Thirty four years after the shooting at Kent State, Sue stood at the bottom of the hill between Prentice and Taylor Halls, looking up the hill towards the Pagoda. At that moment, a Sunday morning in late May, between the spring and summer sessions, she had the campus to herself. She sensed that the campus and all the buildings around her were deserted. She was alone to see the past alive.Her presentation at Sims Crank & Dye was early on Monday, 9:00am to be exact, so she flew into Cleveland on Sunday. The best flight got her in early so she took time to drive the 40 miles to Kent and visit the university. It was a bit of a pilgrimage.
The square black and white shadow of the Pagoda always seemed out of place with the silhouetted and bayoneted soldiers as they looked that day from Taylor Hall. Sue knew because her mother had told her about it a thousand times and shown her the photos from an old Life Magazine kept on the bookshelf in the hallway.
“By the grace of God I could have been one of those who died. Had it not been for the grace of God and your father’s quick action and the veranda of Taylor Hall, I too would have been dead and you wouldn’t be here and if you were here you wouldn’t be who you because there wouldn't have been me.”
Her mother would point to a photo taken from the commons looking up the hill towards the Pagoda and Taylor Hall and say “Right there, we were right there beside the Pagoda and we ran over to Taylor Hall’s veranda.” Her finger would move across the photo stopping at a dark shadow of a building and her voice would trail away.
Sue never hear her father’s version of the story for he died in a car accident when she was three. She had heard her mother tell the story time and time again, and she really never grew tired of hearing it and had even shared it with others. But it was best told by her mother using the same words and the same rhythm each time with the same controlled passion for that past moment and for the life she felt she nearly never had.
Sue’s mother would describe how she had met Hank the week before at a party to celebrate a mutual friend’s senior recital. The next time they saw each other was on the veranda of Taylor Hall on May 4. When the shooting started, he grabbed her arm and they both fell to the ground.
After that, we needed each other,” her mother would say, then smile with her secrets.
Sue had not heard the story for the last year of her mother’s life. Alzheimer's had hidden the memory away in her mind so even she could not retrieve it to relive it.
As Sue walked back to her car, she stopped at the bottom of the hill and looked back at Taylor Hall to be sure she had a lasting image, something she could take away with her. She looked down and saw the tip of a small rock exposed in a bare place in the hillside. She kicked at it to loosen it and pried it free from the hard packed dirt. She turned it over in her hand, the dirt lightly dusting her palm as she walked to her car.
All the way back to Cleveland she held the rock, turning it over and over in her hand until the surface was nearly clean and her hand the shade of brown earth.
