Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

“Family resources?” What could she mean? That sounded like Mafia to me. Was there a Moroccan Mafia? A Muslim Mafia? I found myself, inexplicably, shivering. And Ayesha’s profound self-assurance made me feel as if I had over-reached in trying to protect her.

  Ayesha set her sandwich down on its plate and pulled off a small piece, the gooey yellow cheese dangling droopy strands, like Silly Putty. She popped it in her mouth and chewed. Then she looked up at me, and now her eyes really were troubled. “Something has happened, however,” she said, “that I would like to talk to you about, but it has nothing to do with Professor Lone Wolf.” She hesitated. “It’s very difficult, and I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.”

  I understood in a flash. I’d had this conversation with women students before: she’s pregnant!

  Pregnant? But wasn’t she supposed to be…

  She continued, “The first time it was—”

  “Blue,” I interjected.

  “Blue?” She looked at me askance. “No, it was an e-mail. I use white paper.”

  “An e-mail?” My brain was trying to make sense of this: some new electronic pregnancy-testing technology?

  “Yes. Then a note on my pillow. That really scared me—someone had been in my room. Then there were more e-mails and a letter in campus mail.”

  “Oh?” Not pregnant, then. “Hate mail,” I breathed in sudden comprehension.

  “Yes. And they were vicious from the start. The first one told me to go back to Africa where I belonged. It said I should go to college with the Taliban and not threaten American college students with my jihad.” Her brown eyes were large, the iris almost as dark as the pupil. Did they hold tears?

  I handed her a paper napkin. “Unsigned, I take it.”

  She nodded, and mopped her eyes.

  “Any idea who it is?”

  She didn’t answer my question. “Until this happened, I felt really comfortable at Enfield, as if people appreciated me for who I am. As if they liked me. But this has shaken my confidence. For a few days, I didn’t know what to do.” She twisted the bangles on her slim wrist, one finely wrought gold and three woven in various strands of colorful thread.

  This old yellow kitchen had seen crises of many kinds over the years, but never before had any of them involved suspicions of jihad. “Is that why you went home for the long weekend?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Dean Johnson?”

  “I was so stupid! My first reaction was to feel ashamed…demeaned. I didn’t want to tell anyone. Then I read Zitkala Sa’s memoir about her school years, and it sounded so much like what I was going through that I got really angry.”

  “Yes, I remember.” I gave her a wry smile. “You scolded the class. I wish you’d come to me first.”

  “I really am sorry about that, but I just had a sudden impulse to…educate these complacent American kids. Afterwards I realized that this isn’t really about me. Just like at Zitkala Sa’s school and college, it’s about ignorance. I looked in the student directory to see whose e-mail address the hate mail had been sent from. But, of course, it wasn’t there—how could I expect a coward to use his own address? So I wrote back to iamurjihad@yahoo.com.”

  The threat implied in the address made my expression freeze. “Weren’t you afraid of reprisal?”

  “I didn’t confront him at all—I just wrote in a spirit of inquiry. I asked him if my presence on campus caused him discomfort and why? Then I said that if he told me what the problem was, I’d be happy to discuss it with him, either by e-mail or in person.”

  I gaped at her in astonishment. So smart. So mature. She’d framed the attack as his problem, not hers, and offered to help him with it! “Then what did he say?”

  “That was yesterday. Last time I checked my e-mail there was no response.” She removed the baseball cap and ran a hand through her braids.

  I filled up her milk glass from the container. She’d referred to the hate-mail sender three times as “he.”

  “You know who it is, don’t you?”

  She gave me a wide-eyed gaze of pure innocence, and her shoulders went up, then down. She picked up the sandwich again and bit into it.

  My heart contracted in fear. I narrowed my eyes at her. “Don’t do anything foolish,” I said. “Ignorant people are frightened people. They can be truly dangerous.”

  ***

  As soon as I returned Ayesha to the dorm and went back to my office, I read her essay. It was terrific. She wrote about Zitkala Sa’s school experience and the concerted attempt of white educators to eradicate unique attributes of Native culture. She then made the connection between her own situation as a Muslim at Enfield College, insistent on “maintaining and practicing my heritage and culture.” The true genius of her essay came in her acknowledgement of similarities between the Native woman’s situation and her own, but also in the awareness that identity is not fixed but mutable. “All cultures evolve,” she concluded, “and to freeze an evolving culture in time, enshrining the static version of that culture as its sole authentic manifestation, while perhaps making things easier for scholars, is less than truthful or useful.”

  “A-plus,” I scrawled at the top of the first page. “Terrific work!”

  ***

  From: APelletier@sbcglobal.net

  To: KPelletier@enfield.edu

  Subject: Moving On

  Mom, we traveled on from Nepal through India. Now in Sri Lanka. If I ever get married, which I don’t intend to, I want the wedding to be in an ancient Buddhist temple. Such serenity.

  Speaking of serenity, stop sending so many e-mails. Cybercafés are few and far between. And stop worrying—I’m fine. I’ll call when we’re back in Kathmandu.

  Chapter 17

  Saturday afternoon

  It was too late now to find any of my colleagues in Java Zone. I’d have to delay talking to them about Joe until at least Monday. In particular I wanted casual chats with Clark McCutcheon and Sally Chenille. Two images were beginning to resonate insistently in my memory: McCutcheon clapping his big hand on Joe’s shoulder that night at Rudolph’s bar, and Joe at midnight exiting Sally’s yellow sports car in the college parking lot with an angry slam of the door.

  When I went back to Dickinson Hall to retrieve my briefcase before picking up my mother at eldercare and going home, the door to the chairman’s office was open. That surprised me; Ned never came in on the weekends. I poked my head inside. The young college custodian turned from the terra cotta planter of cacti on the wide windowsill (ah! That’s where I’d seen them!) with a green plastic watering pot in his hand. He smiled his lovely Incan smile.

  “Hola,” I said. I don’t speak Incan, but I do know enough rudimentary Spanish to be polite.

  “Hola, senora. Buenos dias.”

  Here was an unexpected opportunity. I could get the key to Joe’s office, and no one in the department would ever know. Of course I had every legitimate reason to be in the office—to find his grade book and class notes (although I was beginning to doubt that he would ever have stooped to use class notes). But right now I needed to exonerate myself and Ayesha by finding evidence that might suggest who else wanted Joe Lone Wolf dead.

  I smiled my lovely French-Canadian-American-God-knows-what-else smile at the janitor and strolled over to Monica’s desk. The drawer glided open without a squeak, and the cookie key was sequestered safe in my hot little hand. I slid it into the pocket of my jeans. Mission accomplished.

  Seeing no one around as I walked down the hall, I slid the passkey into Joe Lone Wolf’s door lock, and I was in. Nothing in the cluttered office had changed since I’d peeked in here yesterday, except for the rain suddenly pelting the windows. I closed the door quietly behind me, turned on the light, and headed for the desk—which still resembled a landfill. If his computer was still here, I’d try it first; its files should be far more orderly than the piles of paper I could see on the desktop. The dusty monitor was on a small computer table. I sat on the rolling desk
chair and peered down to the lower shelf, hoping against hope the investigators hadn’t taken it. No computer. Damn!

  I sat up again and sighed. Okay, I’d have to do my research the old-fashioned way, on paper. The desk was Mount Papyrus, in some places papers piled as high as my chin. No labels identified the manila folders, but most of the material looked like Internet printouts. I reached out to take a sheet, immediately causing a calamitous landslide, spilling printouts all over the floor. Double damn! I’d pick it all up later. Now I simply grabbed a random sheet of paper.

  This printout detailed a Native story about a pre-Columbian voyager, Prince Madoc of Wales, who had sailed to America three hundred years before the Italian explorer. According to tradition, Prince Madoc and his crew reached the Gulf Coast and eventually founded a colony of Welsh settlers on the Missouri River. Reports from the earliest European explorers document a tribe of blue-eyed “White Indians” in the region.

  Could this story possibly be true? I mused. “White Indians?” Well, why not? And what of it? In Western epistemological classifications, law, government, society—not to mention literature departments—institutional identity categories have too often been treated as absolute and immutable, while history and experience show us that race and culture have always been in flux. That’s academicspeak: what it means for English professors is that career advancement depends on whatever literary fiefdom the individual scholar has carved out for him or herself, and therefore lines are drawn in the theoretical sand as if they were etched into concrete. What does “pre-Columbian” mean anyhow? The same thing as “pre-Madocian”?

  But, wait, I was looking for clues, not for yet another intriguing intellectual conundrum. I tossed the printout back where I’d found it and opened the top desk drawer.

  There it was—Joe’s grade book.

  Right next to the bong.

  There was a tap on the door. I slid the desk drawer shut and held my breath. Whoever it was, maybe he or she would go away. Another knock, more imperative. Then Clark McCutcheon’s voice said, “Karen, I know you’re in there.”

  I did have a few questions I wanted to ask Clark about his relationship with Joe Lone Wolf, but now was not the time. I rose from the desk chair and opened the door. Clark loomed in the doorway, beaming at me. I almost expected him to drawl, “Now what do we have here, little lady.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned—so this is the Lone Wolf lair? Guy was sure no neatnik.” In his large hand-tooled boots Clark strode into the room; no qualms about trespassing for Professor McCutcheon. “Can I help you find something?”

  “Just looking for class notes,” I said, attempting an innocent expression.

  He gestured expansively around the chaotic space. “Any luck?”

  “I haven’t had time yet to make sense out of this mess.”

  But Clark wasn’t paying any attention to the clutter. His eyes had suddenly fixed themselves on the wall hangings and on the shelves that lined the three unwindowed walls, their contents the only organized part of the room. “Well, I’ll be…” he said, and strolled over to the displays: a shelf of hand-woven baskets lined up according to size, another of hand-thrown pots arranged according to color of the clay, kachina dolls, etc. A finger to his lips, as if deep in thought, Clark hefted a pot, studying its glaze, lifted the corner of a hanging rug to check the weave. The eagle-feather war bonnet hanging on the wall claimed intense scrutiny. “Interesting,” he said, sotto voce, “interesting.” But he didn’t say why.

  Finally he picked up a small, colorful pottery figure of a Native woman with several children clustered around her and held it toward me. “You know what this is, don’t you?” he asked, turning it in his hands.

  “A mother and her children?” I ventured. Mother, I thought, and recalled that mine was waiting for me at the eldercare center.

  “No,” he said, caressing its smooth surface with his thumb. “It’s a story-teller doll from one of the Southwestern tribes. See, the large figure, the story-teller, has her mouth open, speaking, and the small figures, the listeners, are clustered around her, rapt with attention.” He gazed at it with what could be seen as an expert’s concentration.

  “How do you know so much about this material?”

  He shrugged. “I come from Indian country. You pick it up.”

  “Well, then, what do you make of all this?” I asked, with a sweeping gesture of my arm around the room.

  He shook his gold-and-silver head. “It’s a real surprise, that’s for sure. I don’t quite know what to think. There doesn’t seem to be any organizing principle. It looks like a mish-mosh of stuff from a number of widely scattered tribes. Nonetheless Lone Wolf’s got really nice things here. Some of them might even be of museum quality, historical artifacts—like that pipe-tomahawk over the window.”

  He climbed up on the window seat for a close look at the notched tomahawk. “See, this is a very fine item, obviously a ceremonial object. You can tell by the solid brass blade and the inlaid silver on the haft.” He laughed. “It’s ironic. This weapon must have been fashioned for important ceremonial and diplomatic purposes, and now it’s hanging in an academic office, nothing more than fashionable wall décor.”

  “I disagree with you, Clark. It looks to me like these things were more than simple décor to Joe—it’s as if they really meant something to him.” I scanned the shelves. “But, one thing—on an English professor’s pay, how did he afford all these expensive objects?”

  He ran his tongue over his top lip, looking at me intently. “I wouldn’t have a clue,” he replied. Then he stared me right in the eye, as if there were some unspoken meaning in his gaze. “And I’ll bet you and I are the only ones who know about this collection.” I stared right back at him, a little chill running down my backbone. I didn’t know quite what to make of this man, but if he intended to suggest, or even imply, the possibility of any collusion over Joe’s collection, he needed to know that I wasn’t about to bite.

  “He brought his students here,” I said. “They know.”

  He shrugged, gave me a semicomplicitous wink and left. I locked the door behind him, abandoned the printouts and gave my attention to the shelves of Native arts; after Clark’s close perusal of Joe’s collection, I wanted to make certain that he hadn’t walked off with anything, specifically the storyteller figure that had so attracted him. But, no, there she was, lovingly formed by hand, her beautiful colors smoothly glazed, the small brown woman telling her stories to an enraptured group of listeners, her mouth open forever. Joe had chosen this. Joe had treasured it. Now he had left it behind. For the first time I felt a pang of genuine grief for my murdered colleague.

  As I was leaving the room, I recalled my original errand. Searching for class notes seemed to be a hopeless endeavor, but I had found Joe’s grade book. I opened the drawer again, and, without touching the bong, I slid the grade book out, tucked it under my arm, and took it back to my office. Then my cell phone rang: Enfield Eldercare. Yikes!

  I hid Joe’s grade book in my own top desk drawer, and took off like lightning.

  Mom was hungry when I showed up at the eldercare center, and we went for General Tso’s Chicken at Amazing Chinese. Before we entered the restaurant, however, I wiggled the department pass key from its chocolate-chip cookie ring and dropped it off at Enfield Lock and Key to have a copy made. After all, no sense in bothering Monica every time I had to enter Joe Lone Wolf’s office.

  Saturday evening

  The memorial poetry slam for Joe Lone Wolf was open mic, and Java Zone was packed. A panel of five student judges sat at a table by the fireplace in front of which the poets performed. At night, with the lights lowered for dramatic effect, it was easy to see the coffee house’s origins as a rathskeller. The low, beamed ceilings, leaded windows, the long, narrow tables, massive stone fireplace, all spoke of a long-ago time when the college was all male and all white, the drinking age was eighteen, and one could smoke in any public building. I could almost smell the cigaret
te smoke and beer fumes embedded in the off-white walls and the dark chiseled pillars. I could almost hear the smoke-husky voices of inebriated ghosts singing eins, zwei, drie, vier, lift your steins and drink some beer. And what would those old ghosts of young people think of today’s student incarnations, men and women, black, white, Asian, and New-World natives, no one smoking (at least not here), no one drinking (at least not openly), all engaged not in singing drinking songs but in partaking of a new kind of student pastime: the poetry slam.

  Mom was at Felicity and Lombardi’s place for the evening so I could attend this student memorial service for the dead professor. I wasn’t here so much for the sake of commemoration as for purposes of investigation. Poetry conveys and elicits powerful feelings, and I hoped an image or a reaction might help me get some insight into the hold my colleague had had on these students.

  I arrived in the middle of a…a what? Was it a poem? Was it a rant? Was it a dance? Well, anyhow, I arrived in the middle of what I imagined would be called a spoken-word performance. Hank Brody danced and chanted, his feet moving in what could possibly be called native ceremonial footwork:

  Eagle is dead. Eagle is dead.

  Eagle is dead. Watch out for your head.

  They won’t scalp your skin,

  They won’t scalp your hair,

  But your brains and your hearts

  Until you despair

  Of the sky, of the wind, of the blue, blue, blue air

  Of freedom.

  Eagle is dead. Eagle is dead.

  Eagle is dead. Watch out for your head.

  Freedom

  (shouted)

  Freedom

  (spoken)

  freedom

  (whispered)

  The reaction was unexpected—to me at least—a standing ovation with tears and sobs. And there were more poems and testimonials in which I heard about a Joe Wolf I never knew, an engaging teacher who spoke without notes and stimulated students’ interest in all kinds of texts and contexts and who used his own identity as a Native Indian as a springboard for discussion of “Outsider” peoples of the world.