by Kluge, P. F.
We left the edge of the lawn and took the path that cut through the fields, curved towards the river, passed the trestle and cut in towards the ruined barn. The same barn where I’d found the hanged student and where Tom had found me. Where he was waiting for me now. He hadn’t hanged himself. I thanked him for that. He was sitting against an old stall, the gun in his hand, shot through the heart, not the head. In the end, he made it easy for me.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said, on my knees in front of him, taking the gun out of his hand.
“You shouldn’t touch that,” Lisa said behind me. “The sheriff...”
“The sheriff doesn’t come into this,” I said. “Besides. It’s my gun now.”
I carried him to the edge of the field, right where the woods began, went back to the house for a shovel. It was dark and we were out of sight of the road. No one comes onto our property, after hunting season. So there was time to dig.
“I don’t feel so good right now,” I said before I started. “He loved me, he raised me...”
“He killed four people.”
“No,” I said, forcing the shovel into the ground. “Five.”
“Okay,” Lisa said.
“No one’s gonna know about this. They’ll blame him anyway, after they notice he’s missing. The blame, the credit, whatever. But they won’t get him. They’ll never know for sure.”
It takes time to dig a decent grave but I got as far into it as I could. “Turn your body into a machine,” Tom used to say. A grave digging machine. Dig, dig, dig, don’t think. Don’t feel. Put him into the hole, don’t think, toss that first handful of soil, aiming away from his face, pick up the shovel cover him with dirt, cover the dirt with leaves and branches. Then stand back and study what you made, wait for winter, wait for snow and rain and time to swallow a corpse and build a legend, right up there with Harry Stribling and Hiram Wright and Johnny Appleseed.
“This is how it’s gonna be,” I said. I had Tom’s Smith and Wesson inside the bookstore bag with the college seal. “He’s out there, damn it. Out in the world. He got away, you understand? Took right off. Could be in these woods or Las Vegas or Key West or up in Alaska, maybe, running a fishing camp and taking folks on trips and teaching kids how to cast and shoot and pitch a tent and...” I was crying, not the way you cry when it’s a sad occasion and tears are expected so you talk yourself into it and squeeze out some tears, like an actor on camera, crying on cue. Really crying. “Most of my memories of this man,” I said to Lisa, “are going to be good.”
Me in Tom’s truck, Lisa in mine, we drove to Sunbury, the exit on the interstate between Cleveland and Columbus, and parked his pick-up at a truck stop. Then we drove home, went to bed, I lay there with my eyes wide open, just trying to sort it all out. Sometimes you know too much, sometimes you know too little, you never get it exactly right. Sometimes you know more than you think you do. But that came later.
Part Four
Second Semester
Chapter XIII
MARK MAY
Warren Niles’ appointment of Hiram Wright as provost was a public relations gesture. That’s what they said, the faculty gang that gossiped at the post office. The old duffer was our new poster-boy, gallant defender of the liberal arts. He showed up on news shows during the murders, was interviewed on Nightline when the college closed, had Good Morning America down to his cabin, where students sat on his porch while river people guarded the property. Hiram’s Bullet-Proof Symposium they called it, and the nation cheered. Just lately, he’d made the cover of Modern Maturity magazine. There was some grousing from the Hartley Fuller types that there hadn’t been a national search but, come on, what kind of job posting would you put in The Chronicle of Higher Education? “Respected college, now closed as a result of unsolved serial murders, seeks provost to preside over empty campus, shredded faculty, uncertain future.” Who’d apply for a job like that? G. Gordon Liddy? So Hiram Wright wasn’t a real provost, he wasn’t even a caretaker. He was there to turn out the lights or, considering his age, blow out the candle.
Then he started doing things that were hard to believe. E-mails started showing up, e-mails from a man who never learned to use an electric typewriter. Long, crafty messages which described a reorganization of the faculty, the curriculum, the entire college. The faculty was scattered, half of them someplace else and the others selling houses and setting up job interviews. The most they could manage was a committee to bargain for furloughs and, when it came time, severance. The college might not have students, they contended, but it had an endowment, it had assets and it owed its professors support—we’re talking pay, plane tickets, travel expenses. This was supposed to be a closing, not a lockout! So at first, Wright’s position papers didn’t draw much of a response. People were busy doing other stuff and anyway, his plans would never be implemented, not here, not anywhere. “What’s sadder,” Hartley Fuller was heard to wonder, “than an old man’s wet dream?”
That was the trick, though. The fact that the college was moribund gave Wright his chance. He got away with—I’m just saying what other people said, when they cottoned to what was going on—he got away with murder. The faculty ignored him at first, derided him later. But other people noticed—some of the journalists who’d been to campus, network parachutists and feature writers and eventually, education editors. Soon, Wright’s messages were showing up on op-ed pages, getting quoted on talk shows, inserted into the Congressional Record.
Wright’s Modest Proposals, as they came to be known, are soon to be published as a book. I only summarize. He raised faculty salaries by half, across the board. And all but eliminated tenure. There’d be one or two tenured professors in each department, one of whom would serve as chair, an appointment without limit. Other professors would be on contract, one or two years to start, up to seven years later on. Who decided about that? The administration, basically the president, the provost, the department chair. This, Wright admitted, was a command structure and so be it. Faculty committees were dismantled. A professor’s job was to profess. And professors—the nature of their work, the course of their careers—were his next subject. Or target.
Before the murders, the college consisted of big departments that offered a smorgasbord of courses—“richly articulated” was their self description—and little departments, service departments that lived off introductory courses and struggled to attract majors for advanced courses. Also, there were interdepartmental programs, concentrations, mix-and-match synoptic majors. Wright attacked the small departments first. Some he enlarged and others he folded into larger departments. “I oppose the Balkanization of the curriculum and of the faculty,” he said. “We must contend with each other. Let the wearers of dashikis confront tweed coats and rep ties, let sandals and Birkenstocks, Hush Puppies and wingtips walk together. Let there be an end to territoriality, separation, an end to distance and diffidence masquerading as diversity.” At first sight, the big departments looked like winners. But keep reading. All departments were obliged to offer agreed upon and relatively uniform introductory and survey courses, those grueling and, if you taught them year in and year out, repetitive basics. No one was exempt from this, not the senior professor with an endowed chair, not the heavily recruited grad school whiz kid who pined to teach the latest scholarly dance steps to students who hadn’t learned to walk yet.
It got interesting, at least to me. Wright was touching things that smart people had talked about forever, addressing questions that were thought to be insoluble or, at least, insoluble by us. Grade inflation. Lots of people regretted it. But who was going to be the first to beat up on the kids in his or her classroom? These likeable kids, why should they be the first victims of reform? Why should this college be the first to put its ass on the line when everybody knew—hint, hint, nudge, nudge—that the problem was just as bad, maybe worse, at places more highly regarded, more deeply endowed? But Wright didn’t buy that. “Let us confront this problem where it occurs, our own small
patch. Looking ahead or behind, gesturing left and right, implying that all vices originate elsewhere, all virtues are local, is self-serving sophistry. Let us deal with the campus we see every day. Let us contend with what we see in the mirror.”
His broadside on scholarship and teaching, a constant tension in a college like ours, drew the most notice. To its credit, the college always insisted on superior teaching as a sine qua non: if you couldn’t deliver in the classroom, you couldn’t stay. Some professors would have been happy to leave it at that. But there was a countervailing force, especially among younger faculty, who wanted to make a name in their field, who traded in articles, conferences, papers, panels, encyclopedia entries. Teaching enriches research, research enriches teaching, that was the mantra that accompanied requests for reduced teaching loads, release time, pre-tenure sabbaticals. That was what they were up to: the name they made in “the profession” mattered more than the professing they did at college. Or, as My Provost, My Wife put it, “it’s the wine, not the winery.” Along came Wright. “A commitment to teaching and research can be admirable,” he wrote. “But either one can be the refuge of a failure. Forced to choose between teaching and research, I choose the former. The students’ interests demand no less. We are a college, not a research university—more a conservatory than a laboratory. Happily, for us, we aren’t obliged to choose between teaching and research. We shall have both. We have had both in the past and will again. I offer current and future faculty the same terms of employment Harry Stribling enjoyed. I invite great teachers to come here. We will know them when we see them and if they are great, truly great, they shall stay. Greatness in scholarship, research, creative work we shall also have. We will recognize it as well, when we see it. I said greatness. Greatness of the kind that resonates beyond this hill, that resides in publications, public recognition, that comes to rest between hard covers. Scholarly articles, conference papers, letters to the editor may be a prelude to greatness, one hopes, but greatness does not reside in them.”
That got Wright on Nightline. Hiram sat on River Road, Ted Koppel was at his desk in New York, and a frighteningly smart English professor, Michael Pike, was in his office at Duke. Pike took the offensive. He accused Wright of mounting “a romantic, reactionary putsch.” He was more than ready for Wright. “Far from rescuing a college, Wright is embalming it, dismantling governance, disenfranchising faculty, disregarding research, disregarding developments in academe and the requirements of the marketplace. He proposes returning curricular structure to hidebound, straight-line patterns more appropriate to a military academy than a liberal arts college. He ought to be ashamed of himself.”
“Pike’s Pique,” Time magazine called it. But that was the sub-headline. “Hiram’s Right” was at the top of the page. You should have seen him respond to Pike’s accusation that he was “a Gauleiter of the Great Books,” that he was returning the college to dead white males, that he was reprising Matthew Arnold’s moldy definition of literature as “the very best that has been thought or said,” dusting off a list of texts that Matthew Arnold himself would surely recognize because you could count on Wright’s not including anything that had been written since Arnold’s death more than a century ago.
“Please, sir,” Wright said, erupting in laughter, just chuckling to beat the band and everybody had to wait for him to collect himself. “Alright. Very good! Let me say a few words. Won’t take a moment. All of this comes down to books, doesn’t it? The books one requires, recommends, neglects. It comes down to hard choices. But has anyone heard me prescribe what books should or should not be taught? Have I banned a single book? Or required one? I think not. All I require is focus, perspective, order. Mr. Pike teaches the latest things first, what happens now, his own personal Cuisinart, described as cutting edge. I teach first things first and move on from there. As to specific titles, I’d be happy to teach a course, co-teach a course, with Mr. Pike someday, a course in literature or history. I ask to be permitted to choose half, no more than half, the texts and I accord him the same right. And I am content to let our students decide about what they got and what they needed.”
“Everyone knows that student evaluations...”
“Let me finish. The century which Mr. Pike accuses me of neglecting comes at the end of twenty other centuries. I do not neglect our times but I insist they be studied in connection with the past. Mr. Pike speaks for now. I speak for then and now. He trades in waves. I consider the ocean. I dive, possibly I drown, I sail in the ocean of time. He...surfs.”
That probably was the height of the media attention. Lots of professors at other places screamed in pain. They saw a threat. The joke was that, if this place needed to be finished off a second time, and Hiram Wright along with it, they could recruit volunteers at the December meeting of the Modern Language Association, just put a sign-up sheet on a table in the lobby. But outside of academe, Wright sailed. At the moment of its death, The New York Times said, our college’s last offering was a road map to the future. The only question, sadly undecided, was whether bigger places with lesser men would have the fortitude to follow Hiram Wright.
What turned out to be Wright’s last epistle didn’t resonate the way the others did. It wasn’t meant to. Wright was first and last a local hero, at least that’s how I think he saw himself. If he’d stayed at Rutgers, then gone on to Stanford or Berkeley, he might have turned out like Michael Pike. But he’d come here and it changed him, like it was changing me. So he saved his finale for the community. Even as the place was emptying out, and the place became known for the classiest yard sales in Ohio, even then he came up with an essay called “The College Community.”
“There’s no way of knowing what might have become of me, if I hadn’t come here,” he began. During the early years he chafed, like people still do, missing all the things that weren’t here. We all had our lists. But then he realized that he wanted to stay, stay in a good place he could make better, a good place—as he had come to see recently—that he could save from getting worse. Place? What did that mean? A location? A dot on the map? Here, not there? No. A college community, where people lived and taught and learned together. Not a university, a college; not a city, a village. Getting to this place had been an accomplishment, staying was a challenge. Before long, he believed that no matter where in the world he went and was honored, this was what mattered. So it had distressed him to see his place changing, apologizing for its limitations, departing from its mission. He aimed to restore the college and the community to its rightful function. The essence of the community was that people lived there. To that end he was reimposing the long dead residence rule that obliged college employees to live within a certain distance of the campus, a distance that was measured from the flagpole in front of the village post office. Once, the prescribed distance was three miles, then seven, then ten. Wright chose twelve: “We draw a larger circle,” he said, “and let that circle be unbroken.” Surprisingly, he endorsed Averill Hayes’ controversial Senior Years development, provided that faculty housing be included as part of the project, some of which would be located in the Stribling Tract.
What about the students? If faculty presence was required, surely student attendance wasn’t too much to ask for. Or require. Attendance at classes was henceforth to be enforced throughout the college: three unexcused absences permitted, the fourth resulting in expulsion. Student attendance would be further encouraged by his decision to end all study abroad programs and close the off-campus studies office. No more junior year vacations. Furthermore, Wright restored Saturday classes, a casualty of the sixties. It would be a miracle if he pulled that one off, I thought. That’s when lots of people were sure he was mad.
“Fantasyland,” I heard. Another conversation at the post office. It was the only place people met each other anymore. It was crazy, Hartley Fuller said, preaching community values in a ghost town, extending classes on an empty campus. It was delusional. Raising salaries he’d never have to pay. Still, it was al
l hypothetical, so much singing in the shower, poignant, if you liked what you were hearing, pathetic if you didn’t. So that was that. But then the faculty started getting phone calls. Would you believe it? One by one he was calling them into his office. Some, of course, had left. Others blew him off. “Fuhrerbunker fantasy,” Fuller said. “Phantom armies. Secret weapons. Madness.” Still, when Wright called, I came.
“Sit down, Mr. May,” he said. “Thank you for coming. Give me a moment.” There he sat, where My Wife, My Provost used to sit, same desk, same office, though Caroline’s furnishings were on their way to California. Still, she’d left my dossier behind and Wright took his time reviewing it.
“Stark and Plimpton,” he remarked. “You had them both I see.”
“Great kids,” I said. “I guess they’re part of the reason I’m here.”
“I see,” he said, in a way that didn’t invite me to proceed. He kept reading. Then he threw the dossier back on the desk, looked at me hard and all of a sudden laughed.
“‘Pandering to sickos,’” he cried. “‘the milk from contented cows!’ ‘That combination of country club living and easy grading gets them every time.’ Are those accurate quotes? You really said those things? In a meeting of prospective students?”
“That was my first year, Mr. Wright. I was a bad boy.”
“A very bad boy. A very boyish boy. Have you grown up at all since then?”
“Yes.”
“I had wondered...” He glanced back at the file. “...what it was like being married to a provost.”
“That’s over,” I said.
“How’s that, sir?”
“Well, Caroline’s not provost here anymore, as you know. She’s also not my wife. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“I’d heard,” he said. I should have known. In a town like this, which I proposed to love, a secret was something you told one person at a time. The thing, though, was I hadn’t told anyone. The culture of gossip was so fertile here, you didn’t need a seed to grow a rumor.
