Leaning back in my swivel chair, wondering if firing Bill Morrison would affect the fate of World Civilization, I stared at the volumes of French history on the bookshelves and wished somebody else was in charge of oiling the guillotine.
Jenny Vecoli barged in. She does that.
"The meeting's in fifteen minutes. Three students want to see you. I told them to come back at four o'clock."
"Did you ever think of knocking before you come in? Just a couple of raps, maybe, to let me know you're on the way?"
Jenny swung out the chair across from the desk and sat down, tossing her dark brown hair to show me how little she cared.
"Listen. I know you're the big boss, but without me to sort you out you'd never get anything done. If I knocked every time I come in here I'd get a sore hand, and the whole department would go to hell."
She was right. In my weak moments I'd rather it was 1910, and she wore a long dress and treated men with the respect they obviously need, but it isn't and she doesn't and on top of that she's so efficient it takes my breath away. Besides, I like her.
"All right, don't knock. I should have realized when they stuck me with this job that life as I'd known it was over." I slung my feet off the desk and sat with my elbows on the papers in front of me and my head in my hands and looked at her. "So tell me whether to save Bill Morrison or not."
"No choice--you know that. You've talked to every one of the tenured faculty, and the vote's going to be about ten to two. Bill's gone."
"I could talk them out of it."
She sighed. "Yes, you could. But if you do it'll cost you. The dean would hit the ceiling, and Bill would still have to go."
The students loved Bill. He told stories, he made people care about specie payments, he argued both sides of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He had a wife, a baby, and a toddler. He needed the job. But he hadn't published a damn thing in the three years since we'd hired him. His contract would run out in another eight months. It's not as though the university was Ivy League, but everybody from the Governor on down claimed it was an intellectual powerhouse. Bill was about to perish, and I was the appointed executioner.
I won't bother to tell you about that meeting of the tenured faculty. Or not much, anyhow. I'd figured out a long time before that the best way to deal with these people was to let them talk themselves out, and since most of them thought they were smart, that took a while. Vaughn Reaves explained Darwinism at some length, which made sense because he specialized in the Victorian period. Latisha Bradshaw made it sound like Simon Legree was about to do in Uncle Tom, but since she was female and black nobody listened. In short, they did the usual, and the vote was ten to two. Jenny always knew about these things.
The rest of them didn't have to wait for Bill the next morning. I did. I remembered standing in a rice paddy shooting some poor slob in black pajamas. Nobody asked me if I wanted to shoot gooks, but they said somebody had to do it, and I was elected. I still dream about that sometimes. You do it, you shoot them, but you remember. At least I did.
Firing Bill wasn't quite the same thing, but it felt surprisingly similar.
When he came into the office he dragged the chair over to the corner, ten feet away, right where the door would smack him if Jenny appeared. But she knew what was going on; she wouldn't come in.
"Hello, Bill." I sat there in my Harris tweed jacket and smiled at him, wondering if I should frown instead.
"So tell me what happened." He knew already. If he'd been stupid, my job would have been easy.
"We're not renewing your contract." That time I didn't smile.
He just stared at me for a while. He didn't bleed like the guy in the paddy.
"I'm about to finish an article," he said.
"Yeah. But you're still out of here next June. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. I warned you last year." I looked at the fingernails on my right hand. One of them had a nick in it I couldn't remember getting. Then I looked up and waited.
"It's strange," he said. "I didn't think it would come to this."
"It always does. You grind out the stuff, or you go. It's not personal."
In a minute he got up, opened the door, and left. Didn't say a word. I suppose I should have praised his teaching, wished him luck, but I couldn't. That wouldn't change anything. I sat there a while, and then reached over to pull out Michelet's book on the revolution. God knows Michelet turned out enough to get tenure anywhere, and then they fired him for writing political tracts. But I doubt he was ever a department chairman, and I know he never shot anybody.
Funny. You get elected to do things, so you do them. I'll probably dream about Bill Morrison, too.