The Last Telegraph

by J. Bradley Minnick

I was a regular Chatty-William until I was ten—a wailing dervish, running around the house, my voice full-throttle, scaling up throughout the day, the pitch increasing at an ever-alarming rate. 

My mother, on the advice of a slew of throat specialists, purchased a clicker in an attempt to quiet me. She clicked once for each word.  

In perpetual motion through the turbulent channels of life—I spewed schwas, sputtered fricatives, and even made my own clicks, which confounded my mother.

As the day wore on, I amplified vowels, consonants, affixes, words, phrases, and finally whole sentences until, by mid-afternoon, my voice had transmogrified into high-squealing frequencies, unnerving in duration—louder, louder, louder still.

My desire to be heard, to be noticed, to be understood, produced in listeners the very opposite of its intended effect. 

Mother’s neighbors: Uncle Vail, Miss Sturgeon, and Mister Gale graced our summer afternoons. At first, they’d given me audience, pushing kitchen chairs into the living room’s center, attending to me and attempting to make sense of my formant transitions. No luck. After five minutes, they’d push their index fingers deep into their ears, their eyes still following me in an attempt to identify my segmented speech streams. 

Suburban decorum suggested they wait long enough for a semblance of a proper visit: Upon completion of a cup of tea and a sugar cookie, these overly polite neighbors would suddenly bolt from our midst without a real excuse—although they would stammer through many—vowing that there was a grave matter they must attend. 

After they’d taken leave, I continued through the frequency spectrum: shrieking, wailing, and yelling until sometime in the late afternoon, my voice would STOP. After that, I emitted only a throbbing unvoiced hiss like a broken steam-heater, and had I stood next to one, I’m certain I’d have felt the need to compete with it until my hissing overwhelmed it. 

Late in the afternoon, my father, with briefcase in hand—an accordion box that was filled with what felt like rocks—made headway into the late-light of our recently vacated living room, and set down his heavy load. My mother showed my father the tally on the clicker, and he’d shake his head and unburden himself of his tie, which he’d hang in a twisted mess on a single wire hanger in the hall closet.

Then, he’d point at me and toward the downstairs bathroom. Dutifully, with a bar of soap, I’d wash my dirty hands, and subsequently find my way to the kitchen table, pull up a chair, and sit down to a dinner my mother had somehow prepared between the time the neighbors had left and my father had found himself in our midst. Spoons, forks, and knives clattered—my parents undoubtedly thankful for what in our house resembled silence.

In that we owned no television set—my father referred to TV as “the idiot box”— after dinner, he’d push back his chair with a scrape, and together we’d find our way into his

“den”—a very square room near the back of the house. 

While standing in front of the waist-high white book shelves on the den’s far end, he would remove a book with his thimble-thick fingers and point to the ancient telegraph machine that sat alone on what we called our “ship table”— a varnished door, impossibly heavy that held gold and silver medallions fuzzily visible underneath its shellacked veneer. I imagined the coins were worth a great amount of money and ignored the shellac’s stalactite drips that gave me pause. 

Together, we would sit side-by-side on a straight-back hard pew-of-a workbench in front of the old telegraph machine and its ancient telegraph key and spool. 

My father would open the book he’d selected to a random page: Stevenson, Dickens, Twain, or Faulkner, say, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” I’d work out the Morse code, and he’d let me tap it into the machine and send it off. 

Then, we’d put on headphones, eye the large metal wheel that spooled the ticker tape, and wait. The waiting was the delicious part—an anticipation of a response from the future or the past.

During the pause, I could barely sit still, although I’d trained myself to do just that. And even if, throat willing, I could have said something, I’m not sure what it would have been. Usually, I had little trouble conjuring words and found the meaning of the sentences that followed the second they came out of me, but within the silent walls of my father’s den, I tried to imagine what I might say if I had been able, but the words just wouldn’t present themselves. 

Miraculously, however, the telegraph’s ticker-wheel broke the silence and began to turn, its needle making dots and dashes while my father translated responses.

He wrote out each reply’s translation for me to check against tape: “Every child has a dream, to pursue the dream is in every child’s hand to make it a reality. One’s invention is another’s tool.” [1].

“…One’s invention is another’s tool.” I couldn’t figure that one out for the life of me, but it sounded pretty and seemed to be saying something about the present and the future: How one thing leads to another. And as my father watched me pore over the words, making sure he had correctly decoded them, I imagine that he wondered: Who is this creature, this boy, William Alexander, who refuses to remain silent until forced into it. Who refuses to listen, except to the last telegraph machine? 

The tape continued to tick, and my father would write out a translation and again give it to me to check against the tape: “The great object of human thought is the discovery of truth or, in other words, to arrive at conceptions and expressions of things which shall agree with the nature of things” [2].

The second phrase was clearly about truth, but I didn’t know what the nature of things was. What things? Was it in my nature to yell my throat closed each afternoon? Was I bound forever to spend time in silence with my father? Was this how we were destined to communicate? Through the quotations he read and the responses we received from others? These were truths, yes, but not our own words. And I wondered where our own words had gone. 

And unlike a photograph or even his storied voice, my father’s handwriting, whenever I see it, even now, conjures him up for me. Takes me to a place beyond his voice—lets me into his essential core—that unchanging part of us all that remains constant throughout our lives. 

My mother always used to say, when she showed the clicker to my father and he wearily shook his head, “It is what it is.” I hated that sentence, refused to believe any part of it—within those words, there was no room for possibility. 

After I’d double-check the ticker's responses, my father would read them aloud. When he received nothing from me but silence, he’d shut the machine off, it’s winding reel slowing to a stop; and after unplugging it, and handing me the ticker tape, he’d say something like: “All knowledge is profitable; profitable in its ennobling effect on the character, in the pleasure it imparts in its acquisition, as well as in the power it gives over the operations of mind and of matter” [3] —all those plosives that swam that night through my dreams.

The world ends up taking funny turns; it just does, and I’m convinced that whoever or whatever has put it together finds ways to slowly take away what it is that one loves, and this leads to the gradual abandonment of desire.

One morning toward the beginning of August, the tenor, the pitch, the rate of my speech increased suddenly, and then gave out so completely it dissolved from a hiss to a rasp and then stopped in mid-click right in front of the neighbors. They sat in those hard-backed kitchen chairs in stone silence, and as I stood in front of them. I sounded less like a broken steam heater than a fish gasping for air. They didn’t leave this time, but oddly began voicing thoughts as if I couldn’t have heard them. “I think he’s run out of electricity,” Uncle Vale said. “I think he’s finally broken,” Miss Sturgeon replied. “Perhaps this is the end of that terrible voiced machine inside of him,” Mister Gale said. 

That evening, while we sat at the dinner table, my mother and father discussed “the situation” in front of me as if I wasn’t there. Both were certain, they said as they eyed one another with reassuring glances that my squalling, my squealing, my squawking would return the next morning. 

But the next morning, my throat had closed almost completely, and, without a vehicle to call attention to myself, I began to believe there was absolutely nothing left of me. I was struggling to breathe, and whenever I tried to communicate, I turned very red in the face 

Perhaps because of the sudden change, Uncle Vail, Miss Sturgeon, and Mister Gale paid full attention to the silence that was me. 

As for my part, I began to believe that by being silent, I was re-creating the world. The neighbors watched my gesticulations intently, parceling me out as my body literally turned and twisted into letters: Miss Sturgeon decoded each of the consonants; Uncle Vail sounded out the vowels; Mister Gale wrote it all down in a flip-top notebook. They waited, they watched my body turn into lettered shapes and called out: I/ have/ never/ had/ my/ admiration/ of/ any/ man/ increased/ by/ reading/ his/life [4]. I reveled in their attention and began to believe I was creating and re-creating the world.

As the day wore into afternoon, the neighbors became more practiced at decoding me: Uncle Vale became adept with subtext; Miss Sturgeon with implicature; Mister Gale with the pragmatics of movement. And as I moved, I became my father, carefully selecting passages and embodying them. “There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect,” from Robert Lewis Stevenson for Uncle Vale, who unburdened himself of his handkerchief, decoded the quotation on it, and wiped his face blue. “What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew?” from Dickens for Mister Gale, who wrote down the letters on his hand and looked longingly at Miss Sturgeon, who I then realized was his Estella, and the primary reason he adorned our living room was to be close to her. And “I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead" from Huck Finn. This, I hoped the neighbors understood, was irony, which my father said was the highest form of intelligence. 

Then the world paused: my father interrupted us, having come home from work early. In slow motion, we watched as he unburdened himself of his accordion briefcase and, in front of us all, attempted to untie his tie but instead fell into the couch that held his imprint. 

From a short distance away, I waited for him to acknowledge me, but my mother appeared at his side, hesitantly, with a glass of water. At that moment, I hoped for a kind of reversal—I hoped the real alphabet would spill out of me. 

Instead, I watched my father silently hold out his hand for the water glass that my mother might well have forgotten she was holding. Without opening his eyes, he gulped down the liquid. My mother motioned me into the kitchen to fetch another glass of water. No words passed her lips.

While I was in the midst of filling up another glass, my mother emitted a loud animal screech whose sound moved around the living room and silenced the dazed neighbors. I raced back, my hands dripping. My father lay in nearly the same position, emitting a kind of hissing—which soon morphed into a clicking.  Dot dot dash/dot dash dot/dot dot/dot/ dash dot dot.

Miss Sturgeon placed her cold, dry hands against my throat, looked searchingly into my eyes, and whispered, “Silence.” Uncle Vale held me firmly by the shoulders and said, “Stillness.” Mister Gale put the tip of his index finger on the crown of my head, wound me up, and then allowed the other two to spin me around like a top until I unraveled, and he said, “You’re healed, speak.”

I raced down the hall toward my father’s den, grabbed the telegraph, and ran back into the living room. I read the quotation my father had last selected: Samuel Morse’s initial message when demonstrating the first telegraph:  “What Hath God Wrought” [5].

And for the first time that day the house was truly silent and for one final time the old telegraph machine sputtered, its tape unspooling a series of dots and dashes and I heard clearly my father’s voice translate the text: “All parts of the material universe are in constant motion and though some of the changes may appear to be cyclical, nothing ever exactly returns, so far as human experience extends, to precisely the same condition.” [6].

[1] Samuel Morse.

[2] Joseph Henry lecture on geology and revelation.

[3] Joseph Henry in ‘Report of the Secretary’, Sixth Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1851.

[4] Joseph Henry Letter to Alexander Dallas Bache, July 31, 1855, in Henry Papers, vol. 9, p. 271.

[5] The text of Samuel Morse's demonstration message, “What Hath God Wrought,” came from the Bible, Numbers 

[6] Joseph Henry Address (Jul 1874) at the grave of Joseph Priestley.

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J. Bradley Minnick is a writer, public radio host and producer, and a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is the executive producer of Arts & Letters Radio, a show celebrating modern humanities with a concentration on Arkansas cultural and intellectual work, and can be found at artsandlettersradio.org. He has published in Cleaver, Literally Stories, Southwest Review, and others.