Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  Caesura

  Outside, the day calls to everyday folk. Old Glory snaps in a norther sent straight from Canada down Main Street. I stare out the windows of Scottie’s Eat-Mor. Yep, I’ve rallied and gone back there again. An eastern redbud rattles in the wind. It’s the sort that Grandpa called a ‘Judas Tree’. It has a few last copper-yellow leaves hanging on at the tips of each branch. Old guys come into the diner. One says, “I don’t mind them salads as long as they’ve got cheese and bacon in ’em, eh?” My mind stalls. For some reason I keep repeating Keats’ words, “thou foster child of silence and slow time.” The wind gnaws at the sign outside that reads, ‘Wow! Friday fish is back’. This small town threatens to dissolve my floor of memory. I think I’m going to drop through everything and somehow fall into another dimension. At night I wake from drowsing with a jerk to find the TV playing ‘I Love Lucy’ shows back to back. I noticed today the quamash bulbs I planted in a pot in the yard a month ago. Then, they were dried-up lumps of matter but now they have violent, white roots roiling out the container despite winter’s advance.

  What I’d like to do is to light out like Ambrose Bierce. He wrote his family that he would not be a burden then went to Mexico. Ostensibly, he went to take notes on the civil war there in 1913, Pancho Villa and all. But really he went to disappear. No-one knows what happened to him. One Bierce history freak even built a gravestone for him in a Mexican mountain village. But it could have been quite another spot where he met his end. It’s a bit like the Babbacombe Lee story, you could make a mark and say it all ended here. But you’d be wrong.

  I’m the young gringo set to follow my own journey to its mysterious ends. Only I’ve got no family to write. I so admire that short story by Bierce, an 11th grade English high school staple, called ‘Occurrence At Owl Creek’. If you don’t know it, it’s about a man set to be executed by being hung off a bridge. We follow how he escapes when the rope apparently breaks and he dives away down the hungry river. The physical world seems intensely real for him for the first time in his life as he swims along and glories in his reprieve. He eludes the bullets of his pursuers and flounders out the shallows and heads for home. He resolves that he will now appreciate everything about his life. We jerk back to the fateful bridge and find out that it is all taking place in his mind in the last moments before his neck is snapped.

  That Bierce disappearance idea has real appeal. Georgia won’t let up. She keeps bugging me about something. When I pay attention to what she’s actually saying it seems she keeps telling that I’ve missed something important. She keeps saying something that sounds like “seize her”. I guess it’s only a mind glitch, one of my many mental malfunctions. Just to be sure I’m fixing on asking Mulvina if she can rid me of my ghosts.

  Who was Dr Kaiser?

  This whole Lee deal has become a drag. I’ve written no poetry since it started. I just want it over but I don’t know how to end it. I thought when I had played Lee’s recordings and transcribed them that would be it. I would cut this sucker to the bone, write a short pithy crime book about the mystery of Babbacombe finally revealed and then sit back and rake in the sales. Instead I’m faced by more questions than ever. And I seem to have inherited some spooks of my own. I had a thought that I needed to go back to first base. You can start with the problem about who exactly was Doctor Kaiser and why did he record Lee?

  Let’s again go over those other things in the old cardboard box along with the spools and the Webster wire recorder machine. First, there was the name stamp, I’ve mentioned already. Kaiser must have used it to sign off his official correspondence or to mark his prescriptions maybe. There’s the scrap book with English newspaper articles. John Lee or Addie could have given it to Kaiser for it to end up jumbled up with Kaiser’s things. And the same for the old copy of Lee’s Autobiography Kaiser surely had got off Lee or Addie directly and it shows that Lee must have become more than a patient to him. Not forgetting the invoice from Schusters, the big old Milwaukee department store. Kaiser must have been on the ball to buy the Webster, one of the first wire recorder models to be available to the public. Maybe he just liked gadgets or he was thinking to use it for his medical work.

  Then we have the medical notes. They were written on pieces of lined card and were really hard to read. The ink was faded, the writing crimped and willfully illegible and some of it was in medical shorthand. I’ve had to look up no end of stuff to understand them. This is my transcription attempt.

  Home visit. Exn. 02/03/45

  James Lee. 454 East Holt Avenue. 81 yrs.

  Complains of nausea, weight loss, tiredness, (illegible word), breathless ++

  Exn.

  Weight 94 lbs

  Height 5’ 11”

  Edentulous

  BP 90/69

  85/63

  Pulse bounding, 100-120

  Temp Norm.

  Scattered rhonchi

  Systolic murmur

  Percussion revealed moderate enlargement left ventricle

  Pitted oedema both feet

  Hist

  Married. 1 daughter † 1933 (Acc. Poisoning)

  Immigrant,

  resident 35 years

  ? Pneumonia/TB age circa 18

  Old injury scars on l. & r. Arms, - healed rib fractures, cause?

  Infarct probable 3/12 ago

  Nil else of note

  Diagnosis

  1- chronic congestive heart failure 2- atheroma with secondary renal impairment

  Treatment

  Digoxin tab 125mg x1 daily

  Mercuhydrin 0.5cc im x1 daily

  Trinitrin prn

  Prognosis

  Poor

  There you have it. Lee’s poor health captured in Kaiser’s brutal shorthand. However you read it, it didn’t look so good for the patient. His heart rate was going like a machine gun and his blood pressure was in his boots. Especially when he stood up. His arteries were blocked and his heart’s pumping action was weak. The doctor did not have it easy, I bet. Lee was a frickin’ liar on many occasions. He didn’t give his right name to start with and I’m sure he would have tried some BS on the doc about his symptoms. I wonder when Kaiser started to find out who his patient really was. Kaiser started seeing Lee at the beginning of February 1945 so the recordings must have been made in February and March of that year.

  I was staring at those medical notes under a lamp at my old deal desk when I noticed there were indentations coming through the paper from the other side. Turning the notes over, I could see that there was something faintly written on the back. I managed to make the writing clearer by rubbing a soft pencil over the marks. The words out of the first group spelt what looked like “brag …flash …holdfast” and a little lower at an angle as if jotted on the knee, was the word, at least I think it was a word, “agepannies”. It took me a while of mumbling these over and searching online before I could work them out.

  There is one of those whacky British sayings which goes, “Brag is a good dog but Holdfast is better”. You can find it in Dickens’ novel ‘Great Expectations’. I guess Kaiser’s note refers to this strange expression and was something he heard Lee saying which he did not understand. Lee probably used it as part of his ordinary speech. The phrase apparently means that it’s alright to be flash, brash and blingy but tenacious, quiet purpose is better. Doc Kaiser must have puzzled over this and jotted it down. I think Lee might have been kidding around with his doctor to come out with it in the first place. Maybe Lee was intimating that he wasn’t expecting to make spectacular progress but “holdfast” would be as good as anything given his sick condition. The mysterious word “agepannies” was harder to work out. All I can think of that it was Lee’s mispronunciation of ‘agapanthus’—a blue-flowered garden plant. Why he mentioned an agapanthus I’m not sure. They were popular in Victorian times and maybe Lee grew them for Miss Keyse. I know they get burnt by the hard winters up here, maybe Lee was saying that his body was like the agapanthus after a cold winter—all bu
rnt out and frosted, gone mushy to the roots.

  That’s as much as the old Lysol box yielded up about Doctor Kaiser. I looked him up on-line to see what else I could find about him. There were a few Howard Kaisers, including a sex offender in Colorado, but not my man. Doc Kaiser inhabited a pre-digital age. I got on better through an initial genealogy search. There was a group of Kaisers from Philadelphia in the 1890s and I found a Howard D. Kaiser born there in 1905. Tracking him along, I could see that he married a Lina Weidman in 1925 and had one son, Clyde Kaiser, born 1926. I cast around in other sources and found an old Milwaukee city directory which had a Doctor Kaiser listed on Fond Du Lac Avenue. I drove down there. All the old properties have been torn down, and it’s the Marquette campus there now. There was a heavy vibe on the street and some bad looks so I did not linger. If you look lost or out of your territory you are a target.

  Bronzeville has expanded greatly since John Lee’s day. The divisions between folk have different manifestations but they are just as toxic. Now, you have the Hispanics also, South Side is their big territory and the gang stuff is rampant. Each outfit has its own territory, whatever you call them, Latin Kings or the Cobras, it’s the same stupid deal. Let’s not dwell on our own ugly times, the murder of Miss Keyse seems genteel compared to Jeffrey Dahmer’s activities for example. He also lived not far from Kaiser’s old surgery on 924 North 25th Street.

  Still, one murderer at a time please. Let’s stick to the sawbones. Genealogy can be an uncertain trail and there were so many Howard Kaisers. The web archives at The American Medical Association put me on the right track. It seems that a Howard D. Kaiser graduated from North Western medical school in 1936 and practiced as a community physician in South Milwaukee up to the end of the 1940s. He seems to have switched direction and worked in public health at the Milwaukee Veterans Hospital in the ’50s through to 1978. There was no note of death nor any obituary that I could locate. I looked around the Veterans Hospital. There was no plaque or building named after Kaiser. I guessed he had just gone off and retired somewhere.

  Darleen Engstrom pushed me on in my Kaiser-hunting just as I was losing traction. I hit on an old article from the Sentinel Journal about a woman who had retired from the Veterans Hospital after 55 years as a medical transcriptionist. The piece sketched out a lively character study of the gutsy old lady so dedicated that she had started work in Eisenhower’s presidency and had served through the period of 11 other presidents. According to the article she had remained single, had rarely taken a vacation or sick leave, and had walked to her place of work every day. The newspaper piece was only two years old so I thought there was a good chance she was still around. I looked her up on White Pages and yes indeed there was a Darleen Engstrom, listed as aged 65 plus and on Becher Street, not far from the VA hospital. I rang a few times before I got an answer. When I did get her she confirmed that she was the same Miss Engstrom who had worked for Milwaukee VA Public Affairs. She had a giggly, girlish manner on the phone. She asked me if I was from a dating agency for seniors then laughed as I hesitated and said that I mustn’t mind her, she was just kidding. In truth, I was afraid that she had dementia or something. I told her I was doing some research, a family history of Dr Howard Kaiser. Did she remember him?

  “Kaiser, Kaiser? Oh yes,” she said. “He was on the staff when I first came in ’57. Yes, I see him now, quiet and serious with a grey streak in his hair in the front there.”

  I asked her what she recalled of him. All the while I tried to control my voice. “Very quiet and reserved,” she replied, “He never got over his son, you know,”

  “Clyde?”

  “I never knew his name. He was killed in the Pacific. Doctor Kaiser kept the anniversary every year. They said the grief broke up his marriage. He lived for his work. He was polite and pleasant to us secretaries. He bought us donuts sometimes. A distant man but a good doctor. The boys liked him, the patients, he could never do too much for them.”

  She said he had retired in the ’70s. He didn’t stay local, she thought. He had maybe died in Florida in the mid’80s, he went somewhere south anyway. She said she might have read it in the VA newsletter.

  I could not get much more out of her. She said I should come over and talk about the old times. She knew of no connection of the doctor with England and could suggest no one else from that time who knew Dr Kaiser. They had all passed, she explained. She told me she was on her way to her voluntary work, she was a “get up and go person”, that’s what had kept her young. She worked with the animals at Wisconsin Humane. That kept her going. Before I rang off she said, as a kind of afterthought, “What I do remember about Dr Kaiser is he made our lives easier in transcription. He got us those IBM Selectrics, as soon as they came out in the early’60s. Before that we had manual typewriters. Good on new equipment he was, Dr Kaiser. It made all the difference to our secretarial work. Of course the computers are marvellous now.”

  That call got me boosted. I was sure that was my Kaiser, the gadget man. I could almost touch him, and the information about Clyde being killed made sense when I recalled that Lee had spoken of the doctor wearing a black arm band. Both men knew grief then. Maybe that was what had linked them.

  I was all fired up after that success and went back to online genealogy with renewed enthusiasm, although I got ground down again after a while. You need to be a methodical type to trawl through the lists. It was easy for me to start follow the line of some other Kaiser or get distracted by the suggestive names that called out to me. That ancestry searching began to kill me financially. It was $10 dollars a pop to look up original records and it was eating into my meager pot. There are some dudes who really like this stuff and after once more faltering in my searches for Kaiser and his family I found a website called ‘Roots Web’ where you can post genealogy enquiries and good-hearted enthusiasts answer your queries for nothing. It’s called “free look-ups”. I posted a query about looking for the family of Howard D. Kaiser, born 1905. Someone who used the tag-name of “Whizzbang” took up the case, bless his hide.

  I waited for him to complete his work and passed the time looking at streaming video of the web camera at Babbacombe Beach all the way over in England. The low-definition camera seemed to flick on at an image every second. You could see the light winking and ever-changing, the waves beetling in slow-mo and the black jerky shapes of dog walkers on the shingly beach.

  Within a couple of hours I got a ping back from Whizzbang. It read, “Hey buddy, looks like I found a younger sister and brother of your man Howard Kaiser in census records. Both born in Pennsylvania. Hermina Kaiser b. 1918. Orville Kaiser b. 1917. In 1920 the family was in Milwaukee but by 1940 they had moved to New Athens, Illinois, leaving Howard behind. Their 1940 address was 60 South Elizabeth Street, New Athens. It seems that Hermina married a Randolph Parks. I can find no issue from Orville. Good hunting. W.”

  New Athens was in South-Eastern Illinois beyond Springfield, six hours drive away. I wondered why on earth the Kaisers had gone there? A quick look up on White Pages revealed 23 Kaisers in New Athens even though it was a small place. I could find no Orville Kaiser among that throng though. It seemed too draggy to ring my way round all the Kaisers in New Athens and so I looked for Hermina Parks instead. That turned out to be a whole lot easier. There she was listed at the same 1940s address that Whizzbang had found for me. There was no associated name listed at the place so I guessed that she was now widowed.

  I suppose I should have rung first but I was impatient to get started and it was late at night when I found her online. That next dawn I dropped some guarana tabs, filled up the Ford and headed South on 1-39. There were hours of driving in the soapy light, straining to see through the wipers going full tilt and dodging the big looming rigs. I kept telling myself that a journey has no merit unless it tests you. Past Litchfield, Edwardsville and Troy, I followed the blue and red shield sign of the Interstate 55. For some reason I kept on repeating the phrase from Virgil’s Aeneid which begins,
“I beg you, let me be mad with this madness before death comes.” Its deep echo in Latin was pleasing to me and I said it out loud again and again. I think I must have some high-functioning syndrome the way I lock onto things. Sometimes I just open my mouth and chimp-out. Yipping and hooting noises or loud screams are my favorites. If you repeat anything long enough it finds its own meaning. I find it strangely soothing to shriek and gibber like that.

  I came in to New Athens over the big white bridge that spans the Kaskasia. The whole place was watery and low-lying like my own home town. I’d read somewhere that those south eastern Illinois lands belonged to an Indian tribe called the Tamaracks. There was a green sign for “New Athens, population, 2000”. The hamlet sat in the bend of the river among vast bare fields. A fitful sun came out to celebrate my arrival. There was no sign of the Tamaracks now only the looming white tadpole shape of a large water tower. I got passed by a pick-up with a gun rack, full of hunters in camo who eyeballed me as a stranger. Duck feathers flicked up out the back of their vehicle and came eddying around my dirt- crusted windshield. Following the route of the old state highway onto Spotsylvania Street, I passed a brick building which had a sign on it saying it was the first house in the settlement, founded 1847. Hell, that was only 17 years before John Lee was born. We are such a young country compared to Devonshire. This place only recently wrenched from the hold of the rivers and the Indians.

  Elizabeth Street was a left hook off Spotsylvania. There were not too many other streets to get lost in. The Parks place was a woodboard one-story house. It looked newly painted. A snakebark maple lifted up its arms in the front yard. The street was empty of all inhabitants, not even a dog around. I got the impression they were all hiding or watching me. Out the travel-stained SUV, I was hit by the smell of wet earth and the raggedy cheeping of sparrows. The silence seemed exaggerated by the noise from the birds. I went up and knocked. There was no answer so I wandered to the side of the house. I could see no movement through the ground windows. At back there was just a washcloth jittering in the wind on a rotary clothes dryer and an old box left out on the grass. It was packed full of discarded women’s shoes. I sort of slumped then and thought, “Now what? You tard. You’ve dragged your sorry ass all the way here to this void.” I might have stayed there an hour or a week while those sparrows squeaked on. I’d somehow run out of ideas as to what to do next and decided to hang tight and wait for inspiration. It’s just as well that at some stage an old timer came out from the next house, peered me for a while from his porch then came out to speak to me.