Authors: Paul Metcalf
Genoa (28 page)
The work of bringing out the dead proceeded slowly, the bodies being brought singly. Rescue workers were handicapped by gas fumes which flooded the mine immediately after the explosion.
Tremendous crowds thronged the scene soon after word of the disaster spread . . .
Wives and children of miners employed in the shaft crowded about, seeking information, and groups of waiting, sobbing women and children clustered about as the news was broken that 51 of the men were known to be dead.
I recall standing beside Mother—Carl on the other side, a hand of hers reaching to each of us—waiting, hour after hour, not moving . . . and when the body was brought up, the faces of the others turned toward us—curiosity locked in compassion—Mother waiting (Carl and I looking to her, even though it be disaster, wanting to be sure), waiting until the body were brought before her—and, as she recognized him, Father, her hand clutching, tightening . . .
Most authentic reports of the accident were that the explosion occurred when miners either cut into abandoned workings or a slight cave-in opened old entries in which gas had collected, the miners’ lamps setting off the pocket of gas . . .
Men who had been in the mine said the explosion seemed to go in gusts, some being suffocated, others horribly burned, while others were but slightly burned. Many were hurled about rooms and entries . . .
Rope lines established by local authorities and miners failed to check the rush of hundreds who flocked to the mine.
(. . . rushing, eddying to the disaster . . .
there was the long period of waiting, and discovery—the knowledge, in the pit of my stomach, that something had happened, the excitement, the image of his face, as Carl and Mother and I saw it before us, his body—waiting for the realization, the understanding of it to burst upon me . . .
like a holiday: the normal, daily laws of living abrogated—waiting to discover what it was, what it meant, that Father was dead . . .
. . . followed by disappointment, as there was no discovery, no bursting upon me, but only dullness, a slow seepage of understanding . . . and the poverty doubled in, feeding upon itself, as we lived now, a family of three, on the compensation—$13.20 a week—allowed by the law . . .
with the numbness: the absence of Father, who, even in failure, had provided a dimension that was now gone . . .
Where Melville dove, Dreiser floated . . . a great mass of pity, cut off . . .
Hurstwood, in S
ISTER
C
ARRIE
, as Dreiser’s father, sitting alone, apathetic in his rocker:
“Hurstwood saw her depart with some faint feelings of shame, which were the expression of a manhood rapidly becoming stultifed.”
and the drear, the cold, wint’ry drear of Hurstwood, struggling to reclaim himself as a $2-a-day scab in the Brooklyn trolley strike . . .
Dreiser, who was sterile—terminating his sons before their conception, giving them, therefore, shorter lives, shorter agonies than Melville’s sons—nevertheless took the trouble, on a trip to Europe, to hunt out his father’s birthplace . . .
searching the sources, the roots, the blasted paternity . . . Theodore Dreiser, Indiana-born, doorkeeper of the century . . .
(in ancient Rome, the double barbican gate in the Forum—dedicated to Janus, supreme janitor—was closed during times of peace, open only in war . . .
A
FTER
M
OBY
-D
ICK
, the sinking, Melville, with pseudonyms and anonyms, kept trying to die, as P
IERRE
. . .
“. . . death-milk for thee and me!”
B
ENITO
C
ERENO
. . .
“seguid vuestro jefe”
and B
ARTLEBY THE
S
CRIVENER
. . .
opening lines, written when he was 34: “I am a rather elderly man.”
and like Columbus, in search of death, he turned to the Holy Land, Sodom, the Dead Sea . . .
“. . . foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog—smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & Bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I.—Old boughs tossed up by water—relics of pick-nick—nought to eat but bitumen & ashes with dessert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea.— . . .”
and Columbus, following the 3rd voyage, liberated from his chains by the Sovereigns,
(as Melville had been liberated, temporarily, from the chains of poverty, by Judge Shaw,
turned inland
(as Melville turned inland, in P
IERRE
,
to another scheme: the liberation of Jerusalem . . .
retiring to the convent of Las Cuevas, he began work on the B
OOK OF
P
ROPHECIES
:
“St. Augustine says that the end of this world is to come in the seventh millenary of years from its creation . . . there are only lacking
155
years to complete the
7000,
in which year the world must end.”
“The greatest part of the prophecies and Sacred Writing is already finished.”
thus foreclosing on the future of the hemisphere he had discovered,
. . . condoning and justifying all brutalities against the Indians, as extreme haste must be made to convert the heathen . . .
Melville:
“With wrecks in a garret I’m stranded . . .”
and
“Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.”
Columbus, on Jamaica:
“Solitary in my trouble, sick, and in daily expectation of death . . .”
and back in Spain, 1504, still trying to get to the Court to present his claims and grievances—too weak and ill to make the trip on foot or on horseback—requests the loan of a funeral bier from the Cathedral of Seville:
“This day, their Worships ordered that there should be loaned to the Admiral Columbus the mortuary bier in which was carried the body of the Lord Cardinal Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, whom may God have in his keeping, in order that he may go to the Court, and a guarantee was taken from Francisco Pinelo which assured the return of the said bier to this church in safety.”
. . . to be carried out of his disaster like Ishmael, on the floating coffin . . .
But Melville, after trying through the long middle years to die, put out a late, late bloom . . .
(scores & underscores, in a volume of Thomas Hood: “. . . the full extent of that poetical vigour which seemed to advance just in proportion as his physical health declined.”
. . . in his sixties and seventies, came to life:
“We the Lilies whose palor is passion . . .”
“. . . the winged blaze that sweeps my soul
Like prairie fires . . .”
“To flout pale years of cloistral life
And flush me in this sensuous strife.”
“The innocent bare-foot! young, so young!”
“The plain lone bramble thrills with Spring”
“The patient root, the vernal sense
Surviving hard experience . . .”
In a volume, transparently dedicated to Lizzie.
“. . . white nun, that seemly dress
Of purity pale passionless,
A May-snow is; for fleeting term,
Custodian of love’s slumbering germ . . .”
“I came unto my roses late.
What then? these gray hairs but disguise,
Since down in heart youth never dies . . .”
“Time, Amigo, does but masque us—
Boys in gray wigs, young . . .”
and elsewhere:
“Could I remake me! or set free
This sexless bound in sex, then plunge
Deeper than Sappho, in a lunge
Piercing Pan’s paramount mystery!
For, Nature, in no shallow surge
Against thee either sex may urge . . .”
Sappho, and Hart Crane . . .
surely, if Melville died before he was born, then, too, he was born before he died . . .
. . . and on the 4th voyage, aging and ill, forbidden by the Sovereigns to enter San Domingo, Columbus set sail for that very port. Ovando, the new governor, busy with a fleet of 28 vessels embarking for Spain, refused to admit the Admiral . . . on board the fleet were Francisco Bobadilla, who earlier had chained Columbus; Francisco Roldan, archrebel; and a rich cargo of West Indian gold . . .
Columbus warned them not to sail, that a storm was brewing . . .
perhaps he noted an oily swell from the southeast, abnormal tides, oppressive air, veiled cirrus clouds, gusty winds on the water’s surface, brilliant sunset illuminating the sky, and large numbers of seal and dolphin on the surface . . .
(as well as twinges in rheumatic joints . . .
But the others laughed, called him a diviner and a prophet,
(Like Melville, in C
LAREL
, predicting for the New World:
(“Not only men, the state lives fast—
Fast breeds the pregnant eggs and shells,
The slumberous combustibles
Sure to explode . . .”
Ovando’s fleet set out boldly, under full sail: headed into the full blast of the storm . . .
Later, when all but 3 or 4 of the 28 ships had gone down, with all hands lost—his enemies accused the old discoverer of having raised the tempest himself, by magic art . . .
When I went to St. Louis a third time, Carl was out of the hospital. It was pleasant weather—brisk and sunny—and he met me at the station with a borrowed car—a ’51 Plymouth station wagon.
There was vigor in his face, freshness in his actions. He had a crew haircut, and was sunburned. Standing at the train gate, his collar turned up, legs spread apart, hands thrust in his pockets, he looked boyish and strong.
(It wasn’t until after I had left him, when I was on my way back to Indianapolis, that I realized he had said nothing about what he was doing, where he was living, what his plans were—so completely was he taken up with the present moment—so thoroughly did he capture my assurances . . .
We headed west on
U
.
S
. 40, out of the city. I recalled Carl’s driving from childhood—from the first time he massacred the cornfield on a tractor. No less erratic now, he talked volubly, gestured with one hand and the other, moved his feet restlessly over the pedals—glanced only occasionally at the road, appropriating it as he wished.
He told me that
U
.
S
. 40 follows old animal and Indian trails, westward migration trails. It was known for a time as the Boone’s Lick Trail, for the salt lick developed by Daniel Boone and his sons. Carl told me—bouncing his broad rump, spreading his arms as he talked—how Boone had moved out here because he wanted more elbow room, Kentucky had become too crowded . . .