No one laughed, but Weedeman appeared to grin. “ Class dismissed.” I took extra time clearing up, half in hope my Lesson Plan Thief might stop and talk. He did not. With resignation he co llec ted books, penc il s tubs and crumpled papers, unceremoniously depositing all in a cheap cloth sack before turning his wearied attention to the task of standing. When he did this, I saw how hard it was for him, a bag of bones pushing hard away from the desk to bring a small shape teetering upward. Row 4, Seat 2 ,1thbught, his choice as the fewest steps to the door. His right leg, which would not bend, swung a wide arc for every second step, throwing him into bumping imbalance. “ Have a good day,” I called. The grunt I heard might have been his, or the door hinge closing. With Weedeman still on my mind, I made a quick stopover at my office and set out for the faculty lounge. I spread books and papers on the table. The calligraphy glared at me from the inside flap of my briefcase. S o m e teaching activity, I reflected, is prompted by an unreasoned fear of ghosts. One ghost, for example, chases me to the faculty lounge each day. I had an office. At least the dean of my department thought I had an office. My calligraphed motto could not be installed there yet. Like my temporary instructorship, the office was mine through the intersection of misfortune, good timing and a tip from a friend of a friend. I had been offered this job on the short notice occasioned by a former teacher’s death. On my second day, when I asked for office space, I was given a key and directions to the deceased’s door. The office made its feelings clear from the start. As I eased into the heavy leather chair, I could sense Clark Rood’s vaporous I had never met Clark Rood, but I felt as if I had lived inside his skin untold years. I regretted every class cancelled due to illness. I relived the failure in each hesitant F, and the agony over the appropriateness of any A. presence as clearly as any premonition. The former professor had no local family, and the college was waiting for relatives from California to claim the possessions. Gray, government-issue bookcases lined three walls, and threatened to shimmy free of their complimentary copies if I so much as slammed a drawer. Lecture notes stacked tidy rows on the desk top. His fly-tying sampler provided the room’s only decoration. Rood must have been a fisherman. Beside them, rested an ashtray, whose outer rim spelled “ Brown University Class of ‘42.” His pipe, which I pictured clenched between his teeth as he stood hip deep in a rushing coastal stream, was now perched on the ashtray edge, one match flipped dead center into the clean glass. I had never met Clark Rood, but for every breath I drew in that room I felt as if I had lived inside his skin untold years. I regretted every class cancelled due to illness. I relived the failure in each hesitant E and the agony over the appropriateness of any A. On his Daily Agenda, now two sad days out of date, small lettering revealed a conscientious hand, a schedule of classes, committee meetings and one student conference. A week later I took courage from desperation and began snooping through his books. I found each flyleaf inscribed with his name, below the date of the book’s receipt. I began hauling my paperwork to the faculty lounge, anxious for the day those vague California relatives might arrive to make his go away, fearful lest Ghost Rood might refuse to leave. Unreasoned fear of ghosts? Hardly, I told myself. I leafed through the pile of papers. Weedeman’s was not among them. I was annoyed. I had been looking forward to another try at his hieroglyphs. ROGER DUGANS. ASSIGNMENT #4. MY JOB IN THE SHIPYARD: WELDER FOR GOD. This topmost paper intrigued me despite my disgust. Paper Four was supposed to use categorical thinking in descriptive writing, as in ‘write me your job description.’ Mr. Dugans, who guessed I was from out of town and needed to know about God, had foiled me a fourth straight time. “ People might think working for the U.S. Naval Shipyard cannot be spiritual. I know otherwise. . . ” Considered within context, Roger Dugans was no fanatic. He was typical at this community college, an academic oas is in cong ruou s ly near a naval shipyard. The Yard, as it was fondly known, paid wages to a breadwinner in every family and gave these environs a canon all their own. The Yard held certain truths perfectly obvious, among them a mutant strain of pentacostal evangelism, indistinguishable from politics, that consumed heathen beliefs fast as prairie fire. The college kept spirit with the community, though it stayed nondenomina- tional. For example, I had been warned before my interview to avoid mention of Jean Paul Sartre, Ezra Pound or the Pass/Fail system. Around here the first two were considered Communist, and the third was under suspicion. Nevertheless my students were bright. They had come to college because they had worked for the Yard a couple of years and saved their bonuses. Their minds, for the most part, were parched fpr new ideas, any that did not sound subversive at least. Once, during my first quarter, I mentioned a Village Voice article as an example of persuasive reporting. When I he ld it up, the cover e l ic i te d no recognition. “ Village Voice. New York Tabloid.” Nothing. “Anybody read it?” “Anybody heard of it?” The theater major in the back row finally exploded. “ Yeah! but do you know where I can buy it? I looked every place, all the stores, and. . . ” I began bringing my subscription copies. He devoured back issues. Another time, a shut-in mother of five, taking my course to get out of the house, asked about daycare. Soon she had enrolled full-time, and the college newspaper reported her agitating for a childcare center. I was promoting my own brand of evangelism. Toward page three of Mr. Dugan’s paper, where he summarized his work as a mission, both patriotic and religious, I found myself thinking of Weedeman. I had made a cassette of 101 ’s first meeting. Class members had introduced themselves. Abandon ing Dugans, I rushed back to the office. I shut the door before punching the recorder’s fast forward to locate that high nasal voice. “ . . .don ’t really major in anything. DVR gave me a scholarship. . . ” “ DBR?” my voice questioned. “ Department Vocational Rehabilitation. I just go to classes and I guess maybe. . . ” Ghost Rood and I reviewed the tape several times, searching the voice for a clue to the contradictory intelligence I had begun to suspect. E£y the following Tuesday I knew considerably more about the occupant of Row 4, Seat 2. Weedeman’s halting, self- deprecating introduction only sharpened my curiosity. I had taken a look at his transcript. I told the records secretary, and myself, I was doing this for professional reasons. Jeremy Weedeman, who was 22 and whose birthdate made him an Aquarian, lived near the Yard with his father Lamar—Occupation: Pipefitter. I had figured Jeremy for slighter than five feet, five inches, 135 pounds the medical form allowed, but this discrepancy was explained by the DVR scholarship and the special parking permit. They both came in response to his handicapping, at age eight, by polio. His mother had died of it. He was born in Macon, Georgia and had attended Jesuit schools in the years before his mom died. Then he transferred to the public system. His I.Q., taken when he entered the public schools, levelled off a few points below average. He spoke no foreign languages. His transcript favored C’s, but revealed no talent in any single field. And, as I noted during Tuesday’s class, Jeremy Weedeman dropped things. I had trained my attention to filter out the irritating clatter from the fourth row. Earlier in the quarter the students had been content to watch Jeremy’s painful stretches after items slipping from his desk, but they had not been able to stand that long. Today those nearest him seemed at seat’s edge, alert to snatch falling pencils or books, anxious lest they should have to witne'ss his struggle. When yet another dropped notebook page was o f fe re d p o l i te ly back , Weedeman took it without comment. He accepted these favors with that characteristically blank refusal to say thank you which seems the birthright of the truly poor. Weedeman passed in two papers at the close of class. When I was safe in the lounge, I concentrated on deciphering them, and met defeat. I gathered that Paper Four’s job description had to do with pipefitting. Later that week I had my calligrapher friend, who moonlighted in handwriting analysis, take a look-see. She could say only that their author “suffers from some unspecified physical ailment.” r h e quarter droned on. Week by week I confirmed my intuition of what, in the privacy Ghost Rood and I shared, was known as the Weedeman Phenomenon. I would have traded twenty other papers, filled with tedious narratives about frustrating lives and boring jobs in The Yard, for one crack at reading Jeremy’s work. He could print, his headings were always clear. Perhaps he did not want me to read his papers. I might have spoken to him, but I expected his handwriting would be explained by his polio. I did not want to make him bring it up. I began to feel an intimacy with him, w ith the uncanny mind ins ide his crumpled body, and I did not want to hurt him. Soon I was feeling almost as close to Jeremy as I was, of all things, to Ghost Rood himself. Rood and I had become fast friends. Janis Joplin, I think it was, once said, “Sooner or later we each become the thing we despise most.” I most despised my fantasy of Rood, those thirty years of good intentions dried to a few lesson plans. Those lesson plans gathering dust, in neat rows, in an office at a provincial community college. I fought that afterimage, changing lecture notes each term, reading a bestseller to counteract every classic, behaving as if I would never evolve to the state Rood’s leavings personified—night watchman for others’ ideas. My student conferences took place over a beer at the local tavern or on the lawn behind the bookstore. I never once saved an unclaimed term paper. Nonetheless, Rood crept up on me. I tossed my notebooks in a jumble on the chair in sheer defiance of his neat rows atop our desk. Rood’s predilection for Henry James, I came to admit, was matched by mine for Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps most persuasively, I sensed that the vaporous Rood, that compulsive scholar, would have understood my fascination with the mind of one oddball student. No doubt he had had the same hopes for some other problem child when he too was a young, and evangelical, instructor. Weedeman’s handwriting showed no improvement, so in my instructions for the final paper I waxed fanatic. “Would you strikeover, would you spill coffee, on a job application?” I paused and glared. “Then don’t let me see that on your term papers. I will not read a paper which is not typewritten. Spelling will be counted. Bibliographic form will be observed.” Pained, perplexed stares accused me of betrayal. Weedeman, who I was really watching, did not react. Returning to the office that day, I experienced a true stroke of genius. Actually, it was Rood's idea. The instant I opened the door I was struck with the sense that something was wrong. I surveyed the room. Something had been moved. Did Rood havb poltergeist talents? His notes held their tidy rows. My booksand papers overflowed the chair, as usual. Yet my ghost and I had become accustomed to a certain order. Our room had changed. The ashtray was clean. That match. The janitor, in his quarter’s end rounds, found only that one item to adjust. I was witnessing the synergy of our room. Rood’s ghost, I, these particular objects—we formed a configuration which the janitor had altered. I saw my solution—the Multiphasic Systematic Sorter. I would trap Weedeman and find out just how smart he was. By now Jeremy’s mind had me hooked. Its dialectic was downright seductive. This student obviously felt the easier questions, those which others snapped up eagerly, lay beneath notice. Each Tuesday he watched our class, question by question, netting a little knowledge at a time. He waited until my line of reasoning eluded the others. Only when my questions dropped through dead air, would Jeremy, with no hint of superiority, begin to answer. He never failed me. Now I found a way to force a play-off. I had run across the Sheffield Multiphasic Systematic Sorter in my educational psychology studies. Its colorful sequence of designs judged ability to cut through the specifics and lock onto the unity, the concept hidden beneath variation. I had been drilling my 101’s in abstract thinking for nine weeks. This would look like a test. I called the testing service and scheduled the Sheffield, borrowed an overhead projector, and hauled the whole clumsy contrivance to Room 208. W h e n the students saw the projector, they were delighted. Twenty minutes into the test, however, their suspicions increased with each reply. True to his M.O., Weedeman held silence as the screen f lipped through the ear lie r problems. “ Ten? ” my fron t- row freshm an attempted. “Try again.” Row 4, Seat 2 gave them more than enough time. His elbow drifted toward the ceiling. “Zero.” Score one, Weedeman. On to the 30 Clinton St. Quarterly
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