by Kluge, P. F.
“Fine, then,” Graves says. He gets up, as if to leave, turns away, heads towards the door, where he retrieves a leather satchel he deposited at the foot of a coat rack.
“Shall we begin?” he asks the provost. He sees her surprise. “Cooperation, right? That’s what you promised. You and your president.”
“That’s correct,” she says, glancing at her watch, the way people only do in movies, signaling how busy they are. Graves doesn’t go for it.
“Well then...” He gestures for her to sit down. “Let’s get started.” Then, as if to demonstrate his control, he sifts through the files in front of him, while everybody waits, empty-handed.
“You hired Martha Yeats for a tenure-track position in the Department of History a dozen years ago,” he says without looking up. “That was before your time, am I right?”
“This is just my second year,” she responds, as if she’s still angling for permission to leave. No such luck.
“You weren’t around then,” he confirms. “And you, Professor Fuller?”
“I wasn’t chair then,” Hartley says. “The chair rotates among tenured members of the department.” It makes a funny picture: one chair, a half dozen professors’ asses. “But I was on the search committee.”
“A national search?” asks Graves. “You advertised the position, people applied, you interviewed them at a professional convention, you brought two or three candidates to campus where they taught a sample class and gave a lecture, met the provost and the president and the honors majors, was it like that?”
“Yes,” Hartley replies. He seems surprised by Graves’ knowledge of college hiring. “All our searches are national. She replaced a professor who was about to retire. Was that your next question?”
“You guessed right, professor. Who’d she replace?”
“Hiram Wright.”
“One of our great faculty names,” the provost says. “Right up there with Harry Stribling. Wright lives just outside town, to this day. He’s a nationally known historian.”
“Nationally known. Did Professor Wright retire willingly?”
“We’ve never had a mandatory retirement age,” the Provost says.
“Okay. You had a national search to replace a nationally-known professor. How many applications were there?”
“Oh, at least two hundred.”
“We keep applications a year or two,” the Provost volunteers, “on the chance that we may go back into the same pool. After that...”
“Sure. You chuck them.”
“We advertise for a dozen positions of one kind or another every year,” she says. “We can’t save them, we have as many or more applications from prospective faculty as from prospective students, any given year.”
“Is that good news or bad news?’ Graves asks her.
“Well...”
“Never mind,” he says. He walks Fuller through an account of how Martha got hired. There were no local candidates, visitors or spouses that year. No suspects there. Then he goes over Martha’s job reviews, which were in her second year, her fourth, her sixth, when she got “appointment without limit.” Tenure. Tom Hoover calls it “lifetime employment.” Short of rape or arson, you can’t get shitcanned.
While they talk, I half listen. I picture Martha Yeats. They knew her while she lived. A fighter, a noisemaker, a pain in the ass. I only knew her as I found her, sitting in front of a tree, a bib-sized splash of blood coming out of her throat. Sherwood Graves wants to know about students who dropped or flunked her course or petitioned to withdraw and two or three she’d accused of plagiarism. And some professors who questioned her classes, “feminazi rally,” “caterwauling 1-2,” who belittled her research, the clothes she wore, the weeds in her yard, the rust on her car, the bumper stickers, the dog she allowed under seminar tables. These are things that might lead to jokes, gibes, snubs. But not murder.
When Graves starts in on Martha’s scholarship, I’m back in grade school, watching the clock on the wall, waiting for the bell that doesn’t ring. I even catch the provost looking at me and we trade smiles. She knows a lot—too much, maybe—and I know nothing but together we make the most bored couple on the planet. I’m picturing what she’d be like if we were stranded someplace together. And you know what? She might be wondering the same thing. That’s how bad it is. Anyway. “Women and Power,” that was Martha’s theme, comparing early female leaders—Imelda Marcos, Mme. Chiang Kai-shek—to honest-to-God feminists like Benazir Bhutto and Winnie Mandela. It turns out, once Martha had featured them in this article or that colloquium, they got indicted, assassinated, otherwise driven from office. It got to be a joke, Willard says: recognition from Martha Yeats was an instant jinx. The bottom line—which it takes two hours to get to—is that Martha Yeats had answered a casting call, that was all. A certain kind of part was open, a character in a long-running series called small college. She played the part: woman crusader. The lesbian thing was a throw-in. Hell, she’d arrived with a husband, a visiting professor who left after a couple of years. No one’s mentioned him, I suddenly realize. So does the provost lady.
“Excuse me,” the Provost says. “Hartley? What was the name of Martha’s husband? I was just wondering.”
“Husband?” Graves asks, his head popping up from below the table top. “She decided she was a lesbian after she got here?”
“It’s not a decision,” Hartley promptly corrects. “It’s a discovery. And her husband’s name was Robert Rickey.”
“Is he around? Robert Rickey?”
Now it’s my turn. I get this look from Tom, this nod that it’s okay for me to speak.
“Excuse me,” I say. Suddenly, everybody’s looking at me. He walks, he talks. Surprise!
“Yes?” says Graves.
“Robert Rickey? He’s around.”
“Can you find him?”
“I suppose,” I said. Maybe I should have left it at that. “He’s living on my farm.” I stop again. And start. In for a penny, in for a pound. “With my wife.”
“Well then...” Graves says. He stops a minute and then I hear the kind of stirring you get at the end of college ceremonies, where the audience sniffs an ending. A long meeting would have gone longer, if my wife hadn’t left me for Martha Yeats’ ex. I even get a grateful nod from the provost as she rises, like she owes me one. “Thank you.” She just mouths the words.
“Oh,” says Graves. “I’ll need a driver.”
“Oh?”
“I could get someone up from Columbus but it would be better if it was a local. How about him?”
He was gesturing at me.
“He’s plenty local, alright,” Tom says.
“Don’t go finding no more bodies, Billy” the sheriff says.
“You’re early,” Sherwood Graves said, the next morning. He came to the door of the Motel Eight with a towel wrapped around his middle, soap in his ears and dripping wet.
“I’ll just wait outside here,” I said. He nodded okay and closed the door. I didn’t get more than a sneak peek but when you work around a college you learn how to eyeball a room in a second and that’s what Graves’ place reminded me of, a dorm room: papers spread over the bed, clothes on the floor, styrofoam cups and plastic plates from fast food places across the road. The room was hot, the air was sour, the curtains were drawn.
I waited in the parking lot and checked out Route 36. The first bunch of shopping centers got built along here, the ones that emptied out the downtown. They were growing old now too, losing out to newer places up the road. People said a mall was coming.
“Alright, Billy,” Graves said, closing the door behind him. “First stop is Hiram Wright. He lives on...let me see...Lower Gambier Road.”
“River Road, sir,” I said. “That’s what us locals call it.” River Road is a spooky kind of place. As a kid, I was scared shitless of River Road. It had some of the roughest white people I’d ever seen and their dogs were the meanest anywhere. It was a strange place for a professor to retire,
but near the end of the road, just about where you caught your first glimpse of the college hill, there was a sturdy looking red-clapboard house sitting on a narrow pie-shaped piece of land that was five feet from the road, five feet above the river. Someone was on the porch in a rocker, watching us approach. Maybe he knew we were coming. Maybe he sat there all the time.
“Good morning,” Graves said, in this way cops have of staying polite without getting friendly. “Are you Professor Wright?”
“Yes.” So we’d found him. The college legend, him and Harry Stribling, Butch and Sundance. They put the little jerkwater college on the map, so I’d heard. Stribling had been dead for years. He was just a name to me, a name on a grave in the college cemetery that visitors photographed, on books filled with poems that don’t have rhyme—or, Tom says—reason, on the building where old Warren Niles has his office. His name was on something else, too. Harry Stribling left the college a ton of money that went into buying land around the college, so the place would stay country-like forever. The thing was, when the Stribling Tract bought the land, the farmer stayed put, nothing changed and that was the whole point. The farmer died or moved to Florida, the Stribling Tract found a new farmer or just closed the property off and that’s when you’d see “no trespassing” signs in hunting season, with Stribling’s name on them. And that was only some of what they owned. No one knew how much. People were always guessing. The other thing was that the college didn’t control the Stribling Tract: it was some lawyer in Columbus. Old Harry loved the college but not so much that he trusted it not to screw things up. All of this meant that old Harry Stribling gave folks something to talk about, even if they never read a line of poetry: the Stribling Tract. Where it began, where it ended, nobody was sure. Tom says it wasn’t the poems made him rich. It was family money. Poems don’t earn squat, Tom says.
Hiram Wright was something else again. I’d seen him around, not knowing he was special. He was the kind of guy you noticed, with a body that reminded me of Orson Welles on The Tonight Show, and a goatee that was like Colonel Sanders. But he dressed River Road: work boots, wrinkled chinos, old-fashioned undershirt, the kind with long sleeves and buttons in the front you see in pictures of old-time mining camps out west.
“I’m Sherwood Graves,” my partner said. “I’m with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation. I’m looking into the death of...”
“Martha Yeats,” Wright said, jumping in. But while he was talking to Graves he was staring at me. It was the oddest damn thing. Then, his hands came out from behind him. One of them was holding a cane, which he planted in front of him. He stood up, leaning forward on it, that much closer, staring at me.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re a Hoover.” He came closer to me, moving slowly behind the cane. It wasn’t for show. He needed it. He put his hand under my chin, ran it around my face, studying me, like I was something interesting he hadn’t expected to find. It gave me the willies getting looked at that way.
“You’re Earl’s boy,” he said.
“I’m Billy.” I just barely managed to get it out. Earl Hoover had been dead for going onto twenty years but now this old guy said I’m Earl’s boy, it took me back. I was a kid. I was my father’s son, that’s me. “How’d you know my dad?”
“Your father and I went hunting together three or four times a year, for a dozen years in a row. Out towards Newcastle, in the flood plains along the Walhonding. Up in the Killbuck Valley, on the way to Millersburg. Down to the covered bridges in Licking County. You must have seen us come and go. I saw you...it must have been you.”
“My God...” Now I had it. Someone who’d drive out to our farm on a cold pink-sky November dawn, in a jeep with his dogs, joined by our dogs and my father. What I saw of him, I saw through sleepy eyes, my forehead against a chilly pane, I saw a flash of headlights, the dogs stirring. I smelled coffee, I heard the stamp of boots on the doorstep. The professor had come, my father’s friend from the college, the professor.
“You’re the professor.”
“That’s right, Billy.”
“My father said you were the smartest man for miles around.”
“He was one of the best men I’ve ever known,” Wright said. He stopped and studied me some more. “Do you miss him?” he asked. I stood there, words caught somewhere between my stomach and my throat. “I know you do,” Wright says. “It’s written all over you.” He stops but he’s still looking at me. Then, as an afterthought, he glanced at Sherwood Graves. “I know you too.”
“I guessed you would,” Graves answered.
“Well, come in,” he said. Then he couldn’t resist turning back to me. “I must have walked a thousand miles with your father, over the years,” he said.
I expected something low ceilinged and choppy, with lots of little rooms, which is the way all the old houses are around here. But, except for a kitchen and bathroom towards the back, Professor Wright’s place was one big room where furniture—a bed, a rough wooden table, an easy chair with a reading lamp, a television—made islands in a sea of books. I spotted a murderer’s row of liquor bottles in the corner and classy glasses that might be crystal. No applejack and Mason jars for Professor Wright. And there were serious copper pots and pans hanging on the wall and an oversize gas stove and strings of peppers and garlic hanging from the beams, all of it looking like a set for one of those cooking shows on cable television.
“So,” Professor Wright said. “The subject is Martha Yeats.” He aimed his words at Graves but he was still taking me in, maybe thinking of all those miles with my father. Maybe they were friends, just like he said they were, but it was hard to believe.
“There must have been some tension between you and Professor Yeats,” Graves prompted.
“That’s what they told you? Who told you that? Hartley Fuller?”
“Yes. The history chair.”
“That’s not a chair, son. That’s a stool.” He enjoyed his moment of anger, then got back to us. “Maybe it doesn’t matter. History gets written by the winners, no? Bad history. And Hartley is surely a bad historian. And...in a way...a winner.” He fell silent for a moment and Graves knew better than to throw in another question. “The fact is, Martha and I overlapped for a few years. So we lived across the hall from each other. A duet. My swan song and her...I wouldn’t know what to call it...” His voice trailed off. “So what kind of wisdom are you looking for?” Wright finally asked. “I didn’t kill her.”
“But somebody did,” Graves said. “It wasn’t a robbery. It wasn’t a rape. It was an execution. Maybe some maniac drove through town. That happens. But chances are, it was someone who knew her, who found her while she was out walking her dog, who got close enough to join her, to drop back a step and fire a bullet into the base of her skull. Don’t tell me who killed her, Professor Wright. Just tell me why someone would want to kill a professor at this college. Kill her and display her body outside a fraternity lodge.”
“God, what a question,” Wright sat quiet. “Let the old professor ramble. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“You’re the man they call the legend. You and Harry Stribling. And Stribling’s rambling days are over.”
Wright laughed at that and sat some more. I guess when you’re talking to someone old you take your chances. It’s a grab bag. You make room for memories. “Stribling’s been dead fifteen years this December,” Wright said. “Amazing. And he wasn’t up to much for years before that. His best work was done in the thirties, most of it before he even came here. Country Vespers, Things I Wish I’d Known. A small shelf. Reputations are peculiar things. As you know, Mr. Graves.”
Graves nodded his head. There was something they knew that I didn’t. They were signaling to each other in a code I couldn’t break. I wish they’d let me in on their little secret.
“Harry Stribling died in doubt. Did you know that? He thought of himself as a failure. I know they’ve named a building after him. He left some land behind. The Stri
bling Tract. They use him in brochures. He’d be amused. What he accomplished didn’t measure up against what he aimed to do. I’m dying a slower death. Or living a longer life. It’s the same thing, I suppose. I’ll die and they will mourn me and raise funds in my name. In the meantime...so much for legends. Harry Stribling was a fine writer of the second rank. I have a name as an American historian. Harry and I were enough to give this college a reputation. And now...so what?”
He pulled himself out of his chair and went over to the long table with the bottles, poured himself a glass of something brown and sat back down. Then he reminded himself we were there, gestured an offer, got turned down.
“You’d be amazed at the number of institutions that perk along from year to year and never get closer to acclaim than a professor who appeared on ‘Jeopardy.’ Those colleges you see in the sports pages in columns of tiny type, places that I can’t associate with anything, not with a colleague, a book, a single living idea. What are these places that make no claim on the world’s attention, on the world’s mind? What goes on there? Does anybody know? Is anybody checking?”
He stopped there and collected himself, staring out the window now. I was amazed at Graves’ patience with this guy. It was like Martha Yeats’ murder was just an excuse to get together and talk about the college.
“Martha Yeats,” Graves reminded him. The gentlest possible nudge.
“You called her my replacement? Yes and no. She wasn’t another me. She wasn’t supposed to be. She was part of a larger change. Bear with me now...” Graves nodded. “In the thirties, this college was like the others I’ve mentioned, just a name on a list. Relaxed. Obscure. Upperclass. There was a flying club. They played polo. They visited brothels in Mansfield. Then there came a new president—Chambers—an imperious, driven fellow who determined to make this place...” He stopped in mid-sentence, as if he were searching for the right word, but I’d bet the money in my wallet he had it already. “...great. But he didn’t have the money. He couldn’t go at it top to bottom. He couldn’t build new buildings, he couldn’t even maintain the ones we already had. So he hired a handful of professors who might make a mark. He brought Harry Stribling up from Tennessee. He found me at Rutgers. He got some brilliant refugees right off the boat. Philosophers, scientists out of Berlin and Warsaw. He found, he recruited, he seduced talent and he brought it here—here!—to this improbable place. It wasn’t a wholesale transformation. Likeable, mediocre faculty outnumbered—and sometimes resented—the newcomers. Resented the president as well. As for the students...well...a mixed bag. Still our little college had some magic. It wasn’t always wonderful, Graves. But we rarely doubted that we were where we ought to be.”