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The Funeral

John Charles Creed was buried in Resurrection Cemetery, a gently rolling uplands on the edge of the northwestern Wisconsin woods just south of Lake-of-the-Woods on US 63. Interment took place on March 17, 1997, following a closed casket service in St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church.

Of the days between March 15 and March 17, I remember little more than walking numbed through a blur of chaotic events. “Sound bite ceremony,” Jack might have called it. Only two images are now sharp in my memory: the face of Kelly Creed as we heard the gunshots—that suspended instant before ecstasy transformed itself to anguish—and the picture of Jenny Lynn stepping forward at the grave site to toss a softball into the vault atop her father’s coffin. I will never forget the faces of those two women. The rest is fuzzy.

I cannot now picture Jack’s crumpled body by the courthouse telephone, although I certainly saw it. I remember no details of the scuffle between Victoria Nation and the bailiff, although Lloyd and I helped bring her down, at some personal risk to ourselves. I do not remember the single bullet all accounts report Virginia firing in our direction, and I don’t remember “plaintiff Virginia Coyle restrained by male police from comforting her hysterical female colleague,” as the New York Times reported. To this day I remember nothing of the sixteen-minute interval between the murder and the arrival of an ambulance. Newspaper reports are more accurate than my memory. The stories in The Chicago Tribune and The Milwaukee Journal strike me in rereading as the truest. (The one-page article in Time magazine is also accurate.) I do recall being driven to the hospital in some ambulance or squad car: Kelly, Jenny Lynn, Marcus, Lloyd, Marilyn, Ed, all of us whisked off in the entire Lake-of-the-Woods fleet, which, unlike the ambulance, had been parked conveniently beside the Court House that late Friday evening.

I remember looking at all those cops and wondering where they were when we needed them, how Victoria had managed to walk unrecognized and unchallenged into a courthouse she was barred from entering. With a loaded gun. I remember hearing, even as I asked, Jack’s own voice of a decade previous: “I figured nobody in Security was going to stop me, and nobody from Riverton P.D. would recognize me. I was right.”

I remember a glimpse of Jack’s red Mustang in the courthouse parking lot as we rode away in the squad car, and wondering how it would get home.

Jack was dead on arrival at La Follette Memorial Hospital. I think we all secretly hoped he would be. The thought of Jack Creed as a drooling invalid in a wheelchair, as a brain-dead acute in some Midwest Cuckoo’s Nest, as anything less than 100% of Jack Creed was too monstrous to entertain. We all wept, our heads ringing with recriminations, should-haves and could-haves. “I told him to call Timm.” “I told him to wait until after the verdict.” “I sent him out into the hall.” “I should have gone with him.” “I’d rather have lost the case and saved the life.”

“Look,” one of the cops finally told Kelly. “Quit blaming yourself. This dame was coming after your husband wherever she could find him. On the phone, off the phone, in the courthouse, out of the courthouse. This afternoon, next week, next month. She was going to get him sooner or later. It didn’t matter.”

His consolation didn’t matter. There was guilt enough for us all.

In an odd way, however, those hours at La Follette Memorial were the calm before the storm. Jack’s body was off in a room somewhere. Kelly and Jenny Lynn spent more than an hour by the cold body that had a few hours previous been their father and husband. I never saw Jack again. There was nothing to be hoped for, nothing to be done. Victoria was in a cell downtown. I never saw her again either. We sat, twelve or fifteen of us and half a dozen police officers, in the lobby of La Follette Memorial, an antiseptic atmosphere of blond furniture, month-old magazines, and buzzing fluorescent lights. At intervals some member of the Novum faculty or student body would arrive to offer support or satisfy curiosity, only to be repelled at the sliding glass doors by Lake-of-the-Woods police. We were not asked to return to the courthouse, nor did anyone suggest leaving the hospital. Quietly, still in shock, in distant corners of the room, we repeated our stories to investigators. Occasionally Lloyd or Marilyn or I would wander down a silent corridor, to return ten or fifteen minutes later and slump into a chair. None of us slept. None of us read. We spoke little to each other.

In a small building in a small town in the northwestern reaches of one of America’s less significant states, we stared into the American darkness and shared, briefly, the peace of our intimacy.

Even before the sun rose, however, media people began arriving. Minneapolis-St. Paul’s WCCO broke the story of Jack’s murder on the 10:00 news and had a reporter and cameraman in Lake-of-the-Woods by 2:00 a.m. Print journalists from both Twin Cities newspapers were not far behind. The Milwaukee Journal’s Pete Lindsay, who had written one of the earliest and best reviews of Age of Faith and was something of a Charles Creed junkie, heard the news shortly after 11:00 p.m., jumped in his car, and made Lake-of-the-Woods before dawn. Likewise Curt Goodwin of the Chicago Tribune. In the dark morning hours, reporters from newspapers and television stations around the country jerked from their beds to answer an insistent telephone, then dragged themselves to airports to catch the first flight to St. Paul. More than a dozen found themselves reassigned from Clinton in Washington to Creed murder in Wisconsin. They spent the groggy in-flight hours digesting hastily constructed briefings, arrived in St. Paul around 7:00 or 7:30, then raced each other in rented cars north and west across the St. Croix River, up the snow-packed back roads of Wisconsin. A whole convoy of ice- and salt-rimed Barettas and Tauruses arrived in Lake-of-the-Woods around 9:00. By 10:00 that Saturday morning in early March, Time magazine reported, Hertz, National, Avis and Budget Car Rental had booked everything available at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. By that afternoon they were negotiating short-term leases with local car dealerships on anything with an engine and four wheels. By Saturday evening, motels as far away as Ashland, Duluth, and Eau Claire were full up.

And so the deluge was upon us. We were then no longer our own persons, and Jack’s death was a media event.

Marcus appointed himself director of media relations. I resented his decision at first, but came quickly to understand that his status as a lawyer was, among largely unprincipled reporters, very much in the best interest of Jack and his loved ones. Victoria’s plan, which Marcus perceived immediately, was to provoke a media investigation into the past sins of the wicked, wicked man whom male chauvinist Judge Mortland had protected. By controlling the flow of information on the one hand, and pointing out the opportunity for law suits on the other, Marcus exercised what has come to be known in other circles as “damage control”—at least with the major newspapers, magazines, and television stations, who require on-the-record verification before printing off-the-record rumors. As the days wore on, I became increasingly grateful to Marcus DeLotta for his role in handling the media, and increasingly respectful of his skill and intelligence as a lawyer.

Even Roger C. Barclay, who knew trouble when he was in it, behaved with a certain degree of class. Barclay put a gag in his client’s mouth which has not, to this writing, been removed. Pleading her obligation to the police investigation of Jack’s murder, Barclay kept Coyle sequestered from the moment of Jack’s death to noon on Saturday. Barclay was not exaggerating: he and Virginia were in fact busy with police most of that time. By 12:00, Lake-of-the-Woods police had finished questioning them both and indicated they were free to leave town. They met briefly with Judge Mortland and, by 12:45, Barclay and Coyle were fleeing Lake-of-the-Woods and Wisconsin, bucking heavy traffic all the way, probably the only vehicle headed south on US 63.

Locked in solitary confinement, Victoria was permitted contact with no one except police and a court-appointed lawyer. She refused to speak even a single word to the lawyer, a male, writing messages on a pad of paper. She also spoke not a single word to police, male or female. Victoria did phone her friend Francine Fitzner, and by Saturday evening Fitzner had arrived in Lake-of-the-Woods, out of Riverton by way of Chicago, where she had picked up a female lawyer acceptable to Nation. Speaking to reporters, the lawyer attributed her client’s actions to “temporary insanity triggered by the enormous injustice of the verdict in the Creed trial and Victoria’s painful awareness of the historic subjugation of women in America.” To their many questions, including requests for clarification of “wicked, wicked man,” she offered only a prudent “no comment.” “No comment” remained Victoria’s position until her ill-advised “exclusive interview” in the October 1998, issue of Ms. Magazine, an interview which has resulted to date in four law suits against her and the magazine, and promises to do Victoria Nation precious little good in her own upcoming trial.

DeLotta and Barclay were less successful with reporters from the tabloids. While mum was the word from Nation, Fitzner, Barclay, and Busiris, Jack was not yet in his grave before outraged feminist ideologues had barred what they considered the sins of Charles Creed to anyone who would listen. Pretrial interviews and depositions with Marcus DeLotta had quieted Robertson, Brower and friends, and most of Busiris was sympathetic to Jack, especially in his death, but Nation, or Fitzner, had apparently disseminated details of Coyle vs Creed throughout the country before Judge Mortland drew his close circle. The feminist press had been gunning for Charles Creed ever since “Women’s Lib: The Conservative Revolution.” Inevitably the old BTU gossip surfaced, if not the old personnel files. The gossip was more slanderous than the files. In the pages of The National Enquirer, Star and other pulp newspapers lining the grocery store checkout counters, feminist scholar Victoria Nation, Ph. D., presented her case against Charles Creed.

“Tabloids are tabloids,” DeLotta pointed out. “From pulp journalists you expect things like ‘SERIAL SEX AND THE SINGLE COED’ or ‘CRAZED FEMINIST FELLS COLLEGE PROF WHO SINGLE-HANDEDLY DEMOLISHED CAMPUS.’ Charles Creed is too juicy a story for us to control assholes like them. Sex and murder: he’s almost as good as O.J. I’m afraid Jenny and Kelly are going to have to deal with tabloids for a long time. Probably until the defense opens up in California.”

What was said on the internet shamed even the tabloids.

This book stands as a factual answer to the unsubstantiated, sensational, irresponsible, and wildly inaccurate allegations that have surrounded Charles Creed in the feminist and tabloid press.

During the dark early hours of the 15th, and on into mid-morning, Kelly, Jenny Lynn, Marilyn, Ed, Lloyd, Marcus and I did our best to accommodate the requests of the most intrusive reporters and television cameramen. Then the number of reporters became overwhelming and their assertiveness more than a little offensive. Marcus and Novum State Publicity Director Toni Barbour put together a crude press release on her Macintosh, which Toni updated and expanded hourly, while Arnie Marin’s work-study students researched Creed materials in the library and Toni’s work-study students photocopied. Toward noon, as Barclay and Coyle escaped Lake-of-the-Woods, Kelly, Jenny, Lloyd and I retreated into the necessities of funeral arrangements, shielded by Marcus, Toni, Arnie, and other Novum State friends. Initially we returned to the farmhouse, which sheriff’s police had cordoned off when television cameramen began converging on the place at the first light of dawn. By Sunday evening, however, even the police were having trouble protecting us from reporters who snuck like illegal aliens behind the snowbanks and through the forest to come popping out of the barn a hundred feet from the house. Police finally evacuated Kelly and Jenny Lynn to Marilyn Schneider’s place on the opposite side of Lake-of-the-Woods, and drew a tight ring around Jack’s house, abandoning out-buildings and acreage to strangers. Lloyd and I spent the day with Kelly and Jenny, retired that night to Lloyd’s Cowley’s place on Elm Street.

Kelly, Jenny, Lloyd and I spent most of Saturday on the telephone, calling those with whom we wished to talk.

“I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day,” people told us.

“That’s why we called you,” we answered.

And the weeping began anew.

In retrospect, I do not believe I personally was useful. However Kelly Creed, like Marcus DeLotta, demonstrated great intelligence under pressure . . . and the weight of grief lay heavier on her than on anyone except Jenny Lynn. It was Kelly who understood intuitively that reporters would leave Lake-of-the-Woods only after Jack’s funeral, that only after a funeral would we be freed from public duties to confront our private sorrow. “Autopsy this afternoon or tomorrow, if the coroner or police demand one,” she decided firmly. “Funeral Monday afternoon. By Monday night I want all these people out of here. I’ve got nothing to say to them. Neither does Jenny. My husband is not coming back.”

“Funeral Monday,” Marcus announced to reporters.

“Funeral Monday,” we told friends over the phone, one by one.

“Funeral Monday,” Jenny Lynn told her brother. And her mother.

“I’ll be there for the funeral,” Timm promised.

“It’s crazy,” Jenny told him. “I’ll find you a place to sleep.”

Somehow it got done. Cemetery plot. Casket. Memorials. Service. Music. Programs. Minister. Mortician. University personnel. Police investigators. Reporters who found their way around DeLotta and intercepted Kelly at the church, at the cemetery, at the school. While the tornado howled around us, she walked her way through a surreal landscape with a calm borne of desperation.

Somehow it got done. People rise to the occasion—especially small town people. And Jack Creed’s funeral was certainly the most remarkable occasion ever presented to Lake-of-the-Woods. Out of a series of hourly revisions and re-revisions emerged a simple plan for a memorial church service at St. Stephen’s, Monday morning at 10:00, to be broadcast on Radio WLOW, family and invited friends only, please; reception at Novum State University Student Center, 12:00 until 2:00, public invited. At 3:00, Service for the Burial of the Dead, St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church, simulcast into Novum State University Field House and broadcast on Radio WLOW and Radio Busiris. At 4:00, internment in Resurrection Cemetery. 5:00-7:00, press conference. After 7:00 p.m. on Monday, silence.

“Jack always liked flowers,” Kelly noted. “Tell people flowers are fine. We’ll set up a memorial scholarship too.”

“And tell people to dress however they feel like it,” Jenny Lynn suggested. “Dad hasn’t worn a suit in years. Except for court.”

John Charles Creed, the man whose only real goal in life was that his children would look back at him and say, “My old man was an okay guy,” would have been astonished at the people who attended his funeral. Jack had rather accustomed himself to living a quiet life in the backwaters of the educational and literary world, his Pulitzer far in the past, the positive critical reaction to Songs of the North Country a pleasant but unnecessary recent distraction. He had come to appreciate the delicate flavor of unspiced food, and the subtle sounds of silence in the snowy fields. His friendship with Robert Bly was rewarding, and the prospect of having the definitive say on Dylan, but in 1997 Creed and Bly and Dylan were keeping well out of the limelight. Jack had looked with mixed emotions to publication of the Dylan biography, which he expected to gain him a lot of international attention. “No talk shows,” he had told the publisher. “I don’t want them, and Dylan wouldn’t want them.”

“We’ll see,” was all his editor, Marcie Grossman, said. “For now, just write the book.”

“I don’t know as I’m ready for a lot of attention,” he had told me the weekend before his trial. “Kelly and I live a pretty pleasant life . . . or we will, once this business is over.” Part of Jack had always sought anonymity.

Anonymity was not what he was receiving on the weekend of March 14-17. Drawn by Jack’s reputation as a writer, the press coverage of a sensational crime, and the now nationally debated Coyle harassment case, 4000 people poured into Lake-of-the-Woods, Wisconsin, on March 17. Most of them were strangers to the deceased and his survivors. Most knew Jack only by his words.

Many came with copies of Age of Faith or Songs of the North Country, or some small magazine with a Jack Creed story or essay which, in a bizarre scene out of Heller or Vonnegut, they sought to have autographed by the author’s wife and daughter. When they found Robert Bly in Lake-of-the-Woods, he too became a target. So certainly would have been Robert Dylan, had Dylan not hid in the background most of the day. The manager of the Lake-of-the-Woods B. Dalton store told me that people were pouring into her bookstore to buy anything with the name Jack Creed or Robert Bly on or in it: books, anthologies, even magazines. On Monday morning her Twin Cities supplier delivered its entire stock of Songs of the North Country—six hundred books—to Lake-of-the-Woods. By noon they were gone. “I could have sold three times that number,” she told reporters. The Novum State University Book Store was experiencing a similar run of what can only be called souvenir items.

Other writers went unrecognized in rural Wisconsin, except by literature professors, some reporters, and each other. They included Jack’s old buddies Dave Etter, Norbert Blei, Phil Farmer, Bill Holm, Linda Hasselstrom, and even Ken Kesey and Norman Mailer, who presented themselves to Kelly and Jenny Lynn at the 12:00 reception. “I can honestly say I read your books,” Kelly told Kesey in awe. “Jack had read them all. Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion several times. I think you were a great influence on his life.”

“I read his stuff,” Kesey assured her. “Creed was a good writer and a good head. The country could use a million more like him. And a million fewer like that dingbat who offed him.” I hope Jack, wherever he was, heard the remark.

This influx of notables necessitated continued revisions in the funeral service, which grew in length as persons who had come to honor Jack or the occasion were invited to add their eulogies. Lloyd Cowley had assumed responsibility for coordinating Monday’s events, with the help of Toni Barbour and other NSU personnel. Throughout the reception Lloyd kept coming up to Kelly and Jenny with one message after another: “Kesey wants to say a brief something about Jack at the funeral service. Is that okay with you?” “Okay if we add Mailer to the eulogies?” “Alonzo Jackson is here. One of Jack’s former students. Played for the Bulls. . . .” “A guy named Paul Popowski, says he was an old friend of your dad. . . .”

St. Stephen’s, not a large church, was packed. Sitting in the second pew with the other pallbearers, behind Kelly, Jenny, and Rose Marié, I was not in a good position to notice who was in the church and who was not. With me sat Lou Feracca, Lloyd Cowley, Ed Haley, Marcus DeLotta, and Paul Lesinski, a last-minute replacement for Timm Creed. Much of the Busiris faculty and administration was in Wisconsin, because of either Jack or Victoria Nation. Many of Jack’s former students were in town as well, including Popowski, but I doubt they received seating in St. Stephen’s. Did it matter?

Despite his promise to Jenny Lynn, Timm had not arrived by 3:00 on Monday. He had talked with his sister for over an hour on Saturday and again on Sunday. He said he was having some transportation problems but promised to be in Lake-of-the-Woods by Monday afternoon. The whole schedule was designed in part to allow the presence at Jack’s funeral of the son he so loved.

When Timm had missed the 10:00 service, Jenny Lynn had phoned Mirimar. “He’s on his way,” an officer had told her. At 3:00 Timm Creed was nowhere to be seen, and his absence upset both his sister and his stepmother. Already more than one reporter had struck on the same sidebar story, which ran in several of the nation’s evening newspapers. Even the New York Times story plays misleadingly on fancied father-son conflicts which propelled the son of a sixties radical hippie into a service academy and a career as a Navy pilot. Other reporters had picked up on Jenny’s year in Women’s Studies at Bryn Mawr, and were playing variations on the theme of a generational conflict. The Philadelphia Inquirer discovered that Nation also had a connection with Bryn Mawr, and played that angle. “They’re having a field day with Jack and his kids,” Lou whispered to me.

“That’s the American news media.

“It’s the fucking American public. Simpson. Clinton. Lady Di. Charles Creed. The country is fucked.”

“Still, Timm is not here.”

“They loved each other more than anything. We both know it.”

“Timm should be here.”

“I’m sure his absence is not voluntary.”

Charles Creed’s funeral oration was delivered by Reverend John Anderson, who had been Jack’s pastor at St. Mark’s, Riverton. Anderson had baptized Timm and Jenny Lynn, and had known a side of Jack Creed that none of his other friends had seen. He was the man whom Anarchist Jack had once thanked for saving his life. That story Rev. Anderson related as an example of the enormous capacity of the deceased for Christian forgiveness. “Our Lord himself exhibited moments of righteous anger and decisive action,” Anderson pointed out, “but always that anger was followed by forgiveness. To hate the sin and love the sinner is the essence of Christian charity. Charles Creed, a man of strong passions who aroused in others equally strong passions, was also a man of great forgiveness. And even Charles Creed had not yet reached the limit of seventy times seven.”

Other speakers played variations on the theme of Jack’s capacity for understanding, courage, and forgiveness. Robert Bly described Jack as a man with strong interior warriors, who had the knowledge of how and when to wield a sword, and the courage to swing it. “Like all of us, Charles Creed grew through stages,” the poet pointed out. “At the time of his death, Jack had ripened to wisdom, but the arc of his history reminds us once again of the old truth: the road begins with red. If there’s no red, there will be no white, and no black. Neither the male nor the female can skip directly to wisdom.”

Mailer described Jack as a gutsy and talented writer familiar with the full range of language and passion, unafraid to truth and ideas, not one of those one-trick magicians popular with commercial houses these days. Kesey described Jack as a straight-shooting truth-teller and a friend. Alonzo Jackson described Jack as a man who always did what he thought was right, even if he knew it would get him into trouble. “I think I might have caused him some problems once, because I didn’t do what was right,” the Bulls star admitted. “I feel pretty small about that, and I’d like to ask his forgiveness. I was just a kid then. I understand now that Professor Creed was bigger and badder than most guys I played against in the NBA.”

“Jack lived outside the law and was honest,” Dylan said. “He was a friend to the poor, and always lent a helping hand.”

“He always did for others,” I added mentally. “Sometimes he let others do for him. Not very often, though. Not very often.”

“My old man was an okay guy,” Jenny Lynn Creed said. “I guess he’s famous, and he’s been famous for a long time, even when I was a kid. His bigness never meant less time for his kids, though. When I was a kid his being famous wouldn’t have impressed me, and probably it doesn’t matter now. I love dad because he was a good man and a good father. Timm and I told him that lots of times. I just wish we could have said it to him one more time.”

To the words of “Children of the Heavenly Father” Jack’s casket moved from chancel down the nave. The man who so detested sing-song ditties like “Love Me Tender” and “Silent Night,” who so admired the complexities of rock and Bach, had always loved this, the most sing-song of simplistic Scandinavian hymns. That was something Rev. Anderson knew that the rest of us did not. Jenny Lynn confirmed the fact later, and Kelly. “He used to walk around the house humming that tune,” she remembered. “I never knew what it was until today.” Charles Creed was a man of infinite contradictions.

In that regard, Bly and Dylan probably understood him better than I.

The funeral cortege was very long. By police count, over 250 cars left St. Stephen’s, to be joined on the outskirts of Lake-of-the-Woods by nearly 500 more coming from the NSU Field House parking lot. Others must have fallen into line later, since police counted a total of 852 vehicles entering Resurrection Cemetery. By their estimates 5,000 people, most of them students, gathered at the grave site. Two hundred of these were journalists. I wasn’t sure whether the rest were friends of Jack or just celebrity seekers.

Lou, Lloyd, Ed, Marcus, Paul and I carried Charles Creed from the hearse to his grave. Then Lou and I left Kelly and Jenny Lynn, and drifted to the rear of the crowd. I was tired of impertinent reporters jostling each other and everyone else for a front-row position. Their cameras caught relatively little of significance anyway, except for the coffin. Shock, exhaustion, and a little bit of anger had sealed Jenny and Kelly off from true grief, and the few notables that had driven to Resurrection were not standing in the front row. From my position more toward the rear, I noticed Kesey and Mailer in quiet conversation. Dylan’s white stretch limo was parked on a hill some distance from the small knoll where Jack was laid to rest. I don’t think anyone else noticed it. The rear window was down, and a face, Dylan’s I imagined, stared silently at the scene in front of him. I didn’t hear or see the limo depart.

Also ignored by the reporters were the faces they did not recognize, the faces which had played such important roles in Jack’s life: Ted Jones and Percy Thompson, Morie Kaufman and aged Virgil Cutter. Phil Steiner was at Jack’s funeral, as were Joe Rausch, Marcie Grossman, and three or four other people from Scribner’s. The new crowd was there: Marilyn Schneider, Linda Tholen, Eric Syverson, Charlie Weber and Andy Olsen and even Brad Newlund. Paul Popowski was at the grave, with a woman I took to be his wife, and a couple of kids . . . and Terry Cunningham. I saw Deirdre Williams, May O’Hara, and Carolyn McQuillan, with whom I spoke briefly afterward the ceremony. Perhaps my imagination, fatigued and distracted, was playing tricks, but I thought I recognized Annie Brower and Billy Jo Allen. I am sure I recognized a middle-aged Blondie Robertson, who, upon seeing me seeing her, ducked out of my line of vision and disappeared.

One player, of course, sat in police custody back in town. Another had last been seen with her lawyer heading out of town.

I did not see Herman Hauptman or Bert Reich.

Lily Lee Martin too was missing from the scene, although her son introduced himself to Marcus and to me.

“You probably don’t recognize me,” he began, and he was right. At Busiris, I’d seen very little of his mother and father, nothing at all of him, especially after 1985. “I’m John Oliver. Jim and Lily’s son.” He extended his hand.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

“You knew my mother back at Busiris. And my dad.”

“Are they here?” I wanted to know.

“No. She’s in Tangier, actually. On vacation.” The young man’s eyes shifted uneasily. “They’re not together anymore.”

“It happens to most of us these days,” I said sympathetically.

“I guess she got tired of playing the role.”

“That too happens.”

“I was visiting the University of Minnesota,” young John Oliver explained. “I might go there next year on one of those Kirby Puckett scholarships. Then this happened and I remembered mom talking about Professor Creed. I thought I would drive up.”

I nodded.

“Mom said she knew Professor Creed when she was a student at Busiris. Said I’m named after him. It made no sense to me. His name is Charles, and my name is John. Although she always calls me Jack.”

“Professor Creed’s first name was really John, not Charles. John Charles Creed is his full name. Or was. His friends did in fact call him Jack.”

“Hey, man. Ain’t that a story? According to mom, they were pretty close.”

“You could say that.”

“Well, mom. You never know with her. I mean, I love mom, but she does get some strange ideas. I guess she’s just . . . a mom.”

I had no idea how much of her relationship Lily Lee had told, or intimated, to her son, or how much Jack or Lily would have wanted her son, a high school senior, to understand.

“My good man,” I said finally, “Whatever she might be now, your mother in her youth was possibly the most remarkable woman I ever met. Probably she was the most remarkable woman Jack Creed ever met. You didn’t know her then, and I don’t know what stories she’s told you, but in the 1970s your mother was somethin’. The boys fell out of trees at her feet.”

“Wow.”

“We’ll just let it rest there, eh, son? Good luck with the U. And with the scholarship.”

“I’ll say hello.”

“Kiss her once from Charles. From Jack.”

“I’ll do that. What you told me just now is . . . totally weird!”

My thoughts on that gray, chilly March afternoon were not profound. I had spent a long three days—a long two weeks, really—with a lot of highs and lows. My thinking was far from coherent, and I made no effort to focus. Life, obviously, was meaningless anyway. Fragments of history swirled through my head, little vignettes triggered by a face or a word.

I remember thinking that something very large had passed through my life, a great mysterious presence, like some enormous fish that passes beside the bow of a canoe, its bulk betrayed only by a fin that slices the surface, by the roil of water around it. You catch your breath in awe and fear, playing mentally with portents and dangers. But even in the moment of your recognition, it has already moved beyond you. A few seconds of dark chaos, and it’s gone.

I remember scanning the tombstones around me—Krause and Kreuger, Nielsen and Anderson, Kubiczewski and Ortegas. Peltier, Deremo and Jones and some Irish name I have since forgotten. Nemo, the name Nemo stuck in my mind.

I remember thinking, “What a melting pot this America is! And this is where it all ends up.”

I remember thinking that Jack had picked the right place to die, here among the commingled ethnicities of working Americans, far from the centers of ambition, in a forgotten corner of rural America, in some quiet, peaceful place.

“And now Creed. Now this has happened to Charles Creed. One day it will happen to Lou Feracca and Lloyd Cowley.

“One day to Andrew Tucker.”

I remember scanning the crowd that gray, chilly afternoon and deciding I was tired of people—“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”—and what I wanted more than anything was time alone with some natural, organic thing.

The thrum of jet engines brought me back to the present, a sound not organic or natural, a sound foreign to Wisconsin as the buzz of fluorescent light bulbs in La Follette Memorial Hospital.

Not commercial air liners, but a row of fighter jets rumbling low across the western horizon.

“Those boys are a long way from home,” I whispered to Lou. “I don’t think there’s an Air Force base within two hundred miles of here.”

“There’s Fort Willey McCoy,” Lou pointed out. “But you’re right. Those boys are a long way from home. Those are Navy jets.”

The mechanical cranking of a winch, lowering Jack’s coffin into the snow-covered earth.

Jenny Lynn tossing a softball into the vault atop the coffin, inside of which, beside Jack, lay a pair of her ballet slippers, Timm’s Navy football jersey, and Kelly’s volleyball sneakers.

The explosion of one, two, three, four U.S. Navy F/A 18s flying low across the grave, dipping a wing as they passed, each in turn, before disappearing, as suddenly as they had appeared, far, far, far into the great gray amplitudes of the North Country.

And then silence.

We all spent a long, long while staring after those jets.

Monday night brought a kind of silence to Lake-of-the-Woods, and closure to Jack’s story. Timm’s plane broke from his squadron and touched down at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. A buddy returned the craft to Ellesworth Air Force Base whence the squadron had taken off that afternoon, and ultimately to Mirimar. Timm signed out a military car and was in Lake-of-the-Woods by 8:00. He visited his mother and spent most of the evening talking with Jenny Lynn. Rose Marié invited both her children to return with her to Riverton that evening, but both begged off. Timm had a car to return and a flight to catch out of St. Paul. Jenny told her mother she needed a few more days in Lake-of-the-Woods to sort things out before returning to Madison. She felt closer at this point to Kelly than to Rose Marié.

We slept that night, most of us, for the first time in days.

Tuesday morning Timm spent three hours at his father’s grave, shedding a few tears, making a few promises, adding a small bouquet of blue and gold chrysanthemums to the mound of flowers already there.

Then he got into his government Buick and drove to St. Paul. Jenny Lynn stayed awhile in Lake-of-the-Woods.

I too lingered through a series of discussions with Marcus DeLotta, Lake-of-the-Woods police, and federal investigators. There were more private discussions with Lloyd Cowley, Kelly, and Jenny Lynn. I talked with Marcie Grossman, about Jack’s literary estate and about this book. I spent a morning tidying up Jack’s office. The thick gold band I found in his top desk drawer I put quietly in my pocket. I could never have explained it to Kelly.

Finally I spent an afternoon alone in Bayfield, pondering Madeline Island and the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, searching to make some sense out of what made no sense, searching to find justice in the American system of justice.

The day of the 21th Jenny, Kelly, and I returned to the farmstead, sorting through the rich complexity of Jack’s life. Arnie Marin, Novum State’s librarian, had agreed to accept whatever of Jack’s books and papers his heirs chose to donate to the collection, and I agreed to sort and value the donation for tax purposes. I spent the rest of the week inventorying Jack’s library and papers, setting aside several items, including the Audubon folio and various autographed editions, for Jenny Lynn, Timm, and Kelly. I took, I admit, a few items for myself, including an Abraham Lincoln autograph letter. I also photocopied about 2,800 pages of correspondence and manuscripts.

On the morning of March 25 both Jenny and I left Lake-of-the-Woods, Wisconsin, traveling south out of the land of water and birch and pine, toward Madison and Riverton, toward our respective futures, toward life without Charles Creed. By a strange twist of events, Lake-of-the-Woods had become not Jack Creed’s, but Victoria Nation’s town.

I visited Resurrection Cemetery only once after the funeral. In May of 2000 I was in St. Paul, Minnesota, interviewing for a position at the College of St. Thomas, and after two days of the city—although a very fine city—I needed some rural distance to consider my future . . . and the shape of this book. I needed also to see Kelly Creed, to refresh my memory of Lake-of-the-Woods and Novum State University, to discuss some details of this present manuscript with Kelly, Marilyn Schneider, Ed Haley, and Lloyd Cowley. I rented a car, drove east across the river, and headed north.

On the drive up US 63 I was haunted by the ghost of Charles Creed. I could feel his presence in the passenger seat, although I said nothing to him, and he said nothing to me. I was as close to Jack then as I had ever been, having spent the previous year reliving the stories told in this biography, studying his journals, untangling fact from tabloid fictions, attempting to reconcile conflicting testimonies. I had re-established contact with Jack’s old friends (and some enemies), including several long telephone conversations with Lily Lee Martin herself. During those twelve months I had come to know Charles Creed intimately. It seemed to me I knew the man better after his death than before.

Still, some intangible mystery remained. I was missing a key to Jack’s history, some perspective on the larger picture. Loose ends and unanswered questions abounded. Something was not there in the journals or the interviews. Driving north up the highway down which Roger C. Barclay and Virginia Coyle had escaped in March 1997, I found myself looking for closure, replaying old scenes, thinking about Jack and Lily and Rose Marié. Thinking about America. Thinking about the law. I kept bouncing questions off the ghost of Jack Creed, aloud, almost as if we were having a normal conversation.

But Jack wasn’t giving me the answer I needed. Possibly I hadn’t even framed the right question.

The closer I came to Novum State University, the slower I drove. The answer wasn’t going to be there either, I felt . . . although I still wanted to see Kelly and Lloyd and Marilyn.

On my way into town, a thought crossed my mind (or maybe Old Jack himself directed me): Resurrection Cemetery. I turned around in the Novum parking lot and headed out of town again. Maybe I was stalling for another hour of meditation, time to clear my unsettled head. Maybe I sought subconsciously to bring the ghost home, to use his own bones to conjure an answer or two out of him.

Maybe my visit was less mysterious than all that. Paying respects was the appropriate thing to do, a first item of business, not a last.

In any event, I let Kelly and Marilyn and Lloyd wait, and returned to Resurrection Cemetery.

The place was country quiet: no crowds, no voices, no traffic. No jet airplanes this May afternoon. No heaps of flowers, either, and no black and white striped tent sheltering the casket from storms that never materialized. I think I was the only person there. The absence of tire marks in the muddy road suggested I was the first person to visit Resurrection in several days.

Since the day of Jack’s funeral, three years of grass had grown and seeded and withered. Three years of autumn leaves had fallen and been swept away to the wooded thickets. Three years of winters’ snow had blanketed the sod, and frozen to ice, and melted to water. Now the land was flushed with the tentative yellow-green of spring in the North Country. In the maple trees, a swollen expectancy. On the willows, the first suggestion of leaves. A woodpecker whooped from one tree. A couple of squirrels chased each other up and down another.

“I picked a good place to die, Tucker,” Jack seemed to be telling me. “Life is a small and quiet thing, and you don’t get much. A few words. A few trips. Good music and good talk. The love of a couple of children . . . and a few good women, if you’re really lucky. That’s all life is. Stay out late tonight, because you’re going to be dead for billions of years, Tucker. And when you go home, be good to Linda.”

I nodded in agreement with the silent voice.

“At the end, little is best. This little place has absorbed me. It’s okay here. I’m okay here. You’ll see.”

I nodded again.

So well had Jack been absorbed into this small and quiet place, I had trouble finding his grave at first. There were more gravestones, for one thing, and the foliage was different for another. Three times I returned to the cemetery gate attempting to reorient myself. Finally my vision cleared. I placed Dylan’s limo on the road over my right shoulder and the trees into which Timm’s jet had disappeared ahead of me. I looked to where Jenny Lynn was tossing her softball on Jack’s coffin.

Then I recognized names.

“Kubiczewski.”

“Ortegas.”

I walked forward.

“Nemo.”

Then a rectangle of green sod noticeably darker than the surrounding grass. A gray marble slab, newly set, newly carved.

“John Charles Creed 1941-1997,” the stone read. “FURTHUR.”

And lying across the monument’s base, withered in the damp spring air but clearly a recent placement, a single red rose.