Chapter XVII: The Alma Mater

Night was falling on the campus in more ways than one. On the eastern wall, a row of construction equipment had been set up, and it was only a matter of time before the big dozers broke through the perimeter and begin tearing down this once proud institution only to replace it with new structures that fit the economic mold of the new Tri-Towns.

On an early November evening, as the first chills of winter were beginning to blow in from the north, I sat outside the library with Winston and looked beyond the rubble of the Fieldhouse and past the crater where the campus lake once sat. A freight train was rolling through the county down towards the big city. The lights from the double locomotive slid from right to left, followed by a long procession of dark cars, backlit by the light pollution emanating from the suburban sprawl around us.

“Ghost train,” I muttered, but Winston was not amused. He had been very quiet all day, even when we walked down into the Tri-Towns and stole art supplies from really nice people down in the cultural district. Winston was always pretty weird, but there was something else on his mind, and he didn’t look comfortable keeping it inside him.

He let out a series of emotion-laden exhales and looked down at the ground. I looked over at him and knew immediately that he had seen something that had truly spooked him, despite his long history with spirits and apparitions.

“Kid,” he said with gruff and gravity, “If I told you that I saw something, can you promise me that you won’t tell anybody?” There was a good deal of fear in his voice. He had seen something that he was not supposed to see. I was more worried about hearing what this thing was than keeping a big secret.

“Okay, bu…”

“You can’t fucking tell anybody, got that?” Winston shot back with tense nerves.

“Alright, alright.” I said, trying to ease his mind. Winston tried to light a cigarette with his shaking hand and failed several times before I took the lighter from him and lit his butt while he sat. He took a tremendous drag and let out a monster cough followed by a few tiny aftershocks. He sniffled and let out one final exhale before turning to me.

“I think I saw Kendra last night.”

Suddenly, a chilly gust blew through the campus. It rattled through the trees and swirled around Winston and I. Bone shaking chills rolled up and down my spine and every hair on my body stood up. The wind carried with it an eerie presence. Winston looked around at the wind-swept trees as if he understood the gusts like another language.

“Don’t fuck with me man,” I said, frightened. “You wouldn’t say shit like that if you didn’t really see it.”

“You think I wanted to see that?” he said and took another drag. “You think I want to see any of this shit?” The wind had died down, in it’s wispy absence, and a low rumble from the freight train carried over the chilly night. I wanted to ask him so many things. I wanted to know the answers to so many questions, but there was no way to drag it out of Winston. Kendra had been the only person that he would open up to. The only other way to get to Winston was to feed him or give him smokes. I had neither.

I supposed that it didn’t hurt to try. “What did she say?” I asked. Winston needed a few minutes and a few more cigarettes I was able to drag it out of him.

Winston had always complained about the predictability of the specters that shared the library with him. Whenever something new happened, he usually took note of it. He had begun to notice some of these new tricks about a month or so after Eva had joined our company and shortly before The Watcher departed this world in a death that seemed fitting to those who he tormented for so long. At night, when Winston channeled the energy of the ghosts through his brushstrokes, he began to hear a faint whistle coming from somewhere up in the mezzanine. The ghostly whistles always blew the same tune—an old rag that didn’t sound much different than an old fight song his high school marching band used to play. The whistles would come and go throughout the night, getting louder whenever Winston’s creative juices hit a speed bump.

He had lived in the old Morgenthau library for more than five years and he had long ago found a manageable equilibrium with the ghosts. He didn’t mind the shadows and the squeaks and the footsteps. However, the whistling spirit was throwing a monkey wrench in his workflow and he could not concentrate.

Winston once told Kendra that at times when he was heavily focused on his work, he would get the feeling that there were a crowd of people standing behind him watching his ever move, totally transfixed by the gruff painter and his jerky motions. Every now and then, when the feeling became so overwhelming that it became a distraction, he would swing his neck around to peer over his shoulder and see a series of silhouettes quickly dissipate like the plumes of smoke blowing out of a city bus in first gear. Winston didn’t mind the ghosts, but if he were dead, he would rather be doing something more productive with his afterlife.

The whistles persisted all summer and well into the fall, especially after The Professor had died. In an attempt to break both his depression and an unnerving monotony that had begun to dry up his creative juices, Winston began experimenting with new canvases and paints. He had come upon a long piece of fabric in the rubble of the Fieldhouse a while back and he was storyboarding ideas on the floor of the library trying to think of what he would paint next.

He kept looking at his new canvas—a banner of some kind that stretched about 15 feet wide by three feet tall—but could come up with no promising ideas. As had been the case for roughly two and half months, whenever he found himself in a “painter’s block,” that god damn whistling came back in full force.

It was louder than it had ever been before, as if the whistler was blowing into a megaphone perched up in the mezzanine. Frustrated, Winston stared up into the darkness and lurched back when he saw a ghostly silhouette standing in front of the stained glass window. Winston had never seen a fully formed apparition before, they usually appeared as shadows or quick flickers of mass and matter. This figure had a head, arms and a torso, and if not for the railing of the mezzanine would probably have legs and feet as well. Winston stared in fear as he looked up at the silent shade hovering in the balcony. It appeared as a vague figure at first, but Winston immediately started picking out the figure’s attributes. The figure had big, puffy hair that blew with the wind and bounced with every step. The figure was slender, but wore long cloak and a thick upper-body garment.

Immediately, Winston recognized the high volume, curly hair and the old green bomber jacket. He noticed the long flowing skirt and when the ghost started whistling again, he noticed its accent.

It was the ghost of Kendra Keane.

“Ka-ka-ka-Kendra?” mustered a terrified Winston as he sat frozen in his cavernous studio. The ghost did not give an affirmative or a negative, but Winston knew the figure once it had taken its shape. It sat silent for a moment until the ghost’s whistle faded into a whispery voice that sang along to the same melody.

“As leaves fall in the commons, As roses bloom in spring, For friends never forgotten, For loves ever lasting, For honor, truth and valor, We stand up brave and proud, And wave the crimson flag and sing for Morgenthau…”

As the ghost sang the final line of the song, it moved out of the backlight of the stained glass window and into the shadows where it vanished into the darkness. Winston suddenly unfroze from his chair next to the canvas and bolted towards the mezzanine.

“Kendra!” he yelled, looking for another sign from the ghost, “Kendra!” She was gone. She had vanished from sight, but she was still there. She had never left.

It had to be Kendra’s spirit, it all added up. He knew that voice anywhere. He could still smell her hair, which he knew so well from leaning over her shoulders when he gave her painting lessons. He knew that her spirit was still in the library somewhere, but their inter-realm transmission had ceased.

“Then I started painting,” he told me the following night after a long description of the account with the ghost. “I painted until about eight o’clock this morning. I haven’t been that inspired since…” he trailed off thinking about the night he challenged the ghosts to a spirit vs. man free-for-all as he painted the great portrait of Kendra.

“Can I see it?” I asked him, only to immediately regret the request when I realized that he would make me follow him inside where the spirits were waiting to haunt both of us. Winston considered the request for a few moments and reluctantly accepted. He took his cigarette lighter and lit one of the many candles he kept handy and led me through the library’s thick, foreboding doors, through the deserted lobby, past the dusty reception desk and into his cluttered, yet cozy painting studio. I tried to remember what Winston had told me about the ghosts. I kept my confidence high. I tried not to be afraid of them. The thought of encountering Winston’s regular ghosts did not bother me. I was terrified of seeing Kendra.

We stopped in front of the bookcases that served as the backboard for Winston’s canvas. On this long piece of cloth stood a procession of faces and bodies carrying a banner and waving flags high. It looked like the scene out of a great battle march or the Macy’s Day parade. As I looked closer, I started to see individual faces pop out among the crowd. I could see The Professor and his trademark pipe and Irish knit cap, Alistair and his crazy eyes, The Steve and his cracked eyeglasses, Eva and her pregnant tummy, Big Willie clutching his shovel, a self portrait of Winston and his shaky hands, Grover and the elated smile he gave whenever somebody said hello to him, me wearing my filthy hoodie, a dozen shadowy addicts and maniacs, the snakes, the cherubic spirits of Hook Hands and Doobie floating on clouds of their own marijuana smoke, and the angel Kendra floating effortlessly above the crowd.

The faces of our closest associates at Morgenthau were marching with a bright banner that read the school’s name. It looked like the homecoming parade, but they were marching to no football game. The figures held fists high, appeared to be shouting or yelling different things. The crowd did not resemble an angry mob, but what struck me was the sense of unity and purpose that these faces portrayed. Never had the homeless residents Morgenthau been united under one banner. We all came from different backgrounds and had suffered a wide array of misfortunes, but the only emotion that had ever united us was grief. On Winston’s canvas, our faces beamed with confidence, dedication and determination. We seemed to be ready to take on anyone and anything the world had to throw at us with the same fearlessness that Kendra displayed when she sacrificed her life for the good of the campus.

I took a step back in awe. I searched for the words to tell Winston what I really felt. It was painted in his usual twisted style, but it was absolutely beautiful.

“It’s all of us,” I said quietly. Winston nodded. He was incredibly modest of his work, but even he knew that there was something very special about this painting and all of the people in it.

“What does it all mean?” I asked him as he peered over my shoulders and let out a disgusted sigh, probably at the sight of one of the annoying spirits that lingered around his residence.

“Fucked if I know,” he said flabbergasted. “I mean, it doesn’t even make sense to me.” He let out a disconcerted chuckle and then asked, “Want to see the weirdest part about it?” I nodded in agreement. Winston walked over to the canvas and untied two strings that affixed the long sheet of cloth to the bookcase. The canvas flipped over to reveal the opposite side of the banner. There, in crisp crimson, as if it had been washed yesterday, read “MORGENTHAU” in big white letters. An even bigger shock, it was the exact same banner that the parade of characters had been carrying in Winston’s mural the reverse side.

“Thing is, I didn’t even know that this thing was on the other side of this cloth,” he said. “But I painted it anyway. What are the odds of that?”

Then, as we stood in the great hall of the library, a soft, high-pitched melody floated over the sounds of the wind rustling through the naked trees and through the wispy jungle of weeds in the quadrangle. It could have been anybody’s whistle, but I have always believed that it was Kendra’s. It was the exact same tune that Winston had hummed for me. It was way too creepy for me, the faithless follower who did not believe in angels, demons, saviors and devils before I came face to face with all of them in Morgenthau. Like I had a few weeks earlier, I made a mad dash for the door and never looked back.

The tune haunted me for the next few days while an ominous feeling began to infiltrate the campus like never before. Something big was going to happen. Everyone could feel it. I had been walking around on brisk autumn days singing it to myself, trying to figure out what Kendra meant by it. On my way up the stairs back to my second floor room in the Main Residence Hall, I sang the melody with doo-doo-doo’s and la-la-la’s, listening to the notes echo off the old, slimy walls of the staircase. A flight above me, Grover was heading out, but he stopped and shot me puzzled look as he passed me on the steps.

“Wait, stop,” he told me with a little force. “How do you know that song?”

I wanted to know the same thing from him. “Have you been talking to Winston?” I asked Grover.

“No,” he said politely. “I haven’t seen him in a few days. But you have to tell me how do you know the alma mater?”

“Whose alma mater?” I replied, confused.

“No, no, no,” said Grover frustrated, “That song. It’s called an alma mater. It’s Morgenthau’s alma mater. It’s a fight song, the college’s national anthem, so to speak. They used to play it at basketball games and graduations.”

“No shit?” I said.

Grover would postpone his trip outside to take me up to The Professor’s room, which still contained his great multitude of papers, books and some of Kendra’s paintings. In an old yearbook that Grover had found while going through his things, he pointed out sheet music to a song called “Wave The Crimson,” which was attributed to an old Irish folk tune with lyrics written by H.G. Lowery, Class of ’55. Having sang in the choir back in his freshman year, Grover easily recited the song in perfect pitch, and then sang the soprano, alto and bass parts.

Grover again pressed me about how I had heard the song. I broke my promise to Winston and spilled the beans about Kendra’s ghost. Grover’s eyes welled up with tears and he bolted out the door, down the stairs and over to the library. He found an angry Winston, but no Kendra.