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Oink

Page 6

by J. L. Newton


  “They aren’t going to go for this,” the director of African American Studies said. He was given to pessimism, which while frustrating at times, I also knew to be well earned.

  “Let’s have a fallback position, then, a bottom line.” Alma darted her dark eyes around the room. She sometimes found her colleagues less daring than she’d have liked. “If we can’t become a separate division, let’s say we want to be a named unit within the Division of Humanities. That way we won’t be in competition with each other and the administration won’t be able to play us off each other the way they like to do.” Alma took some corn chips and laid them on her plate like exclamation marks. The director of American Studies put even more on his.

  We were meeting at my home, and I’d served us homemade corn chips and guacamole. The chips were thick, salty, smelling freshly of corn—much more of a mouthful than chips from a bag. But for the first time in my life I’d paused before serving my guests food. Although the police had yet to announce that corn bread had been the vehicle for Peter’s poisoning, informal news of my baking had spread across the Haven Hall community in just seven days. I wondered how long it would take before colleagues I didn’t know so well started looking at me funny. Just the other day, indeed, the chair of the English Department had turned his basset-hound eyes in my direction and had given me an assessing look. Had he been considering me as a future, and potentially disruptive, member of his fiefdom? Had my hair been unusually limp and frizzy that afternoon? Or was he trying to decide if I was skilled in the art of poisoning? It was impossible to tell.

  Even Alma had joked. “I’m eating these chips to show my faith in Emily and because they’re really good.”

  I’d given her a grateful glance. But there’d been no time to discuss the Peter Elliott affair. The business at hand had been too pressing.

  Isobel revised and then reread the document while standing at one side of the fireplace, where a blaze leapt invitingly. The temperature that day had climbed to eighty-six degrees, but the breeze from the local waterways had cooled the evening air, making a fire an appealing possibility. I liked the way fire drew a group together around its warmth, evoking ancestral memories of a distant time when heat, light, and community were necessary for survival, for protection, for keeping the dark at bay. The fire, like the food, seemed to give us all a feeling of confidence and connection, deepening our sense of common cause.

  Our dismal meeting with Lorna, only one week ago, had brought us closer to each other, and, now, our programs were formally resisting the higher administration, defying its threats to cut our funding or fold our programs into giant departments where we would dissipate and dissolve. How would the guys at the top respond to our petition? Or, more to the point, what would they have Vice Provost Lorna Vogle do? Life was going to get interesting, or perhaps interesting was not the word.

  * * *

  The next morning I was eager to talk with Helena White, one of my closest friends in Women’s Studies and a professor in the Department of Textiles. We had plans to take a walk together and then attend a meeting of women who were trying to improve conditions for females in the sciences on campus. Our ties to Women’s Studies made such collaborations a matter of course, and being in Textiles, which was located in the College of Agriculture, brought Helena into regular contact with women scientists.

  Taking a shortcut on my way to Textiles, I walked through the plaza in front of the Language Building—a looming nine-story pillar of precast concrete with a long tube of greenish glass attached to its front side. Why did so many of the buildings on campus look like science experiments? As I passed one of the benches in the courtyard, where a pair of students sat idly chatting, I noticed a copy of the Arborville Courier and saw its headline: POLICE SEEK UNKNOWN MAN. A man with a full beard and unruly hair, dressed in long brown pants and a faded red sweatshirt, was wanted for questioning. A witness had placed him near the Hog Barn in the early morning of October 11 when Peter Elliott was found. Long hair and a beard? Was he one of the vandals who had trampled the cornfields only weeks before? I realized that I didn’t know what participants in Save the Fields looked like—and neither did anyone else. They worked at night and then, seemingly without a trace, they disappeared. And at any rate, why would long hair and a beard signify vandal, especially on a college campus? I wondered if Save the Fields was even involved in Peter’s poisoning. The note they’d left had hinted at physical harm, but would they have used corn bread—corn bread, really?—to achieve it? Talk about a strange and unwieldy weapon. I tried to imagine how they would have gotten Peter Elliott to eat it.

  The idea seemed ridiculous, and yet Peter was so well funded by Syndicon and was so openly invested in corporate ownership of GMOs that it would make perfect sense for him to have been an object of Save the Field’s wrath. I hadn’t liked what I’d heard from Peter on the panel in the spring, but an attempted murder of someone for his point of view was threatening to everyone on campus. It soiled the air we all breathed like fumes from some torrent of oil gushing and spraying out of a broken pipe. And now I was a suspect in the case, and my act of sharing food had drawn suspicion not only to myself but to a whole group of colleagues with whom I was close.

  And there was more to consider. Both Frank and I were persons of interest in the case, which hardly put our programs in a favorable light. Maybe our status as suspects would make Lorna feel even more justified in cutting our programs’ funding or merging us into departments where we would quietly fade into the night. I remembered my nightmare about the poisoned enchiladas and my colleagues’ deaths. I had responsibilities not just to myself and Women’s Studies but to my ethnic studies colleagues and their programs as well. I had to find out all I could about the attempted poisoning. My head was a hive of speculation about vandals, wives, and poisoned corn bread as I headed toward Helena’s office.

  * * *

  “Emily.” Helena smiled her widest smile as she opened her office door. Helena, who wrote on the cultural meanings of fashion, was wearing a smart black dress that she’d purchased while attending a fashion conference in Eastern Europe “Are you ready?” I looked forward to these walks with Helena. They were islands of pleasure in what often felt like a choppy sea of struggle.

  “Yes.” Helena picked up a red leather bag. “The arboretum?”

  The arboretum was the university’s botanical garden, which followed Indian Creek, a sometimes clear and sometimes muddy stream that meandered through the southern edge of campus. Paths on both sides of the creek cut through well-tended borders of native trees and bushes and, at one point, through hilly swaths of closely trimmed lawns. Helena and I were fond of walking there. As we strolled down the shaded walk that led to the administration building, I filled Helena in about the nightmare, my worries, and details about the case that she hadn’t heard of yet.

  “Do you know Peter Elliott?” I asked.

  “Oh yes.” Helena’s round, blue eyes widened. “He’s kind of a legend.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s a man of appetites. He knows what he wants and usually gets it. He’s done important work on corn that’s doubly resistant to pests and disease in some way, and he’s always well funded.” We’d reached the administration building, but instead of entering we turned left and walked along a woodsy trail to its left side.

  “Peter likes to think of himself as a gourmet. He eats a lot and drinks the best wines. But he dominates people and has a bad temper, and there’s always talk about his being sexually involved with some of his students. Nothing proven as far as I know but he has a bad rep.” Helena brushed at a vagrant strand of her corn silk hair, as if pushing the distasteful thought away.

  Great, I thought, just great. The number of Peter’s potential victims and, therefore, enemies had just multiplied.

  “There was a young woman at the Hog Barn,” I said, “when Peter was discovered. It seems she was really upset, more than most students would be about someone they only worked for.” I
glanced at the overarching trees sheltering the path. Arbor State really was full of arbors. “I wondered about it. Maybe she was connected to him in some amorous way.”

  “How did you know there was a woman at the Hog Barn?”

  “I met someone new in math. He’s the one who found Peter that morning.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “Taking photographs. He has an office at the Institute of Analytical Dynamics right next door.”

  “This is new.” Helena gave me a sly, inquiring look. “What’s he like?”

  “Smart, polite, good looking in an understated way. All we’ve done is have coffee. But I can tell you more after our date. We’re doing dinner and a movie tomorrow night.” I looked forward to having more to share. Ever warm and supportive, Helena made a congenial confidante.

  On the other side of the administration building, we passed through a wooden arbor draped in ivy and then walked down a grassy hill that led to a place where the creek formed a modest lake. There was a puddle in the middle of the lawn and a half dozen mallard ducks were gathered there drinking. Three ducks with iridescent green heads waddled up to us quacking for food. They were used to being fed, although it wasn’t good for them and posted signs warned visitors not to feed the wildlife. Both Helena and I laughed.

  “No, we’re not going to feed you,” Helena said. The sun glanced off the water, some ducks swimming in the lake left quiet ripples behind them, and knots of staff sat on benches quietly eating lunch. “I love the arboretum. There’s a sense of harmony here.”

  “Someone’s given it a lot of thought.” I stooped to read a sign that identified a wild-looking pink rose bush at the water’s edge. I liked how the signs gave plants a kind of dignity, inviting passersby to pause and take them in.

  Near the last bridge the arboretum path diverged, one part leading over the bridge past a gazebo to the other side of the creek, the other disappearing into a grove of redwoods. I saw a flicker of reddish shirt and bushy hair at a distance among the giant trees. A man in brown pants and a red sweatshirt was walking rapidly down the path in the opposite direction. I stopped and put a hand on Helena’s arm.

  “Stop. Did you see that man?”

  “No, where?”

  “Over there on the redwood path.” I pointed. “He’s gone. He looked like the man the police are searching for.”

  “I saw that story. Who do you think it could be?”

  “He looked homeless, kind of wild and unkempt. I wondered earlier if he were one of the vandals, though maybe that doesn’t make sense.”

  “Could Save the Fields be walking around campus?” Helena studied the redwood path nervously. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  I remembered the sense of shock that had torn through the College of Agriculture like a flash of lightning after the crops were ruined. Helena had felt it deeply.

  “They did leave a threatening note, and Tess Ryan was followed home the night before Peter was found. She’s usually unflappable, but it really unsettled her.”

  “It makes me so angry. Where does vandalism get us? And they tore up the wrong field at that and just at harvest. Now the graduate student who planted that cornfield has to start her project all over again. The damage they did cost her a year of work.”

  We walked gingerly to the edge of the redwoods and peered down the path. There was no sight of the man.

  “Let’s go down the path the other way,” Helena suggested, hugging herself as if staving off a shiver. We retraced our steps and headed west along the arboretum path until we reached two towering palm trees, some enormous yuccas, and a prickly pear cactus where white cabbage butterflies flickered in the sun, landed briefly on some bladderpod bushes, and then fluttered again, always in motion. It was a peaceful contrast to our unsettled state at the redwoods only minutes before, peaceful that is, until, between the cactus and the yuccas, an opening in the bushes brought something else disturbing into view.

  “Look at the water tower,” I said. “It makes me queasy just to be near it, but I can’t help staring.” The tower—a huge white metal dome with the name Arbor State painted on its side—sat astride four giant metal legs that were interlocked with a web of sturdy braces. At fifteen stories high, it was the tallest structure on campus and a well-known landmark of the university. I studied the tower now with morbid fascination. I was terrified of heights, but was always drawn to looking at whatever made me dizzy.

  A narrow white ladder hung on one of the tower’s back legs, and at the very top of the ladder a fenced-in catwalk skirted the gigantic cake-shaped dome. I imagined standing on that cat-walk, looking down, experiencing that sense of tingling dread that high places always induced in me. I stared at the tower intently for a moment, becoming a little faint. I hated the way it loomed over me, how—like the sudden appearance of the man in red—it disrupted the peacefulness of the walk, making me feel that Arbor State was not so sheltered a place as I liked to imagine it. Helena and I continued our progress, and I was relieved when the water tower passed out of view.

  “Should we turn back now?” I asked.

  “Perhaps we’d better.”

  It was time for the meeting with women scientists.

  * * *

  Women wearing plain-looking shirts and khakis, clearly scientific types, were filing into a classroom in the white-columned building devoted to chemistry. I saw the flame of Tess’s hair and Helena and I moved toward her.

  “Any news about Peter?” I asked.

  “I heard they questioned Juan Carlos Vega in Environmental Toxicology.” Tess grimaced.

  I remembered him from the GMO panel last spring, the young half-Chicano, half-Native American professor with a fine long nose and a black braid down the middle of his back. He’d been vehement about GMOs and had warned about the possibility that the modified seeds might migrate into Mexico and contaminate traditional Mexican crops.

  “Corn is our identity,” he’d said with passion, looking directly at Peter Elliott.

  Peter had merely stroked his skimpy mustache, his face impassive. Juan Carlos, too, had attended the reception with the corn bread. I hadn’t talked to him, but I remembered seeing his braid from across the room. Now it occurred to me that Juan Carlos had had access to the corn bread and, as a professor in Environmental Toxicology, to pesticides as well and that his department’s offices were in Bauman Hall not far from Animal Science where the reception had been held.

  I wondered if the police knew that. Frank might have told them about the reception, but had they known about the GMO panel and about Juan Carlos’s anger? Frank, of course, could have told the police about that too, but I doubted Frank would have exposed a friend of the program to suspicion. Maybe someone else had told the police about the tensions that day. I strained to remember who’d been in the audience. A lot of people, unfortunately, whom I didn’t know.

  The meeting for women scientists began, and Tess, Helena, and I scrambled for some seats.

  “Good morning,” the speaker said. A professor in Physiology, and a woman I trusted, Katherine Breyer had a scientist’s rationality but was emotionally engaged with women’s interests and clearly opposed to the less-than-democratic elements of a university that increasingly privileged scientific competition while giving women in science less support than men. She herself had once served as vice provost, and I’d sometimes sought her advice about how to respond to unfriendly moves against Women’s Studies.

  “Let me bring you up to date. We’ve agreed that we will begin our grant-writing project by gathering data about inequities for women in science on campus.” Katherine was a solid woman with gray hair and large tortoiseshell glasses, which gave her a rather owl-like presence. “We’re proposing to obtain the number and percentage of women faculty in science, the percentage of women scientists with tenured positions by rank and department, and we’ll also collect data on tenure and promotion outcomes for women and men.” Heads around me nodded with approval and support. The women s
cientists, hearing talk of data, were in their element.

  “As you know all too well,” Katherine continued, peering at us over her glasses, “a recent report has revealed that while women in math, physical sciences, and engineering constitute 12.4 percent of the hiring pool for tenured faculty, women are only 7.8 percent of tenured faculty in science on campus and only 7 percent of the hires. Other inequities in pay, promotion, and lab space have also been uncovered.”

  I wondered how Tess’s lab space compared to Peter’s and what the relative speed of their promotions had been. A young woman with a face pale as an egg, a graduate student I supposed because of her youth, was taking copious notes.

  “We’ll also count the women in endowed chairs, but to emphasize the positive we’ll compile lists of the departments that have been successful in hiring women and we’ll lay out what they did to make that possible.”

  I admired Katherine’s broad grasp of the situation for women scientists and the psychology of stressing the positive when one could. Plans to improve the fortunes of women on campus always stirred my blood, and working with others gave me a sense of hope, which was sometimes hard to come by. The university’s growing emphasis on consolidating power and privilege at the top—part of its incipient immersion in corporate practices and points of view—only made women’s historically unequal situation worse.

  “We’ve also agreed to evaluate the cost to women of trying to combine family and careers,” Katherine continued. “We’ll eventually develop a plan for on-campus childcare, so more women will want to come here and stay. We’ll be saying that supporting childcare is as important as supporting high-risk research.”

  I wasn’t sure what “high risk” research was. My degree was in literature, after all, though writing about gender had not been without its hazards early on in my career. Even at Arbor State, the chair of English, or so I’d heard, had described my work as “sociology.” Trained in literary criticism, I’d been pleased at the idea of having a sociologist’s skills as well, although the chair of English hadn’t used the word as a compliment, more as an allusion to my assumed alignment with the Prince of Darkness.

 

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