“But how can we do work in any field,” Doris Heckerling, a frost-headed daughter of Minnesota, asked, “if we are constantly questioning what we know and believe?”
“That, Ms. Heckerling, is the purpose of history. What we know, or what we think we know, is always in the present, here and now. But the future, almost contradictorily, is where the past will change. We might for instance learn that Richard the Third was vilified by the landowners of his time because he wanted to empower the peasants. What was evil for the ruling body then becomes heroic for us today. Because of the natural limits of our perceptions we come to understand that history is always changing. This transforms a static study into a dynamic engine of thought and investigation. It is the process of continual reinvestigation itself that defines and ranks our work.” The students, John thought, were looking into themselves. Willie Pepperdine smiled broadly.
“I think that’s enough for today,” the young professor said. “Next Tuesday we’ll have Justin present a ten-minute talk on how the study of a so-called hard science is at odds with the notion of historical investigation. Read some of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to prepare for the discussion.”
John was walking down the northern stairwell when he turned a corner and came face-to-face with Carlinda and Tamala. The latter was wearing a formfitting full-length dress composed of bright blue and charcoal squares. Carlinda wore a pearl gray taffeta dress the hem of which covered the upper half of her knees.
“Professor,” Carlinda said.
“Miss Elmsford, Ms. Marmon.”
“We have to talk to you,” Tamala said.
“Here?”
“We could go to the rotunda and take a bench,” Carlinda suggested.
Tamala gave Carlinda a hard stare.
“What, Tam?” Carlinda said. “Nobody’s gonna listen.”
“The rotunda then,” Woman agreed. “It will be my pleasure.”
They took a marble bench that was partly hidden behind a large potted fern. The professor sat dead center. The young women perched themselves on either side, their knees listing toward John. Restrained excitement exuded from their faces and fidgety hands.
“So?” John asked.
“We don’t want you to get upset,” Carlinda said. “We haven’t really done anything yet.”
“Anything about what?”
“Pete Tackie is majoring in computer science,” Tamala said. “He’s really very smart even if he’s kind of a jock.”
“Okay.”
Carlinda reached into her big white bag coming out with a dun-colored plastic folder. This she handed to her secret boyfriend.
The first page contained a list of eighteen professors down the left side — eight women and ten men. Three of these were from the history department and the rest ran the gamut of the school. On the right side of the page was a list of felonies, criminal investigations and other improprieties attributed to the teachers. There were acts of drug abuse and smuggling, predatory sex acts and even a case of suspected manslaughter. One professor made extra money by selling weapons of questionable pedigree at gun shows across the southwest. The following pages provided further descriptions of the crimes, redacted trial transcripts and other documents.
For the next half hour John read through the sixty-two-page collection of names and accusations.
“Where did you get the police reports?” he asked.
“Most of them were public record,” Tamala said. “The rest Pete hacked from computers and police databases over the Christmas break.”
“We didn’t want to tell you before now,” Carlinda said. “We knew you’d tell us to stop.”
Carlinda had stayed in the international dorm over the winter break. They saw each other almost every other day. But she’d given no hint of this... study.
Gesturing with the folder John asked, “Why?”
“You’re the best professor in the school,” Tamala said, “and they’re trying to run you down just because you don’t think like them.”
“And how’s this supposed to help me?”
“That’s what’s so great,” Carlinda said. Her eyes, John noticed, were glistening. “Kerry Brightknowles’s boyfriend is a printmaker in Pine Bluff. He knows how to make these bright yellow posters that have an epoxy base. Once you slap them up on a wall they won’t come down and it’s almost impossible to mark them.”
“So you’re going to put this page up on the wall and destroy these people’s careers to help me?”
“No, silly,” Tamala said. “We’re going to say that the killer was a drug dealer and the rapist a thief; then we’ll change the place and date of the crimes so that only the perpetrators will know it’s them, like you said. Nobody’ll be able to prove it has anything to do with you because you’ll be out of town the night we put them up.”
“But won’t the authorities be able to trace the yellow posters?” John asked. “I mean there probably aren’t that many made.”
“They don’t come from the U.S.,” Carlinda said with a smirk. “They’re fabricated in China and the U.S. can’t demand the files.”
John stared at his students wondering why he hadn’t seen that they could actually enact the theories he espoused.
“I’m sorry I called you silly,” Tamala said, misinterpreting his gaze.
“Can we do it, Professor?” Carlinda asked.
“Are you sure everything you have in here is verifiable?” He had no intention of agreeing to the crazy plot but he found the notion... interesting.
“Yes,” Carlinda averred.
“But even if they aren’t all exactly right,” Tamala added. “The ones against Eubanks, Orcell and Carmody are incontestable.”
“So one of the crimes was committed by Auntie Annette?”
“Yes,” Carlinda said. “She was arrested for embezzlement when she was eighteen. The Kansas City prosecutor indicted her but then came up with a deal with her parents and employer. There’s a big article about it in a Sunday paper, all about teenage middle-class criminals.”
“What if they find you guys out?” John asked, still thinking he should say no. “I mean what if Kerry’s boyfriend leaves a print on some computer or Pete develops a conscience?”
“It won’t matter,” Carlinda said with conviction.
“Why not?”
“Because nobody on this list or from the school would want to have all this come out in public.”
John saw the fever in his young lover’s eyes. It was a look his father got when thinking about his beloved books. With that John was drifting again. His father would have called the students’ plan an example of the uses of history. He would say that real historians are the ones who edit, embellish and reinvent the details of myths mistaken for facts.
It was his father, and not the young women, who changed his mind.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
“Really?” Tamala screeched grabbing his biceps.
“Yeah. It’s the best student project I’ve ever seen: taking more or less verifiable facts from the recent past and using them to change or attempt to change the future — where those facts will be judged.”
At 4:27 John was sitting at the desk in his Prometheus office trying to remember word for word the Bard’s sonnet number seventeen. Who will believe my verse in time to come?
It was his father’s favorite poem about history and the human heart.
John had quoted the sonnet four times when the tapping came at the door.
“Come in.”
Arnold Ott stood five nine but looked shorter because of his box-shaped physique. His thick, black-framed glasses had rectangular lenses and his black hair grew in tight curls. Ott wore a tan jacket, dark green trousers and a button-up shirt the color of natural cream. But it was the student’s eyes that arrested John. They were a green that seemed removed from the rest of him, beautiful, passionate — the word that occurred to John was holy.