Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

All this occurred so quickly that I was hardly aware that Mr. Stanley had been wounded, until he, riding wildly and grasping his neck, began to sway from side to side. By then, the plantation slaves, hearing the shots as they worked in the fields, were waiting by the road to help us. Bleeding badly, Mr. Stanley slumped off his saddle into the arms of two slaves, and they carried him into the house, where he lay stretched out on a chair in the parlor.

Gasping for air, and with a gurgling sound coming from his dressing-wrapped, swollen neck, Mr. Stanley seemed, in those moments, as good as dead. I could only pray for his recovery.

After a few hours Mr. Stanley began to suffer from a high fever, and in the delirium that followed, he asked several times to see his dead wife. By then, Mr. Davis had instructed one of his overseers to head out to one of the bigger plantations to look for a doctor (and to inform the civil guard about the bandits so they might round up a posse), but at some late hour, as it seemed that Mr. Stanley would surely die without immediate medical assistance, Mr. Davis, having some knowledge of surgery, loosened the wrapping and decided that it would be best to extricate the bullet. A large black-and-blue lump had risen along the right side of Mr. Stanley’s neck, and discerning that the bullet was lodged there, Mr. Davis, pressing against that swelling and manipulating the hardness within, gradually brought the round dark pellet out, along with much blood and an ooze of pus. Dousing it with a cup of brandy, he then instructed one of his slaves to pour pitcher after pitcher of cold water over the wound until the swelling gradually subsided; then he dressed the wound again, and all of us, somewhat exhausted by the ordeal, retired to the veranda to drink.

A CUBAN DOCTOR DID ARRIVE — two days later — and when he examined Mr. Stanley, he saw that while the wound itself was in a process of healing, an infection of a septic nature had begun to spread through his system. Blunt in his appraisal, he could only recommend rest, but he thought it not a bad idea for us to summon a priest to give him the last rites, “in the event he believes in such things.” Despite our obvious despair — I was inconsolable in those days — the doctor took legal issue with the fact that Mr. Davis had attended to the wound himself, and he threatened to report him to the authorities. At heart, even if he knew that Mr. Stanley would have surely died without Mr. Davis’s assistance, this physician, a somewhat bitter and gloomy man, argued for several hours with Mr. Davis about it, until Mr. Davis, getting the drift of the doctor’s threat, agreed to pay him a fee so substantial that it amounted to a bribe.

And so the doctor, having made his point and profited by it, rode away.

HERE I CAN HARDLY CAJOLE my own hand to write more of those days: I cannot say whether a recent fever has weakened my resolve or whether it is always painful to continue with the remembrance of sad things as one treads on a march of words toward a resolution. Beginnings are exhilarating; middles are comforting; but the final chapters of such memories are fearsome and resist easy summary. But here, as I squeeze out the words, is what happened:

Because he slept through many of the hours of the day, I had made it my habit to look in on Mr. Stanley, to find if he had awakened. He was dressed in a long white shirt that reached to his ankles and was laid out in bed; his beard had been shorn, exposing his fine chin, and the scab on his neck, I could see, was the size of a silver dollar. In his company were two female slaves, one of whom stood beside his bed moving the air with a feather fan; the other attended to him with a casual familiarity that I found dismaying.

On the fourth morning of my father’s illness, with little progress by way of his recovery to report, Clemens accompanied me into his room and witnessed a remarkable thing. For a few hours my father seemed to take a turn for the better: As when we entered, he was sitting up, and though by no means cured, he had apparently regained some strength.

“Come close to me,” he said to me in a hoarse and low voice. “There is something I must tell you.”

“What is it, Father?”

“As you can see, you have journeyed far to look upon the face of a dying man.”

“Think not of such things,” I said. “I know in my heart that you will get better, and when you do, there will be much awaiting us! And if you must stay in this place, then I will be by your side.”

“Oh, my boy, just wanting something does not make it so: I can no more wish myself to good health than I can command the furniture to rise off the floor. But take heart: Though I am a dying man, I am not bothered by it, for I know that I will soon find the answer to many things.” Then, as if he could read my thoughts, he said: “As to more practical matters, regarding your adoption: I have promised to make you my legal heir, and I am now ready to do so. But I have no such paper, and so you, my dear young gentleman, must compose one for me to sign while I can still hold a pen.”

This I agreed to do, but thinking it unsavory to hurry the matter, I remained by his side. Within a few hours Mr. Stanley’s condition worsened to the point where he could barely open his eyes or even move his head: His breathing had become forced, and all manner of aches overwhelmed him. But Death was merciful, for there came over Mr. Stanley’s face a change of expression. Shortly whatever anxieties and sadnesses were going through his mind departed, and with a sigh, and with his pulse slowing, he took my hand into his own and was about to say something, when all at once, he faintly smiled and closed his eyes and settled into a sleep from which he would not awaken. Later that night, as I stood by his side in misery and with a feeling of an impending and irretrievable loss, he breathed his last.

MR. DAVIS HAD THOUGHT to arrange the transport of his body back to America, so that Mr. Stanley might be buried alongside his wife in St. Louis, but the logistics and the matter of preservation made it impossible, for there was no ice in that place, nor was there a nearby mortician to do the work; and he had thought of instructing his blacksmith to build a lead coffin, but such materials were not at hand. And so it was that on the morning of April 12, 1861, after a brief ceremony, during which Mr. Davis and I said some words, Mr. Stanley was laid to rest in a grave under a banyan tree on that plantation.

The next day, Clemens and I began our journey back to Havana. What I had left of the late Mr. Stanley, aside from an indelible memory of his last moments, were a lock of his hair, which I had cut from his head as he had lain still in his bed, some few letters, and a watch of his that Mr. Davis had given me as a keepsake. Naturally my spirits were low, and my body was soon again racked by illness, my recurring malaria coming back to me: I was so grieved and upset that my constitution suffered for it. But hardly anyone would have noticed my state, for when we finally arrived in Havana, the city was in an uproar over the latest news brought in on ships from Florida. A few days before, on April 12, 1861, the same day that my father was buried, Fort Sumter had been bombed, beginning the armed hostilities of the Civil War. It took us another nine days before we reached New Orleans, and from there, we parted in the harbor, Clemens heading north up to St. Louis to join his family; and I, some hours afterward, setting off upriver to Cypress Bend, mainly to retrieve my possessions. But upon my arrival, like most young men from those parts, I was quickly swept up by the war fever, and, wishing to take my mind off Cuba and Mr. Stanley’s death, I decided to honor my promise to join the Dixie Grays, under the command of a certain Colonel Lyon, thereupon beginning my life as a Confederate soldier.