Oink

by J. L. Newton

  “Turn away from me,” Isobel had said and then she passed the wand down my back. I, being sensitive to energy work of any kind, felt something in me shift. Was it the smoke, the plant spirits, the care that Isobel expressed through this ritual, or Isobel’s own energy that made me feel suddenly clearer in mind and lighter in spirit than I’d been before? Maybe all of it combined.

  Frank had given a speech, wearing a corduroy jacket, a white shirt, and a bolo tie, his dark, gray-streaked hair tied back in a ponytail, his prominent nose as sharp as the edge of a carved stone. He’d welcomed guests to the reception and had launched into a meditation about the nature of community. He’d spoken about ecology as a way of thinking about life that brought together the sacred source of creation with plants, animals, human beings, and the light of the sun.

  “We do nothing by ourselves. We are part of a continuum extending outward from our consciousness, living in harmony with living things. Even rocks are living energy.” Frank paused and took the room in. It had grown quiet as he spoke. Although there was no central Native American doctrine, the Native way, as he had experienced it, was to live with gratitude and humility.

  “Humility and lack of arrogance are accompanied by a tendency toward simplicity of living, and that reinforces the ideal of concentrating on the ethical quality of one’s life as opposed to focusing on competition and amassing personal possessions.”

  Frank’s ecology, I reflected, seemed a more spiritual version of what Tess had called biodiversity. Both ways of thinking assumed the connectedness of all to all, both valued the smallest forms of life for what they contributed to the whole. Lorna’s emphasis on big departments and her threats about making small programs disappear represented a stark contrast in world-view. I liked to hear Frank talk. He made me feel more humble and yet more alive, more aware of the life around me. He touched something deep within me, reminded me of what was important. Now Frank looked at each quadrant of the room. It was ceremonial, not quite like church, which I’d attended as a child, but close.

  “We must see ourselves as part of the earth, not as an enemy from outside who tries to impose its will on it. We cannot hurt any part of the earth without hurting ourselves.” And then he’d cited Slow Buffalo, from a thousand years ago: “‘The sky is your father, the earth is your grandmother. Whatever grows in the earth is your mother. Always remember your grandmother is underneath your feet.’ The first thing an Indian learns is to love each other.”

  Could a man who talked like that poison anyone? Sitting in my office now, staring at the European elms outside my window, I couldn’t imagine it.

  * * *

  Home again that afternoon, I’d slipped into my study chair, a cup of decaf on my desk, the swimming pool—a common feature of Arborville’s sweltering backyards—reflecting blue-green light through the French doors, when a solid knock on the door and a determined ringing of the front bell cut through my solitude. I opened the front door curiously. No one knocked on my door unless they were trying to sell me something, often their own religion. Two female police officers stood outside in their blue uniforms, one tall, one short.

  “Are you Professor Addams?” the smaller of them asked. I nodded. “I’m Sergeant Gina Garcia,” she said, holding herself tightly. “Sergeant Dorothy Brown,” said the other who was broader and whose arms hung loosely at her sides. Her skin was the color of French espresso.

  “Can we come in? We’d like to ask you some questions,” Sergeant Brown said. Her uniform enlarged her already wide frame.

  “Sure. Please, come in and have a seat.” I led the women to the dining table that looked onto the pool, and the three of us seated ourselves delicately.

  Sergeant Brown removed her hat, revealing a close cap of gray hair, while I perched uneasily on my chair. I hadn’t planned to call the police until later that afternoon, needing time to figure out what I would say. Would it look bad that I hadn’t called sooner? I knew it would, and Sergeant Garcia, with her thin face and dark hair pulled tightly under her cap, looked severe.

  “We want to ask you about a reception you attended on Sunday evening,” Sergeant Brown said.

  “Yes, it was the Native American welcome reception. I was there.” Having delayed my call, I was determined now to be as forthright as possible.

  “And had you done some baking for the reception?”

  “I’d made corn bread with caramelized onions and goat cheese.”

  Dorothy’s square face took on a sudden nostalgic look.

  “I’ve never had it like that,” she said. “It sounds good.”

  “Me neither,” Gina said, removing her own hat. “I’ve had it with jalapeños.”

  She was so petite that her uniform might have come from the boy’s department. Good, I thought. They both like food. But would that help? I couldn’t tell.

  “My mother used to make the best corn bread,” Dorothy continued. “She’d put some butter in a skillet and get it all hot, then pour the batter in and put the skillet in the oven. That skillet gave it a nice crust.” Dorothy looked for a moment at the pool outside, her substantial hands lying on the table before her. They seemed like capable hands, hands used to taking care of business. I imagined Dorothy at a stove, stirring something in a pot, her high-cheekboned face, with a faraway look, pointed toward a window. But really, I caught myself, is this what we should be doing, day-dreaming about cooking?

  “Did you eat the corn bread?” Gina asked, with a sharp look for Dorothy.

  “Yes, I did and so did a colleague of mine.”

  “And you had no bad side effects?”

  “No, none, and if there’s something wrong with food, I always get sick. I don’t have a great stomach. My colleague was fine too.”

  “What did you put into it?” Gina was about to write in a small notebook.

  “Cornmeal, baking powder, flour, buttermilk, honey, eggs, corn, the onions, and goat cheese.”

  “Was this cornmeal you had at home?” I nodded. “And you’d baked with it before and you were fine?”

  “Yes, there was nothing bad about the cornmeal that I know.”

  “Is there any way someone could have put something into the corn bread without your knowing it?” Gina’s pen hovered above the notebook.

  “I left the reception early and I took my platter and left the rest of the bread on paper plates. So I guess someone could have taken it away after I was gone.” I turned my palms up on the table. The idea that someone at this reception, in particular, could have turned my corn bread into a weapon was disturbing. Who’d been there? Frank, Isobel, Antonio Conti, the director of the program, other faculty I knew well, and a young half-Native, half-Chicano professor I’d met at the GMO panel. There’d been graduate and undergraduate students as well, many of them white. And then the staff.

  “Do you remember who was at the reception?” Dorothy asked.

  “Colleagues and staff I know, but plenty that I didn’t. I imagine Frank Walker has a better idea than I have. I assume it was you who talked to him.”

  Dorothy and Gina sat silent.

  “We can’t comment on that,” Gina said. “Did you know Professor Elliott?”

  “I’d met him once.”

  “Do you know anyone who might want to harm him?”

  “Not really.”

  Then Gina asked me where I’d gone after the reception and where I had spent the early morning hours.

  “I drove straight home and was asleep by eleven and up again by eight the next morning.” My schedule was boringly predictable.

  “We’d like to search your kitchen. If you’d sign this agreement for us to do so, it will save time and we won’t have to get a search warrant.”

  Search the kitchen? This was getting serious. But I nodded and signed. I couldn’t imagine them finding anything suspicious in my kitchen. And wasn’t cooperating with the police, in this case, the best thing to do?

  “We’ll need to take the cornmeal, the platter, and the pan and any other
ingredients you have left over,” Gina continued.

  I found the platter, pan, cornmeal, baking soda, flour, and honey.

  “I’m afraid I used all the goat cheese, onions, buttermilk, and corn.”

  “Thanks,” Dorothy said. “I’m afraid we’ll still have to search.” The two women put on latex gloves and began methodically opening and closing the white cabinets and drawers with soft clacks. Then they searched my garbage can, taking out some wrappers and sealing them in plastic bags. This was the kind of thing I’d seen on television crime shows. It felt unreal, even dreamlike, but in a nightmare sort of way, to see two strangers going through my kitchen.

  I took some comfort in the fact that my spices were lined up in alphabetical order, the glasses, plates, and silverware stacked neatly in cupboards and drawers, the kitchen utensils corralled in a turquoise crock. Even the garbage can had not yet developed a sour smell. Surely, this spoke well of my character. And at least, the police had sent two people who seemed respectful of the space, seemed to understand that searching a woman’s kitchen was an act of intimacy that required a delicate touch. Would other officers, male officers perhaps, have felt that kind of empathy? Would Wilmer? I’d not been thinking about Wilmer much. There was a lot going on.

  “Thanks for your help,” Dorothy said, when they were finished. The two women removed their gloves. “We may be back, and if you think of anyone who would want to harm Professor Elliott, please let us know.”

  “I will, but do you know for certain that it was my corn bread that was found in Peter’s hand?”

  “No, we won’t have the lab results for several days, but now that you’ve given us the ingredients we’ll let the lab know what to look for.” Gina and Dorothy exited the door.

  Geez, I thought, this could cure me of bringing food to gatherings. Now I and everyone else at the reception was a potential suspect. Had any baking project ever gone so wrong? But was it my corn bread? Maybe Wilmer and Isobel were right. Lots of people made corn bread, and it was easy to buy. I’d seen a bakery table with corn bread on it in the farmer’s market just last week.

  Southern Corn Bread

  ½ stick butter

  ¾ cup yellow corn meal

  ¾ cup general all-purpose flour

  1 tablespoon baking powder

  ½ teaspoon sea salt

  ½ cup sugar

  1 egg

  ¼ cup milk

  Put a cast iron skillet in a cold oven and preheat to 350°F. Once the oven is at the right temperature, put the butter in the hot skillet and return it to the oven.

  In a large bowl, whisk together your dry ingredients (cornmeal, sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt). In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and milk until fully incorporated.

  Make a well in the center of your dry ingredients and pour your wet ingredients in and mix with a rubber spatula. Do not overmix. Lumps are fine. Add most of the hot butter to the mixture and mix a bit more. Again, do not overmix.

  Pour the mixture into the hot skillet and bake for about 20–30 minutes, until nicely browned and a toothpick inserted into the cornbread comes out mostly dry with some damp crumbs.

  Recipe by kind permission of Mattie Smith Nettles.

  Chapter 4

  Haven Hall was a graceful, buff-colored building with a red tile roof and large windows that actually opened—it had been built in the 1920s before university buildings had been designed to hermetically seal in their occupants. I loved its spaciousness and its light and the fact that it housed women’s, American, and the four ethnic studies programs. Some of the programs’ offices were mixed together, and the place seemed less like a worksite than like a neighborhood, where people gathered together in the halls, visited each other’s offices, and sometimes met in the women’s bathroom to discuss important strategies.

  The main staircase, however, had an acrophobia-inducing well that extended from the third to the bottom floor, and I tried not to look down it at the floor below. Once, in Colorado’s Mesa Verde Park, Solomon and I had sat with a tour group on a ledge that overlooked a deep canyon. I couldn’t see the canyon from my position on the ledge, where I had planted myself against a rough rock wall, but I’d known it was there, and I’d grown so faint that I’d had to grip Solomon’s arm to stave off the sensation of plunging into distant crevasses below. Climbing the stairs this morning, I kept my eyes directly in front of me.

  At the top of the staircase, doors opened to a conference room that was shared by all the programs in the building. A long rectangle with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of the tops of bushy trees, it was my favorite place to meet, like being in a canopy, a refuge within the refuge that Haven Hall itself provided. Despite the light and greenery, however, the mood of the meeting would be tense. Faculty from the ethnic, American, and women’s studies programs were coming together to respond to Lorna’s threats, only three days ago, about cutting our funding or possibly merging us into English or Sociology. Given what I’d heard about the gender troubles in one department and the turf wars in the other, the choices felt bleak. Which was better? Falling from a cliff or tumbling down a well?

  Since the director, Antonio Conti, was away, Isobel took the floor as soon as we’d settled in.

  “It’s their old corporate trick. For years they’ve tried to collapse the ethnic studies programs into a single unit, which would have allowed them to cut staff positions, double the workload of the remaining staff, and reallocate the money to the sciences. The new tactic is to scatter us between Social Sciences and Humanities, starve us, merge us into a larger department, fire our staff, and then watch us disappear. That we’re mainly white women and women and men of color only makes it easier to justify their policies. They’re used to regarding us as marginal.”

  “We should consider some kind of unification,” Alma called out. “Why not become a separate division of Ethnic, Women’s, and American Studies?”

  “Excellent thought,” the director of Asian American said.

  “We could ask for our own dean,” I added. Where was this going?

  Isobel, striking in a purple T-shirt and long black skirt, moved like a dancer to the board.

  “Why don’t we list the things we all want for our programs.”

  Something new was in the air. None of the programs had ever contemplated uniting.

  “To get support for our programs and research units.”

  “To turn out students who are human beings, who can think critically, and who want to change the world.”

  “Not to be competitive with each other, to have community.”

  One by one everyone in the room was enlarging the list as Isobel’s chalk tap-tapped against the board.

  I was taking notes as fast as I could. I, along with Alma, Isobel, Frank, and the directors of the American and the ethnic studies programs, had worked hard toward bringing our faculty together. We’d tried to build relationships by showing up at each other’s lectures and conferences, having coffee together, dropping by each other’s offices, talking out conflict, and enjoying each other’s company at my large off-campus buffets. Being part of this community-building effort was important to me politically, but it had also helped fill the void that had been left by Miriam’s death. The community itself, indeed, had supplied a sense of home that was continually being disrupted in the domestic space I shared with Solomon. It was comforting that a community could feel so much like family, and, for political and deeply personal reasons both, I was devoted to its survival.

  Still, I’d never imagined a moment like this. Each of our units would retain its separate identity, but we’d change our informal circle into a formal structure. It was more than I’d ever hoped for. I remembered an angry moment earlier in our days when a volatile professor of Native American Studies and an equally volatile professor in Chicana/o Studies had gotten into an argument and suddenly jumped from their seats, as if about to come to blows. We’d come a long way from eruptions such as those.

  “Isobel,
” Alma said, “why don’t you write up a proposal for our becoming a separate division? Then we can meet again and go over it.” Time was short. The reorganization of Letters and Sciences was going forward, and the deadline for responses to the administration’s plan was a little more than a week away. We had to move quickly or our fates would be decided for us—by Vice Provost Vogle.

  “How about an evening meeting?” Isobel suggested.

  “I’ll volunteer my house,” I said. I’d noticed that everyone felt freer and bolder when meetings were held off campus.

  * * *

  I stayed in my office that evening e-mailing about the faculty’s winter schedules, though I usually avoided working after hours in Haven Hall. It was isolated at night on the upper floors, and because of the computer lab on the first, the main doors were left unlocked. Anyone could walk the halls at night, which gave late-working staff the creeps, and the place was poorly illuminated as well. But this was the night of the fall reception for the Latina Council, and there was no point in going home and then driving back. Since Alma was in her office just around the corner, I had her company and, later, we could walk over together to the Deadly Planet, where Isobel had somehow convinced the administration to give her a series of rooms for the council’s offices. Isobel could be very persuasive.

  I’d had coffee with Alma two weeks after I’d moved to Arborville. Hired to develop the Women’s Studies program, I’d taken seriously the criticism by women of color that women’s studies was too white and middle-class and had promised myself not to let that happen at Arbor State. From the beginning, I’d devoted my energies, and much of my heart, to creating a program that was half white, half women of color and to consolidating ties among the women’s and the ethnic studies programs. From the start, Alma had been welcoming and more. She’d been ready to be friends and had helped me organize a series of lectures on different kinds of feminisms that had made a strong beginning for our community-building work. That was another thing I liked about Alma. She was always ready to join forces.