Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  Francis stayed by the phone, hoping. After a while he knew Peggy wasn’t going to call. So he picked up the phone again and put in a call to Nan White. It was Saturday. Back east it was three hours later, and even Nan had gone home. Unless she came in on Sunday too, she wouldn’t get the message until Monday morning. Nevertheless, he left the message on her voicemail that he would attend the San Francisco recruiting meeting and asked her to call back with details. Then he hurried up the hill to the dig and got back to work. They still had a few hours before it got dark. Tonight, thinking of his chance to redeem himself, he would sleep better than he had since leaving Connecticut.

  When Nan White came to work on Monday morning and heard Francis’s message on her voicemail, she had no idea that Peggy had called him and urged him to attend the recruiting event. She assumed instead that Francis had known about it all along. Who more than the senior teacher to know such things? She forgot that the plan had been made after Francis had left. So she stuck to the original decision that Fred had made on her advice not to include Francis Plummer. She wasn’t going to ask Fred to make the same decision twice. If Francis Plummer was angry about this, let him be angry at her.

  So she picked up her phone and left a message for Francis on Mendoza’s tape. If she had waited a little longer she would have realized her mistake. But she had a rule: Whenever you have something unpleasant to do, do it right away. “Thank you, but our plans are all set,” she recorded at seven-thirty in the morning in Connecticut, while in California Francis was still asleep. “We have a very specific design,” she added to make the message less insulting. Then she put Francis out of mind. She had a million things to do.

  At breakfast, Mendoza handed Francis the note in which he had transcribed the message Nan left on voicemail. “Thank you, but our plans are all set,” Francis read.

  Mendoza saw the shock on Francis’s face. “Anything wrong?” he asked. His voice was kind, worried.

  Still looking down at the note, Francis shook his head. “We have a very specific design.” He had no idea, of course, that these words weren’t Kindler’s and had been added by Nan White to alleviate the insult. They had exactly the opposite effect. For who else but the head of school made such decisions? Specific meant without him. Kindler had slapped his face.

  “I sure hope everything’s all right at home,” Mendoza said.

  “I have to go make a phone call,” Francis said. “I’ll be back in half an hour.” He was going to call Kindler, interrupt whatever he was doing—he’d call even if it were the middle of the fucking night, he was so mad. “What do you think, I’m not going to help get kids into the school?” he said to the air around him. But as he walked down the hill, he began to change his mind, and by the time he was in the office he had decided: He wouldn’t stoop to argue with Kindler about his worthiness to represent the school—after all these years! It was humiliating enough already without his begging. And the insult to Peggy after she’d already invited him. Let Kindler do his own recruiting.

  Mendoza was surprised to see him returning so soon. He sent Francis another worried look. “Everything’s fine,” Francis lied. He was tempted to tell Mendoza what was happening and everything that had led up to it. After all, Mendoza was a kind of priest, a medicine man, but Francis rejected the idea as just as crazy as Mendoza.

  By the middle of her day, Nan woke up to what a dumb mistake she’d made. Of course Francis would tell Peggy that he offered to come to the meeting and was refused. She was not about to let this insult to Peggy happen. She would just have to call Francis right away before he told Peggy and invite him after all. She would make up something about how excited they were about that specific design, but now that they’ve had time to think about it…. And she would make sure Francis understood the whole thing was her mistake, not Fred’s. So she picked up the phone and left her new message.

  But this message, which Francis listened to in Mendoza’s office during the lunch break, didn’t assuage his feelings even a little. Instead, it made him even angrier. And though he’d been thinking that maybe he would show up at the event after all—what right had Kindler to tell him he couldn’t participate?—now he was ten times more resolved not to attend. Not for one minute did he believe that the original refusal of his offer had come from Nan. Why would she do that? They’d known each other for years. He knew damn well she was the kind of person who didn’t pass the buck. So she was taking the heat for Kindler because he wouldn’t take it for himself. And what enraged him further was his assumption that the only reason for this recanting was Peggy’s going to Kindler. Begging! She, a favored subject, kneeling to the king on behalf of her unworthy husband. How do you think that makes me feel? he wanted to ask her. But he was so deeply insulted he knew he wouldn’t ever be able to bring it up with her. There were some things between husband and wife best not talked about, and this was one of them. And another thing he knew: he was not even going to respond to Nan’s recanted disinvitation. It didn’t deserve an answer.

  MENDOZA’S CREW WORKED fervently for the next two weeks to find the Ohlone village. Francis committed entirely to the cause, discarding as much as he could his sense of absurdity and disbelief and working harder than everyone except Lila, whose energy and passion he couldn’t begin to equal. If the dig succeeded, his Western adventure would not be merely an escape.

  Two Sundays later, with only six days left before their August first deadline, they had still found nothing. Mendoza stayed up all night searching for an idea to rescue them, and at dawn, confusing desperation with inspiration, he decided that impurity of resolve was the reason for the failure to find the village. “We haven’t truly walked in the shoes of the Ohlones,” he explained, and so he resolved the argument about whether only males should use the sweat house by declaring that they all would imitate the Ohlone purification ritual. They would stay most of the night in the sweat house, scraping the sweat off their bodies with willow sticks, building the heat to the fainting point then building it more, until the present melted and they saw visions. They would make themselves worthy by sweating out of their bodies the evil that caused them their blindness. While Mendoza urged fervently, Francis started to giggle again as he had in Bullington’s office. But when Lila reached out from where she sat across the circle to touch his hand, he realized that she was not doing so to join him in his laughter but to calm him down, and when he turned back toward Mendoza’s voice, the little professor gave him such a pleading look that Francis agreed to the ritual.

  Francis joined the others in helping Mendoza prepare the sweat house. He worked hard, trying not to admit that every once in a while in the last few days he’d found himself wondering if he really wanted to find the village. The relentless searching had made him begin to feel it would be an invasion of the privacy of defenseless strangers to probe around in what they had left behind—especially if they found the burial ground. And then it was not much of a jump for him to understand that he was going to feel the same way when he got home and stood in front of the Pequot display in Peggy’s library. Maybe, deep down, he’d always felt this way. He didn’t even want to think about that.

  He tried, also unsuccessfully, to keep his mind from the fact that a crucial recruiting event for Miss Oliver’s School for Girls was going to take place without him tomorrow night just across the bay. As the afternoon went by, he sensed Mendoza’s spirits lifting. “We won’t let them sweep everything away, we’ll protect their village, we’ll protect their bones,” Mendoza urged in his mesmerizing chant. “They are in the ground because they were the lesser-ranking members of the tribe and they didn’t rank the honor of a funeral pyre,” he added, as if to prove that the meek shall inherit the earth.

  That evening, twenty-four hours before the recruiting event in San Francisco that Francis had decided to spurn, the group assembled in the sweat house after the sun went down.

  They sat, male and female, in a tight circle, in their underwear, a completely asexual near-nakedness. M
endoza had pushed for complete nakedness. “To be like Indians,” he’d said. But Francis had talked him out of it, over Lila’s objections. “We don’t have to go that far,” he’d said. Now in the fading light, he saw Lila’s face across from him, her eyes closed, sweat faintly glistening on her shoulders. He and she both knew that Mendoza hadn’t even got this right: The fire to heat the rocks still burned, and there was a hole in the domed roof to let the smoke out, but the Indians had used rocks heated earlier by a fire and there should be no hole above. Nevertheless, Lila had given herself completely, unselfconsciously, to the ritual, entirely serious, and Francis was envious of youth, regretful of his common sense.

  His almost-naked butt itched where it pressed against the scraped earth; he suspected there were bugs down there exploring; it got hotter in the little hut; he was already wondering if he’d make it. To his left, one of the male students groaned. “Shut up!” the girl next to him whispered, and from his right another girl said, “Are you sure we’re doing this right?”

  “Hush!” said Mendoza. His face was uplifted. Sweat was running down his neck toward the black hairs on his puny chest. Francis looked longingly at the tiny closed doorway, imagining the spacious night outside, the cool evening air. Mendoza started to chant.

  It grew hotter. Without stopping his chant, Mendoza leaned forward, stirred the fire. The lodge was full of smoke. Above, through the hole in the roof, blurred a single star. The rocks in the center gleamed red in the coals.

  The guttural syllables of Mendoza’s chant rose in volume. Several of the students joined him. Francis couldn’t bring himself to join the chanting, though after a while it began to sound more authentic. Different from the psalms that Peggy loved. He was glad Peggy couldn’t see what he was doing. He saw two Francis Plummers simultaneously: One was dressed in a sports coat and gray flannels and was talking convincingly to a group of teenage girls and their parents about Miss Oliver’s School for Girls; the other sat almost naked, on the ground in a fake Indian hut, listening to Mendoza’s chant while an army of bugs crawled up his ass.

  As an antidote, he tried to keep his promise to Mendoza—and to himself—to see with Indian eyes. But no vision arrived. He saw only his little group of students and Mendoza in the blazing weather of the tiny hut. He was much further away from an Indian consciousness than he ever was back home—where the Oliver campus overlay an ancient Pequot village from which, sometimes, some hint seeped up into his brain—and where he knew he was needed.

  Nevertheless, he started to chant, forcing himself to get into it. In the red glow of the rocks, he saw Mendoza glancing at him in thanks. Mendoza stirred the coals with a long stick. The rocks grew redder. The end of the stick flamed, lighting the hut. Shadows flickered. Lila was pouring sweat. Francis was dizzy, short of breath.

  The chant seemed strangely beautiful suddenly, the rhythm more accentuated. He felt the heavy frightening beating of his heart. It was much hotter now. The girl next to him moaned softly. Mendoza stirred the fire again. Francis’s heart was a loud drum. He started to faint, felt himself falling away.

  Then, in the acme of the heat, Mendoza made a little motion with his hand and stopped chanting. A syllable later, so did everyone else. Francis heard moaning, and one of the boy students, giving up, scooted out through the doorway. Lila leaned, put the tulle mat the boy had kicked aside back over the doorway.

  “Another hour,” said Mendoza. “One more hour.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Lila whispered. “A day, a week, a year, whatever it takes.”

  Half swooning in this furnace, his brain melting, Francis despaired. Still, no new visions had arrived; instead he heard himself babbling to Peggy about church, stale territory, and he was trying to make her laugh. “When the priest says, ‘Lift up your hearts,’” he told her, “I see this huge red giblet I’m holding above me and it’s dripping on my head.” But she wasn’t laughing.

  “Hotter,” he heard Lila saying. “Make it hotter!” He could hardly see her across the little space. A vague figure, disembodied, she hung in air. Mendoza’s airy body leaned forward as he stirred the fire.

  “And when he says, ‘It is meet and right so to do,’” Francis went on in his unreadiness, “I always imagine ‘It’s meat and rice, LUUNCH TIME!’ because by that time I’m so hungry! But the service goes on and on.” Peggy was looking at him as if he were a little kid.

  And then, as if he were outside himself, he listened, horrified, to his brain decide to try one more thing. He would tell a joke to this congregation. That would take the heat off; you can’t fail if it’s only a joke. “What’s the difference between a BMW and a porcupine?” he asked. Mendoza stared across the fire at him, disgust written all over his face, Lila looked away, and no one else seemed to hear. “With a porcupine, the pricks are on the outside,” Francis announced.

  “All right, enough!” Mendoza shouted, giving up. He started to get up on his knees to crawl out the little door, then fainted. Lila reached to support him. Francis did too, but Lila pushed his hand away. Mendoza stirred, got back onto his knees, pushed aside the tulle mat, and crawled out. Everyone followed. Outside the little hut in the cool of the starry night, Francis was as embarrassed as he had ever been. He couldn’t wait to escape to his hut.

  “There’s one more thing,” said Mendoza, looking straight at Francis. “We’ll give you one more chance.” Mendoza, Lila, and Francis were standing now by the entrance to Mendoza’s hut. The others had drifted off to bed. They’d just finished hosing themselves down in the stink of the Porta Potties from the water truck parked between two of the them. “Because there are no creeks left,” Mendoza explained, after they were back near his hut, away from the stink. “In those days, before the white man destroyed the water table, these hills were traced with creeks. The country was actually wet.” He swept his hand. The windless night was domed with stars. Behind them, Mount Alma’s dark shape loomed, the smell of dew on dry adobe ground.

  “One more thing,” Mendoza said again, then disappeared into his hut. “For those who dare,” he said, reappearing and looking again straight at Francis. Mendoza was carrying a canvas bag. He pulled out a plastic tarp and spread it on the ground. Then he pulled out an Atlas jar with something white inside. “Lime,” he said. “I made it myself. Ground up seashells.” Then a canvas pouch. “Tobacco. The final step in the purification process was this.” He dumped a little pile of lime on the tarp, knelt down, and mixed in the tobacco. “The Ohlones grew tobacco on these hillsides,” he explained.

  “You can’t smoke lime,” Francis said. Lila gave him another funny look.

  “Wasn’t going to,” Mendoza said, dividing the mess into three parts. “Going to eat it.” He stood up, one pile cupped in his two hands, and held them out to Lila. “Ladies first,” he said. Lila put her hands out, cupped like Mendoza’s, and received.

  “Eat it?” Francis heard the squeak in his voice.

  “That’s right. We eat it.”

  “What for?” he said, as if he were curious and wanted to understand.

  “It’s an emetic,” said Mendoza, holding his cupped hands out to Francis.

  “Emetic?”

  “A cleanser.”

  “Do we do it here?” Lila asked.

  “You take it to someplace you want to be alone,” Mendoza answered. “It’s a very private experience.”

  “How do you know, you ever done it?” Francis asked. His hands were down by his sides. Mendoza’s hands were still held out to him, offering.

  “I read about it,” Mendoza said. “Makes you clean. Empty, like after fasting.”

  “You mean you puke?” asked Francis.

  “Well, if you want to talk about it that way.”

  “I don’t like to puke.” Then trying to be funny again: “It comes out my nose.” He glanced at Lila. She was looking hard at him. Not smiling.

  “It’s different,” he heard Mendoza saying. “You get convulsions, go in and out of consciousness. You don’t get
sick and then get well. You go in one place and come out another.”

  Francis’s hands were still down at his sides. Mendoza looked hard at his eyes, dropped his outstretched arms, shrugged, and walked away, taking the offering for himself. He left the third portion on the tarp by Francis’s feet. Francis stared down at it. When he looked up, he could see Lila walking away through the dark. He knew where she was going: a ridgetop on which he had watched her sitting in the early morning waiting for the sun. He left the powder on the tarp and went to his hut.

  But, of course, he didn’t sleep.

  He lay on his cot hearing the wind that rose now, riffling the walls of his hut. In his head, he watched again as Lila walked away toward her ridgetop and saw himself spurning Mendoza’s offering hands, and it came to him that now that they knew the dig was going to fail, it would be his fault, not Mendoza’s. He knew the thought didn’t make any sense—it was Mendoza’s bungling that doomed the venture—but it wouldn’t go away, and he spent the few hours remaining in the night tortured by it. In the morning as the group returned dispiritedly to work, the students avoided his eyes.

  At the lunch break he sat down next to Lila. He wanted to apologize and explain to her that he was not as free as she was to be like an Indian; he had too much history in another role. Before he could even begin, she got up and moved away.

  It’s not hard to understand how insulted Lila was, how abandoned she felt, by what she could only interpret as Francis’s irreverence, the apogee of which was his dumb joke in the sweat house. For it was Lila who had listened to the story his wife never wanted to hear and gravely explained its meaning. It was she who had legitimized his spiritual hunger, who said, “He’s your totem,” speaking with no hesitation of the turtle who chose to appear to Francis “from out of the time when the world was here and human beings were not.” A few years hence, Lila would lighten her disappointment with a helpful dose of irony. Right then she and her passion were too young; and, after all, she had thought she’d found in Francis an adult soul mate, something very rare, and a surrogate dad—and now she thought he was neither.