And I would yell into the mad clashing of bells and echoes, “Laugh, Jack, laugh!”
After the prison break, the College President would shoot convicts down below from the belfry. The acoustics of the valley would cause the escapees to make many wrong guesses as to where the shots were coming from.
8
In my day, the bells no longer swung. They were welded to rigid shafts. Their clappers had been removed. They were struck instead by bolts thrust by electricity from Niagara Falls. Their singing could be stopped in an instant by brakes lined with neoprene.
The room in which a dozen or more learning-disabled bell-pullers used to be zonked out of their skulls by hellishly loud cacophony contained a 3-octave keyboard against 1 wall. The holes for the ropes in the ceiling had been plugged and plastered over.
Nothing works up there anymore. The room with the keyboard and the belfry above were riddled by bullets and also bazooka shells fired by escaped convicts down below after a sniper up among the bells shot and killed 11 of them, and wounded 15 more. The sniper was the President of Tarkington College. Even though he was dead when the convicts got to him, they were so outraged that they crucified him in the loft of the stable where the students used to keep their horses, at the foot of Musket Mountain.
So a President of Tarkington, my mentor Sam Wakefield, blew his brains out with a Colt .45. And his successor, although he couldn’t feel anything, was crucified.
One would have to say that that was extra-heavy history.
As for light history: The no longer useful clappers of the bells were hung in order of size, but unlabeled, on the wall of the foyer of this library, above the perpetual-motion machines. So it became a college tradition for upperclasspersons to tell incoming freshmen that the clappers were the petrified penises of different mammals. The biggest clapper, which had once belonged to Beelzebub, the biggest bell, was said to be the penis of none other than Moby Dick, the Great White Whale.
Many of the freshmen believed it, and were watched to see how long they went on believing it, just as they had been watched when they were little, no doubt, to see how long they would go on believing in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus.
Vietnam.
Most of the letters to The Musketeer protesting the modernization of the Lutz Carillon are from people who had somehow hung on to the wealth and power they had been born to. One, though, is from a man who admitted that he was in prison for fraud, and that he had ruined his life and that of his family with his twin addictions to alcohol and gambling. His letter was like this book, a gallows speech.
One thing he had still looked forward to, he said,
after he had paid his debt to society, was returning to Scipio to ring the bells with ropes again.
“Now you take that away from me,” he said.
One letter is from an old bell-puller, very likely dead by now, a member of the Class of 1924 who had married a man named Marthinus de Wet, the owner of a gold mine in Krugersdorp, South Africa. She knew the history of the bells, that they had been made from weapons gathered up after the Battle of Gettysburg. She did not mind that the bells would soon be played electrically. The bad idea, as far as she was concerned, was that the sour bells, Pickle and Lemon and Big Cracked John and Beelzebub, were going to be turned on lathes in Belgium until they were either in tune or on the scrap heap.
“Are Tarkington students no longer to be humanized and humbled as I was day after day,” she asked, “by the cries from the bell tower of the dying on the sacred, blood-soaked grounds of Gettysburg?”
The bells controversy inspired a lot of purple prose like that, much of it dictated to a secretary or a machine, no doubt. It is quite possible that Mrs. de Wet graduated from Tarkington without being able to write any better than most of the ill-educated prisoners across the lake.
If my Socialist grandfather, nothing but a gardener at Butler University, could read the letter from Mrs. de Wet and note its South African return address, he would be grimly gratified. There was a clear-as-crystal demonstration of a woman living high on profits from the labor of black miners, overworked and underpaid.
He would have seen exploitation of the poor and powerless in the growth of the prison across the lake as well. The prison to him would have been a scheme for depriving the lower social orders of leadership in the Class Struggle and for providing them with a horrible alternative to accepting whatever their greedy paymasters would give them in the way of working conditions and subsistence.
By the time I got to Tarkington College, though, he would have been wrong about the meaning of the prison across the lake, since poor and powerless people, no matter how docile, were no longer of use to canny investors. What they used to do was now being done by heroic and uncomplaining machinery.
So an appropriate sign to put over the gate to Athena might have been, instead of “Work Makes Free,” for example: “Too bad you were born. Nobody has any use for you,” or maybe: “Come in and stay in, all you burdens on Society.”
9
A former roommate of Ernest Hubble Hiscock, the dead war hero, who had also been in the war, who had lost an arm as a Marine on Iwo Jima, wrote that the memorial Hiscock himself would have wanted most was a promise by the Board of Trustees at the start of each academic year to keep the enrollment the same size it had been in his time.
So if Ernest Hubble Hiscock is looking down from Heaven now, or wherever it is that war heroes go after dying, he would be dismayed to see his beloved campus surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. The bells are shot to hell. The number of students, if you can call convicts that, is about 2,000 now.
When there were only 300 “students” here, each one had a bedroom and a bathroom and plenty of closets all his or her own. Each bedroom was part of a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom suite with a common living room for 2. Each living room had couches and easy chairs and a working fireplace, and state-of-the-art sound-reproduction equipment and a big-screen TV.
At the Athena state prison, as I would discover when I went to work over there, there were 6 men to each cell and each cell had been built for 2. Each 50 cells had a recreation room with one Ping-Pong table and one TV. The TV, moreover, showed only tapes of programs, including news, at least 10 years old. The idea was to keep the prisoners from becoming distressed about anything going on in the outside world that hadn’t been all taken care of one way or the other, presumably, in the long-ago.
They could feast their eyes on whatever they liked, just so long as it wasn’t relevant.
How those letter-writers loved not just the college but the whole Mohiga Valley—the seasons, the lake, the forest primeval on the other side. And there were few differences between student pleasures in their times and my own. In my time, students didn’t skate on the lake anymore, but on an indoor rink given in 1971 by the Israel Cohen Family. But they still had sailboat races and canoe races on the lake. They still had picnics by the ruins of the locks at the head of the lake. Many students still brought their own horses to school with them. In my time, several students brought not just 1 horse but 3, since polo was a major sport. In 1976 and again in 1980, Tarkington College had an undefeated polo team. There are no horses in the stable now, of course. The escaped convicts, surrounded and starving a mere 4 days after the prison break, calling themselves “Freedom Fighters” and flying an American flag from the top of the bell tower of this library, ate the horses and the campus dogs, too, and fed pieces of them to their hostages, who were the Trustees of the college.