come home gentlemen.

The sky is a mute gray, the color of campfire ash and I wonder if it is always going to be like that. Trees with no leaves stretch for miles in perfect rows that can be seen as far down for as fast as the car moves. We pass cars, trucks mostly, they drive on the service road for I-60 and cut outward into the woods.

The land begins to open up towards Faribault’s west side at I-35, giant tracts of land stripped and hoping for a plot of commerce. You transfer onto the 35 and the sky gets darker, then sun setting somewhere back behind you and behind all of that gray, like it set weeks ago, months.

Driving into Faribault, Minnesota at dusk and there is no one to be seen, the town that dreaded sundown. The parking lots of the Hy-Vee Grocery and the Wal-Mart across the street sit barren and brown leaves scrape across the parking lot and meet in the middle to spin a tight circle with the dailies and leaflets. Cars sit empty deep along side streets and every light from the highway exit to the main street stands at green, ushering you along and back to school.

You pass the groceries and their parking lots and alongside the Thomas Scott Buckham Memorial Library that crawls up to the street it’s bells ringing the full cadence of 7pm. I don’t know who out there hears it.

Then the mom and pops begin to run along side the street all pushed out close to the road that used to be a main strip of the highway until I-35 was expanded in 1975. People pulling their Ford Mavericks or Delta 88’s off of the road to buy a wool blanket or get a quart of milk, a handful of candy for the backseat. The streets bright and busy in the summer with lines around the corner to ride the tilt-a-whirls built by Herbert Sellner back in the 20’s. Still made in Faribault today, they use salt sacks to simulate people before they leave the factory. You try to imagine the brightly colored people with the sun shining down on them and witnessing a future that never really came. The airy and open shops now dusty with grime and closed most of the day with cheap Thanksgiving decorations taped in the windows or pilgrims with scarecrow arms that swing on brads. The tuxedo store waits for us to have our prom and a photographer in a dim studio waits to take senior pictures for those moving on.

The liquor stores, the most per capita of any city in the country, four of them sit across from each other on the corners, divided in half by the railway tracks. Their signs swing back and forth with squeaky hinges singing sirens song for the coal men, or the turkey processors, the cannery and the plastics plant where a black smoke boils overhead.

The car moves slow down the hill past the tracks and turning at the depot to go over the ravine. The ravine with it’s ghosts of missing children and the short footsteps of men who have gone running from the correctional facility that sits out on what they used to call the State Schools land, the mental hospitals. At it’s deepest you could fall straight down the hill and no one would find you unless they fell on top of you. The ghost stories of woman luring drunk men from the edge of the trees with their red eyes and pockets full of the brittle bones of forest vermin. In a town like this, it didn’t take witches and gypsies to kill drunken men, for that they had winters and combines, heavy machinery and the occasional stray hunting round.
I can start to see the windows of dorms that sit with their backs to the ravine. The dorms of the lower school where the grades six through nine live peering out over the town and hovering at the very cusp of affluence and poverty, one glacially overtaking the other.

The car stops at the four-way and begins to turn on Shumway Ave. named for Augusta Shumway who lost all of her property in the Chicago fire but fulfilled her promise to build a chapel for the Bishop Boys school, mailing all of her insurance checks to Henry Whipple, who was the first Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota. Now she has a road and I eat lunch in a building that bears her name.

American flags drifty idly alongside month early Virgin Mary’s at the fronts of the houses. It is two months since our greatest American tragedy and a candle flickers in every front window.
The grass is a little bit greener up here than below the ravine.

I can see the large trees that mark the entrance to our school as we coast silently along Shumway, the large stone arch rises out from in between two massive and naked Elm trees. Too my left, bordering our school is the Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf where the football huddle was invented to hide the sign language that players would give each other before plays, this was in the early 1900’s. The entire Academy is bereft of activity as we pass by and turn into the short and curved road that leads through the arch and between the trees.
Through the arch and the campus opens up wide in front of us, a large circular drive that contains a soccer field and baseball diamond, it’s backstop rusty and buckled, dog-eared at the top corners.

The first building that we pass is the non-descript home shared by Mr. Freeman and Mr. Bourdoin, physics and trigonometry respectively and carrying further on the right is the first girls dorm, Clapp. Built in the 1970’s and wearing every sign of it from it’s slanted outside windows that slope down with short angular awnings for style rather than substance. A flat roof that collects snow and water. The second floor has a shorter ceiling because it was added in haste. I start to see the first people slipping in and out of the windows and in between the drapes as we pass. An empty bench sits out front with a tarnished plague dedicated to someone’s checkbook.

A third of the way around the circle and sitting on a slight hill is the second girl’s dorm, Breck Hall, much more traditional with three floors and stacked stones for walls, lined with shrubbery around the base. The building sits on a slight hill making it difficult to see anything inside, the front door bobs open and closed slightly as if someone can’t decide to stay or go.
As you round past Breck, Shumway Hall starts, the gymnasium stairs rolling out from two enormous barn doors and onto the sidewalk. The van stops here and we pile out, I grab my one suitcase and throw it over my back, and walk along the same path the van will take. The gymnasium connects to the academic part of Shumway Hall and is further book ended by the cafeteria where it seems like every light in the place is on and as I walk by I can here the low reverb of a late dinner inside. It is around now that I feel the surrender of coming back, a relaxing feeling of giving in to four more months away from home.

This morning, before mom took me to the airport, she took me out to breakfast at the Alpha Coney, just her and I, which is something I can’t remember her ever doing. I forced myself to eat a stack of blueberry pancakes and bite back emotion. She couldn’t walk to my gate what with all the security increases and she gave me a hug and I thought about that as I looked back over the campus and past the Chapel, beyond that the houses of other teachers, far from sight and tucked into a corner of the woods with short driveways that attached to the main circular drive and beyond that the exit out of the arch you came in under.

I passed Shumway and saw my dorm, Whipple it was called. Named for the man cashing in on Augusta Shumway’s misfortune.

It is the largest of the dorms, three stories with an east and west wing. A branch jumps off at the end, giving it a slight L shape where the larger apartments jut out, the apartments for the dorm parents. The building used to be four floors, but sometime in the past there was a fire the decimated the inside and it was rebuilt to only have three. There is a small fourth floor made up of empty half rooms and thing floorboards that sit above our drop ceiling. Something walks around up there, jumping over the spaces in the rafters where it is unsafe to walk. Something whispers and laughs in the middle of the night when it is only you to hear it. Two little girls laugh down through the pipes with a cotton like ping that wafts up from the radiator.
The steps up and into are the building are those aggravating long and short steps where it appears as if they couldn’t decide whether to build a ramp or a set of stairs so they settled on an obnoxious combo where every steps plateau is about two and half feet long and they rise up only a mere two and half inches to the large steel dorms. The doors have portal windows big enough to peak out of the doors themselves open with a great bit of resistance, straining and
popping where missing rivets have left the steel sheeting bowed out.

The doors open into the Dead Hall. In the middle of the dorm, bisecting the east and west wings is a large room that rises all three floors from which a small area of each floor can be seen. The room has giant marble slabs that rise up to the ceiling and on the slabs, carved into the rock are the names of every man and woman who was killed in combat while attending the school back when religion wasn’t enough to draw students and it became military oriented. Nurses and soldiers, all broken down by war and divided by rank and the date in which they were killed in action. The names rise on each side of the room, rising high enough that they become hard to read. Most of the military tradition is gone however and the only carry over is a Rifle Drill Team that conducts practice in the gymnasium. In the dead hall, at times, you can hear argumentative whispers towards the ceiling that collect and swirl at a point up top and above the dusty and dim chandelier that hangs there, whispers of the dead coming home to the familiar.

The wet and cold feeling against your left arm, when you take a sip from a water fountain, is Dobbin. Dobbin was a black lab that lived with a family in the dorm when it was eviscerated by fire. He puts his cold nose to your arm because the fountains were put in eight inches higher than before the fire and he can no longer reach the cool pooled water on his own.

Outside, you could hear him running back and forth, touching his nose to the hot door handles before he settled and burned.

After the Dead Hall there are more short stairs to a stained blue carpet, horrible under the fluorescent lights and my room is the first in the west wing. The heavy wood door is painted brown with a silver kick plate at the bottom and a large deadbolt lock that clicks over heavy. My room is no different from the rest of them, aside from a few pictures and posters. It’s dark when I arrive and my roommate is curled atop his loft with his back to me, he waves a hand when I flick the overhead on and then off. Making my way to a small desk on the far side of the room and fumble for a lamp and turn it on and put my suitcase down against my bed.