Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [4]
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.
2
IN 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”—since 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 Tarkington’s 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. Aaron’s 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 head-strong, 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 Tarkington’s daughters married into prosperous and enterprising families in Cleveland, New York, and Wilmington, Delaware—innocently 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 father’s 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