So Many Questions
Volume 1, Issue 29 — Bu Also a Few Answers
IN THIS ISSUE, Denele Campbell reminds us to drive carefully while contemplating the balance of the universe; Ellen O’Neal brings us the third part from a piece of short fiction about a first date; and there is a glimmer of humanity in the little white dog.
Goat on the Road
SHORT STORY
By Denele Campbell
I met a goat on the road today. He approached from the opposite direction, running at a steady but moderate pace—not a gallop but more of a trot. It seemed about the same speed as my car had reached, as fast as I felt like driving on a hot August morning when a faster speed would have generated billowing plumes of dust from the powder dry land. He ran in a straight line along the roadway, his intention of uninterrupted travel quite apparent in his demeanor. He needed to be somewhere.
He was a small goat, not exactly a Nubian or Toggenberg but of some mixed breed, with a confidence attesting that in spite of his lesser size, he was most assuredly full grown. His foot-long horns flared from the top of his head up past his ears and off to each side of his black-marked face. The only other markings on his white body were on his legs, black from the knee down. His body held the features of a potent male, well-muscled in the chest and shoulders, his sides curved in health.
As it happened, we took the wrong sides of the road as we approached each other. He seemed to favor the right side of the road and I did not find it necessary to confront him about it.
No doubt he had skipped the part of driving lessons that taught the proper side of road, but then perhaps not, since he was a goat and goats have their own firm opinions about what they will and won’t do at any given moment in time, rules be damned.
We considered each other with curiosity as we slowed in meeting, a greeting and courtesy that, on reflection, I concede should not be limited to human travelers. His gold-flecked eyes came directly to mine, the black pupil slits narrowed against the sun already brilliant in the hot sky. It was not a hostile exchange, since I was quite willing for him to go on about his urgent business that called to him from somewhere to the west. For myself, I was already late for business to the east.
His expression conveyed a world weary understanding that we all have places we must go, or return to, in the course of conducting our daily affairs. It was not immediately clear whether he was coming or going, but then neither was that really any of my concern. His gold-eyed appraisal was brief and to the point, whether I was someone he knew, whether I meant him any trouble, whether I had any rolled oats he might nibble before continuing on his way. In moments, he gained the answers to his queries and began to move on.
Likewise, my glance carried questions. Was he seeking assistance? Was there any trouble? Was there anything I should do?
No, it was clear nothing was required of me. His flat black nose lifted slightly, a nod of acknowledgment which I returned before thinking that I was, in fact, conversing with a goat.
I eased my foot off the brake and the car rolled eastward, tires crunching on the hot gravel. He hurried on without a backward glance which I knew only because I gave a backward glance in my rearview mirror. I did not ponder whether a goat, like fabled dogs and a few cats, might travel to find a family that moved on without him, or whether, once moved to quarters not exactly to his likely, he might make his escape and return to his preferred location.
Those were questions not to be answered unless I followed him. Then, as if observing a quark, I would have altered our original trajectories.
Denele Campbell writes historical non-fiction books of Washington County as well as the occasional story of adventure. “Goat on the Road” was originally printed in her book I Met a Goat on the Road: And Other Stories of Life on this Hill, available through Amazon.
Crompet’s Tale, Chapter One
PART 3 of Four: Read Part 1 and Part 2
SHORT FICTION
By Ellen O’Neal
“I finished out my undergraduate degree at Penn,” Crompet said, “and then earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Yale. The job prospects for new English professors are never great and were worse as the flood of veterans quickly finished degrees and hit the job market. The University of Arkansas had an opening and very few applicants in 1957 due to the segregation crisis in the state capital. I nearly didn’t apply for the same reason — who wants to work in such a state of things. But, a colleague invited me down to Fayetteville for a visit, and I was quite taken by the hilly town and cloistered campus. It was in the northwest part of the state, progressive and removed from the racial politics of the central region. The chair of the department offered me a tenure track position, and I moved to the town by early August.”
At this mention of tenure, Crompet explained the concept to Salter, whom he hoped would pursue a college education one day. “It is better than copyright,” Crompet said, “better than trademark or patent. It is your license to print money even as you chase your heart’s obsessions and become a god among the mortals — or a goddess, Maggie, should you choose the academic life. Now, where was I? Yes, yes, I threw myself into the groves of Academus. It flew by quickly as if tethered to the winged feet of Hermes himself.”
My first book came out in ’62. I achieved tenure another year later and was promoted to full professor after another five. So it came to be in the fall of 1968, that monumental year of cultural revolution, that I was preparing my lessons for the fall semester at the university.
I was to teach two courses that semester but became trussed up with a third when my office partner, Abernathy, ran off to France with a foreign language instructor just before the semester started. You laugh, but this happens more often than you think. I had not taught Abernathy’s course, Introduction to Chaucer, for many years, so I was in a dither trying to prepare a syllabus for it and looking for my copy of Robinson’s Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. After finding notes and appropriate readings and all manner of supporting documents for the class, I piled them into my satchel and headed over to a faculty mixer at Memorial Hall.
Clark and Dungewell were there ahead of me and had found a table next to the architecture professors, who were in those days the true gods of the campus. We English professors stood just a step or two below them but still near the top of Olympus, and yet we were obliged to pay dutiful honoraria to the architects for the acclaim they brought to our small university. Frank Lloyd Wright had visited campus to lecture a year before his death, and Aero Saarinen was greatly anticipated as a speaker that next spring. The architecture professors were a heady lot but didn’t get full of themselves unless they were talking about modern design, and then they became as picayune as my English colleagues bartering the placement of a comma.
At the table to my left, far below the hillsides of Olympus, somewhere in the depths of the Ziliana Gorge, were the journalism professors Bowdoin, Vancouver, Smythe, Loenchaer and Blaggle. Professor Esmont stood alongside them, gesticulating wildly, laughing uproariously and going on about his success in a lawsuit propounding freedom of the press. They were unpretentious and therefore respected in ways that no other professors on campus could be, even the architects. I turned to ask Vancouver about the prospects for his biography of the early muckraker Ida Tarbell, but before he could answer I was distracted by the grace of a woman passing through the crowd and taking a chair at a table of lady professors.
She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, a complexion as soft and wan as a dandelion puff. She wore trim, black slacks with a sharp crease down the middle of each leg making her seem taller than she was. A white twill shirt with high collars and a man’s narrow loose tie and a charcoal Nehru jacket. And her eyes, there was something about her eyes that mystified me. There was not another woman in the room like her.
“Who is she,” asked Vancouver, having followed my gaze.
“I know not.”
“You’ve lost a step, Crompet,” he said. “She just sat down with the women of your department, and you haven’t met her yet?”
“So she has,” I said, suddenly realizing that the ‘lady professors,’ whom I should never have referred to as ‘lady professors,’ were indeed my own colleagues, Yates, Pierce, Goff and Jennings.
“I can go over and ask her name, Crompet, if you like,” Vancouver said.
“No, don’t you dare,” I said. “Yes, actually, yes, that would be good, I said. No, wait. I thought for a moment. Yes, go.”
Vancouver smiled his knowing smile and set off in a circuitous route for their table. I risked sending him. He was a flirt. There was every chance that he and the woman would fall madly in lust and run off to France to find Abernathy and his consort even before Vancouver had determined this new faculty member’s name, but her reaction to him would tell me more than if I had gone myself.
Part 4 of Crompet’s Tale, we finally meet her, and so does Crompet.
Ellen O’Neal is a writer working on a novel about America, and “Crompet’s Tale” will probably become part of it.
Little White dog
By Mark Pennington
The little white dog came with a toy cat that purrs and meows when it's poked. Some time ago Lynda broke it trying to install new batteries so, after a lot of accusing looks and sad pokes of the deceased, she bought a replacement. Yesterday we discovered the batteries for the new one were dead. My wife set about putting in fresh ones. The little white dog sat beside her obviously concerned that the cat's life was in danger, reaching out gingerly several times to touch it as Lynda worked. Eventually she got the new ones in place and returned the cat to the floor. Relieved, the little white dog poked it until it meowed, poked it until it purred, licked it all over, and went about her business.
