Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  FINAL EXAM

  By P.F. Kluge

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Copyright 2013 / P.F. Kluge

  Cover photograph by Ruth Smilan

  Cover design by Jerry Kelly, Pamela Hollie, P.F. Kluge

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Novelist, journalist and teacher, P.F. Kluge is Writer in Residence at Kenyon College. His six previous novels include Eddie And The Cruisers and Biggest Elvis. His non-fiction books include The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia and Alma Mater, an account of a year in the life of Kenyon College. Two films, Dog Day Afternoon and Eddie And The Cruisers, have been based on his work. His journalism appears in National Geographic Traveler, where he is a contributing editor, and elsewhere. A native of Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, Kluge lives in Gambier, Ohio with his wife, Pamela Hollie.

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  FINAL EXAM

  My thanks to Nikki Taylor for typing; to Pamela Hollie and my agent, David Hale Smith, for reading; to Ruth Smilan for the haunting cover photograph; and to Jerry Kelly, who makes publishing a pleasure. Thanks to my friends outside of Gambier for the refuge and perspective they give me when I leave home, and to my friends in Gambier for welcoming me back.

  P.F.K.

  To Doug Givens and Peter Rutkoff, and all my morning coffee people in Gambier...

  Editor’s Note

  The horrifying ordeal that beset a small college in Ohio two years ago is well known, the serial murders that generated a crescendo of attention in which individual lives, institutional character, the very purpose of liberal arts education all were tested. The crimes’ solution, when it came, answered only some of the questions that arose and left many of us who lived through that violent season exasperated and perplexed. The murders were eventually attributed to a person who had departed the campus abruptly and, absent other evidence, remains alive. This person’s conviction has been in the court of public opinion, not of law. The murders ended but not the speculation; the “semester from hell” still resonates. No wonder some of our wisest commentators suggested we might never know what really happened.

  But now we do: this book tells the story. It consists of the accounts of three people on campus at the time. Warren Niles, former president of this college, has made available a journal he kept those terrible months. Fragmentary and incomplete, this manuscript—entitled “Night Thoughts of a College President”—is President Niles’ contribution. The second testimony comes from Billy Hoover, the College Security officer assigned to the investigation. His pages, like President Niles’, are his own story, in his own voice, self-written. The third voice in this book is mine. I was a visiting professor at the time of the murders. My role in the story is smaller but, it turns out, necessary.

  My editorial function has been little more than placing the testimonies in chronological order. I wish I could have done more. I advised both writers to delete substantial passages that were embarrassing, even damaging. To their credit, both men demurred, reminding me that my own account had its share of indiscretions. What results is the fullest possible account of the times we shared. Any number of reputations will be affected by this book, those of the living and the dead, the innocent and the guilty, as well as the college where our lives converged. So be it.

  MARK MAY

  Prologue: 1976

  BILLY HOOVER

  Everybody knew a student was missing. They’d been searching for days, searching all over—cops driving country roads, teachers and classmates walking through cornfields, combing the woods. They walked along the river, poked around abandoned sheds and trailers. Every cow pond, gravel pit, every dumpster got looked into. And, each day that passed, people got a little more scared. Scared of finding. Scared of not finding.

  I heard about it from my uncle, Tom Hoover, who worked in College Security. My father had died the year before, my mother was “failing,” as they say around here. She went down real fast after my father died. A lively, healthy woman—the talker in the family—turned thin and silent. I’ll never know about her fall down the steps of our house, which she’d walked down thousands of times before, whether it was an accident or not. The end of her failing, that’s what it was. That happened a few months before the student disappeared and Tom was there for me, getting me new clothes for eighth grade, taking me fishing, hunting, out for pizza. Some nights, he took me to work at the college—patrolling parties, keeping drinkers out of cars, escorting girl students home from the library at midnight. That was my first taste of college.

  I remember wondering about that missing student, not just where he went, but why. For me, lost meant misplaced: lost keys, lost ball, lost and found. Not like lost at sea, lost in combat, lost forever. Even the posters that were all over town— at the bank, the post office, the grocery and gas station—though they were supposed to show who folks were looking for, seemed more like messages meant for the student himself, telling him that people missed him and it was time to come home now, please.

  My home was—and still is—a farm just across the river from the college, which sits up on a wooded hill. My father always told me I was lucky to be born where I was, in this part of Ohio, in this particular place. Not everybody had a famous college in walking distance. That brought some quality to life, he said. Some magic. Just look at it, he used to say, pointing up at the hill. Like a castle. Or a monastery. Or a space station, shooting signals out into the stars. High and mighty talk coming from a college maintenance guy who plowed snow and scattered salt in winter, mulched leaves in autumn, cut grass in summer and spring. There were plenty locals who took potshots at the college, at spoiled kids and snobby faculty and presidents who...as my Uncle Tom put it...thought their shit didn’t stink. But, low rank as he was, my father believed in that place and what he believed in was good enough for me.

  It was Indian Summer that day, a kindly warm spell after a killing frost. The October heat was a surprise. Flies were buzzing, crows circled overhead and—just when the wind was right—I could hear the announcer at the home football game, the college taking yet another pounding. Our local high school team could beat them, folks said. I sat awhile on a railroad trestle, walked along the river, then set off uphill, into the woods, into a neighbor’s orchard that smelled like cider, drunken bees feasting on windfall apples. I followed a deer trail back onto our place into a bumper crop of blackberry bushes, sumac, scrub oak and maple, a field that hadn’t been planted for years. My father wasn’t out to shake the last penny out of the ground. Leave something for the deer, he said, the wild turkeys, the raccoons and the possums.

  Leave something for the crows. They were all over an empty barn at the edge of the field, up against the woods. My dad used the barn for wood, dismantling it a board at a time, when he was building benches and tables for professors who liked that weathered, broken-in-look in their garden furniture. The crows had found it now, swarming around the place, cawing like crazy, circling overhead. I walked towards them, through dry grass and brambles, floating through that last warm sunlight, late in the day, late in the season.

  The smell hit
me, slugged me, before I saw where it was coming from. Something hanging inside the barn, hanging at the end of a rope looped over a beam at the edge of the hay loft. A week had passed since the student vanished, a week of warm days since the crows had found him, turning him slowly as they landed and took off but never deserting him completely, one or another always in contact, never leaving the dead kid alone, never backing off to admire their work. I folded down on my knees, gagging and vomiting. The crows knew I was there but that didn’t bother them. I chucked a handful of stones at them. That didn’t bother them much. They lifted off the corpse, letting me see their work in progress. The eyes were gone, the ears, the tongue, cheeks, everything that made a face. All the easy pickings. When I saw that, when I looked down at where trousers had split open, where like kids pulling ribbons off a gift, the crows tugged at intestines, I screamed and ran. It was him alright, the lost student. I couldn’t believe it, that I was the one to find him. I hadn’t even been looking. As soon as I hit the trail that runs along the river, I saw Tom Hoover walking towards me. He always was able to find me, whenever I needed him, and now I threw myself into his arms, crying. “I know,” Tom said. “I know.” He told me I should stay put a minute and he headed for the barn. I could see him shudder when the smell hit him but that didn’t stop him. He stepped inside, stayed a minute and came back to me. “Spoiled,” he said. “Spoiled rotten.” He held me and hugged me, the way he did the day they found my father in the river. “There’s a reward,” he said.

  The reward was a hundred dollars. But it was more than money. It was death. The smell of road kill got me, ever since. The sight of anything hanging the way that dead boy had hung. A deer on the first day of hunting season, hung from a branch, gutted and bled. A piñata thing at a Mexican party. That was my reward. A gift that kept on giving. A role to play, a part in life. I was the one who found the bodies. Or they found me.

  Part One

  Orientation

  1999

  Chapter I

  WARREN NILES

  Night Thoughts of a College President

  Next year, the last of my twenty years here, will doubtless be filled with tributes and farewells of all kinds. Much, I’m sure, will be made of me. That is why I have chosen this penultimate year for a long-contemplated project: my journal, my reflections on my tenure as president and what it means, or meant. I do this for my own pleasure, yet not without hope that this summing up, carefully placed and well published, might be of interest to others.

  I look forward to writing this. For years I’ve had a notebook with Night Thoughts of a College President written on the cover and nothing within. What a joke it would have been if I had died and someone going through my possessions, the college archivist perhaps, had come across those unwritten pages. It would have confirmed what many have suspected: that behind those suave presidential walls, an empty lot reposed. But now, at last, I commence.

  The morning after I return from Maine, I position myself in my living room window, watching the college faculty assemble at the college gates. Dressed in caps and gowns of many colors, plush maroons and somber judicial blacks, decorated with silver and blue sashes, pinks and yellows. Returning like the swallows to Capistrano, one odd bird at a time, they turn the campus into a medieval aviary. The old timers, about to retire or already emeritus, can be counted upon for a day like this. Some of them have been retired for decades but they take their place in front, death and eternity right ahead of them. Soon they are joined by junior colleagues, visitors and recent tenure-track hires, dressed in plain black robes and ordinary mortar boards on loan from the wardrobe department in the basement of the college bookstore, the sole exception being their hats—whimsical beanies, boaters, derbies—that some of them wear to show that none of this is to be taken seriously.

  I walk downstairs and pause to check myself in the hall mirror by the front door. Blue robe, black piping, silver sash, black mortarboard, gold tassel. Pale skin, gray hair: dead white male walking. Student waiters scurry by, carrying trays of glasses out to the front porch. The smell of hors d’oeuvres reaches me from the kitchen, like the generic whiff of heated fodder that wafts down airplane corridors. I duck out of a waiter’s way, apologize, open the door for him. Where I have lived for twenty years is not my property. It comes with the job. Other presidents have lived in it before me and others will follow. I know that that’s true of other houses too; we’re all just passing through. But this house reminds you of it all the time, the formal parlor, the dark dining room, the uncluttered study. It’s the kind of place an undertaker buys.

  I step outside and feel the heat. August has two days remaining. I understand the intricacies of college calendars but part of me nonetheless resents the way we start in August. I remember when Labor Day was the end of summer. There was time for last walks on the beaches, barbecues outside vacation cottages, resort romances ending, the first thought of school supplies and new courses, flannel and corduroy to buy, Dr. Zhivago not yet read and now all of it’s gone the way of doubleheaders. I walk across the grass and greet the senior faculty.

  When did I come back, they ask. How was Maine this summer? Is my new home almost built? When will my wife be able to tear herself away from contractors? Isn’t it amazing how the weather cooperates when freshmen and their parents are here? How long has it been since rain forced us indoors? Once again, I am a president. No one more talked about, more closely observed, more deftly parodied. The average college president serves for seven years. I have been here nearly three times as long. If time itself were a monument, that would be mine. An almost unprecedented run. Can I be blamed for feeling proud?

  Ninety out of 120, not bad at all: faculty arrange themselves up and down the path. The smart alecks pick the side of the path which will lead them to the shady side of the stage. It won’t be long before we’re all sweating. Though summer pleasures end today, the heat continues. I detect mixed emotions in the conversations I hear, exchanged condolences on the end of summer. The long vacation begins with imperative books to read, manuscripts to write. But life gets in the way and lack of talent and loss of interest and today there’s a note of apology and relief, that the agony of freedom is over and more manageable pain is about to begin. Because: they’re back. They’re coming.

  They’re here. They march towards us, down the path. Call them matriculants, incoming students, underclassmen, first year students: only the word freshmen describes them. This, I confess, is a moment I love completely, this first glimpse of the young people who have chosen us. Oh yes, we’re a “highly selective” college. We accept—select—seventy percent of those who apply to us. Of those applications, slightly fewer than thirty percent (our “yield”) agree to come. We choose once, sort of. They choose twice, decisively.

  While we sweat in caps and gowns, freshmen pass by in shorts and wrinkled khaki trousers, short-sleeved shirts, t-shirts even, running shoes, sandals, flower print summer dresses, madras shirts, a few white shirts and ties, a few earrings and nose rings. What they are wearing, I grant, is roughly what their professors-to-be are wearing underneath their robes. It’s enough to make me doubly grateful: that clothing covers our bodies and that regalia covers our clothing. Amen and Amen again.

  Some students smirk as they pass by. What a goof, stepping through this gamut of faculty while bells toll—for them!—in the nearby chapel. Others are plainly moved; they sense beginnings and endings in their lives. Some—prep-school graduates, I suspect, though that may not be fair—plod along familiarly, institution-wise, like juveniles moved from a youthful offender facility to adult minimum security. Been there, seen it, done it. Many students just can’t decide, they’re giggly, they’re anxious, like newcomers at the edge of a party. Sometimes, I sense a trace of concern about being accepted, about fitting in and finding happiness and—very occasionally—I think I detect a concerned expression, the vestige of another time, when academic failure was something to worry about. These days, flunking out of college is rare
r than breaking out of prison; also harder to accomplish.

  Now it’s our turn to parade. The junior faculty head towards the stage and then, in rough order of seniority, from mid-career to old timers, we follow. It must be like time-lapse photography, to see what professing does to the human body, turning spiky-haired theorists into fuddled curmudgeons. At first, there’s only grass and trees on either side of us. Then, things thicken. I see village people, up for the parade but keeping a safe distance from our oratory. Early arriving upperclassmen, football and soccer players reconnoiter the freshmen women while lounging on the grass. I see dogs and kids and faculty spouses, cheerfully paying their respects. I walk through parents pointing cameras my way, I walk through students. I take the stage. After the priest prepares the way for me, I arise and speak.

  “GOOD AFTERNOON!!! AND WELCOME to what has been and is and will continue to be the finest college of its kind!!!” An audacious claim. I repeat it. “The finest college of its kind. I know what you’re thinking. What does he mean by that? Some of you in front of me may wonder. Along with some of those behind....” This is when I turn and ponder the faculty, part sullen, part sycophant. People who talk for a living resent being forced to sit and listen. They know my performances in and out. Over the years I’ve repeated myself. As if they hadn’t!

  “Look around you,” I declare, in what is locally famous as my Brigham Young moment. “Consider this place, this hillside in the heartland, so central yet so remote, this hill and the river curving around below, these trees and lawns and college paths. Consider the sense of discovery you feel, when you come up the hill for the first time, when you discover this improbable, unexpected college-out-of-place. Consider that the trip you make today repeats the arrival of the college’s founder, more than a century and a half ago. And he—passionate, visionary—turned a dream into a fact, a desire into an imperative. Look around at his place. It is still his place. And now it is yours as well. You are part of the river of life that flows to, and through, here. You are newcomers, each of you, the latest but not the least, and not the last. You are part of something larger and older, a college rooted in a certain time and place. Ask me to define my terms. Well, that is part of it. This is not just any college!”