Genoa: A Telling of Wonders

HEADWATERS

ONE

CITY OF INDIANAPOLIS, a cold spring day, late. Blackberry winter, my father called it—after some warm days, some affluence of sunshine, a sudden crackling blast of cold, rain edged with sleet, low, almost formless clouds scudding across the level land.

When ocean clouds over inland hills Sweep storming . . .

Thus Herman Melville put it, thinking, perhaps of Pittsfield. Here there are no hills—only the squared-out city. Further south, toward the Ohio, Crawford County, where Mother’s family, the Stoneciphers, came from, there are hills—hills and valleys, woods and caves.

But here I turn a square corner, and the old house comes into view, the house that used to be country and now is city, that has not moved, but in remaining still has allowed our fellow Americans to sweep around it, to put up suburban dwellings in what used to be the cornfield, so that it now stands, as it ever was, but with the largeness of land lopped off; the house in which I was born and raised, on the land that we farmed; house and land that we lost, or that I thought we had lost, but that unknown to the rest of us remained, during the years of depression, in the arthritic grip of my mother, so that when I married and gave evidence of settling down, it fell into my lap, a gift—the land gone, but the rough old house, of timbers pegged and nailed before the Civil War, the house my father was born in, and his father before him, standing strong.

My father’s name was Paul B. Mills—he would never tell us what the B. stood for—we would guess and joke about it, Carl and I, but he remained passive and humorless—nor did my mother offer help, either condone or criticize our curiosity, and to this day I don’t know if she ever discovered what it was—but there was the strange look from him one day when out of a clear blue, I had been thinking of other matters, I suddenly said Bunyan—my father is Paul Bunyan, and again he neither affirmed nor denied, just for a moment the queer look—but there it was, on the birth certificate that showed up after his death, and the shock, perhaps greater than the accident of his death and those who died with him, the funeral, the relatives, the shock when I read it, the spelling of it: Paul Bunion Mills.

Making the right angle turn I am now running up into the wind’s eye, as Melville said it—the only approach to a storm. Elbows digging into ribs hold an overcoat tight around me, and I lean forward, letting the rain and sleet beat against my face, so that forehead, cheeks, nose and chin, and the lines incised into my face, become a mask, at once me and not me, alive . . .

During the Cambrian, Ordovician, and most of the Silurian periods, Indiana was submerged beneath the seas. In the later Silurian, a mighty upheaval began; eventually most of the continent was uplifted and the great interior seas slowly receded. This was not a violent or sudden process; the earth rose only an inch, perhaps, in a century or more.

In the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian epochs of the Carboniferous period, Indiana was steadily elevated; at the close of the Mississippian the whole region was above sea level. During the Pennsylvanian, a period of millions of years, Indiana was probably a rank, lush swamp—populated by amphibious creatures, and covered with fern-like plants growing in vast luxuriance.

In the Pleistocene about five-sixths of the whole region—all except what is now south central Indiana—was at one time or another under a massive layer of ice, sometimes 2,000 feet thick.

and

The Miami, original Indian inhabitants of Indiana, lived on wild game and fowl, corn, tubers, roots and dogs. As late as 1812, the Miami burned their war captives, but the practice of cooking and eating them, which had once been very popular, ceased around 1789.

Passing the suburban houses, homogenized so that one might be another, I approach the old farm house down the road, anachronistic and stubborn; but for this, the regularity would be complete.

Complete, that is, but for one other factor, rendering irregular all that I reach through my eyes: with every step I lean off balance, off center, and back again, the prairie landscape ragging down with every leftward thrust:

Klumpfuss. Pied bot. Reel foot. Or, from the medical book: Talipes equinovalgus, or ‘rocker foot,’ with some syndactilism. I have clubfoot.

From Melville, MARDI:

"Averse to the barbarous custom of destroying at birth all infants not symmetrically formed; but equally desirous of removing from their sight those unfortunate beings; the islanders of a neighboring group had long ago established an asylum for cripples; where they lived, subject to their own regulations; ruled by a king of their own election; in short, formed a distinct class of beings by themselves.

One only restriction was placed upon them: on no account must they quit the isle assigned them. And to the surrounding islanders, so unpleasant the sight of a distorted mortal, that a stranger landing at Hooloomooloo, was deemed a prodigy. Wherefore, respecting any knowledge of aught beyond them, the cripples were well nigh as isolated, as if Hooloomooloo was the only terra firma extant.

Dwelling in a community of their own, these unfortunates, who otherwise had remained few in number, increased and multiplied greatly. Nor did successive generations improve in symmetry upon those preceding them.

Soon, we drew nigh the isle.

Heaped up, and jagged with rocks; and, here and there, covered with dwarfed, twisted thickets, it seemed a fit place for its denizens. Landing, we were surrounded by a heterogeneous mob; and thus escorted, took our way inland, toward the abode of their lord, King Yoky.

What a scene!

Here, helping himself along with two crotched roots, hobbled a dwarf without legs; another stalked before, one arm fixed in the air, like a lightning rod; a third, more active than any, seal-like, flirted a pair of flippers, and went skipping along; a fourth hopped on a solitary pin, at every bound, spinning around like a top, to gaze; while still another, furnished with feelers or fins, rolled himself up in a ball, bowling over the ground in advance."

The sleet cuts into my eyes, and I incise deeper the lines among the features, steel myself to the weather. Limping, steady-gaited, I turn into the path, past the frosted jonquils, leading to the door. The heavy latch responds.

Oh, Daddy, Daddy—close the door, quick! Only one of my three children turns, the youngest, Jenifer. And quickly her back is to me again, like the others.

As I stand just inside the closed door, shaking the weather from me, there is, first, the warmth of the house—central heating and therefore without source, simply a presence—then the second warmth, radiant from a source, and it is this that draws the family, as I felt drawn, as a child, to the black wood range, back in the kitchen: the family, now, the children, attentive to the glowing vacuum tube: the television. Taking off my coat, watching the hunched heads, the shoulders, the little backsides perched on stools, I think, for a moment,

(of Maria Melville, Herman Melville’s mother, who, it is reliably reported, would require her eight children to sit on little stools around her bed, motionless, while she took her daily nap, that she might keep track of them)

of the weird business, soon after we got the TV, of the electronic particles that hit the screen one night, and then kept recurring—I was in the kitchen, and the children came running, said there was a woman’s face interfering with the cowboys—I recognized her from the show the night before—she stayed for a while, went away, and kept coming back—the service man tried to explain her, the local station, even the network people—none could give an answer, they had to take out the set, put in a new one.

Stepping into the kitchen, I reach at once for the oven

BECAUSE MY WIFE WORKS. I don’t make enough money at General Motors to support the family—and it is this—this mystery, that my classmates at medical school are now making twenty, forty, fifty thousand a year, and I, possessing the same sheepskin, Doctor of Medicine, and with a school record better actually than most of theirs, but the sheepskin is furled, in the attic, and I am unshingled, I cannot, will not practice, and this is mysterious to me

and so Linda works, going on the second shift at GM, already at her machine before I leave the first, and we have dates on the weekends. She cooks dinner before leaving home, puts it in the Frigidaire in warm weather, in the oven in cold, leaves the kids in care of the vacuum tube,

and I reach for the oven.

Now, there is a kind of ceremony about this, that I like. I, Michael Mills, presiding over the kitchen, the living room, the children, the house and grounds—a great chief, chef (of a meal already cooked), un jefe grande—Opening the oven door, lifting out the meatloaf and setting it on the stove, I stand for a moment, rubbing the five o’clock stubble on the mandible, listening to the sounds of home (cowboy bullets) from the next room, and thinking

of Ushant, the old tar in WHITE-JACKET who survived the massacre of the beards—one of the people, merely, he held the hair of his chin, grimly, against the officers

and of Melville’s own—no soft silken beard, but tight curled like the horse hair breaking out of old upholstered chairs, firm and wiry to the grasp, and squarely chopped.

and thinking, too, as the warm air from the open oven fills the room, of

Melville’s daughter, Fanny, reporting him to be unhandy with tools, of no use around the house,

and thinking that, as common sailor on many a ship, he must have learned a certain handiness—but this he would not employ, to benefit THE BARK OF DOMESTIC FELICITY . . .

and passing the meatloaf to the table, and the beans and the potatoes, from the top of the stove, there is a momentary recall, a pleasurable memory in the glands and the blood, of the three occasions when the children were born—I took leave from work and kept house while Linda was in the hospital, and each day, after cleaning, washing, making beds and taking in the milk, there was the ceremony of cooking dinner—made truly ceremonial, made ritual by the fact that, for a week, I grew a helluva ragged beard, and, as I cooked each evening, drank a glass of white port wine and smoked a black, child-destroying, outsize cigar

Now, the leaf called tobacco is of diverse species and sorts. Not to dwell upon vile Shag, Pig-tail, Plug, Nail-rod, Negro-head, Cavendish, and misnamed Lady’s twist . . .

Knowing better than to call the children before the commercials are over, I sit at the table and wait, warm and reminiscent. Then—we might have pickles, milk for the children, butter for beans and potatoes, and—a glance through the window at the steady dripping rain, the thick atmosphere—and

ale must be drank in a fog and a drizzle.

These from the Frigidaire to the table, and a swallow of ale inside; turning the bottle in my hand, and then staring at the jar of pickles, and my hand goes off the bottle and into my pocket, drawing forth a fragment of paper, before I think the connection. Shard of an old shopping list:

pickles

&

popsicles

and a scribbling on the back, that I must have copied or added,

Pick-L-Joy

&

Popsie Pete

"enclose the wrapper

with twenty-five cents

and you will

receive two ball point pens"

The cowboy bullets have changed to talking cereal boxes, and I begin to serve the plates. In a moment, the children come to the table, and we have jokes, laughter, squabbles, scattered information, questions, jumping up and sitting down, a few tears, and—only casually and incidentally—the business of eating. Still, for all that,

a better temper than prevailed in the Melville household, where Herman would harangue his wife and two daughters (this was after the sons were gone) on matters that had no interest for them, and they would roll their eyes, and sigh, and wait, or there would be outbursts of temper, sarcasm

Daddy, are we going to have a dessert tonight? A popsicle?

There is an experience that I must try to understand, and it has to do with awareness, with a point in time and perhaps also in space where the awareness may be fixed, a time-space location, such as, say, a whale-ship, or perhaps what a cosmologist means when he says—with his stage the universe—A fundamental observer partakes of the motion of the substratum, that is, he is located on a fundamental particle. Or, in my own terms, there is Carl, my brother, and the picture that flashes is Carl laughing, holding a book and laughing, and, at once, the illusion of hugeness, an illusion fostered, perhaps, by contrast with my own small frame, but shared nonetheless by others who also reported it, and it came not from height, for he was only five foot eight, but perhaps from a way of using himself, arrogant and careless, from a general stockiness of build, from a sultanic gluteus maximus, and, most of all, from the monstrous, out-shapen head that heaved and rolled with his mood, upon his shoulders. And it is all there, in this picture that flashed up from some back corner of my brain: the hugeness, a little of what Pliny meant when he said that nature creates monsters for the purpose of astonishing us and amusing herself, and of the meaning of the word Teratology, the medical term for the Science of Malformations and Monstrosities, from the Greek teratologia, meaning a telling of wonders. It is in the way his body and head shift, shake, and revolve, as he laughs, as though composed of epicenters, randomly contiguous, with no single center, the parts loose, accidentally associated; it is in his hands, which are large hands, but again not as large as they appear from the way he uses them, the manner he has of holding the book, possessing it loosely, embracing it so as altogether to smother it, and at the same time letting it go loosely from his fingers, holding it at no single point, seeming to extend some of the casual humanity through his extremities into the very binding and paper, so that the pages flutter with the fierceness of the wings of a bird trapped, as he loses his place and finds it again, and quotes, from WHITE-JACKET:

I love an indefinite, infinite background—a vast, heaving, rolling, mysterious rear.

And again the burst of laughter, the explosion and reshaping of his body, the unplanned and weirdly incomplete arcs described by his head, the book squeezed and relinquished in one gesture. And as I hold this picture in my brain, this momentary recall—or as I am held by it—and add to it, bring alongside it, the fact, the datum: Carl is dead, killed by gases released into a pan beneath his chair in the death chamber at Jefferson City, Missouri—this, his execution, being the last in a series of events as strangely associated as everything in his life, and which I still do not understand; when these—the image of him laughing, quoting, and the fact of his execution—are brought together, there is this experience, the fixing of my awareness at some time-space point that I am unable to identify, a seizure of elation

My memory is a life beyond birth . . .

Melville, in MARDI. And there is this: the time-space point is not limited to my own lifespan, nor to the surfaces of the earth that I have traveled—nor are these areas excluded. My body feels dull, the blood slows, sensation withdraws from the extremities and consciousness, toward the trunk, and the meatloaf sits in ale, undigested in my stomach.

There is, after this, an illumination, an area of local bodily sensation, random and ephemeral, one following another, as a corollary, perhaps, an inscrutable hint, to the time-space fix itself—an intense warmth just above the heart, then something, an alertness, say, in the cells of the thigh; an ache in the shoulder, answered in a vertebra, and back again to the shoulder . . . and in the club, in the high, thick-soled boot, a tingling

Daddy! Daddy!

It is Jenifer, and her voice conveys alarm. I localize myself, search out the condition that she has discovered, and realize that, for some moments, I have been gazing at her, altogether oblivious to her. I glance for a moment at the room, open the senses: the old woodwork painted white, the warm air, the food smells. Turning to Jenifer—a smile, a word, a gesture, and she is restored. The dinner begins to move once more.

But eating I recall the medical student, interning in obstetrics, who made a custom of talking to newborn infants, presenting simple requests such as open your eyes, raise your right hand, or the like, and claimed remarkable results—the nurses liked to have him around, said he could quiet the most irritated or soothe the most feverish child;—pursuing his research, he developed a strange look, began to study philosophy and religion, and left medicine abruptly for divinity school.

One of the greatest pleasures of this house is the presence in it of the old chimney. In a fit of modernizing, Mother once wanted to cover it with wallboard, but I protested, successfully. A great mass of stone and mortar, it centers and roots the house; and, although all the fireplaces except the one in the livingroom have been sealed, portions of it appear, the stonework obtruding, refusing to be hidden, in nearly every room. Sitting at the table, now, observing the corner of it that appears in the kitchen, the sealed flue opening before which the old black cookstove used to sit, I am reminded of Melville’s I AND MY CHIMNEY—and of the engineers, when we put in the furnace, telling me that the old chimney couldn’t be used, a new one would have to be built, the flue wouldn’t work—and of how I argued and persisted, with the result that now the stones impart flue heat—heat that would otherwise be wasted—to every room of the house, and even the long, narrow attic, running the length of the house, the attic where I keep my desk and books, the husbanding of Melville and medicine, history and archeology, even the attic is made livable, on a stormy spring night, by virtue of heat radiant from the old stones.

The children have begun the nightly chore of cleaning up the table and washing the dishes—spreading the job, fluctuant between dishwater and television. The day’s manifest obligations having been met, it is not difficult for me to ascend the two flights to the attic—the heavy foot following the light, and then leading it—to meet, to face, to examine, perhaps, some of the other obligations, such as

Item: a Post-mortem: to understand my brother Carl

and

Item: for the living, myself and others, to discover what it is to heal, and why, as a doctor, I will not.

TWO

"Save the prairie-hen, sometimes startled from its lurking-place in the rank grass; and, in their migratory season, pigeons, high overhead on the wing, in dense multitudes eclipsing the day like a passing storm-cloud; save these—there being no wide woods with their underwood—birds were strangely few.

"Blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie. ‘It is the bed of a dried-up sea,’ said the companionless sailor—no geologist—to himself, musing at twilight upon the fixed undulations of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the horizon, and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at