The second eulogist was Smoky Hollenbeck, the former Athena athletic star who was supervisor of the physical plant, Faunia's boss, and—as I knew from Coleman, who'd hired him—was for a time a bit more. It was into Smoky's Athena harem that Faunia had been conscripted practically from her first day on his custodial staff, and it was from his harem that she had been abruptly dismissed once Les Farley had somehow ferreted out what Smoky was up to with her.
Smoky didn't speak, like Sally, of Faunia's pantheistic purity as a natural being; in his capacity as representative of the college, he concentrated on her competence as a housekeeper, beginning with her influence on the undergraduates whose dormitories she cleaned.
"What changed about the students with Faunia being there," Smoky said, "was that they had a person who, whenever they saw her, greeted them with a smile and a hello and a How are you, and Did you get over your cold, and How are classes going. She would always spend a moment talking and becoming familiar with the students before she began her work. Over time, she was no longer invisible to the student, no longer just a housekeeper, but another person whom they'd developed respect for. They were always more cognizant, as a result of knowing Faunia, of not leaving a mess behind for her to have to pick up. In contrast to that, you may have another housekeeper who never makes eye contact, really keeps a distance from the students, really doesn't care about what the students are doing or want to know what they're doing. Well, that was not Faunia—never. The condition of the student dormitories, I find, is directly related to the relationship of the students and their housekeeper. The number of broken windows that we have to fix, the number of holes in the walls that we have to repair, that are made when students kick 'em, punch 'em, take their frustration out on them . . . whatever the case may be. Graffiti on walls. The full gamut. Well, if it was Faunia's building, you had none of this.
You had instead a building that was conducive to good productivity, to learning and living and to feeling a part of the Athena community
..."
Extremely brilliant performance by this tall, curly-haired, handsome young family man who had been Coleman's predecessor as Faunia's lover. Sensual contact with Smoky's perfect custodial worker was no more imaginable, from what he was telling us, than with Sally's storytelling pantheist. "In the mornings," Smoky said, "she took care of North Hall and the administrative offices there.
Though her routine changed slightly from day to day, there were some basic things to be done every single morning, and she did them excellently. Wastepaper baskets were emptied, the rest rooms, of which there are three in that building, were tidied up and cleaned. Damp mopping occurred wherever it was necessary. Vacuuming in high-traffic areas every day, in not-so-high-traffic areas once a week. Dusting usually on a weekly basis. The windows in the front and back door sash were cleaned by Faunia almost on a daily basis, depending on the traffic. Faunia was always very proficient, and she paid a lot of attention to details. There are certain times you can run a vacuum cleaner and there's other times you can't-and there was never once, not once, a complaint on that score about Faunia Farley. Very quickly she figured out the best time for each task to be done with the minimum inconvenience to the work force."
Of the fourteen people, aside from the children, that I counted around the grave, the college contingent appeared to consist only of Smoky and a cluster of Faunia's coworkers, four men from maintenance who were dressed in coats and ties and who stood silently listening to the praise for her work. From what I could make out, the remaining mourners were either friends of Peg and Sally or local people who bought their milk up at the farm and who'd come to know Faunia through visiting there. Cyril Foster, our postmaster and chief of the volunteer fire department, was the only local person I recognized. Cyril knew Faunia from the little village post office where she came twice a week to clean up and where Coleman first saw her.
And there was Faunia's father, a large, elderly man whose presence had been acknowledged by Sally in her eulogy. He was seated in a wheelchair only feet from the coffin, attended by a youngish woman, a Filipino nurse or companion, who stood directly behind him and whose face remained expressionless throughout the service, though he could be seen lowering his forehead into his hands and intermittently succumbing to tears.
There was no one there whom I could identify as the person responsible for the on-line eulogy for Faunia that I'd found the evening before, posted on the Athena fac.discuss news group. The posting was headed: From: clytemnestra@houseofatreus.com To: fac.discuss Subject: death of a faunia Date: Thur 12 Nov 1998 I'd come upon it accidentally when, out of curiosity, I was checking the fac.discuss calendar to see if Dean Silk's funeral might show up under coming events. Why this scurrilous posting? Intended as a gag, as a lark? Did it signify no more (or less) than the perverse indulgence of a sadistic whim, or was it a calculated act of treachery?
Could it have been posted by Delphine Roux? Another of her unascribable indictments? I didn't think so. There was nothing to be gained by her going any further with her ingenuity than the breakin story, and much to be lost if "clytemnestra@houseofatreus.com" were somehow discovered to be her brainchild. Besides, from the evidence at hand, there was nothing so crafty or contrived about a typical Delphinian intrigue—hers smacked of hasty improvisation, of hysterical pettiness, of the overexcited unthinking of the amateur that produces the kind of wacky act that seems improbable afterward even to its perpetrator: the counterattack that lacks both provocation and the refined calculation of the acidic master, however nasty its consequences may be.
No, this was mischief, more than likely, prompted by Delphine's mischief, but more artful, more confident, more professionally demonic by far—a major upgrade of the venom. And what would it now inspire? Where would this public stoning stop? Where would the gullibility stop? How can these people be repeating to one another this story told to Security by Delphine Roux—so transparently phony, so obviously a lie, how can any of them believe this thing? And how can any connection to Coleman be proved? It can't be. But they believe it anyway. Screwy as it is—that he broke in there, that he broke open the files, that he broke into her computer, e-mailed her colleagues—they believe it, they want to believe it, they can't wait to repeat it. A story that makes no sense, that is im-plausible, and yet nobody—certainly not publicly—raises the simplest questions. Why would the man tear apart her office and call attention to the fact that he'd broken in if he wanted to perpetrate a hoax? Why would he compose that particular ad when ninety percent of the people who saw it couldn't possibly think of it as having anything to do with him? Who, other than Delphine Roux, would read that ad and think of him? To do what she claimed he'd done, he would have had to be crazy. But where is the evidence that he was crazy? Where is the history of crazy behavior? Coleman Silk, who single-handedly turned this college around—that man is crazy? Embittered, angry, isolated, yes—but crazy? People in Athena know perfectly well that this is not the case and yet, as in the spooks incident, they willingly act as if they don't. Simply to make the accusation is to prove it. To hear the allegation is to believe it.
No motive for the perpetrator is necessary, no logic or rationale is required. Only a label is required. The label is the motive. The label is the evidence. The label is the logic. Why did Coleman Silk do this? Because he is an x, because he is a y, because he is both. First a racist and now a misogynist. It is too late in the century to call him a Communist, though that is the way it used to be done. A misogynistic act committed by a man who already proved himself capable of a vicious racist comment at the expense of a vulnerable student. That explains everything. That and the craziness.
The Devil of the Little Place—the gossip, the jealousy, the acrimony, the boredom, the lies. No, the provincial poisons do not help. People are bored here, they are envious, their life is as it is and as it will be, and so, without seriously questioning the story, they repeat it—on the phone, in the street, in the cafeteria, in the classroom.
They repeat it at home to their husbands and wives. It isn't just that because of the accident there isn't time to prove it's a ridiculous lie—if it weren't for the accident, she wouldn't have been able to tell the lie in the first place. But his death is her good fortune. His death is her salvation. Death intervenes to simplify everything. Every doubt, every misgiving, every uncertainty is swept aside by the greatest belittler of them all, which is death.
Walking alone to my car after Faunia's funeral, I still had no way of knowing who at the college might have had the turn of mind to conjure up the clytemnestra posting—the most diabolical of art forms, the on-line art form, because of its anonymity—nor could I have any idea of what somebody, anybody, might next come up with to disseminate anonymously. All I knew for sure was that the germs of malice were unleashed, and where Coleman's conduct was concerned, there was no absurdity out of which someone wasn't going to try to make indignant sense. An epidemic had broken out in Athena—that's how my thinking went in the immediate aftermath of his death—and what was to contain the epidemic's spreading?
It was there. The pathogens were out there. In the ether. In the universal hard drive, everlasting and undeletable, the sign of the viciousness of the human creature.
Everybody was writing Spooks now—everybody, as yet, except me.
I am going to ask you to think [the fac.discuss posting began] about things that are not pleasant to think about.
Not just about the violent death of an innocent woman of thirty-four, which is awful enough, but of the circumstances particular to the horror and of the man who, almost artistically, contrived those circumstances to complete his cycle of revenge against Athena College and his former colleagues.
Some of you may know that in the hours before Coleman Silk staged this murder-suicide—for that is what this man enacted on the highway by driving off the road and through the guardrail and into the river that night—he had forcefully broken into a faculty office in Barton Hall, ransacked the papers, and sent out as e-mail a communication written purportedly by a faculty member and designed to jeopardize her position. The harm he did to her and to the college was negligible. But informing that childishly spiteful act of burglary and forgery was the same resolve, the same animus, which later in the evening—having been monstrously intensified—inspired him simultaneously to kill himself while murdering in cold blood a college custodial worker whom he had cynically enticed, some months earlier, to service him sexually.
Imagine, if you will, the plight of this woman, a runaway at the age of fourteen, whose education had ended in the second year of high school and who, for the rest of her brief life, was functionally illiterate. Imagine her contending with the wiles of a retired university professor who, in his sixteen years as the most autocratic of faculty deans, wielded more power at Athena than the president of the college. What chance did she have to resist his superior force? And having yielded to him, having found herself enslaved by a perverse manly strength far exceeding her own, what chance could she possibly have had to fathom the vengeful purposes for which her hard-worked body was to be utilized by him, first in life and then in death?
Of all the ruthless men by whom she was successively tyrannized, of all the violent, reckless, ruthless, insatiable men who had tormented, battered, and broken her, there was none whose purpose could have been so twisted by the enmity of the unforgiving as the man who had a score to settle with Athena College and so took one of the college's own upon whom to wreak his vengeance, and in the most palpable manner he could devise. On her flesh. On her limbs. On her genitals. On her womb. The violating abortion into which she was forced by him earlier this year-and which precipitated her attempt at suicide—is only one of who knows how many assaults perpetrated upon the ravaged terrain of her physical being. We know by now of the awful tableau at the murder scene, of the pornographic posture in which he had arranged for Faunia to meet her death, the better to register, in a single, indelible image, her bondage, her subservience (by extension, the bondage and subservience of the college community) to his enraged contempt. We know—we are beginning to know, as the horrifying facts trickle out from the police investigation-that not all the bruise marks on Faunia's mangled body resulted from damage inflicted in the fatal accident, cataclysmic as that was. There were patches of discoloration discovered by the coroner on her buttocks and thighs that had nothing to do with the impact of the crash, contusions that had been administered, some time before the accident, by very different means: either by a blunt instrument or a human fist.
Why? A word so small, and yet large enough to drive us insane. But then a mind as pathologically sinister as Faunia's murderer's is not easy to probe. At the root of the cravings that drove this man, there is an impenetrable darkness that those who are not violent by nature or vengeful by design—those who have made their peace with the restraints imposed by civilization on what is raw and untrammeled in us all—can never know. The heart of human darkness is inexplicable. But that their car accident was no accident, that I do know, as sure as I know that I am united in grief with all who mourn the death of Athena's Faunia Farley, whose oppression began in the earliest days of her innocence and lasted to the instant of her death. That accident was no accident: it was what Coleman Silk yearned to do with all his might. Why? This "why" I can answer and I will answer. So as to annihilate not only the two of them, but, with them, all trace of his history as her ultimate tormentor.
It was to prevent Faunia from exposing him for what he was that Coleman Silk took her with him to the bottom of the river.
One is left to imagine just how heinous were the crimes that he was determined to hide.
The next day Coleman was buried beside his wife in the orderly garden of a cemetery across from the level green sea of the college athletic fields, at the foot of the oak grove behind North Hall and its landmark hexagonal clock tower. I couldn't sleep the night before, and when I got up that morning, I was still so agitated over how the accident and its meaning was being systematically distorted and broadcast to the world that I was unable to sit quietly long enough even to drink my coffee. How can one possibly roll back all these lies? Even if you demonstrate something's a lie, in a place like Athena, once it's out there, it stays. Instead of pacing restlessly around the house until it was time to head for the cemetery, I dressed in a tie and jacket and went down to Town Street to hang around there—down to where I could nurse the illusion that there was something to be done with my disgust.
And with my shock. I was not prepared to think of him as dead, let alone to see him buried. Everything else aside, the death in a freak accident of a strong, healthy man already into his seventies had its own awful poignancy—there would at least have been a higher degree of rationality had he been carried off by a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. What's more, I was convinced by then—I was convinced as soon as I heard the news—that it was impossible for the accident to have occurred without the presence somewhere nearby of Les Farley and his pickup truck. Of course nothing that befalls anyone is ever too senseless to have happened, and yet with Les Farley in the picture, with Farley as primary cause, wasn't there more than just the wisp of an explanation for the violent extinction, in a single convenient catastrophe, of Farley's despised ex-wife and the enraging lover whom Farley had obsessively staked out?
To me, reaching this conclusion didn't seem at all motivated by a disinclination to accept the inexplicable for what it is—though it seemed precisely that to the state police the morning after Coleman's funeral, when I went to talk to the two officers who'd been first at the scene of the accident and who'd found the bodies. Their examination of the crash vehicle revealed nothing that could corroborate in any way the scenario I was imagining. The information I gave them—about Farley's stalking of Faunia, about his spying on Coleman, about the near-violent confrontation, just beyond the kitchen door, when Farley came roaring at the two of them out of the dark—was all patiently taken down, as were my name, address, and telephone number. I was then thanked for my cooperation, assured that everything would be held in strictest confidence, and told that if it seemed warranted they would be back in touch with me.
They never were.
On the way out, I turned and said, "Can I ask one question? Can I ask about the disposition of the bodies in the car?"
"What do you want to know, sir?" said Officer Balich, the senior of the two young men, a poker-faced, quietly officious fellow whose Croatian family, I remembered, used to own the Madamaska Inn.
"What exactly did you find when you found them? Their placement.
Their posture. The rumor in Athena—" "No, sir," Balich said, shaking his head, "that was not the case.
None of that's true, sir."
"You know what I'm referring to?"
"I do, sir. This was clearly a case of speeding. You can't take that curve at that speed. Jeff Gordon couldn't have taken that curve at that speed. For an old guy with a couple glasses of wine playing tricks on his brain to drive round that bend like a hot-rodder—" "I don't think Coleman Silk ever in his life drove like a hotrodder, Officer."
"Well...," Balich said, and put his hands up in the air, the palms to me, suggesting that, with all due respect, neither he nor I could possibly know that. "It was the professor who was behind the wheel, sir."
The moment had arrived when I was expected by Officer Balich not to insert myself foolishly as an amateur detective, not to press my contention further, but politely to take my leave. He had called me sir more than enough times for me to have no hallucinations about who was running the show, and so I did leave, and, as I say, that was the end of it.
The day Coleman was to be buried was another unseasonably warm, crisply lit November day. With the last of the leaves having fallen from the trees during the previous week, the hard bedrock contour of the mountain landscape was now nakedly exposed by the sunlight, its joints and striations etched in the fine hatched lines of an old engraving, and as I headed to Athena for the funeral that morning, a sense of reemergence, of renewed possibility, was inappropriately aroused in me by the illuminated roughness of a distant view obscured by foliage since last spring. The no-nonsense organization of the earth's surface, to be admired and deferred to now for the first time in months, was a reminder of the terrific abrasive force of the glacier onslaught that had scoured these mountains on the far edge of its booming southward slide. Passing just miles from Coleman's house, it had spat out boulders the size of restaurant refrigerators the way an automatic pitching machine throws fastball strikes, and when I passed the steep wooded slope that is known locally as "the rock garden" and saw, starkly, undappled by the summer leaves and their gliding shadows, those mammoth rocks all tumbled sideways like a ravaged Stonehenge, crushed together and yet hugely intact, I was once again horrified by the thought of the moment of impact that had separated Coleman and Faunia from their lives in time and catapulted them into the earth's past. They were now as remote as the glaciers. As the creation of the planet. As creation itself.
This was when I decided to go to the state police. That I didn't get out there that day, that very morning, even before the funeral, was in part because, while parking my car across from the green in town, I saw in the window of Pauline's Place, eating his breakfast, Faunia's father—saw him seated at a table with the woman who'd been steering his wheelchair up at the mountain cemetery the day before. I immediately went inside, took the empty table beside theirs, ordered, and, while pretending to read the Madamaska Weekly Gazette that someone had left by my chair, caught all I could of their conversation.
They were talking about a diary. Among the things of hers that Sally and Peg had turned over to Faunia's father, there had been Faunia's diary.
"You don't want to read it, Harry. You just don't want to."
"I have to," he said.
"You don't have to," the woman said. "Believe me you don't."
"It can't be more awful than everything else."
"You don't want to read it."
Most people inflate themselves and lie about accomplishments they have only dreamed of achieving; Faunia had lied about failing to reach proficiency at a skill so fundamental that, in a matter of a year or two, it is acquired at least crudely by nearly every schoolchild in the world.
And this I learned before even finishing my juice. The illiteracy had been an act, something she decided her situation demanded.