Beet

by Roger Rosenblatt

  Naturally, Peace blamed himself for the committee’s failures, and his fellow committee members agreed; they blamed him too. But to be fair to them all, the task simply might have been too enormous and too much to ask. Perhaps no solution could do all that was expected—to satisfy the highest intellectual standards, to be intrinsically interesting, and to have mass and commercial appeal to boot. In any event, time was certainly running out. And the last few meetings, including the one of the present afternoon, had opened with a drowned, world-weary silence; that is, until Heilbrun and Kramer burst upon the scene.

  “What have you got?” asked Smythe listlessly.

  “The answer!” said Heilbrun. “We—Kramer and I—have solved the problem of the new curriculum!” The two men plonked themselves down in their seats, flushed with anticipation. Peace, hopeful to the last, gestured for Heilbrun to continue.

  “Well, we were asking ourselves—Kramer and I [Kramer nodded rapidly]—what is the one thing truly fundamental to Beet College? What lies at the heart of the meaning of the school? Its deep-seated intentions, its essential purpose, its—how shall I say—raison d’être?”

  “Why not say raison d’être,” yawned Smythe. Heilbrun ignored him.

  “Well?” said Booth, who’d had it up to here with the babble of humanists. “What is it?”

  Heilbrun looked to Kramer, who looked to Heilbrun. They spoke in unison. “Pigs!” they said. Then Heilbrun said it alone. “Pigs!” Then Kramer. “Pigs!”

  Peace tried very hard not to look as if someone had rabbit-chopped him in the back of his neck. The table hunched forward, seemingly aware that it was about to be treated to yet another demonstration of insanity. Someone asked the obligatory, “What are you talking about?”

  “Until now,” Heilbrun continued, “we have been approaching this matter of a curriculum as if it pertained solely to the mind, unconnected to more basic aspects of life.” Kramer nodded more rapidly, and continued to nod nonstop during Heilbrun’s presentation. “But last night, as I was dozing over a terribly boring history of Croatian mime theater, an old song came into my head—‘Come on people now / Smile on your brother…’” He repeated the lyrics, this time singing.

  Kettlegorf leaped at the chance to sing along with him. Then Lipman and Booth and the rest, except for Peace and Smythe, all singing together: “…‘right now!’”

  The blood drained from Peace’s face—that being one of two songs his parents sang mercilessly to him when he was still in the crib. The other—and he stiffened at its recollection as well—was…but Heilbrun suddenly sailed into that one too: “‘This land is your land, this land…’”

  “Are you getting at something?” Peace asked.

  “It’s the land,” said Heilbrun. “Your land, my land—”

  “Our land?” asked Smythe, with a snigger.

  “Our land, yes,” said Heilbrun. The group seemed happy, if bewildered. “You see, the song brought me back to the consideration of original purposes, of the consciousness Charles Reich talked about in The Greening of America. [Again Peace paled.] What was Beet College in its origins?” asked Heilbrun. “Two simple things, if you don’t count God. A pig farm and a library. And for many years it thrived as a single entity composed of books and attention to the soil.”

  “The pigs soiled, all right,” said Smythe. “Anyone seen Latin?” He tended toward jealousy as well as a desire to fit in, lending him a leer that was both with it and without it.

  “So I came up with a thought,” Heilbrun went on, “and phoned Professor Kramer at once [Kramer confirmed this with jackhammer nods]. Why not create a curriculum by going back to the land, and establishing a pig farm?”

  “You’re not serious,” said Smythe.

  “Quite serious,” said Heilbrun. “You see, the students, our students, have been educated in a vacuum. They have no connection to the life of the earth. They have no kinship with the land. And yet, this land is their land, this land is our—”

  “Please!” said Peace.

  “The sad truth is that none of us has any connection to the land either,” said Heilbrun, looking sad. “We have forgotten our roots. And the students have forgotten theirs. Most of all, they have forgotten how to work with their hands. So [he smiled to Kramer, who smiled back] here’s the plan: We create a wholly new course of study that has our students take classes and do farm-work. They could build the sheds for the pigs, and the sties. They could repair the fences and lay the roads. In short, do all the work of the farm. A curriculum of hand and mind!”

  “Pigs!” said Kettlegorf, as if goosed by an electric prod. “The students could study the pig as a being, a cultural figure. I don’t know, but there must be a great deal of literature on the pig.”

  “The etymology is Anglo-Saxon,” said Smythe, appearing interested for the first time, since the turn in the conversation afforded him an opportunity for erudition. “The Anglo-Saxon pecga and the Low German bigge, both meaning pig. Then there’s the medieval Dutch, and finally the Middle English pigge.” Everyone save Peace seemed impressed, mesmerized actually, so he continued. “‘And whether pigs have wings,’” he quoted. “Does anyone know where that comes from?”

  “Alice in Wonderland,” all but Lipman said at once, plunging Smythe into a momentary gloom. He soldiered on nonetheless. “And there’s Charlotte’s Web. And Dylan Thomas—‘Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath and smile as they snort and dream.’”

  “Snort and dream!” said Kettlegorf.

  “And there’s Beatrix Potter,” said Booth, suddenly enthused. “Little Pig Robinson.”

  “And Samuel Butler,” said Smythe. “‘Besides ’tis known he could speak Greek as naturally as pigs squeak.’” Kramer tittered.

  “And A. A. Milne,” Kettlegorf chimed in. “Piglet. And Edward Lear.”

  Smythe: “‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?’”

  Back to Kettlegorf: “‘Said the piggy, I will!’” She sighed. “I will! Just like that! The piggy is asked to part with his ring, out of nowhere, mind you, and he simply says I will! Is there a more generous figure in all of literature? I think not.”

  “And Miss Piggy!” said Lipman, who did not know as many literary references as the others but wanted in on the discussion. She also mentioned the movie Babe.

  “Don’t forget Animal Farm,” said Booth. “Which reminds me. We’re not only talking about pig literature. There must be a very extensive pig history. I mean, all the pig farms in Europe and America.”

  “The Allies slaughtered pigs in France,” offered Kramer. “Chopped their heads off with bayonets.” He pursed his lips knowingly.

  “And biology,” said Heilbrun. “Why study crustaceans when we could do the same thing with pigs?”

  “And economics,” said Smythe, who now was clearly aboard. “A pig farm is a business. I am sure that basic economic principles apply. Industrial farms. Conglomerates driving out the smaller operations. Consolidation versus independents. That sort of thing.” Having not a whit of information on the subject, the others vigorously agreed.

  “And languages!” said Kramer. An amateur linguist as well as a militarist, he rattled off the words for pig in different languages: “French—cochon, German—schwein, Czech—vepr, Finnish—sika, Afrikaans—vark, Croatian—svinja…” The others attempted to stop him, but he was supercharged with excitement. “Danish—svin! Bulgarian—svinia! Polish—prosiak!” He had delivered the Sanskrit (varaaha) and was approaching the Maltese (qazquz) when Heilbrun put his finger to his lips, and Kramer finally calmed down.

  “You’ve made your point, dear boy,” Heilbrun told his colleague, who was sweating like a kwiskwis, pig in Mingo, which he whispered to himself.

  “And songs!” exulted Professor Lipman, who fancied herself an expert on contemporary groups. She cited Eminem’s “Chokin’ This Pig,” Dave Matthews’s “Pig,” and Nine Inch Nails’s “March of the Pig,” as the others wondered what she was talking about.

&n
bsp; Though they knew it was coming, they could do nothing to stop it. Kettlegorf launched into “Piggies” from the Beatles’s White Album: “‘Have you seen the little piggies / Crawling in the dirt…’” She made it two-thirds of the way through.

  Faster and faster the committee members talked, with Professor Booth, the lone scientist on the committee, seizing the floor to get down to brass tacks. “You know, if this is to be a real working farm, we need to decide on what breeds to raise.”

  “How many breeds are there?” asked Kettlegorf.

  Now it was Booth’s turn to show off. “There are weaners,” he said, searching the air for more specifics. “There are Stock Boars and Tamworths and Iron Age Pigs, which are a cross between the Tamworth and the wild boar. There are the Large Whites, of course, like Latin…” He paused, considering what an entire farm of Latins would do to the plant life. “And the British Saddlebacks. Pietrains and Landraces—you’ve seen them, with their lop ears that cover most of their faces.” No one had, but they all nodded. “And there’s the Duroc, which I like very much, that reddish brown color. I nearly forgot the New Zealand Kunekune.”

  “Kunekune!” said Kettlegorf. She clapped in ecstasy.

  “But who will tend to the farrowing?” said Booth, who saw that the others did not know what he was referring to. Everyone but Peace was rapt. “When the little pigs begin to appear,” he said coyly.

  “The students!” said Heilbrun again. Kramer, too.

  “And the feeding?” said Booth, who was becoming a sort of evangelist to the group. “Who will grow the clover, the alfalfa, the chicory and turnips?”

  “The students!” Lipman and Kettlegorf cried as one.

  “And what about the business of the farm?” said Booth. “It’s very important that the enterprise be more than self-sustaining. It’s got to make a profit. The college endowment is all gone, you know. I’ve been paying attention to Mr. Bollovate—reading what he tells the papers. And if I understand him aright, the days of the nonprofit college are long over. Every tub on its own bottom. That’s the way Mr. Bollovate describes it.”

  “And he’s the tub to know,” said Smythe. All laughed, except Peace.

  “So the pig farm has to pay for itself and then some,” Booth went on.

  “You know?” said Kramer, about to come up with his first original thought, “this may have been Nathaniel Beet’s plan all along. Deus Libri Porci. God leads to learning. Learning leads to money.” How Peace wished Manning could have heard that.

  “But who’ll run the business?” said Kettlegorf.

  “The students!”—everyone but Peace.

  “And the slaughter of the pigs for ham and bacon and sausage?”

  “The students!”

  “And who will package the meat?”

  “The students!”

  “And manage the sales and the accounts?”

  “The stu…”

  There was no stopping them. Peace wandered into two lines of thought. The first was that soon, he knew, the now hepped-up committee members would hit a snag and run out of gas and grow surly and destructively witty, as they’d been doing for the past five weeks, and yet another meeting would come to nothing. The second was, Livi had been right about one thing. He sank deeper into his chair and vowed to go home and draw up the new curriculum himself.

  “You know,” said Booth. “Most of the little male pigs will have to be castrated.”

  “The students can do it!” said Heilbrun. And all except Peace agreed the students could castrate the pigs.

  CHAPTER 13

  BUT TO RETURN TO FERRITT LAWRENCE: HE HAD BEEN HAVING another bad day—the one-thousand-and-fourth such day in his career as a junior journalist. This one had preceded the Veterans Day/Parents Weekend holiday. Ferritt had been spending the afternoon in his room in Coldenham, preparing his answer to a take-home quiz, “Should the media police itself?” He was brooding and depressed that his chosen profession might have been misdirected, after all, and his parents may have been right when they tried to steer him toward a career in air conditioner repair. With the sky over Beet College going black and the clouds crushing the sun into a saffron line, his spirits had not sunk so low since last winter’s German measles prevented him from attending an invitation-only dinner in the Communications Arts private dining room for columnist Bobo de Pleasure, “the conservative’s liberal and the liberal’s conservative.” De Pleasure was speaking about his new book, How to Become a Columnist, the sequel to his two very popular previous books, Is There Anyone in America I Don’t Agree With? And I Could Not Agree More!

  Ferritt had been getting nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in his pursuit of the story of the closing of the college, the story of a lifetime. The CCR members with whom he continued to hold off-the-record conversations were on their own kicks and were telling him that if he wanted a story “of lasting significance” he ought to write about them, their remarkable successes and their hidden gifts.

  Professor Kettlegorf prodded him to detail her early potential as a ballerina, a prodigy if she said so herself, and how she had sacrificed certain stardom for the greater good of teaching “our nation’s future.” She also mentioned her heartbreaking experience with the ship’s captain in Kansas, but when pressed by Ferritt said she could not go on. She did start to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset,” but by that time Ferritt was out the door.

  Professor Smythe was deep into his ninth year on his seminal, comprehensive, and definitive study of the difference between the concepts of the egotistical sublime and negative capability. When, in a rare burst of innocent curiosity, the boy asked the professor if those ideas weren’t just elaborate terms for self-concern and self-lessness, Smythe chuckled bitterly and accused him of misprision, which silenced him for once.

  Professor Booth tried to persuade the young reporter to do a six-part series entitled “Booth: A Life in Chemistry.” And Professor Kramer agreed it would be an excellent idea, or perhaps another idea would also be excellent.

  Professor Heilbrun, who was wearing a Ruckley (navy single-breasted lounge suit), had meager experience with journalism or its standards and thought Ferritt might wish to write about his treatise on Charles Pisherwold, a dim-witted thirteenth-century serf who was born without the sense of taste and wrote passion plays to be performed by cows. When the reporter seemed uninterested, Heilbrun asked whether he wished to hear him sing the entire score from Two By Two. He believed he was the only man living, including the former Broadway cast, who could do that.

  Since Professor Lipman was Ferritt’s instructor in the New York Times course, he decided in the end to do her bidding, and had produced but one piece of writing in all those weeks, other than his piece attacking Professor Porterfield at the faculty meeting. It was Professor Lipman’s own story, “To Publicize or Criticize: A Celebrity Editor’s Dilemma.”

  “The question is…,” said Lipman.

  “Is what?” said Ferritt.

  “No, that’s what you write. The question is…”

  “The question is?”

  “Yes. When you’ve written the preliminary material and are about to state the problem, you write, ‘The question is…’”

  “Do I always do that?”

  “Yes. Or sometimes, if you are dealing with the past, you write, ‘The question was…’ But here you write ‘The question is…’”

  What was worse, his editor on the Pig’s Eye, Jacob McMinus III, grandson of the notorious Drunk Thief of Wall Street, had taken to downing Ecstasy with Tab every morning. By late afternoon, when the paper was closing, he sat slumped over in his swivel chair, spinning himself faster and faster and muttering limericks about girls from Cape Cod.

  Am I the only honest, responsible, sober professional in this outfit? Ferritt asked himself. The question was: Did every great journalist suffer this way?

  And then, on the day of his deepest despair, he got lucky, because on that rock-bottom afternoon, he’d decided to do what all the great journalists had d
one before him, when they too questioned the validity of their calling: he determined to get shit-faced. And so he slipped into the safari jacket that had briefly belonged to Diane Sawyer (purchased on eBay for a song), climbed upon his mountain bike, rode to town, and parked himself in the darkest corner of the High on the Hog Lounge at the Pigs-in-Blankets Bed ’N Breakfast, not five minutes before Matha Polite and Joel Bollovate had sat down at the onset of their partnership.

  Ferritt had been the figure barely visible to anyone, and quite invisible to Matha and Joel as they had moved closer together with each glass of wine. He’d watched them with dark and narrow eyes. “Knowledge is power,” he said to himself, and so he would not forget, he wrote it down.

  From that day in the bar, during which he had taken care to remain undetected, to the present, this week before Thanksgiving, Ferritt followed Matha wherever she went. He would have liked to follow Bollovate as well, but since the trustee’s main mode of transportation was an Apache Longbow attack helicopter minus the missiles and customized for his private use, the reporter was discouraged. Matha would do as a quarry because she frequently led him to Bollovate anyway. The chairman would pick her up outside the college gates, and they’d drive off to their business conferences. What was the story in their trysts? Something connected with the fate of the college? If not, at least a scandal, which Ferritt hoped would be “juicy.”

  So he followed the two of them to Sow’s Motel, and he believed he was becoming a first-rate tracker, though he trailed the couple at such close range—his mountain bike grinding its gears behind Bollovate’s black Escalade at a distance no greater than sixty feet—they could have spotted him every time. Fortunately for Ferritt, the pair were so absorbed, not in each other but rather in themselves individually, he could have lain in bed between them without being noticed. He didn’t need to; he could listen in with his cassette recorder outside their window.