Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [67]
After his graduation from Amherst College in 1832, Zebina became a rector of an academy in Tennessee; then almost at once he left off teaching, sold up (as he put it) and joined his brother, a merchant in Georgia. There the bookish Zebina, keen on Latin and English literature, worked in a store and then as assistant cashier in a Georgia bank. Inexplicably this sedentary man volunteered to fight some escaped Creek Indians in Florida, but was assigned only camp duties. Returning to the bank in Georgia, he became engaged at the age of twenty-nine. His record says nothing of his fiancée apart from her wealth and social standing, as though this were yet another career move. He will draw a veil over what happened next, he says, for it was then, in 1839, that ‘disaster’ struck: he was sick and the marriage was off - or those two linked events may have happened in reverse. The veil consists of one inadequate word of explanation: he was ‘paralysed’. Whatever actually happened, it left him dazed, and when he could not recover, a devoted slave (whom he’d taught to read and write) undertook to convey the sick man a distance of some fifteen hundred miles - an interminable journey in bumping coaches - to a sick and ageing mother in the Montague homestead in Amherst. Secure in the belief that his mother loved her ‘diseased lamb’ best, he became a permanent recluse, and what is curious is the silence around his condition. He was a ‘mystery’, it was said at his graveside, for this supposedly sick man went on living for a very long time - another forty years. His paralysis was said to be ‘partial’, without indicating, as people usually do, what (if any) part of his body was visibly affected.
When Emily, aged eleven, heard that Zebina, aged thirty-two, had bitten his tongue in the course of a fit, secrecy was not preserved - not in the family. The word ‘fit’ was in the air in 1842, and an alert child picked it up. It’s impossible to know if the fit was epileptic or caused by some other chronic condition. What is certain is that it was not a fatal condition.
From his late twenties until his seventies Zebina remained in seclusion, and therefore needed that sort of support in which one member of family puts her life at the service of another. Zebina’s sister Harriet did this. He didn’t marry and neither did his sister.
Zebina wrote Cousin Emily a long letter, we recall, after ill health had forced her to leave college for a month when she was seventeen. If she were showing symptoms of permanent illness he would have wished to enlighten her so far as he could. His situation was hardly cheering. In Amherst he and his sister were regarded as oddities. ‘Poor Harriet and Zebina’, Emily said in 1863. They were a ‘genteel’ pair, given to sighing reminiscences, punctuated by ‘God help us.’
Then another member of the family turned out to be afflicted: young Edward (Ned) Dickinson, born to Austin and Sue in 1861. At the age of fifteen, in mid-February 1877, Ned had a fit, to his family’s dismay. ‘It seems he went to bed as well as usual Sunday night,’ a caller was told, ‘- in the night was taken with a fit, followed by another on Monday morning’ while the doctor was present. Dr Fiske feared the fit was linked to Ned’s weak heart, the result of rheumatic fever in 1874. By the following day, the caller reports, the family, though anxious, began to think ‘the trouble might not be so serious’.
Emily wrote to her nephew after a few weeks, hoping he’d recovered, but the fits returned. It can’t have helped that his parents’ marriage was strained. The preceding autumn, while Susan and the children had paid their annual visit to Geneva, New York, Austin had lived at the Homestead for four weeks. This is when Emily noticed a change in her brother: he