xiv
Kelly Ayers

Between 1978 and 1989 Charles Creed was in many respects a man in suspension. His output during that decade, of course, represented a life’s work for most academics, but his life lacked direction. He was doing little more than keeping afloat, supporting his family, extending a teaching career he wasn’t really sure he wanted. Even his enthusiasm for Novum State seemed forced, the affected good nature of an accomplished actor in the middle of his career, happy to be going through the motions of the five hundredth performance of a Tony Award Winner, but aware nevertheless he is merely going through the motions while his days dwindle down. This was nowhere more clear to me than Jack’s visit of May 1989, which seemed staged and distracted. An old Dylan line kept echoing through my mind: “There was no actor anywhere better than the Jack of Hearts. . . .”

Then in the fall of 1989, in the middle of Jack’s union presidency, came two telephone calls which convinced me that he had finally recovered his way.

The first came in September. “Tucker, this is Creed.”

“Jack . . . !”

“Quiz time: what do Robert Bly and Robert Dylan have in common?”

“I give up.”

“They’re both from Minnesota and they’re both poets.”

“You call me long distance to tell me that?”

“They were together in Moscow in summer of 1985. The only American poets invited.”

“So what.”

“There’s an article in there somewhere. Maybe a book.”

“The union business getting a little on your nerves, Jack?”

“I’m serious, Tucker. It couldn’t miss: Bob Dylan and Bob Bly. I interview Dylan on Bly, and I interview Bly on Dylan. Two North Country poets in Mother Russia. A dozen places would publish that piece.”

“I’ll tell you something else Dylan and Bly have in common.”

“That is?”

“Both disappeared somewhere at the end of the sixties, and nobody has heard from them since.”

“They’re the two major American poets of our generation,” Jack insisted.

“Jack!”

“The others are just cannon fodder. Including Berryman and Lowell and your man Ginsberg. And that nice Bill Stafford and that not nice bitch Rich.”

“Geography aside, I can’t think of two people who have less in common,” I told Jack. “But then again, you’d know better than I.” It cannot be said that Charles Creed’s best friend encouraged him into writing his second book.

Despite my lukewarm support, the project soon became an important article in the Creed canon, and, somewhat later, Jack’s second major book, Songs of the North Country: Explorations in Two Minnesota Poets, begun in 1989, published finally in 1994.

Jack Creed had first met Robert Bly at a poetry reading in Knox College, May 9, 1979, seven years before he moved to Wisconsin. Long before that, he had been familiar with Bly’s work, especially the poems of Silence in the Snowy Fields, and he knew of Bly’s involvement in the Vietnam War protests. Age of Faith and a few trips through the American Literature survey course had firmed up what in the sixties was a nodding acquaintance, but Jack had never heard Bly read before 1979. After that date, Robert Bly joined Kesey, Kerouac, Thoreau, Twain, Dylan and Fitzgerald as major stars in Charles’ constellation of American literary greats (later to include Cather, Garland, and Dave Etter).

We drove together to Knox, with a few Busiris students—May O’Hara, I think, and one or two of the undergraduate men—not Paul Popowski, who hadn’t yet arrived on the scene. The students came less to hear Robert Bly than to be with Professor Charles Creed, who gave a pretty good performance of his own over dinner at Jumer’s in Galesburg.

Bly gave a marathon reading, nearly three hours, in a rather intimate setting, something between a reading and a theatrical production. He used no masks, but he did have his dulcimer, and his hands danced like birds across the strings, through the air in front of him, around his head. Jack, a decade later, recalled “Finding the Father,” which Bly did with the dulcimer.

“I wept and wept,” Jack remembered, “and I didn’t know why.”

I don’t recall the weeping. I recall Jack’s rapt attention—and May’s. I recall “Snowbanks North of the House.” For some reason I recall a very lonesome train whistle which cut through the spring night (and Bly’s poem) from the Burlington depot in downtown Galesburg, where Carl Sandburg’s father once worked.

I recall also that May O’Hara was definitely more attentive to Jack than to Robert. It occurred to me that May might have been Jack’s new Lily Lee, except for the timing. “It’s too early, May, although you don’t know it,” I thought and nearly said aloud. “Give him time.”

After the reading Jack introduced himself . . . as Charles, not Jack, Creed. Bly recognized the name and gave Jack and two dozen other listeners a five-minute critique of Age of Faith. Although not without criticisms, it was largely favorable and devastatingly accurate. Bly even quoted a couple of lines. May O’Hara was enormously impressed with both Bly and Creed; Jack seemed slightly embarrassed that he couldn’t respond with some equally insightful remarks on Silence in the Snowy Fields. He did tell the poet that he hadn’t been so moved since the 1974 Dylan concert.

Bly harrumphed.

“Now where did you say you were teaching?” he wanted to know.

“Busiris Technical University,” Jack admitted.

“And where’s that?” Bly demanded.

“Riverton,” Jack told him.

“And you have to come to Knox to hear Robert Bly?”

The students giggled uncomfortably.

“I don’t control the readings budget,” Jack explained. “To be invited to Riverton, you have to be a close personal friend of Professor Ted Jones.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever heard of the man.”

“And you never will,” I told Bly.

He and Jack laughed together sardonically.

During his Illinois years, Jack heard Bly read again at Eureka College, Ronald Reagan’s alma mater. Then, preoccupied with his own troubles and possibilities, he lost touch with the Minnesota poet, although he did own first editions of both The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Silence in the Snowy Fields. In the late eighties, however, walking the muddy roads of rural Wisconsin, Jack returned to Bly as he turned to a number of rural Midwestern writers. From spring of 1987, he never missed an opportunity to hear Bly. And before Iron John made the best seller’s lists, Robert Bly was very visible in the Upper Midwest.

Bob Dylan, on the other hand, had been an obsession with Charles, and to a certain extent with all of us, from the early sixties. It’s not possible to imagine Age of Faith, or Jack Creed of the 1970s, without Dylan. Lily Lee, a black girl from East St. Louis, only reinforced Jack’s Dylan obsession. She and Jack could do whole songs in dialogue, hold complete conversations in Dylan lines. Jack claimed to have heard Dylan “frequently” in the early sixties Village, at Gerde's Folk City and the Gaslight Café, and at Newport in 1963. He claimed to have caught Dylan in the mid-sixties at Carnegie Hall and Hempstead Island Gardens, and at the August 1, 1971, Concert for Bangladesh in Madison Square Garden. This is certainly possible, even probable. I know he saw the 1974 tour performances in both the Chicago Stadium and the St. Louis Arena. There were at least three performances in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Much to Charles’ disappointment, the Rolling Thunder Tour never rolled through the Midwest.

Dylan and Bly conjoined in Jack’s mind at a Bly reading in Duluth in the summer of 1988. Asked about his combination of dulcimer and poetry, Bly commented on “the interesting things some of the rock singers, people like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, had done with music and poetry.” Bly and Creed were by this time known quantities to each other, almost friends, and in the small talk which followed the formal question-and-answer period, Jack felt he could press Bly further. Bly was evasive, except to mention his experience with Dylan in Russia. “It’s something that needs looking into,” he told Jack. “Maybe that’s your assignment.”

The comment hung in the back of Jack’s mind. By 1989 Timm was settled into Annapolis. Jenny Lynn was, to all outward appearances, doing fine without him, thank you. The job at Novum appeared secure. The term as union president carried a half-load release and required, initially, only a few hours each week. It was time for Jack to take a blow.

Songs of the North Country: Explorations in Two Minnesota Poets was more than just time off. It was the perfect project for Creed in the late eighties. Three years into the writing, the book united an old passion with a new passion: the American sixties with the Edenic vision. It offered a return from social politics to history and literature. In 1991 it reclaimed Jack’s national reputation after the polemics of “Women’s Lib: The Conservative Revolution.” And, as 1989 melted into 1990 and 1991, it provided a gift for Kelly Ayers, the ponytailed phenom who did finally become Jack’s new Lily Lee.

“I got tired of all the time telling Kelly, in effect, ‘I’ve done this, I’ve done that, blah, blah, blah,’ ” Jack admitted. “You can get a twenty-year-old girl with this heavy trip about all you’ve done and how important you are, but you’re not going to keep her. You might get away with ‘I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that,’ and small potatoes like an article or a story, but sooner or later she’s gonna want to see some big potatoes. If you’re all that hot a shit, you should be doing it.”

Starting in 1989, Jack was doing it again.

In his essay called “The Bifocal Vision of Charles Creed,” Perry Higginson has advanced an interesting interpretation of Charles Creed’s work between 1978 and 1989. During this period, Higginson argues, Jack was running on memories, reputation, and momentum from the late sixties and early seventies. An unusually high percentage of his work reflects a backward vision, from a short story like “Daisy” to the memory poems on his children to photo journalism pieces on Ronald Reagan’s Illinois. Rightly or wrongly, he scoffed at new developments in pedagogy and literary theory: deconstructionism, feminism, multi-culturalism, collaborative models, the teacher as facilitator. He was equally dismissive of the new age college student: a lazy, complacent, thin-skinned, under-achieving middle class wanna-be with an inflated grade point average, a mini-I.Q., and a maxi self-image, more than happy to blame his failure on anyone but himself. Locked inside his sixties persona, Jack kept bashing his head into the walls of a new world which to him was increasingly unrecognizable. In the process he bloodied mostly himself.

In both Dylan and Bly Jack found artists who had—not without pain, discomfort, and regret—worked their way out of the sixties, through the seventies, and into the eighties. In Dylan’s exploration of one musical style after another, and in his excursion into born-again Christianity; and in Bly’s redirection of deep-image poetry into deep-image psychology, and in his refocusing from female Other to distant Father, Jack found more than new values for his own life. He developed a sense that options exist for any artist: multiple personae, multiple subjects, multiple truths. Higginson quotes a letter in which Jack wrote, “I understood, finally, what Thoreau meant when he said, in walking away from Walden after a couple of years and a couple of months, ‘perhaps I had other lives to live.’ What Whitman meant when he said, ‘I am large. I contain multitudes.’ I understood that Robert Bly is large, and at times self-contradictory. That Dylan contains multitudes. That Charles Creed too contains multitudes. It was time to leave Walden. Or, in my case, to come to Walden.”

Jack learned also about accepting the unattractive parts of attractive wholes, himself included. He was never really comfortable with Dylan’s fundamentalism, Jewish or Christian, and even while writing on Bly, Jack never attended a men’s gathering.

“I couldn’t afford them for one thing,” he said. “And Robert did those conferences mostly to chase ideas into the open, where he could have a look at them. You can see Iron John developing through Robert’s readings, poems, talks, and those Alley Press publications. Both Dylan and Bly are intellectual artists: they’re craftsmen, but they’re more interested in ideas than art. Essentially they’re message-oriented moralists. They’re not just entertainers; they’re prophets, preachers. I think that’s my position as well, a peculiarly Midwest manner of writing. That’s why there’s so little gossip in Songs of the North Country, why I did so little interviewing of old friends and former lovers. Who cares? I looked at the art: the performances and the culture from which the performances came. I called it sociological anesthetics.”

The project had the additional virtues of bridging some of Jack’s own constitutional polarities: the urban, East Coast sixties in which he had grown up, and the rural, Upper Midwestern scene in which he found himself living life after his fortieth birthday. It moved him finally and completely out of Wales and out of Afro-American studies, a field in which he lost interest proportional to the extent it became dominated by female feminists. In the longer curve of his career, Afro-American studies proved something of a detour. He wrote only one critical essay in the field, and Afro-American style, insofar as there is an identifiable Afro-American style, never really flavored his creative work.

“Sociological aesthetics” was not the dominant criticism of the 1980s, and most of Songs of the North Country was written without a contract or even the suggestion of a contract. Jack tried some of his old New York connections, but in the game of musical chairs that New York publishing had become, most of the old friends and many of the old houses were long gone. “Robert Bly?” wrote back the new editors, responding to his proposal. “He’s a poet. Try a university press. And who is this Dylan fellow?”

“Bob Dylan?” wrote the university press editors, responding to an outline plus one or two chapters. “We buried him long ago. Besides, only a commercial press doing a large run could afford permissions.”

So Jack wrote for the best of reasons: to focus himself, to please himself, to serve the discipline. When the manuscript was completed and once revised, he sent it once again to University of Illinois Press, to Dick Wittington, whom Jack had known briefly at Busiris. Wittington sent Jack a contract, accepting the book conditionally and making several suggestions. The contract, which carried no advance in light of anticipated permissions costs, Jack celebrated with bottles of New York State champagne . . . in the Novum State recreation center, with Kelly Ayers and his Novum State colleagues. The suggestions, all of them, Jack incorporated into his final revision, a marked contrast to his experience with Age of Faith.

Charles Creed’s second book was written under circumstances in some ways similar to and in other ways quite different from his first. In a purchased farm house well outside of Lake-of-the-Woods—larger, more cluttered, but in many respects similar to the house he had rented from Harlan Everts in 1986—Jack read, listened, and meditated. He wrote letters and he answered letters. Occasionally he spoke by telephone with writers whose work on Dylan or Bly he admired. Less frequently, he spoke with persons who knew both Dylan and Bly. (The interviews included Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Robert Shelton, whose interviews were a testimonial to Jack’s status as a music critic; Donald Hall and David Zimmerman, whose interviews were a testimonial to Jack’s status as a scholar and a writer; and Carol Bly, whose interview was not only generous but courageous, considering Jack’s late-eighties reputation as an anti-feminist.) Despite his early plan to interview Dylan on Bly and Bly on Dylan, Jack spoke directly with neither of his subjects. Supported by a N. S. U. research grant, Jack made one extended trip to England in 1990 to pillage some Dylan files maintained by The Telegraph, for which he wrote several articles. Supported by another grant he and Kelly made a tour of Dylan’s North Country (Hibbing, Duluth, Red Wing, the Dinkeytown area of Minneapolis). On his own he took Kelly on an extended tour of Bly’s Minnesota, the land of cornfields and sloughs, of gloomy groves watched over by abandoned farmhouses and haunted by fox and owl. Using contractual travel, he and Kelly Ayers traveled to western Minnesota for the 1989 Marshall Fest, where Robert Bly joined Norbert Blei, Dave Etter, Eugene McCarthy, and two dozen other neo-agrarians for a week of sensory overload. Unmarried at the time, Jack and Kelly were refused a joint room in the Southwest State University dormitory and, the local motels being booked to overflowing, commuted 45 miles each morning from Montevideo.

Jack traveled and read and thought and wrote, achieving finally a sense of spiritual and geographical place which was at once the reflection of his subject and the subject itself. Dennis Engebrecht caught the synthesis in his New York Times review when he observed, “not only is this a Charles Creed we have never seen before, it is a form of scholarship we have not seen before.”

There was no Pulitzer in 1994, of course, and Songs of the North Country proved too subtle for the general trade market. It fared well among older Dylan fans, and very well with the kind of serious male literary people who harbored reservations over Bly’s excursion into popular psychology, and hoped Creed’s book would return Bly’s focus, and the popular focus on Bly, to his poetry.

The book delighted Kelly, who read in Jack’s dedication of the book to her, to Jenny, and to Timm the message Jack had intended her to read.

And the book won the approval of its two subjects. Robert Bly not only read the book, he understood it. He took the time not only for a congratulatory phone call, but for a five-page typed letter in which he annotated, expanded upon, and took issue with a dozen of Jack’s points, major and minor. Their correspondence continued through the ensuing years and, as the nation’s news media noted, Robert Bly spoke eloquently at Charles’ funeral.

The media noted as well the presence at the funeral of Bob Dylan, who did not speak. What the media did not know was that at the time of his death Jack Creed, despite the distractions of his trial, had completed two chapters of the authorized biography of Bob Dylan.

Kelly Ayers was the subject of the second significant phone call I received from Jack in the fall of 1989.

It came late in the evening of Tuesday, November 7.

“Tucker, this is Creed,” it began.

“Jack . . . !”

“I think I’m head over heels in love,” Jack announced. “With one of my students. I need some good advice.”

“Well.”

“Yeah, well.”

I paused a minute.

“The only thing that surprises me,” I told Jack finally, “is that it didn’t happen sooner.”

“Actually, it did.”

“Well, yes.”

“What do you hear of Lily Lee?”

“Nothing since February. You want I should check?”

“I think I’m ready to let it go.”

“New love drives out old love. Who is this woman? How old is she?”

“That’s what I need some advice on. I’ve been through this before, and I know where it can lead. I need this job, Tucker. Well—let’s say I want to keep this job.”

Kelly Ayers, Jack explained, was two and a half decades younger than he, not even one decade older than his daughter. She was Novum’s star volleyball player, a sophomore, who had taken Charles’ American Literature I class as an elective and spiked one right through his lonely heart.

“She seems a little young,” I said dubiously.

“Or I seem a little old. When we’re together, though, I don’t find myself wishing I were twenty-four. And she doesn’t want to be my age. We’re pretty much content to be who we are, as old as we are. Is it possible to be out of time?”

“She’s in your class?”

“In two weeks she’s out of my class. She’s a phy. ed. major, so I think we can keep her out of my classes in the future. Lily Lee was in lots of my classes, but these days. . . .” Charles’ voice trailed off.

“You’re asking my advice about a PE major, a college sophomore less than half your age. How does that sound to you, Jack?”

“About the way it sounds to you.”

“At least she’s not a cheerleader.”

“My daughter is a cheerleader.”

“You never did care much for the stupid ones.”

“This girl is no dumb jockette, Tucker. I can guarantee you that.”

I paused again.

“I don’t know how it is in Wisconsin, but around here we’re not even supposed to socialize with students. New regulations from Our Miss Vicky, after that affair between the girl and her sociology prof. I told you about that last spring.”

“The movement has not yet reached northwestern Wisconsin.”

“You couldn’t have picked somebody a little older?”

“She kind of picked me.”

“I’d be very, very careful if I were you, buddy. Rose Marié could take you to the cleaners.”

“What’s to clean? Timm’s settled, Jenny’s doing okay. Our marriage has been over for years. For”—Jack laughed himself at the absurdity of his situation—“as long as Kelly’s been alive.”

“I don’t see this thing as doing you any good.”

“It’s a rush when somebody young and good looking and full of life comes at you like that. It’s . . . rejuvenating.”

“That’s what the guy in sociology thought. I’d be careful. You want this job.”

“I guess.”

“On the other hand,” I heard myself saying, “maybe if you keep things quiet you can enjoy it while it lasts. How long can you keep this up, anyway?”

“No need to say anything to Rose Marié,” Jack added.

“No need to tell me that.”

“I just had to talk to somebody.”

“Yeah. Well I guess my advice would be to eat the ice cream before it melts. And maybe check the rules. You’re a state school, and you’re union. Maybe things are different there.”

“Nothing on Lily Lee?”

“Lily has left Riverton and she has left your life,” I told Charles. “She forgot you a long time ago. Focus on this Kelly woman. Anybody that young. . . . You have a whole lot of unlearning to do.”

“It ain’t easy being twenty-five again,” Jack admitted. “Wish me luck, good buddy.”

“Ten-four,” I told him. “Over and out.”

Kelly Ayers was indeed no dumb jockette. “I’m in the honors program,” she told Jack when he asked what a PE major was doing in a junior level American Lit. class. “Dr. Freiberg told me to include some literature classes in my honors program, and since I’m an American, I thought I’d take this one. Plus everyone says you’re a good teacher. Guess that kind of puts the pressure on you, doesn’t it?” Her remark broke up the class.

“Guess it does,” Jack admitted. “But everyone else in this room is an English major. Some are seniors with lots of background in literature classes. And I’m going to teach on a junior level, English major level. Guess that puts a little pressure on you, huh?”

“I can hang,” Kelly told him.

“She hung, all right,” Jack told me, recalling their early days with Kelly on a visit to Riverton for Jenny Lynn’s graduation. It was the first time I’d met her. “Highest score in the class on the mid-term.”

“I was studying my ass off to impress you,” Kelly admitted.

“And a lovely ass it is,” Jack pointed out.

“It was the middle of volleyball season, and I was in shape.”

“And a lovely ass it still is.”

A week into the term, Kelly had announced she might miss a class or two because of away games. “If there’s a way I can meet you during office hours to make the work up, I will.”

“I’m not going to repeat lectures. I’d give you my lecture notes, but I rarely use notes. You’ll just have to read the stuff.”

“Maybe I can borrow somebody’s notes. If I miss something, I guess I’ll just miss it.” Kelly sounded, and looked, disappointed.

“Volleyball, eh?” Jack asked.

“Full scholarship.”

“I’ve always been partial to athletes,” Jack admitted. “But I don’t know a thing about volleyball.”

“You should come to a game. We’re pretty good this year.”

“If that’s an invitation, I accept.”

“That’s an invite, Teach—to the game. Home opener is Wednesday night at 7:30. Duluth Bull Dogs. I’ll serve an ace just for you.”

“You’re an ace, all right,” Jack told her.

“You’re the ace, Teach. I am . . . the missing Queen. But I’ll deliver an ace for you.”

“She did, too,” Jack recalled. “First serve. She looked up at me in the stands, smiled, and banged that ball over the net, off the arm of some poor girl from Duluth, high enough it hit the rafters. Then she looked up at me and smiled again. I thought the sun had risen.”

Jack lingered in the bleachers after the match. “That first one was for you,” Kelly announced in front of the entire squad. “Did you notice?”

“I noticed. Nice win.”

“Always a nice win.”

“We hate the Bull Dogs,” one of Kelly’s teammates told Jack.

“Hate keeps a man alive,” Jack told her.

“A woman too,” the girl laughed. “This your dad, Kel?”

“This is Professor Creed.”

“So you’re Professor Creed! . . .”

“I’m Professor Creed.”

“My favorite prof,” Kelly said enthusiastically.

“I just thought, with the wing-tips and all. . . .”

Jack looked self-consciously at his feet.

“Nobody wears wing-tips these days,” Kelly told Jack. “Come on over to the Foot Locker Saturday and I’ll sell you a pair of Air Jordans. They got some really slick models this year—none of that red, white and black stuff. You’ll look way too cool. Loosen up a little. This isn’t practice, you know. This is the only life we’re gonna get.”

Like Lily, Kelly was a full tilt boogie. Like Lily, she was her own woman with her own program. Unlike Lily, Kelly was flagrantly, sometimes recklessly public about that program, including Jack’s role in it.

“You’re allowed to come to away games,” she told Jack after he complained of missing her the weekend previous, when the team had been on the road. The two were sitting in Jack’s office, where Kelly had taken to visiting an hour after the completion of a home match. It was 10:00, the night of October 7, a weekend.

“Who comes to road matches?” he wanted to know. “Parents and friends and people who really love volleyball.”

“You’re my friend,” Kelly argued.

“I mean friend friends,” Jack told her. “It would be pretty obvious.”

“What would be obvious?”

“Just. . . .”

“So you love the game.”

“I don’t love the game. I . . . enjoy watching one of the players play the game.”

The office became real quiet really quickly.

“Well I enjoy you enjoying watching me,” Kelly said thoughtfully. “And I think if two people enjoy something, then that’s okay.” Kelly looked at Jack. He looked at her. It was just like in the movies. He kissed her lightly on the forehead. She kissed him on the lips. With his foot, Jack kicked the office door shut, and they kissed some more. “The light,” Kelly said. Jack reached behind her and turned the light off.

“If I get out of line, say something,” Jack said, sliding his hands under the back of her sweatshirt.

She reached for his belt buckle. “Don’t ask. Just do.”

Within five minutes the writer and the ponytail had become lovers.

“We were fucking each other’s brains out is what we were doing,” Kelly remembered, “On that sofa in his office. Something I’d been fantasizing for a month. All of a sudden there it was. Plus I had all the energy from the game. God, it was the greatest ever!”

“It was something,” Jack admitted.

“If I’d have been any wetter, we’d have needed a rowboat,” Kelly said. Both Jack and I blushed.

“I didn’t feel particularly threatened at the time,” Jack admitted. “It was 10:30 at night. My office was, you’ve seen it, in the second floor of one of those towers. Pretty out of the way. If you’d been watching from the outside, you might have noticed the lights go out; if you’d been inside, you might have heard some strange noises. But it was 10:30. Classes were over, and so was the game.

Kelly and Jack dressed in the dark. He gave her one more kiss and turned the light on.

“I want you to think about this in class Monday, because I sure will,” she told Jack. “When I remember, I’m going to get wet all over again, just thinking about you being inside me. I’m going to smile. What are you going to do then?”

“I don’t even want to imagine.”

“I know. You’ll get good and hard. I’m going to stare. It’s gonna feel so gooooood!”

“I am still married, you know. I have two grown children. My son is exactly your age.”

“They’re not in this room right now, are they? Your wife’s not even in Lake-of-the-Woods. If she throws something out, I got a right to pick it up.”

“I guess if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.”

“I think it’s great,” Kelly told Jack. “You’re special. Everyone here thinks so. I want everyone to know about us.”

“There is the fact that you’re in my class this fall.”

“Well you are one, Professor Creed! I could tell you some stories about a few people at this school.”

“About me? About yourself?”

“No, not about you.”

“That’s just the way we want it to stay. You don’t need those stories being told about you, and I don’t need them being told about me.”

“Are you ashamed of me, Professor Creed? People gonna think you’re robbing the cradle?”

“Are you ashamed? Making it with an old bag of bones?”

“Afraid, then? I’m not going to bite you. Not there.”

“I am afraid,” Jack admitted. “For you, and a little afraid for me. I know some stories too. I know students who got burned by profs who were just using them, and I know profs who got burned by students who were just using them. Or who got quickly tired of them. I’ve also seen these things blow up.”

“Nobody runs my life but me.”

“That’s what they thought. Turns out everybody runs our lives. Your coach. Your other teachers. Administration. Jealous gossips. Believe me, our lives are one thing we do not control.”

“If it feels good, I’m doin’ it,” Kelly Ayers told Jack Creed.

“You feel good, I got to admit.”

“Guess that settles things, then.”

“How about if it feels good, we do it, but we don’t talk about it? At least not until the term ends. And not until I check Wisconsin State University System regulations on student-teacher relationships.”

“You’re the union president.”

“I don’t know the rules on this one.”

“You’d make a lousy ref,” Kelly told Jack. “But you make a great player. That’s a joke, teach. You get it?”

Jack and Kelly exchanged a few more tokens of their newly redefined relationship, and Kelly left for the showers.

Then Jack phoned me.

The next morning, he phoned Linda Tholen in Madison.

“It’s not exactly the behavior we look for in a union president,” Linda told Jack. “And as you know, on some campuses there’s talk of setting up some kind of guidelines, if not actual regulations. Still, in Wisconsin, there is no rule, written or unwritten. If anybody were to propose a rule, SUUFAMP would fight it. If you’re over eighteen and she’s over eighteen, what you do in private is your own business. Use discretion. Keep it private. I do think you should make sure she’s not in your class after this fall.”

“That’s understood.”

“Also,” Linda warned, “she may change her mind later, and file a sexual harassment complaint. The fact that she’s a student and you’re a teacher would give her a case no matter what she says now.”

“It’s not exactly courteous to ask a woman to sign a legal release,” Jack pointed out.

“I’ll admit it’s not very romantic, but I’m pointing out a worst case scenario. The fact that you’re a teacher and she’s a student could make a difference. Not with SUUFAMP, but with administration. Or someplace else. Especially if she’s registered in your class.”

“So whatever we do is our own business, but it could not be our own business.”

“I’m saying that student-teacher relationships break no system rules, and SUUFAMP will always protect its members. Just don’t make life difficult for us or yourself. And be sure you’re not being used.”

“That’s a real insult,” Jack told Linda.

“Just a note of caution. Some of these women can be pretty manipulative. You don’t read the right books.”

“In this case. . . .”

“I don’t even know this woman. I do know there’s no fool like an old fool, and while you’re not old yet. . . .”

By Christmas of 1989 Kelly and Jack were out of the closet. They arrived as a couple at the SUUFAMP Christmas party, lunched together in the Student Center, and sat near each other, holding hands, talking or not talking, at basketball games and wrestling matches. Dylan and Bly were put temporarily on hold, Jack’s classes ran on momentum, and Kelly’s roommate rarely saw her. Jack bought himself five pairs of Air Jordan’s and a restored red 1966 Mustang convertible. When the Mustang was not commuting between Lake-of-the-Woods and Riverton, it was headed toward the Twin Cities or Chicago. Kelly and Jack spent Easter 1990 in Florida. After graduation, they took off for Quebec and the Gaspé Peninsula. In August, between summer school second session and the start of volleyball, a week in Door County.

“One of the few advantages of being older,” Jack pointed out, “is that you have money to do things.”

Initially the couple raised a few eyebrows, especially among faculty, but Novum State had been there, done that back in the high sixties. Most faculty were young enough to remember their own childhoods. “We attended all the University functions together,” Jack testified in his deposition, “and not once did anyone give spoken or written indication of displeasure or discomfort. Not that we would have cared, really.” Kelly’s quick wit and expansive mind made her instantly popular with even the female members of the department. By fall 1991, attendance at Novum volleyball home games had increased by half a dozen English Department faculty members, and the number of jocks and jockettes taking advanced English classes had increased similarly.

“I believe it was William Byrd who once said a sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary that can be sent amongst any infidels,” Jack told Lloyd Cowley.

Some members of the Novum State faculty were not entirely sympathetic to Jack and Kelly. Not surprisingly, they were those who had disapproved of Jack before the SUUFAMP Christmas Party of 1988. One such person was his old antagonist Brad Newlund.

Brad went to Marilyn Schneider almost immediately after the party in December. Behind closed doors, he told Marilyn that Jack was engaged in unprofessional if not unethical behavior, that he was an embarrassment to the department, the profession, and the union he headed.

Marilyn saw, or thought she saw, where Newlund was coming from and quickly dismissed his complaints. “Their relationship has sustained itself for some while now,” she told him, “and promises, from all appearances, to sustain itself for some time to come.”

Newlund was “not so sure.”

“If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. Not all love ends happily, I’m afraid.”

“This could be a terrible scandal for SUUFAMP.”

“A lot of SUUFAMP people I know are all for it, Brad,” Marilyn responded. “It does not appear to be abusive from either end. They’re both as happy as pigs in shit. Kelly is pursuing a Health-Phy. Ed. degree, not even an English minor, so I foresee no pressures related to future employment. Not that Jack or Kelly would bring such pressures to bear, implicitly or explicitly.”

“A couple of other people have complained to me.”

“I don’t know what they’re doing complaining to you. I don’t know what you’re doing talking to me.”

“You’ve been around the department and the union for a long time.”

“So you want me, as department chair and union old timer, to have a talk with Charles because his relationship with Kelly Ayers gives you problems?”

“And others.”

“I have heard no complaints from anyone else, Brad. Nor am I sure I would be open to receiving complaints from others, students or faculty. Not about Kelly’s and Charles’ private business. If the relationship somehow interferes with the professional working relationship between you and Professor Creed, then I would have a problem. I can’t imagine how a love relationship between Charles and Kelly could affect the collegial relationship between you and Charles. No more than Jack seeing anyone else, married or unmarried, of any age, color, profession, or, for that matter, sex.”

“You honestly have no problem with a forty-something professor dating a twenty-something coed?” Newlund persisted.

“Not as long as the relationship is mutually consenting and transgresses no University regulations.”

“Some of us think it’s time for a university regulation. Other schools have codes.”

“That’s an item for discussion at the next SUUFAMP meeting. Not in my office. I will, incidentally, speak against your proposal.”

“It’s a matter of professionalism.”

“To intrude upon the personal relationship of two consenting adults strikes me as unprofessional in the extreme. Your position is completely intolerant. You’re trying to impose your morality on others. That’s exactly what we try to teach our students not to do. I know you’re a Baptist, and I respect your religious convictions. Miss Ayers and Dr. Creed are not Baptists, and you have to respect their rights. If Ms. Ayers should one day choose to complain—although I couldn’t see how, under the circumstances, she possibly could complain—then I might have a problem with Charles’ behavior. But I am certainly not about to call him on the carpet on behalf of an apparently deliriously happy Kelly Ayers.

“Which raises another point, Brad. Since Ms. Ayers is apparently very much in love with Charles, I personally approved of the relationship.”

By the end of her speech, Marilyn’s blood pressure had risen.

“And I’ll tell you one last thing before you vacate my office,” she concluded, “while we’re talking about professionalism. If you’re looking for a club to beat up on Charles Creed with, then you leave Kelly Ayers and every other student out of it. That’s what I have to say about professional behavior.”

That was the extent of Newlund’s conversation with Schneider.

Newlund went next to Linda Tholen, whose position accorded with that of her old colleague and union buddy. Linda told Brad essentially what she had told Jack: the couple’s private business was their private business, as long as both he and Kelly were over the age of consent. The university system did not hold itself in loco parentis. “At least we did not then,” Tholen added in recalling the episode. “Our understanding of sexual harassment has changed since 1989. The law has changed and our policies have changed. I’m not sure I could be quite as clear cut today as I was then. But that was my reaction to Brad Newlund’s phone call.”

Perhaps it was Linda Tholen’s parting piece of advice which sent Brad Newlund reaching for the club which did knock Jack out of the union presidency in the spring of 1991. Perhaps Newlund would have created whatever he needed. Perhaps this club presented itself inevitably: Jack was too much a believer in qualitative standards to last long as president of SUUFAMP. Sooner or later, Jack Creed was going to find Dr. John Charles Creed, President of SUUFAMP Local 12, defending someone or something for which Jack Creed, Professor of English and professional writer, had only contempt.

The issue involved neither Kelly Ayers nor Jack’s professionalism . . . except insofar as Jack’s sense of personal professionalism brought him into direct conflict with the policies of the Novum State University Learning Resource Office . . . whose employees, although not teaching faculty, were members of SUUFAMP Local 12. It revolved around the Novum State Office of Learning Resources.

The Congressional Task Force on the Rights and Empowerment of Americans with Disabilities had done most of its preliminary work on what would become The Americans with Disabilities Act, and its chairman, Justin Dart, had for years been touring the country drumming up support for his cause. In November he spoke to a small but receptive audience in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jack was not there, nor for that matter was Brad Newlund. But Madeline Santos, director of Novum’s Office of Learning Resources heard Dart’s address, along with three of her subordinates. The four returned to Lake-of-the-Woods fired with a vision of the future and determined that for once Novum would position itself on the cutting edge, not the rear guard, of change.

Santos organized a forum of her own, which Newlund did attend, and made the rounds of NSU administration. She then prepared a Blueprint for the OLR of the Future, complete with projected staff and budget: eight additional special needs counselors (two per year for the following four years), two (rising to three) dozen student interns, a whole gaggle of “peer tutors.” Office and support staff for all of the above, and a budget which, by its projected fourth year, would quadruple Santos’ 1988-89 allocation.

The late eighties had been good years at Novum, and while slightly pie-in-the-sky, Santos’ request was worthy and a not impossible dream. It did, however, present problems. For one thing, everyone knew Novum was flush. Worthy proposals for educational utopias were more plentiful at Novum State in 1990 than mystical visions of peace and love had been at Woodstock, twenty years before. Novum could never fund them all. The OLR proposal was in competition with a dozen other proposals, and Santos was in competition with a dozen of her NSU colleagues.

For another thing, Santos’ proposal dramatically expanded the instructional role of non-instructional personnel, including the student interns and peer tutors. Special needs counselors, trained in particular learning disabilities, could possess skills not found in ordinary faculty which might arguably make them more effective teachers despite their relative inexperience in the subject field. However, when N. S. U. faculty saw ordinary undergraduates scheduled as tutors, exam proctors, and “alternative-form instructional delivery personnel,” their necks stiffened.

The most vociferous objections were to Santos’ dramatically expanded definition of what constituted a disability in need of special assistance from the Office of Learning Resources. “We’re not talking blind, deaf, or paraplegic,” Lloyd Cowley pointed out to Jack over beers at the Silver Dollar. “And not dyslexia either. She’s got a whole bunch of mental and psychological disabilities that are just a little pink, I’d say. I had a kid in my office the other day telling me he had trouble remembering things. This is a learning disability, he says, and he gets special attention. Specifically he needs extra help from the Center for Learning Resources, and extra time on exams. I told him that being unable to remember things is going to be a heck of a problem in college, but I didn’t see where it entitled him to extra help or extra time. I told him I forget a lot of things too.

“Then there’s that Attention Deficiency Syndrome. What the hell is that? You can’t pay attention? That’s a disability? How about depression? That’s a good one! Hell, we all get depressed. Being depressed entitles you to special help? Pretty soon every kid in the college will be learning disabled, and we’ll need a hundred special needs counselors. Madeline’s building an empire over there at the expense of regular faculty. It’s time we put our foot down.”

Push came to shove when it came time to prepare the 1991-92 budget, in which Jack as SUUFAMP president played a central role. Under the collective bargaining agreement, both union administration develop complete budgets for an upcoming academic year, based on data provided by the Admissions and Business Offices, and on their own priorities. In a series of labor-management conferences, the two budgets are merged into a compromise acceptable to both sides. Inevitably both SUUFAMP and administration proposals are products of several internal compromises, and as well as pre-conference in-the-halls discussions between the labor and management. A local president attempting to negotiate among parties who don’t wish to compromise is a man caught between a rock and a hard place.

Santos was not much for compromises. She had seen the future, and it was hers, deeded to her, she anticipated, by the full force of the law.

“Why not take this thing step by step?” Jack wanted to know.

Santos wanted to lock Novum into a fully developed, long-range commitment.

“Why not four counselors and ten interns as a reasonable target, adding more as need arises?”

Santos had already documented an arisen need.

“ ‘An estimated ten undiagnosed cases for every reported incidence’ is not hard documentation.”

Santos considered the figures conservative.

“Could some response be formulated to faculty concerns that OLR appeared to be usurping faculty teaching duties?”

Santos considered the faculty, including Lloyd Cowley, callous and insensitive to the special needs of “her” students. Many faculty, including Cowley, were no better suited to teaching than her student interns. Probably less suited.

“For the purposes of this proposal, can we settle on a definition of ‘special needs student’ which seems less all-encompassing?” It seemed to Jack that Lloyd was right: by Madeline’s definitions, just about anyone would qualify as learning disabled.

It seemed to Marilyn that Jack was being insensitive.

“None of us have any problem with physical impairments,” Jack told Madeline. “Things like dyslexia and depression are a trickier issue. People are initially sympathetic, but as you move to less extreme situations, I begin to question the extent to which Novum State needs to be involved. Many faculty members, including myself, I’ll admit, have difficulties seeing emotional illnesses as a learning problem.”

“Those are all serious disabilities.”

“They may be. The question I’m raising, in the name of other people inside SUUFAMP, is the extent to which those serious problems are cause for special education initiatives. And once we get into the realm of emotional matters like motivation, or mental problems like retardation, attention deficit, or short- and long-term recall, then I personally don’t believe there is much an institution of higher education can do. Or ought to do. These are social, psychological, and medical problems.”

“They’re obviously linked to student success rate. Every study shows that.”

“Granted. But the institution cannot treat students socially, psychologically, and medically as a preliminary to, or even concurrent with educating them. To do so overextends the university’s resources. Or lowers standards to the extent that the degree becomes meaningless.”

“Your position is entirely insensitive to the student’s need to develop a positive self-image. The weak self-image perpetuates poor performance. The cycle has to be broken.”

“Call me insensitive. Call me whatever you like, Madeline. A kid who can’t remember, who won’t or can’t pay attention, who is just plain stupid—that was the old-fashioned word for it, and I think it has some currency even today—a kid who is just plain stupid doesn’t get a college degree.”

“No learning disability should disqualify any student from the opportunity to secure a college degree.”

“Some of the things you’re identifying as learning disabilities are absolute disbarments to achieving a college education in any meaningful sense of the word. And the compensatory adjustments you propose in the learning and testing environment make a college degree meaningless. Open book exams for people with short-term memory problems? OLR personnel rewriting essays for students with poor writing skills? Many faculty have problems with that, including me.”

“Your position is contrary to the law, Professor Creed.”

Santos thought she had played her trump card, but the law was exactly the wrong way to argue with Jack. He gave her the John Charles Creed lecture on American Justice and American Law, a lecture I knew by heart.

“In the first place, Ms. Santos, you’re a little ahead of yourself. My position is not contrary to law, it is merely contrary to the prevailing interpretations of those Washington bureaucrats who, usually in their own self-interest, set guidelines for the interpretation of law.

In the second place, law is a mere matter of power and convenience. We will both agree, probably, that law has historically operated in this manner, and I see no reason to believe it functions otherwise today. I have seen enough of law to know it has nothing to do with truth, justice, or even common sense. Slavery was part of the Constitution. For much of America’s history, and human history, it was perfectly legal. Capital punishment for crimes as trivial as adultery and poaching has been, as you put it, ‘the law.’ All those deportations and executions in Nazi Germany were ‘the law.’ Consuming alcohol was within the law, then it was outside the law, and now it is within the law. Driving 60 miles per hour on I-94 was inside the law, then outside the law, and now, thank god, it’s inside the law again.

“I don’t care what is and isn’t the law. I care what is sensible and manageable. What you’re proposing is an overly ambitious program that is neither sensible nor manageable within the limited resources of Novum State, and the uses your colleagues would like to make of those resources. I can’t responsibly take your proposal, as it exists, to administration. And I guarantee you, they won’t buy it if I do.”

It was “I don’t care what is and isn’t the law” that got Jack into trouble in the long run, but the short-run battle waged by Newlund and Santos against Jack’s alleged insensitivity to the needs of the disabled cost him energy, respect, and credibility. Newlund formed a coalition of left-leaning behaviorists, largely psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists, which put up a floor fight in support of Santos’ proposal at the March 6, 1991, SUUFAMP meeting. President Creed spoke “for a faculty consensus” which favored serious reductions in the OLR proposal. Newlund’s coalition accused him of misrepresenting the faculty opinion, offering their own vocal presence as evidence that Jack was out of touch with his membership. The fact that Jack’s position carried the day in SUUFAMP and in the SUUFAMP-NSU administration negotiations only increased the bitterness of the dissatisfied.

Later that spring, as Linda Tholen won election to her second term as statewide president, Newlund defeated Creed in the Local 12 election. Newlund never mentioned Kelly Ayers, but he did accuse Jack of “unprofessional behavior.” He attacked Jack as insensitive to the plight of disabled students and “significant” elements of his membership. He accused Jack of illegal conferencing with administration on the budget and a number of other occasions. His most effective point was Jack’s own “I don’t care what is and isn’t the law.” “With all due respect to our present president,” Newlund argued, “is not the function of a leader of this organization to uphold the law, as represented by our binding contract? Not only is our president distracted by other people and projects, he candidly tells us he doesn’t care what the law is. Our contract has the force of law. How can we reelect as president of our organization someone who says he doesn’t care what our contract is?”

Jack took defeat gracefully, even gratefully. He was by this time far more interested in Songs of the North Country and Kelly Ayers than in union business, and was happy to be able to devote more time to each. Not to mention teaching. Newlund, he reasoned privately, would have Linda Tholen above him in Madison, the old bulls patrolling the fences in Lake-of-the-Woods. If Newlund led the union astray, the membership deserved what the membership got.

The only trouble was, Jack got it right along with the rest of them.