The greatest stroke of luck for me, the biggest chunk of manna from Heaven, was that Tarkington had need of somebody to play the Lutz Carillon, the great family of bells at the top of the tower of the college library, where I am writing now.
I asked my old CO if the bells were swung by ropes. He said they used to be, but that they had been electrified and were played by means of a keyboard now.
What does the keyboard look like?¨ I said.
Like a piano,¨ he said.
I had never played bells. Very few people have that clanging opportunity. But I could play a piano. So I said, Shake hands with your new carillonneur.¨
The happiest moments in my life, without question, were when I played the Lutz Carillon at the start and end of every day.
I went to work at Tarkington 25 years ago, and have lived in this beautiful valley ever since. This is home.
I have been a teacher here. I was a Warden for a little while, after Tarkington College officially became Tarkington State Reformatory in June of 1999, 20 months ago.
Now I myself am a prisoner here, but with pretty much the run of the place. I havent been convicted of anything yet. I am awaiting trial, which I guess will take place in Rochester, for supposedly having masterminded the mass prison break at the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena, across the lake from here.
It turns out that I also have tuberculosis, and my poor, addled wife Margaret and her mother have been put by court order into a lunatic asylum in Batavia,
New York, something I had never had the guts to do. I am so powerless and despised now that the man I
am named after, Eugene Debs, if he were still alive, might at last be somewhat fond of me.
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more optimistic times, when it was not widely understood that human beings were killing the planet
with the by-products of their own ingenuity and that a new Ice Age had begun in any case, the generic name for the sort of horse-drawn covered wagon that carried freight and settlers across the prairies of what was to become the United States of America, and eventually across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, was Conestoga¨Xsince the first of these were built in the Conestoga Valley of Pennsylvania.
They kept the pioneers supplied with cigars, among other things, so that cigars nowadays, in the year 2001, are still called stogies¨ sometimes, which is short for Conestoga.¨
By 1830, the sturdiest and most popular of these wagons were in fact made by the Mohiga Wagon Company right here in Scipio, New York, at the pinched waist of Lake Mohiga, the deepest and coldest and westernmost of the long and narrow Finger Lakes. So sophisticated cigar-smokers might want to stop calling
their stinkbombs stogies¨ and call them mogies¨ or higgies¨ instead.
The founder of the Mohiga Wagon Company was Aaron Tarkington, a brilliant inventor and manufacturer who nevertheless could not read or write. He now would be identified as a blameless inheritor of the genetic defect known as dyslexia. He said of himself that he was like the Emperor Charlemagne, too busy to learn to read and write.¨ He was not too busy, however, to have his wife read to him for 2 hours every evening. He had an excellent memory, for he delivered weekly lectures to the workmen at the factory that were laced with lengthy quotations from Shakespeare and Homer and the Bible, and on and on.
He sired 4 children, a son and 3 daughters, all of whom could read and write. But they still carried the gene of dyslexia, which would disqualify several of their own descendants from getting very far in conventional schemes of education. Two of Aaron Tarkingtons children were so far from being dyslexic, in fact, as to themselves write books, which I have read only now, and which nobody, probably, will ever read again. Aarons only son, Elias, wrote a technical account of the construction of the Onondaga Canal, which connected the northern end of Lake Mohiga to the Erie Canal just south of Rochester. And the youngest daughter, Felicia, wrote a novel called Carpathia, about a headstrong, high-born young woman in the Mohiga Valley who fell in love with a half-Indian lock-tender on that same canal.
That canal is all filled in and paved over now, and is Route 53, which forks at the head of the lake, where the
locks used to be. One fork leads southwest through farm country to Scipio. The other leads southeast through the perpetual gloom of the Iroquois National Forest to the bald hilltop crowned by the battlements of the New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena, a hamlet directly across the lake from Scipio.
Bear with me. This is history. I am trying to explain how this valley, this verdant cul-de-sac, got to be what it is today.
All 3 of Aaron Tarkingtons daughters married into prosperous and enterprising families in Cleveland, New York, and Wilmington, DelawareXinnocently making the threat of dyslexia pandemic in an emerging ruling class of bankers and industrialists, largely displaced in my time by Germans, Koreans, Italians, English, and, of course, Japanese.
The son of Aaron, Elias, remained in Scipio and took over his fathers properties, adding to them a brewery and a steam-driven carpet factory, the first such in the state. There was no water power in Scipio, whose industrial prosperity until the introduction of steam was based not on cheap energy and locally available raw materials but on inventiveness and high standards of workmanship.
Elias Tarkington never married. He was severely wounded at the age of 54 while a civilian observer at the Battle of Gettysburg, top hat and all. He was there to see the debuts of 2 of his inventions, a mobile field kitchen and a pneumatic recoil mechanism for heavy artillery. The field kitchen, incidentally, with slight modifications, would later be adopted by the Barnum &
Bailey Circus, and then by the German Army during World War I.
Elias Tarkington was a tall and skinny man with chin whiskers and a stovepipe hat. He was shot through the right chest at Gettysburg, but not fatally.
The man who shot him was I of the few Confederate soldiers to reach the Union lines during Picketts Charge. That Johnny Reb died in ecstasy among his enemies, believing that he had shot Abraham Lincoln. A crumbling newspaper account I have found here in what used to be the college library, which is now the prison library, gives his last words as follows: Go home, Bluebellies. Old Satans daid.¨
During my 3 years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers. Not 1 of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.
One boy of only 18 said to me while he was dying and I was holding him in my arms, Dirty joke, dirty joke.¨
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E
has Tarkington, the severely wounded Abraham Lincoln look-alike, was brought home in 1 of his own wagons to Scipio, to his estate overlooking the town and lake.
He was not well educated, and was more a mechanic than a scientist, and so spent his last 3 years trying to invent what anyone familiar with Newtons Laws would have known was an impossibility, a perpetual-motion machine. He had no fewer than 27 contraptions built, which he foolishly expected to go on running, after he had given them an initial spin or whack, until Judgment Day.
I found 19 of those stubborn, mocking machines in the attic of what used to be their inventors mansion, which in my time was the home of the College President, about a year after I came to work at Tarkington. I brought them back downstairs and into the 20th Century. Some of my students and I cleaned them up and restored any parts that had deteriorated during the intervening 100 years. At the least they were exquisite
jewelry, with gamets and amethysts for bearings, with arms and legs of exotic woods, with tumbling balls of ivory, with chutes and counterweights of silver. It was as though dying Elias hoped to overwhelm science with the magic of precious materials.
The longest my students and I could get the best of them to run was 51 seconds. Some eternity!
To me, and I passed this on to my students, the restored devices demonstrated not only how quickly anything on Earth runs down without steady infusions of energy. They reminded us, too, of the craftsmanship no longer practiced in the town below. Nobody down there in our time could make things that cunning and beautiful.
Yes, and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: