Sacrificial Lam

SACRIFICIAL LAM

Part I

“We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”

Book of Common Prayer

Chapter 1

Lam Corso cursed under his breath when he saw the white envelope jutting from under his office door. Official stationery, university logo, legal size. The last thing he wanted on a Friday morning was administrative doublespeak from the college dean. But there it lay, staking a claim on him, daring him to ignore it.

He picked it up. DOCTOR CORSO was hand printed in large block letters on the front. Certainly not the Dean’s secretary, who had small, neat handwriting, immediately recognizable. Nor Denise, the English Office Administrator, whose hand was a graceful, looping cursive.

He unlocked the office door and stepped inside. The morning light streaming across the room seemed to offer a new start, full of possibilities. Through the bank of windows across the room, he could see students coming and going from a three-story co-ed dorm, heading for breakfast or their first class.

He set his shoulder bag on the corner of the desk, dropped into his chair, and ripped yesterday’s page off the small desk calendar. Friday, October 16, stared up at him. The envelope felt empty. He slit it open. Inside, a single piece of paper offered a note typed in a large font.

“Lambert Corso, you and your kind are gutting this country with your sick liberal agenda.”

Lam smiled. It had to be from one of his colleagues, most likely Dooly Smith, a Medievalist in the office next to Lam, young and a practical joker. Lam leaned back in his chair and continued reading.

“Once the greatest country on the earth, America has become weak, infected with the perversion of homosexuality. Human sewage flows unchecked across our borders. We plunder private property to save a colorless amphibian that only a handful of people in the world have ever seen. We allow millions of unborn children to be destroyed every year.

We will soon be a rotten carcass in the ditch of history.”

Homosexuality, immigration, the environment—all the issues Lam had a reputation on campus for championing, especially the environment. He was a “liberal’s liberal” at a university with deep conservative religious roots. His colleagues in the department could keep a comfortable low profile because Lam wouldn’t. He’d take the flack. It looked as if Dooly had decided to have some fun and provide some flack.

Lam read on, “You are leading the children astray. A millstone shall be tied to your neck, and you shall be thrown into the sea.”

Lam chuckled at the biblical cadence and language. The bit about the millstone was good.

The note ended, “You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting. There shall be gnashing of teeth. Fire and whirlwind shall be your inheritance. Your judgment is death.”

Quite a crescendo. The allusion to the book of Daniel was especially nice. Poor King Belshazzar, found wanting, a good dinner spoiled by the hand of God scratching on the wall.

Lam dropped the envelope on his desk, reached for his shoulder bag, and pulled out a book, a notebook, and the morning newspaper. The newspaper went into a blue recycle bin to the right of his desk. He opened the book and the notebook and sat down to look over his notes.

The day had begun beautifully. When Lam had climbed on his bike, an old Schwinn ten-speed, for the morning commute to the university, the autumn sun had lit the big maple in front of the house, shimmering yellow and orange. Billy and Simon, nine and six, rode their bikes to Wilson Elementary School, four blocks to the south of Lam’s house. As the two boys rode away, Lam turned to his wife and said, “Another day in Paradise.”

She grimaced. “From the mouth of an English professor. A cliché for my Friday.” Susan, at thirty-eight, owned a screen-printing business she had started in high school. With four employees who had been with her long enough to know the business as well as she did, she could choose her work hours. And she made more money than Lam, a full professor at the university. She stood in her blue full-length housecoat and slippers with her short brown hair tucked behind her ears. She held a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and held the robe closed at her neck with the other.

“Bye bye, Dr. Honey.” She let go of the robe to reach out and pinch the slight paunch that had begun to push over Lam’s belt. “I’ve got an important meeting at the peace center this afternoon. We’re doing one more push before the midterm elections, but I’ll be home by five thirty. I expect to be taken out to dinner.”

“Ah,” he said. He strapped on his helmet and adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. The Mandela Peace Center was Susan’s baby. She had founded it and built it into a voice for peace and justice in the area. Other than Billy and Simon and the screen-printing business, the peace center was Lam’s main competition. Sometimes it felt to Lam as if he were losing the competition.

She stepped a little closer to him and touched his lower lip. “How does a bottle of cabernet by candlelight after dinner sound to usher in the weekend?” Her brown eyes said, “Come,” but the one-sided smile and the teasing voice, two of the things that had attracted Lam, said, “If you think you can.”

He smiled, glanced at the cleavage folded in the open bathrobe, the flush of heat rising in his cheeks, and pushed off on the bike. “You got it. See you this evening.” After fifteen years of marriage, that smile still left him disconcerted. It was not reserved for him alone. Everyone who knew Susan knew that smile. But for him, it never failed to send a shockwave of desire that could throw him off balance.

The bike coasted down the drive and into the street before he began to pedal. The neighborhood showed signs of life. The old woman two doors down rolled her over-sized trash container down to the curb. Lam waved, and she squinted at him before waving vaguely. The retired military engineer three doors down and across the street stood surveying the world, his arms crossed, his pipe firmly between his teeth, the morning paper at his feet. He nodded crisply as Lam rode by. The Swiss looking blonde on the corner, in a pair of short shorts despite the cool air, hosed off her driveway. The sun struck the spray ricocheting off the concrete. When Lam waved, she smiled, perfect white teeth between pale red lips, and waved back.

He was transported back to 1993, the Toyota Corolla parked on the lip of Lake Tamerlaine, making out with the blonde cheerleader he dated most of his senior year. He smiled, the breeze from the bike’s movement caressing his face, a mild tingle in his abdomen at the memory. To the surprise of anyone who got to know him back then, Lam had been a jock who was also a serious reader. He and the cheerleader had little to talk about. The back seat of a Corolla on a cool autumn night after a game, had finally not been enough for Lam.

As he turned onto University St. for the five-block ride to Mid-South Methodist, he wondered what had ever happened to the cheerleader. At forty, Lam felt good. He had developed close friendships among his colleagues at the university. He was a good teacher, and many students from past years stayed in touch with him. His marriage was good and his family was healthy. A perfect life.

A late model Ford Expedition passed him traveling too fast, too close. The shock of air whipped around him, and as he pedaled, he considered sending a message to the rearview mirror.

The steep hill that rose from University Street to the parking lot behind the cathedral was the only real grade Lam had to ascend. The cathedral, the center of campus life for a hundred years, served as a reminder of the school’s religious heritage. When he rolled into the parking lot at the top, he was breathing hard, and a drop of sweat trickled down his spine.

After locking his bike into the rack behind the academic wing of the cathedral, he pushed through the large glass doors into the foyer of the Music Department. The area was already busy with students coming and going in the hallways. As he crossed the lobby, a student voice ran up and down a scale behind a door on his left, and to his right, someone played Chopin on a baby grand.

At his desk, Lam looked over his notes for his first class, Nineteenth Century British Literature, at nine. The Pre-Raphaelites, dreamily disengaged and self-obsessed poets for the most part, were today’s reading. Lam read the stanza he intended to discuss in class, from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine”:

Pale beds of blowing rushes,

Where no leaf blooms or blushes,

Save this whereout she crushes

For dead men deadly wine.

Lam preferred Keats and the early Tennyson, but the students liked the Pre-Raphaelites because they died young as a result of a dissipated lifestyle. Alcohol, drugs, and sex were a sure attraction to undergraduates.

After fifteen minutes, Lam pulled out the threatening note and began marking it with red ink, inventing grammatical errors where there were none, encouraging the writer to work on control of tone, then giving the note a high mark, A-, for bravado. Ten minutes later, he looked over the work he had done. He smiled. Dooly would no doubt appreciate the response to his little masterpiece.