Chapter 13
Friends Drown (1847)
The same year that my father died, I saw two of my schoolmates drown. I was there for the second one; I was among the swimmers and saw it happen.
To take things in order, though, the first boy to drown was Clint Levering, a worldly boy whose demise my comrades and I at first attributed to divine retribution. That’s what the books and the church had taught us—that the lives of “bad boys” would come to horrendous and early ends like this. But then, just three weeks later, “Dutchy”—the “model boy” of the village—also drowned, and this was inexplicable to us.
Clint’s death was understandable; it corresponded with what we had been taught, and it further instilled the fear of divine wrath coming upon us from wrongful living. This affected my annoyingly overactive conscience to the point that I had a hard time sleeping—but at least when I did sleep, it was with the added entertainment of nightmares. I viewed every storm as a warning; every crash of thunder and lightning strike seemed to me a harbinger of what was to come to me if I did not improve.
Not that I was truly wicked. No, nothing like it, but in my ignorance and innocence I thought perhaps I was. And the same could be said of Clint Levering, for he was by no means a hardened criminal.
When Dutchy drowned, though, it threw us into great confusion. Where was the logic in it? What had Dutchy done to deserve that fate? Maybe it didn’t matter how you lived, I reasoned, as you could die at any time, even if you were the “model boy” of the village.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain wrote of these drownings in chapter 54 of Life on the Mississippi; after leading up to Dutchy’s drowning, he recalled the particulars as follows:
Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and ‘seeing who could stay under longest.’ We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count—‘be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.’ Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said ‘All right, Dutchy—go ahead, we’ll play fair.’
Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy’s humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. They were ‘so full of laugh’ with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers said, with surprise—
‘Why, he hasn’t come up, yet!’
The laughing stopped.
‘Boys, it’s a splendid dive,’ said one.
‘Never mind that,’ said another, ‘the joke on him is all the better for it.’
There was a remark or two more, and then a pause. Talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. Before long, the boys’ faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. Still there was no movement of the placid water. Hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. We all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other’s countenances to the water.
‘Somebody must go down and see!’
Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task.
‘Draw straws!’
So we did—with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response—and if it had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened suddenness.
The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there, helplessly. I fled to the surface and told the awful news. Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. We did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing—except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody’s that came handy, and getting them wrong-side-out and upside-down, as a rule. Then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. We had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life.
The night presently closed down. Then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. I was perfectly dazed; I could not understand it. It seemed to me that there must be some mistake. The elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. All heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, ‘If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?’
Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Dutchy’s account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard I might try.
Although the account above is related in "Life on the Mississippi" as if it is a veracious one, some doubt remains—concerning the drowning of Dutchy, at any rate—because the following passage from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer not only tells a different tale about Dutchy (“a boy of German parentage” who seems to match the description of the model boy of the village), but also: would a boy who had drowned in front of Twain’s eyes end up being portrayed in “Tom Sawyer” as one who “was little better than an idiot from that day forth” after citing a prodigious amount of Bible verses? The account therein states:
Tom’s whole class were of a pattern—restless, noisy, and troublesome. When they came to recite their lessons, not one of them knew his verses perfectly, but had to be prompted all along. However, they worried through, and each got his reward—in small blue tickets, each with a passage of Scripture on it; each blue ticket was pay for two verses of the recitation. Ten blue tickets equaled a red one, and could be exchanged for it; ten red tickets equaled a yellow one; for ten yellow tickets the superintendent gave a very plainly bound Bible (worth forty cents in those easy times) to the pupil. How many of my readers would have the industry and application to memorize two thousand verses, even for a Doré Bible? And yet Mary had acquired two Bibles in this way—it was the patient work of two years—and a boy of German parentage had won four or five. He once recited three thousand verses without stopping; but the strain upon his mental faculties was too great, and he was little better than an idiot from that day forth—a grievous misfortune for the school, for on great occasions, before company, the superintendent (as Tom expressed it) had always made this boy come out and “spread himself.”
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