Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

That same evening, I resolved to leave the plantation, and I sought refuge with one of Major Ingham’s neighbors, a certain Mr. Waring, whose own lands were at the other end of a deep wood. I made no mention of why I had abruptly left, putting it to him that I had merely wanted to rest there for the night. In the morning he arranged a carriage to retrieve my trunk from Major Ingham’s house and made a further arrangement to send it off to Mr. Altschul’s store ahead of me, as I told him I would be covering the forty miles or so of countryside and forest toward the Arkansas River on foot, so as to acquaint myself with the region.

AFTER TRAMPING WITHOUT INCIDENT through various interesting terrain (and the deepest woods I had entered into until I went to Africa), I finally arrived at my destination, at dusk, two days later. Only a crooked sign on a tree had pointed me to the place. From a kind of road of sandy loam, defined by the deep grooves made on hard earth by wagon wheels and a horseshoe trail, I had crossed over a rickety wooden bridge to reach the island, where moss covered every spot on the banks and tree trunks. With the sun just descending on the river, and with dragonflies floating over the waters, I saw the store standing in a spot of great natural splendor, and for that reason it seemed a promising place to be.

The store itself was a long, one-story affair constructed from logs and divided into four separate chambers, with all kinds of goods — guns and anvils; dresses and finery; comestibles and groceries — arranged therein. Mr. Altschul himself was a smallish and thin man, with large, slightly jaundice-rimmed eyes, a balding head, and dark features. He had been in a state of anticipation as to my whereabouts, as no date had ever been set for my arrival. Greeting my presence as a godsend, he called forth his two clerks and some family members to welcome me.

It was gratifying to find several letters waiting for me at Mr. Altschul’s store. These were from my father in Havana, the first conveying news of his safe passage and reporting on his brother’s condition, the fever having left Captain Stanley in a grievous state. The doctors of Havana were as baffled by such diseases as were the physicians of New Orleans, and yet it was Mr. Stanley’s hope that the captain, of a strong constitution, would eventually recover: “I have prayed for such,” he wrote, “but as the will of God is a separate thing from the workings of this world, I would hold no grudge at a sad outcome, for there is a natural order to things.” The second letter, of general encouragement and practical advice, had been written in a calmer hand, and at this I took heart.

I HAD BEGUN MY TENURE in that store in November of 1860, and indeed, with time, I slowly became acquainted with the peculiarities of the locals. We had about one hundred or so regular customers, among them wealthy planters whose character and manners were defined by the customs of the “Old South.” Beneath them were the planters with smaller estates and tradesmen; then the backwoods farmers working their little plots — and as one went down the social scale, it was my observation that fine manners gave way to ascending heights of crudity and incivility. Being frontier lands, in the sense of having been settled in fairly recent times, during the cotton-boom years of the 1840s, such places upriver, perhaps a day’s ride from the nearest constables of law, seemed more like isolated kingdoms, where little news of the outside world crept in to disrupt their provincial ways. The first rule to be followed, I learned, was one of self-protection: Most of the backwoods men carried bowie knives and revolvers, if not shotguns. And they often walked into the store with bloody game slung over their shoulders or with jugs of liquor in hand. The ever-present heat and humidity of those swamplands left many of them irritably disposed, and many, I’d heard, were quick to fight over the slightest provocation: The kinds of arguments that in New Orleans would have been resolved by genteel discourse or through arbitration became, in Arkansas, an insult to a man’s “honor,” and the fighting of duels, often to the death, was common enough in those parts.

Slaves, I noticed, were treated differently here. In New Orleans I had seen them walking the streets, side by side with the glut of Creoles, freedmen, and whites that were the population of that city, but in this region they were more strictly kept in their plantation compounds.

Then there was the matter of indecorous behavior in regard to the females. Whatever notions of propriety might have tacitly prevailed in New Orleans in relation to slave concubines, these were discarded in Cypress Bend, for occasionally a gentleman entered the store with one or two young and healthy Negro beauties following behind him, such “items,” I heard, being regularly won or lost in card games or swapped at a whim among fellow planters. About that easy abandonment of morals (such as I would later see in Africa) I had written to Mr. Stanley, in frank complaint of witnessing such things.

Out of necessity, as a merchant and German Jew in those Christian parts, Mr. Altschul owned a slave, a burly giant named Simon, whom he used as a bodyguard. But otherwise Mr. Altschul kept no slaves in his household — he had a fine house about a quarter mile away from the store on that island — and he said that in his faith, such things, being considered wrong, were not permitted. It was no wonder to me, then, that I saw Mr. Altschul treated wrongly — more than once had I witnessed planters spitting a spur of chewed tobacco down at his shoes. And although the store was necessary to the practical provisioning of the local plantations, one could read a sort of resignation upon the faces of those who had to enter the “Jew’s” premises, for to go against local customs seemed to them the mark of the hostile foreigner.

When not attending to my duties, I filled my spare hours not with books (it was often too hot and humid for that) but by learning to shoot a rifle and a pistol, old cans and bottles set out in the yard being my targets. Though I could not have imagined how such skills, honed over many hours, would serve me well in other places, I took to it quickly and, mastering the art of holding a barrel steady with the recoil, became a superb marksman and was able to shoot a sprig off a tree at twenty paces. In time, as was the custom in that place, I carried, as did my fellow clerks, a loaded Smith & Wesson revolver, its pearly white handle evident in a special side pocket. In those swamplands, to have no pistol on one’s person would have been the equivalent of a New Orleans clerk turning up to work without his trousers on, as a firearm was considered an indispensable accoutrement to manly attire.

NOW, IN THAT PLACE, MALARIAL AGUE was prevalent, a disease for which there was no explanation as to its cause. Local superstition placed its transmission on exposure to miasmic swamp gases, those will-o’-the-wisps that, capturing the moonlight in their swirls, floated in a ghostly way along the banks of the river and across the swamps at night.

Though I had asked a local doctor, a boarder in Mr. Altschul’s house, if there were any means to avoid this pernicious disease or if there were precautions to be taken against it by way of pills or medicines, he had wanly smiled at me and said: “Yes, there is. Leave as soon as possible.” That, however, was not in my makeup.

As I was attending to my duties in the store one morning, my hands began to inexplicably shake, and then my whole body began to violently tremble. With that came the chills. Helped to my room by the clerks, I lay in my bed shivering, as if I had been packed in ice. I remained in that state for several hours, until a spell of burning fever came over me, followed by delirium: I heard voices and saw the disembodied faces of persons I had known in the past floating before me. For a time I had the very strong impression of being somewhere else, as if I were in a cabin aboard a ship or in the room of a house somewhere in England. In my hallucinations I imagined a visitation from Mr. Stanley, my benefactor sitting by my bedside and reading me verses from the Bible, but no sooner had I taken heart at his presence than the vision went away.