But my foot finds no auger holes, and if bare, would roll like a globe on the old planks.
Reaching the desk, I sit down, body straight out as before, head tilted back. .
“But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable) thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jawbone tiller smote my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, in spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way, inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship’s stern, with my back to her prow and the compass.”
My eyes suddenly grow dim. I am, in effect, under water, my vision snuffing out like candle flames. I am rigid, but alive, aware.
There is a sense of motion, barely perceptible, yet abrupt; motion neither within nor around me, but something of both. .
like the cadaverous man in the mental hospital, haggard with sleeplessness, who fixed a rigid grip on his bedposts every night, “to keep from slipping away”. .
Or Melville in OMOO, feet in the stocks, waking with the notion of being dragged. .
Or perhaps like an old sea captain, comfortably resting in his home ashore, startled by the thought of the house pitching. .
“It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another. .”
I am covered from head to foot, unable to move, a small boy, standing upright; I taste dirt on my lips. There is a moment of amnesia, and, separate from this, the knowledge that the bottoms of my feet hurt, and the lower spine and back of the head have been jolted. Then, the recognition, the discovery: I have fallen, with arms pinned to my body, into the empty post-hole, around the edges of which I had a moment before been playing.
With this recognition comes the experience: I had wandered from Carl, discovered the freshly dug holes along the edge of the field, had inspected them one after another, skipping over them, leaning into them, dropping pebbles in, and finally, reaching the last and loneliest, farthest from the house, had slipped on the clubfoot, and, as in burial of a sailor died at sea, had slid beneath the surface and out of sight.
The modified sensations linger in my body, still rigid in the chair, as more of the emotion comes back: the desolation and helplessness, the abandonment; the stopping of time, and, in its place, a circular expansion of sensation, a vortex in reverse, limitless in proportion to my physical confinement. Almost dizzy, I am not at first aware of the shadow that moves over my head, or even of my father’s hands slipping under my arms to lift me out. It is only the merest chance that he decided to survey his day’s digging, and heard my cries.
Worse than the accident itself were the cold pity I received, the assumption, without asking, that the “bad foot” was to blame, and my own knowledge that this and only this saved me from punishment. . There was, too, the nature of the accident, the ignominy of it; especially as it came soon after Carl’s more dramatic tumble out of the haymow, twelve feet to the concrete floor of the barn. .
(We had been playing in the hay, and when I ducked suddenly, he lunged past me and over the edge. I looked up and watched him falclass="underline" he landed flat on his back, his rump, shoulder blades and back of his head taking the blow; he appeared to bounce, the act of rising being continuous with that of falling, so that he was for a moment off the floor again, landing the second time on his feet, and emitting two single words,
“JESUS CHRIST!”
that my father claimed to have heard at the far end of the cornfield, half a mile away.
(He staggered for a moment, and shook himself — the motion originating in his buttocks, and rising loosely through his torso, until finally his great head rocked and shivered; then he glanced at me, and, for an instant, there was a queer smile, at once large-hearted and derisive, and a look in his eye that understood and conveyed more than he could speak. Then he raced for the ladder, and a moment later we were playing again in the hay, the accident ignored.
My body relaxes a little, releases itself, unwilling to participate further in the work of the mind. Other images, however, come flashing in. .
I see Carl, age twelve, the time he found a bottle of gin, and got himself fabulously drunk. No longer able to stand, he suddenly discovered that he could roll the pupils of his eyes in little circles, and could control the motion: rolling them first one way then the other, clockwise and counterclockwise; then rolling one eye at a time, while the other was still; rolling both at once, each in a different direction; then reversing the directions. This gave him an idiotic satisfaction, and he continued until he passed out, going to sleep without ever lowering his eyelids, so that when he was snoring, I could still see the naked eyes, free of design and volition, meandering. .
Now I see him swimming, going under the surface to take in a mouthful of water, then coming up, floating on his back, his body all belly and head in profile, while he spouts a great long stream of water, so that it seems he must have the whole lake in his head.
“But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton. .”
Melville, speaking of the sperm whale; and
“It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale!”
and
“If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down to the human magnitude) among a plate of men’s skulls, and you would involuntarily confound it with them. .”
Now it is Carl coming at me, in mock fierceness, when we are roughhousing. He imitates a professional wrestler, ape-like, all arms and shoulders, with the illusion not only of having no neck, but of his head actually being sunk in his body — a round, weather-smooth rock wedged in a cleft between boulders.