Sweep Out the Ashes by Mary Clearman Blew

Author:Mary Clearman Blew [Blew, Mary Clearman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC033000 Fiction / Westerns
Publisher: Bison Books

20

That was Monday. On Wednesday Dean Maki tapped on Diana’s office door. He was a tall man with a narrow chiseled face and a thick white thatch of hair. Although Diana had had dinner with him and his wife at the time of her interview, and she had gone to him for an answer to the opening-garage-door mystery, she’d not seen much of him during the term.

“Dr. Karnov,” he said, taking the students’ chair. “I’ve been meaning to drop by and see how you’re doing at Versailles State, but there always seems to be something critical to deal with first. How’s your year going for you?”

“Pretty well,” she said, wondering if Ramona had dropped her word. “The winter weather takes some getting used to.”

“I had a chance to visit with one of your senior seminar students today, Cheryl LeTellier, and she told me about her final paper. I was impressed by the quality of the material she’d pulled together.”

Diana didn’t know how to respond. Was this a promising development or a potentially dangerous one? It was the dean speaking to her, after all.

Dean Maki smiled at her. “She’s a bright young woman. One of the reasons I was so interested in her research—it dovetails in some ways with a class I taught several years ago in cultural history.”

Diana was surprised. “Cultural history?”

“Well—” he looked embarrassed. “It was one of the last history classes I taught as a professor here, and I indulged myself by working out some ideas I’d come across in recent cross-disciplinary writing. Work being done in anthropology, even in literary theory. English departments and anthropology departments, even these new Native American studies departments, have been well ahead of us historians in many ways, and I don’t believe the class has been taught here again, although it went very well. Cheryl’s brother, Jake, was a student in that class. I always wished he’d majored in history.”

Diana could not think what to say, but he continued.

“Cheryl is drawing some interesting inferences from her interviews. She told me that you and she have been meeting after class and discussing some of them?”

Diana nodded, thankful to be talking about Cheryl and not Cheryl’s brother. “It started because I was worried about her lack of interest in the Westward Movement seminar. Worried about her, really. But I’d been thinking a great deal about the nature of narrative—stories, really—and I was fascinated by Cheryl’s story—her cultural story, I suppose you’d say—and I learned more from her than she did from me.”

“My own story is one of the reasons I suppose I’m drawn to her work,” said the dean. “My grandfather emigrated from Finland to file on a homestead north of Versailles. Built him a sauna. And neighbored with the old Stillingers.”

“I see,” said Diana, wondering how many more loose threads were going to be pulled out of the weave of her Versailles experience. “Since I came here, I’ve been seeing everything I once read and studied in a different light. Dean Maki, I know you’re very busy, but I can’t help wishing I could talk to you further.

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