"Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

turer who nevertheless could not read or write. He now would be identified as a blameless inheritor of the
genetic defect known as dyslexia. He said of himself that he was like the Emperor Charlemagne, тАЬtoo
busy to learn to read and write.тАЭ He was not too busy, however, to have his wife read to him for 2 hours
every evening. He had an excellent memory, for he delivered weekly lectures to the workmen at the
factory that were laced with lengthy quotations from Shakespeare and Homer and the Bible, and on and
on.
He sired 4 children, a son and 3 daughters, all of whom could read and write. But they still carried the
gene of dyslexia, which would disqualify several of their own descendants from getting very far in
conventional schemes of education. Two of Aaron TarkingtonтАЩs children were so far from being dyslexic, in fact,
as to themselves write books, which I have read only now, and which nobody, probably, will ever read again.
AaronтАЩs only son, Elias, wrote a technical account of the construction of the Onondaga Canal, which con-
nected the northern end of Lake Mohiga to the Erie Canal just south of Rochester. And the youngest
daughter, Felicia, wrote a novel called Carpathia, about a headstrong, high-born young woman in the
Mohiga Valley who fell in love with a half-Indian lock-tender on that same canal.

That canal is all filled in and paved over now, and is Route 53, which forks at the head of the lake, where
the
locks used to be. One fork leads southwest through farm country to Scipio. The other leads southeast
through the perpetual gloom of the Iroquois National Forest to the bald hilltop crowned by the battlements of the
New York State Maximum Security Adult Correctional Institution at Athena, a hamlet directly across the lake from
Scipio.
Bear with me. This is history. I am trying to explain how this valley, this verdant cul-de-sac, got to be
what it is today.

All 3 of Aaron TarkingtonтАЩs daughters married into prosperous and enterprising families in Cleveland,
New York, and Wilmington, DelawareтАФinnocently making the threat of dyslexia pandemic in an emerging ruling
class of bankers and industrialists, largely displaced in my time by Germans, Koreans, Italians, English,
and, of course, Japanese.
The son of Aaron, Elias, remained in Scipio and took over his fatherтАЩs properties, adding to them a brewery
and a steam-driven carpet factory, the first such in the state. There was no water power in Scipio, whose industrial
prosperity until the introduction of steam was based not on cheap energy and locally available raw materials but on
inventiveness and high standards of workmanship.
Elias Tarkington never married. He was severely wounded at the age of 54 while a civilian observer at the
Battle of Gettysburg, top hat and all. He was there to see the debuts of 2 of his inventions, a mobile field
kitchen and a pneumatic recoil mechanism for heavy artillery. The field kitchen, incidentally, with slight
modifications, would later be adopted by the Barnum &
Bailey Circus, and then by the German Army during World War I.

Elias Tarkington was a tall and skinny man with chin whiskers and a stovepipe hat. He was shot through
the right chest at Gettysburg, but not fatally.
The man who shot him was I of the few Confederate soldiers to reach the Union lines during PickettтАЩs
Charge. That Johnny Reb died in ecstasy among his enemies, believing that he had shot Abraham Lincoln. A
crumbling newspaper account I have found here in what used to be the college library, which is now the
prison library, gives his last words as follows: тАЬGo home, Bluebellies. Old SatanтАЩs daid.тАЭ
During my 3 years in Vietnam, I certainly heard plenty of last words by dying American footsoldiers.
Not 1 of them, however, had illusions that he had somehow accomplished something worthwhile in the
process of making the Supreme Sacrifice.
One boy of only 18 said to me while he was dying and I was holding him in my arms, тАЬDirty joke, dirty
joke.тАЭ