English Department

The English Department is the academic setting where Thad Beaumont’s teaching life, a police inquiry, and the novel’s supernatural signs briefly converge. Its ordinary routines—the faculty directory, summer teaching schedule, office files, and a note for the secretary—become entangled with Thad’s effort to explain an unexpected call and with automatic speech he does not understand.

Setting and Routine

Thad works in the department as a faculty member and is off teaching duties for the summer. Its telephone directory lists department members alphabetically, in fine print. Because Rawlie DeLesseps appears after Thad in the listings and there is no faculty member whose surname begins with C that year, the two men sometimes receive one another’s calls. Thad uses this arrangement to explain how a young caller could have reached him after seeing him near a bookstore and asking whether he was teaching a summer writing course.

The department also has a common room and offices where faculty can talk over coffee and cookies. While police officers accompany Thad, he says he needs to return files he will not need. These mundane details establish the department as a working academic environment even as Thad’s explanations and behavior come under scrutiny.

Staff and Relationships

Rawlie is Thad’s colleague and follows him in the faculty directory. He is present when Thad explains the phone mix-up, and his brief agreement lends the explanation the appearance of ordinary collegial confirmation. Later, Rawlie asks Thad to remain behind for a private conversation as the officers move down the hall. His concern is not simply departmental business: he has been investigating what Thad has been seeking to understand about the sparrows.

Althea Fenton has served as the English Department’s secretary since 1961. When Thad leaves Rawlie’s office, he unexpectedly says that he must write her a note, without knowing why the words have come to him. Rawlie points out that Thad has a note to write; Thad then recognizes the disturbing discrepancy, because Fenton died of throat cancer in April. The department’s secretary is thus present in the scene through an ordinary administrative role and through a phrase that seems to arise beyond Thad’s conscious intention.

The Department and the Investigation

The department becomes a temporary setting for the police inquiry into Thad. During the encounter, Thad resists being taken away and insists that he has done nothing wrong. His anger rises as he challenges the officers’ assumptions, while a child cries in another room. Later, police remain close as he explains the directory’s fine print and the confusion between his calls and Rawlie’s. The faculty listing functions as a concrete, plausible account of how the caller found him, but it does not explain the involuntary reference to Fenton.

Thad’s earlier research for his Stark novels has also shaped his thinking about the case. He asks Alan Pangborn whether fingerprints require a minimum number of comparison points before they can be admitted as evidence. Pangborn answers that Maine requires six perfect comparisons. The department itself does not produce the forensic evidence, but Thad’s professional identity as a writer is linked to his awareness of investigative procedure, and the police questioning reaches into his academic and literary life.

Sparrows and the Uncanny

After the unexplained reference to Fenton, Rawlie tells Thad that he may have found what Thad was looking for about the sparrows. He retrieves Barringer’s Folklore of America and explains that sparrows, loons, and especially whippoorwills are regarded as psychopomps—figures associated with guiding the dead. The disclosure turns Rawlie’s request for a private word into a significant exchange: a colleague has found a folkloric framework for the birds that have troubled Thad.

The department’s significance lies in this collision of systems of explanation. Its directory can account for a misplaced call through alphabetical order and fine print; the forensic investigation proceeds through fingerprints and standards of comparison; and Rawlie’s book offers a traditional account of the sparrows. Against those ordinary and evidentiary structures, Thad’s unexpected words about a dead secretary remain unexplained, making the academic workplace one of the places where the novel’s rational and supernatural possibilities meet.