The Lesson of Her Death

you’ve come. It’s why you always come.”
    “You’re right.” Sayles leaned hard into the abuse. “I’m not going to deny it, Hal. But you understand what Auden does for this town. We’re in danger of losing the school.”
    Strumm frowned and nipped off a tendril of green from a viney plant. “That serious?”
    “We’ve already drafted severance letters to the staff.”
    “My word.”
Nip
.
    “We need some money and we need your help. You’ve always been generous in the past.”
    “You know, Professor, I’m in a generous mood today.”
    Sayles’s heart beat with a resounding pressure, he heard the hum of blood speeding through his temple.
    “I might just be inclined to help you out. Do I assume you’re talking about some serious bucks?”
    “I am, that’s true.”
    “You know I went to a state school.”
    Sayles said, “I didn’t know but that’s okay.”
    “Of course it’s fucking okay,” Strumm barked. “We didn’t have a good team. We had a terrible team. I always thought if I had it to do over again I’d go to a school that had a good team.”
    “Auden has a pretty good team.”
    “It’s got a nice stadium.”
    Sayles said it did, that was true. “Modeled on Soldier Field in Chicago.”
    “That a fact? I’ve had a dream in my life,” Strummsaid. “A man gets older and he starts to think about his dreams more and more.”
    “Happens to all of us.”
    “One of my dreams has been to make a lot of money.”
    Well, you certifiably crazy old cocksucker, you sure have done that
.
    “Another’s to give some of it to a school like Auden.…”
    Are you playing with me or is this for real?
    “And in exchange …”
    Spit it out
.
    “… they’d build a football stadium in my honor. You see, I had my chance and I didn’t seize it. So the next best thing would be to have a stadium named after me.
    “Well, Hal, we have the stadium already.”
    “Named after Barnes. Who was he?”
    “One of our graduates in the 1920s. A philanthropist. He set up an endowment that’s still in effect.”
    “So that means you’re not inclined to change the name of the stadium?”
    “It’s in the terms of the endowment. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
    Strumm studied a sickly plant and sprinkled on its leaves something out of a package labeled “Strumm’s Extra.”
Extra what?
Sayles wondered. The businessman said, “Well, enough said of that. I’ve had another dream. I’ve always wanted a reactor named after me.”
    “A nuclear reactor?”
    “At Champaign-Urbana I think it is, they’ve got a research reactor named after somebody. I thought that would be almost as good as a stadium.”
    “Hal, we don’t need a reactor. We don’t have a science department to speak of. We’re mostly liberal arts.”
    What was in the white-and-yellow packages? Old horses? Old pigs? Strumm shit?
    “I’d write you boys a check for two hundred thousanddollars if you built a reactor and named it after me.”
    Sayles said quietly, “Hal, we need three and a half million.”
    Nip
.
    “That much, hum? I couldn’t come close to that. Been a bad year for the company. Economy’s down, people get rid of plants. First thing to go. I’m not recessionproof like everybody says.”
    “Auden’s going to close.”
    “Even if I had a stadium and a reactor both I couldn’t come up with much more than a quarter million.”
    “We can name a chair after you. A building. We’ve got a couple buildings. You could have your pick.”
    “Three hundred’s the top. Maybe for a vet school I could go up to three-fifty but that’d be the end of it.”
    “We don’t want a vet school, Hal.”
    “Well, there you have it.”
    Nip
.
    Sayles drove at seventy miles an hour all the way back to the campus. His car came to rest partially over the curb of the parking lot. He ran through the corridors of the Arts and Sciences Building and stopped in front of the door to his lecture hall, composing himself and listening to Glenn Darby’s voice explain about Sayles’s absence.
    He caught his breath then pushed the doors open and strode confidently down the long aisle to the podium. He was halfway there when the class realized he had returned and broke into applause, which grew ever louder, rolling and rolling, then was joined by whistles and shouts. By the time he was on the podium, clipping on his lavaliere mike, the applause had become a standing ovation and it was five minutes before he was able to quiet the