Carry

Abstract

Carry Toni Jensen (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 34] I In the memorial garden, my colleague Michael Heffernan bends to tend some short, once-green plants that, to my untrained eyes, remain mysterious. He is quiet and pours the water with care. He is so quiet. In this, the first week of classes, my first on this campus, I don’t yet know Michael well, but already I know quiet to be, for him, the most unnatural of states. The moment before, I was sitting in my office near his in our building, Kimpel Hall, and he was trying to exit the door next to my office, his hands filled with water glasses. I said, “Thirsty?” And he said, “Do you know about the garden?” When I shook my head, he nodded toward the window, to a grassy patch, and I had work to do, new names to memorize, grading to finish already. Another colleague had just been in my office too, talking about a female graduate student, describing her as “a bag of snakes.” At first, I’d misunderstood. “She has a bag of snakes?” I said. “In the building?” On the topic of snakes, I’m surprisingly neutral. But if this student kept her snakes, say, in her office down the hall, I felt I perhaps should be prepared. “No, no,” said the colleague, “she is a bag of snakes,” and when I presented to him my blank-faced silence, he waved his hands around in my doorway as if [End Page 35] clearing a swarm of bees and took himself back down the hall. I understood him fine, of course. He was trying to tell me the student is difficult, is trouble, is to be avoided. But the phrase “bag of snakes” and his casual delivery made me want to defend her. I thought, if this is how her faculty are, how brave she must be to have brought with her only one bag of snakes. I thought, she needs to go home on the weekend and collect the other three bags. So when Michael holds out his water glasses, says garden, I’m still thinking snakes and more snakes, and now I’m thinking Arkansas, Bible Belt, strangeness, and I don’t want to follow. I don’t. But Michael is more than seventy years old, and how will he open the door with glasses of water in both hands? So I take one of the glasses; I follow. In the garden, after the careful tending of the plants, Michael tells me about his friend, John Locke, who was killed in our building, on this campus, the University of Arkansas, on the first day of classes in fall 2000. The memorial garden, like me, is new to campus in fall 2010. After the tending, Michael and I sit on a concrete bench, the August sun heating the concrete, the concrete heating the backs of my legs. He tells me about his friend’s life, as a father, as a professor of comparative literature for thirty-three years, as a teller of elaborate jokes, as a mentor. “He could listen,” Michael says. “He heard you.” Michael’s eyes are wet behind his glasses, and we sit across from the memorial grass, the memorial koi pond, the small plaque. We sit like that, the sun on our heads, the concrete warming my legs, until Michael nods and pats me on the arm, and we head back inside, each of us carrying a water glass emptied. After, I learn more details: a graduate student, about to be expelled from the program, shot John Locke in his office, and then, a few minutes later, shot and killed himself. In the faculty vote on the student’s expulsion, John Locke had been the only person to abstain, the student’s only supporter. John Locke’s office was Kimpel 231, and my new office is Kimpel 221. This year, in spring 2018, in the first week of classes, according to new law, anyone who’s licensed can come to Kimpel Hall carrying a handgun, to my office, to Kimpel 221, carrying a handgun, to my classroom carrying...