Shadow by the Library

An excerpt from Early Morning: remembering My Father, William Stafford, by Kim Stafford, Associate Professor in the Graduate School and Director of the Northwest Writing Institute

Editor’s Note: William Stafford, poet laureate of Oregon from 1974 to 1990, taught at Lewis & Clark for three decades. He died in 1993.

My office at Lewis and Clark College, where my father had begun teaching in 1948, was moved by 1990 to the cabin called "The Engineer’s Hut" on older campus maps. It was a tiny house in a canyon filled with native salal, huckleberry, vine maple, sword fern, and tall second-growth Douglas fir. When the breeze came from the north in early spring, the fragrance of cottonwood was intoxicating. And just outside my window sprang a thicket of wild rose; in spring, our hummingbird might visit, then whiz away. The dark Douglas squirrel barked somewhere, an elusive towhee called low-octave questions, sometimes a winter wren would unfurl an endless song, and on quiet afternoons you could hear the gnawing of carpenter ants in the wall, slowly taking the place apart.

After occupying this humble dwelling for a year or so, I learned it had been my father’s office in the early days. But I did not learn this from him, for he was long retired by the early 1990s and rarely came to campus. Sometimes I would find a note on my desk when I returned from a meeting or class. He had come by to see if I was in. The note would imply my absence spoke well for my assiduous attention to college affairs. There was always some little irony.

My father caught me once getting ready for class with a stack of a dozen books on my desk ready to carry to my seminar, each with a card or two marking a passage I wanted to weave into my rambling lecture.

My father perched on the chair I offered. I could not get him to settle back for a long visit. He was always full of apologies for interrupting me, even as I urged him to stay and bring me up-to-date.

"It’s so rare I ever get to see you these days," I said.

"You’re a busy man," he said.

Such a remark from him was always suspect. Once, when I was out of work, he said, "People who have a steady job think they have it solved." Implication: the real mysteries of life don’t accompany a job defined by anyone but yourself.

He gestured toward the stack of books. "Do you have enough there? Are you sure you’re ready?"

"Well," I said, "these will keep me going for a while, but then I’m going to have them write."

"When I went to class with a big stack of books and papers," he said, "I knew I wasn’t ready. When I went with a single question, or one quotation on a card, I knew I was. You have to leave room. . . ."

"And what was on that card?" I said.

"Oh. . . ." He laughed. "You’d be surprised." I wasn’t going to get the answer.

"Daddy," I said, "I can’t believe I’ve never asked you this before: Could you cover my class next week? I have to be away."

"Next week?" he said. "So far as I know the calendar’s clear. Tell me when, and I’ll dance the minuet." We went over the details of time and place, and he scribbled them down. . . .

When I returned from my journey and met my evening class, I asked about my father’s time with them. They looked at one another.

"He teaches really different from you," said one.

"Yeah, quite a bit of the time, he didn’t say anything. We had to do most of the talking."

"And when he got us writing, he let it go on forever. Like, we were done, but he wasn’t, so we had to keep going until he was."

"Did he bring any books or anything?" I asked.

"Nothing. He just started asking questions, and then we took over."

"That’s because he wasn’t getting paid," I said. "He could relax. It was easy."

"I wouldn’t exactly say it was easy," said one student. "He heard everything we said—every little thing, and he kept turning it back to us. It’s like he couldn’t leave out the slightest idea that came up . . . oh, and he wanted us to give you this." She held out a paper. "He wrote it while we were writing." I took the page with his familiar scrawl.

"Thanks," I said.

During class, I tried to be more reticent, my students told me to be myself, and we made good use of our three hours. When I got back to the office, late, I flipped on the light, put his paper on my desk, and worked through it. It was yet another farewell, but this time it seemed not only a farewell to the world and to the college, but to me. Or did it include me? . . . He knew how to be very close at a great distance:

From the soft Oregon night a new shadow
converged with our walk near the library.
In dim light the figure moves easily
along, not toward us or away, but living
its own actions, flickering toward a car
nuzzled to the curb. And it’s all easy,
no need for meeting or not meeting this
moving, unknown being.

And a voice comes from the shadow,
tentative and mild: "Is it you? Is it the one
who was here in those years when I
lived in this town?" And the figure
turns quietly and faces us, not moving now,
not reaching out or going away, but waiting.

And whoever it is then quietly rocks
back and forth, and we know it’s because
those years have gone, and this person
carries them, simply brings them here
and offers them, no prize, no penalty,
just a reminder the night allowed us.
And we turn, easily, no haste, and go on.

Copyright 2002 by Kim Stafford. Reprinted from the book Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford by permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

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