Genoa (32 page)
Authors: Paul Metcalf
“. . . Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair.
I am sleepy . . .”
There was the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly,
discussing a possible article on Melville:
“I can’t help thinking that there must be some good material on the subject, though probably it would be better still if Melville would only let go of life. So much more frankness of speech can be used when a fellow is apparently out of hearing. What you say of his aversion to publicity makes me pause . . .
“On second thought therefore, I believe we had better wait for our shot at Melville, when his personality can be more freely handled.”
. . . like Ovando, sending a ship to rescue Columbus on Jamaica: standing off shore, hovering, hoping him dead . . .
and Melville writes D
ANIEL
O
RME
:
“But let us come to the close of a sketch necessarily imperfect. One fine Easter Day, following a spell of rheumatic weather, Orme was discovered alone and dead on a height overlooking the seaward sweep of the great haven to whose shore, in his retirement from sea, he had moored. It was an evened terrace, destined for use in war, but in peace neglected and offering a sanctuary for anybody. Mounted on it was an obsolete battery of rusty guns. Against one of these he was found leaning, his legs stretched out before him; his clay pipe broken in twain, the vacant bowl and no spillings from it, attesting that his pipe had been smoked out to the last of its contents. He faced the outlet to the ocean. The eyes were open, still continuing in death the vital glance fixed on the hazy waters and the dim-seen sails coming and going or at anchor near by. What had been his last thoughts! If aught of reality lurked in the rumours concerning him, had remorse, had penitence any place in those thoughts? Or was there just nothing of either? After all, were his moodiness and mutterings, his strange freaks, starts, eccentric shrugs and grimaces, were these but the grotesque additions like the wens and knobs and distortions of the trunk of an old chance apple-tree in an inclement upland, not only beaten by many storms, but also obstructed in its natural development by the chance of its having first sprouted among hard-packed rock? In short, that fatality, no more encrusting him, made him what he came to be? Even admitting that there was something dark that he chose to keep to himself, what then? Such reticence may sometimes be more for the sake of others than one’s self. No, let us believe that the animal decay before mentioned still befriended him to the close, and that he fell asleep recalling through the haze of memory many a far-off scene of the wide world’s beauty dreamily suggested by the hazy waters before him.
“He lies buried among other sailors, for whom also strangers performed one last rite in a lonely plot overgrown with wild eglantine uncared for by man.”
and on the 28th of September, 1891, Melville—unwilling to face another northern winter—died . . .
there was the dedication of B
ILLY
B
UDD
: to an old shipmate, Jack Chase, “wherever that great heart may now be . . .”
and Melville’s physician signed the certificate, ascribing death to “Cardiac dilitation . . .”
ENLARGEMENT OF THE HEART
I get up, stand by the desk, and turn off the light. A thin bit of gray comes through the attic window. There is a strange smell of gas, sulphurous, that I had smelled earlier, much earlier in the evening . . .
WILLIAMS KIDNAPPERS
DIE SIDE BY SIDE IN
MISSOURI GAS CHAMBER
Mrs. Heady,
Mills Chat
Before Death
From
UP
And
AP
Reports
JEFFERSON CITY
, Mo., Friday, Dec. 18—Bonnie Heady and Carl Mills died side by side in a swirl of poison gas early today for kidnapping a little boy and killing him.
In the last hours before they were taken to the death house, the killers had kept a strange composure.
. . . deadly fumes with the faint scent of almonds.
the daylight is getting stronger . . .
treading softly, I go downstairs, both flights, and into the kitchen. I stand by the table, resting one hand on it, trying to listen to the silence. The refrigerator motor turns on, becomes a steady hum. I hear one of the children, Jenifer, stirring . . .
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Genoa
was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Caslon.
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