Beet Read Free

America.”
    â€œBoethius!”—Bollovate shuffled on—“Who the fuck was Boethius?”
    Beet occupied no more than 210 acres, but within its precincts it became an inescapable maze. The Pens were enclosed, the classroom and department buildings nearly touching. The dorms were rectangles, the length of one bisecting the breadth of another, and creating an alphabet of horizontal T’s with the two lines unattached. Once autumn arrived, one could barely see daylight—for the trees, and for the high chimneys, many to a building, which seemed to serve as lookouts for attacks. Even when high noon was blasting all the rest of Massachusetts, Beet remained a network of penumbral corridors that went everywhere and nowhere, there being many more paths than destinations, as if they had been laid in anticipation of every possible walker’s itinerary, with several extra thrown in to confound them. It was a world unto itself, equipped with its ownsun, which never blared brighter than a platinum haze, and its own moon, which was russet and wore a veil.
    â€œI don’t get you,” said Manning. “You sit there as though you had nothing on your mind but those papers.”
    â€œBecause I can do something about them.”
    â€œOh, yes. I forget. You’re the pure teacher. But it’s not natural. Where’s the gnashing of teeth, the cursing out of the pricks?”
    â€œYou handle that.”
    From the year of its establishment, darkness seemed to have found a home in Beet College. Dark pink for the brick buildings, dark green for the doorjambs and the benches, dark iron for the hinges, dark stone for Nathaniel’s Tomb; darkness in the piceous roots of trees that broke through the earth like bones through skin. Darkness in the impermeable forest surrounding the college, and in the Atlantic, too, three miles to the southeast yet audible at night.
    Livi loved the sound of its churning. “Like traffic going somewhere else,” she sighed.
    Darkness even in the Temple, whence Bollovate made his slow descent and which, though composed of alabaster, seemed to absorb the light and turn it to the color of tarnished silver. High on the hill it squatted, with its frieze of piglets on the tympanum above the cornice, and its acroterion made up of a three-foot-high pig on its hind legs, the entire structure looking like a proud white pig itself, yet still emitting that haughty gloom the Puritans gathered up from the smoke-choked huts and cottages of the seventeenth-century English countryside and brought to the New World to guarantee its continuity.
    â€œI knew it, I knew it! They’re definitely closing us down,” said Manning, as he traced the trustee’s leaden steps. “If they had intended to keep us open, they would never tell the faculty first.”
    That was the general opinion of all who flattened their faces against the windows of Beet that morning, including the dither of deans (the collective noun was coined some years earlier by a professor of Romance languages named Wilcox, who ran off with a wild and brilliant sophomore named Maud). Many grew excited.Hungry for honors, no matter how dubious, they sought even this one—to receive the bad news personally and be the first of the last people standing.
    And yet, as usual, the Beet intelligentsia misjudged the situation. For if Bollovate planned to deliver the announcement of Beet’s closing, he never would have bothered to tell the faculty himself. He held an even lower opinion of Beet’s professoriate than he did of the administration. He held a very low opinion of Beet altogether. When President Huey appointed him to chair the board, he’d asked what exactly a college trustee was entrusted with. Was the board supposed to keep the college going no matter how much money it was spilling? Or was a trustee one entrusted to make the hard, unsentimental choice of getting off the pot when the pot was