wouldn’t say “Indian” but “First Nations,” and who wouldn’t know one First Nations person if they met him on the street; who would ban Huckleberry Finn but never be able to create one. This is the country of transgressionalists who deplore religion yet have created their own, more sanctimonious than any other you could imagine. The university bred this kind of sanctimony; it was a place where moral positions were so often paid for by inherited money or student loans.
In the world of my students, Ian and Harold and Evan—and Molly, Sara and Annette—did not have a chance. There were actually better off with Lonnie. And when I began to realize this, what I knew of Ian and Harold and Evan—and Molly and Sara, and Annette with all her small hopes and dreams—changed me. I began to argue with my ownstudents, and with other professors like Jonathan Mittens, my one-time high-school friend, in defence of something that I no longer was. And so I became a pariah, just as those three boys were. The university sooner than later wanted rid of me. Professors spoke against me at certain faculty meetings I did not attend. The most vocal was Jonathan Mittens himself.
Once, I took my students up to the Ridge and showed them what was left of the houses there and the great tract of lumbering land Ian had once wanted to save, which was now plowed into the earth and thrust up against a grey-black sky, a sky turbulent in its very silence. And in that silence, as sometimes happens, it began to rain.
“My God, who could ever live here?” one of the girls said, accentuating here , the sound with its own sense of middle-class condemnation.
At the turn just before Ian Preston’s lifeless, bulldozed homestead, there was an old Pepsi sign tacked against the side of a barn, and in the distance the desperate tower where small mentally disabled Glen Dew had lost his life. Some of the students looked at it all as if excavating a site for bones. I had tears running down my cheeks.
“Is this where it all happened?” one of the brighter students said, looking over at me pensively. “Then it is true. Human drama, and human greatness, unfolds wherever humans are—and that’s a fact.” He did not know we were standing beside what was left of my parents’ house.
So let us become ghosts and return to those days just after the hunting trip.
Evan Young had hoped Ian would help him ask Joyce Fitzroy for the money, and then he would pay the loan back. But Ian believed Evan wanted his help in asking for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage. The hand of Molly Thorn. That quiet child whom Evan loved.
Ian knew he had done nothing wrong. He reacted to the silent accusations of others by being silent, and this was to his own credit, in hindsight—but in hindsight only. Now he was certain both of his blood brothers hated him; and he was even more certain it was not his fault.
Fitzroy had wanted to be a partner in the store until he died. That was all. Sitting by the stove and chewing snuff, his false teeth in his pocket, he still smelled of the woodchips and ice he had worked with for almost sixty years.
He had $125,000 to show for those sixty long years and he had given this over to his youngest sister’s grandchild, Ian Preston, a boy he had spoken to only a dozen times before.
And so Ian’s great store became, to some, “the stolen store,” and remained so until it closed in disgrace some years on. Did it matter if this was untrue? Not one of my students thought it was untrue—yet none of them wanted to investigate it to find out. The stolen store had variant meanings—that is, it was stolen from Harold Dew; or, as most thought, from Joyce Fitzroy; or, as was hinted at times, it was stolen from Lonnie Sullivan, who always sounded hurt when he spoke of it. But the one point that never varied was this: it had been stolen.
So how did this happen? How did a man who was above reproach in his dealings and scrupulously honest, who refused
In the world of my students, Ian and Harold and Evan—and Molly, Sara and Annette—did not have a chance. There were actually better off with Lonnie. And when I began to realize this, what I knew of Ian and Harold and Evan—and Molly and Sara, and Annette with all her small hopes and dreams—changed me. I began to argue with my ownstudents, and with other professors like Jonathan Mittens, my one-time high-school friend, in defence of something that I no longer was. And so I became a pariah, just as those three boys were. The university sooner than later wanted rid of me. Professors spoke against me at certain faculty meetings I did not attend. The most vocal was Jonathan Mittens himself.
Once, I took my students up to the Ridge and showed them what was left of the houses there and the great tract of lumbering land Ian had once wanted to save, which was now plowed into the earth and thrust up against a grey-black sky, a sky turbulent in its very silence. And in that silence, as sometimes happens, it began to rain.
“My God, who could ever live here?” one of the girls said, accentuating here , the sound with its own sense of middle-class condemnation.
At the turn just before Ian Preston’s lifeless, bulldozed homestead, there was an old Pepsi sign tacked against the side of a barn, and in the distance the desperate tower where small mentally disabled Glen Dew had lost his life. Some of the students looked at it all as if excavating a site for bones. I had tears running down my cheeks.
“Is this where it all happened?” one of the brighter students said, looking over at me pensively. “Then it is true. Human drama, and human greatness, unfolds wherever humans are—and that’s a fact.” He did not know we were standing beside what was left of my parents’ house.
So let us become ghosts and return to those days just after the hunting trip.
Evan Young had hoped Ian would help him ask Joyce Fitzroy for the money, and then he would pay the loan back. But Ian believed Evan wanted his help in asking for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage. The hand of Molly Thorn. That quiet child whom Evan loved.
Ian knew he had done nothing wrong. He reacted to the silent accusations of others by being silent, and this was to his own credit, in hindsight—but in hindsight only. Now he was certain both of his blood brothers hated him; and he was even more certain it was not his fault.
Fitzroy had wanted to be a partner in the store until he died. That was all. Sitting by the stove and chewing snuff, his false teeth in his pocket, he still smelled of the woodchips and ice he had worked with for almost sixty years.
He had $125,000 to show for those sixty long years and he had given this over to his youngest sister’s grandchild, Ian Preston, a boy he had spoken to only a dozen times before.
And so Ian’s great store became, to some, “the stolen store,” and remained so until it closed in disgrace some years on. Did it matter if this was untrue? Not one of my students thought it was untrue—yet none of them wanted to investigate it to find out. The stolen store had variant meanings—that is, it was stolen from Harold Dew; or, as most thought, from Joyce Fitzroy; or, as was hinted at times, it was stolen from Lonnie Sullivan, who always sounded hurt when he spoke of it. But the one point that never varied was this: it had been stolen.
So how did this happen? How did a man who was above reproach in his dealings and scrupulously honest, who refused
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