xi
The North Country

Jack’s immediate plans were not academically ambitious. His lump-sum severance payment from Busiris, combined with his Fulbright stipend, promised to carry him and the family into 1988. Three years would allow him to repair relationships with New York and, he hoped, land another book contract . . . on America in the 1970s, on Ronald Reagan’s Illinois, on the BeeGees greatest hits, on any subject New York was interested in publishing. John Charles Creed was Literary Gun for Hire. Meanwhile, he would take whatever speaking engagements came his way (Jack was not much in demand by spring 1985) and type his fingers bloody on anything that promised to make a buck. He could apply for Guggenheim, NEA and Illinois Arts Council grants. If the spirit moved him, he could from Wales apply selectively for stateside teaching positions. He could, if he had to, renew the Fulbright for 1986-87, stretching his resources to the end of 1989.

“If push comes to shove,” he wrote me once from Wales, “I’ll take a job in the brewery. On the assembly line. As a shoemaker or a restaurant cook, writing at night. You know what Housman did after flunking his exams at Oxford? He got a job in the Patent Office and wrote scholarly articles. After ten years of scholarly articles, University College, London, hired him as Professor of Latin. Still without a degree.”

Jack’s writing at this time was not exactly Latin scholarship. Convinced he would never again teach in an American university, Jack concentrated exclusively on words for pay. “It’s a whole new ball game,” he wrote from Wales. “Or a return to the old, sensible ball game. Not only is my writing easier, it’s better, cleaner. I don’t get all tangled up in footnotes and citations and second guesses. I’m more aware of the audience. Of the real audience, not the academic asshole who is reading some boring dog-turd piece in an academic journal prefatory to writing a boring dog-turd piece of his own to send to the editor of some boring dog-turd journal he spent three days at a conference kissing up to. I mean the guy who will plunk down a couple of his own bucks to buy the magazine I am writing for, and then, of his own free will, read the words I write. Freelance journalism is the only real school for writers. These MFA people are a load of shit, getting grants from arts organizations staffed by other MFA people to write dog-turd books they can publish only with obscure presses underwritten by more grants and distributed to dead-end bookstores and dog-turd academic libraries by organizations subsidized by yet more grants. Nobody reads them but other MFA people and academics! That’s dog-turd writing. It’s time to cut the life support system. Let art pay its own way or circulate in manuscript.”

Thus wrote senior Fulbright lecturer Dr. John Charles Creed from Wales.

Avid readers of Creed’s work have long recognized in his writing of this period a style and vitality all its own, not as polished, perhaps, as earlier and later work, but focused and wailing with energy. Necessity provided the spark missing since the departure of Lily Lee Martin.

The new clarity of vision made Jack’s work quite marketable. He found an easy market in the middle-level men’s magazines, which he hit regularly during 1985 and 1986. Nine known fictions, each the work of a day or two, were published under at least two pseudonyms in Gent and Cavalier. They brought between $250 and $350 each . . . in aggregate, about what he was paid for two eight-week summer school courses. There may have been other work in other magazines. Playboy paid over $2,000 for “Superjock,” as did The New Yorker for “The Watchers.” “Fish On” brought only $200, but it won an O. Henry Prize. At one point Jack mentioned publishing in a U. K. publication, and his boxes of printed and manuscript material contain several British magazines and newspapers from 1985-86, including Mayfair, but I have been unable to positively identify any fiction or non-fiction as definitely the work of Charles Creed.

Jack wrote several short travel pieces as well. There was a Chicago Tribune tour of Reagan’s Illinois, and half a dozen pieces on the United Kingdom for the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Washington Post. The “Coal Mines and Castles” article earned him $350 for text and another $250 for photographs. His classic “The Flake of Snow on the Horse’s Mane” in the Riverton Standard-Republican paid substantially less, but it gave him the satisfaction of flaunting his success during the depths of Busiris disasters. (It also nearly cost Jim Gross, Standard-Republican travel editor and one of Jack’s former students, his job at the paper.)

All totaled, Jack’s writing during 1985-86 earned him about $8,000 from first-rights sales . . . not enough to sustain a married father of two in his career as a freelance writer, but a pleasant addition to Jack’s Busiris settlement and his Fulbright stipend.

Speaking engagements brought another $2,000.

Finally—and adding insult to injury—in mid-April Charles Creed applied for, and began receiving unemployment benefits . . . which continued until his departure for Wales in September.

The unemployment claim was a bit much for even Jack’s closest friends, and I challenged him on it sometime in the summer of 1985.

Jack’s response was an interesting combination of sixties subvert-the-system pranking, rationalization, and honest analysis.

“In essence, you were paid for working nearly a year and a half, February of 1985 to June of 1986, with no teaching obligations,” I argued. “During your year-and-a-half paid holiday you augment your income further by writing, lecturing, whatever. And if a full 1985-86 salary, plus a fat cash bonus, plus freelance work, were not sufficient, now you’re extorting an additional—what?—60% of your salary from the system. Don’t you feel, in this case, just a little . . . well, crooked?”

“Unemployed is unemployed, Tucker,” Jack told me. “From here to September I have no work. For ten years, longer really, I’ve paid into a system of insurance that is supposed to compensate me if and when I have no work. All that withholding that shrunk our summer school checks by 50%, all the money Busiris paid into unemployment compensation when it could just as easily have paid me. Would you pay year in and year out on an insurance policy, then decline to collect benefits when you get sick, just because you think you’ve got enough money right now, thanks anyway? Or because you’re going to get better some day?

“There is the further consideration that when I left Busiris I had put in over a decade toward a sabbatical leave. The institution refused even to entertain my request for a sabbatical while I was there. Of course it’s not going to give me one now that I’m gone. A sabbatical is a right. Maybe not every seven years, but after ten. It’s a fringe benefit. The university banks ten percent of what wouldn’t even constitute a decent annual salary if it gave you the cash up front. Then you collect what’s in your account by taking a year off with pay. The institution, as always, keeps the interest.

“After my ten years’ service, Busiris owed me a year’s salary. The settlement they gave me was just my own money, the account into which I paid, which I’ll never collect in the form of a sabbatical. The additional dollars are a bonus for pain and suffering . . . and a bribe for not making a Big Damn Mess. Busiris owed me that. They got off cheap. The system still owes me. And it owes you too.”

“If last spring wasn’t a big damned mess, you tell me what it was.”

“Nothing next to what it could have been. I chilled Popowski and McQuillan and Williams when they were ready to torch the place on my behalf. Myself, I did nothing. The wrath of other people in their own causes, I can’t control.” Jack apparently believed what he said.

So for all our concern, Jack and Rose Marié were better off financially in 1985 than at any other time of their lives together. Had they not later opted to maintain separate households, they would have lived comfortably indeed.

The cloud over Jack’s departure from Busiris, the tenuous state of their marriage, and Jack’s behavior during the previous Welsh adventure determined that Jack would do Swansea on his own. Rose Marié's career and the educational and social needs of Timm and Jenny May were also a consideration. This much Jack understood to be the emotional and financial price he would pay . . . in England and, later, in Wisconsin. “In February 1985, I excised, together, the two great miseries of my life, miseries I once considered permanent,” he once told me; “The price was one even deeper sorrow, separation from my children. But that sorrow was temporary. One day, inevitably, they were going to grow up, move away, and send me a Christmas card. Conversely, the further I went into Busiris and that marriage, the harder it was going to get to leave. I traded two permanent problems for one temporary problem.”

In the house, an uneasy truce prevailed. Jack feared divorce, a subject Rose Marié discussed more than once with Linda and other friends. “I had a bundle then,” Jack later mused; “at least $50,000 in cash. Maybe $60,000. More than I’d ever had previously, and more than I’ve ever had since, until my advance on the Dylan project. Half of that, plus half the value of the house, would have given Rose Marié a good start on a new life out East.”

Which is exactly where Jack’s wife intended, in March and April and even into May, to take Timm and Jennifer.

“It’s a funny thing,” she once told Linda. “I learned to tolerate the gossip and the rumors. At first they bothered me, but they got so ridiculous after a while that nobody would have believed them. Besides I never cared for Victoria, or any of them.

“But what really got to me was the pranks. And all the police investigations. I was willing to take Jack’s word on getting fired, but you know he had to have something to do with that stuff. A lot of it was criminal. Killing the trees and things. We had police at the door constantly. And phone calls. I couldn’t stand living in a house that was constantly under surveillance. Talking on a phone that was probably tapped. Being followed every time I left the house. People watching and listening. Did I want my children’s father to be a crook? To end up in jail? That’s what I really couldn’t handle.”

Her parents, of all people, finally convinced Rose Marié that Riverton was best for her children . . . and for her. After all, she was out of the house most of the day, and the children too, while Jack did whatever he did. Dinner was tense, but after the meal Jack would retreat downstairs, behind the door of his basement study, reading books by the lamp while the kids did their homework by the light of their television. Usually Jack slept alone in the study, on the pretext of having stayed up very late. By the time he awoke in the morning, Rose Marié and the children were gone.

“Stay in Riverton, dear,” her mother advised repeatedly. “You have friends there. You’ll be more comfortable in your own place.” By May Jack had official notification of his Fulbright appointment, and she could add, “Next year he’ll be out of the country, anyway.”

So in the spring of 1985 Jack spent lonely days and nights reading and writing and doing whatever it was he did. He saw his wife only at dinner, and his children only in the early evening.

With summer, however, his life changed. Rose Marié's work continued; the children’s school ended. Jack backburnered the writing projects to enjoy one glorious summer with Timm and Jenny Lynn. There were fishing and camping expeditions to Burr Oak Park; baseball games in Chicago and St. Louis; excursions to Hannibal, Missouri, and Springfield, Illinois; explorations of every state park and historical site Jack could discover. There was an overnight steamboat excursion on the Illinois River. There were visits to Jack’s writing friends up and down the state: Dave Etter in Elburn, George Chambers in Peoria, John Knoepfle in Springfield, Jim McGowan in Bloomington. In Chicago, Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael Anania, Curt Johnson, Ralph Mills, and, I believe, Sandra Cisneros, whose career was then just beginning. A full week they spent in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, with Norbert Blei, whose encouragement and influence on Jack’s style during this time should not be underestimated.

Only the knowledge that Timm and Jenny would return to school in September kept Charles Creed from calling in crippled to Swansea. He left for Wales with a head scarred by the memories of summer.

Wales again did not go well, perhaps because Jack never gave himself fully himself to the Fulbright experience. Part of him was obsessed with what was going on at Busiris. Letters and in telephone conversations were full of requests for details on the latest disaster. Part of him was still trying to become an American writer—not a European writer, or an American writer in European exile. Wales again exerted no discernible influence on his writing. The landscape was useful for travelogues, but it was not Charles Creed’s true material. The rich, musical, tapestried language was a polar opposite to Jack’s sparse, athletic Midwestern-American idiom. Only a handful of Creed poems and one story—“The Black Bells of Rhondda”—have a Welsh setting.

And Jack missed Jenny and Timm terribly. “I’m haunted here by the ghosts of ‘83,” he wrote me in October. “Every time I drive a familiar road, every time I pass a familiar landmark, it’s Jenny and I here, Timm and I there. I was up in Conway last weekend, walking the walls, and broke down weeping. Tears streaming down my eyes for half an hour. I’ve had half a dozen offers of Christmas in Wales, but I’m flying home to Riverton. My hosts are tolerant, but I am blowing a golden opportunity. Maybe Easter I can bring the kids over here.”

Thus 1985 became one of those turning points that do not quite turn out. Liberated from the petty politics of academia, and committed 100% to writing, Jack collapsed into his children and old comforts. Having gotten himself booted out of the comfortable womb of academia, and having made a promising start on life as a full-time, freelance author, Charles Creed opted at the first opportunity right back into the system he had left with such exhilaration.

Victoria Nation was wrong in that regard. Jack tried to quit, but he never quite made it.

Lou, I, and his friends understood fully his reasons for returning. His need to support the children. His need to rejoin a profession to which he’d made a lifetime commitment, from which he felt he’d been unjustly purged.

His need to prove himself again in a system he might have wanted to leave, but only on his own terms—with a flip of his middle finger and some smart remark over his shoulder.

In any event, we all forgave Jack his aborted rebellion.

He never quite forgave himself. “I could have been a real writer,” he told me in 1994. “But I am not. 1985 was the year of decision. I was on my way, but I backpedaled into that Fulbright. And then into Novum State. I became a coffee house writer, a parlor poet. For the second time in my life, I fucked up big time. It was too sweet a deal.”

The package Novum State University offered Charles Creed in 1986 was indeed one sweet deal. In the Pulitzer Prize winner Busiris threw away, Novum State saw a golden opportunity to put itself on the academic map. They wanted Jack bad.

Novum is one of those products of sixties affluence and benevolence found in every state in the Middle West. Sometime in the mid- to late-sixties, a group of regents sitting in a state board room with a handful of cigar-smoking politicians watched as the chancellor of their State University System pulled down a map of the state and drew large red X’s with a felt-tip pen to work the state’s four-year institutions. Pointing to some great vacuum, he made the pitch.

“Fellows, now take a good, hard look at this map. You see we’re doing okay by the metro area, and in this sector and this sector and this. But look out here: not a four-year school within a hundred miles. Only little villages and lakes and forest. And the Vo-Tech up here.

“Now my idea, fellows, is that there are lots of very capable youngsters of all sexes in those villages, who are too poor or too timid or too tied down to come to the big city. They’re good kids, too, who deserve every chance we can give them. They’re the backbone of this country, and we’re not doing well by them.

“Meanwhile every state college we have is overloaded. We're building dorms like crazy, putting up new buildings all over the place. Our state colleges are getting bigger and bigger. More and more impersonal and inefficient. You need an airplane to get around some of them campuses. Kids from these little villages get lost in ‘em. So do their own presidents. So do I when I visit some of them.

“My idea is, why not take the college to the kids, instead of bringing the kids to the college? Build us a whole new institution, from scratch, right in this middle of this emptiness. Make it state-of-the-arts right from the git-go. Bring in a bunch of hotshot young teachers and crackerjack administrators. Half our problems with these older schools, and we all know it, is a people problem: bad teachers we can’t get rid of. Start from scratch and we eliminate the problem. Plus, there’s lots less crime and drugs in these small towns than in the big places. Let’s face it, some of the universities in this system are not in the best part of town, if you know what I mean. And it wouldn’t hurt some of those radical city hooligans to put in four years out in the boonies. Toughen ‘em up, teach ‘em wholesome small town American values.

“Plus think what a new college would do for one of those towns economically.

“Finally, we’ll keep our Wisconsin kids in state. Right now we got too many of ‘em slipping across the border to Minnesota!”

(Variants included, in Illinois, “Our state capital deserves a four-year institution of its own” and, in Ohio, a reversal of the pastoral ideal: “Why should kids from Cleveland have to go all the way to Athens or Miami just to earn a college degree from a state institution?”)

Between 1966 and 1969 Novum State had sprung up just outside of Lake-of-the-Woods, Wisconsin, in the northwest “Indian head” part of the state where no four-year institution had previously existed. A former cornfield was transformed into a parking lot, a field house-convocation center, a four-story library, and football, baseball, and tennis fields. Through the oaks and birch of an adjacent wood lot was carved a serpentine chain of interconnected two-story academic buildings. Through the windows of every office and most classrooms, students and faculty gazed out on a Wisconsin woods alive with woodpeckers, squirrels, chipmunks, and other timid woodland creatures. Floor-to-ceiling thermopane windows in the west wing of the student center, which hung cantilevered over a coulee, afforded spectacular autumn and winter views of northwestern Wisconsin sunsets. Even today, Novum State—all red brick, steel and glass—is truly a magnificent campus, like many of those institutions built from scratch in the late sixties and early seventies.

The Novum State faculty was both more and less than its founders had envisioned. Recruited in a seller’s academic market, N. S. U. professors came with little more than an M. A. and aspirations to something further. At the outset there was a sprinkling of foreign degrees and even, in the applied sciences, a B.S. or two. Among an initial faculty of 108, Novum State counted only five Ph. D.s, one in Education from Michigan State.

These were, however, the wild ones, the Jack Creeds, those who would never have survived Yale or Brown or Princeton, who settled, therefore, for the newer, less prestigious programs, thereby disqualifying themselves forever from appointments in elite schools and even at aspiring elite schools like Busiris. As a result, throughout the eighties and into the nineties, students willing to sacrifice brand name diplomas for real learning received far better educations at the less prestigious American colleges than would have been theirs in the big time, big name places. Marcus DeLotta himself had been offered a job at Novum State after being terminated at Busiris. “If I’d taken that appointment instead of going to law school, I’d be teaching still,” he told me. “Not as rich as I now am, but probably a lot happier.”

Most faculty were not, in their early years, “real hotshot teachers.” What they lacked in formal preparation and experience, however, they more than made up for in enthusiasm. They were not much older than their students, and wild with the wine of youth and a good job. “The stories from those days,” Jack told me; “Man, I would love to have been here. Imagine Busiris in 1972 without all the dead wood. Non-stop party, Monday through Monday.”

“No Lily Lee Martin,” I reminded Jack.

“Yeah, no Lily Lee. But some of these Wisconsin dumplings are A-okay.”

Novum State administrators were no crackerjacks either. They came mostly from other Wisconsin institutions: younger men not yet settled, older men on their way to retirement, idealists caught up in the enterprise of a New College and the romance of the Wisconsin woods. The first N. S. U. president (and a good one for the institution) was the former state Senate majority whip, a local politician who held a B. A. in agricultural sciences and spent much of his day schmoozing area businessmen and removing beer bottles and hamburger wrappers from the green swards of Novum State. He spent five years seeing the ship launched and stabilized. With enrollments quadrupled and the institution booming, he passed the president’s office to a real academic with a Ph. D. from Columbia, and began a comfortable retirement boating and fishing on the area lakes.

It was under the second president that Novum’s troubles began.

By the time Jack showed up, most of the craziness had gone out of Novum State. Town-gown conflicts, the bad leadership of an impractical idealist, and simple demographic realities had caused Novum State enrollments, like those at Busiris, to spiral downward in the middle seventies, bringing layoffs, cuts, and program reviews. The more innovative programs and a good portion of the Fine Arts curriculum had evaporated. Benchmark programs in theater, painting, vocal music, and forensics had given way to the same business, sociology, psychology, and education curricula found all over the state, the region, the country. The truly wild ones had left academia—or at least conservative western Wisconsin. The moderately wild ones had settled to middle age, habit, and marriage—several to former students. A few of the youngsters had taken advanced degrees and matured into truly first rate scholars, writers, and teachers. Some of the others had moved into administration or union offices. Most had merely put in their years, rising, falling, rising again with the tide.

In its communal memory, however, and in its active faculty union, Novum State retained enough of its sixties heritage to locate Jack Creed, in 1986, at the center-to-right of institutional politics. “All things are relative,” Jack told me. “At Busiris I was Mr. Pinko. Here I’m Just Plain Jack. I don’t think I’ve changed all that much.”

After a rising, and then falling, and then rising curve, the English Department had been awarded in the fall of 1985 its first real vacancy in nearly a decade, a tenure-track position which it advertised proudly in the MLA job listings of that year. More than one member of the Busiris department applied for that position. I thought about it myself before mailing the MLA announcement to Wales. The same vita which brought Jack a Fulbright in the United Kingdom got Jack the interview that eluded his former Busiris colleagues. In December Jack charmed the socks off everyone on the hiring committee, including Marilyn Schneider, who is not easily charmed. In March he accepted a tenure-track position at 143% of his Busiris Tech salary. In view of his remarkable vita and extensive teaching experience, a review for tenure and promotion would be possible after two years.

The security of this appointment allowed Jack, Timm and Jenny Lynn to spend their Easter holiday revisiting—in infinitely good spirits—Conway, Caernarfon, Betws-y-Coed and other remembered landscapes. The same security brought a slight relaxing of Jack’s mental muscles, a significant curtailment of his writing output, and perfunctory conclusion to his Fulbright. Not two days after finishing his last tutorial at Swansea, with all the United Kingdom, all Europe at his doorstep, Jack was on an airplane, headed for Riverton.

Two weeks after landing in Riverton, he was in Lake-of-the-Woods, Wisconsin, trying to assess what had happened in his absence.

The nine-month separation had finalized the break between Jack and his wife. Neither could abide the other’s proximity, certainly not in bed, and not, really, in the same house, and there was no hiding from each other. Rose Marié’s job at Helping Hands had been curtailed to nine months, September through May, and Jack had no office to escape to. The very house had, in his absence, lost some of his imprint and taken on a feminine quality that made him uncomfortable. Rose Marié had grown into the place and found his male presence unsettling, even irritating. Timm and Jenny both had found their own circle of friends, and Timm had a summer job.

“I came back to be with the kids,” Jack told me, “but the kids were gone. Doing fine, near as I could tell. While I’d been nursing memories of the summer previous, they’d each put on about ten inches and ten years. In Wales I didn’t notice the change, but in Riverton they were different kids. I’d like to think they cultivated friends as an excuse to be away from Rose, but those commitments called them away from me too. The Zoo? They were way too mature for the zoo. Baseball? No interest. Not even the Cubs. Camping? Sure—with my buddies, dad. Travel? Love to, but I have to be in Riverton this weekend for the Kappa Chi Car Wash. The situation was ridiculous. Rose and I hiding from each other in opposite ends of the house while the kids were out having a ball.

“As a resident of Riverton with a Public Library card, I still had access to the new McKinley Library, but the place was full of people I never wanted to see again. Riverton Public was hopeless. I spent most of my time in the study, trying to write but really hiding from Rose Marié. Finally I said to myself, ‘This is crazy. I don’t need this shit.’ ”

What Jack did need was a place to live come September. Loading the ancient Crown Victoria with books, a few kitchen utensils, a toaster oven and some small furniture, Jack headed north past Rockford and Madison, through Tomah and Eau Claire, to Lake-of-the-Woods, to the North Country. He was met by Lloyd Cowley, who had returned briefly to campus from his lake home in the National Forest specifically to welcome Jack. Jack spent his first evening in town walleye fishing on the St. Croix River. “I didn’t catch a goddamn thing,” he reported. “The place caught me.”

Over a late evening beer at the Silver Dollar Bar, Lloyd outlined the housing possibilities. There was Northland Apartments, $350 a month for a two-bedroom on the first floor, very convenient to the University and no problem getting out in the winter. Jack would probably meet a lot of interesting people in Northland. “Possibilities, good buddy, you know?” Lloyd encouraged him. There was a small farm site outside Lake-of-the-Woods, he’d not seen it yet, could be nice, could be crummy, $200 a month, no telling what the roads would be like in winter. There was a duplexed former bank in the town of Stone Lake, a small community fifteen miles from Lake-of-the-Woods, either apartment only $175 a month plus utilities, larger than Northland, convenient to the river but a 20-minute drive from the University, could be treacherous in the winter. “You’re not going to meet a soul out there, unless some hot little number moves into the one you don’t take.”

“I’m still married,” Jack told Lloyd.

“It never hurts to keep the eyes open.”

“I been there,” Jack reported. “And I want this job.”

“I don’t know about Illinois, but up here what you do in your private life is your own business. Speaking of meeting people, you ought to think seriously ‘bout joinin’ Pheasants Forever. And the National Rifle Association. . . .”

There were a couple of student rooms with local townsfolk, “not near enough room or privacy in my opinion,” and a couple of student apartments, “although anything not yet claimed for fall is likely to be pretty shabby, also in my opinion.”

They spent a day making the rounds of Lake-of-the-Woods, Jack trying to be appreciative but finding little to suit him, Lloyd becoming increasingly glum at Jack’s obvious lack of enthusiasm. That evening, nothing settled, they returned to the Silver Dollar for a burger, a beer, and a game of pool.

“It’s gonna work out,” Lloyd promised Jack. “Housing is tight in this town. But it’s cheap, especially on salaries pegged to state-wide cost of living. You’re gonna be okay.”

“You got an ax and some acreage?” Jack joked halfheartedly. “I could build myself a place the way Henry Thoreau did at Walden. Always wanted to try that. My first publication was on Thoreau.”

“Yeah, you betcha,” Lloyd laughed. “Out East, you can maybe get by with that kind of stuff, but up here you’d need one heck of a wood stove, and a whole lot of insulation. We’ll find something.”

Then, pointing to a short, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties who had just entered the bar, “Now there’s a fellow you should meet: Harlan Everts, the Doc’s boy. He runs a dairy operation now, but he spent time in VISTA. He also does conservation and Democratic Party politics. President of our local chapter of Ducks Unlimited, and active in Pheasants Forever too.”

Harlan Everts was younger than Jack by half a decade, not yet weathered, but a real farmer with real cowshit on his real working books. And a real Wisconsin accent. “Ya, I’ve got over a hunert head, dad and me. Put up a tousant ton of hay a year fur feed. Two farms sout of town, another vun out nort. I’m in charch a da whole operation. So you’re gonna be teachin’ out da college, den? I got a farm site dat’s empty, just a little sout a town, if you’re lookin’ fur a place. Da last renter left her a little banged up, ya know, but vhatever you puts in her, you can yust deduct dat from your rent. I’d be glad ta have somebody on da place, keepin’ a eye on her. I got lotta equipment out dere, and it ain’t good to have da place empty like dat. Kids always lookin’ fur a place ta party. I tink I seen some out dere yust last veek.”

“You leave the house unlocked?”

“Some place that far out—what’s the difference I leave her locked or unlocked? Better you leave her open: they don’t bust no windows. Best thing is you join the National Rifle Association. $150 a month. You pay your own utilities. I’ll make sure she’s plowed out in the winter. Your car got an in-block heater?”

The following morning Jack found himself exploring a classic L-shaped white clapboard farmhouse: large kitchen with white wainscoting all around, a living room with flowered wallpaper, flowered linoleum rug and flowered drapes; one bedroom downstairs (more floral wallpaper) and two upstairs (flowers); pantry off the kitchen with a trap door leading to a cellar, water pump, and fuse box. Indoor plumbing had been added around 1950, tucked into the pocket of the L along with an entrance shed. The outhouse, against which leaned a rusting red child’s bicycle, was forty yards from the front door.

Across the front of the house ran a small porch with hardwood floors and a roof gray and green with cedar shingles and moss. The yard was filled with outbuildings in various stages of collapse. One shed held a large bass boat; a large Quonset hut held Harlan’s heavy machinery: a huge John Deere 8920 and an even larger International Harvester combine. The barn, from which all vestiges of paint had long ago disappeared, contained nothing save rusting cow stanchions and a rotting leather horse collar. On the north and west both house and buildings were sheltered by deep woods, the habitat surely of deer, pheasants, owls and foxes.

Twenty minutes after Jack’s arrival, Harlan drove up in his Ford pickup. The two shook hands, Jack wrote Harlan a check in the amount of $150, and Harlan handed Jack a key to the unlocked front door. “If you’re going to leave your stuff here until September, you might want to lock her up. And on the rent—you don’t owe me a cent ‘til October.”

Jack stacked what he had brought with him in the kitchen, locked the door behind him, and returned to the acreage. Two days he lingered in Lake-of-the-Woods, drinking beer, eating burgers, and setting up an office at the college. Then he pointed the nose of his Crown V south to Riverton, toward the children he loved and the wife he didn’t, away from the future, into the ruins of the past. He was less than 100% happy.

Jack made three more round trips to Lake-of-the-Woods that summer, hauling record albums, files, and books, which he stored mostly at his office. The farmstead remained simple as Thoreau’s cabin. In the kitchen, the toaster oven, a refrigerator, and eating utensils. In the living room a couch, an overstuffed chair, the stereo and six cartons of records. In the bedroom, a bed, a table and chair, a lamp, a radio, a rug. And the old Smith-Corona portable typewriter.

On Jack’s second trip, he was accompanied by Jenny Lynn. Her first sight of the farm brought a positive response: “Neato, dad.”

Reaction to the house’s interior was more tempered. “You’re not going to live here, are you dad? All year? In this dark house?” Jack gave her a brief lecture on Thoreau at Walden, and pointed out that a barn which once sheltered cattle might possibly in the future shelter a horse.

“That’s a bribe.”

“Indeed it is.”

The bribe was not effective. As the two returned to Riverton, Jack understood for the first time that neither of his children would be joining him in Lake-of-the-Woods, Wisconsin. In leaving Riverton for Lake-of-the-Woods, he had wandered out alone in the night. The sooner he lost his memory, the better.

So the year unfolded, and the next, and the next, a succession of biweekly commutes, Lake-of-the-Wood to Riverton, 400 miles each way, depart Wisconsin Thursday after classes, drive an average of 55 miles per hour to arrive just around midnight, let himself quietly in the front door and curl up on the sofa in the study, see the kids off to Friday school, kill the day sleeping, writing, reading or lunching with old friends at Tookey’s, catch Timm’s football game Friday evening in the fall, Jenny’s Saturday morning softball game in the spring. Sometimes a movie. Never a Bucks game. Church on Sunday morning, followed by an increasingly painful noon meal. Then another hard goodbye, as painful to children as to father, and the long drive north, baseball or football on the radio, the air growing cooler and the forest thicker as the great whale of a car pressed its way further into the gathering Wisconsin darkness, arrive again around midnight, catch a few Z’s, arise to the morning’s classes.

During their remaining high school years, both Timm and Jenny visited twice or three times annually, usually over holidays, invariably in a state of exhaustion. “They bring about twenty books and thirty assignments, they have all kinds of plans for the weight room and the pool, they want to skip down to Minneapolis-St. Paul for a ball game or a museum,” Jack wrote me. “Then they sleep all the way up here, snooze in the office while I’m teaching, hit the rack early at night, and sleep the ten hours back to Riverton. I get the pleasure of their presence. I guess that’s all I really want, anyway. At least they go home rested. And you can’t quarrel with their grades.”

Before the trial, Rose Marié had never once visited Lake-of-the-Woods . . . which was 100% okay with both her and Jack.

Weathering winters on the rented farm, watching the subtle changes of color through five successive falls, feeling the landscape quicken across three successive springs, Jack came to a genuine and first-hand appreciation of farm life and of the subtleties of the landscape akin to that of his pals Robert Bly and Nobert Blei. He learned the soft, absorptive squish of deep mud and the hard squeak of boot upon snow at 10 degrees below zero. Owl, deer, rabbits, pheasant, squirrel and woodpeckers frequented the place, and an occasional raccoon, fox or skunk.

He came gradually to appreciate the still center of his own being, and the landscape’s, an absorption reflected in his later writings. One winter he set out corn to see what animals he could attract. Another winter it was a salt lick. He sat contentedly by the hour, listening to some sporting event on the radio or a Dylan album on the stereo, reading Norbert Blei, Dave Etter, and Robert Bly, carefully recording the number, frequency, and sequence of animal visitors. At school, he would wander the wood chip trails of the Novum Wildlife Area maintained by the biology department as part of its Natural Resources Management major. Some late afternoons he escaped campus, alone or accompanied, for the National Forest or the St. Croix River. One winter he bought a pair of cross-country skis, and boots, and a snowmobile suit, and spent weekends in Lake-of-the-Woods skiing the farm’s back slopes.

Twice Lloyd Cowley invited Jack pheasant hunting, and twice Jack accepted. “The problem,” he told me once, “was that if you pretend to be a hunter, when something flies up, you have to pretend to shoot it. And a bad amateur hunter sometimes hits what he’s trying to miss.” Jack never hit a thing.

Twice Lloyd invited Jack ice fishing, and twice Jack accepted. Ice fishing was another Wisconsin sport for which Jack never really developed a feel.

Snowmobiling was out of the question entirely.

Jack never joined Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited, or the National Rifle Association.

The late eighties were for Jack Creed a period of longing for his children, but also of forgetting, of letting go, of—how does T.S. Eliot put it?—learning to care and not to care, learning to sit still.

Charles Creed never formed in Wisconsin the close friendships he had developed in Illinois. He was older, and often absent from the school and even the state. Also, he harbored, after February 8, 1985, a bred-in-the-bone understanding of the vulnerability inherent in all deep relationships.

Jack was, however, every bit as popular among N. S. U. students and colleagues as he had been during his Busiris heyday. His classes filled early and permanently. “Demanding but fair” is the phrase most prominent on the voluntary (and anonymous) written course evaluations with which he filled his personnel file as insurance against another Busiris Armageddon. “Jack Creed is just about the only member of the Novum English department who could carry a Friday afternoon class,” Marilyn Schneider noted in a letter explaining why the department offered no Friday afternoon classes. Just two years after coming to Lake-of-the-Woods, Jack was awarded, after only pro forma examination of letters and course evaluations, the tenure which he had relinquished upon leaving Busiris.

In fact, liberated from Rose Marié, and once again a (guarded) believer in his employer, Jack gave himself more reign than he had since the days of Lily Lee Martin. He drank and partied, as in the early seventies, with students and colleagues. It was not uncommon for an evening class to extend well past midnight over beers and pizza at the Silver Dollar or the Lone Pine. “Since coming to Wisconsin,” he told me around 1991, “I have come to see quite clearly what is and is not important. I have attended a whole bunch of birthday and graduation parties, eight students’ weddings, and the christening of two students’ children. I have become Papa Chas Creed. Apart from the loss of Timm and Jenny, I’m happy as a clam in mud.

“And what the hell. They were practically gone anyway by the time I came up here.”