Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“For what it’s worth, the car — the Findley boy’s car. Well, it was a ’49 Mercury coupe. Just like the one James Dean’s character drove around in that movie last year.”

“The boys — they were playing something out?”

The deputy sheriff shrugged. “Looked pretty real to me.”

The doctor got up. “I don’t like to put this sort of thing off. Worst part of my job. Yours too, I’m guessing. We shouldn’t keep the families waiting any longer.”

The deputy nodded. “Merton’s been staying tight-lipped on my instructions.”

Both men left the room, the doctor switching off the light on his way out. The corridor was empty — the bright illumination was again broken by the pop and flash of another fluorescent rod in its death throes above their heads.

The deputy reached over and touched the top of the doctor’s hand. The doctor turned his hand around, hungrily grasping the deputy’s hand, palm to palm.

After a couple of seconds, still alone in the corridor, the men broke their clasp. The doctor squared his shoulders. The deputy cleared his throat a couple of times.

Each man prepared himself to deliver the sad fact of the teenage boys’ deaths and then the lie that went along with it. It was the same lie that the doctor and deputy sheriff would have wanted told if they had found themselves in the same situation.

It was the lie that permitted the boys to take their secrets to the grave.

Sanpitch Academy was founded in 1875. Located one hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, it sat in the dead-eye center of the state. Its twenty-five-acre, sixteen-building campus lay in the scenic Sanpete Valley, where alfalfa grew in abundance, sheep grazed in fat, fleecy flocks, and thousands of farm turkeys, it was said, tried very hard not to think about Thanksgiving. A boarding school, it was built by Mormons in the largely Mormon town of Mount Pleasant. In 1957, most of its day employees (that is, locals who didn’t live on campus) were Mormons. Most everyone else — its administrators, its teachers and students — were Gentiles (as western Mormons in 1957 referred to non-Mormons, that latter group even including the school’s music teacher, Julius Lafer, who was, in fact, Jewish). The school was affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, and a good many of its teachers and students were more than just non-Mormon; they were Protestants, and more specifically, Presbyterians.

This is somewhat important when one considers the political leanings of Sanpitch. The eighty-seven-year-old boarding school had a racially integrated student body (remarkable for the time). It boasted a student organization devoted to debating issues of international import (this in an era of monochromatic Cold War politics). Even more controversially, it used the recently published Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible in its religion classes — a bold move that generated no small protest from parental proponents of the King James (penned, it has been said, by God’s own hand). While Boston was banning the Everly Brothers’ Top 100 single that autumn, “Wake Up, Little Susie,” it was played with defiance and impunity in Sanpitch’s Tiger Den snack bar, the kids agreeing with most of their contemporaries that “Susie” wasn’t about teenage fornication at all, but told the rather benign story of a teenage couple who happen to fall asleep at the drive-in because the movie was so boring.

In the same way in which its teachers and students lived a soundly insular and familial existence (weekends as observed at Sanpitch were Sunday and Monday, so that its male students would have less opportunity to interact with roughneck townie youths), the school was allowed to go its own way in terms of policymaking and day-to-day operations. There was a governing board that oversaw things from a distance, but the board rarely involved itself in matters that onsite school officials — the superintendent, the director of academics, the separate deans of boys and girls, and the pastor and director of Christian education — could handle.

On Monday, December 16, shortly before the Christmas break, that changed. As it did twice a year, the Board of Oversight met in the conference room of the school’s administration building to review the first few months of the school year and to be apprised of what to expect in the months that lay ahead. It was also time to gather up signed contracts for the next semester.

Three new members had joined the board since its last convocation — members not so willing to remain hands-off, members far more conservative in their political ideology. What came out of the meeting was a dictate that was perceived as both intrusive and, well, apocalyptic.

“There have been mumblings and grumblings,” said Vince Sprawley, the youngest and most vocal of the new troika, “about your decision this year to replace the King James with the Revised Standard. Though most of us have had misgivings about it, we — the board — have done, I think, a rather good job of mustering support for your decision, Tim.”

“And I thank you for that, Vince,” replied the superintendent, who was sitting next to the school’s pastor, Howard Claxton, both men tensely clinching their shoulders with mention of this potentially contentious matter and then instantly relaxing them when the matter was defused in a single breath.

“This board continues to believe,” Sprawley went on, “in the importance of preserving Sanpitch’s autonomy in all matters of religious instruction and identity, especially given the minority status of Presbyterianism in this state. Good citizenship, however — now that’s a cat of a different breed.”

Superintendent Timothy Grimm cocked his head. “I don’t quite get your meaning, Vince.”

“I think he means rendering unto Caesar and so forth,” interposed the Reverend.

“Not exactly.” Sprawley casually leaned back, intertwining his fingers behind his neck. “This country being a democracy and not an empery. As you’ve no doubt noticed, these are difficult times. Communism is on the rise, sirs, both outside our borders and within. Senator McCarthy’s committee demonstrated that—”

The only woman at the table, Wanda Showalter, an outspoken member of the board for nearly twenty years and one easily annoyed by such things as being negligently designated a “sir,” interrupted: “Mr. Sprawley, I must caution you against invoking the name of the late senator to make any sort of point regarding national fealty.”

“My point, good lady, and I will gladly detach Senator McCarthy from it, is that institutions and organizations throughout the U.S., from the federal government all the way down to your local PTA, are asking their employees and constituent members to sign loyalty oaths these days — oaths that affirm one’s allegiance to this nation by taking a pledge to protect and defend it.”

“You mean a pledge not to overthrow it,” explicated Mrs. Showalter with an attendant groan. “The board has drafted the oath and we’ve voted on it. Please be honest with Superintendent Grimm and the others as to its meaning and intent.”

“May I see it?” asked Grimm. “You say the oath has already been approved?”

Sprawley nodded. “As a condition for renewal of your employee contracts for the spring. It will be incorporated into the language of Sanpitch’s biannual employee agreement. By signing the contract, your teachers, and all of your non-teaching staff, as well, will be agreeing to uphold the tenets of the oath.”

“Or affirmation ,” added the Reverend Claxton. “Some of our teachers do not ‘swear.’”

Sprawley nodded again as he handed a copy of the oath/affirmation to Grimm. Claxton peered over Grimm’s left shoulder to read along with him. Director of Academics Roger Rainwater looked over his right.