C Corwin - Dig

Monday, March 5

The obituaries are the best part of my day. I get to the newsroom right at nine. I make my first mug of Darjeeling tea. I settle in at my desk with a crisp copy of that morning’s paper. And I read the obits.

My assistant Eric Chen thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world. “You just want to make sure you’re still alive,” he says, “so you can go about your earthly mission to make everybody else’s life miserable.”

“Poop!” I snarl back at him. “I’m just being nosy.”

Anyway, the only person I made miserable reading the obits that particular Monday morning was me. “Good gravy,” I gasped. My stomach was rolling like I’d swallowed ten pounds of baby snakes.

Eric’s desk bumps right up to mine. He was drinking his first Mountain Dew of the day. “Somebody you know, Maddy?”

I answered in a whisper so faint I barely heard it myself. “Somebody I used to know very well.”

I clutched the loose skin on my neck and read:

Gordon Sweet

Gordon E. “Sweet Gordon” Sweet, professor of archaeology at Hemphill College, died this week. He was 69.

He was born June 5, 1934, in New Waterbury to Archibald and Ruth (Berghoff) Sweet.

He attended Hemphill College from 1952 to 1958. He received a Ph. D. in archaeology from the University of Michigan and returned to Hemphill College in 1961. He was a member of the Society for American Archaeology, the Society of Professional Archaeologists, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Archaeological Society of Ohio and the Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society.

He is survived by his sister, Gretchen Gitlin of Captiva Island, FL, and a nephew, Michael Gitlin of Harper’s Ferry, W. Va.

He was preceded in death by his parents, and his brother, U.S. Army Lt. Walter Sweet.

A memorial service will be held at 11 AM Saturday at P.W. Leech Unitarian Universalist Chapel, 185 Goodhue Ave.

When I looked up I found Eric leaning over the front of my desk on his elbows. He’d been reading along with me, upside-down. “His name was Gordon Sweet and his nickname was Sweet Gordon?” he asked. “How cute is that?”

I did not like him referring to my old friend in the past tense. I did not like hearing myself do the same. “We called him Sweet Gordon because that’s the way his name always appeared on college grade lists,” I said. “Sweet comma Gordon.”

Eric slipped back into his chair. “Better than Morgue Mama, I suppose.”

He was referring, of course, to me. My name is Dolly Madison Sprowls. I’m 68 years old. I’m short, a little dumpy, and I haven’t changed my hairstyle since college. For the past 33 years I’ve been the head librarian at The Hannawa Herald-Union. In the newspaper business they call the library the morgue. It’s where we keep the stories that have already run-the dead stories if you will-from the big political scandals on the front page to the PTA bake sales buried deep inside. When one of our reporters needs background for a new story they’re writing, they come to me. “Maddy,” they say, “I need everything you’ve got on so and so.” And I go digging through the files.

The problem is that reporters are always asking for information they don’t need. That’s why I go out of my way to be a royal pain-in-the-ass. So reporters won’t bother me unless it’s absolutely necessary for their stories. And that’s why-behind my back-they call me Morgue Mama.

Anyway, Eric could see I wasn’t in the mood for his teasing. He apologized by acting interested. “So you and Sweet Gordon were buds in college?”

I tried to force a smile on my face. And failed. “We were the best of friends for a long time. He went on to become a professor. Right there at Hemphill. In archaeology. He specialized in some kooky field called garbology -digging up old junk to see how people really lived.”

“Well-sounds like he was an interesting guy.”

“He was an eccentric old fool,” I said. “I wonder how he died?”

Eric’s eyes sagged with dread. He pulled the huge Sunday edition off the top of his computer terminal and shook out the Metro section. He turned the first page timidly, as if pulling the sheet off the face of a corpse. His eyes drifted down the page. “I knew that name rang a bell,” he said. Now I was the one reading upside-down. BODY FOUND AT LANDFILL, the tiny headline said.

Those baby snakes in my stomach had grown into a ton of pythons. Gordon Sweet had been murdered.

HANNAWA -The body of 69-year-old Hemphill College archaeology professor Gordon Sweet was found Saturday at the abandoned Wooster Pike landfill in Durkee Township.

Police said he had been shot once in the head.

The body was discovered shortly before noon by a graduate assistant who told police he had been looking for Sweet since he failed to show up to teach his Friday morning class.

The body was found in high grass a few yards from the gravel driveway, police said.

The graduate assistant, Andrew J. Holloway III, told police Sweet had been conducting an archaeological dig at the landfill for the past four summers.

Police said they have found no motive for the shooting and are continuing their investigation.

I’d read the Sunday paper at home. From front to back. As I always do. But it was such a small story, stuck at the bottom of an inside page, next to an inky ad for truck tires. The headline must have passed through my eyes and out the back of my head without my groggy, Sunday-morning brain taking notice.

I pulled the metro section from under Eric’s elbows. I cut out the story with the big, black-handled scissors I’ve been using since my first year at the paper. (I call them my black-handled scissors even though the black paint has been worn off for ages.) Then I cut out the obit from that morning’s paper and stapled the two together. I read them again and again. There was more information in those two little columns of print than my mind-or my heart-could digest. Yet I wanted more. I wanted every horrible detail. I wanted to know that the bastard who killed Sweet Gordon was already in jail, hanging from the ceiling by his big toes.

One thing I did know was that the story in Sunday’s paper hadn’t been written by Dale Marabout, our regular police reporter. It had been written by one of the general assignment reporters in metro, whose turn it was to work the weekend. Pestering that reporter for more information on Gordon’s death wouldn’t do me a bit of good. The weekend people don’t physically go to the central police station downtown the way Dale does during the week. They call from the desk. They jot down what the cop on the other end tells them. They pound out the shortest story possible. So if I wanted more information on Gordon’s murder, I’d have to wait for Dale to come in, and hope he had something new to tell me.

I knew I should put Gordon’s murder out of my mind and get to work. Louise Lewendowski would be drifting in at noon and I’d promised her all the old stories we had on the Hannawa Zoo-she was writing some dreadful puff piece on the zoo’s 75th anniversary-and knowing Louise she’d almost certainly have a little sack of her delicious apricot kolachkys for me. She bribes me with bakery the way house burglars carry raw meat in their pockets for big nasty dogs. But how could I not think about Gordon that morning? About the young Gordon I knew in college dancing madly in smoky jazz clubs, or slumped against the trunk of a big oak discussing poetry or politics? Or about the old Gordon I still bumped into occasionally at the supermarket, sprawled out dead in the high, soggy grass?