The Englishman

chapter 14

I’M RUNNING, STUMBLING OVER STONES and the roots of trees, trying not to twist my ankle, trying not to fall. Trying to run off the adrenaline that sears all the nerve endings in my body, threatening to tip me into a vat of panic. What am I doing wrong? Everything is going wrong!

Not everything, not quite everything.

Dancey must not have been informed about Madeline Harrison’s complaint about me, or he would surely have slapped me with that, too, the same way he feels it necessary to inform me that one among my colleagues considers the noise of my heels an attack on his personal freedom. Corvin. Or Dolph Bergstrom. Who else would complain to the department chair about a new colleague’s shoes? Shoes, for Chrissakes, half-boots, not Louboutins! I’ll be damned if I’ll be bullied like this! They can underpay me, and they can fire me for treating students like liberal-minded adults, but they can’t make me take off my heels! This battle I will fight.

And upon reflection I doubt that Logan Williams will report me to the chair, or worse, the Dean of Studies. Does he really want to tell Ma Mayfield about “semen” and “phallus”? Not freakin’ likely. So I’m safe, for the time being.

As long as I don’t fling myself at Giles Cleveland.

I must keep my distance, or I will fall for him like an egg from a tall chicken. Like an egg shot from a sling. Destruction upon impact. That was a crazy moment, earlier today. Crazy. At the time I could have sworn that he was about to come for me, but now, in hindsight—impossible. Maybe what I saw in his face was his consternation at what he saw in mine! I can only hope and trust that in hindsight he, too, has decided that he was wrong.

The adrenaline ebbs out of my body, leaving behind a sense of nausea. Like a virus that crawls up my spine from the pit of my stomach. I would be fine, here, in my little cottage, with my new job and my new bike and my new colleagues. I would be fine, if it wasn’t for Giles Cleveland.

Smoke.

I’m jogging along, deep in thought, and I couldn’t say for how long I have been smelling burning wood, but it is very distinct now, and it’s getting stronger. Feeling like Davy Crockett, I sniff and listen and peer through the dusky trees, and soon I can hear the sound of a guitar and of voices. The pickers’ camp. I hadn’t noticed it before when I walked past the clearing, but there is a knee-high stone circle designed to hold a fire. Several figures are sprawled round it, and on the wind comes a familiar whiff as of Catholic churches. I wonder whether the Walshes know of the depraved activities that go on here, the sex and drugs. But at least it isn’t sex and drugs among illegal Mexican laborers; maybe that is all that counts.

One figure disengages from the group around the fire and walks toward me, or rather toward the path that leads back to the farm, and it is now so dusky that we only recognize each other when we’re just a few yards apart.

“Hey, Jules,” I greet her serenely.

She isn’t as composed, but she manages to fake it, and she has no choice but to walk back together with me.

“Not for nothing, Jules, but you do know that if I ever happen to see you smoking dope, I’d have to tell your parents, right?”

“I wasn’t smoking anything!”

“I’m not the Drug Squad. I don’t need to know what you did or didn’t do, and by the way, I could tell if you were stoned, and you’re clearly not. I’m just saying. If.”

“Have you ever—”

“Nice try, girlfriend, but hardly the issue.”

“That means yes,” she says quickly, and we both have to laugh.

“I confess nothing, Jules! I hope you heard me!”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“More importantly, how’s Karen?”

“How do you know about that?”

And why did I think I would get a straight answer out of a teenager?

“I had to get something from my car last night, and I saw them driving off. Is Karen at home again? Is she all right?”

“They’re keeping her at the hospital for a day or two. To find out where the blood came from.”

“That’s okay, no need to tell me the gory details.” A fifteen-year-old shouldn’t have to talk about the vaginal bleeding endangering her mother’s pregnancy.

“This would be the third miscarriage since the twins,” she offers as if she were talking about the weather. That, of course, explains the hushed excitement when Karen told us the good news. “But she’s only thirty-five; she can try a little longer.” I have the uncanny feeling that she is giving me a sound bite from home.

There is a lot of bitterness here, and again I wonder whether it wouldn’t improve Jules’ lot if there was a little tomato princeling to shoulder his elders’ expectations. But it wouldn’t be appropriate to share this with her, particularly since there may well not be a princeling. Instead, I give her what I hope is an encouraging smile and let her jump first across the brook and onto the grass verge of the dirt track leading past the farm. In a cloud of dust a car approaches, a pick-up about ten years more beat-up than Pop Walsh’s. Jules seems to recognize it; she gives a little yelp and starts waving. The pick-up slows down, and out the window leans my favorite student.

“Hey, ladies—going home already? The party’s just starting!”

Jules giggles and says something about a curfew. I wonder whether her admiration is as obvious to him as it is to me, and my heart sinks.

“Who’s your friend?” Logan asks Jules and hesitates only for the tiniest moment before he looks over at me, bold as brass. Looks me straight in the eye, daring me.

“Oh, this is Anna!” Jules responds eagerly. “Lieberman, Dr. Lieberman. She is an English professor at the Folly, too—don’t you know each other?”

“Yeah, the name rings a bell.”

Against my will I am a little tickled by this display of chuzpah, but if he thinks he can play me, he better think again.

“Logan is in one of my classes this semester, Jules.”

“He is? That’s so neat!” she exclaims. “That’s so weird, though! Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“I do.” My tone is dry enough to register with Logan, but not with Jules, whose attention is focused on the boy.

“Stranger things happen at sea,” he says breezily and drives off.

Great. Logan Williams and Jules Walsh exchanging gossip about his new professor and her family’s new tenant. This you do not get if you teach on a large urban campus.

“How come Logan hangs out with the pickers?”

“He has a job here! He’s a regular, been picking for, dunno, four or five years?”

With a dysfunctional family and the transition from a community college to Ardrossan University to digest, Calderbrook farm may well be a comforting factor of continuity in Logan’s life. He’s welcome to it, too, as long as he keeps his mitts off my landlord’s underage step-granddaughter.