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

ordinary college age. One was a Union veteran who had lost his legs at Shiloh. One was a former black slave 40
years old. One was a spinster 82 years old.
The first President was only 26 years old, a schoolteacher from Athena, 2 kilometers by water from Scipio. There
was no prison over there back then, but only a slate quarry and a sawmill and a few subsistence farms. His name was
John Peck. He was a cousin of the Tarkingtons’. His branch of the family, however, was and remains unhampered
by dyslexia. He has numerous descendants in the present day, 1 of whom, in fact, is a speech writer for the Vice-
President of the United States.
Young John Peck and his wife and 2 children and his mother-in-law arrived at Scipio by rowboat, with Peck and
his wife at the oars, their children seated in the stern, and their luggage and the mother-in-law in another boat they
towed behind.
They took up residence on the third floor of what had been Elias Tarkington’s mansion. The rooms on the first 2
floors would be classrooms, a library, which was already a library with 280 volumes collected by the Tarkingtons,
study halls, and a dining room. Many treasures from the past were taken up to the attic to make room for the new
activities. Among these were the failed perpetual-motion machines. They would gather dust and cobwebs until 1978,
when I found them up there, and realized what they were, and brought them down the stairs again.

One week before the first class was held, which was in Latin, taught by the Episcopalian priest Alan Clewes,
André Lutz the Belgian arrived at the mansion with 3 wagons carrying a very heavy cargo, a carillon consisting of
32 bells. He had cast them on his own time and at his own expense in the wagon factory’s foundry. They were made
from mingled Union and Confederate rifle
barrels and cannonballs and bayonets gathered up after the Battle of Gettysburg. They were the first bells and
surely the last bells ever to be cast in Scipio.
Nothing, in my opinion, will ever again be cast in Scipio. No industrial arts of any sort will ever again be
practiced here.

André Lutz gave the new college all those bells, even though there was no place to hang them. He said he did it
because he was so sure that it would 1 day be a great university with a bell tower and everything. He was dying of
emphysema as a result of the fumes from molten metals that he had been breathing since he was 10 years old. He
had no time to wait for a place to hang the most wonderful consequence of his having been alive for a little while,
which was all those bells, bells, bells.
They were no surprise. They had been 18 months in the making. The founders whose work he supervised had
shared his dreams of immortality as they made things as impractical and beautiful as bells, bells, bells.
So all the bells but I from a middle octave were slathered with grease to prevent their rusting and stored in 4
ranks in the estate’s great barn, 200 meters from the mansion. The I bell that was going to get to sing at once was
installed in the cupola of the mansion, with its rope running all the way down to the first floor. It would call people
to classes and, if need be, also serve as a fire alarm.
The rest of the bells, it turned out, would slumber in the loft for 30 years, until 1899, when they were hanged as a
family, the 1 from the cupola included, on axles in the belfry of the tower of a splendid library given to the school
by the Moellenkamp family of Cleveland.
The Moellenkamps were also Tarkingtons, since the
founder of their fortune had married a daughter of the illiterate Aaron Tarkington. Eleven of them so far
had been dyslexic, and they had all gone to college in Scipio, since no other institution of higher learning would
take them in.

The first Moellenkamp to graduate from here was Henry, who enrolled in 1875, when he was 19, and when
the school was only 6 years old. It was at that time that its name was changed to Tarkington College. I have
found the crumbling minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting at which that name change was made. Three of
the 6 trustees were men who had married daughters of Aaron Tarkington, 1 of them the grandfather of Henry
Moellenkamp. The other 3 trustees were the Mayor of Scipio, and a lawyer who looked after the Tarkington
daughters’ interests in the valley, and the area Congressman, who was surely the sisters’ faithful servant, too, since