26. The lawsuit was finally settled. Box 17, Legal Documents, JBP.
27. The ether had already been administered. The heroics as described by Nurse Monette (New England Medical Union Oral History Collection) were only slightly exaggerated in the yellow press. Jonathan’s “rescue” by a motley band of side show performers and irate Blashette family members was the stuff of the “mellerdrama” or some heart-stopping Kinetoscopic short. What we know to be true is that the rescue party did indeed storm the operating room just as Dr. Meemo was positioning the amputation saw, not, in fact, over the tertiary leg — nor any leg, for that matter — but over Blashette’s right arm. Numerous eyewitness accounts attest to Meemo’s advanced state of inebriation at the time and the subsequent Keystone Cops-like arrest of both Meemo (for public intoxication and potential malpractice) and several of the more anatomically intriguing members of the sideshow brigade who mistakenly entered the children’s ward and frightened the youngsters into eating not only everything on their dinner plates but their paper napkins as well.
28. “I, Jonathan Blashette, make these solemn vows.” JBP. In addition to vowing never again to seek removal of the extraneous leg, Jonathan made a number of other promises to his thirteen-year-old self. Below is the full text of Jonathan’s “Promissory Note to Myself.”
On this day, February 12, 1901, I, Jonathan Blashette, vow the following:
1. Given the grave risk of accidental removal of a non-designated appendage, I will never again seek to dispatch any part of my body with which I have been either blessed or inconvenienced by the good Lord, nor will I ever again complain of my lot on this earth.
2. I will apply myself to diligent study and mold myself into a man to make my mother and father exceedingly proud.
3. I will marry a woman with large and exciting breasts, like those on Batanya Batavia, the hatchetman’s assistant.
4. I will seek a career in either the ministry or as a fitter in women’s foundation furnishings.
5. I will serve my country and my fellow man through whatever means are offered to me but will never — regardless of financial incentive — dress up like a clown because some people find clowns scary or at the very least comically unengaging.
6. I will buy my mother an emerald choker, one size too large as a margin of safety.
7. I will transport myself thirty years into the future as did the gentleman in Mr. Wells’s novel The Time Machine and I will find out where my future self will be stationed at that particular moment, and I will hide behind a hedge with the intention of jumping out and startling him but because my intended victim will remember being the me of thirty years previous, he will be prepared for this prank and will not be in the least bit frightened but will wag a finger at me, and say, “I’ve been waiting for you, rascal!” and invite me to sup with him and he will let me drink beer because he will know how much he wanted to but was prevented from doing so when he was thirteen, and it will be a very droll evening indeed.
8. I will become one of Governor Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and serve with him on his next military campaign, especially if it is in some exotic place such as Hawaii or Tahiti where island girls wink at you as they feed you coconut meat with their supple island fingers.
5 HOME AGAIN, HOME AGAIN, JIGGITY JIG
1. The homecoming was bliss. Jonathan’s Diary, JBP.
2. The next morning he entered Pettiville High School. Some say through the north door, others the south door; there is also a small camp that believes that Jonathan entered the school through the kitchen and nipped a egg cream cup as he passed. Obviously, this is inconsequential. (It is also becoming obvious that this book has been seriously over-researched.) The most salient fact here is that Jonathan was home safe and sound, and back in school. His circus days were over. Life for young Jonathan Blashette had finally taken a promising turn.
3. Even at this early age, Jonathan had become a crusader. Always a compassionate child, Jonathan’s concern for others less fortunate than himself and especially for the maltreated and oppressed of society only grew stronger as he matured into late adolescence. Living with side show performers whose physical defects had left them open to abuse and societal marginalizing only strengthened the boy’s resolve to fight for the rights of all those who were similarly relegated. This group included Native Americans as well. I discovered among Jonathan’s papers a very telling letter from author L. Frank Baum, dated January 27, 1904. It was apparently written in response to one that Jonathan had sent him. (Jonathan’s letter no longer exists. According to Baum, the drawing that accompanied it was immediately destroyed; one suspects that the letter itself quickly met the same end.) Nonetheless, the beacon of Jonathan’s courage shines through by inference.
Dear Master Blashette,
Thank you for your letter of January 22. For a young man of fifteen you express yourself quite well. If you were to choose a career as a writer you would be well served by your talent.
While I commend your command of the language, the content and thrust of your missive was most unwelcome. Your anger is curiously misdirected, or shall I say, microscopically directed. Is my position not one shared by hundreds of thousands of other white Americans? Will you write vituperative letters to all of these good people as well? You will be a busy lad. I suggest you get to work without delay!
I have not altered the opinion I held in the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer editorials to which you refer, and that is that our safety even in this relatively new century continues to depend upon the total extermination of the Indians. I will agree with you that we have wronged the savage Red Man for centuries. But while you suggest that we make amends in whatever way possible for those decades of subjugation, I strongly argue the opposite course of action. The red-skinned barbarian will never submit to our civilizing influence. He will insist on retaining claim to land to which by his innate primitivism he has lost clear title. Anger-fueled violence toward our government will never subside. Without hope of reconciliation or redress, it is most efficacious for us to simply finish the job we started: wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth and be done with it. Unless we take swift action along these lines, our great nation will remain under-civilized, its enormous potential unrealized. We have no choice: the Red Man must be eliminated.My secretary tells me that your letter was accompanied by a picture which you had drawn that was of such a distressing nature that she was forced to place it directly into the hearth fire to ensure that none of the many children who wander into my office would find it and be harmed by the exposure.
Young man, I think it should be possible for you to disagree with me on this matter without making a shamefully obscene mockery of my work. My secretary tells me that your drawing depicted a full scale Indian assault on the characters in my children’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the picture the savages have eviscerated the Scarecrow, chopped the Tin Man into a pile of scrap metal, and skinned the Lion and hung him upon a spit, his face twisted in agonizing death throes. Young Dorothy lay writhing upon the blood-streaked Yellow Road, her scalp peeled horrifically from her skull.