pocket of his gray flannel vest, draping the narrow gold watch chain across his dignified midsection and sticking the penknife and Phi Beta Kappa key on its end into the left pocket. Clasping his lecture notes and tucking reference books under his arm, he turned to leave, but a voice from behind stopped him.
“Canon Bothwell, I need to talk to you about that term paper. I’ve never written one before.” It was Seth Clarke.
Bothwell paused, put notes and books back on the lectern, and consulted his datebook. “Are you free this afternoon at three, Mr. Clarke? I could see you then.”
“I’ll be there. Thank you, sir.”
Bothwell headed out the door and toward the stairs at the end of the hall. Students released from class clogged the stairwell. Immediately in front of him was a student draped in a white Mexican poncho with black stripes. The garment had a ceremonial appearance between that of a vestment and a monastic habit. From this costume and his long, wavy, golden hair, Bothwell recognized Sebastian Seymour, the incoming class’s self-appointed candidate for guru status. Seymour was saying to a nearby classmate who did not appear particularly interested, “I should have known that simply because it was a class in church history, I could not expect to hear anything spiritual. No one around here seems to recognize that Christianity is a religion, and its history therefore might include something about human efforts to experience the divine.”
Bothwell saw the elbow aimed at Seymour’s ribs and heard the hiss: “Shut up, you fool! Don’t you know he’s right behind us?” There was the sound of a sharp intake of breath, and the Canon was gratified to see on the face that jerked around to stare at him an expression other than its customary saccharine simper. The day Seymour had arrived at the school, Bothwell had decided he looked like the pictures of the Sacred Heart seen on pine slabs in dime stores. Saying nothing, Bothwell moved on past him.
When Katrina ushered Seth into his study that afternoon, Bothwell seated him in a leather wingchair facing his own. A cheery fireplace was on one side of them and a leather sofa on the other. These seating accommodations were disposed around a low, square table displaying magazines. The room stretched behind Bothwell to a bay window twelve feet away into which was fitted an enormous roll-top desk of walnut that incorporated a veritable columbarium of pigeonholes. All the wall space not occupied with windows was given over to bookcases, except above the mantle where a colored steel engraving showed The General Theological Seminary as it must have looked when its Hebrew professor, Clement Clarke Moore, was writing A Visit From St. Nicholas as a Christmas present for his children. Shields hung on either side of the mantle, one from the University of the South and the other from Jesus College, Cambridge. The only object on the mantle itself was a seventeenth-century Spanish crucifix, an ivory corpus suspended from an ebony cross.
“Sit down, Mr. Clarke, sit down. May I offer you some refreshment? My housekeeper can give you coffee or a soft drink.”
“Thank you, sir, but I won’t take anything. That sort of thing cuts down on my wind.”
Passing over to him a large flint glass compote on which were stacked apples, oranges, bananas, and grapes, Bothwell said, “Then have some fruit. That should be healthful enough for you.” After Seth had selected a banana, Bothwell returned the compote to the table and took an orange for himself. Then he removed the penknife from his vest pocket and pulled the longer of the two blades from the thin gold handle. With precision he incised the orange top and bottom, the incisions of the top half offsetting the bottom half incisions. Then with the tip of the blade he began to loosen the skin from the fruit, the skin coming away in one piece in a zig-zag pattern.
Fascinated, Seth said that he had never seen anyone peel an orange that way. Bothwell replied that he had peeled all of his oranges that way since his fifth-grade teacher had described Mercator projection maps as misleading since the earth’s surface is spherical. To represent it on a flat page, some maps in their geography book laid it out like an orange peel. He could hardly wait to get home and try it.
“But,” he continued, “You did not come to learn about my peculiar orange-peeling habits. You want to discuss term papers.”
“Yes, sir. You see, I graduated from Purdue with a major in forestry, and the only history course I had was on the history of forestry. And we did not have to write term papers.”
Bothwell thought for a moment. “Was that course only about the attitudes toward the forests and the methods of conservation in the various societies, or did you deal with the economic impact of the kinds of lumber available in various periods? I had a student once who had studied engineering, and the only history course he had taken was the history of science, and the only thing he remembered from it was the name of the inventor of the flush toilet, Sir John Harrington, one of the brightest lights at the court of Queen Elizabeth I.”
Seth smiled. “Oh, we dealt with the economic implications, all right. It gave me a new way of looking at trees. I went into forestry because I like the woods. I knew that most of my fellow students were going into one end of the lumber business or another, but I wanted to go into conservation. I spent my summers at Turkey Run State Park as a Junior Ranger, and I hoped to go back permanently after graduation.”
“Then you had not yet decided to study for the ministry?”
“No, sir. I received my call when I was in ‘Nam. But being a forestry major was not the best seminary preparation imaginable. The guys who majored in liberal arts have a much easier time of it here.”
“Well, that may be, but don’t despair. You bring to your work a background they lack. Would you like to work on a term paper in which you use what you know about the impact of forestry on an economy to explore how the church in that society was influenced by that economic situation?”
“That sounds like something maybe I could do, and that I would find very interesting.”
“Good. You don’t happen to read French, do you?”
Seth looked surprised. “I do. My mother believed that knowing French was one of the accomplishments of a gentleman, and she made me start as soon as possible in junior high school. I thought it was sissy stuff and drug my heels on it until three-quarters of the way through the first year, when I discovered that it came easy to me, and I actually liked it. It was one of the things that got me into the Special Forces.”
“Wonderful, because there is a school of French historians called the Annalistes who believe that history grows out of geography, demography, and economics. One of them, Fernand Braudel, has written a two-volume study on the Mediterranean area in the sixteenth century. We won’t be dealing with that period until next year, but his geography holds true for earlier periods. Perhaps you can take his work along with that of Rostovsteff on the social and economic history of the Roman Empire and write about how some economic condition connected with forestry affected the early history of the church. How does that sound?”
“That sounds great, sir. You really have taken a load off my mind. Thanks a lot.”
“Oh, you’re most welcome. It’s what I’m here for. But, if you don’t mind, perhaps you can help me.”
“I’d be glad to do anything I can.”
“I would appreciate your reaction to the discussion in class this morning. It helps me to know what questions are of concern to a number of students, and which are merely the private interests of the individuals asking.”
“Well, from various bull sessions and from what I’ve heard said in courses in the fall semester, I’d say those responses were typical. What really got me angry was Sebastian’s
