by Sam Halpern
The big question, I thought, was what would have happened if everybody had just told the truth. Fred, LD, Lonnie, and I would have gotten in trouble (in the case of Lonnie, perhaps horrible trouble) but I doubted that the community would have gone after the crazy man. They were too scared of the unknown. Ben was a triple murderer and they surely would have executed him if they had known about him before the crazy man incident happened. Instead, ignorant of his previous murders, the neighbors said prayers for Ben, built him the best monument they could, and began turning him into a legend before we left Berman’s.
“Being a human is difficult,” I said aloud. “Common decency is the greatest quality to which one can aspire and the hardest to practice.” I had never expressed that thought before. Maybe I was learning something after all.
Fred returned to my mind along with a lump in my throat. I thought again about the night Fred had backed me against his own interest. How much we shared before our family left Berman’s. It kept revolving through my brain like an endless computer program. How do you come to grips with the fact that you abandoned your best friend? The first time might be forgivable because as a teenager I was worried that if I returned to the hills to see him some of my high school classmates would find out and return to their “hillbilly” hazing. That was spineless of me, but like LD, I was a kid. In later years I just didn’t have the guts to face him. “You weren’t a man,” I said very loud.
I thought of Ben again and his final gift to me that lay in boxes in our attic. I had never discarded the wood carvings but I never displayed them either. Why? I knew the answer: I didn’t want questions asked about them, didn’t want to see them every day and be reminded that I was in large part responsible for his horrible death. He had saved my life, and maybe the lives of others; his thanks was to die alone with his dogs. I took another drink.
Nora. What of Nora, the woman who loved me so much that she put up with my bullshit. What the hell did she see in me? She was ten times the person I was, and yet she saw me as “her Rhett Butler.” Her hero? Some hero.
She believed in me! She understood somehow the effect my past had on my life. She said one time that the hill people I described to her had instilled in me a sense of Old Testament honor and its attendant rigidity. Combined with the scholarly bent of my ethnic group, these values had somehow merged to produce a being who fiercely demanded total intellectual freedom, yet sought absolute truth! I didn’t believe any of that mumbo-jumbo but maybe it was true. If so, it was an unfortunate coupling that had haunted my life.
I was drunk but I refilled my glass with ice and booze and settled into pleasant memories of the early years of my career. Things had been going great for us those first six years at Leland-May. Nora got pregnant. I had a great wife, was starting a family, my students loved my classes, and I was moving along professionally. I didn’t, however, particularly like the Leland-May faculty and they didn’t care much for me. It started innocently enough. I was on the student affairs committee to which most young profs were assigned at L-M because you couldn’t do a lot of harm as a member of SA (as it was called). SA was run by Tolliver Atwood, who wanted the kids to adhere to a dress code. I thought it was stupid, especially given the temper of the times, and disagreed. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of calling the idea ridiculous during a meeting of the committee and embarrassed Atwood. Shortly thereafter, several members of the faculty began subtly critiquing my academic endeavors in unflattering ways. I was pretty sure the instigator was Tolliver, who remained cool toward me for months after the committee incident.
Life stayed sweet, but my tenure hearing was looming and I had only published a few scholarly articles. I loved teaching, but a tenure committee wants to see some creativity. I was due for sabbatical and had a chance to go to England and do some research.
The sabbatical was in Cornwall, only a few miles from Land’s End. Our daughter was toddling and repeating Gaelic words to the delight of the town’s women. Nora and I loved it there, and I got a lot of great work done. I discovered that English scholars had largely ignored the fascinating field of Cornish fiction. By the time we returned to New Hampshire I had compiled enough research to write a major tome and several articles. I made tenure. We got the house painted. Nora was ecstatic.
Then came the James Wallace episode. James Cacey Wallace was a bright young man who had done well in my classes. One day, in our Charles Dickens course, he turned in an essay on Joe, the Pickwick Papers character who keeps falling asleep. Something about it was familiar. A few days later I remembered where I’d seen it before: my undergraduate years when I cowrote my paper on Dickens. I confronted Wallace and he confessed. His excuse was that his grades in the current semester were good, but not good enough to keep his full scholarship. He needed an “outstanding” in my course since it was his area of concentration or he would lose his funding. That night I talked it over with Nora.
“What will the administration do if you report it?” she asked, stirring the beef Stroganoff.
I knew exactly what the dean would do. “Kick him out of Leland-May,” I answered.
Nora continued stirring the Stroganoff, casually sipping a glass of wine. “What would you like to do?”
My mind flashed on Fred and the stolen rabbits. “Give the boy another chance. Wallace isn’t a liar and a plagiarist; he’s just a kid who lied and plagiarized.”
Nora, who by this time was accustomed to hearing such logic from me, answered in a matter-of-fact tone, “Then why don’t you give him another chance?”
I did, but I made sure he earned it. Wallace worked in my courses like a field hand.
For days after that, I thought about Fred, but as the time approached to buy my plane tickets to Kentucky, I developed a sinking feeling. What would Fred and I talk about? So much of what had happened on Berman’s was traumatic and in the years since, our lives had been totally different. I didn’t go.
The Wallace episode wasn’t the end of that issue, even though the kid went on to graduate with honors. Nothing ever seemed to be the end of an issue with me. Occasionally, I got to Nora. I remembered how exasperated she became when I refused to meet with the committee about my refusal to give didactic lectures.
“Samuel, meet the schmucks’ demands partway,” she said. “Give a few lectures, then teach the way you want. For God’s sake, the faculty understands this is about academic freedom. Why do you have to drink the hemlock?”
Her argument made sense, but I couldn’t do it. Didactic lectures had been shown to be an ineffective way to teach. The way to transmit knowledge was by challenging students. But Dean Simmons was not open to challenges of any kind, especially to his preferred pedagogy.
I paid a price for continuing to teach my way. The committee on academic advancement declined to recommend my promotion. And who was a power on that committee? Tolliver Atwood! Salaries in academic literature departments are not high, and I needed the money that promotion afforded. We had an eight- and a twelve-year-old. Nora had to take a part-time job in a bookstore to build up their college fund instead of staying at home until both children were in high school.
The attack on my teaching was the beginning of an academic nightmare. I seemed to be criticized by every professor on campus. While annoying, it was still just criticism.
Then James Wallace, who was now a young professor at a little Ivy League college, gave amnesty to a student who cheated. He told him why, naming me as his mentor. The student told his friend, who told his father, who was on the Leland-May Board of Trustees. The father, of course, told Dean Simmons. A firestorm ensued. Tolliver’s attack was overt and I became ostracized by my colleagues. I was again passed over for advancement.
Then the last shoe fell. Anton Cathcart, editor of one of the most important literary journals in my field, wrote a scathing review of one of my publications. The result was disastrous. I was attacked now for both my teaching and my creative work. It was obvious that I would never make full professor at Leland-May a
nd the odds of getting another academic job were slim, given the negative comments I was accruing. I was fifty-six, had one child entering graduate school and a second entering college, was ten years from retirement, facing old age with inadequate financial means and poor job prospects because my curriculum vitae was less than sparkling.
Then came the miracle of Cyrus Whitley-Jones. The old Oxford don, who rarely said anything good about anyone, went so far as to use the term “significant” in regard to my work in one of his articles on writers of the Cornish region. Within a month, four major universities contacted me regarding positions at the full professor level. Even better, I could teach as much or as little as I liked, provided I taught “some.”
I contacted Dean Simmons by letter, asking for a short leave of absence to “investigate other academic positions” and copied it to the department chair. Leland-May’s faculty was composed of superbly educated, adequate teachers (depending on your point of view), but far from creative. If they lost their one internationally recognized scholar, it would not go well with the Board of Trustees. Especially if it appeared that I had been driven out of town.
The dean and my chair made an offer. I thanked them, but replied that in the interest of my family and career, I had to investigate other institutions. The next day, the committee on academic advancement voted to raise my rank to “Distinguished Professor,” let me determine which courses I taught, and assured me my pedagogical technique was a matter of academic freedom.
I stayed. Every fiber of my body wanted to write an open letter to the faculty, who had made my life miserable. Nora advised rapprochement and a new attempt at social interaction. Rapprochement, I could do. See them socially? I would have preferred dining with Faulkner’s Snopes family. A few years later, I won the Johnson-Goldsmith Prize. I developed a cult following. Nora developed cancer.
40
The blow delivered by the memory of Nora’s death brought a draining of the alcohol in my glass. Again, I lay on the bed and waited for the pain to ease.
Ease, the pain did not; change my reference point, it did. It moved back to the time I left the hospital after my arm and emotional upheaval had improved and I returned home. People treated me like a returning hero. I felt drenched in guilt. The next few weeks . . .
. . . went hard. I just couldn’t get over Ben. Fred come to the house every night and told me what happened while I was sick. Having him there helped. He said he seen me slip away from the group in front of the cave and followed me. He wanted to stop me lots of times but could tell I didn’t want anyone to know where I was heading so he hung back. The times I thought somebody was behind me, he was only a hunnert or so foot away. He stopped just inside the oak grove and watched as I went to Ben’s cabin. When the dogs come, he said he didn’t know what to do. He knew they were killers, but after I pet Abel, and Cain backed off, he figured everything was okay. By the time they turned on me, it was too late for him to do anything and he just stood at the edge of the oaks scared to death. He said he felt bad he didn’t run to help me but he thought it might make things worse since the dogs didn’t know him. I told him I would’ve done the same thing, knowing Cain and Abel.
Everybody around that had known Mr. Collins saw the body. What was left of him, I mean, ’cause Fred said he was really shot up. Wudn’t any doubt in anybody who it was and the sheriff said the case was over. They held a funeral at the church for Mr. Collins because the preacher said Christ would have wanted that, since Collins was a good man before he turned crazy, and asked that he get forgiveness from everybody, which I suppose he got. He didn’t get forgiveness from me though. I hated the sonamabitch and hoped he went straight to hell!
Poor Ben. After Fred and me ran for help, Ben shot Cain and Abel and drug them inside the cabin, then doused it all over with coal oil and shot hisself after he lit the fire. He put the bobcat and coons and the Christmas knife outside. Dad said he saved them since he figured they were for me.
Fred said the church held a funeral for Ben too, right where the cabin stood, and buried what parts they could find. The preacher said Ben had laid down his life for his friends and that the name Begley would always live in our parts and in the house of the Lord. After that, all the men got together and hauled the biggest rock they could find to the top of the grave so it wouldn’t ever be plowed over. They buried Cain and Abel right beside him. I was the only one who knew about Ben, who he was and what he done, and wudn’t anybody ever going to find out.
Everybody tried to help me but the going was slow. I missed Naomi a lot. She’d started nurse’s training and they wouldn’t let her come home. Debby was in California now and Bob only got home one day a week. I’d get really sad, and Mom and Dad would try to cheer me up, but they just couldn’t pull me out of it.
After several weeks at home I went back to school. The kids treated me great. The sheriff come down a couple Sundays. The first time he showed up I was worried he was going to ask me a lot of questions about Ben, and while I wudn’t sure, I figured knowing what I did was against the law. He never mentioned it though, just squeezed the back of my neck with his big hand and asked about the arm. It was a little strange, though. I saw him kind of look at me out of the corner of his eye once, like he was wondering what else I knew. Nobody asked anything about Ben. Not even Fred. LD didn’t ask. His pa got more religious than ever, and Fred said Mr. Howard told the church that God had called him to move to Georgia and become a Holiness preacher and they’d be going after the crop year.
Lonnie come over one day. He looked happy and I told him that.
“I am happy, Samuel. I’d like t’ go talk though. Someplace nobody can bother us.”
That surprised me because Lonnie never said those kinds of things. “Let’s go down to th’ tobacco barn,” I said.
When we got to the barn, we climbed up on the wagon and sat kind of catty-corner facing each other. He didn’t say anything for a while, then he swallowed.
“Samuel, I know all what you done for me. I know you were afraid my daddy’d beat me t’ pieces about hit someday if we told and that I was why you said not to tell. I acted like I didn’t care, but I was scared. Hit should’ve been me what come forward but I didn’t ’n’ all this bad stuff happened. I wudn’t a man and I come here t’ tell you I was sorry.”
Tears come up in Lonnie’s eyes and I kind of looked away when I answered like I didn’t know they were there. “Wudn’t just you. None of us did right and what happened was all our faults. You’re th’ best man of all of us, Lonnie. I’ve thought that for a long time. And I’m always gonna be your friend.”
Then we just kind of sat. He was the same boy I knew before, but somehow now he seemed different. Finally, he slid off the wagon, stuck his hand out, and we shook.
“I best be gettin’ home. Pa and me are workin’ up wood for winter,” then he moved toward a ventilator, slipped out, and was gone.
I sat on the wagon for a while thinking about all that happened. I wondered if we went back to the start of things, would we have done different. Without knowing all that would happen if we didn’t tell, I mean. I couldn’t say and that really bothered me. Ben was dead, stock was killed, I went crazy, everybody around got scared out of their wits, and I still didn’t know if I would have done things different. People thought high of me now and I was dumber’n owl shit. I went back to the house feeling good about Lonnie and bad about myself.
After Christmas, I started feeling a lot better and by the time the cast come off my arm for good, I was well enough in my head to visit Ben and Cain and Abel’s graves. I lay on their graves and bawled, telling them what happened to me, and how I felt about them, and asked Ben to forgive me for letting him down and said that I was going to make it up to him someday.
41
It was about this time that things started going bad for the Mulligans. They hadn’t been doing real great since Alfred got sick, but they still managed to get their work done. Also, they were moving to Red Bill Rogers’ place a cr
op year away, and no matter what else happened, that kept them going.
Then Red Bill died. The Franklins got his farm because they had promised Red Bill, if anything happened to him, to take care of the magnolian idiot Red Bill lived with. The Franklins wanted to work the farm themselves, so that left Alfred out.
Alfred took losing the farm awful hard. He had been counting on cropping Red Bill’s place and ever’ penny he had was tied up in mules and equipment. Wouldn’t have been so bad if there was anyplace else for him to rent, but times were changing and the new Ford tractors were really low to the ground and wouldn’t turn over in steep places and everybody was quitting on horses and mules. If you wanted to get a good place to rent, you had to have a tractor. For a while Alfred just stopped talking, then he began going into wild spells where he’d tear up the house. He stayed that way until almost May and when he did start talking, it was to a wall. Fred said you could ask him a question and he’d set on that old no-back chair and turn to the wall and start telling it what you wanted to know. After a while, he talked to that wall even if you didn’t ask him a question, sometimes gettin’ flaming mad and hitting it with his fists, yelling he was being cheated by some guy named Cosmoton. One day Alfred grabbed Annie Lee by the throat and told her if he ever heard of her fooling around with that Rooshian Cosmoton sonamabitch again he’d beat her until she couldn’t walk and did she understand that! Fred said it was the first time he’d ever seen Annie Lee scared.
Over the next few weeks, Alfred come around some. He still talked to the wall, but at least he didn’t threaten to beat up on anybody. That was a tough summer, boy. With Alfred being like he was, Fred was left with all the Mulligans’ work, and Dad and Mom and me with ours, but we finally got the crops out. I saw Fred every day because we swapped work. But that’s what it was, work, with never a day off.
