It is rare to be able to state unequivocally that one has just awakened from the worst nightmare of one’s life. There is no question in my mind, however, that I had just achieved that state of certainty. The sheets were wet with sweat and I was more exhausted than when I had lay down to sleep. I definitely needed a drink and took one.
My God, I thought, that was exactly the way it had happened. I felt amazed that I had come through my break from reality. After a half dozen more deep swallows of some sort of alcohol, I felt better. I laughed when I remembered the Hebrew prayer thanking God for giving the Jews the “fruit of the vine.”
“You are indeed a wise God,” I said aloud. I began to wonder if I was turning into an alcoholic, then it occurred to me that I rarely drank. I thought about Ben, wondering if he had been drunk when he murdered his wife and her lover. I had my problems, but where did he stand on the great scoreboard of life? He murdered three people and left a son without a father or mother. But he died because he didn’t want to chance my not telling the adults what I knew. The truth was, he also died for our community because they didn’t have the courage to face up to their responsibilities and take on the crazy man years before the disaster happened.
They embraced Ben after he died heroically. They wound up building him a monument; a huge stone that took them days to move into place. Would they still have erected the monument had they known of his past? I didn’t know. Would I have told of his murderous past had I learned of it after he saved me from the river? I decided I would not have told then and still would not tell. Was my decision the correct one? I didn’t know and wondered what the great philosophers would have done if they had faced that question in real life outside their ivory towers. I suddenly remembered my philosophy professor who had been sleeping with my college girlfriend. He was married and the subject he taught was ethics. So much for an unlived philosophy!
The big question, I thought, was what would have happened if everybody had just told the truth. Fred, LD, Lonnie, and I would have gotten in trouble (in the case of Lonnie, perhaps horrible trouble) but I doubted that the community would have gone after the crazy man. They were too scared of the unknown. Ben was a triple murderer and they surely would have executed him if they had known about him before the crazy man incident happened. Instead, ignorant of his previous murders, the neighbors said prayers for Ben, built him the best monument they could, and began turning him into a legend before we left Berman’s.
“Being a human is difficult,” I said aloud. “Common decency is the greatest quality to which one can aspire and the hardest to practice.” I had never expressed that thought before. Maybe I was learning something after all.
Fred returned to my mind along with a lump in my throat. I thought again about the night Fred had backed me against his own interest. How much we shared before our family left Berman’s. It kept revolving through my brain like an endless computer program. How do you come to grips with the fact that you abandoned your best friend? The first time might be forgivable because as a teenager I was worried that if I returned to the hills to see him some of my high school classmates would find out and return to their “hillbilly” hazing. That was spineless of me, but like LD, I was a kid. In later years I just didn’t have the guts to face him. “You weren’t a man,” I said very loud.
I thought of Ben again and his final gift to me that lay in boxes in our attic. I had never discarded the wood carvings but I never displayed them either. Why? I knew the answer: I didn’t want questions asked about them, didn’t want to see them every day and be reminded that I was in large part responsible for his horrible death. He had saved my life, and maybe the lives of others; his thanks was to die alone with his dogs. I took another drink.
Nora. What of Nora, the woman who loved me so much that she put up with my bullshit. What the hell did she see in me? She was ten times the person I was, and yet she saw me as “her Rhett Butler.” Her hero? Some hero.
She believed in me! She understood somehow the effect my past had on my life. She said one time that the hill people I described to her had instilled in me a sense of Old Testament honor and its attendant rigidity. Combined with the scholarly bent of my ethnic group, these values had somehow merged to produce a being who fiercely demanded total intellectual freedom, yet sought absolute truth! I didn’t believe any of that mumbo-jumbo but maybe it was true. If so, it was an unfortunate coupling that had haunted my life.
I was drunk but I refilled my glass with ice and booze and settled into pleasant memories of the early years of my career. Things had been going great for us those first six years at Leland-May. Nora got pregnant. I had a great wife, was starting a family, my students loved my classes, and I was moving along professionally. I didn’t, however, particularly like the Leland-May faculty and they didn’t care much for me. It started innocently enough. I was on the student affairs committee to which most young profs were assigned at L-M because you couldn’t do a lot of harm as a member of SA (as it was called). SA was run by Tolliver Atwood, who wanted the kids to adhere to a dress code. I thought it was stupid, especially given the temper of the times, and disagreed. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of calling the idea ridiculous during a meeting of the committee and embarrassed Atwood. Shortly thereafter, several members of the faculty began subtly critiquing my academic endeavors in unflattering ways. I was pretty sure the instigator was Tolliver, who remained cool toward me for months after the committee incident.
Life stayed sweet, but my tenure hearing was looming and I had only published a few scholarly articles. I loved teaching, but a tenure committee wants to see some creativity. I was due for sabbatical and had a chance to go to England and do some research.
The sabbatical was in Cornwall, only a few miles from Land’s End. Our daughter was toddling and repeating Gaelic words to the delight of the town’s women. Nora and I loved it there, and I got a lot of great work done. I discovered that English scholars had largely ignored the fascinating field of Cornish fiction. By the time we returned to New Hampshire I had compiled enough research to write a major tome and several articles. I made tenure. We got the house painted. Nora was ecstatic.
Then came the James Wallace episode. James Cacey Wallace was a bright young man who had done well in my classes. One day, in our Charles Dickens course, he turned in an essay on Joe, the Pickwick Papers character who keeps falling asleep. Something about it was familiar. A few days later I remembered where I’d seen it before: my undergraduate years when I cowrote my paper on Dickens. I confronted Wallace and he confessed. His excuse was that his grades in the current semester were good, but not good enough to keep his full scholarship. He needed an “outstanding” in my course since it was his area of concentration or he would lose his funding. That night I talked it over with Nora.
“What will the administration do if you report it?” she asked, stirring the beef Stroganoff.
I knew exactly what the dean would do. “Kick him out of Leland-May,” I answered.
Nora continued stirring the Stroganoff, casually sipping a glass of wine. “What would you like to do?”
My mind flashed on Fred and the stolen rabbits. “Give the boy another chance. Wallace isn’t a liar and a plagiarist; he’s just a kid who lied and plagiarized.”
Nora, who by this time was accustomed to hearing such logic from me, answered in a matter-of-fact tone, “Then why don’t you give him another chance?”
I did, but I made sure he earned it. Wallace worked in my courses like a field hand.
For days after that, I thought about Fred, but as the time approached to buy my plane tickets to Kentucky, I developed a sinking feeling. What would Fred and I talk about? So much of what had happened on Berman’s was traumatic and in the years since, our lives had been totally different. I didn’t go.
The Wallace episode wasn’t the end of that issue, even though the kid went on to graduate with honors. Nothing ever seemed to be the end of an issue with me. Occasionally, I got to Nora. I remembered how exasperated she became when I refused to meet with the committee about my refusal to give didactic lectures.
“Samuel, meet the schmucks’ demands partway,” she said. “Give a few lectures, then teach the way you want. For God’s sake, the faculty understands this is about academic freedom. Why do you have to drink the hemlock?”
Her argument made sense, but I couldn’t do it. Didactic lectures had been shown to be an ineffective way to teach. The way to transmit knowledge was by challenging students. But Dean Simmons was not open to challenges of any kind, especially to his preferred pedagogy.
I paid a price for continuing to teach my way. The committee on academic advancement declined to recommend my promotion. And who was a power on that committee? Tolliver Atwood! Salaries in academic literature departments are not high, and I needed the money that promotion afforded. We had an eight- and a twelve-year-old. Nora had to take a part-time job in a bookstore to build up their college fund instead of staying at home until both children were in high school.
The attack on my teaching was the beginning of an academic nightmare. I seemed to be criticized by every professor on campus. While annoying, it was still just criticism.
Then James Wallace, who was now a young professor at a little Ivy League college, gave amnesty to a student who cheated. He told him why, naming me as his mentor. The student told his friend, who told his father, who was on the Leland-May Board of Trustees. The father, of course, told Dean Simmons. A firestorm ensued. Tolliver’s attack was overt and I became ostracized by my colleagues. I was again passed over for advancement.
Then the last shoe fell. Anton Cathcart, editor of one of the most important literary journals in my field, wrote a scathing review of one of my publications. The result was disastrous. I was attacked now for both my teaching and my creative work. It was obvious that I would never make full professor at Leland-May and the odds of getting another academic job were slim, given the negative comments I was accruing. I was fifty-six, had one child entering graduate school and a second entering college, was ten years from retirement, facing old age with inadequate financial means and poor job prospects because my curriculum vitae was less than sparkling.
Then came the miracle of Cyrus Whitley-Jones. The old Oxford don, who rarely said anything good about anyone, went so far as to use the term “significant” in regard to my work in one of his articles on writers of the Cornish region. Within a month, four major universities contacted me regarding positions at the full professor level. Even better, I could teach as much or as little as I liked, provided I taught “some.”
I contacted Dean Simmons by letter, asking for a short leave of absence to “investigate other academic positions” and copied it to the department chair. Leland-May’s faculty was composed of superbly educated, adequate teachers (depending on your point of view), but far from creative. If they lost their one internationally recognized scholar, it would not go well with the Board of Trustees. Especially if it appeared that I had been driven out of town.
The dean and my chair made an offer. I thanked them, but replied that in the interest of my family and career, I had to investigate other institutions. The next day, the committee on academic advancement voted to raise my rank to “Distinguished Professor,” let me determine which courses I taught, and assured me my pedagogical technique was a matter of academic freedom.
I stayed. Every fiber of my body wanted to write an open letter to the faculty, who had made my life miserable. Nora advised rapprochement and a new attempt at social interaction. Rapprochement, I could do. See them socially? I would have preferred dining with Faulkner’s Snopes family. A few years later, I won the Johnson-Goldsmith Prize. I developed a cult following. Nora developed cancer.