Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“One day, we were coming downriver from St. Louis when the steamer hit some very high winds, and the captain sent Henry up to the pilothouse with instructions for the senior pilot, a rough fellow named Brown, to put into shore. But the pilot, being somewhat deaf and disdainful of lowly hands, ignored the order and continued on his way. Shortly the captain came to the pilothouse to accuse the pilot of disobedience, but, denying it all, once the captain left, the pilot took it out on my brother. With a piece of coal in hand he lunged at him: I had come into the wheelhouse at that moment and, seeing Henry thus assaulted, picked up a stool and clacked it over the pilot’s head. Then I pounded him with my fists, and very justifiably so. At the end of that unpleasant affair, when the Pennsylvania had been put into port in New Orleans, I was transferred to duty on another steamboat, the Alfred T. Lacy , which was to follow the Pennsylvania on its next journey upriver to St. Louis.

“Though there was in my gut a sense that Henry should have stayed with me, I made no fuss over the matter: Henry already knew the run of the side-wheeler, and, as each ship had its own system, he had not wanted to make a change, which made sense at the time.

“Two days after his steamship left New Orleans, I followed, aboard the Alfred T. Lacy . We were at Greenville, Mississippi, when I heard a rumor that the Pennsylvania ’s boilers had exploded by Ship Island, near Memphis: The side-wheeler had gone down, it was said, and some one hundred and fifty lives were lost. I immediately thought of Henry and despaired, though my apprehensions were somewhat dispelled when we docked in Napoleon, Arkansas, and I read a Memphis newspaper that did not list my brother among the casualties. The next day, however, farther upriver, I read another ‘extra’ and saw my brother’s name among the ‘gravely injured and beyond help’ list.

“It was not until we arrived at Memphis that I heard the full details of what happened: As the steamship had been racing along, to make good time, four of its boilers had overheated and exploded. It was six in the morning on a hot day, and my brother was asleep in a hammock on the aft deck at the time. Some seven hundred people were aboard, and the explosion lifted the first third of the boat into the air and tossed about all the passengers within the ship; the chimneys collapsed, spewing sparks and causing a fire; and the boilers rose up onto the deck, shooting scalding steam and objects everywhere — a Catholic priest was said to have been impaled upon an iron crowbar that nearly cut him in half. And while the force of the explosion flung my brother and many an injured passenger a considerable distance into the water, Henry, deeply wounded but unaware of it, had chosen to swim back to the disaster to see whom he could save, for many people, blinded and barely able to breathe, were tottering along the deck in agony or else caught under burning debris, miserably crying for help.”

Mr. Clemens, who had maintained his composure to that point, paused to draw from a flask.

“Want a swig?” he asked me.

I felt it would have been improper to refuse him; the harsh and musty-tasting liquid burned in my throat, and immediately the room took on a more intimate quality. Then he continued:

“Attempting to help others, my younger brother was rendered senseless by a second steam explosion, his lungs and body scalded. He fell onto the deck, and the wooden parts of the ship burned down around him. Shortly a fire brigade came out by barge to find which persons were still living, Henry among them, and these they gathered on stretchers and carried to their boat. When another steamer came upon the scene, all who survived were taken from the barge by firemen and transferred to a hospital in Memphis, where they were laid out on pallets along the floor of a great hall — by then Henry’s injuries had been examined, and he, wrapped all over in a dressing of linseed oil and raw cotton, had been put into a separate section, of the dying.”

Then he looked at me again.

“I was there for six days and nights, and of the general misery I will not report. But I had lingered long enough in that gloomy hall to watch my brother’s nerveless fingers grasping after an object that was invisible upon his chest, many times over. That I could not speak words to him that he could hear told me most directly that there is no God who answers prayers. What say you to that?”

I had no answer.

“When he went to sleep, for good, he was dressed in one of my suits and put in a lead coffin: As he lay in his repose, some sympathetic locals came along and placed white and red roses upon his chest — my little dream having, sadly, come true.

“You can’t understand my misery over the whole affair — I put him on that steamboat, even when I knew the potential for such disasters… It was my fault.”

When he was relieved of his post, the river before us was serene. As we descended down into the lower decks, he stopped to ask me: “Would you, judging by what I have said of that situation, find reason to hold me at fault?”

“I would not.”

“Do you judge me to have been a good brother to him?”

“Yes.”

“For that consoling thought, I thank you,” he said before leaving me and retiring to his cabin, somewhere on the deck.

ON THAT VOYAGE, MEETING HIM on several occasions, I told him, in some detail, more about my father’s business dealings — he seemed particularly interested by Mr. Stanley’s trade in Cuba, for it seemed to him another of those places where an adventurous and resourceful man could do well for himself. The name of that island sparkled in his mind with the allure of other distant places — from Brazil to China — places that he, with his unabated wanderlust, hoped to see one day for himself: “As much as I enjoy the kingly and unfettered position of riverboat pilot, and the good wages, I can’t imagine staying put in one place for long when there is so much of the world to be visited.” And he would ask me a great many questions about England — another place of legend in his mind — home to Shakespeare and Milton.

“With ink in my veins, it would be a surely fine proposition to write of such places, but I’ve got to get the Mississippi out of my system first — I suppose I will, sooner or later.”

In those days I came to respect and admire him, for he was a largely self-taught man — and far more intelligent than most one would ever hope to meet, his memory, like my own, “sharp as tacks,” as he would put it. Among the subjects we good-naturedly discussed on such evenings were the origins of chess, which was apparently an Arab innovation passed on to the Europeans during the Crusades. He thought it the best thing to have come out of those conflicts besides the introduction of the orange to the West. In his affable way, he told me that he had once been hit in the head by an orange that had fallen out of a tree—“To think that we have the Crusades to thank for that!” he said. Then, too, in the way that we spoke of many arcane things, he marveled at the invention of the compass and other such intricate objects, including clocks. He always carried a watch, which he kept in his vest pocket, and he loved to look at it. The tiny gears and latches and springs were of such fascination to him that he could not help but pry open the back of the metal shell to show me the mechanisms. He then held forth on the history of clocks, marveling at the leap from sundial to hourglass to water clock, which somehow led to the marvelous modern invention. Machinery in general fascinated him, and he wondered aloud whether such clocklike mechanisms could be applied to the process of printing. Before becoming a steamboat pilot, he had experienced firsthand the dreary careers of compositor and typesetter; altogether, it was as if he believed that many of mankind’s problems could be solved through mechanical techniques. I thought him clearly some kind of natural genius.