He began raving. In his office he said, “They can send me fools to teach, and I will send them back educated fools; nobody can teach the fool out of them!” very many times the last week of his life. This statement bit and lasted. They had it cut into an epilogue on the marble tablet of the stone arch at the exit of the campus drive.
That dreary antique word fool lashed at me every time I drove under the arch. The tablet was muddy with veins now. Some days I was on my way to playing snooker over at the Twentieth Century Recreation in Jackson. Tuesday nights I was on my way to rehearsing with the symphony. Then there were the afternoons when I rode with a hag or roach: lonely, tacky girls I picked up in the coffee room or in the hall of the Fine Arts Building, girls wearing Ivy League outfits from Sears, Roebuck, girls with odd fannies, queer noses, and strange legs. Then one time, a positive beauty, begging to come with me and crash the Twentieth Century, where no women were ever seen, and then she opens her mouth to laugh and shuts it immediately, very sad now, looking out the window away from me, knowing I’ve seen them — her teeth, a brown nest of grubworms. “Take me back to the dorm,” she says. Then in front of the dorm she explains that her family had once lived in an Arkansas town where nobody knew the water was bad until their children got their permanent teeth. “It could have been something worse,” I said. Later I wanted to hang myself with shame. I wondered if I had begun some rotten subconscious habit last year with Tonnie Ray Reese. Why did I even approach these girls? Who was I to give them my backside when they didn’t suit my needs? How had I known there was some huge spoiling defect when I picked up this beauty with the teeth? I was sure I already knew, somehow, when my eyes took her in. Well, I was a fool, as the epilogue told me.
But the alternative to being a fool, and maybe a bastard, was staying on the campus of this forlorn asylum and being conscientious and being dead. Such choices, I think, have broken over this head of mine whenever I stopped to think.
I filled my space in the desks. I was looked through and talked through by all the Pee Aitch Dees, and I turned around to see just who they were looking at and talking to in the back of the room, and saw they were talking to nobody, but a thing: out there was the lawn, the olden greenery, the slow quietness, the recumbency, the ancient brick and the long, long history — everything you need for a cemetery.
We were dragged into Chapel three times a week to hear speakers of such interest as to make flies change place on a corpse. The Pee Aitch Dees checked roll for their sections and then sat down and slept the old eye-open snoozes of scholars. Up on stage would be a millionaire Christian from Texas, dramatizing life to us as a tennis game. There you were with the net of dread in front of you; but you had to keep serving; you fended, you sweated, you looked to see if your partner was still there and He was. It was Jesus. (The Savior favored a dogwood racquet with lambgut strings — a cheap joke on my part, but it matches the allegory of the millionaire evangelist.) Another morning we heard the anti-beer and anti-promiscuity specialist, a limp bachelor of fifty who was a huge personality among the denomination. He clung meekly to the lectern, paralyzed us for five minutes with memorabilia about vivid prudes we had never known, then he affected a madness like Hamlet’s and cannonballed — dry limp hands flying, wide stiff suit reminiscent of an iron lung — into a case history of two “young people” on a Saturday night. Hands wrapped together now, coming to it with dire breathlessness, holding the vowels in his mouth: “A dark night, a parked car, a can of beer, a fond embrace … a wandering hand … and sin entered the lives of these young people!” Oh, the dizzy sick mauling of it; oh, the vague sweaty pre-coital commotion; oh, the breaths of beer, that drink “akin to rat urine!” (so he pronounced it) — all we students perking up when he said that. Then he told us about seeing the rat swimming in the beer of the vat of a brewery down in New Orleans. The student body and I sat back then. We had thought we were going to hear about the whole act of love, but no, and we lay back in the seats. The boy right behind me was a famed athlete on the Hedermansever football team. They called him Mole-Digger. Mole-Digger struck me on the back of my head. I turned around. He leaned up on the back of my seat and whispered, “Why’ont you raise yo hand and ask him would he go on about them lovers …” Another athlete, sitting next to Mole-Digger, had a big, living snake in his hands. Covertly, he rammed the writhing thing under the back of Mole-Digger’s tee shirt. So Mole-Digger fell back, clutching his back, grinning, and that was my only contact with Mole-Digger, forever.
But the ministerial students, who were about thirty per cent of the student body, stood up and clapped for the bachelor at the podium who was such a great name among their denomination. In their ranks were the hard-lipped scowlers for Jesus and the radiant happy gladhanders for Jesus. You had Jesus coming at you in all styles at Hedermansever. You had people full of Jesus who dressed very costly in Ivy League and you had people full of Jesus who looked like they just ran out of a fire.
At eighteen years old, trying to come on strong in that herd of backs and cowlicks, female pageboy hairdos, pants-butts, bouffant hair, bare girls’ ankles in brown penny loafers, and skirts flairing up to show stocking latches, all of us making out of Chapel in our congested warm dumb way, I smelled in that crowd the odor of flowers and fish, together, the effluvium of real women somewhere in the crowd. The heavy magnolia and the sardines. I held to my books, becoming the very nose of lust.
I am a gift, so someone take me, I thought. Someone record me. Don’t lose me. What with my talents on the horn, my car, my suntan, my musician’s hair, my execution of the Vivaldi piece just recently in my music room … well, what about that? But carrying the slippery books alongside my hip, and sweating tactlessly like a slug snail, I looked in the face of a belle, some gal in her negligent blouse who had found a cool nook for herself and was leaning back as if saying, What can you show me, boys? She looked just as annoyed by Chapel as I was, but in some way I could not possibly touch, my hands were so full of sweaty books. The belles were there at Hedermansever, about ten of them in the two thousand of us there, and you would see them poising like statues in the alcoves, the shadows of the halls, and they knew how to lean, and how to be mildly reckless with their legs, cocking them out of their skirts so you saw, could imagine, both knees raised.
But the belles had learned to ignore by the time I got there. They knew how to look blissfully by one. What they were looking for is still unclear to me. I followed them up in the newspapers later and saw they’d married men like Air Force lieutenants and stockbrokers from Dallas and once-married rich lawyers from Atlanta, who seem like second-rate interlopers to me.
These belles were expert at ignoring me. They had developed such subtlety that my gleaming face did not occupy them. So there I was left with my books, yearning for my trumpet to play that Vivaldi strain brassy and direct into this belle’s face, working down her until the bell of my horn was perfectly crammed by her breast, the song going right to her heart; then moving down to the cup of her navel to delight her at the place she snapped off from her mother, making her tickle as she receives food there again, in the form of music this time, from the brass throat of my horn … But the belles looked away, and I was shocked to think suddenly how drear and antique the Vivaldi tune would seem to them, just like another Chapel meeting, sleepy, with another baba on stage drinking glasses of his own words, a wind blowing in and out of the cracks of dead Italian castles. So I removed my cold horn from the navels of the belles.