Autumn under the Maples

English 1010 might have been a very boring course for a physics major if not for an exceptional instructor named Raymond Walker. He was determined to make it interesting for all of his students. The Composition I class that he taught was generally about writing a variety of essays. He wanted to take it further than that. He hoped it would be a challenge.

“This is an opportunity for extra credit,” he told them during the first week. “I’ll add points to your final grade if you do it. Just write a short story. The only requirement is that it is 1,000 to 3,000 words and that it is written by no one else but you.”

He explained that an A would be ten extra points, a B would be five extra points, and a C would be three extra points. Anything else would not be eligible for extra credit.

“Your short stories, if you decide to try to write one, will be due two weeks before the final exam,” he said.

For student Benjamin Jones this seemed to be a chance to improve what otherwise might be a low grade. He was only taking the course because Motlow State Community College required it. In two years he planned to transfer to Tennessee Technological University and complete a degree in physics. Math and science were the subjects in which he always excelled, not English.

By the first week of December, he had completed his short story but with doubt that it would be good enough for extra points. He titled it “Autumn under the Maples” because it was under the maple trees on the campus that he frequently studied on pleasant fall afternoons. The short story was mainly autobiographical. It contained numerous misspelled words and grammatical errors, but its content was worthy of ten extra points on his final grade.

The short story was better than anything Walker had read since he had started teaching at the small community college. It was so good that he decided to make a copy of it and keep it. He marked a C at the top of the first page and returned it to Benjamin when he handed back the papers to the other students.

Benjamin was discouraged because he had spent a lot of time writing it. Nevertheless, he had received the kind of grade he was expecting. He promptly wadded the short story and threw it into a wastebasket before he left the classroom. It was the last time he would attempt to write anything like it again.

The short story remained in Walker’s filing cabinet for a year. However, the instructor did not forget about it. He bravely took it out and read it again. He thought the ideas in the short story were fantastic. With some work, it could be developed into a novel, Walker decided. He spent the next two years expanding it into a 90,000-word manuscript. He sent a query to three literary agents and the third one said he wanted to read it. Within four weeks, he signed a contract with a large agency in New York. In the following month, four major publishers bid on the novel. It was sold to one of them and he received a generous advance.

Meanwhile, Benjamin did not make it to Tennessee Tech after finishing at the community college. Instead, he was struck by an automobile while trying to cross Jackson Street in nearby Tullahoma. He was walking to the post office when a drunk driver steered into the wrong lane and hit him. An ambulance carried him to Harton Hospital and then he was airlifted by helicopter to Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. After two weeks in its trauma unit, he was told by his doctors there was a possibility that he might never walk again. After months of physical therapy, he was able to slowly walk with a cane.

“I’ve never been happier!” Walker told his pretty wife on the day he married her two years after his novel was published. He had renamed it In the Shadow of Autumn Maples and changed the name of the main character to Benjamin Adams, and the book quickly climbed to the top ten lists of The New York Times and USA Today. Raymond Walker was the guest on many television shows and toured the country promoting the sales of his book. “I’m already one of the most famous authors in the world,” he told her. “We can go anywhere! We can do anything!” They moved to Los Angeles after the book was turned into a movie. And Walker never attempted to write anything again. He did not have to.

A small disability check and Medicare did little to help Benjamin. He was handicapped and poor, and his wife, after a few years of marriage, divorced him and took their two children with her. He did not see them again. He smoked too much and he drank too much, and he was addicted to his pain medication. He had already given up on his dream to be a physicist. He had never imagined that life could be so unhappy for him.

“I’m miserable,” he said to no one, because there was no one there to listen to him.

It was quite a life for Walker. He did not have to teach; he did not have to grade tests; he did not have students in the room who did not want to be there. He looked good. He felt good. He and his wife had three children. His children were all attractive and smart. He had a large home with a swimming pool in a desirable neighborhood. He drove a Porsche 911. His friends were celebrities. He was tanned, but obese, and still had his dark hair.

“What more could I want?” he said to everyone who listened to him.

There was nothing for him to do, he was bored, so that in October he and his family went to Paris for two months. He toured the city, his wife shopped, and their children stayed with their tutor in the hotel. All of them learned to speak French, and they ate at the finest restaurants. He was particularly pleased when he saw his novel, In the Shadow of Autumn Maples by Raymond Walker, in the bookstores in Paris. His wife never wore the same clothes twice, she did not have to, and his children were quiet and mannerly and never unruly.

While Walker and his family were in Europe, fire destroyed Benjamin’s house. The wires of an old space heater had short-circuited while he was asleep. Suddenly he had almost nothing left, and there was nowhere for him to live. He bought a used tent in a Goodwill store and camped with other homeless people under an Interstate 24 overpass. While the traffic droned overhead, he dreamed about the life he once thought he could have. It was difficult for him to understand why he did not have a good-paying job and why his wife and children were no longer with him. He was twenty-five years old and sleeping on a rug laid across the hard pavement.

Benjamin died within another year. He was sleeping under the interstate overpass on a very cold night in January. Many of the homeless people had left for one of the town’s warm shelters. He stayed. Benjamin was frozen when he was found the next morning. On his face were the same eyeglasses he had been wearing when he was a student in Raymond Walker’s English 1010 class. He wore a coat that he had found in a dumpster. He was covered with an old army blanket that he had been given by another homeless person. His clothes were the same clothes that he had been wearing since his house burned down. The shoes on his feet were old and worn out. His slim body was placed in a cardboard coffin.

Three people went to his funeral. They were all homeless people that he had met. His ex-wife refused to go, and she would not tell anyone how his children could be contacted. Benjamin died with less than ten dollars in his wallet. He certainly would not be remembered as the physicist he wanted to be or the author of the ideas in a short story that got the attention of the publishing industry. If someone had mentioned Benjamin Jones to his Composition I instructor, he would say he was not able to recall his name or remember his face. It seemed that Benjamin had somehow been dealt a bad hand of cards to play in the unfair game of life. He was buried in the very back of Tullahoma’s Evergreen Cemetery, the same graveyard where author Stephen Crane was buried almost 125 years before.

Benjamin had not been dead long when Walker was driving east on Interstate 110 in Los Angeles and a drunk driver suddenly switched lanes and struck his car. Some of the witnesses thought he had stopped breathing before an ambulance arrived there. It took him to the emergency room at a nearby hospital, Good Samaritan, and he remained there for almost two weeks. His doctors told him there was a possibility that he might never walk again. He had months of physical therapy ahead of him. Eventually he could walk slowly with a cane.

By then, bookstores were almost giving away In the Shadow of Autumn Maples by Raymond Walker. Its movie was shown only occasionally on television, usually in the middle of the night. He was no longer the successful author that he had wanted to be, and his wife divorced him and took their children with her. She took most of his money also. He was smoking too much and drinking too much, and he was addicted to his pain medication.

He fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand while sitting in his living room at two o’clock in the morning. It ignited the curtains behind the couch and fire quickly spread throughout the house. Three fire engines arrived, but they were too late. The fire destroyed most of his home, and he had not paid its insurance premiums for months.

Walker realized it was time to get out of Los Angeles. He had enough cash to buy a bus ticket, $448, back to Tullahoma with the idea that Motlow State Community College might hire him again. He was drunk when he went for an interview with the dean of the school of liberal arts, and the dean knew it. There was no way they were going to allow a drunken one-time author to teach their classes.

“I’m miserable,” he said to no one, because there was no one there to listen to him now.

He had come from Los Angeles without a jacket, and with winter coming on soon, he used the last money he had left to buy a coat, a tent, and a sleeping bag at Goodwill. He left there wearing the coat with the tent and sleeping bag strapped to his back. Walker did not know where to go.

He met other homeless people who led him to a camp under an overpass under Interstate 24. He stayed there until January, when the temperatures remained below ten degrees for several days. Walker died in his sleeping bag under his tent, but nobody knew when he died. His body was then thin and frozen.

No one really knew anything about him. They didn’t know that he had an ex-wife and children in California so they could not be contacted and come to the funeral. His withered body was placed in a cardboard coffin. One person was at the graveyard to say good-bye, a lean unidentified bespectacled homeless person. Workers in the grounds crew at the cemetery volunteered to be pallbearers. A priest from Saint Paul the Apostle Catholic Church agreed to come to say a prayer. He was buried in the back of Evergreen Cemetery, not far from where author Stephen Crane was buried in 1900, and not far from the grave of another homeless man, whose ideas for a short story for a while interested readers around the world.