The Hair of Harold Roux Page 29

  She nodded, her polished, cracked old face unmoving but her eyes bright. She raised her arms and her hands began to move quickly, up and down, back and forth, her crippled old fingers moving, too. He couldn’t understand anything of what she was trying to say, and he felt hopeless again. But a strange thing happened, little by little. He would never know how it happened, but he began to understand! Her gestures that a minute before were nothing but the meaningless twitches of an old woman’s arms and hands suddenly began to mean water, box, powder, cup. Other movements suddenly meant open, heat, pour, stir, and finally all the different kinds of words—words for things and words for doing—came together just as easily as the words he had spoken all his life.

  When the old woman stopped speaking she nodded three times and he nodded three times back, then began his preparations. Janie and Eugenia watched in wonderment as he put just so much of the brown powder from the box with the hand on it into a large cup. He added hot water from the water pot that hung over the fire, added a pinch of kinnikinnick and a pinch of glasswort and stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon. He got down from the shelf the two kinds of mushrooms they hadn’t dared to eat before—the yellow ones and the red ones. They were dried out now, and he put them together in the mortar and with the pestle ground them into a fine powder.

  “But what are you going to do with those things, Billy?” Eugenia said. “They may be dangerous!”

  “I’m making medicine for Dad,” Billy said, pouring the ground mushrooms into the steaming cup.

  “No!” Eugenia said. “It might be poison! We don’t know what those things are!”

  “Are you sure, Billy?” Janie said.

  “No, I’m not exactly sure,” Billy said, “but I feel this is the right thing to do.”

  And so Billy propped his father’s head up in his arm and held the strange steaming broth to his lips. Billy could see the orange-yellow steam enter his father’s nose at each short breath. Soon the breaths became longer, longer and more easy, and then, still deep in sleep, his father drank the brownish broth. When he had drunk it all he still slept, far too deeply for their voices to follow him, but it was an easier sleep, and they all at once dared hope that he might live.

  Now Billy Benham’s hands pressed Aaron’s arm, the small hands holding his father’s thick forearm as if it had been in danger of going away. He would not be as demonstrative of his excitement and pride about the boy’s brave cleverness, but his hands held tightly.

  The story went on, as it had to. When they looked around to thank the old woman, she was gone. When they looked further they found that the barn door was open and that Oka was gone, too. Brin and the goats were there in the dim light of the barn, but Oka was gone. They couldn’t tell which direction she had taken because no hoofprints would show in the ice. They tried to comfort Janie but she could not be comforted. Eugenia made a thick, nourishing soup for them from some of the powders in the birch-bark boxes, but Janie couldn’t eat. “Oka will be hungry!” Janie cried. “Dear Oka! Where can she go on the ice with nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat?” Later, when she was in bed, all she could see was Oka, somewhere deep in the strange wilderness, hungry and alone. Oka, who had been so generous to them, all alone in a cruel land so different from the warm green fields she yearned for, with no one to help her. Even now the deadly cold might have her down on her side, awkward on the hard, slippery ice. Janie couldn’t think of anything else. She couldn’t sleep in her warm bed when Oka was in the cold, so when everyone else was asleep she got up, as quietly as she could, dressed herself in her warmest clothes—her fur parka with the fringed hood, her fur-backed mittens, boots with the fur inside and the iron crampons strapped to the soles—and stepped out into the moonlight where it was so clear she was in the cold zero chill of the moon itself. She didn’t know where to go to look for Oka, but she had to go. And that was how she left her warm home and her family for the cruel shadows of the frozen forest.

  His last words had that final sound. Janie Benham groaned, a noise that held, at its rising end, a question. Could the story go on? A little girl named Janie was going on her great adventure. What about that vision of dark mountain and falling water, and the black clouds rolling? How brave and kind she was! Because she loved a cow she would leave her home and go alone upon that deadly quest.

  “It’s time for bed,” Aaron said.

  “It’s nine-thirty,” Agnes said from across the room. “It’s late and you both have to go to school tomorrow.”

  “Just till where the little girl …”

  “No. Come on, now.”

  Billy stared quietly across the room at the fire, his cowlick standing up in a silken whorl on his head that was still balanced upon the slender neck of childhood. “They don’t go to school,” he said.

  “It’s a story,” Aaron said. “Maybe they’re taught at home. I just didn’t get to their lessons.”

  “His father taught him to cut jerky and he helped his father all the time.”

  “Her mother taught her how to sew moccasins and make butter,” Janie added.

  “You’re both procrastinating.”

  “I don’t want to go to bed yet,” Billy said in a calm, thoughtful voice, as if for the first time in his life that feeling deserved rational consideration.

  But they had to go to bed because the father and the mother, who had the power, would make them go to bed. Not soon, not later, but now. Janie got up with a sulky swagger. It wasn’t fair. Her look at him was resentful, glistening, her turned-down mouth almost ugly. He was about to call her ungrateful; wasn’t the story a gift from him?

  “I just want to talk about it for a little while,” Billy said.

  Janie immediately understood Billy’s new method and joined it. “What’s the matter with that?” she asked.

  His children’s brilliant sly reasonableness made Aaron’s heart turn with love and admiration.

  Aaron has been dissolved. He wakes bodiless, his soul at the specific gravity of tepid water. What used to be his legs and arms feel little more cohesive than gelatin. But there is something he has to do. All he knows is that it is something he doesn’t want to do, but of course that condition is so usual it doesn’t help him remember. Then he does remember and reaches a gelatinous arm for his watch, where he left it on the bathroom scales. Four o’clock: he must go right now. He’d rather be a sinuous body of kelp, his head a hollow flotation chamber swirling gently in the warm tides of a timeless sea. But like an awkward, transitional monster he heaves himself from the brine. His knee no longer hurts quite so much but it does not want to be bent; certain valves within that complex joint are plugged with grease. His wrist will do nearly anything for him except be leaned upon. In the mirror he sees a Band-Aid melting from his jaw, a bloodless blue cut showing. He talks to the parts of his faithful body as he dries and gets dressed, reminding them of all their shared experiences. The captain may be crazy but they owe him a certain loyalty and he is certain they will do their utmost. Besides, they are far from port and they’d better make the best of it.

  He finds a clean cotton shirt and some untorn pants, cleans the unfortunate squashed bugs from the lenses of his glasses. Soon he is beneath his humid crash helmet in the garage, trying to find neutral—any of the three possible places where the Honda will be in neutral and will start. Finally, with a lugging and a crunch of the delicate gears, he is off down his driveway, numb here and there but in general feeling that his articulate minions, his good crew, will get him through the campus to the somewhat decaying building, moldering sedately beneath its ivy, that is the dark center from which the English Department, whatever that is, insidiously spreads its tentacles around the tender, overly receptive brains of what was once our pride and our hope, our youth. Perhaps he shouldn’t go; the water has got to his flotation chamber after all—that gray, soapy water mildly chemicaled by some of Agnes’ bath oil beads. Is that why he feels so slippery?

  It is not that he dislikes his fellow senior members,
those who have been graced with tenure, those eminences beginning to gray or wholly gray or white (strangely, none are bald) who can without any mnemonic devices tell immediately whether the sixteenth century is actually the fifteen hundreds, the sixteen hundreds or the seventeen hundreds.

  When he arrives they are there behind the closed door of the chairman’s office. The two and one-half secretaries smile at him, the one-half secretary referred to this way because she works half time. There are one-half assistant professors who are there full time, he always has to think when he looks at the one-half secretary, who is actually a pretty girl, as bilaterally symmetrical as one could wish. He takes his mail in with him to read during lulls. Not lulls of talk, for his colleagues can talk forever, but lulls of emotional tension. He is nodded to, an eyebrow is raised (he is on leave, is he not?) and he finds a chair.

  Forty-five minutes later the subject of George Buck comes up. It is not that Aaron hasn’t been listening; these men are really no more digressively verbose than any others, nor do they enjoy the sounds of their own voices more than men of any station. They are, if anything, more precise, more intelligent than most, and their ambitions are no more nakedly egocentric. Perhaps a certain intensity of moral fervor can at times make them ruthless or cruel, but often the same fervor causes them to make judgments that are moral. Why expect from professors an Olympian objectivity beyond that of ordinary men when one has, no doubt, once taken a course in ancient Greek mythology in which one found out all about Zeus? And, after all, these men have reached their august positions through competition—grinding, eye-blearing competition—with other ambitious and intelligent men.

  Well, this isn’t exactly true in all cases, but what is? Aaron is listening. Perhaps the most fervently moral, those whose standards of teaching and scholarship are impeccably rigid, are those whose work hasn’t progressed very well for the last ten years or so. But he won’t generalize in this area, either.

  There are ten men sitting in the chairman’s spacious office. Their styles of clothes and hair vary according to their (comparative) youth, their convictions concerning fashion, politics, student Gemütlichkeit, or having to get along with local, nonuniversity artisans and officials. He notices that the student representative, who has been duly elected to this body, is absent. And there are no women, but several female junior members look promising enough so that this sexist segregation will most likely be broken soon. There are also two junior member blacks, one of whom is definitely on his way in unless he is grabbed by Harvard.

  But this tone, Aaron has to think, is not exactly fair. How easy it is to caricature these colleagues of his, to feel superior. Professors are either revered or despised, according to the age. But there is X’s strange involuntary smirk, Y’s sly attempt to sound like an honest, candid, good old country boy, Z’s Rhodes scholar accent which is entangled glottally with the Down Maine inflections of his childhood, W’s slightly off renditions of not quite current student jargon (“Outasight!”), V’s prissy, pursed lips and bow ties, U’s ostentatious annotating of a Latin text all during the meeting, S’s constant complaints that the students don’t work any more, have no standards, don’t care about anything (who, during the Cambodia-Kent State spring was so frightened by their caring about that issue he was pale and speechless for several weeks). A strange set of perfectly normal, ordinary men, as honest as most, most of them Aaron’s friends, none of whom he really dislikes.

  The arguments over George Buck’s case will proceed along certain lines. Those to whom published scholarship is not and never has been their strong suit, who in fact sometimes sneer at the value of the Ph.D., including their own, will support George wholeheartedly, citing student evaluations of his classes, his personality, his fairness, his “feedback” and so on. Those, on the other hand, who have the glory of the departmental Ph.D. degree in mind, will point out that even if George does manage to get his degree he will probably never do scholarship—visible, published scholarship, that is —and so will never be a candidate for tenure. If, in effect, we give him more time, all we are doing is putting off an inevitable and much more traumatic firing of the man two years hence.

  Are we going to reward good teaching at this institution or not? asks group number one.

  We should reward good teaching, of course, answers group number two, but good teaching along with good scholarship.

  Publish or Perish! a member of group number one says, and suggests that what with all the wordy, irrelevant, feather-splitting nonsense the scholarly publications are full of today we should pay these young scholars not to publish.

  While the argument runs its predictable course, Aaron is silent. His heartbeat seems to him erratic, his palms are sweating. He has descended into that terrible internal place that is too close to the center of the organism. It is the control center, and he’s there with no plan, no directions from the captain. He is the captain, and he doesn’t know what to do. So he inhales eighteen cubic feet of poisonous cigarette smoke in one drag, thinking that a better method of suicide would be to open the window of his study that overlooks a blackberry patch, take his shotgun, put the muzzle in his mouth and carefully blow his brains out the window so as not to mess up the house and cause his wife to see unnecessary gore. A gentle summer rain or two and everything will be fine. Having gone over this familiar recipe for immediate, painless, sure-fire extinction, he comes back to George Buck, Helga Buck, and Edward Buck. The fact is that in his own screwed-up, ambivalent way he loves these people, and they, in their much more human and sincere fashion, love him. God knows why.

  Group number two is probably right, but it might very well kill George to have to sell his beloved house, to leave his beloved students and move away. And what will that do to Helga and Edward? Their unhappiness is so inevitable. Of course, all this is George’s fault; George is no revolutionary, either, who might have a crusade or such against the present form of the university. He entered upon his job willingly, knowing what was expected of him. He worked himself to exhaustion at Brown in order to finish his residency requirements, his written and oral examinations. All he has to do is write his dissertation, God damn it! And be interested enough and curious enough and original enough to discover new ideas and share them with his peers via the printed word, God damn it all to hell!

  Ah, but these arguments are mere procrastination. All Aaron’s life he has known people, one here, one there, who have given him the supreme gift, the highest, most valuable gift of all, and that is to have redeemed in his eyes the human race. Certainly he cannot find in himself much evidence for the possibility of such grace. Again he thinks that it has always been his role to be stronger and morally inferior to these chosen few.

  He has been asked a question. It is Z, the chairman: “Addon, praps you have news of Jawge’s pro-gress tawd the complation of his dis-tation?”

  If he could only say how happy he is to report that it will be published by Columbia University Press this fall; that they also plan a series of monographs in pamphlet form on Henry Troy, George to be the general editor of the series, followed by The Complete Works. Columbia is also very much interested in George’s as yet unfinished book-length manuscript, Troy-ism as an Aspect of the Age, and they hope to publish it toward the beginning of next year.

  “He says it’s coming along,” Aaron says.

  “Ah, but is it?”

  “I really don’t know,” he lies.

  He thinks: screw this university. Screw all institutions. It is the seed of murder when a man is loyal to anything but another man. But what arguments can you now muster that will change anything? And listen, you compulsive survivor, how much exactly do you need this system, not to mention the check in the warm little green envelope that comes every two weeks? Yes, you are one of the lucky few and could probably live on your writing, but do you feel that you have all that energy? No, he would not want to take on that nervous risk—not at the moment, anyway.

  Aaron, who rarely gets headaches, now has a red
-hot ball bearing just under the skin at the back of his head. Or maybe it’s a crunching, vise-turning sort of thing, not heat so much as pressure, so there probably isn’t a column of smoke rising from the back of his head. Whatever it is, it’s real pain.

  He remains silent; he does nothing to help his friend. This is the moment a man with any greatness in him would seize. He should speak, jolting them with his emotion, shaping their beliefs with his brilliant clarity and logic, outlining for them a whole new philosophy of their stewardship. He is silent because he has none of these ideas and probably wouldn’t agree with them even if he could get his golden tongue around their invincible sonorities. So he tries to think that, after all, in the end, it will probably be best for George, a favor, really, to …

  He is presented with a small blank piece of paper, upon which he will write “yes” if he wants the department to recommend to the dean that George’s deadline be moved forward to January 30, and “no” if he wants it to remain August 30. Of course he will write … what? Why doesn’t he write “yes” and be done with it? He almost writes “no.” Might he write “abstain”? Finally he writes “yes.” The vote is counted and the “noes” win by two votes, a result he exactly knew beforehand.

  After a few announcements that Aaron’s on-leave mind safely evades, the meeting is over. W wants him to play squash for an hour but Aaron explains that he fell off his motorcycle and his knee doesn’t work very well today. Maybe in a few days.

  He takes his mail down the hall to his office, unlocks the door and dumps the envelopes and brochures on his desk, then quickly sorts them out and puts most of them in the wastebasket. Through his two windows he sees the graceful branches of a heroically surviving elm, an expanse of green lawn and the stone legend over the library arch: YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE. You shall know the truth and the truth shall drive you up the wall. He doesn’t want to see George. He doesn’t want to see anybody who might want to discuss George’s case, so he leaves.