Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  We kept her room as she had left it. Her Raggedy Anne still on the bed, a beret on a chair as if just thrown down there, her little ukulele against the wall, her South Div yearbook, her phonograph, her black button purse, some cardboard 20 cent discs she had bought and a photo of Ted Lewis. How she loved to dance around her room singing with him. In those last years she became a woman before our eyes. Her hair was bobbed and waved in a fancy style but she had her grandmothers hawk face and far-seeing eyes. She had a great liking for sweet things. She loved Snirkles Bars and Barque’s root beer. She’d feast on them with her little Polish friends. They called her ‘Lynn’. Their laughing and stamping feet filled the house as I sat downstairs on the front room rocker listening to them. She also loved the movie houses, I took her to see ‘Gold Diggers of 1933’ and Laurel and Hardy in ‘Hog Wild’ and sometimes we’d drive downtown to watch the famous light display outside the Butterfly Movie Theater.

  Evie was easy to please. She liked everything: drives out in the Ford Tudor, walks by the lake. Especially trips to Jones Island. The city was breaking up the old shacks on our last visit there. We would walk along the beach along the lines of empty old wooden houses and I would tell her stories of the Great Lakes ghost ships. I could not help laughing at her antics. She had that gift to pull me out my mazy old ’aid. I knew then that she could be taken from me but I just thought it would be by some man. I was all primed up for boys in two-seater sedans, fast German boys from the West Side. Addie and I had talked of what we would do if she wanted to go out on dates but Evie had shown little interest in men. She liked those sloppy tunes though and maybe she kept her own secrets from us. That was the weakness of my selfish ways. My watching was for press hounds, for men with flash cameras and for letters with English stamps but the danger was to be quite different. Caw, my dear days, I’d got to be like a big old crab ahiding on the sea bed. I feared a pulling away of the shell I had built around myself.

  Ess, there was no forevision although there was a turrible ache like the time Evie caught a fever after taking swimming lessons at Bechstein’s Swimming School on the river. She had laid in sweaty sheets all night whispering “Sorry Pa… Sorry Pa…” over and over. I sat up over her until the fever broke. And once, in our first house on 5th Avenue right by the lake, she must have been six, I heard her screaming for me in the front yard. I galloped out in my shirt sleeves thinking that she had been hit by an auto. There was such relief to see her standing, with her black hair all tumbling in the sunlight. It turned out she had cut her bare foot on a piece of grass in the lawn and that was all so easy to fix.

  Doctor Kaiser: And what happened? Can you tell me what happened to her?

  —They used some sort of strong cleaner at work. Lysol, or something. I cannot bear to be near these strong killing chemicals now. They all seem to have a creosoty stink. They get you at the back of the throat like mothballs. Evie used that Neko germicidal soap for her spots and Addie had King Pine in its slope-shouldered bottle. They all had that smell. And the P & G naphtha laundry soap in its green packet, one dollar value for 25 cents, for soaking the woolens in the yard. The stink of the stuff—I should have seen it as a warning.

  Addie had taught Evie the trade. She had worked as a cleaner to help with money right through our time here. Folks liked her English voice and her wage helped pay for Evie’s music lessons and we could get little extras when Nash’s cut everybody’s pay. Evie was happy at her first proper job as a maid to Dr Kovacs, a doctor on West Wisconsin. Evie said that he was not a doctor, he was a ‘physician’. Same difference. The job was a chance for her to buy herself things. Forty dollars a month didn’t sound bad. We’d have wanted more for her, but we were happy to hide and not push ourselves forward. We’d had enough of that. Better to quietly get on. After her first day of work she came back all full of news about those rich Kovacs. She had been given the job on the Friday and started with them on the Monday. It was golden fall weather and she told us all about their swanky home. I grumbled to myself. It went bitter for me that my family were still servants in this country of freedom but I was happy to see her so merry.

  By the Wednesday Evelyn had come back from work more quietly. She complained of being tired out and later she told us of having a headache and feeling sick after cleaning all day. We got her to take some cocoa that night but she ate nort and went to bed early. She was out the next morning as bright as usual. Addie had stood at the front door and watched her go up South 10th and turn one last time to wave back. Then the police came knocking later that day and later still Detective Bailey came asking more questions. Then there had been the identification of the body and more turrible things after that.

  The inquest had been the first time that I had been back in court since the trial at Exeter but maybe it was worse for Addie with her memories of her father. Her Pa had drunk carbolic acid when she was young. Have I told you? Poor Addie, first her Pa, then Evie. In Evie’s case the only insanity was a careless doctor. We found out that the Kovacs had set Evie on to cleaning the curtains using a bottle of naphtha cleaning fluid. They called them drapes in the inquest but they were curtains. I saw it on the table in the inquest room. It had a label on it that read ‘Sunshine Cleaning Oil’ with a little poison sign on the bottom of the bottle. You would think a physician would know better but it was that wife of his, pushing Evie to spot clean the drapes and to do them again and again. I thought of Evie’s hands on the bottle, dabbing the stinking stuff onto gauze and wiping their rotten drapes with it in that warm little bathroom. I thought of her coughing, perhaps knocking the bottle over with the cap undone. Evie fainting, falling, great splashes of the stuff on her grey maid’s dress. While she was blacked out the air in the room must have filled with the mortal stuff. Her body was burned red at the neck and her skin smelt of it when I bent down to kiss her in the morgue. And it remained on her clothes also. I would never forget the awful smell of her things when they were sent back to us in a brown paper package.

  Reaching the dead

  I’ve been staring at a pic of Lee. His face seems like a big hole that grows and grows. I think the death of his daughter was his first real loss. That time death threaded his needle right through Lee’s heart. Everything before that somehow seemed not to touch him very much. Evie’s going wrecked him and he collapsed inward from his skin. I read in an archive copy of the Milwaukee Sentinel for 1934 that he attended the inquest but avoided the reporters. The story ended up on the front page. They headlined it, ‘Terrible Poisoning Tragedy’. Poor frickin’ bastard Lee, though there is nothing new in dying, grief is such a pot–hole. I think of him lying down on his daughter’s grave talking to where he thought her face was. Pouring out all his bad dreams to the uncomplaining dead.

  Maybe Lee is teaching me about living with loss. I told you Kimmie left me last summer. Just went back to her folks in Houston. I guess she got sick of the isolation here and my ambition and my cold water poverty. I used to keep that thirtieth Ode from Book Three of Horace pinned on my wall. The one that begins, “Exegi monumentum, aere perennis…” I explained to her that it meant, ‘I’m going to build me a monument, higher than the pyramids, safe from the gnawing wind and rain and the scouring years, a part of me that will never die.’ She wasn’t impressed with that, nor with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55. She couldn’t understand why I lived by that stuff and was damned sure she wasn’t going to be no Muse neither.

  Man, I miss her! Even spent three days driving down to that bayou outside of her folk’s place. I sat and watched the lights in the house and tried to catch a glimpse of her. In the end a tropical storm passed over and beat down on my truck. The brown water kept on piling down the bayou and in the end I drove all the way back. All I have now is my invisible friend and persecutor—Georgia. She keeps on slithering out warnings, pleas and prayers. She assures me that there are three beings hovering around me that are wishing me well but she says I must be careful of a shadow entity. “One two – he’s coming to get you,” she ke
eps saying. The “Boogie Man” she calls him. I still carry that chromed .45. No use against invisible powers but it will sure work against mortal flesh. I really should be mad with Georgia. I spent my teens converting to the idea of scientific materialism. I not only got rid of God but all the accompanying fandang of ghosts, ghouls, demons and spirits. I did it to protect myself, to get away from the accusing dead and to piss off all those believers who made my life miserable at High School. I wanted to shuck off that body and spirit duality bunk and instead I have reinherited the whole mess.

  It’s weird how Georgia never mentions Grandpa. Maybe he and I understood each other and that’s why he doesn’t haunt me. He died very calmly. The illness took him quickly, all of a sudden he quit eating and seemed to shrivel away. Near the end, I asked him if he was scared. He shook his head without saying anything. I want to touch the death I saw in Grandpa. The calmness of it. I visit his grave sometimes. Yep, he wanted to be buried properly, didn’t want to be scattered dust like Mom and Dad. He’s buried out at Prairie Home. There’s a bronze plaque on his headstone that reads ‘World War Two, PFC 101st Airborne.’ His veteran buddies leave a flag there every Memorial Day. I found a note in his desk drawer after he died—it’s the same desk I write on now—“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. They will have rest from their labors for their good deeds will follow them.” Revelations. I’m not sure why he copied it out. Maybe it was a message for me. Anyway, I had it cut into his headstone, it’s there forever now.

  Not sure what will follow me except bad stuff. I still have horrible sweaty nights, timor mortis conturbat me. I’ve wrapped pillows around my head to keep the noises away. Often the sweaty bedding gets wrapped in some way round my neck, I have red rings on my skin like a kind of stigmata.

  I keep going by concentrating on getting a handle on Lee. I think now that he’s not just teaching me about loss but about the line between life and death. A no man’s land where we live all the time.

  It’s mind blowing to think that John Lee, born under the witchy spells and portents of a nineteenth century South Devon village, would live so long to inhabit a modern world that we can all recognize, a place of automobiles, peanut butter, cornflakes and movie theaters. In a way, it’s easier to imagine him safely bound up in the past. It’s strange how his voice actually gets stronger as you go through the spools in time order. He seemed to get something from the recordings, as if they made him grow emotionally. Lee made that amazing jump from Prisoner L.150 Portland Prison South Block to being a motor industry parts clerk and house owner in South Side Milwaukee. He wouldn’t find it so easy to hide nowadays; Homeland Security would probably deport his ass.

  As ever with Lee there are as many questions as answers. I’m sorry I keep jumping from one thing to another. It’s the way my mind works. Also, maybe truth can only be found in piths and gists. These days we log into the Net for a few moments, fire our neurons for a few seconds then jump like a ninja to the next thing.

  That long Lee narrative seems like a throwback. He’s pretty sneaky and search engines cannot track him down. For instance, who are the Dingles? Lee listed them on his Ellis Island entry ticket as his address of destination, E. Dingle at 625 Vanderbilt Avenue Brooklyn. Maybe they were friends of Minnie Williams, the mysterious American wife of the landlord of the Old King’s Head? Or a connection to Jimmy Clabby? It seems beyond knowing now—they certainly don’t appear in any census or directory. I broke my usual habits, took a week out and hauled my ass all the way to NY to check that one out. Travelled Greyhound Express by way of Chicago, 14 numb- butt hours. I’m scared crapless by flying, you know. I’m frightened my spirit would get lost in the ether, maybe get jolted out of its zone should a jet break up all of a sudden.

  I made my way to the address that Lee gave in Prospect Heights and stood under the honey locust trees in the street. It’s a soda bar now. Everything is just surface upon which all exists. All I could see was my own shadow in the plate glass windows. Someone cloned my credit card when I joined one of the ancestry internet sites that lets you read New York phone directories from the past. I couldn’t find the Dingles on there but whoever ran the site went shopping with my card in Union Square and Nolita. They seemed to go for chi-chi clothes and jewelry mainly. It made me laugh. I wondered if it was somehow the psychic revenge of Lee, the name stealer.

  I used to waste my time on dumb video games like King’s Quest and shit. I’d spend days on them. You had to go up and down the levels solving puzzles, answering riddles and looking for magic rings and weapons. It was boring but I enjoyed the slow concentric accumulation. The riddle I’m trying to solve is: what is the genuine face of Lee? I’m looking for something within him that is undivided, a filiation where he finally gets to parent all the versions of himself. I find it hard to imagine how anyone can live without the consolations of art although millions probably do it. Maybe as a proxy to art Lee was looking for that mute undivided thing within himself. Was that what all those recordings were for? He was looking for the truth about himself? So often though he seems to flailing around, describing everything except the most essential and integral. I’ve often wondered how far could Lee swim out and keep himself intact.

  From Devon to Portland, to Newcastle and Southwark and then to Wisconsin, Lee was always by water. Like my home town, the Rock River here floods pretty much every year. We are straight out West a short way from Milwaukee off Interstate 94. It’s a land of hills and lakes and birch and sumac. The population of my town is 11,000 and one poet, moi. That sounds about the right ratio—it’s an archaic profession really. I am one whose name is writ in water. I carry my clarity with me. Lee found me by a sort of process of convection, a property that is only possessed by liquids.

  I think of my grandparents, a few miles out of Waukesha. As kids they might well have passed the Lees out motoring in their Ford Tudor on 1930s summer jaunts to the Dells and Black Hawk Island. That is before everything fell in for the Lees when Evie died. Memories get laid down in irregular clumps like crystals adhering; I think of the Lees perhaps mentioned in some diary or a scribbled-on calendar kept by those that encountered them, their neighbors maybe, or a calendar of 1933 like those calendar poems of Lorine Niedecker ( she lived on Black Hawk Island, you know). I always seem to be looking for confirmation. Dr Kaiser’s stuff is only a start. I’m thinking of those vacation snapshots taken by strangers where you unwittingly appear somewhere in the corner of a scene, now stacked in a shoebox or on some forgotten digital chip. The thought of other versions of Lee out there…

  I’ve been digging around the things in that old box and had another look at an old chewed up album—from the 1920’s at a guess from the pictures on the front. It’s full of yellowed scraps of English newspapers. I’ve worked out that it must have belonged to Lee. Lee must have had the clippings sent to him by his kin, maybe Aunt Millie’s son Fred Marles who lived in Tormahan. They include a piece from an English paper, The Daily Mail, dated 1912. The story told how Lee’s wife Jessie had showed up at a South London workhouse in that year. The workhouses were awful places from what I’ve read and you had to be real desperate to go there. Jessie had a baby and an invalid kid to care for and Lee’s cash had stopped. There must have been something so bitter to her in that desperate humiliation. Only two years before she had been in charge of the females’ wards at Newton Workhouse; now it was her turn to join the wretched army of the old, the sick, the helpless and the hopeless. The paper described how the wife of ‘The Man Who Could Not Be Hanged’ was destitute. Her husband had been exhibiting himself until February last when he left the country. He had sent back money for a while then wrote to say that he was without a job. There had been silence since then. She had been struggling to manage and the children were going hungry. Her daughter, Eveline, had been born in the August after he left. Those were not generous times but the paper told how the deserted family were given some money and vouchers for the local charities (sort of like our food stamps, I guess).


  There was also a cutting from the Plymouth Advertiser about his old girlfriend Katie Farmer. She married a seaman two years after Lee’s trial, endured five years of an unhappy marriage then ran off with a housepainter to live in nearby Plymouth. The press guys tracked her down years later after Lee’s release. She spoke to them on her doorstep before shutting the door to her past. They recorded what she said about her old boyfriend, Lee: “He has suffered. I hope his future life will be happy. His way will not be my way for I am now settled in life. I hope he may be able to prove his innocence. I was then a silly, sentimental girl. I am wiser now. My friends told me that he would be kept in prison as long as he lived and a life’s devotion would be thrown away. So I put him out of my heart.”

  Fred Lee, cousin to John, Uncle George’s son, also wrote him. The letter was tucked in the album, still in its envelope with Lee’s first Milwaukee address. The faded script informed Lee that his mother had died in 1918. Found dead in bed by the Bonds. It also said that people had been looking for him. One was a Mr Bryan who had helped Lee in prison. He had come wanting Lee’s new address but Grandma Lee’s guardians, the Bonds, had sent him away. Another, a seaman, who was also turned away by the Bonds, lingered in the Tradesmen’s Arms. Tried to pay for his beer by doing card tricks. Asked again for Lee’s whereabouts then stuck a piece of paper under Town Cottage front door. It read, “C. Harrington, care of Mrs Connors, 15 Granby Street Devonport.” Cousin Fred also reported in the letter that he had called at the address a while later but the landlady had said that the gentleman had been on another binge and been taken to the pauper hospital fit to die. There wasn’t much else in the album. Some advertisements for autos, a postcard of Jimmy Clabby in his younger days crouching fists out and an article about Sultana at Milwaukee Zoo—apparently, the first polar bear in captivity to have cubs. A search through the papers in the years after the First World War show that Lee’s name kept on flickering up. People seemed to want the man they could not hang to keep on surviving. There were reports of Lee running a shop in King Street, Plymouth, Lee a bar owner in London, Lee prospecting for gold in Canada, Lee in Flanders killing Germans. He was also reported dead many times, in a Devon workhouse, in Melbourne, Australia, in 1918 and in Illinois in 1931. They even made a movie about him and the movie-goers were greeted at the doors of the cinema by an actor calling himself ‘John Lee’ and wearing a prison get-up with crow’s foot markings. I aim to seal him down though. No more reappearance antics or versions of himself. Like the way I caught those big fierce yellow jacket hornets in the back yard of our house on Summit Avenue when I was a kid. I’d lure them into a sticky jello jar then slam the lid on them then take them into the house and watch them press their fierce empty faces against the glass until they weakened and died.