The Book of Kills (2 page)

“Johnny!” said Miss Trafficant impatiently. Anita Trafficant was the chancellor’s secretary and Johnny the chancellor’s driver. There was enmity between her and Johnny. The chauffeur had an annoying habit of acting as if he worked directly for the chancellor and was on an equal footing with Miss Trafficant! She would not have been human if she did not relish the thought of scolding him for whatever had happened. But he did not answer his car phone.

Miss Trafficant believed in scheduling. Her success at her job depended in large part on the efficient way in which she arranged the chancellor’s day. Without her precise allocation of
his time, he could not have done half of what he did. She had allowed an hour and a half from the time of his arrival at the airport to the first appointment of the day. Father Bloom should be well rested from his long flight in business class across the Pacific.

Two hours passed and the chancellor had not arrived on campus or come to his office. The tenth call to Johnny’s car got an answer. His speech was slurred and he made little sense.

“Have you been drinking?”

The answering obscenity was sufficiently garbled that she could honorably ignore it. She managed to learn where he was.

“You were supposed to pick up Father.”

There was a call on her other phone. She cut off Johnny and took the call.

“This is the Blue Cloud Nation. The chancellor of Notre Dame is our prisoner. Stand by for further instructions.”

The phone went dead.

The consensus in the lounge of Corby, the building where lived priests who were not rectors of residence halls, was that it was a student prank. Johnny had been slipped a mickey and the students who met the chancellor’s plane hit upon the politically incorrect excuse that Indians had kidnapped him in an effort to reclaim the property on which the university stood. True, this theory had been floated recently in an allegedly humorous column in the student newspaper, but then it was difficult to distinguish intended from unintended humor in that publication.

“They got the idea from the log chapel incident.”

“Or the vandalism in Cedar Grove.”

“What if they’re all connected?”

“How?”

The speaker had held up one hand as he spoke, but then immediately let it drop to the arm of his chair.

In the faculty senate the Quinlan Resolution was being debated. If passed, it would become the sense of the senate that the administration should appoint a committee to meet with the Blue Cloud Nation in order to review with utmost seriousness their claim that ancestors had been bilked out of the land on which Notre Dame stood.

“It doesn’t matter,” one phlegmatic senator observed. “There isn’t a patch of earth that was not at one time inhabited by someone other than those currently inhabiting it.”

“These people weren’t even alive at the time.”

“Their quarrel is with Sorin.”

“He’s dead.”

“So are their ancestors.”

“It’s a matter of justice.”

“You want to give the place back to the Indians?”

“If they’ll have it.”

“If it is theirs it would not be a gift.”

An observer from the
Observer
thought that the senate as a body was inclined to think that Notre Dame had been built on a foundation of injustice and crime.

A video of the captive chancellor was delivered to Corby Hall. He looked disheveled and unfocused, but then he wasn’t wearing his glasses. He seemed to be reciting when he spoke.

“I have pledged to correct any injustice that has been done against the Blue Cloud Nation by the University of Notre Dame.”

His eyes lifted to the camera and filled with tears. His lower lip trembled. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“He didn’t know what he was saying.”

“So what’s new?”

“He was just reading words written for him.”

“So what’s new?”

“You can’t just wish away an institution that has been situated on this land for over a century and a half. What would the Indians do with the land?”

“A casino?”

“They’d sell it.”

“That’s the answer! Give it back to them and then we buy it right back. If all they want is money . . .”

This turned out not to be true. They wanted the land. They wanted the lakes. They wanted the woodland. They wanted their old burial ground back.

“Where is it?”

“It has yet to be located.”

IN A CONFERENCE ROOM IN
Decio a few days before the trouble began, the graduate committee of the history department was in session. The first order of business was the fate of Orion Plant, a doctoral candidate.

“We’ve already extended him two times.”

“Who’s his director?”

Professor Otto Ranke raised his hand but not his eyes. He had lied for Plant too many times and he was not inclined to do so again. The inevitable question was asked.

“Has he made progress on his dissertation?”

“No.”

“Is there any reason why the rule should not be applied?” The rule was that a doctoral candidate must submit his dissertation for reading and defense within seven years of getting approval of his topic. Plant’s dissertation had been approved eleven years ago. Ranke was not only the director, he was the only survivor of the original committee. All the others were retired or dead. Or both.

“The rule should have been applied earlier.”

A vote was taken. The decision was unanimous. Sencil, the director of graduate studies, said he would convey the decision to Plant, but Ranke said that task must be his. The others might rightly feel that they had condemned someone in absentia. Had
they even known Plant? Ranke felt that he had just bade adieu to his golden years. Plant was the last candidate who had sought to do a dissertation under his direction.

“What was the topic anyway?”

“The relocation of Indians to the southwest.”

The love of learning takes many forms. In some, it is a pure gemlike flame that warms and does not consume the student. In others, it is a means to ameliorate the human condition, first of all in their own case. In a few, as for Nietzsche, it is a path to power for whom knowledge becomes a weapon. A blunt weapon in the case of science, a remote and transcendental one in the case of philosophy, but subtle and sure in the case of history. From the outset, Orion Plant had seen history as revenge upon the present.

As a boy in Toledo he had spent hot summer afternoons in the attic of his grandmother’s home, turning over the pages of old albums and ledgers, pondering the facts entered on the flyleaves of old family bibles. He was fascinated, a question grew in him, he followed the spoor of possibility. It was there in the attic with lungs filled with dusty air and sweat running down his broad freckled face, that he had discovered he was not his parents’ child. His family was not his family. He had not even been legally adopted. His apparent parents had taken him in when a neighbor went on a trip. The neighbor never returned. With time, the family gave Orion their name and neglected to tell him he was not one of their own. After a moment of vertigo and a pang of sadness, Orion found the discovery oddly exhilarating. What he would learn to call research was a means of overturning the apparently real world.

Acquiring the academic credentials to pursue the surprising secrets of the recorded past as a lifetime task turned out to be more demanding and less interesting than Orion had supposed. But he persisted. He got an undergraduate degree at a small college in his native state and was then admitted to graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame. When he left Toledo he metaphorically shook its dust from his sandals. At Notre Dame he took with diminishing interest the required number of courses. Availing himself of the unofficial archives kept by generations of graduate students in history, he passed the written and oral examinations and was admitted as a candidate for the doctorate. Resentfully prowling through the past of the area, he chose a topic and it was approved. Professor Ranke nodded sagely through clouds of the sweet smoke rising from his pipe. Orion would chronicle the forced march of local Indians to Kansas just prior to the founding of Notre Dame. He would focus on the martyred devotion of Father Petit, who had accompanied the Indians on their death march. The benign official version of the transfer of the land to Father Sorin invited skepticism.

“He’s buried in the crypt of Sacred Heart.” Ranke sent up his words in little puffs of smoke. Orion looked at his director impassively. He had nodded through the professor’s boring lectures, but now his estimate of his guide sank further. Orion had found the burial plot of Father Edward Sorin in the community cemetery located just off the road that led from the grotto to the highway across which stood Saint Mary’s College, the sister institution of Notre Dame.

“Father Sorin?” The question was meant to make Ranke’s ignorance explicit.

“No, no. Petit.”

“Ah.”

Orion thought Ranke might be wrong at least in this, but he was not. This oddly increased his disguised contempt for his director. He began his research.

He had been at it three years when he met Marcia. She worked in the Huddle, preparing stir-fried concoctions to order. He might not have noticed her if she had not, surreptitiously but making sure he noticed, put a double portion of chicken in his order as she began to cook it. The second time this happened he read the name on the plastic badge she wore.

“Marcia.”

“Marcia Younger.”

“Than what?”

Her pained expression told him he was not the first to make a bad joke of her name.

“I’m sorry.”

“Everybody does it.”

“I’m Orion Plant.”

“I know.”

Those behind him in the line were beginning to mutter, but Marcia was practiced in antagonizing customers. He pushed on, paid, and took a table. Some minutes later, minus the plastic snood she wore over her hair while stir-frying, Marcia joined him.

“I asked who you were, that’s how I know.”

And so it began. She was a substantial young woman but her face was pretty, made even prettier by the adoring expression in her eyes. He was not used to the deference she showed him. She had the impression that he was a junior member of the faculty. As a graduate assistant, he was part of the platoon of indentured servants who made life even easier for the faculty.
He felt that he was monitoring the professor’s lectures and in his discussion sessions he subtly corrected what Ranke had said. He did not correct Marcia’s misapprehension. After all, in a few years . . .

Her father was dead, her mother stone deaf; Orion became a constant visitor in their small house just east of the campus, within walking distance of graduate student housing on Bulla Road. As they walked back from her house they could see Hesburgh Library lift like a great sarcophagus among the trees. It was there that his study carrel was located. After a few months, they seemed to be engaged. When, given her passionate yielding, an early marriage seemed advisable, Orion told her they would be married in the log chapel.

“I’m not Catholic.”

“That doesn’t matter.” In his cluttered, imperfectly formed Catholic mind a cunning thought occurred. Marriage to Marcia might not really count so far as the great book in the sky was concerned. He changed his mind about the log chapel, citing as reason his great reluctance that he might be married among those primitive paintings in which the natives obsequiously received the great white fathers. Orion and Marcia were married in the courthouse by a judge who had just sentenced a man to life imprisonment. Orion did not voice the joke that occurred to him. They honeymooned in Niles and moved in with her mother. Marcia wrote down the good news for her mother to read after several shouted versions failed to get through to her staring, open-mouthed parent.

Her father had been in real estate as had his father before him, the family business going back generations. The records of the now-defunct enterprise were in old wooden file cabinets
stored in a rental locker north of town. An hour spent perusing them piqued his interest and Orion brought the records to the house and it was not long before his passion for research was diverted to the records of Younger Real Estate. The records went back into the nineteenth century and proved to be a vein of precious ore.