Harry at the Breach

An excerpt from The Return of the Son of Needmore, A novel in progress

Way out there at the far edge of the country in Arbuckle, Oregon, that most anonymous of towns, Assistant Professor Harrison B. Eastep, MA, was living a highly anonymous life in an anonymous apartment at an anonymous address, toiling by day deep in the bowels of Lower Division Humanities, holing up at night in his apartment to grade papers and drink blended whiskey and contemplate the Meaning of It All. His second marriage had by now - let's say midwinter of 1974 - been dead almost six years, or about twice as long as it had lived. ("You know what I think, Harry?" his wife, Joellen, had said tearfully on her way out. "I think you're just hiding behind all that cheap cynicism! You're just scared, Harry!" Cheap? he'd asked himself when she and the boy were gone. If it's so fucking cheap, how come it's costing me so much?) For the last couple of years he'd been carrying on a half-hearted affair with a woman named Marcella, a divorced librarian at the state university in Eugene, sixty miles away but neither of them was enjoying it much (in large part because Marcella's three teen-age daughters persisted in treating Harry like The Degenerate Who Came to Dinner), so Harry only saw her every couple of weeks or so, when the sexual imperative asserted its insistent self. Between times, blended whiskey provided all the solace he could handle.

Joellen had been right, actually: Cynicism did come cheap in Arbuckle, whose residents took great civic pride in the fact that they lived in the seat of the only county west of the Mississippi River to support Alf Landon for president in 1936.

Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where Harry had spent two dismal years mindlessly typing recquistions for laundry soap and toilet paper, remains the only public facility in his experience that could rival Arbuckle State for pure ugliness. The institution had begun life as a teacher's college, but over the years its mission had gradually expanded to include agriculture, engineering, home economics, nursing, accounting, and a host of similarly romantic disciplines, with the result that the campus itself was a preposterous confusion of uniformly unimaginative yet utterly contradictory architectural styles.

The stateliest buildngs were the ones that made up the original campus, a cluster of eight or nine low, homely but serviceable crenellated red-brick farewell salutes to the Industrial Revolution. They were closely surrounded by several nice stands of elms and maples; in the spring the trees became leafy ambuscades for great raucous flocks of grackles and grosbeaks that unloaded their sodden ballast only when Humanities faculty happened along the sidewalks below. One learned not to mind it much; in Oregon it was always raining something or other anyhow.

But looming over this bucolic little patch of relative serenity was a farrago of towering slabs of steel and glass and concrete thrusting themselves skyward as if to blot out the very sun itself (on those rare occasions when the sun endeavored to shine on this gloomy Joe Bltsplk of campus), each of them - like the new Food Technology building, which the student newspaper proudly dubbed "the largest erection on the Arbuckle campus" - as impersonal and heartless as... well, as the largest erection on the Arbuckle campus.

About the feet of these noble piles crept, kudzu-like, an impenetrable maze of inter-connected one-story frame barracks, olive-drab relics of the Navy's wartime V-12 officer-training program. Here, in shabby oblivion, resided (or was bivouacked) Lower Division Humanities, including the Departments of Art, Languages and Literature, Social Studies, Band (not Music), and History, an Augean stable where Harry and his friend and colleague Gil Burgin shared a stall and plied their inglorious trade.

Humanities was a two-year "Service Division," ranking just above Maintenance and Janitorial. Its minions were regarded by the larger Arbuckle faculty much like the famous red-headed step-child at the family reunion: Assistant Professors of Poultry Management looked down their beaks upon Western Civ instructors as if at indisgestible insects; football coaches treated the poor devils who taught freshman composition like something they'd stepped in by mistake. A distiguished Professor of Sanitary Engineering once openly referred in the faculty senate to required humanities courses as "a damned nuisance," and further denounced these la-te-da garnishments to a liberal education - in a soaring flight of rhetoric such as was rarely heard in the august chamber - as "frills, fluff, and frippery!" Students who evinced an unwholesome interest in the humanities were sent packing after their sophomore year, before the condition became contagious.

When Harry first came to Arbuckle, he'd supposed that he was under some personal or moral or even intellectual obligation to do his best to teach a little something, so he included an essay question in his first exam: He asked his students to discuss briefly some of the influences of the Great Plague of London on the religious climate of the time. The first paper he read began, "In this modren world of ours today, our modren medical science..." The second paper began, "Daniel Webster, in his dictionary, defines 'influence' as..." The third, "In his dictionary, Daniel Webster defines 'climate' as..." Harry round-filed the whole batch of papers then and there and began immediately to make out another test, multiple-choice questions only ("The Great Plague was spread by: a. dirty doorknobs; b. old paper money; c. rats; d. illicit sexual intercourse"). Later, he discovered that true-false questions ("Sir Walter Raleigh caught the Great Plague from an Indian maiden in America and brought it home to London with him. T or F?") were even less bothersome to mark, and nowadays he relied on them to the exclusion of all other forms.

So it came to pass that Harry's dedication to pedagogy had eventually eroded to such an extent that when his mother first hinted, in a letter, that he might want to consider relocating back home to Kentucky and going into the antiques business with her, he found himself, he confided to his officemate Gil Burgin, seriously entertaining the possibility.

"What?" cried Gil, as he scurried off to knock down yet another Western Civ section. "And give up the Life of the Mind?"