Shadow of the Lions by Christopher Swann

Author:Christopher Swann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2017-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

On Sunday, my head pounding after three hours of grading papers, I threw on my barn coat and headed out into the chill air for a walk. The windows of the Brickhouse were steamy from the students gathered inside for fries and Cokes, and a couple of new boys were halfheartedly throwing a Frisbee on the Lawn, but otherwise a kind of limp exhaustion had settled over the Hill, as if even the few leaves left on the trees were too tired to let go and sail to the grass below. Sundays were for doing laundry, catching up on homework, or watching an old movie for the fourth time in the A/V center. Students were bored and already mourning the weekend that was not yet over, watching with dread the hours tick by toward Sunday dinner, chapel, and study hall.

I didn’t want to just take a short stroll around the Lawn and head back to the dorm, so I walked past the chapel and Sam Hodges’s house, thinking I might stop by the infirmary and see if Porter was in. But the porch was empty and Betty Yowell’s kitchen window was dark, so I decided to wander down the drive to at least the start of the trees. It was brisk, a light wind cooling my breath. Low gray clouds hid the sun, although you knew it was there, like a lamp held up behind a shade. If it had been colder, I would have thought of snow, although we were a few weeks away from that at least. In that strange, soft light, I cast no shadow as I walked down off the Hill, the drive a ribbon of asphalt at my feet.

I reached the grove of hickory, oak, and poplar that were older than the trees by the lions at the other end of campus. Rather than a manicured green lawn, the ground underneath these trees was blanketed in dead leaves. This drive was used more as a service entrance, a back door that did not require the same attention to appearances that the lions’ entrance did. As a result, the woods here were more like an actual forest, wilder, more real. The light dimmed around me as I continued to walk down the drive that led to the bridge and the river, where Porter and I had spotted Terence’s body. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the gentle slope that rose to Saint Matthew’s Chapel and the rest of the brick-and-columned Hill. Then I turned my back on it and walked on into the trees.

When I had been a student, this had been a favorite run of mine in the spring, when flowers bloomed in the undergrowth and the oak trees rose like gray columns wreathed at their crowns by golden-green leaves. Now in mid-November, the leaves scorched and the bushes bare, the branches were more skeletal and angular, like the naked limbs of an older woman stripped of her finery. Still, there was a

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