future than I did a present. Things were disappearing on several levels at the same time. The less I had, the more I risked, and the more I risked, the more real I became with my students, and the more dangerous I became to the chairman, the president, and myself. Teaching was no longer something I did only during office hours; it was something lived. Poetry was no longer nailed to the library shelves. Dylan snarled that “ezra pound and t.s. eliot were fighting in the captain’s tower, while calypso dancers laugh at them and fishermen throw flowers.” I was following “Mr.Tamborine Man,” leaving behind the dusty archives, heading further than the woods.
I had cancelled the remedial grammar and the composition texts, substituting instead Demian and Siddhartha, two of Herman Hesse’s books about the search for self, and I had photocopied essays from the text Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Camus. Dr. Mytower was spluttering with rage. He burst into my office, paced and glared, spun and gesticulated. Who the Christ did I think I was, lopping off dangling participles and gerundial phrases!
“These idiots have no business reading Sartre! Nobody can understand him! These kids don’t even know the past from the future! There’ll be hell to pay when these jerks come through my Shakespeare course, and they’ll have you to thank for their demise!”
“Dr. Mytower. These kids are scared shitless about flunking out and being sent to Vietnam. I’m trying to teach them how to think. They’re talking about ideas and they’re writing down their thoughts.”
“These hillbillies wouldn’t recognize an idea if it kicked them in the ass!”
“Dr. Mytower, there are students in the hallway, waiting for appointments with me. You’re yelling.”
He suddenly ceased, and gazed at me, as if from a very great height; his fleshy lips pursed towards me like a tongue: “You’re a man with a death wish, Ziegler. And it’s going to come true sooner than you think.”
I was way out on a half-sawed limb, dangling from my own näiveté just above the draft board: who did I think I was? My draft status was inching towards 1-A, my teaching position was all that remained between the militia and me. In addition, I had a poor grasp of grammar and little interest in it; I was doing the students just as much harm as he was. In the eyes of the chairman, I saw reflections of my thesis committee and my parents; all those grave reservations about my shortcomings, the questionable sanity of my writings, my political philosophy, and my projected future choices. Something was happening here, but what it was wasn’t exactly clear. Who had walked into the room with a pencil in his hand? Who saw someone naked and asked who is that, man? Who was Mr. Jones? Dylan wasn’t saying. Who didn’t have any idea what they would say when they got home? Who couldn’t go home anymore? Who couldn’t stay where they were? Who wouldn’t do as he was told? Who was that rapping at my door?
That final knock was Rene, a blonde, third year English major who had a gap between her teeth and short, curly blond hair. She wore tight Levi’s and cowboy boots, sat *censored*ily on the corner of my office desk, and asked if she could come see my farmhouse. Said she’d heard stuff about me from my students, and would I like a good, home-cooked meal? It had been seven months since Bunny had gone, and she wrote that she’d been dating around, still searching for her own identity. So, sure, I could use a good home-cooked meal.
Friday afternoon, I toured Rene through the meadow where I had been erecting rusted metal farm-junk sculptings, drank red wine, shared poems, listened to records, ate chicken, tangled up on the candlewax chair in the lamplight, and then it was midnight. Weekend curfew for dormitory students was 1:00 am, so I reluctantly brought up the time and the distance back, but she covered my lips with her fingertips:
“I signed out on the dorm register for the weekend.”
“Wow! That’s foresight! Where’d you sign out for?”
“Your house!”
“Oh. Great. Yeah, that’s great.” Though it was a pleasant way to go, I felt the limb give way completely, and I was in free fall.
On Monday morning, the cat was out of the bag. Voices lowered and eyes glanced away. Conversations stopped when I entered the staff room. Mytower’s voice careened down the hallway:
“For Christ-sake! Now he’s sleeping with his students, Liz”!
“I know, I know. The women’s supervisor phoned me on Sunday.”
I opened my door and interrupted the gossip: “If you have something to say about me, I’d prefer you say it to me in my office. You’re both welcome.”
Mytower’s face darkened as he strode into my office. I shut the door and raised my hand to silence him: “She was not a student of mine. I did not compromise anyone’s grades, and I have not had a date with a woman for seven months.”
“I don’t care whose student she was, Ziegler. If you were horny you could’ve picked up some slut of a waitress at the Circle-Inn. That’s what others do. This was the last straw, Ziegler. This one goes past the Dean, right to President Morely and your ass is grass.”
April was “the cruelest month,” and it was hard to go to the campus anymore. The fields were bursting with wildflowers and fingerling brook-trout were darting through the sunshot riffles in the stream. Soft breezes blew through the sentinel pines and the farm had become my home. One day, the campus psychiatric counselor knocked on my door. He was a short, pleasant-looking man, with a crew cut and black, horn-rimmed glasses as thick as Leroy’s.
“We thought you might benefit from a few counseling sessions with me.”
“We? Who is we?”
“Well, ah, you realize that Dr. Mytower is very upset with some of your behaviors, and . . .”
I interrupted him: “Maybe Dr. Mytower could benefit from some sessions with you, so he could understand why he has so much difficulty with my behavior.”
“Yes, well, and Dr. Morley and the Dean have been in touch with your parents, and they,
of course, are very concerned about you, living out here alone in a place like this, and . . .”
“And what?”
“Well, look at this place . . .”
“Dr. Janis, I have heard quite a bit about you, too. Students avoid you, don’t they? Do you know why? Because you are biased towards this administration, and you attempt to force the students’ minds into your square boxes. The boxes are too tight. Perhaps we could look through the other end of the telescope together? We’ll interview each other.”
He smiled benignly, shrugged his shoulders, and left. He had done his part in the labeling. In hindsight, perhaps we could’ve done some interesting work together, and I could’ve had fresh insights sooner rather than later. But my momentum was too great; destiny was playing heavy with hundreds of thousands of us, as the war spilled onto the Kent State campus, swept around the Chicago Seven, and washed up nameless bodies in plastic bags, guys my age and younger. Body bags.
Next came Dean Morrisey, to cinch the noose; he read my legal rights:
“You breached a moral contract, Robert. You slept with a student.”
“I don’t recall that being part of my contract.”
“You’ve been making it hard on everyone here, do you know that?”
“My students seem to be satisfied. That’s who’s important. Actually, a group has already begun to organize a sit-down strike in the Administration building. Apparently this happened last year too, when you fired the Art instructor?”
“Anything goes with you Robert; you don’t have any standards. You’re tearing down everything of value in this department, everything that people like myself and Dr. Mytower have stood for over the years. Sure, it might be boring for them. Restoration drama was even boring to me, and I taught it for 12 years, but that’s not the point.”
“And what is the point?”
“The point is that they have to learn it the same way we learned it. You can’t just change things when life gets boring; next thing you’ll have anarchy. This college is the same as this country, and if people like you slip into positions of authority everything goes to hell in a handbasket.”
“And I was taught that the purpose of education is to challenge the stale and lifeless forms, to bring new energy into the classroom, so that anarchy doesn’t need to occur. I teach Shelley and Keats and Byron, and I love the Romantics, but we have to build metaphorical bridges into the students’ worlds, so they can cross over.”
Morrisey stood, straightened his tie. The discussion was over. We were on opposite shores. I turned to leave but Morrisey called me back.
“One more thing, this student sit-down protest. I’d suggest that you strongly discourage it. You don’t have a legal-leg to stand on regarding your contract renewal. We could, if we choose, see that you’re blackballed from any further teaching contracts at any other colleges, too. You play ball with us, we play ball with you, okay?”
I drove home deflated, picked up The Hobbit, and slouched against a sentinel pine by the pond. Bilbo was being badgered and prodded to leave his cozy, secure tree-stump existence and to pursue The Ring. Bend the Forks! Break the Plates! That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates!
I finished the chapter, climbed the porch, had some tea and bread with honey, and fell into bed. It was still cool at night so I pulled a blanket over me and fell easily to sleep. And, perchance, I dreamed. About a map. I was surrounded by clutter and disarray, not dirt, but a tangle of objects and events. A parade of familiar faces flickered by like an early silent movie. Then I was down in a circular or spiral-shaped room, earthen and musty. Overhead a light was shining down from a hole near the surface. I was not so deep down that I felt fearful; more, like I was stumped, thwarted from reaching that shining outer-world. The last images I remembered were a gradually emerging sign or map which appeared to have been inscribed on the side of the upward-spiraling wall of the trunk-room I was in. Two youthful faces looked down over the edge of the light-bright hole, and they had a glowing radiance around their heads. As I extended my hands towards them, I seemed to rise upwards, and they disappeared.
Wednesday morning, May 17, l968, was just another spring morning. I heated water on the wood stove, washed and shaved, plucked a letter from the metal mailbox, and whooped. Bunny was ending a brief relationship she’d been in, said she’d sorted things out now, and was ready to go with me, wherever I needed. California-style platitudes abounded: we’d go with the flow; things always take care of themselves exactly at the right time, and so forth. The day flew by on Wordsworthian wings, and, as I hummed along the curving highway out of Frostburg, reflecting on the last two weeks before final papers were due, and the draft-board (Canada or Europe, jail or a military desk-job) two hitchhikers on the crest of the hill, their longhair brightly backlit by the sun going down behind them, caught my eye, and I pulled over to give them a ride.
Tim and Marty, a blonde-haired-blue-eyed couple in denim, stuffed their fat backpacks into the trunk, and slid happily into the Mercedes. Where were they headed? To L.A., where Bunny was waiting! And, yes, as the sun was going down, they’d love to stay overnight at my place, get a fresh start in the morning. After a dinner of chicken and cornmeal muffins, they rolled a joint, to pay their way, and, like some Ancient Mariner, I unwound my harrowing tale, and my nebulous future with Bunny and Canada. What was I waiting for, they wondered? Why not leave tomorrow, share the driving, get on with the adventure? But my classes, the students? Bend the forks, break the plates, that’s what someone did for Bilbo. Besides, they had a map.
They crashed-out in old man Freeman’s bed, and I went out for a moonlight walk. The stars were thick and almost within grasp. I found myself poised on a big stone by the rushing stream, thinking about some myth of the heartsick lover who stood on a cliff, high above the pounding surf below. As he stared at a star, the face of his departed lover appeared, and his intense longing drove him to leap for the star-face of his love, hands and heart fully extended, into the void. He was warned to not look back nor down, not to doubt for an instant, or he’d be dashed to pieces on the rocks below. And suddenly, I had leaped across the water and was standing on the other bank, looking up at the moon. As I walked through the dark little door of the farmhouse, I realized I’d made my decision, and that this would be the last night I’d be sleeping in my magical, latter-day Walden.
At dawn I made sunny-side-up eggs in the firepit on the lawn, and shared my decision with the “twins.” I packed my few belongings into a satchel, loaded my books into boxes, closed the door. Rent was paid until the end of the month so there were only two things left to do: go to the bank and withdraw my $700 of savings, then go to my classes and bid goodbye to my students. I had a coffee in the student union building with my friend John, who admonished me about Mohammed going too hastily to the mountain, being impatient. Fears, like bats, began to flap through my skull: the rashness, the academic consequences, my parents’ imminent disappointment, my country I couldn’t afford to linger on the cliff’s edge; I had already jumped. So I detached my self from his well-intentioned warning, hefted up my boxes of books, and walked towards my classroom.
My students were astonished at my announcement; some were glad for me, others were angry. They said, quite rightly, they felt that I was abandoning them. I apologized but there was no turning back. I gave away the remaining books from my grad-school library, requesting that they share some of them with the other class. I couldn’t wait until mid-afternoon class; I didn’t have the strength. The trumpets were sounding, the clouds were opening; there was no time to tarry. And suddenly we were heading down “Route 66,” Tim at the wheel, Marty riding shotgun, and me asleep in the backseat like a fugitive, bound for the City of Angels.
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I hope there will be more chapters of "A Banquet of Crow" to follow. I have often wondered over the past 36 years what had happened to the teacher who had such an influence on us kids of the 60s.
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Maryann from Maryland