More Bitter Than Death

by Dana Cameron

  But of course he was looking at Duncan; they were at New Hampshire College at the same time. Under Garrison.

  “Okay, do you want me to make an announcement?” I asked. “What are we supposed to do in this situation?”

  “I don’t know. What I want to do is wait until the authorities can make their way here and take care of the body. I don’t want to make any formal announcements until we hear from them, and that’s going to take a while because of the weather. I’m hoping it won’t get around too much, but you know how gossip moves.”

  “Who found him anyway?” I said.

  “One of the hotel people gave me the news. One of their people went to get a snowblower out of the utility shed down by the lake.”

  I looked at Scott closely; he was still sweating and his face was now gray. “Are you going to be okay?”

  He shook his head. “Yeah, but I think I want to sit down for a bit.”

  “Let’s go over there.” I indicated a couch flanked by two end tables with ghastly, oversized silk floral arrangements badly in need of dusting. As I put my arm around his shoulders, I bumped into Duncan’s hand. Although my first instinct was to pull away, I wasn’t about to make a scene in front of Scott.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

  “No, that’s all right, Emma,” Duncan replied. “Why don’t you go back to the session?”

  “Why don’t you go and—” I took a breath. “Scott was looking for me. I’m fine here.”

  “Actually I was looking for—” Scott began, then sat heavily onto the couch. “I was looking for Dunk. But I’m glad you’re here too, Em. I’ll need all the help I can get.”

  “Right, sure, anything,” I said, nodding quickly. “Do you want some water?”

  “That’d be great.”

  “I’ll get it,” Duncan said before I could answer.

  I sat next to Scott, whose head was in his hands. I put my hand on his back, and waited for him.

  “It’s just so strange,” he kept saying to the carpet. “The man was a force of nature. Not that he was Superman or anything, he was old, and was feeling his years. Healthwise, I mean. But his personality, for whatever faults you might have seen in him, was just huge.”

  I chose to take Scott’s “you” as the general one, and not me personally. Duncan had returned with a glass of ice water from the coffee table.

  “I just can’t believe that he’s…that he won’t ever…ever again.”

  “It’s the end of an era,” Duncan said.

  I wanted to tell him to shut up, and I almost did, but then I saw Scott nodding again. I bristled, thinking it wrong that Duncan should also have history with Scott, who was my friend; territoriality, especially under these circumstances, is not my best look.

  “Yep. Now we need a plan. I want to wait until the business meeting tonight, to make a general announcement. That will give me a chance to talk to the board and to call his family; I think that would be best, even if the authorities contact them too. If we address it tonight, we can get that over with, maybe have a few speeches and a moment of silence, or something, and carry on with things tomorrow.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, we couldn’t possibly carry on, and then realized that of course we could. We should. “Right.”

  “He always said that there was no excuse for not handing in work, and even a death certificate wouldn’t be sufficient, as you should have anticipated it and planned your work accordingly,” Duncan said.

  Automatically I checked for whether he was being sincere, but I didn’t see any of the telltale signs that would indicate otherwise. Scott cut me off in my thoughts.

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Scott turned and smiled ruefully at Duncan, then gave himself a shake. “Right, thanks guys, I’m feeling better. Let’s say if I need you to do anything, I’ll leave a message in your rooms or on the message board. Okay?”

  I nodded and glanced at my watch. “Sounds good. I’ve got to get back in there and finish up this session. With any luck, the paper hasn’t ended early. As if that ever happens. I’m really sorry, Scott.”

  He nodded. “Me too. Figures it happens when I’m the one running the show. Old bastard.”

  But he said it fondly, not with any of the real ire that I’d always heard from Grandpa Oscar and sometimes used myself. Duncan nodded, of course, and said to Scott, “Walk and talk with me.”

  I got up and left abruptly, hearing him say “Good-bye, Emma,” from behind me. I waved my hand without looking back.

  As I suspected, I got back to my post just in time to give the “one minute, wrap it up” signal. To my relief, no one much noticed my hasty departure, and things seemed quite as usual. The reader obligingly finished, fairly smoothly, and I got up to announce my own student, Katie Bell, whose paper I was planning to see in any case.

  Several things happened at once. As I announced Katie’s name and her paper title, I heard a roar of laughter from the session right next door to us. That meant that they were running over, but it also meant that my little surprise for Carla had been discovered, just about on time. I also noticed that Katie kept looking around, disappointment evident on her features. As she fiddled with her scrunchie, which was too big for the ponytail it held, I realized that she hoped that Garrison would appear in time for her paper. I couldn’t tell her that wasn’t going to happen, but I did give an extra flourish to my introduction, which brought a smile to her long narrow face.

  I don’t know why I should have been nervous for Katie, except that she was young, just a senior, and this was her first paper. All on her own, she was showing enough nervous energy to power a small factory, but I had vetted her paper at her request, made some suggestions, and she swore that she’d practiced reading it out loud to her roommates. It was good experience, and I didn’t think it would do her any harm, but she was high-strung as a new tightrope and as jittery as the first person to try it out. I guess I just felt for her.

  She started off okay—she’d managed to clear her throat away from the mike and didn’t go three octaves higher than her normal voice—and was actually doing well reading the paper, which was on the smoking pipes from the Fort Providence assemblages. I actually found myself leaning forward, eager to hear her next words about a site I’d researched and excavated myself, until she went disastrously off script.

  She lost her place, which led to several seconds of stuttering. Then she took a deep breath and a drink of water, just like I’d told her to do if she got hung up somewhere. Then, for some reason, she started talking about the slide that was showing a preliminary overview of the site with the location of the units superimposed over it. She was starting to repeat what she’d already said at the beginning, and worse, seemed to be spiraling downward into needless detail. I sat on my hands and tried to find the right moment to correct her course, biting my lip in anxious sympathy.

  “—and the crew used trowels—not the roundy, gardening kind, but flat mason’s trowels—to dig. They followed the existing stratigraphy, the layers of soil that were deposited by wind, water, or human landscaping, until they hit the glacially deposited sand, which meant there would be no human artifacts below that, because there were no people around here before the glaciers. As far as we know.”

  Aw, hell, Katie, I thought, you don’t need to go into this basic stuff, not with this crowd. Grandma doesn’t like being taught how to suck eggs. I considered clearing my throat, trying to get her to go back to her discussion of the site and the goodies, but imagined it would throw her off balance even more, and then she’d be explaining about how the Europeans had actually started regularly visiting this side of the ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but that the Indians had been here a good long stretch before that.

  Her extemporaneous ramblings seemed to peter out and she faltered, looking around the darkened room nervously. She caught my eye and I just about strained something, simultaneously trying to look reassuring, urge her on, and indicate that she should get
back to the substance of her paper. She nodded, found her place, and began to read again, moving through the text smoothly, once in a while looking out to the audience, and pausing occasionally to point out something in one of her slides. She didn’t go too fast, she read the paper as if she was familiar with its contents, and she remembered to breathe normally. I began to relax as she did, and found myself nodding as she hit the right beats about the pottery and the military artifacts. When she showed the slide of the tiny early pipe-bowl fragment, which was our present pride and joy, unearthed during the last field season, there was an appreciative murmur through the crowd that made her flush with pride.

  At last she finished, just a minute ahead of schedule.

  “Thanks, Katie, well done,” I said.

  Katie’d done a good job overall, but she again looked like a deer in the headlights. For an instant, I thought she was going to stay frozen up there as the polite clapping for her petered out; I moved to announce the final speaker, thinking I would have to nudge her back to her seat, when a louder ovation, more raucous than the rest of the audience, came from the back of the room. I peered through the lights and saw a cadre of graduate students, led by Meg Garrity, standing at the back, clapping and shouting for Katie. She flushed and smiled, collected up her paper and her water, and ducked her head, giving them an embarrassed little hand flick as she found her way back to her seat.

  “Our last speaker, Michelle Lima, will be presenting her paper entitled ‘English and Dutch Pipes in the Mid-Atlantic Colonies Before Seventeen Fifty.’ Michelle?”

  Michelle was right on cue, coming up the stairs as I was going down. I stopped to let her pass, and she leaned over to speak in my ear.

  “You going to be at the Grope later, honeycakes?” she whispered.

  “But of course, my darling Misha-lima. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “And it wouldn’t be a party without you.” She got to the lectern and in a much different, fully professional voice, said, “Thank you, Emma,” and began her paper.

  After the questions at the end of the session, I found Katie out in the hallway, and congratulated her, moving her out of the crowd intent on finding their ways to the next papers. “That was great! And look, you were able to walk away! Very far from what you were predicting back on campus.”

  She twisted her presentation pages into a tube. “I got nervous. Could you tell? I just lost my place for a minute, and then I started thinking about who was out there, listening to me, and I just started babbling. I looked like an idiot.”

  “Naw. I think people knew that you were a little nervous, but that’s okay, and you recovered really well, and that’s the name of the game, right? And then you finished up like a pro, so that was more than ninety percent that went smoother than silk.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She stuck the tube between her knees, trying to recapture the escaping scrunchie. “I was kinda disappointed that Professor Garrison didn’t show up. I really wanted to meet him, today. I mean, especially since I got into his session rather than the general one on pipe studies.”

  I thought, please don’t ask me to introduce you later, please don’t ask me to introduce you later, please don’t ask me—

  Katie hesitated, then looked up. “If we see him later, would you introduce me to him? I’d really like that, because I wanted to ask him about some of the stuff in his book on West Devon factories.”

  I really wanted to tell her, but I also wanted to respect Scott’s wishes about how he announced the news of Garrison’s death. “Look, he’s kind of hard to pin down sometimes. We’ll see what we can do, okay?”

  When I saw the eager look on her face, I couldn’t resist adding, “I wouldn’t get your hopes up, is all.”

  She nodded. “That’s okay, that’s fine. I gotta go, I wanted to catch another paper at twelve and I don’t want to be late.”

  “Okay, see you later, Katie.”

  She practically sprang away and loped off to her next session, her slide carousel left forgotten by the projector. I went to retrieve it, and found Meg waiting for me outside after.

  “Nice of you guys to come by to support Katie,” I said. “I think she really appreciated it.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s not a bad kid,” Meg replied. “And we all knew that she was wicked nervous. She kept going on and on about it, so Neal and I figured we’d let her get it out of her system and then get her good and drunk tonight.”

  Wicked? I thought. More of Neal’s New England speech patterns must be rubbing off on our transplanted Ms. Garrity than I imagined; although Meg had traveled all over as part of a military family, most of her accent seemed to have been developed in the western United States. “Of course, you’ve all taken into consideration that she is actually of legal drinking age? That she in fact imbibes?”

  “Katie? Oh God, yes. Why do you think the other undergrads call her ‘Sandbag’? Because the morning after a party is the one time that she isn’t rocketing around like a spaz.” She looked at me, conceding the point. “And she turned twenty-one over the Thanksgiving break.”

  Was spaz back into the common parlance? It never took more than a few moments with any of my students to plumb the exact depths of the generation gap that separated us.

  “She’s eager,” I said. “I’m sure you were exactly the same way, when you were younger.”

  Meg gave me a cool and long-practiced glance.

  I shrugged. “Okay, maybe you weren’t.”

  “Were you?”

  “I don’t know that I was as hyper as Katie, but I had a lot of practice in how to behave at conferences. Not everyone grows up with this coming to them like second nature, right? But the thing is I remember how Katie feels. Perhaps you can recall some similar—though not, of course, identically expressed—feeling?”

  Meg rolled her eyes. “Maybe.”

  I wasn’t letting her off the hook that easy. “And the great thing about being young and immature is that you eventually outgrow it, right?” I insisted.

  Meg snorted; apparently Katie was beyond hope of salvation. “If you’re lucky. Where are you off to now?”

  “Artifact Comparison Roundtable.”

  “Ah, well, maybe you’ll let me go next year? With the stuff from the second season at the Chandler house? Once we get it cleaned up.”

  “Sure, if you want to. I didn’t know you were so inclined.”

  “Can’t hurt.”

  Her career, she meant. “Okay, well just list anything we come across that is particularly nice or unidentifiable, and we’ll pull it for you next year.”

  “Good enough. See you later?”

  “Absolutely.”

  And my second student flew off. I found my way up to the room reserved for those of us who made it a point of getting together every year to show off our best stuff and try to identify the things that were seemingly unidentifiable. It eventually was formalized into the roundtable, limited to a dozen people or so, but we just always called it the Goody Grope. It was porn for archaeologists, a chance to touch the stuff, grok it in fullness, and maybe learn a little something new. The great thing was that, no matter what period you were interested in and no matter what artifacts were actually present, you ended up building up a pretty good awareness of who had what, and from what site.

  I glanced in the room before I got in there, and the good news was that for once, it was a good-sized space. I mean, you can sit there in the lobby or the bar and look at artifacts, but what you really want is a nice big table, plenty of chairs, light, and a bit of elbow room to pass the stuff around. The bad news was that Noreen McAllister was first in there, and she’d already seen me. Crapshitpoop.

  I raised a hand, not quite a wave, and walked in, grabbing the chair that was nearest the door and farthest from Noreen, who immediately pulled out a notebook and became engrossed in it. My watch told me that I was just a few minutes early, but other folks should have been here by now, shouldn’t they?

  “Pretty good paper
s so far,” I hazarded.

  “I thought they were better in Chicago,” she said, not looking up; her dark hair made a curtain between her face and sight of me.

  “Oh.” I pulled up my briefcase and rummaged around inside until I found the small box of goodies that I’d brought. “How was your summer?”

  “Rotten. Never made near the numbers for our field school, so we had to cancel it. Didn’t get a tenth of the work done I wanted to.”

  Little Miss Mary Sunshine. “Bad luck.”

  She grunted, and flipped a page of her notebook.

  I heard a rustling in the hall and looked up just in time to see Lissa look in and see that it was just the two of us. A look of horror crossed her face, and despite my pleading glance, she scurried right past the door and down the hallway. Thanks a lot, Lissa; see if I ever talk to you again, you wretch.

  Carla came in right after, and she was followed by Chris.

  “Hey, Carla, Chris,” I said, not about to let them get away. Carla hesitated by the door, but, God bless her, came through and sat down next to me. Chris, oblivious to it all, came in, said hi to me, and sat down heavily at the middle of the table.

  “How you doing, Noreen?” he said.

  “Hi, Chris!” She gave him the first smile I’d seen out of her, and she called him over to her end of the table. “I got something you might be interested in.”

  Fat chance, I thought. Slut.

  “Glad I got here when I did,” Carla whispered while she settled in. “I can call the trauma team ahead of time so that they can come in and clean up the gore before it hardens and sticks to the walls.”

  Carla rummaged through her bag and pulled out a couple of small, brown, acid-free boxes. “That’s disgusting,” I whispered back. “It’s not that bad.”

  “What channel are you watching? I’m just glad Chris was here to throw himself on the grenade.”

  “Chris is too nice a guy to realize he’s a diversion.”

  By this point, several others had come in, including Lissa, who strode in and took a neutral seat, smirking, her eyes bright with concealed merriment. I mouthed the word “bitch” to her, and she put her hand up to her throat in feigned surprise. She could barely conceal her giggling.